The Black Death and its aftermath left communities marked by bereavement, yet surrounded by the challenges of opportunities created by death. Kingship, lordship, administration, and above all family, strove to benefit from possibilities and to alleviate pain. People sought the remedy of law, the durability of records, in efforts to enshrine and make safe so much that was new: tenancies, contracts of domestic service, arrangements for retirement, enclosure of fields for pasture, membership in fraternities. Law was a common facet, and many understood and participated in its multiple occasions and rituals. It offered a framework from which new lives could be made; and it was authorized by the person of the king.
Awareness of the law pervaded all aspects of life and affected all classes of society: no one was too far from a legal nexus or beyond it, even if many could subvert its processes or despair of its workings. Although some evidence was admissible – a bloody knife, torn clothes, stolen goods – the legal process depended largely on the reputation of an accused presented to court by a jury of men from the locality within which the crime occurred. Reputation was secured by friends, or, in legal terms, ‘on oath helpers’. Thus it seemed easier for a rich man to be true – to be surrounded by supporters – than a poor woman. The law was not only a process but a labelling system: it defined servility or freedom, a distinction from which flowed a multitude of consequences to do with rights to land, the status of offspring, suitability for clerical office, or participation in the public life reserved to free persons.
The law recognized men and women as agents with differing capacities. In the Welsh Marches, in Ireland and in the northern Borders, ethnic affiliation determined people’s rights to hold land, the pool of marriageable partners, and liability to pay certain dues, such as the ambor marriage fee in the Welsh lordships. In Ireland common law was used by the Anglo-Irish, in parallel to Gaelic law by Gaelic-Irish, with its emphasis on resolution between kin groups. Many more people participated in public legal processes than is true of western democracies today, and although a long-term professionalization of legal skills was at work during our period, it was still possible for lay people to state their own cases in royal courts and to plead and give evidence in ecclesiastical ones.
The law was far from being a coherent code, but rather was fragmented into many jurisdictions and inflected by a series of cases which demonstrated its possible applicability. In manorial courts local custom of the manor was retained in the memory of jurors under the scrutiny of the lord’s stewards, and custom could vary greatly as to what might seem very basic questions such as the age of majority and the forms of inheritance. Enfranchised towns were granted the freedom to act on a wide range of business related to the operations of their markets – control of the quality of goods, punishment for minor violent acts – in borough or leet courts. Criminal cases remained the business of the royal courts, as was the increasing business of statute law, with the growing body of parliamentary statutes enacted from the mid-fourteenth century. People were to be judged by other men of their region, their visine. A writ to the sheriff directed him to empanel some twenty-four men on a certain date, of whom twelve were to be sworn. Yet this apparently straightforward system was dogged by the failure of men to appear as summoned. Those most likely to serve were men of middling rank: free tenants who in turn often served as church wardens, or townsmen of a high tax assessment. Trials were often postponed repeatedly for lack of twelve jurors; they could be adjourned also for a shortage of the right type of jurors, as in the case presented to the King’s Bench of a Gloucestershireman suspected of theft, until the time that a Gloucester jury could be empanelled.
Ecclesiastical courts controlled marriage litigation, probate of wills, defamation, judicial action against clerics and those suspected of heresy. Their business coincided frequently with cases related to inheritance brought to royal courts. A dual system was at work regarding inheritance of property, through civil action on land, and ecclesiastical action on moveables. Since issues of inheritance often hinged on decisions over the legality of a marriage and the legitimacy of its offspring, the jurisdictions frequently overlapped. Certain ecclesiastical institutions – like the Durham Palatinate – constituted separate jurisdictions, and some religious institutions held peculiar jurisdictions carved out of the bishop’s or archbishop’s normal remit, such as that of the Dean and Chapter of York over parishes in York, the East, West and North Ridings, and Nottinghamshire. Cathedrals had their precinct privileges and immunities; jurisdiction produced influence, patronage and income.
People were adept at using and moving between the broad avenues offered by this complex network of law and courts. Yet much legal business was transacted outside courts, through arbitration, conciliation and the offices of trusted and respected local individuals, saving the litigants time and money, and avoiding the adversarial drift which court action created. Peasants sought arbiters among their neighbours, say in complaints about debts; for knights the circle of the magnate in whose sphere they dwelt offered that service. The mutual deterrence and responsibility achieved by the system of mutual oaths to keep the peace – the ancient ‘frankpledge’ system – was widely accepted, and was not challenged even by the activists of the Peasants’ Revolt, who criticized so many other aspects of prevailing legal practice.
So an extra-curial world of law coincided with the services of the manorial, baronial, royal, urban and ecclesiastical courts. Among other forums for adjudication and the settlement of disagreements were the internal courts of guilds, whose statutes regularly required that arbitration between members – most frequently members of the same craft – be sought within the guild before turning outside it, on the pain of high fines. The preoccupation with settling within the guild must be related to a fear that secrets, often industrial ones, might leak out of the trade group. In London, judicial business took place simultaneously in the sheriff’s court, the Hustings court (the mayor’s court), in the ward assemblies (wardmotes) and in guilds, and that was just for civil and secular business.
The overlapping of authorities and the influence of powerful men in their localities also produced famous examples of miscarriage of justice, or the failure of attempts to enforce it. The complaint of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester, in a sermon of the 1370s, conveys more than the generic lament of a moralizer: according to this informed commentator, England’s laws were many, yet their application was null. Excuses seemed always to be found to mitigate guilt, with claims such as ‘He is a youngster’, or ‘If indicted his shame would stain us all.’ Those in the best position to make forceful mitigating claims were members of influential gentry families, or those protected by magnates. In consequence, opined the bishop, homicides and notorious thieves went unpunished. The poet John Gower similarly expressed the idea, around 1381, that mankind was coming to an end ‘since there is no justice in their laws’, a complaint echoed in a petition to the Scottish parliament in 1399 about ‘misgovernance of the realm and the default of the keeping of the common law’. The test of legal probity even touched the king, the fountainhead of law. By the end of his reign, Richard II was seen as lacking in commitment to common law, and as practising wilful and sectional legal favour.
It was not only influence that could distort or retard the legal process; sometimes the personnel involved were at fault. Officials such as coroners, charged with the investigation of sudden or unnatural death at the request of the sheriff, were not paid for their services. They were thus required to prove good financial standing before they could take office. So it is not surprising that recurrent accusations of corruption became attached to them. Occurrences such as the case at Salisbury in 1384 where six serving coroners were fined for extortion were common.
By the second half of Richard II’s reign the chancellor offered some alternative services as judge: he dealt with bills of complaint which he could remedy and adjudicate on in vast areas left uncovered or hampered by common law procedure. Where common law was notoriously lacking in suppleness, such as in cases of debt and promise – in the realm of conscience – Chancery court provided a relatively cheap and accessible service. It even became a forum for the discussion of issues of heraldry and honour, as in the case of John Lord Lovel against Thomas Lord Morley over the design ‘over argent and lion rampant sable crowned and armed’. In time, Chancery also provided training for clerical apprentices, a training so valued that by 1389 Chancery ordinances attempted to prevent infiltration of its Inns by ambitious law students keener on the law than on clerical status. As the legal profession grew, its reputation declined: in 1381 rebels burnt books and committed murder in the Inns of Court.
However varied the styles and judicial orientations of the various jurisdictions, the king’s person, personality and persona were expected to guarantee the operational integrity of law and justice in his lands.
Richard II ascended the throne at the age of ten in 1377, and began his rule under a ‘continual council’ – a council of magnates and administrators charged with rule during the years of his minority. At his first parliament the accumulated discontent with his grandfather’s last years led to the restatement, through petitions, of fifteen of the ordinances presented earlier in the century to Richard’s great-grandfather, Edward II. At the next parliament, at Gloucester in October 1378, the Speaker of the Commons and the Steward of the Household debated the uses made of the tax awarded the king on his accession. The Commons claimed that while the kingdom’s wealth was flowing to recipients favoured by Edward III and the Black Prince, there was little left to be used by the king. The Commons also requested reports on the actions of the king’s counsellors. The young king’s first years were repeatedly affected by a lack of trust in his counsellors. Another important player distrusted by the Commons was John of Gaunt Duke of Lancaster, the uncle who had never ruled, but whose interests ranged very widely over parts of England, Wales, Ireland, Aquitaine, Normandy and Castile.
Parliamentary taxes from 1377 took the form of a poll-tax, paid at the rate of one groat (4d.) per head by all men and women over fourteen, and in 1381 1s. for each person over fifteen, with a graduated provision for a 4d. contribution by poorer taxpayers, and several shillings by richer ones. In Richard’s third parliament, of April 1379, open dissent against the poll-tax and subsidies was strongly voiced. Yet the taxation of these years, 1377–81, matched very closely the military expenditure required in Gascony and for defence of the sea.
In these years the king was challenged by his most important responsibility, as protector of the realm. The ports of southern England and their hinterlands were under attack from France and later from Flanders too. One can sympathize with the poetic exclamation, ‘Woe to the land in which a boy is king’ (‘Vae terre ubi puer rex est’), expressed in the 1370s by William Langland, the author of the poem Piers Plowman. Conversely, another poet, John Gower, saw in the king’s youth proof of his blamelessness. Here was a boy who had grown up hearing glowing praise of his father, the Black Prince, but who now as a young adult sought his way without that trusted father at his side. There was something of charm and promise about the young king: on Twelfth Night 1378 he held a performance of the traditional scene of the Adoration of the Magi, which his father had staged in January 1367 in Bordeaux, on the occasion of Richard’s own birth. Untried and pure, one thing was certain: the young king was bound to mature, and political sense as well as tradition dictated that the young king be given a chance to prove his mettle.
The lands of Richard II were many and varied, and several dilemmas touching their rule faced him and his advisers. The French wars had resulted in an expansion of French lands under the rule of the kings of England: alongside Gascony there was Normandy, and there was expectation of further conquests, with the myriad sources of income that prisoners and protection afforded. Yet the French counter-attack did not only touch these foreign territories and populations. In the years of Richard’s adolescence there were sacks of Rye (1376), Plymouth, Dartmouth and Exeter (1377), Winchelsea (1380) as well as a Scottish raid on Beaumaris (Anglesey) in 1381. Magnates and gentry considered investment in fortification of their domains: in 1381 and 1383 John Lord Cobham fortified his castle in Kent, in 1385 Edward Dallingbridge acquired a licence to turn his manor house into a castle, at Bodiam in the same county. The 1380s saw diplomatic experimentation with new alliances against France, such as that with Wenceslas Duke of Brabant, and it took the Franco–Flemish alliance of the late 1380s to direct the young king towards peace. Richard’s apprenticeship was wide-ranging in its content and swift in its pace.
Some of the most testing moments of Richard’s reign occurred over a few days in June 1381 which saw what has come to be known as the Peasants’ Revolt. Since this was neither led by peasants nor unfolded as a revolt, it is probably better to use the French term émeute – a tumultuous sequence – than words suggestive of a sustained threat to social and political order. The events of June 1381 were a series of occasions for action created and seized by those not represented in parliament. These were expressions of political opinion in the broadest sense, comment on an administration and its policies, through partially ritualized violent action. The majority of ‘rebels’ were Londoners, and as Londoners they were savvy, acquainted with a variety of political jargons and modes of public behaviour. London life was, after all, based on association: in guilds, neighbourhood fraternities, apprentice companies. One person’s fellowship was another’s coven; and so even regular gatherings of apprentices for drink – admittedly rowdy occasions – seemed, to town governors, dangerous political meetings. The possible affinities between associational groups – those of London, and those marching on London – terrified London worthies. As the Westminster chronicler put it, they feared that London commoners might join in with the serfs.
Events in and around London and Westminster were bound to carry the utmost resonance. Already, on 11 June 1381, before the tumult reached London, a royal serjeant-at-arms had rushed to the Scottish border to alert John of Gaunt with the news. Gaunt was conducting a ceremony meant to ensure peace, known as the March Day. He moved south to his castle of Pontefract, but also sent commands for the garrisoning of his Welsh castles against possible rebellion. Regional unrest was never a limited affair to men of state; the borderlands were particularly sensitive to lapses in royal concentration. But even as he took these actions, he remained in the north to settle a personal feud with Scottish and northern magnates. The interests of the realm were here mediated through personal and dynastic considerations.
Before we see the marchers in action, what were the conditions which affected the people who came from the provinces to protest? In the countryside opportunities abounded, beyond the routines and limited rewards of small arable cultivation: in fishing and handicrafts, in extraction of mineral resources, which were increasingly explored by landlords and which created openings for labourers. Even those primarily cultivating land were engaged in hectic activities of exchange and leasing in order to make their holdings more profitable and their cultivation of them less hampered by customary obligations. Hence, between 1370 and 1420 there was a sustained rise in the purchasing power of wage-earners. Servile status seemed to curtail opportunity and limit freedom of movement and action; the court through whose workings it was enforced became the focus of political discontent. Even after the death of their leader Wat Tyler and the disintegration of the movement he had led, Essex men sought the abolition of manorial courts.
Domestic service became an attractive work opportunity, especially for women willing to learn the skills and prepared to live away from home and save money towards marriage. Tax returns reveal just how widespread service was: 20 per cent of Rutland households had one or two servants, whereas a third of urban households contained servants. The poll-tax returns of 1377 allow us to glimpse the distribution of servants in the paying population: in Worcester, Carlisle, Dartmouth and Northampton, servants account for 19 per cent, 17 per cent, 20 per cent and 30 per cent respectively. Most servants were women, especially in those areas where the textile industry was the predominant one, such as Yorkshire and Essex. Sons and daughters no longer adhered so closely to home, since opportunities for work and land-holding had improved; they married later, and so family size declined. In a rural community like Kibworth Harcourt (Leicestershire) it fell from 4.84 on average in the late thirteenth century to 3.72 in 1379, and so servants now provided some of the services which family members had done before. The emergence of service also meant that a significant social reality emerged in late medieval England, one which saw an abundance of young women in towns and of young men in the country. In Hull there were nine men to every ten women in 1377; whereas in the rural hinterland, the opposite prevailed. The mobility and opportunity of a society abundant in resources, and one in which industry offered work for young men and women alike, further enhanced the experience of singlehood, of isolation from family, and of villages full of older folk, without the young people who might care for them in old age.
