It is hard to think of decades more turbulent, times in which anxiety and suffering affected so many sections of society, than the later decades of Henry VI’s reign. The causes were not so much the accession of an infant king in 1422, nor the impossibility of living up to the charisma of Henry V, who died so young of dysentery in the Bois de Vincennes in August 1422, leaving little bitterness or disappointment behind him. Rather, the erosion of links of trust and responsibility between crown and subjects, combined with devastating economic hardship, meant that by 1450 individuals and communities, in towns and in villages, were rendered restless, weakening the civic responsibility felt by political and military leaders.
There were times of some comfort and confidence following the death of Henry V: trade benefited in the aftermath of conquest and settlement in France, routines of garrison life were established, and there was relative peace. The birth of Henry V’s son had been an occasion for joy in dynastic continuity of a family recent in its ascent. Celebration reached throughout Henry V’s domain, even in the lands he had secured by conquest: in January 1422 fireworks displays and wine were offered by the captain of the garrison of Mantes for the pleasure of soldiers and townsfolk.
The royal uncles, John Duke of Bedford and Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, and great-uncle Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, ruled the country, formally and informally, for their young nephew. As Regent of France, Bedford governed the territories in France (Normandy, Gascony and the Channel Islands), maintained a substantial household and commanded the military establishment (Plate 18). A bodyguard of 100 men-at-arms and 300 archers accompanied him on his movements between Paris, where he maintained a palace (on the site of today’s Musée de Cluny), and Rouen in Normandy. He became one of the greatest European patrons of art, music, poetry and works of gold and silver. In England, the Duke of Gloucester was Protector, and under his supervision a minority council handled domestic affairs with care for political equipoise. Or at least this had been Henry V’s desire, when he composed his will and its codicils: a succession without strife. The king was a baby, but he had an impeccable pedigree. His could be a reign even greater than his father’s short-lived one.
At Henry VI’s English coronation of 1429 at Winchester, when he was aged eight, the Garter Fellowship held a cloth of state over the head of the young king, during an acclamation which invoked the spectacles of Edwardian monarchy. After the coronation of Charles VII in Reims in 1429, famously orchestrated by Joan of Arc, Henry was forced to claim his French throne, too. He entered Paris on 2 December 1431, and was crowned there a fortnight later, in fulfilment of the terms of the Treaty of Troyes of 1420. After a lavish entry ceremony which saw members of the Parisian guilds and clergy hail him as a sacred being, on 16 December the young king processed from the Royal Palace to Notre Dame Cathedral on foot, and in its choir he was crowned.
This was a very English ceremony, officiated by an English archbishop, accompanied by English musicians, all adorned with the fleur-de-lis. The king’s right to the French throne was displayed at the command of his uncle, Bedford; the ten-year-old’s genealogical table was made public, charting his right to the dual monarchy. Images were accompanied by French verses penned by the Duke’s notary, Laurence Colet. Richard Neville Earl of Warwick requested that the poet John Lydgate translate these verses under the heading, ‘The title and pedigree of Henry VI’. In these Henry VI is shown to be the descendant of the sainted Louis IX, King of France:
On the other part behold and you may see
How this Harry in the eighth degree
Is to Saint Louis son and very heir.
The genealogy was copied and recopied throughout Henry VI’s reign and has survived in a variety of sizes, shapes and formats.
The young king was surrounded by powerful kinsfolk whose experience stabilized rule, but whose ambitions could cause the deepest division. During his minority many of the sympathies of his father’s generation were maintained. He used the grant of membership of the Order of the Garter to reward men for service in France: John Lord Talbot (1424), Thomas Lord Scales (1425), Sir John Fastolf (1426), Sir John Radcliffe (1429), John Fitzallan Earl of Arundel (1432) and John Lord Grey of Ruthin (1436). This was a roll-call of service to the Lancastrians in battle. Under his uncles’ tutelage, Henry VI was expected to emerge with all the virtues of a ruler. Kingship’s good qualities were encapsulated in the words of the poet Thomas Hoccleve, which echo those of Walter Milmete before him: a good king took counsel, listened to young and old, the great and the humble, but reserved his judgement, to be reached in the light of universal consideration and attention to the common weal.
