The Hollow Crown ends with the year 1485. This year was one of the great milestones in traditional histories of England, a form of history preoccupied with the rise and fall of kings. But this book has also unfolded many other kinds of stories – about responses to famine and war, about the efforts to seek spiritual security both in the present and the future, about forms of social life in towns and villages, about aspirations and their fulfilment through careers in law or the church, in local government, military service, governance in France, trade and manufacture. Prospects differed greatly – for men and women, for the free and the unfree, for those educated in Latin letters or in administrative French, and those who functioned mainly in English, for those trained to make and produce, and those destined to serve.
The patterns of many of the lives in our period sound much like the challenges still facing people in the world today. And they are. Yet our story is also firmly situated within the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and within the dominions of the kings who ruled England and Wales and parts of Ireland and France. These lands have meaningfully been called British, although they do not encompass the whole of the British Isles. They were characterized by a political order, bound by law, administrative units and the exchanges which occurred regularly between them. Inasmuch as they were ruled jointly, the communities of these lands also developed capacities to respond to that rule: to act as local agents of its law – both secular and ecclesiastical – to seek representation in parliament, to judge how the burden of taxation might be spread, to manage parishes, maintain churches, to mourn and occasionally to protest. They could also be inspired by affinity to a regional magnate, and on occasion were aroused by the sense of patriotic loyalty.
The generation with which we began experienced enormous hardship during the Great Famine, their sons and daughters then seeing a world halved of its inhabitants by plague – a mortality so far not even matched by the terrible HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa. Their sons and daughters still feared it – less virulent outbreaks occurred in 1361, 1369 and 1371. That cohort also learned a political lesson of violent regime change, whereby a magnate replaced his cousin as king. The next generation was perhaps not fully convinced that this king was quite steady on his throne – though he put down rebellions effectively – for the country remained awash with rumours of sightings of Richard II. Fewer of them were called up for war – either in the north or in France – but the following generation of young men could easily be excited by war all over again. They were called to serve with a charismatic prince, now King Henry V, to conquer and then rule large parts of Normandy for the next generation.
The less populated lands of the fifteenth century were on the whole feeding people comfortably and sustaining a wide range of productive and manufacturing activities. The markets provided services and goods efficiently to all regions. Niche expertise meant that even modest parishes could hire skilled masons and artists from other regions to adorn their churches. Travelling physicians reached all parts of the country and entertainers travelled the same roads as did wool and cloth merchants and similarly affected the lives of almost every person. In the south of England much agricultural work was geared to feed the hungry metropolis – London – reinforcing that sense of involvement in the capital’s life. London was also the natural centre for popular political complaint – as Cade’s rebellion was to show in 1450.
The link between prosperity and peace on the one hand, and political action on the other, is a complex one; it challenges observers even in our own times. Political action can often take forms which are unlikely to enter into official documentation and public historical accounts – court records and chronicles, for example. We are thus bound to remain ignorant of the variety of political views and of the ways these may have been expressed or practised: only occasionally can we document rent-strikes, public disapproval of certain forms of rule, distaste for violent lordship or even abusive headship of families. When such views are accessible we have aimed to take note. People act not only when they are utterly miserable, when they can no longer feed their families, but also when their rights are infringed and questioned. The politics which turned into civil war and violence in the fifteenth century saw great blocks of lordship and the expectations of those who led them frustrated and foiled – from Henry of Derby’s exile to Richard Duke of York’s frustration with the king’s rule. Those who followed them were drawn into an ugly set of confrontations: verbal, legal, in image and on battlefields. As we have seen in our own time in Bosnia, Rwanda and Iraq, such periods of confrontation also give licence to thugs and psychopaths.
The title of this book speaks of the crown – the frame of law, ritual and memory – which gave shape to many of the mundane activities of life on manors and in small towns, in parishes and neighbourhoods. The hollowness of that crown invites us to examine the making and unmaking of meanings. Those who wore it claimed rights over vast dominions, and the complex administration which acted in its name managed resources and people. Its potential power was enormous, but the competition over the idea of that crown – what it could claim to achieve and deliver, who was rightly its bearer – was the defining stuff of politics, which involved not only magnates and gentry, but those who depended on them for security of title or safety of limb.
Dynastic claims were repeatedly made in our period for a leading role in public affairs, the right to fill that crown with meaning, in a kingdom advised by parliament but ruled by kings and princes of the blood. These claims were made acute when a king failed to realize the qualities – ineffable and yet vital – which turned a dynast into a tolerable ruler. The great claims of lordship were at the core: when a king failed to act as more than a privileged magnate, then any other magnate might consider himself a better candidate. When alternative genealogical calculation could support such claims, then a Henry of Derby in 1399, a Richard of York in 1450, and an Edward of March in 1461 found their opportunity and their supporters too. Conversely, Richard III failed to convince of his right between 1483 and 1485.
The Hollow Crown offers encounters with the institutions of late medieval civil society: universities and courts of law, fraternities and craft guilds, town councils and libraries, manor houses, schools and Corpus Christi processions. Yet the existence of such institutions did not remove the problem of dependence on the qualities – real or perceived – of the monarch. The Reformation may only have deepened this dependence with the quite new weight it placed upon the monarch as guardian of a complex and many-shaded religious order. The late medieval order thus shares a great deal with the subsequent centuries as a British ancien régime.
This story stops at 1485. Historians have claimed that a ‘new’ monarchy arose with the coming of Henry VII, that a new age was inaugurated, vigorous in administration, ambitious in its European and global performance. But wise readers should be wary of the ‘new’. Late summer 1485 brought relief to some, and great joy to others: hope for peace and dynastic union. ‘New’ is so often an adjective spun by professional illusionists, the makers of political slogans. While appreciating the verve of the ‘new’ politics, the reader will stop and ask whether it is not above all the fantasy of shapers of opinions – servants of power itself – which historians have been eager to endorse. Most change, deep change, occurs more slowly, experimentally, cautiously and through deliberation. It thus often goes unnoticed by those who live it and make it happen.