The sense of looming disorder and volatility predated 1381. Men moving about the countryside, often in search of profitable work, epitomized the threat to employers’ well-being. In 1377–9 Gilbert Rougge, a labourer of Sturmer (Essex), was thus deemed ‘a rebel’ against the law-enforcers since he was ‘unwilling to swear or justify himself’.
The law was at the heart of the fantasies of those who marched on London in June 1381, in events that are remembered as the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’. The political events which unfolded in the second and third week of June were enacted by two groups – from Essex and from Kent – and were enabled by Londoners. This was not a movement of peasants alone – several bailiffs marched too – but it did reflect worries, complaints and grievances experienced in rural England, on manors, in small towns, and by people not represented fully by the Commons in parliament. Grievances were attached to the traditional arrangements of serfdom which constrained people’s movement and work, but it also objected to the state of national politics, which had brought a heavy and repeated tax burden to poorer folk, in a period of anxiety about invasions from France. The ‘true commons’, as the marchers called themselves, sought the king’s intervention. They asserted themselves as an alternative citizenry, by taking an oath to defend King Richard. Professing no interest but the king’s own, they imagined and proposed a world without manorial lords, and without the gentry justices by whose hands the ‘peace’ was kept and the Statute of Labourers was enforced. True law was invoked, rather than the system of prevailing custom, supported by lawyers and epitomized by their Inns of Court – Gray’s, Temple, Middle – which were sacked during the rising, and by prisons, such as the Marshalsea, which was stormed. The problem was not the country’s laws, but those charged with applying and safeguarding them. This was a deep vein of feeling, a sentiment akin to that expressed by the ‘King’s poor liege men of Shropshire’ in the 1370s, who claimed that by statute sheriffs were now being appointed for a year’s service, in a county where that office had frequently been held for life.
On 6 June a group of men of Kent approached Rochester Castle with the request that prisoners held there be released. On the next day they marched to Maidstone, where their leader – Wat Tyler – seems to have emerged. He then led them to Canterbury where the venerable cathedral and its monks were terrorized with the threat that soon their head, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Chancellor of the Realm, would be executed (and he was, on 14 June). By 10 June a group was at work in Essex. London became the obvious next stage for the buoyant, and so far unstoppable, crowds of hundreds. The men of Kent were also encouraged by an eccentric preacher, the lapsed priest John Ball, who reproached the clergy for its greed and worldliness, a common trope in reformist preaching, favoured by unlicensed itinerant preachers. The Essex group settled north of the Thames and that of Kent on the south bank; both groups wished to see the king, who was only thirteen years old. The king was aware of the events, not least through the message conveyed to him by his man in Rochester, the constable Sir John Newton, who was sent by Tyler with a message of their intent. On 12 June the king, surrounded by some of the less unpopular magnates, sailed down the Thames on a barge to meet Wat Tyler, but the extent, sound and energy of the reception, flanked on either bank by the armed groups, led him to turn round and take safety in the Tower, where the chancellor, the treasurer, magnates and members of the royal family had also sought safety.
Young Richard never seems to have been afraid, understanding how central he was to the fantasies of transformation and betterment woven by the marchers. On 14 June he agreed to meet the Essex group at Mile End, and left the Tower with the mayor of London and an armed retinue. It is hard to reconstruct the exact demands made, but the people of Essex and Hertfordshire were happy to depart with the promise of charters of liberation from serfdom, and pardons for their recent actions over the past week. But Wat Tyler and the men of Kent were not satisfied: they freed prisoners from the Marshalsea prison and entered the Tower to kill Sudbury and Hales – chancellor and treasurer – and other royal servants. That night also saw great violence in the streets of London, and there was counter-violence the next day. At the meeting Wat Tyler acted in a familiar fashion; he only half-bent his knee and took the king’s hand, shook it and said ‘Brother, be of good comfort.’ Tyler may have made further demands, but by now the slightest provocation, Tyler’s drawing of a dagger, provoked the armed reaction which the mayor of London and his men sought to inflict. The king intervened and, according to a chronicler who stayed with him, led the remainder of Tyler’s men out of the city (Plate 9). All they could do was flee – away from the armed force which the Londoners had prepared over the preceding week.
Despite the venom poured upon the marchers by most chroniclers, a pattern arises from their actions in London: the repeated attempt to create a ‘community’ of decent working folk, loyal to their king, against treacherous advisers, such as the chancellor, Archbishop Sudbury, or John of Gaunt, the king’s uncle, whose Savoy Palace was sacked and burnt. The chronicler Walsingham noted with derision their rhetorical stance:
For at that time they… considered that no name was more honourable than that of community, nor, according to their stupid estimation, were there to be any lords in the future, but only the King and Commons.
Favouring the labourer, the rural worker, and claiming the king as their master, the political ideas which animated some of the marchers suggested that the country’s misery might well have been caused by ambitious magnates, and by the hundreds of officials and members of the gentry who applied the king’s law. Poets appreciated this affinity between labourer and king. Iolo Goch (1320–98) praised the labourer, stating that ‘there is no life, no world, without him’, and the same could be said of the king’s political role.
The marchers presented themselves as the ‘true commons’, opposed to the Commons, who legislated evil and enforced it on their lands. Their actions seem deliberate and discriminating: they chose for destruction not the Kent estates of the archbishop, but the archiepiscopal headquarters at Lambeth, near the centre of political events, where records were kept. They piled up high court rolls and muniments and memoranda, documents which were the vehicles of oppression and the bearers of old, often coercive custom. They attacked but did not loot the treasures of John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace.
They were bound by oath, and some even wore liveries. The march was also an occasion coloured by playfulness, by the pleasure of unmaking symbolic edifices, in turning a world ‘upside down’. Some accounts describe the sacking of the chambers of the Tower of London, while King Richard was on his way to Mile End, and the attack on the bed of Joan of Kent, the king’s mother. She was not hurt or violated, but truly terrified, as her bed was sacked and the rampagers asked her for kisses. Similarly, chroniclers described with horror the lowliest of peasants pulling the beards of knights, or hacking away at the effigy of the absent John of Gaunt, whom they mockingly called ‘King of Castile’, for his dynastic ambitions in Spain.
The collective march for justice built up a momentum of self-justification, which touched communities intent to right their wrongs: at Bury St Edmunds (Suffolk) the Benedictine abbey was attacked, as was St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire; in Cambridge, the university with its special court and court records was the focus for violence.
Procession and pleasure, self-assertion and bravado could not alone produce the desired transformation. Only the king could do so: true lord, fount of justice. The Anonimalle chronicler reports that the rebels greeted the king at Mile End: ‘Welcome our Lord King Richard, if it pleases you, and we will not have any other king over you.’ The unknown quantity at the heart of the events was the young king’s reaction to the challenge thrown at him, cloaked in the rhetoric of millenarian expectation and of utopian justice. The meeting between the king and his ‘true commons’ took place on Corpus Christi, the feast which celebrated the eucharist, a habitual, outdoor summer celebration often processional in form.
After its dispersal the movement of marchers met concerted judicial responses: aldermen in London were charged with naming those members of their wards who had participated, though most were granted pardons. Some 150 persons were tried for trespass and damage to property where specific cases could be made, while John of Gaunt attempted to identify the hundreds who had attacked his home. Yet the very men who were expected to set the record straight, five aldermen, were themselves accused of collaboration with the men of Kent. Moments of political uncertainty enacted in public, rather than in council chambers and palace halls, saw the meeting of a multitude of interests and temperaments. It also brought widows into the public domain, women whose autonomy and status earned, for a while, a political voice. The marchers of 1381 saw just such a convergence of the utopian, the opportunistic, the exhilarating and the reckless.
Although efforts were made to reassert control and deterrence in London, the men and the issues that interacted in the early summer of 1381 did not, of course, go away. There was insurrectionary talk and planning in Norfolk as late as the late summer of 1382, aimed, according to Thomas of Walsingham, at the capture and killing of the Bishop of Norwich and other local magnates. There is mention of the use of the fair of Horsham St Faith’s (Norfolk) as a recruiting ground, and of a plan to occupy the Abbey of St Benet Hulme, a danger which clearly worried the monk-chronicler. The instigators were caught and beheaded, and the record of the properties seized shows the men to have been of quite modest means – from villages around Norwich, and led by a single more prosperous man, William Spicer, who was worth 40s. in goods and chattels at his execution. The drama of the thwarted insurrection in Norfolk in 1382 is further deepened when we note that the man who headed the judicial effort and the trial of the suspects had been a humiliated victim of the Norfolk chapter of the 1381 rising. Unrest continued in other areas too. In March 1383 five ‘insurrectors’ were named for treason for having tried to kill the sheriff of Devon, and several cases presented as treason ended up in acquittal. A new level of suspicion, fear and resentment had been injected into the localities – the villages and market towns of England – in the aftermath of 1381.
The events of 1381 showed that London was not only a symbol of the country’s well-being and good rule, but was itself a cauldron of competing associations and groupings. Just as landed men and their followers were clustering into affinities, so association marked the experiences of work, power and leisure in the capital. This constituted the tenor of political life, and also produced a high level of visible political expression. Politics took place not only in council chambers and guildhalls, but in the streets, where enemies were publicly ridiculed or defamed. John of Gaunt was the subject of campaigns of denigration, like that of 1377, when rumours were spread claiming that he was no prince, but the bastard issue of a liaison between his mother and a Flemish butcher of Ghent. Magnates were involved in the politics of the capital, which often provided the stage for the meeting of nationally significant factions. Parliament met in Gloucester in September 1378 because the summer had seen violent attacks by Londoners, led by John Maynard, on the Earl of Buckingham’s household. A petition to the king and council at the Merciless Parliament of 1388 accused Alexander Neville, Archbishop of York, of posting bills against his enemies even during the sessions of parliament. The walls of Westminster Palace, like those of St Paul’s, were favourite surfaces for posting political comments. Although the king had managed to defuse the crowds of 1381, there was a great sense of unease and volatility around the centres of power. Social and economic forces had for decades been creating both capacity and expectation among workers, artisans and tenants, producing greater mobility and less dependence on traditional bonds of authority. The language of these groups was English, rather than French or Latin, and their arenas for action were the guild, the parish, the local court. They were often on the road, as soldiers or small traders, or as labourers in search of a good contract of employment.
The king was not erratic. He favoured the royal uncles, creating Edmund of Langley Duke of York, and Thomas of Woodstock Duke of Gloucester, while John of Gaunt Duke of Lancaster required no further honour. The king was maturing fast as a political actor. He also became a married man, through a union with the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, Anne of Bohemia, in 1382. His home was his palace, and London his playground. As he matured the king was expected to develop, with the advice of his council and parliament, a long-term strategy on finance and war, as well as a system for promoting talented people and rewarding loyal and useful men born with status and expectations. He was planning his first military campaign, put to parliament in 1382 with a request for taxation. But before long he was drawn into another adventure, a crusade, no less.
In fourteenth-century double-speak the Bishop of Norwich’s campaign to Flanders came to be known as a crusade. With the revolt of Ghent against the Count of Flanders in 1383, and punitive action by Count Louis de Malle against the import of English wool into the Flemish cloth-making cities, England’s trade stood to suffer dramatically. Bishop Henry Despenser, who had suppressed the uprising in Norfolk in 1381, came up with another idea of violent action little fitting a bishop: an expedition to the Low Countries with papal sanction. As papal representative in England and Wales, he succeeded in obtaining papal approval and crusading status for the campaign, with all the spiritual and financial support which crusades enjoyed. The aim was to offer succour to the Flemish rebels, and thus to unseat the Count, on whom a Flemish alliance with France depended. And so over autumn and winter 1382–3, after a cross-taking ceremony in London, recruitment began for the army which Despenser was to lead in May 1383 from Sandwich. The army crossed the Channel, soon taking Gravelines and Bourbourg, and then continued further north-east up the Flemish coast. At the siege of Ypres the progress ended, as the force was ill-equipped and suffered disease. With the approach of a French relief force, the bishop called a truce, and withdrew to Calais. Although the young king had not led the expedition, this was undoubtedly a frivolous use of men and funds. If he were to impress and reassure, he would have to do better by leading a successful campaign.
These were years of fear of invasion, when France appeared intent on energetic action, and the Scots added to the anxiety in the north. John of Gaunt invaded Scotland in 1384, and destroyed Haddington (East Lothian). This in turn brought retaliation led by the Earl of Carrick, a rival to King Robert II, which prompted a stronger response. This time the army was led by Richard II, who campaigned in Scotland in 1385 with 4,500 men-at-arms, his sole act of military leadership to date, and succeeded in reassuring the north. But there were other worries: in October 1386 parliament expressed its discontent with the preparations for defence against a French invasion, and its distrust of the advisers who surrounded the king. Parliament did not refuse to raise taxes, but it demanded closer scrutiny of the uses of funds and the planning of war.
The parliament of 1386 came to be known as the Wonderful Parliament, and it impeached and punished Michael de la Pole Earl of Suffolk, the king’s chancellor since 1383. Leading the assault was a group of magnates, known as the Appellants – the Duke of Gloucester (the king’s uncle) and the Bishop of Arundel, with the support of London. There was great fear of a French invasion from Sluys; all those involved in planning and financing sea defences were under public scrutiny: chancellor, treasurer, keeper of the Privy Seal – de la Pole, Segrave and Skirlaw – for neglecting sea defences in the year to October 1386. Those in charge of defences, the communities of the south-east of England, acted. There was a rush of activity in Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, the Isle of Sheppey and Portsmouth. At the same time the Scottish border was also watched, for fear of an opportunistic attack. Armed boats were sent on reconnaissance in Sluys and its vicinity. All this was supported by local finance, at the same time as parliamentary finance supported ship-building, the efforts in Castile (1385), and in Scotland (1385), and the relief of Ghent and Calais.