John Lydgate warned against division within the political elite in his The Serpent of Division of 1422–3, a prose treatise based on the Roman history of Julius Caesar and the Civil War. This was offered to his patron, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, Protector of the Realm, ‘to consider the irrecuperable harms of division’. The Roman elite ‘among themselves stood in such controversy that they doubted to which party they should incline’. So the republic suffered, and was ultimately dissolved. The disputes over jurisdiction and influence which erupted in 1425 between the royal uncles Gloucester and Beaufort were contemporary examples of such disruptions.
The kingdom possessed several strong institutions and components of a stable political culture. In 1422 a little short of half the representatives at parliament had fought with Henry V in France, and their loyalty had a personal resonance. Well into the 1430s Henry V hovered over his son in spirit, as his brothers and trusted appointees still worked at the implementation of his will. Henry, Cardinal Beaufort, was charged with the erection of a commemorative chapel, a chantry in Westminster Abbey where the dead king’s helmet, shield and saddle were to hang. All Souls College in Oxford was founded by Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, a monument to dead warriors and kingly piety. It offered unceasing prayer for the king and the archbishop, for Henry V and all those who had been lost in the wars in France. Built under the warrior king’s less heroic son, the college still boasts the limestone statues of the mitred Chichele and Henry VI in his royal robes.
Inherited charisma favoured the young king, but so did the kingdom’s institutions. Parliament was one such robust arena. Even after the experiences of deposition and dynastic change under Henry IV, it depended very intimately on royal presence to put its increasingly complex procedures into motion. Thus little Henry was bounced on his mother’s knee at the parliament of 1423, summoned in his name. Here was an infant king with a minority council that ruled for him, in his presence. There were serious issues to decide: the diplomatic and military effort in France, the legacy of enormous outstanding loans – from the Calais Staple, from towns, from Italian bankers – amassed by his adventurous father, and some even by his grandfather. The infant had yet to grow into the full realization of his inheritance. Henry V had insisted in his will that none of the prestigious French captives – Charles d’Orléans, Jean d’Angoulême – be released before Henry came of age and into his dual inheritance. Even after the end of the council’s tutelage in 1436–7 its members continued to serve the king as a close group of advisers. In many ways he never came into his own, except in his building projects. This made the expression of political criticism easy: ‘the king’s reason was indistinguishable from that of his counsellors’ was a trope used in the political crises of the 1440s and 1450s.
During the reign of Henry VI’s father and grandfather religious conformity had been established as a central political objective. Procedures were in operation for extirpating behaviour that was too publicly disruptive, even though the privacy of hearth and heart allowed people to maintain a wide range of ideas and aspirations in religious life. There seemed to be no chink in the armour of the dynasty and the polity: the talent which had been drawn into government in the extensive fields of church and state activities was confidently working through problems of law and order, economic regulation and religious probity.
Men such as Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, part of Henry V’s competent government, were to serve his son – as chancellor, in diplomacy, and by promoting the projects closest to the king’s heart with utter loyalty. Chichele was a noted advocate of religious orthodoxy; he devised a uniform list for interrogation of suspected heretics, which was disseminated in 1428 for use in every diocese of the land. It was said that he travelled the long roads, often on horseback, to any place where religious orthodoxy required decisive defence. Chancellors of the realm were often such archbishops of high calibre, men of broad political vision, who by Henry VI’s reign were usually lawyers in training rather than theologians. The Chancery saw continuity of personnel and processed a great deal of business. It comprised a close-knit professional group, admitting few new ideas and skills from universities. In 1448 Richard Weston joined as the sole trained lawyer, and remained such until his death in 1465. Clearly the qualities favoured in Chancery were loyalty, hard work and administrative acumen. The king may have been young but governance was not lax – for a generation or so.