The confrontation did not end with the complaints and trials in parliament; a period of recruitment of armed followers ensued, with the expectation that discontent might also take extra-parliamentary form. During the summer, at Nottingham and Shrewsbury, Richard II inquired into the legal underpinning of the complaints against his rule. At the same time he directed Robert de Vere Earl of Oxford, whom he had made Duke of Ireland and whose elevation was one of the bones of contention with the Appellants, to raise a royal force. De Vere led a royal contingent of some 4,250 men from Cheshire to London, with the aim of asserting the king’s authority and protecting his household. The Appellants, recently joined by Henry of Derby and Thomas Mowbray Duke of Norfolk – engaged and defeated the royal force with their own 4,000–5,000 men on 20 December 1386 at Radcot Bridge in Oxfordshire. Here was civil war after half a century of relative domestic peace.
In what followed Richard was as good as deposed for some three days, during which no credible alternative emerged to his rule. The Appellants continued to London; they also provided a menacing presence during the parliament which followed – the Merciless Parliament of 1388. State trials for treason were held against de Vere and John Beauchamp, Steward of the King’s Household, which resulted in sentences of execution, though de Vere fled to France. The king was drawn into factional politics; thus he was reduced to behaving like another magnate, not as an unassailable king. After the execution of his followers Richard was a fatally wounded figure. He was forced to keep the Appellants on his council, but at the same time aimed for a rappro-chement with his uncle, John of Gaunt, an alternative power broker. Richard also recruited men who would be loyal to him, such as John Waltham, Bishop of Salisbury, who in turn recruited northern clerks into royal service. The king claimed his majority, in 1389, at the age of twenty-two, at a solemn mass. This was a mark of reconciliation and consolidation; men offered their oaths of allegiance and kisses of peace. Yet the traumatic events of 1386–8 had created a bloody memory, one which was to be fatally re-enacted a decade later.
The Cambridge Parliament of 1388, which followed, was a low point for royal prestige, and resulted in twenty-five acts of legislation aimed at containing disorder and enforcing a social peace. Movement and association were deemed dangerous: the Vagrancy Act criminalized movement of able-bodied persons without licence and the abandonment of contracts of service. Moreover, craftsmen, servants and apprentices who were out of work were now obliged to provide agricultural labour during harvest. Such legislation was only patchily enforced, but it bears witness to a mood of discontent and distrust among landlords and employers towards those they might employ or to whom they might grant land in tenure. A nostalgia for greater social fixity and a clearer demarcation of status and estate is evident even in minor acts of legislation, such as the ordinance passed in 1389 at Havering manor court (Essex) against keeping of greyhounds for hunting by anyone with land that yielded less than 40s. per annum. In his poem Confessio Amantis of 1390 the poet John Gower used the story of Icarus and Phaeton to express distaste for those who soar above or plunge below their prescribed social boundaries:
In high estate it is a vice
To go too low, and in service
It grieves for to go too high.
The same parliament initiated a countrywide survey of sworn groups and voluntary associations, bodies which were indeed dangerous and potentially disloyal. Every association in the land which owned property and was bound by oath was obliged to report by February 1389 on its aims and capabilities. The resulting returns to Chancery make interesting reading: sets of statutes and the histories of some 500 social and religious clubs, most from the east of England: Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and London. The country was shown to be supporting hundreds of local groups for worship and mutual help, in which the language of community and brotherhood was used to form bonds of cooperation. Despite parliamentary rhetoric these were not traitorous bodies; the challenge to royal authority came from a much narrower group, which sought scrutiny of foreign affairs and the domestic processes by which the necessary finance for them was procured.
Richard II’s London was a ravenous eater. Food – its production and preparation – posed special problems for town-dwellers. In the later fourteenth century diets became more diversified: England and parts of Wales developed a commercial and agrarian regime, which remained susceptible to harvest failures, but in which few people, even the poor, actually starved. Most regions produced enough grain for local needs. Even large cities – like London or, further a field, Ghent – consumed grain grown over considerable, yet neighbouring hinterlands. Grain was stored for its many uses. The barn at Bredon (Worcestershire), on a 300-acre estate of the Bishop of Worcester, was built from the bishop’s own timber and contained an apartment for the reeve with a fireplace and toilet. Sheaves were kept dry, sorted by grain type, and threshing took place on the barn floor under the vigilant eye of the fathers and sons of the Fryg family such as John (d. 1385) and Richard (d. 1401), who also maintained a lofty dovecote beneath its roof. The corn was sold to the corn-factors of Tewkesbury; its chaff and straw was used for manure and thatching. As the century unfolded, demand for high-quality white wheat bread remained high, affecting sowing patterns, which reeves such as the Frygs were obliged to evaluate and plan.
Feeding the towns and maintaining standards of hygiene became and remained the responsibility of town authorities. Food producers were singled out for special attention in urban by-laws which aimed to control prices and quality: in 1350 London limited the price of baking a capon or a rabbit in pastry to a penny. In 1378 the capital’s authorities ordained a tariff for foods habitually prepared by its cooks, including roasts and pasties of fish, fowl and game. Two years later, anxiety about putrid and malodorous meats cooked in pastry cases led to controls on the work of the pastry-cooks of London. In 1381–2 a London ordinance directed sellers of food and drink to market portions worth a farthing (a quarter of a penny) – portions which even the poorest labourer could afford. The city’s cooks, flan-makers and bakers were responding to a wide range of demand and price: the patrons for this ‘fast food’ were not only travellers and single people, but often the urban poor, who could not afford the substantial cost of maintaining a kitchen with its utensils, supplies and glowing hearth. Even quite substantial households used the services of bakers for their pies and flans, as ovens were rarely possessed by small or even medium-sized households. The kitchen of the London vinter Richard Lyons boasted in 1376 pots and pans, cauldrons and kettles, and a variety of serving utensils; but even this prosperous urban household bought in its bread and ale. William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman offers a lively image of town life with the cries of street vendors: ‘Hot pies, hot! Good piglet and geese, go dine, go!’
Those who had access to fresh produce from their estates tried to consume it even when they were residing elsewhere, or were on the road. Prelates, royal officials and nobles travelled with foodstuffs, or had provisions brought from their estates to temporary residences. Oxford colleges, similarly, consumed bread baked from the wheat grown on their estates, and consequently bought less food in the Oxford market than the town’s merchants would have desired. Merton College’s mathematical scholars – known as the Oxford ‘calculators’ – applied their interest in probability and equilibrium to the working of the markets, as they managed the college’s agrarian produce and purchased necessary foodstuffs and domestic goods. The accounts of the hospital of St John the Evangelist in Cambridge record the purchase of spices and cheese but never of grain, which was brought to it from its estates. Great aristocratic households consumed the specialized provisions of London cooks, of the makers of sauces, flans, wafers and pasties, but required few purchases in bulk of grain for bread and ale, or of meat and fowl, for these arrived cured and salted from their estates. Spices were desired by all who could afford them for the preservation and flavouring of food. Fourteenth-century cookery books abound in instructions for the use of pepper, cinnamon, cloves and ginger. When Edmund Mortimer Earl of March set off to Scotland on a diplomatic mission in 1378, he stocked up in London with large quantities of saffron, ginger and pepper. With these his cook prepared meals from foodstuffs bought on the route to the north: at Royston, Huntingdon, Stamford, Grantham, Newark, Doncaster, Darlington, Durham and Newcastle.
The urban poor used their wages for the purchase of food, and towns attempted to regulate price and quality, particularly at the lower end of the market. Many single people were in domestic service, being fed and clothed by their employers. But towns were full of poor working people, who had to provide for themselves and sometimes for dependants. Poor women appear as recipients of testamentary gifts, as tenants of modest rooms, as persons too poor to pay taxes, and depended on cheap food, bought daily and meagrely. Such food was readily available in towns: Southwark alone had six cooks and four pie-makers in 1381. Smaller towns held weekly markets at which many of the goods known to modest Londoners could be purchased.
But what of rural folk of the poorer kind? About half of the rural population of Suffolk villages were wage-labourers; they too required provisions that were cheap and reliable. Their diet was much more vegetable-based than that of urban workers. The poet William Langland describes the lean winter diet as including bread, cheese, curds and vegetable pottage. Peasants ate root vegetables, onions and leeks, and probably more fruit than their lords and richer neighbours. Harvest and early autumn brought some variation, with better bread and some meat from freshly slaughtered pigs. And some food was free: in gardens, on hedges, and at the edges of parks. What they ate reflected their tenancies and their work pattern: Peter Aldred of Sizewell (Suffolk) was a master fisherman, who earned much by the sea but also held land and reared animals; his family’s table reflected all his pursuits.
Even more than cooks’ pantries and pie-houses, taverns proliferated in the towns and provided a growing part of the nourishment of poor and rich alike. Ale was drunk by all, although the rich also drank wine, usually imported from Gascony or Anjou. Ale was brewed from barley, or a mixture of barley and oats in the south-east. The decades after the Black Death saw a rise in the consumption of ale, reflecting the improvements in wages. This thick and nutritious drink – nothing like most modern ales – supplied a ready source of energy for poorer working people. A 1345 London ordinance aimed at protecting the city’s water described it as ‘the drink of the poor’, but by 1381–2 the city aimed to regulate the price of ale ‘in order to assist the poor’. Adults drank some three pints of ale a day on average, in a period which saw, not surprisingly, a growth of home-brewing for household consumption and modest sales. In Maidstone in Kent around 1386 a third of households were engaged in brewing, usually under the supervision and through the labour of women. Besides its beneficial effect as provider of nutritional plenty, greater alcohol consumption also affected – in public and at home – the tenor of sociability, and it undoubtedly led to accidents and violence at work, at home and at play.
Food was closely linked with notions of justice and order. Mayors used the shaming and degrading pillory in meting out punishment to those who defrauded the poor by overpricing or by the sale of deficient food. Long-standing royal legislation, such as the Assize of Ale and the Assize of Bread, was embellished and extended by the provisions of individual towns and communities. London’s White Book (Liber albus) stipulated that if bread were found to be defective – in price, grain or weight – its baker was to be drawn through the city on a hurdle after the first offence, put in the pillory after a recurrence, and lose his right to bake altogether after a third offence. Cornhill – where a pillory stood – became a focus for the expression of public disapproval. Offenders were led to the pillory in painful and degrading processions, carnival-esque parades through the streets leading to it. Brewsters, bakers, butchers and cooks were punished in such pillories and pinning stools. William Langland’s Piers Plowman explains why: ‘For they poison the people secretly and often.’
London’s needs affected the life-choices of families and communities in the counties surrounding it: Surrey, Sussex, Essex, Middlesex, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Kent. Estates in these counties moved from the predominance of wheat in the corn basket to a larger share of barley and dredge (a mixture of barley and oats). The interaction between different types of consumption was complex: the rise in the demand for ale, for example, required more fuel to support the brewing process. Regional specializations developed as reeves of estates decided, and continued to assess, whether greater profits were to be had from tending their woods – the price of a pack of faggots rose from 1d. c.1300 to 2s. 5d. c.1400 – or extending their arable. The decisions of reeves in Henley (Oxfordshire) or in Faversham (Kent) about the management of wood on the estates in their charge were increasingly affected by the need to provide London with faggots – grown, cut and packed – for use in the kitchens and workshops of the city. The woods of south-east England were tended in cycles of eleven years to produce both the fuel which the city needed to stoke its fires, furnaces and breweries, and the timber needed for its continuing efforts of construction, reconstruction, partitioning of houses, workshops, churches and wharves. Stocks of wood unloaded at Woodwharf, Castle Baynard Ward, were soon distributed by an army of woodmongers. City officials intervened during periods of shortage and seized stocks in wharf storehouses.
Mayors stood at the head of an urban bureaucracy which invigilated over the teeming city of London, over wards which contained noble households, religious houses, noisy workshops, interspersed with havens of verdant pleasance, herb gardens and orchards. These men were ‘between the king and the commune to keep the laws’, as the Cornhill poet William Langland put it. In these words he captured some of the essence of their roles: to ensure some measure of justice, through fair competition, decent pricing, and safety for the weak. Without idealizing these shrewd and ambitious men of affairs one can none the less note the city’s need for persons at the helm, even while citizens still regulated large areas of their lives in small groups: in guilds for work and production, in parishes for sociability and religious progress, and in life of family, kin and affinity. City officials aimed to leave office considerably richer and better connected than they were upon entry, but they were also able to promote some aims which fitted prevalent notions of good urban rule.
London – with its size and variety – offered especially attractive opportunities for progress and growth in professions, crafts and politics. In his Testament of Love of c.1384 Thomas Usk presented himself as a ‘scrivener’ – a writer – and as a Londoner, a resident of Newgate. To be a writer was to possess a specialized skill: the craft’s prominence was recognized by the grant of guild status in 1373. As a writer Thomas Usk probably plied his trade around St Paul’s, copying documents and books and composing legal texts. Men like him, articulate and urbane if not rich and well connected, were drawn into the followings of political faction. In 1388 Usk met his death by execution, as punishment for defecting from the faction led by John Northampton, representing the craft guilds, to what became the ‘wrong side’, led by Nicholas Brembre. Brembre was a grocer, who had served as mayor four times and as alderman twelve, following a career as a customs collector. He represented the great merchants and support for King Richard during the events of 1381 with colleagues such as William Walworth, fishmonger, and John Philpot, another grocer, who were all involved in running the Calais staple and in tax collection. As testimony to the prominence of neighbourhood and kin in political affairs, Thomas Usk’s head was displayed at Newgate for his friends and neighbours to see.
In the 1380s and 1390s London mayors and aldermen were embroiled in politics more than ever before: in 1381 London had stood by the young king. The independence and importance of London’s governing group, its expectations of office, were not easily relinquished and were defended with violence if necessary. Such sentiments led to the murder of a Genoese merchant, Janus Imperial, in London in 1379. Following parliament’s confirmation of special trade privileges for Italian merchants in the autumn of 1378, Imperial was in London to supervise the loading of his ship’s cargo. He was accosted, trodden on and then murdered just outside his house in St Nicholas Acon Lane. The trial records show that the henchmen were servants of the leading merchants of London, all of whom were involved in the export of wool. London shippers had dominated the trade and its profits, even to the exclusion of their own provincial compatriots; they were intent on sabotaging any attempt at enhancing competition from abroad. An appeal stated clearly that the accused believed that ‘Janus Imperial would destroy and ruin all wool merchants in London and elsewhere’ if he were to complete the negotiations. The Genoese opened London not only to their own countrymen, but to Florentines who used Genoese transport. This was too dangerous a development for London’s leading merchants to accept; so Janus Imperial was killed.
This case captures several important aspects of London life: the strength of its merchant patriciate; the benefits which had accrued to merchants from commercial policies during the French wars when trade and taxation were so intimately linked; and the power of older men to recruit and move young men to violence. The Londoners who saved the king in 1381 – many of whom were knighted for their efforts – were a uniquely powerful group of grocers, fishmongers and mercers, with the power sometimes to determine policies at court and in parliaments, to affect the state of the kingdom in meaningful ways.
Foreign traders brought fine cloths, ivory, rare pets; the Datini company specialized in spice and grocery goods from the east: saffron, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, pepper and dyes. They also brought Mediterranean goods: almonds, tin, soap (a mixture of soap-plant ashes and oil), and rice. A Genoese tarita, wrecked off the Brittany coast in 1386 and plundered by Dartmouth men, contained dates, alum and parts for crossbows. Households, and not only the kitchens of the lavish gentry and magnates, came to depend on a regular stream of eastern spices and southern foods; food was laced with their flavours during the festivities of midwinter.
In return all foreign merchants took away wool. Some were so well acquainted with the Cotswolds wool-towns that they coined Italianate names for them – Borriforte for Burford, Norleccio for Northleach – while others did regular and lucrative business with abbeys or with gentry middlemen. But these purveyors of good things were resented by local traders. Lombards were accused in parliament of introducing not only usury but also sodomy into England. Foreigners were at times as vulnerable as they seemed dangerous. In the week of political unrest in June 1381, after setting Archbishop Sudbury’s head on the gate of London Bridge, activists turned to the parish of St Martin’s in Vinery, dragged out thirty-five Flemings and slit their throats. Around 150 other Flemings were robbed. Morbid humour was had by Chaucer in The Nuns’ Priest’s Tale where the confusion of domestic animals caught up in the massacre is imagined:
So were they scared by barking of the dogs
And shouting men and women all did make,
They all ran so they thought their hearts would break.
They yelled as very fiends do down in Hell;
The ducks they cried as at the butcher fell;
The frightened geese flew up above the trees;
Out of the hive there came the swarm of bees;
So terrible was the noise, ah ben’cite!
Certainly old Jack Straw and his army
Never raised shouting half so loud and shrill
When they were chasing Flemings for to kill,
As on that day was raised upon the fox.
Here is opportunistic violence and simmering distrust and envy, which made life unsafe and unpleasant for its trading minorities, only a hundred years after the mass expulsion of the Jews.
Although London patricians resisted change, change was everywhere: in politics, in religion and in the tenor of family life. Prosperous alder-manic families suffered from the demographic realities of the age, like everyone else, and this meant that few parents had more than a single son to inherit and succeed them, and often not even one. Such families were also attracted to the opportunities available in the country, just as sons of gentry families were entering the law and finding their place in the capital, and even abroad. These merchants were also aware of the constraints upon their world, and its dependence on greater people.
London was a cosmopolitan city: in it the king could engage and benefit from the services of men such as the Florentine Mannini, Richard II’s jeweller, and of other financiers for diplomatic activity. International events affected their trade greatly, such as the alliance struck between John of Gaunt and Portugal in 1386. Since the 1360s only single traders had been given privileges in Portugal, but henceforward opportunities were greater: in the fifteen months between September 1390 and December 1391 twenty English ships sailed from Bristol to Portugal carrying arms, wheat and horses, and returning laden with wines, figs, raisins and salt. With the advent of French control of west Flanders by 1386 the French used Flemish ships to threaten invasion and disrupt English trade. Such vicissitudes worried merchants such as Chaucer’s own:
He would the sea were held at any cost
Across from Middleburgh to Orwell town.
For the wool staple had moved from Calais to Middleburgh in Zeeland in the years 1384–9.
Despite the elevation of some such men to knighthood, despite their riches and involvement in high politics, the great London merchants inhabited an ambiguous position in relation to magnates and the king. Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee sets the arguments of chivalric honour against those of urban and urbane ‘prudence’. Chaucer translated from French sections of a tract on peace, originally presented to Richard II, a vision of peace which is politic and subtle, not blandly and naively eirenic. The Tale of Melibee argues for the staying of vengeance and the working at concord. It is a parable about Richard II: his detractors saw him as effeminate, lacking in bellicose instincts; yet the making of peace was harder and more dangerous than any campaign.
In a city like London, and in parliament, mercantile and landed leaders mixed and cooperated, sought and maintained a fragile peace which was far better than its absence. Yet some cultural spheres enshrined the differences between merchants and gentry, counting-table and sword. An event such as the Smithfield Tournament of October 1390 benefited some great merchants through the demand it generated for rich cloth, supplied to the court by the clothier John Hend. The mayor, the financier William Ventour, was invited to view the proceedings from the royal stalls. But such men fitted uncomfortably into the world of prowess and display exhibited on the field. Unlike the equivalent urban festivities of the Low Countries, which many Londoners witnessed as passing merchants or as soldiers, this was an aristocratic celebration, the preserve of grandees such as the king’s brother John of Holland, or the Count of Hainault. Neither magnate nor soldier, the merchant did not aspire to the glory and the easy authority which magnates and knights commanded. Such display was nowhere more evident than in the ostentation of Richard’s later years: his entries into London rivalled those of any Renaissance prince.
Richard’s court revelled in the art and poetry and music which only a cosmopolitan outlook could nurture. In all sections of society people experienced a local version of the Europe-wide Christian culture with its sacraments, offered by clergy and supervised by bishops, who were often themselves figures of European dignity and importance. Ecclesiastical politics became even more complicated as the Papal Schism – a dispute over the identity of the pope which broke out in 1378 with the election of Urban VI to the Roman see – divided Europe along lines of allegiance to one or other (and even a third) pope. English bishops continued to provide English versions of Christian books for pastoral instruction, often of continental origin. Frequently these were confessional handbooks, such as the summary of penitential practice by Raymond of Peñaforte, which was translated into English and into Welsh before 1400; or collections of sermons for feast-days in the vernacular such as that composed by John Mirk, Augustinian canon of Lilleshall Abbey (Shropshire), Mirk’s Festial, part of which was translated into Welsh. Texts circulated for instruction, but for most people reading was not necessary or common for religious practice. Efforts were continuously invested in the provision of workbooks for the clergy: every church was expected to have a missal, a lectionary (with readings for the mass), an antiphonary (with music for the beginning of the mass), a psalter, a book of sequences (special prayers), and an ordinal (with the order of services). Bishops attempted not only to supply the clergy with the necessary working tools, but also to create a uniformity of correct practice within a diocese. As can be expected, many parishes were ill-provided, stripped of basic adornment and supplies. When the Bishop of Hereford visited the churches of his diocese in 1397 he found that the rector of Ollingwick had removed the church door, churchyard lamps, and a large breviary (service-book), which he read to his servant in the privacy of his home.
Around the basic tenets of faith and practice there developed a wide range of activities such as private prayer (the rich could pray with the aid of highly adorned books), pilgrimage to the shrines of saints, processions around parish boundaries, and religious drama. People from all parts wended their ways on pilgrimages. Some ventured far afield: the poet Gruffydd Gryg (c.1360–1410) has left a description of a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. In Wales and Cornwall strong traditions were attached to holy wells, and to the chapels built around them, as in Ffynnon Gybi (Caernarfonshire) or Ffynnon Seiriol (Anglesey) and St Mawes (Cornwall), where healing was sought and frequently found. These adventures were not obligatory; they were arduous, but they could also be enjoyable and invigorating forms of religious participation. The laity could also elicit the aid of various types of religious: monks guarded saints’ relics and their legends, friars composed plays, bishops led processions, hermits chided and pronounced prophecies, and visionaries composed prayers. Biblical reading and reflection on the text of scripture played a limited role in the experience of most Christians, while stories about saints and cautionary exempla were a staple. Scripture offered the verses around which preachers composed their sermons, and furnished some of the English words which actors in religious drama declaimed, but the Bible was rarely encountered directly by lay people. It was read by few, and even those who could read it were encouraged to encounter it through the guiding and corrective mediation of preacher or priest.
The priest was the central pivot of sacramental life, and the onerous task of representing and mediating doctrine, morals, enthusiasm and ritual, with which he was charged, was all but impossible to fulfil adequately. He was meant to live among his parishioners in most cases, managing the land or rents from which he derived his income, and operating over a wide range of some extremely private and other highly public activities. There was a literature to guide him, and churchwardens supported the fabric of his church, but the demands of celibacy and the knowledge and understanding of the purpose and contents of priestly office proved very demanding for many.
The church’s own internal scrutiny, through visitations conducted by bishops and their officials, was often prompted by the complaints of parishioners. Shortage of personnel meant that some men were appointed to jobs they could not fill adequately, on the condition that they improve. So John Laurencz was appointed as clerk to the parish of Great Wishford (Wiltshire), and swore that he would leave at the end of the summer to attend the schools and return when he felt competent. William Colet was examined and found lacking; he was ordered to attend grammar school and acquire the ability to understand scripture and offices within a year. The quality of personal life was often denounced by parishioners who offered details of uncanonical conduct by their priests. In many cases priests cohabited with women, often with a family, a domestic unit in all but law. In 1394 Isabel Seman confessed to having been the partner of William Smyth, vicar of Chobham (Surrey), and the mother of his children, the youngest of which was in her arms while she made her confession. In the life of John Swell of White Waltham (Berkshire) several weaknesses were found: he secretly kept a woman called Joan who had come with him from his previous living, a woman said to be another man’s wife, making this a case of adultery. He was also remiss in providing extreme unction, was given to drinking and could not sing, read or understand the services. Here were more deficiencies than a few months at a school could remedy. Swell denied having had intercourse with Joan, and swore to do penance and correct his life, in a different parish.
We witness in such records accusations, some real, some malicious, some exaggerated. Some of the resentment harboured towards priests was expressed in the shocking events at Wye in 1382: a group of men seized a priest and mutilated his face with a sign of the cross produced by ashes and sulphur. The centrality of parish priests was tested and matched by the vulnerability of their personal authority. The dilemmas of celibacy and clerical abuse clearly challenged priests and communities in ways which Catholic bishops still confront today.
Every man and woman, child and adult, belonged to a parish. Urban or rural, in bustling streets or on a country lane, the parish church claimed a person’s loyalty from the moment of birth. It was here that children were baptized, marriages were solemnized, and funerals unfolded, with burial in the adjacent churchyard. Parishioners were expected, at the very least, to make confession and take communion at Easter. But a wide range of other services was offered in those parish churches where an adequate priestly presence was to be found. These ranged from exhortations by Sunday and feast-day sermons to celebration of Easter Week and participation in the drama of the Christmas season. There was teaching for boys, the comfort of visitation to the sick and dying, the offering of death-bed communion and extreme unction, and, when necessary, even the committing to writing of a parishioner’s last will and testament.
The parish was not only an ecclesiastical administrative unit in which people were expected to perform their duties, to which they paid tithes and where they dutifully appeared for annual communion. In it, work and kinship, age and gender were regularly expressed in conflict and celebrated in joy. Those who entered a church in breaks from work – seldom in summer, more frequently in winter – were reminded by the rood, by wall-paintings, by elaborately carved fonts like the ones East Anglian villages boasted, of their duties and failings. The Christ of Sundays displayed the wounds inflicted on him by those who toiled on his day; the works of mercy beckoned, and even in the poorest church a chancel cross brought to mind the very rudiments of the Christian story. Parish churches offered space for a wide range of social and familial celebrations: church-ales at which money was raised for the support of newlyweds as they set up their new home, marriage celebrations, dramatic performances of biblical tales. The safe and relatively protected space of the parish church was sometimes used as a place of safekeeping for documents or treasure, a meeting place for the transaction of business, even as a market on rainy days. Men and women could express their interest through small contributions made to the parish – holy bread, embroidered vestments, works of art, offerings to the altar, testamentary gifts of plate or cash or cloth – each as he or she could make or afford to buy.
The chancel, the church’s east end and the site of the altar and its precious ornaments, was the responsibility of the rector, while maintenance of the main section of the church, its nave – with its long and wide areas of wall, windows and ceiling – in which the parishioners huddled as they stood during services, was the responsibility of the parishioners. Sometime in the thirteenth century the office of churchwarden emerged, and pairs of such officers, usually prominent and always men, undertook the task of collecting funds and managing them in support of the parish church’s fabric, furniture and plate. The accounts rendered by churchwardens were drawn up annually for scrutiny, and display a wide range of activities: distribution of alms from the parish box and weekly collections, fundraising for special purchases (a canopy or a chalice), and even moneylending from parish capital. The accounts for 1394 of the church of St Margaret’s, York, record small expenses, such as payments for the mending of surplices and altar linen (probably by female parishioners), for the purchase of parchment, of a clapper, of bell-ropes and a trunk. The restoration of the fabric was always a serious undertaking, and the efforts it involved could enhance prestige and solidarity between those who underwrote the project. In Ripon (North Yorkshire) a fraternity was founded in the 1370s for the maintenance of a then ruined chapel, said to be of St Winifred.