The 1430s were Henry VI’s apprenticeship, during which time he enjoyed the relative indulgence accorded to youth. In November 1429 the protectorate of Humphrey Duke of Gloucester ended, though Gloucester recovered his power in 1432, while John Duke of Bedford led the government in 1433–4. During the king’s boyhood some dramatic choices faced the men who governed the interests in France. The most dramatic was the challenge presented by the rallying of French will under the extraordinary inspiration of a young woman: Joan of Arc (1412–29). Above all, Joan encouraged the legitimist claims of the French prince – the dauphin – whose right had been sacrificed in the search for peace after Agincourt. She encouraged him to be crowned at Reims, and to lead under her tutelage an aggressive French campaign against the English. Joan’s life is the stuff of which legends are made, although it left little mark in contemporary English sources, until her spectacular death. After a series of dismal defeats (Cravant in 1423 and Verneuil in 1424), the French forces, led by the ‘maid’, were galvanized into success. They defeated the English by raising the siege at Orléans in 1428, and drove them out of the Loire valley in the following summer. The Armagnac branch, which supported the Bourbon crown, called her ‘pucelle de dieu’ (God’s maiden), but the English and their allies called her a witch.
The capture of the maiden Joan by the English and Burgundians and her trial as a wanton witch had little sustained effect on the politics of the English war. But it forced the French military and political class out of a sense of inevitable defeat, and came at a time when new military technology, above all gunpowder artillery, could change the rhythm of war based on the capture and holding of walled towns. The fate of Joan of Arc also demonstrates forcefully the perilous position inhabited by women who exhibited their religion in public ways and entered into public spaces, without the support of male kin. Dressed as a soldier, Joan was to her enemies like so many of the later witches: vulnerable to the powerful double accusation of sexual incontinence and religious heresy.
In 1435 the king made his own personality felt, as he assumed his full title. By 1436 decisions in council were headed ‘The King with the advice of council’. There was much for him to learn, to discuss and decide in both domestic and French affairs. England was losing ground in France and clear factions had developed around his uncles, each representing a different approach. Following the dismal policy negotiations at Arras in 1436, which severed the Anglo-Burgundian alliance, Henry VI began his personal rule. The diplomatic premise upon which English conduct had relied for over a decade, as far back as the Treaty of Troyes, was a separation between Burgundy and France, supported by an agreement between England, Burgundy and Brittany of 1423. This political order was now over.
In a report to Henry VI and the council offered by Bedford’s lieutenant John Fastolf in 1435, a hawkish and pessimistic picture of the future was put forth. With the collapse of the terms of Troyes, England could expect Franco–Burgundian cooperation against which it would have to fight in all arenas. Economic warfare was foreseen as a shift from the purchase of English wool by Flemish towns to an economic alliance with Genoa and Venice. In reality, little of this came to pass, since the Duke of Burgundy was soon absorbed in confronting large-scale unrest in his own territories and cities. None the less, from 1436 the Burgundian court and other European princes addressed the Lancastrian king as ‘Roy d’Angleterre’, without mention of France. The reversal of the policy which had linked England and Burgundy seemed complete.
The consequences for military policy at home were clear. In the spring of 1436 widespread mobilization of men and arms was under way under the commissions of array in England and Wales. Above all, Calais had to be protected, for it was the main outpost of English military might and a key to commercial well-being. The task fell to Humphrey Duke of Gloucester as Captain of Calais. His task turned out to be an easy one, since the siege had been abandoned by the French before he arrived to relieve the city. Yet the rush of enthusiasm and pride in the outcome, which so many English chronicles, poems and reports expressed, made this into a propaganda coup for Henry VI and his court.
The court entertained differing visions for the future. In the face of the doom and gloom of autumn 1435, there was the good news of excellent stewardship in France, and the raising of the siege of Calais of 1436. A Latin tract written in the late 1430s for Henry VI’s edification recommended that he seek peace, though not at the price of honour. He was to act as befitted his crown, with the support of the elements of the polity represented by its jewels: jasper – the loyal lords and magnates; carbuncle – the bishops and prelates who toiled against heresy; sapphire – the parish priests and monks who served the people; onyx – the commons of the kingdom, communities of concord and harmony. The learned author playfully uses imagery from popular prophecies, which formed a vital part of the political culture. The poet John Audelay, an Augustinian from the Shropshire house of Haughmond, predicted around 1426 that Henry would be the man to free the Holy Cross, by ridding England and France of war and redirecting their efforts towards crusades. Such texts were written by learned men but circulated widely among politically minded lay people. In reality, the king was not a political leader, but a young man liberal with favours: he often turned lifetime gifts to perpetual grants, a habit for which the council rebuked him in 1438. The late 1430s were probably his best years; he participated in a wide range of royal activities, helping to create an image of a boy maturing into a king.
It is a truth widely acknowledged that a mature king also needs a queen. Like all royal marriages this was an opportunity to make an important political and diplomatic deal, with benefits to both sides. The choice of royal partner could promote or retard the cause of peace, and thus was bound to divide the royal counsellors. Here widespread expectation and speculation centred on the hope that the king would emerge as supreme governor and regain power from the Earl of Suffolk, who effectively controlled the court in the early 1440s. Royal marriages were diplomatic challenges. Philippe de Mezières, a well-connected French soldier and diplomat, saw them as obstacles to peace and even the cause of dynastic wars and confusion. Yet the council deemed it right, and an embassy was sent by it to examine possible brides. Margaret of Anjou was a princess, daughter of the gallant and pious René II of Anjou. Her father was to become King of Naples, but she brought no land or dynastic claim. She was an unexpected choice as partner for the King of England, who required dynastic assurance of a different calibre. Fourteen at her betrothal by proxy in May 1444, fifteen at her marriage in the following year, Margaret received as her dower much land of the Duchy of Lancaster. A retinue was led by a loyal Lancastrian servant, Sir Thomas Harrington of Brierley, with four gentlemen and twelve yeomen, to bring her to England, inaugurating ceremonies which cost over £5,500 and culminated in the marriage in April 1445. Pageants were staged in London for Margaret’s entry: from Southwark, through Cornhill, Cheapside and on to St Michael’s in Querne, St Paul’s Gate. This was a hopeful, innovative, lively combination of image, biblical verse and poetry.
A sumptuous book, a lavishly decorated compilation of poetry and treatises, was offered to Margaret and Henry by John Talbot Earl of Shrewsbury, as a wedding-gift (Plate 20). Like the royal couple it was the product of an Anglo-French match: a workshop in Canterbury provided the texts, and one in Rouen copied the texts and appropriately illustrated them. The frontispiece depicts a garbed and crowned couple sitting in state and graciously receiving the gift from their loyal courtier. Indeed, Talbot and his wife had accompanied the young bride from France to England that spring, and they probably came to know her well. The book is a combination of useful and edifying texts, entertaining romances and heroic narratives, and it ends with the statutes of the Order of the Garter. A particular compliment to female wisdom was the choice of the French poet Christine de Pizan’s Fais d’armes, a work on the arts of war, while a venerable text originally offered to Charles VI, The Tree of Battles, was an excursus on the immorality of warfare. The king and queen were to be diverted and informed; war was never far from their reality. English and French fates were closely intertwined.
Like all women in public life, and this still holds true, Margaret of Anjou had a loud camp of detractors. By 1447 she was playing an important role in Anglo–French diplomacy, and soon complaints were sounded about her involvement in the talks preceding the cession to France of her father’s domains of Maine and Anjou. In England the royal couple was keen to excite as much sympathy as possible. In 1447–8 they spent only some seventy nights in London; most of their time they travelled the country, as far as Glastonbury in the west and Durham in the north. Here was an attempt to project control and dignity, especially after the scandals at court, such as that which led to the death of Humphrey Duke of Gloucester in mysterious circumstances while awaiting trial in 1448. The French chronicler Jacques du Clercq was horrified by the fall of a man once so revered:
They made him die an inhuman death… they struck his back quarters, where human nature purges itself, with a cow’s horn, through which they inserted a red-hot iron bar the length of his body.