Churchwardens were leading local men, who were sometimes called to subsidize the parish when it ran into deficit. They demonstrate the many ways in which the parish and the social unit of village or neighbourhood, as well as the judicial and productive unit of the manor, overlapped. The parish sometimes coincided with the urban ward, and often fully with the manorial village, and it sometimes included a number of hamlets. In the parish were displayed not only Christian symbols and artefacts, but, increasingly in these decades, marks of seigneurial presence or patrician involvement. Crests and armour were displayed on walls, as above the north doorway of Castle Acre church in Norfolk, or on shields in spandrels such as those of the de Warennes, Earls of Surrey, and of the Fitzallans, Earls of Arundel. Gifts from local families came in the form of chalices, hangings or vestments, and brasses marked the passing of prominent parish members. The brass of the Admiral, Thomas Lord Bergavenny (d. 1417), and his wife Mary (d. 1392) was probably made in London in the year of her death. It is situated in the north aisle of the church of Wotton-under-Edge (Gloucestershire), where it displays in modest but effective fashion their estate and pursuits: she is a lady in distinguished though restrained dress, he a warrior, with a mermaid collar invoking his maritime pursuits, and a lion and a dog at his feet. Family pews and chantries similarly marked off spaces within the parish church, creating a clear sense of hierarchy within it, as these were invariably placed as close as possible to the chancel-end, the church’s liturgical focus. Entering a church was not so much stepping into another world, but rather entering into a space which depicted and reinforced some of the social and political realities which were encountered outside it. In the parish church, royal proclamations were made, banns of marriage announced, and news of campaigns, treaties and coronations was disseminated. Humiliation and punishment were also practised there, as the excommunicate were named, adulterers shamed and penitents were viewed in their hairshirts and torn garments.
In the plenitude of its social and religious functions, the parish was a meeting-point for rich and poor, the powerful and their dependants. The parish was increasingly the favoured venue for collection, distribution and perpetual provision for the poor. One manner of provision was the allocation of annual incomes to be used in the form of distributions at the discretion of the parish priest. In his will of 1396 Robert Holme of York left 100 marks for the heads of poor families in parishes where he had bought raw wool. This was an act of restitution as well as an act of charity. Parish loyalty mattered greatly to those who gave – not only as a way of perpetuating their names in exchange for future prayers, but also as a vestige of family and lineage in a local setting. Similar understanding of the centrality of parish relief was to be displayed in the sixteenth century in the Poor Law legislation of Queen Elizabeth.
Embedded in the spheres of power and social relations, the parish offered the instruction and support which was meant to keep people away from sin, and to integrate them as good members of a Christian community. Priests aimed at promoting some basic Christian beliefs, the very minimum of structured knowledge that could provide a basis for a discerning Christian life. This knowledge, conveyed by parents and reinforced by priestly attention before confirmation between the ages of ten and twelve, was bolstered by exposure to explicit visual representations. Wall-paintings, statues and stained-glass windows adorned churches to the extent that their members and their benefactors could provide.
People could attend and even join many liturgical enactments such as viewing a procession with the eucharist to the sick, or the elevation of the host at mass. People attended funerals and – especially women – watched over Christ’s sepulchre, carved out of stone, like that at Eastbourne (Sussex), from Good Friday to Easter morning. All these performances reinforced the tenets of the Christian story with its promise of salvation. Late medieval imagery concentrated much attention on Christ’s suffering on the cross, and cross-related imagery abounded, from the rood cross that hung above the crossing in front of the chancel, to the cross which was habitually embroidered on the priest’s vestments, such as the splendid chasuble still to be seen in Skenfrith church in Gwent, with scenes from the Virgin Mary’s life. Parish provision was thus varied and occasions for voluntary participation were many, especially in the summer months when much of the liturgy was enacted out of doors. Rural parishes occasionally pooled their resources for the support of a group of players who performed biblical plays, while the sophisticated communities of towns could mount grand cyclical plays with many scenes and sumptuous props and costumes, planned over months, and involving wide participation of a large part of the male citizenry.
Dynasty linked past and present and offered a focus for identity and aspiration. If the parish offered the channels towards salvation to all, then dynasty offered additional security, by contributing to spiritual well-being. Most commemorative arrangements were set up and maintained by families. The rich could depend on the services offered by chaplains whose whole purpose was commemoration of the dead in family chapels and chantries placed within parish churches, or in cathedrals for the socially exalted. Thousands of chantry priests were paid modest sums – in 1378 a maximum stipend was set at seven marks a year, three in cash and four in food – as wages for incessant intercession for the dead relatives of their employers. Links with previous generations were similarly cemented by the inheritance of objects for daily use, for adornment, for pleasure: clothes, hangings, jewellery, keepsakes, prayerbooks; people invested value and retained memories through them. The great minster at Tewkesbury was the recipient of a bequest made in his will of 1375 by Edward Despenser, Lord of Glamorgan and Morgannwg: a suit of vestments, two chalices and a ewer given to him by the King of France, which he wished to have used for the containment of the consecrated host on Corpus Christi day. The rich were far more able to commemorate previous generations as their lives abounded in objects of value and beauty. Tangible objects, enduring stone structures that could be held by a family for centuries, crests and emblems, documents and muniments, all these cemented a sense of dynastic loyalty and privilege.
Through actions within the locality and beyond it, family members were expected to promote dynastic honour and refrain from bringing shame and damage upon it. An all-important occasion when dynastic considerations were intense was, of course, marriage. The church’s view of Christian marriage required free entry into the relationship, a morally significant act of free will which merited recognition as a sacrament. But in most social milieus marriage was arranged, and it was the prerogative of patriarchs, the result of careful dynastic assessment and planning. The fact that ecclesiastical courts in England and Wales abounded with cases of marriage breakdown, broken promises and unconsummated marriages, demonstrates the degree to which the church’s legal system – canon law – provided avenues for rearrangement of marital situations. Margaret, wife of Robert Handerby, brought her case for spousal cruelty to the ecclesiastical court of York, and although the court attempted a reconciliation it also ordered that, were violence to recur, legal separation would follow. A steady stream of English and Welsh petitioners sent representatives to the papal court in search of such life-changing separation or annulment. Young people clearly often defied parental choice, and prevalent demographic conditions favoured periods of work outside the home, before marriage. Young people seized opportunities to work and train away from family and home, and thus developed greater autonomy in the period leading up to marriage. Richard Carter and Joan ate Enges were domestic servants in a York neighbourhood; when they exchanged vows in 1370 it was before their employers, not their families. But in the landed and wealthy classes less volatility was demonstrated, and in royal marriages there was the least of all. Here, marriage and procreation were affairs of state.
From the 1380s and throughout the remaining medieval decades, the church in England and Wales faced sustained challenges from groups which came to be known as Wycliffites, followers of John Wyclif, and later from those who were labelled ‘Lollards’. What began as a set of theological discussions at the University of Oxford in the 1370s was soon considered to be an onslaught upon the relations of church and state, and a critique of most practices of religious life as known to parishioners. Inasmuch as religion and notions of order – familial, political and communal – were intertwined, this threat was a matter of urgency to every man of power: to every father, every priest, every bishop, to the king.
A subtle interaction existed between religious ideas and ideas about politics and the social order. Whereas the great upheavals experienced by many in the decades following the Black Death may have made some people more independent and relatively sceptical about the fixity of hierarchies and order, it is also clear that for others an adherence to traditional religion, to the system which made sense of suffering and loss and which offered a comprehensive world-view and personal morality, was also attractive. Thus we have seen, in the decades which coincided with the late years of Edward III and with the reign of Richard II, the flourishing of what some have called ‘traditional religion’ – in the work of religious fraternities, foundations of chantries and establishment of masses for the dead.
At the same time a trend was at work which may be called ‘radical orthodoxy’ rather than heresy. This was religious experimentation by members of several distinct social groups: gentry, lower clergy, university scholars, culturally eclectic courtiers, independent and informed merchants. They were attracted by the belief that individuals might forge a personal morality based on a close reading of scripture and outside the promise and mediation of sacraments through the hands of the clergy. Just as the Commons were inveighing against corrupt royal officials and ministers, so the servants of God – clergy and episcopacy, friars and theologians – became the subjects of criticism, dissatisfaction and public lampooning.
Like so many other positions we have already encountered, seemingly deeply contradictory, yet residing cheek by jowl, this diversity in religious styles reflects some regional differences between the lands ruled by the kings of England. It was diversity anchored in regionality – in the agrarian and climatic regimes which differentiate people’s work, diet, appearance; in history – with some regions being conquered lands, exploited by a dominant group of land- and privilege-holders; in geography – as regions which were seafaring or connected by riverine systems displayed more mobility and eclecticism. Diversity and hybridity need not surprise us, for they confirm and explain the expressions of dissent and the burgeoning of ideas in the later decades of the century.
A wide range of attitudes brought into question aspects of the conventional Christian life upheld by ‘traditional religion’. These attitudes were considered and expressed first by scholars in the University of Oxford, and then more widely by their sympathizers, preachers who travelled the country supported by communities which welcomed their message, and harboured them, protected them and committed their words to writing. First among them was the north Yorkshireman John Wyclif (c.1335/8–1384). By the 1360s he was a Fellow of Balliol College, where many northerners came to study. There he stayed to teach and write. In 1372 he was awarded a doctorate in theology, and he went on to lecture on Oxford’s arts course. Teaching Aristotle’s Physics was an occasion to reflect on God’s competence, on the degree of divine intervention in the world, issues which touched on fundamental questions of Christian ethics. Wyclif cherished above all the sense of God’s underlying commitment to the world through his unseen yet formative laws for it. Appearances were surfaces that revealed little of these underlying truths – scripture alone was a sure guide to them. The invisible church was rarely reflected in the visible actions and objects of the practice of liturgy and church law; this was mightily proven by the miserable state of church politics, plagued by papal schism and dispute. Inspired by the political world of the late years of Edward III, this philosopher-theologian wrote tracts on political theory, just as he served in the 1370s as a diplomat in royal service, as part of John of Gaunt’s circle. Wyclif was not a scholar shut away in an ivory tower but an intellectual who brought rigour to bear upon the realities of his day, such as the relative authorities of church and king, the uses and abuses of church wealth. He found particularly harmful – both morally and politically – the involvement of prelates in government, for this necessarily made them agents of oppression. He asked with rhetorical flourish: ‘What is an archbishop doing as the King’s chancellor, an office which is the most secular in the kingdom?’ The clergy’s advantages set it apart from its flock; when the country was groaning under taxation, were not many of the clergy exempt from the poll-tax of 1381?
In 1377 Wyclif was denounced by Pope Gregory XI for his views on the eucharist and the endowment of the church, views which were the subject of many heated disputations in Oxford. When he was arrested by the Chancellor of Oxford University, Wyclif’s release was secured by John of Gaunt, his patron. The crown was slow to respond to Wyclif’s challenge, but when English prelates finally caught up and began examining his books, Wyclif retired to his parish of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, where he died in peace in 1384, having seen his works condemned at the Blackfriars Council in London in 1382. In a sermon preached in the summer of that year, Bishop Brinton of Rochester represented Wyclif’s views as an attack on the sacraments – especially on the all-important remedies of baptism, confession and eucharist – by a ‘pseudo-prophet’. After Wyclif’s death the task of cleansing Oxford of the Wycliffite disease became an obsession, a concern of the Bishop of Lincoln, to whose diocese Oxford belonged. Cambridge gained from Oxford’s notoriety; throughout the fifteenth century it became the university of choice for much royal and episcopal patronage.
Wycliffism was a relatively limited movement of scholars, yet its international links and the spread of the Wycliffite Bible – the Bible in English – made it much more meaningful. The chronicler Henry Knigh-ton coined the pun in his appalled report on the Bible’s effect: ‘Master John Wyclif translated the gospel into the English – not angelic – language… the pearled gospel is spread and trampled by pigs.’ Indeed, over 250 manuscripts of the translation still survive, such as the famous ‘Cider Bible’ on display in Hereford Cathedral Library, in which references to wine were substituted by the word for the local tipple, cider. The prodigious literary production of a small group of scholars and preachers spawned the fantasy of a much wider movement of dissent and reform – to which the label ‘Lollardy’ was attached.
‘Lollardy’ was the term used to describe a multitude of views about the sacraments, on the cult of saints and relics, and on pilgrimages, disavowal of the power of images, criticism of religious drama and the vivid preaching of friars, rejection of purgatory and of the efficacy of prayers for the dead. The understanding at the basis of all these positions was opposition to trivialization of faith, to religion experienced through external signs, mediated by material procedure, to instruction in Christian belief through ‘curiosities and novelties’ rather than through exposition of the Bible. It saw in many practices inventions of priests who wished to extort payments from the laity, rich and poor. Some Lollard writings targeted the interpenetration of church and state institutions: a clause of the Twelve Conclusions, a Lollard manifesto of c.1394, judged the cooperation of ‘prelate and justice in temporal cause, curate and officer in worldly service’ to be contrary to God’s rule. Wyclif believed that had Christ come to visit fourteenth-century Europe, he would have been persecuted and burned. Some Lollard teaching had a disturbing apocalyptic edge; the Opus arduum (Hard work) even saw the year 1390 as an apocalyptic sign, with chaos in the rule of antichrist (the pope). Walter Brut, a layman educated in Latin, who wrote an account of his imprisonment and trial in the diocese of Hereford, believed that the pope was the true antichrist, ‘contrary to the laws and doctrines of Christ’.