Into the void left by a less than potent king stepped the blossoming figure of Margaret. She soon discovered her husband to be self-indulgently pious, not without dignity, but totally incompetent in politics. When Henry collapsed in 1453, as a result of an unexplained illness, she claimed the right to act as regent, confronting Richard Duke of York, who had been named Protector. When Henry rallied somewhat she was there to stand by him, with a son and heir, who had been late to arrive, in 1453, but was all the more treasured for the wait. When Richard of York relinquished the Protectorate following Henry’s return to health, Margaret took over the reins, now protecting king, son and herself.
Margaret of Anjou’s entry into domestic politics cannot be dissociated from her husband’s collapse. Encouraged by a group of court officials in the 1450s, Margaret developed into a remarkable ruler, as her husband began to fade. When neither alchemy nor medicine nor prayer seemed to invigorate the king, she became queen in earnest, a figure whom many came to hate and fear, a woman of some learning and good sense, energy and emerging charisma. A Londoner, John Bocking, wrote of her in 1456: ‘a great and strong active woman, who spares no efforts in pursuing her affairs’. In religious matters she was conventional and far less interested than many other contemporary women in new devotional styles: a roll of hymns associated with Margaret of Anjou contains only hymns to the Virgin Mary.
Margaret has been identified with factions – creating them and exploiting them – at a time which saw the political fabric torn asunder. She has been accused of promoting favourites and developing a court circle, as so many royal women have been before and after her. The courts of king and queen were close, but distinct, entities, with separate administrations, budgets and records. Her household grew, and although her rooms boasted comfortable bay windows and intimate galleries rather than the more formal royal design, her dwellings increasingly resembled courts, with all the circumstance and personnel of a great aristocratic household, and more. Margaret laboured to arrange marriages for members of her household to leading courtiers: Joanna Cherneys, her lady-in-waiting, born in Anjou, married Thomas Sharnebourne, squire of the queen’s household, in 1449. The queen had counsellors and nurtured apprentices-at-law on to judgeships, as she did Robert Danby, who became Chief Justice in 1461.
When men are shamed and degraded, women associated with them – mothers, wives, daughters – are often also denounced. Women were seen not only as purveyors of bad influence, but as suggestible, vulnerable to the spell of another’s personality. When the Protector, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, was discredited in 1441 by a faction led by Henry Beaufort, he stood fast in council, and succeeded in defending himself. But when his wife, Lady Eleanor Cobham, was accused in July of that year of witchcraft, he could do little to help her. Eleanor Cobham was said to have conspired in treacherous divination aimed at causing the king’s death, with the hope of securing the throne for her husband. She was accused of enlisting two learned clerks and a notorious witch, Margery Jourdemayne of Eye (Middlesex), and of together enacting magical incantations against the king. The Duchess fled to sanctuary at Westminster, but she was made to stand trial and was found guilty by the council. While her conspirators were executed, she underwent humiliating penance: she travelled through London from Tower Bridge to Cornhill, over three days, sometimes barefoot with taper in hand, sometimes by water.
Eleanor probably got involved with a woman known for her occult knowledge in the hope of bearing a child with Gloucester. The men she consulted were a learned medic and an astronomer, university graduates both (Plate 1). Margery, the ‘witch of Eye’, served the noble lady that heady mixture of medicine and magic which so many people believed could cure disease and ward off misfortune. She was a figure well known at court, who a decade earlier had been arrested for sorcery. Eleanor had been a lady-in-waiting to Gloucester’s first wife, Jacqueline of Hainault, and may have already used Margery’s services then. But the heavy spin of 1441 turned the casting of her horoscope into a major act of treason; it was claimed that the horoscope was aimed at hastening the king’s death. Her household clerk and her physician, Bolingbroke and Southwell, were accused of predicting the king’s illness, thus affecting the king’s power in the land. So anxious was the king to counter doubts about his health that he immediately requested that an analytic horoscope be cast for him by two leading scholars: John Somerset, his private physician and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and John Langton, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. As for Eleanor’s clerks, they were tried and suffered horrific deaths. Bolingbroke was first humiliated at St Paul’s Cross, with a paper crown on his head, then tried before the king’s council, and when found guilty was dragged to the gallows, hanged, drawn and quartered; his head was displayed on London Bridge and his quarters sent as deterrent offerings to Oxford, Cambridge, and possibly York and Bristol. Margery was burnt as an unrepentant witch.