At its most elaborate, dissent offered a total alternative to Christianity as lived in late-fourteenth-century parishes. It promoted instead a spirituality based on scriptural texts, a piety which saw no reward for external signs of faith, and cherished an emphasis on belief and spirit rather than on materiality. It was austere, and could appear egalitarian; it supported the offering of the Bible in the vernacular, and inspired the creation of groups of women and men for reading and discussion in homes and workshops. Through preaching and exposition such groups aimed to teach, but also to animate that third of all men, and an unknowable but substantial number of women; so, as the chronicler Knighton put it, ‘for the laity and those women who could read’. We often learn about so-called Lollard preachers from the sources of examination and persecution: in 1382 the Bishop of Lincoln issued a mandate against the hermit William Swinderby, who dwelt in a chapel near Leicester and claimed the authority to preach against church doctrine. Swinderby may have learned his views at the Abbey of St Mary, Leicester, which he had recently visited, a centre for dissenting opinions and patronage in the Midlands. Bishops were charged with licensing preaching and supervising its contents; anyone who arrogated to himself the right to teach without licence, or in defiance of recommended styles and topics of preaching, posed a challenge to episcopal authority, upon which the whole structure of the church depended.
The positions which were identified as ‘Lollard’ expressed a desire for simplicity and accessibility of worship which was cherished by people who were never related to Wycliffism. See, for example, the cry for God’s love unmediated by preachers in the words of the poet Dafydd ap Gwilym (c.1320–80) directed at a friar:
God is not so cruel friend
As old dotards would pretend…
Pleasure grown from poet’s song
For sick and whole, old and young.
We have equal warrant each,
I to write verse, you to preach.
Some men in clerical orders, and some who judged themselves to be suitable teachers, traversed the dioceses of southern England offering alternative teaching and worship. Such must have been William Rames-bury who was investigated by the Bishop of Salisbury in 1389. This man defied all categories of ecclesiastical propriety: he was a ‘virtual layman’ who preached and feigned holiness. He claimed to have been tonsured, by a Thomas Fishburn, and thus to have entered into clerical orders. He donned a russet tunic and mantle, and celebrated a type of mass. His mass retained the crucial elements of elevation of the host, prayers for the dead, and blessing of bread for distribution among members of the congregation. He celebrated in this manner for four years throughout the diocese, from Sherston near Malmesbury to War-minster, to his native Ramesbury.
Was his a mock mass or a ‘Lollard mass’? William had congregations, and an amount of local support that allowed him to survive for so long unbeneficed and undetected. He clearly retained central aspects of Christian ritual celebration. He was a powerful preacher and teacher, who talked and exhorted people everywhere: in churchyards, taverns, while travelling. Judging by the erroneous opinions listed by the investigating bishop, and which William then chose to renounce, he held a recognizable and coherent set of convictions: against ecclesiastical hierarchy, against clerical celibacy and against the worship of images. The claim that he advocated sexual intercourse with nuns should be seen as a stock accusation aimed at further embellishing his challenging and transgressive image.
Men such as William were numerous. Some were placed more advantageously as beneficed clergy, who could use their own pulpits for the exposition of reformist views, as did John Coryngham in Diddington, near Huntingdon, up to the spring of 1384. In some cases, and in the early years of Wycliffism, preachers were invited by a mayor to bring illumination to a town, as was William Swinderby, who was the guest of Leicester in 1382; in 1392 Northampton probably initiated a similar invitation to a dissenting preacher. What congregations got was a plain sermon – one which adhered doggedly to scriptural text – which did not deploy the age-old and familiar tales, exempla, and other diversionary tactics which provided comic relief in the midst of traditional sermons. Even on feast-days, some preachers would prefer to adhere to a relevant scriptural text rather than use the legends embedded in hagiographical writing. For this some were labelled ‘Lollards’.
The tens of surviving sermons branded or self-identified as ‘Lollard’ are testimony to preaching which provided food for thought, and which must have impressed with the fervour, commitment and starkness of its message. The Prologue to the Wycliffite Bible, produced in the late 1390s, is a tract on the value and manner of reading scripture. Though simple in tone, and provided in English, here is a distillation of classical rhetoric and Christian exegesis, based primarily on the writings of Augustine: the Bible should be read literally, in its original word, by people of little learning, but not so literally as to denude it of its figurative, poetic qualities. Such new vernacular works and the preachers who spread them and their message did not fit into existing liturgical niches, nor did they require priestly guidance. Rather, they were meant to initiate discussion and reflection. Some preachers even left copies of their sermons with congregations for further rumination at a later time. Although they were presented as novel and disruptive to the Christian tradition, some ‘Lollard’ preachers were university-trained, and were minded to seek links between their views and those of earlier reformers. An interesting juxtaposition is the appetite in England for the reformist and prophetic texts associated with the twelfth-century Rhenish visionary Hildegard of Bingen, who is probably better known nowadays for her musical compositions. In turn, by the 1390s, even orthodox writers, such as the author of the Pore Caitif (Poor Captive), used ‘Lollard’ commentaries on the gospels and drew from biblical translations in the compilation of their teaching materials.
Views deemed ‘Lollard’ went to the heart of clerical privilege in mediating the sacraments to believers, and since only men could become priests, this was also an attack on male privilege. During his examination for heresy of October 1391 Walter Brut was said to have claimed that women had the power and authority to preach, to make the sacrament of the eucharist, that they had the power of the keys, to bind and to loosen, invested in St Peter and thereafter in the clergy for all time. The same ideas were expressed in the Twelve Conclusions, a set of principles nailed to Westminster Hall in the winter of 1394, during the king’s absence in Ireland, by men who presented themselves as ‘poor men, treasurers of Christ and his Apostles’. The first and second conclusions attacked the papacy in Rome, the third claimed that clerical celibacy led to incontinence and sodomy, the fourth that ‘the feigned miracle of the sacrament of bread induces all men but a few to idolatry’. The Dominican polemicist Roger Dymmock, who replied to the Twelve Conclusions, accused the instigators, whom he took to be clerics, of ingratitude towards a church that had educated and nurtured them, and of bringing dangerous harm to simple folk who were misled by their errors.
The church’s administrative machine, led by the bishops, many of whom were leading royal servants, was entrusted with the task of correcting such error and controlling preaching. It set out to identify and correct such preachers, but the task proved to be a difficult one. This is made clear even from a single career: that of William Swinderby. In 1382 Bishop Buckingham of Lincoln moved against a hermit from the Leicester area, who claimed to have been ordained. The latter upped and moved to Herefordshire, where he was apprehended almost a decade later by Bishop Trefenant, who found him to be ‘but simply lettred’. While it is easy to think of a Puritan preaching in whitewashed churches from which much ornament had been dismantled, it is difficult to imagine a ‘Lollard’ preaching from a typical late medieval pulpit, such as that in Castle Acre church in Norfolk, as it was by 1400. The pulpit was adorned with figures of the Latin fathers of the church – Augustine, Gregory, Jerome and Ambrose – and next to it stood the screen, of which only the bottom survives in a colourful display of traditional saints’ legends: Philip, James, Matthias, Jude, John, James, Peter, Andrew, Bartholomew, Thomas, Simon and Matthew. The call for reform was an assault on the aesthetic of worship, accumulated in churches by communities over centuries.
While English came to be associated with mistaken, even treasonous, religious inclinations, its powers were also being tested by aspirant writers – professional, such as Thomas Usk, or leisured men of letters, such as John Clanvowe. In his Testament of Love Usk opined that clerks should write in Latin, Frenchmen in French, which comes naturally to them, and ‘let us show our fantasies in such words that we learned from our mother’s tongue’. Such reflections on the robustness of English as a tool for learned and poetical writing are in themselves a sign of the commitment and excitement which using it engendered. In his Treatise on the Astrolabe Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400) wondered whether ‘light English’ quite suited scientific writing. He was soon to move on to the most sophisticated writing about human affection, community, government and justice. Inspired by Italian and French poetry (which he had heard as well as read), he made English – hitherto the language of the home and locality, of women and children and peasants – into the language of kings and magnates.
Chaucer also wrote the elegy The Book of the Duchess around 1369, in memory of Blanche Duchess of Lancaster, first wife of John of Gaunt. Female traditions of great richness and broad reference were available, and influenced the aesthetic of such highly programmatic royal works as the Wilton Diptych and the images painted in Westminster Abbey, as well as images made as offerings, such as the stained-glass window at Beverley Minster which featured the royal pair. Anne of Bohemia adopted the emblem of the white hart, which had been reintroduced by Philippa of Hainault in the 1340s. Dominicans loomed large in Anne’s court, as they did around most female royals on the continent. Even the queen had few female servants: there were no more than twenty women around her, and she a queen famed for her patronage and lavish hospitality. Yet the cultural resources of this female group were considerable. Queen Anne read Latin, German and Czech, and may have commissioned Geoffrey Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. A cult developed around her following her early death in 1394 at the age of twenty-eight, a cult promoted by her husband, and enlivened by her sumptuous funeral (two months in the planning), and her elegant death effigy, which still survives, in the Museum of Westminster Abbey. Yet for all her impact, the active and creative elements of the Ricardian court, the core audience for Chaucer’s poetry, for ceremonies of diplomatic display or the discussion of Wycliffite ideas, belonged to a male sphere of sociability. These were groups which readily and knowingly discussed war, art, commerce, poetry and love. Chaucer’s English and his literature form part of this world; its first audiences were restricted, almost private, chiefly male.
The chronicler Thomas Walsingham claimed that the Twelve Conclusions had been publicized with the aid of knights of King Richard’s chamber, and that when he returned from Ireland the king chastised these errant, privileged men of his close acquaintance. The royal household was almost wholly male: when it was criticized, barbs were directed not at indulgence in sexual licence – as was the case during Richard’s great-grandfather’s reign – but at expenditure and patronage. Few women attended the court; a celibacy of service was encouraged, or at least an appearance thereof.
Yet a rhetoric of inclusion in a new-born language came to be attached to Chaucer’s poetry even in his lifetime, and became even stronger in the following decades (Plate 10). In his Troy Book of c.1412–20 John Lydgate, monk of Bury St Edmunds and court poet, described Chaucer as the one who magnified English, and ‘adorned it with his eloquence’, ‘adorn’ and ‘eloquence’ both being words which Chaucer had coined. Lydgate also opined that The House of Fame was as good as Dante’s poetry. French penetrated English parlance through Chaucer’s inventive leadership. The French poet Eustache Deschamps, whose self-portrayal as a victim of war found poetical form in a play on his name, brulé des champs – burnt of fields (referring to the destruction of his ancestral lands in Champagne) – described Chaucer as ‘grant translateur’, transmitter and conveyer of literary worth.
The mythical status earned by Chaucer’s English poetry diverts attention from the powerful vernacular poetry in Old and Middle English and in Welsh. English Marcher lords developed a great liking for the sounds and the generic diversity of Welsh poetry; for the Welsh cywyddau, a eulogy which fitted well with lordly self-perception, and for the elegy, or ode (awdl). Such was Ieuan Llwyd ab Ieuan’s elegy for his wife Angharad:
A fitting pain, a shower of tears wets me,
My cheek is sallow and withered by languishing grief;
…
Sad work for the sight, the long enforced weeping;
Woeful work of longing, the memory of Angharad.
So advanced was Welsh poetry that it spawned a critical tradition of treatises on the bardic art. Not only did the Welsh gentry crave it, but so did English lords of Wales, their stewards and officials. Welsh poetry shared with Chaucer’s a love of alliteration and an inclusion of daily patterns of speech. It often displayed, like Chaucer’s, a frisky anticlerical sentiment and a worldly-wise stance towards authority, while at the same time participating in traditional forms of worship and deference within the social and political order. Irish bardic poetry was the subject of repeated legislative bans by bishops in the fourteenth century, yet clearly those who could perform the art were rewarded with food and hospitality, and their works were appreciated by Anglo-Irish lords.
There was also the variety of English dialects, regional languages with traditional genres, sounds and poetics. While Chaucer built upon London English, Langland worked through the dialect of the southwest, the author of Gawain and the Green Knight was from the west Midlands, the devotional text Cursor mundi was northern, and the penitential guide Ayenbite of Inwyt was Kentish. In 1382 John of Trevisa wrote from the West Country about northerners:
The language of the Northumbrians, especially at York, is so sharp, piercing, grinding and misshapen that we southern men can scarcely understand it. I believe that is because they are near strange men and aliens that speak strangely, and also because the Kings of England always live far from that country.
Trevisa ought to have known that London too was full of ‘aliens’, as were Bristol and Norwich. But the final remark is insightful: in these and the following decades English was shaped and endowed with dignity and force by the example of the court, the language of royal proclamation, the habits of Chancery and law-courts. By the fifteenth century it was the language of politics.
The burgeoning of English, the rise of its utility and prestige, is notable in wide areas of practice and experience. Not only does the literature of amusement and leisure display this trend, but so does that of work and vocation. In the latter a distinctive style of mixing English with Latin terms is evident, like the functional bilingualism demonstrated by the barber-surgeon of London, Thomas Plouden (d. 1413). A medical compilation was translated for his use, which combined university texts with practical directions. English was becoming not only the language of oral practice, as between surgeon and patient, but that in which the surgeon read and learned his craft. This was not a total replacement, but a merging of languages, into a bilingualism for a wide range of the literate population. In an English astronomical text Latin was frequently used when a word did not come to mind; the inscription on an amulet turned from English to Latin for the words of prayer. Collections of English medical recipes contained Latin names of ailments in the margin, to facilitate consultation of Latin texts. Another sphere of professional practice, that of Chancery, was also producing an English particular to its practices. In this last quarter of the century English, French and Latin coexisted and enriched linguistic resources, with English in the ascendant in spheres of professional work, religious instruction and private reading and amusement.