The types of knowledge and practices which led to Eleanor’s trial and public penance and to the death of her associates were widely known and used. Magical knowledge was systematically collected and disseminated, like the wonderful manuscript of the Ars notoria, an encyclopaedia of magical knowledge ascribed to King Solomon, large in size and beautifully laid out on the page. Magic-workers used less sumptuous pocket-books which contained recipes and curses, and invocations to ward off all sorts of evil and attract benign forces too. This knowledge could be used as self-help books are today, or by people who were recognized as experts, as Bolingbroke and Southwell and Margery seemed to be. Both canon and common law aimed at countering magic, sermons and pastoral handbooks denounced the use of it, but it was clearly everywhere, available and desired by people of all social situations.
Magic was never far from the official operations of saints’ relics and liturgical blessings. If Eleanor had originally hired Margery to use her magic and make Duke Humphrey love her, and later, to help her bear him an heir, such desires were shared by people everywhere – and still are. A decorous yet puzzling ceremony took place annually in Bury St Edmunds: monks led a white bull, adorned with garlands, in a procession along the precinct boundaries. Women who sought to conceive stroked the bull’s flanks, and then made an offering at St Edmund’s shrine and prayed for a pregnancy. This was the place and these were the relics which Henry VI sought out for his own spiritual refreshment – his visits to Bury were probably the happiest times of his troubled life.
Women’s inspiration was abundant within political circles high and low. Henry V had invoked a mystic, St Bridget of Sweden, and her prophecies in support of his reign and campaigns, and celebrated the triumph at Agincourt with Marian imagery. Richard Beauchamp Earl of Warwick maintained a special relationship with the anchoress Emma Rawghton of All Hallows church, North Street, York, who received visions and prophecies about his political fortunes. Religious rigour offered women of means an occupation and orientation in solitary widowhood. While men of stature and muscle were expected to act in the world, they could relax in the sphere of female piety, and occasionally draw inspiration and hope from it. What might seem an odd combination of extraordinary worldliness and sentimental piety is a creative contradiction characteristic of this world. The milieu of piety, and especially of female piety, was reassuring, seemingly unsullied and seemingly unworldly, a place from which powerful and troubled men could regain solace before facing the world again.
Far more traditional was Henry VI’s own religious taste. He probably felt happiest during times spent in colleges and monasteries; he spent Christmas and Easter 1433–4 in Bury St Edmunds, one of England’s finest monasteries. There he resided in the abbot’s grand lodgings, which were rebuilt for his visit – a monastic palace not unlike the royal apartments at Poblet (Catalonia); he even held parliament there. At Bury Henry was entertained by plays such as Wisdom, a moral allegory which reflected on human frailty and the hope for improvement. He read contemplative texts, often of continental origin, which guided towards the ‘mixed life’, that of devotion and contemplation in the midst of worldly affairs. His stay at Bury inspired the composition by John Lydgate, the monk-poet of Bury St Edmunds, of a hagiographical account of St Edmund, the abbey’s patron saint, and St Fremund (d. 866), a Saxon hermit killed by the Danes. The book, now in the British Library, took about a decade to complete. Near the beginning, above the first verse, ‘The noble story to put in remembrance’, is an image of a presentation ceremony, with a very young Henry VI surrounded by monks and courtiers, among them the author, book in hand. Yet all this religious immersion may have served more as a distraction than a training for one who was expected to move among men of action and to act in the ugly, violent and soul-destroying business of war and dynastic strife. The choice to involve himself in the sphere of contemplative religion was no alternative to the vigorous life of politics and court. It might inspire a king, but could never substitute for the execution of his responsibilities.