So rich was poetical production during Richard II’s reign that the term Ricardian Poetry has been coined to include Chaucer and the Pearl poet, as well as John Gower and William Langland. Poetry had a public and political set of preoccupations: morality, poverty, social change and disruption. Its characters were stock figures of satire, but also identifiable within contemporary life: the Man of Law, the Squire, the pious Prioress, the Plowman. French was the language of reading and writing for lay men and women, but the uses of English were growing: in devotional writings and increasingly in poetry. English was also becoming a vehicle for the learned discourse of the law-courts: the oldest surviving private legal document is in English, a petition of the Mercers of London to parliament in 1386; the oldest will in English was enrolled at the London court a year later.
War had brought England and France together over almost a century; Richard’s second marriage was planned to bring them even closer – war and kinship are links almost equally intimate and revealing. French poets were in the service of John of Gaunt and the Earls of Derby and Pembroke. The Savoyard Oton de Graunson transmitted French poetry that influenced Chaucer, just as music and the entertainment of diplomats at court did; John of Gaunt’s own chapel boasted the finest French music. Where the court of Edward III delighted in French romance and in Arthurian imagery – not least with the creation of the Order of the Garter – in Richard’s court such games would have seemed puerile. In its place Chaucer and the Ricardian poets were experimenting with European poetry expressive of complex social interactions and moral dilemmas, a poetry of the now and the future, not of the bygone past; it was worldly and pedagogic, all-embracing and cautionary.
It is a curious paradox about Richard II that he possessed so marked a capacity towards imaginative thought, and yet judged so inaccurately those enduring, more predictable, aspects of kingly rule, his relations with the peers of the realm. As a young man, as yet unsullied by extended rule, he had been the recipient of the political aspirations and requests of those who marched to London in June 1381. But only a few years later, by 1386, he was seen as a promoter of factional interests and destroyer of fabrics of loyalty and cooperation. He did not shine militarily, nor did he attend to the exercise of power in the council chamber. His court was the seat of poets, in it diplomacy was vibrant.
Richard’s aspirations were laudable, and he sought example in the right places: he impaled his arms with those of Edward the Confessor, and turned to trusted administrators in affairs of state. In an act of dynastic piety and self-presentation in 1390 he sent to the papal Chancery material to be used in the process of canonization of Edward II, his great-grandfather, another ruler troubled by his magnates. He believed that gestures of generosity and images of great beauty might turn foe into friend and scepticism to loyalty. When his conflict with London over the city’s financial and legal privileges was settled, this was celebrated in a pageant of concord of 1392: the city’s capitulation was visualized in processional form from Great Conduit to Little Conduit in Cheapside, and ultimately to Temple Bar. The king and queen offered themselves as actors in scenes of offering and worship: the capital became a celestial city with young men and women descending from overhanging towers with offerings of gold plate to the royal pair. A plethora of religious images pervaded the event, undercutting for a while other political interpretations: the king was bridegroom and the city his bride, in a celestial Jerusalem where John the Baptist was shown preaching and a final, humbling, scene of the Crucifixion was staged.
No single adjective can capture the diversity of political moods and cultural forms experienced in England and Calais, Wales, and the parts of Ireland ruled by Richard II. The collapse of trust between the young king and his most natural advisers, in the events of 1386–8, pushed Richard into the arms of his uncle, John of Gaunt. The Duke of Lancaster became in 1390 also Duke of Aquitaine for life, and he supported the king’s policy of peace with France, which his arch-foes the Percies in the north-east opposed. Yorkshire was a region of constant disorder and insurrection, not least by men in Lancastrian service who disrupted the life of towns and the rhythm of courts. In 1392 300 armed men entered Doncaster and stopped the collection of tolls from tenants of the Duchies of Lancaster and York. Men of the Lancastrian affinity seemed to be immune from punishment. Rather than encouraging people to appeal to royal justice, this realization created disaffection towards the king, who was seen as ineffectual and partisan. As is often the case when the balance of power is unsettled, men like the Beckwiths in the West Riding took matters into their own hands.
In court another set of concerns was being explored and represented. The early 1390s saw intensive efforts at securing peace. Philippe de Mezières, French diplomat, soldier and pilgrim, wrote a letter on peace which begged Richard to join a coalition of peace which would free the hands of England and France to lead a Crusade to the Holy Land. This royal French tutor and adviser composed Le songe du vieil pèlerin (The Dream of the Old Pilgrim), an allegorical account of a journey taken by Queen Truth and her sisters Justice, Mercy and Peace. Each country is described and then offered words of advice for reform: in England the ‘white boar’ Richard, son of the ‘black boar’ of Crécy and Poitiers, has lost his lands (in France), in France there was mayhem and disorder. All this misery would come to an end once the kingdoms turned towards the ideals of peaceful government. Here is a vision of peace, of sovereignty and virtue, worthy of its Aristotelian antecedents and of the Christian morality which nurtured it.
All the elements of the universal Christian vision came together in rich fruition in the Wilton Diptych (Plate 11), a representation of Christian kingship: Edward the Confessor, St Edmund king and martyr and Richard, under the tutelage of John the Baptist, appear on the left panel. Facing it is the prime mediator of grace (a model of what a good queen could be), the Virgin Mary with the Child Christ, surrounded by a heavenly court of angels. Here was a European vision captured in courtly gothic – with dexterity in portrayal of detail, respect for royal dignity, delicate and insightful portraiture, and attention to lineages of right and rule. Richard entertained a European vision; the Diptych belonged to a political moment – sometime between 1395 and 1399 – when Anglo-French rapprochement suggested new horizons of crusading virtue. This vision was promoted in 1396 through the double rituals of a peace accord for thirty years and Richard’s marriage to Isabella of France. In the Wilton Diptych he faces the Virgin Mary in hope of regeneration, dynastic continuity and peace. But this vision failed to ignite his partners in rule – the magnates of England. When this became clear to him, he had no other vision to replace the one spurned, and so his majestic and responsible rule turned sour, reclusive, tyrannical and withdrawn. In the last years of his reign Richard II alienated even those magnates who were tied to him closely by blood and affinity.
English magnates were a group of extremely powerful men – there were six earls with annual incomes greater than £5,000 and eight with incomes over £3,000 – who enjoyed the expectation of leadership in peace and in war. These men were meant to provide kings with counsel and to ensure that the regions of their greatest influence dwelt in peace. To them were related women who inhabited positions of great influence, as wives, heiresses and dowagers. As we have seen, marriage was a carefully calculated and ordained undertaking, particularly first marriages. When magnates married, kings and kin could express opinions and bring strong pressure to bear, but great men conducted domestic lives which suited their sentiments and prospects: John of Gaunt, for example, made his mistress his third wife.
The magnates’ world was regulated by the seasons of the year: times for war, for parliament, for public communal pursuits, for conviviality. Throughout the fourteenth century and in parallel with the growth of the frequency, duration and importance of parliament, they developed substantial urban residences. Whereas they had always played a role in trade, the generations which benefited from war-spoils, and who sought to diversify their economic activities in the period following the Black Death, became deeply interested in commerce, speculation and finance.
The English magnates are best understood not as a class but as a political grouping which was formed and reformed around rival claims to leadership and smouldering enmities. Thus even when they had relative success as a group of Appellant Lords in 1386–8, offering an alternative vision of rulership with considerable effect, the competition between the Earls of Derby (the king’s cousin) and Gloucester (the king’s uncle) ultimately tore the group and its programme apart. Derby and Gloucester were part of a vast family created by the many sons of Edward III. The political aspirations and blocks wielded by such men were enormous, and these marked Richard with the traumas of 1386–8, for the rest of his reign.
Because they wielded extraordinary power in the regions, and were looked to as providers of justice and protectors of peace, magnates also created dependent relationships that reflected and implemented this power. The vast estates of an earl, lying in different parts of the kingdom, its isles and domains, had to be administered, maintained, protected by arms and defended in law. Large groups of men of humbler status, usually but not always of knightly rank (of which there were some 1,100 families at the time), were marked by association with magnates. Justice, estate administration, lines of defence, all depended on this group of magnatic servants, members of what we call the gentry, men who were stakeholders in magnates’ interests, and who had some experience at law, war and the management of people. These men had their own complex dynastic connections, privileges and aspirations, all of which could be bolstered through links to a magnate, at once forbidding and reassuring. This is not to say that men of the knightly class or who aspired to it were subservient to and embraced wholly by magnatic association. They clearly formed a group with important horizontal links of mutuality, sociability and kinship. But particular distinction could be had through association with a magnate. The toll which this system then exacted was clear in periods of magnatic strife, as lesser men were drawn, necessarily, into disputes between magnates, each with his respective local following. Above all, there was the problematic and distorting political situation created when the king behaved as a magnate, and developed strong affinities in the many regions where he held substantial land.
Although London played a growing part in the lives of magnates and the parliamentary gentry, home was the country – family seats enjoyed and used in a seasonal rhythm. The 3,000 or so free landed families of England ranged vastly in status and connections. Like the magnates to whom they turned for example and protection, they had estates scattered over considerable distances. Marriage brought land and reward, as did the taking up of advantageous leases; travel and supervision and the fostering of local connections in several localities could keep a gentleman and his servants very busy. All these posed difficult decisions of policy and politics as they weighed commitment and advantage, loyalty and expectation against each other.
As visitors and hosts, magnates jousted and displayed their status and prowess. At the Smithfield Tournament of October 1390, a reciprocal match to one played in Paris, the English team played a foreign one, the former wearing the king’s emblem of the white hart with a crown and golden chain, the sign of the king’s affinity. The king led the company to the field, twenty English knights led by ladies with golden chains; the knights proceeded to disport themselves in joustes à plaisance, meant to entertain and to cause no serious harm, through a series of engagements with blunted lances. John Holland (the king’s brother), Hugh Despenser, Thomas Mowbray (a reconciled Appellant, now Lord Marshal), Sir Lewis Clifford, John Devereux and Sir William Beauchamp all took part. Three days of jousting were celebrated in leisurely fashion at a banquet offered by John of Gaunt.
The nobility also took part in an international world of politics, dynasty, art and religion. Not only had the French wars brought them into frequent contact with France, the Low Countries and parts of the empire, but other ambitious campaigns followed. Such were the ill-fated Flemish crusade led by Bishop Despenser in 1383 and the crusade to Spain led by John of Gaunt (for this dynastic campaign was blessed as a crusade, with fifty honorary chaplains appointed to serve those going on it). The crusade into Prussia in summer 1390 saw the Earl of Derby and a household entourage of around 150 depart from Boston (Lincolnshire) to Danzig. They rode through Brandenburg to Vilna under the leadership of the Teutonic Knights, and the earl returned for another tour in 1392. The crusade to Nicopolis of 1391 similarly broadened horizons and bonded English magnates with continental peers. The poet John Gower, member of a Kentish gentry family, described such a knight in his Confessio Amantis:
So that by land and also by ship
He must travel for honour
And make many hasty rides
Sometimes in Prussia, sometimes in Rhodes,
And sometimes in Tartary.
He was not unlike Chaucer’s Knight of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales:
In Latvia he fought as well as Russia,
No Christian man so oft of his degree.
In far Granada’s siege also was he
Of Algeciras and of Belmarie.
Distinguished knights such as Sir John Clanvowe and his close friend, Sir William Neville, members of King Richard’s household, even met their end on such crusades. The Westminster chronicler claimed that after Clanvowe’s death of disease during the crusade to Nicopolis, Neville refused to eat, and died a few days later. They were buried in the Dominican church of Galata – a Genoese colony in Byzantium – and the stone placed on their joint tomb displays their helmets facing each other (as if in a kiss), and their arms impaled, as the arms of spouses were on such monuments. Here was a very deep friendship, not unlike a union solemnized three decades later by two English knights in the church of St Martin in Harfleur: John Winter and Nicholas Molyneux swore solemnly to be ‘frères d’armes’, brothers in arms. It is hard to appreciate the full scope of these past relationships, but they must have been enhanced by the intense bonding of camaraderie, away from conventional expectations and support.
Some knights and their families lived in very fine houses, combining combat training and leadership in war with local government in peace and the pursuits of country life, to which risk and profit were added by participation in business and investment in trade. Their books reveal interests which ranged from law to books of advice on religion and on warfare. One of the most popular books in this genre was the Arbre des batailles (The Tree of Battles). This work was dedicated by the monk Honoré Bouvet around 1386 to King Charles VI of France, and became a popular text for gentlemen who read in French, from king to squire. This moralizing work lamented the state of violence and discord which tore Christianity apart. War could be ennobling, even holy, as were those fought by Judas Maccabeus, but nowadays it seemed merely to cause misery to women and children. Some, like Sir John Clanvowe, penned their own reflections on the challenges of a virtuous active life. Here are words from an experienced soldier and courtier, through the life of Christ from birth to passion. Since life in the flesh is frail, trust must be placed in that which is not. Thomas Woodstock Duke of Gloucester used writing to capture the lessons of war, bitterly won, in his Ordinance and Form of Fighting. Magnates like him were attracted to extravagant contemplative writing by mystics such as Richard Rolle (d. 1349). While their lives drew them into strife and discord, they were fortified, comforted – led into some solace – by reading texts and contemplating images in which the body, trained and trusted in this world, was a mere ‘wretched and sinful’ thing.
Besides the soldiers there were the lawyers. Sometimes sons of knights, usually sons of more modest landed folk, they recognized the reward and rank which royal service could bring, since the key to royal administrative service was the common law. They could become sheriffs, coroners, justices of the peace, and be appointed to the many ad hoc commissions detailed to investigate and supervise local government – on subjects ranging from the state of sea walls to the maintenance of ditches. Challenging careers were also offered by magnates’ households.
The magnates aimed at creating chains of dependence and interaction with such professional, experienced and reliable men. These underwent a modification in periods of political instability and insecurity. The war years had seen the expansion of the peerage to include not only old families such as the Bohuns, Beauchamps and Fitzallans, but also the ennobled warriors Mowbray, Scrope and Holland. When magnates felt threatened, often by the aspirations of the king, they attempted to arm themselves with followers renowned not so much for administrative and legal acumen, but rather for muscle and their power to intimidate – their aggression. The expected patronage and interdependence between magnates and their men was transformed into the phenomenon of ‘maintaining’, the proactive creation of followings, of men who comported themselves, often wearing hats or badges of a particular hue, as if to say ‘I am the Earl of Surrey’s man’, or ‘the Duke of Norfolk’s’. That this phenomenon was intimidating and that it caused a deterioration in the quality of life in the regions is evident from the recurrent complaints to parliament about it: petitions for the restriction of ‘maintaining’ were presented by the Commons in 1384, 1388 and 1399. These aimed to restrict to the king alone the right to distribute badges among followers. Henry of Derby had famously snatched the collar off the neck of one of his men in 1393 in order to hand it to the poet John Gower. A year later, Richard Earl of Arundel complained to parliament that the collar of S-shaped links (see Plate 15), associated with the retainers of John of Gaunt, was now being used as royal livery; the king retorted that it was merely a sign of love.
The twenty-two years of Richard’s reign saw a great deal that was lively and good in economic life, religious creativity, and cultural exchange. They broadened the horizons of men and women, but ended in spectacularly unsettling actions, first by the king and then by his magnates. The king’s sense of his realm had shrunk to areas in which he could move comfortably, and in which he would be hailed with enthusiasm and undivided loyalty – areas like Wales and Cheshire. Elsewhere leadership fell more clearly and routinely, unfettered by royal intervention, into the hands of men who would be kings. In the absence of the constant reminder of the limits to their powers, through regular parliaments and the rituals of face-to-face engagement in a court, fantasies of transformation were harboured by some magnates. They were occasioned by the understandable grievance of a magnate, Henry of Derby, who was banished from the kingdom in April 1398, to seek exile in France, and then was denied his Lancastrian inheritance when John of Gaunt died in February 1399. Such designs were also imagined by families of great regional prominence–such as the Percies–who could determine the flow of national politics. An absent king – not exiled or banished or waiting to make his claim – could hardly rally enthusiasm for the defence of his title and prestige in the land. The king was acting like a magnate, and made magnates believe they might be kings.
Yet before his withdrawal Richard achieved considerable success in generating income for the crown, through the negotiation and administration of indirect tax on the major imports of wine and general merchandise. Throughout the 1380s and 1390s, crown income was impressively diversified in customs and dues, and administration was scrutinized closely and in innovative fashion. Where Edward III had only occasionally requested and applied tonnage and poundage, Richard managed, from around 1386, to convince parliament repeatedly that this form of tax be granted, and, after the Truce of Leulingham (Pas-de-Calais) which halted warfare between 1389 and 1392, granted even in times of peace. The resulting revenue, now an expected part of crown income rather than an intermittent grant, rose from some 3 per cent in the 1350s to 8.75 per cent of the value of wine and luxury goods which the consumers of southern England purchased in the late fourteenth century. Income also flowed from exports of cloth, even by those favoured tradesmen, the Hansards – the members of the Hanseatic League of mercantile cities. Much of the stability of the 1390s might be explained by this fiscal and political success.
Yet even this flow of income, and the efficiency and purpose which it demonstrates, could not deflect the sense of unease which related to its recipient, its profligate spender. Richard II’s receipts, buoyed by his period of relative confidence from the late 1380s and by the lower levels of military expenditure required during years of peace (although expenditure continued, not least on the diplomatic efforts which maintained peace), increasingly attracted criticism of a public and defiant kind. He did not counter this by gestures of largesse, such as his grandfather had grandly and wisely made. The occasion of the reversion of Queen-Mother Isabella’s dowry to the crown after her death in 1388 – a protracted accounting and legal affair – benefited the royal treasury, but alleviated none of the burden imposed by the royal household on public finances. The combination of politics of regional patronage and the recurrent investment of resources in Ireland was to unmake the achievements of Richard’s administrative policy. The 1390s produced income which was borne indirectly, and thus burdened mainly those who could afford to pay for expensive foreign goods; yet the rhetoric of profligacy and haughty disdain for the welfare of his subjects was none the less made to stick to the king.
The peace which was renewed in 1389, and endured until Henry V chose to break it in 1415, allowed a great deal of prosperity and rebuilding to take place in England and Wales. But its political significance was rather mixed. In the north, especially Cheshire, where so many families had seen men in constant employment in the royal armies for three generations, rumours circulated in late 1393 that the king intended to relinquish his French title. Under Sir Thomas Talbot, 20,000 men gathered for a great public protest meeting. The West Riding saw the ravages of unrule in the form of gangs of lawless men, such as the Beckwiths, to whom the king’s response was hesitant. But where the king was interested he invested intelligent effort – as in Ireland, where he boosted the standing army, and campaigned to calm violence in Leinster (Plate 19). Here Richard was able to transcend the habitual stereotypes of the Irish, which even his court writer Froissart penned following the 1394–5 expedition: that the Irish inhabit forests, ride without stirrups or saddles, and are cruel captors without a sense of chivalry. Just as he did in the French arena, Richard was able to think the unthinkable, and this set him apart from many in the political community of which he was the head. No single adjective quite captures these last years of the century. Richard’s experiments with peace and with regional rule were disquietingly unfamiliar.
A dramatic, yet not isolated example of the sentiments which Richard inspired by the late 1390s is the petition put forward by Thomas Haxey in January 1397. This petition to parliament criticized the court and royal administration and resulted in its bearer’s trial for treason, but also in his pardon. Haxey, whose family came from the Isle of Exholme in north-east Lincolnshire, was one of the many northerners who held high office in Richard II’s administration, men from south Yorkshire and north Lincolnshire. These men combined ecclesiastical careers and administrative capacity, and even as they served their king, they attended to the requirements of friends and relations within a closely knit regional brotherhood. Haxey’s advance had been facilitated by Bishop (later Archbishop) Thomas Arundel, who had presented him to his first living in 1384. Work at court also underpinned a career in moneylending and legal surety work. Men like Haxey were ready for any purpose in which knowledge of the ways of government could be usefully deployed. Thus Haxey was sent in 1385 with one of the king’s serjeants-at-arms to Cornwall to deal with business relating to ‘some royal fish, called whalles or graspeys’. Two years later, he was in the West Country again, attending to the recovery of the wreck of a Genoese vessel and its cargo. Rising in the ranks, he was by 1387 keeper of the rolls, the records of royal expenditure.
Whose grievances was Haxey expressing in his four-clause petition? His were complaints about administration: about inadequate provision for sheriffs and escheaters; that the Scottish March was exposed, causing great suffering; that liveries still proliferated despite statute provision; that the royal household’s costs should be reduced. The king answered in person, point by point, but he was enraged when addressing the last point. It was tantamount to treason, he claimed, to question royal conduct. So the petitioner was tried and condemned to death. Arundel and several bishops lobbied for his pardon, which Richard granted, responding to the request of ‘bishops and multitudes of ladies’, an ironic dig, as these were the two groups that had epitomized the court’s disorder and extravagance in the original petition.
What can the Haxey affair reflect of the mood within the higher echelons of political society? It teaches us a little. Haxey rose from a group of professional administrators, educated men, a closely knit group of clerics who expected to end their careers with wealth, status, rewards to their family and friends and a bishopric. The king’s actions in the 1390s may have placed some of their expectations in doubt. He used patronage to bolster a circle loyal and able, but which seemed to close down some pre-existing avenues for preferment. Between 1375 and 1400 only one Welshman was promoted to a Welsh bishopric; these sees went to royal favourites such as Alexander Bache, the royal confessor, invested as Bishop of St Asaph in 1390, or Tideman of Winchecombe, the royal physician, at Llandaff in 1394. This logic further worked itself through the lower ecclesiastical orders in prebends and livings in cathedrals and collegiate churches. After a protracted struggle with the papacy over the patronage of St Anthony’s Hospital, London, John Macclesfield, a clerk of the Privy Seal and royal secretary, was appointed as its master.
The king had several ways of marking favourites and rewarding dependants, for he was a keen granter of title and privilege. The by now ‘old-fashioned’ Order of the Garter included young noblemen, sons of magnates, royal intimates, and knights of his Chamber such as Simon Burley, elected in 1381, or Thomas Lord Despenser, the son of the Black Prince’s companion in arms, in 1388. Long records of service to the crown were rewarded. Richard also used the Garter to favour relatives, and especially women – sisters, mother, aunts, sisters-in-law – honouring thirty-six women in all (who didn’t count towards the quota). The oldest surviving Garter stall is from these years: that of Ralph Lord Basset of Drayton, still to be seen in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Titles could be created when favour demanded, and never more so than in 1397 when Richard turned Percy, Despenser and Surrey into Earls, and Huntingdon into a Duke. But he also found new ways to build his faction and mark his friends: he turned Cheshire into a Principality and its men were drawn closely to him. Foreign scions of friendly nobles were also raised, like Albrecht of Bavaria in 1397 with his son William of Ostrevant, who was married to Margaret of Burgundy, and was thus Count of Holland and Hainault.
Chastised by parliament and made to feel extremely uncomfortable in London, Richard created in his last years an alternative kingdom from the provinces he loved, some of which his father had cherished before him. Loved in Cheshire, feared in the Irish counties, followed by Welsh archers, Richard II withdrew from the business of Westminster rule. He made Cheshire and the Principality of Wales, including Flintshire and the Arundel lands, seized by the king in 1397, his special realm. This building of an affinity around him resulted, not surprisingly, in complaint and resentment at all levels. When a Cheshire knight, John Haukeston, was pardoned for having murdered William de Laken in the king’s presence this was no longer a case of administrative corruption, but a blemish on the royal person itself.
The king withdrew into places which he associated with safety, and he failed to create bridges to those who most resented his rule, but who might have been guided or enticed to support him. The Westminster portrait – a large painted image of the king – was created in these years, a unique image of magnificence, placed in the Abbey choir. This icon of the king as devotional focus was new and disturbing; it was the custom in Prague and even in France, but had not been so in England. This gesture was known by only a few, but important, political actors. It combined with the incontrovertible evidence of the king’s curious action against a peer and a cousin, Henry of Derby. The less he appeared to understand the concerns of the magnates, the easier it was for that peer – and his supporters in England – to make a case for opposition, even if initially not for deposition. Henry of Derby managed to mobilize the strong regional magnate, Henry Percy Earl of Northumberland, in support of his dynastic claim to the Lancaster lands. In the face of this cohesive regional block the royal affinity was too distant and too dispersed to act swiftly and decisively.
This was a period of apparent peace, during which alternative habits of solidarity had to be composed to keep a group of powerful men and their dependants harnessed. The political process served not only to remind subjects of their loyalty, but to remind kings of the very purpose of their privilege, that they headed a subtle system of enormous power and of onerous responsibility. When Henry of Derby, Richard’s cousin, the disinherited son of John of Gaunt, returned from exile and landed in Ravenspur in July 1399 he found not only the terrain prepared by his supporters, the Percies, but also support in Lancastrian territories. Edmund Duke of York (d. 1402) was guardian during the king’s absence in Ireland in 1399, and when he heard in late June that the king’s enemies were assembling in Calais ready for crossing he directed sheriffs to prepare, and sent word to Ireland. Richard heard of the challenge a few days later, but left the country only on 24 July, by which time Lancastrians in the south (especially Sussex) were organizing and Henry had begun his march from Ravenspur. The Duke of York attempted to shore up London and control the sale of arms to Derby’s forces, but by early August Henry was making his way through the king’s favoured lands of Cheshire and into Wales. By the time Henry reached Conway Castle to meet Richard II, recently returned from Ireland, he had traversed a large part of the kingdom, north-east to south-west, practically unopposed. The meeting was meant as submission and reconciliation following the restoration of Henry’s hereditary title, but ended as an abdication (Plate 12), and Richard II was made to come to London. Henry’s appetite was whetted for more: Richard faced deposition in parliament in late September – a ‘trial’ which could never be by his peers – banishment followed. And a coronation, on 13 October 1399.
The legal and political minds in parliament created a case against the king, of mismanagement and failure to fulfil his sacred kingly oath. It was not unlike the complaint voiced by the Appellants against the king’s servants, eleven years earlier. The language of deposition suggested that the king was a boy who had never grown up, a man lacking in manliness, a ruler who lacked respect for nobility and historic duty. There were rumours that Richard intended to sell Calais, that he was negotiating secretly with the French. He fell out with the Commons, whose mood was described in 1399 by the French prince, the Duc du Berry, as ‘wanting nothing but war’. Faced with an alternative – a magnate among magnates – the accusations of perversity carried the day, and became political truism: the king had perverted his office. Yet who was to judge him? This quandary was expressed neatly in Shakespeare’s words spoken by the spiritual lord, the Bishop of Carlisle, in Richard II:
What subject can give sentence on his king?
And who sits here that is not Richard’s subject?
(Richard II, IV. i. 112–13)
For the second time in that century the polity’s head was removed; the rest is chaos and ambition – a claimant in search of inheritance soon became a usurper king.
Richard’s downfall was not the result of widespread disaffection, but of the convergence of strongly held sentiments and interests with swift action in the king’s absence. Most of the evidence of his unpopularity is in chronicles written after the deposition, often using the parliamentary records as source material. Parliament was the site of national political conversation, and it had been faced with the facts of a king handing over his crown, and a magnate taking it from him.
The parliamentary chastisement of the king turned into affirmation of the many ways in which Henry of Derby could, should and would rule in Richard’s place (Plate 13). The king was banished to prison in Pontefract Castle, and ultimately died there aged thirty-two, of hunger, it was claimed. Richard II received no state burial, no lying beside his beloved first wife at Westminster. These events were so unsettling that before his body had disintegrated in the ground, rumours of his survival were about everywhere. The expectation of Richard’s imminent return became the stuff of nightmares for Henry, now Henry IV, and his Lancastrian progeny and friends, for decades to come.