Yet Henry’s interest in moral education did result in some spectacular initiatives executed by able men in his court. He stayed at Winchester College in 1441, and there formed the idea of founding his own school, Eton College, a task entrusted to the hands of the reliable William Waynflete – formerly Headmaster of Winchester College – whom he directed to the see of Winchester after the death of Cardinal Beaufort in 1447. King’s College in Cambridge was founded as a sibling institution to Eton, to which the boys of Eton destined for the royal chapel were to progress. Officially founded on the king’s birthday on 6 December 1441, it was built upon the area of the parish of St John Zachary and adjacent academic halls. In 1445 it was named the College of the Virgin Mary and St Nicholas, and was modelled after the example of Wykeham’s New College in Oxford. Under a rector twelve fellows were to pursue the Arts course and maintain the commemoration of benefactors in a magnificent chapel worthy of the royal founder. The chapel progressed little in Henry’s lifetime, but it received some support from every king over the next century. It was ultimately completed and decorated with the glass and wooden furnishings commissioned by Henry VIII (Plate 22). These are still in use, providing the backdrop to the music of the most famous choir in the world. King’s was a royal institution, and an institution of orthodoxy. It was founded in Cambridge, the intellectually ‘safe’ university, which, unlike Oxford, had not been tainted by heresy. The Fellows of King’s College were obliged to take an oath, against the ‘damned errors, or heresies, of John Wyclif and Reginald Pecock, or any other heretic’.
These activities, which combined education, religion and a certain amount of administrative capacity, created the milieu in which Henry VI felt most comfortable and safe. It is not surprising, therefore, that in future years he chose from among Eton men his chaplains and confidants, those who were to see him through very hard times. Clerical scholars were Henry VI’s alternative court and, like all courtiers, they were promoted to bishoprics and offices of state. John Carpenter, Bishop of Worcester, assisted in the foundation of Eton; Henry’s chaplain Henry Sever was the college’s first provost. While dealing with his foundation the young king was alert, engaged and interested, eagerly awaiting important items of correspondence related to the project. He got his way, and in this sphere inspired respect and loyalty, even in years when his presence and effect in council, diplomacy and parliament were lacklustre. He inspired loyalty in men such as John Blacman, Fellow of Eton, who was his chaplain and later went into exile with him in the 1460s and survived to become Henry VI’s hagiographer. Blacman’s writings express a world-weary spirituality, which fitted the king’s later years.
A sophisticated world of letters and writing was available in England, and in it met poetry, politics, propaganda and the display of taste and wealth. In Henry V’s day poetry was invoked in the service of state and dynasty, and several of the projects which he began saw their fruition during his son’s reign. The royal uncles were great collectors of books and artefacts, patrons of artists and poets and musicians. They exchanged cultural commodities in the furtherance of diplomacy, dynasty and personal glamour. Books aimed towards self-help were popular in these years of political turbulence and contested claims to power: physiognomy tracts were not only part of classical heritage, they were manuals which guided their readers to judge the character of future retainers, counsellors, spouses, friends. Such collectors were fond of history, too, and from the fashionably reworked history of antiquity sought to learn lessons of conduct and speech which might tip the balance in their favour, to distil past experience into argument and advice about tyranny, conspiracy, loyalty and fortitude. And as their bodies frequently suffered in battle and imprisonment, during long and uncomfortable periods of travel, they collected books on bodily comportment, diet and exercise and rewarded the men who could help them implement useful regimes of training and improvement.
Gloucester’s chancellor, Thomas Beckington, later Bishop of Bath and Wells, was sent by his master to Italy to acquire books which might guide education in the humanist curriculum and ultimately make it available for public service. These were exciting times in the world of pedagogy and learning; the ethical debates of scholars in Tuscan schools spread widely, and were soon available, interacting with local cultures in all European regions. Various educational institutions were affected by the idea of combining learning, virtue and eloquence, all in the service of utilitas, the greater good. Beckington introduced these insights into his own diocese; the choir school of Wells Cathedral professed in 1460 to direct the training of its choirboys towards manners, instruction and utility.
Humphrey Duke of Gloucester used all his contacts to promote the project of book collection and acquisition of humanist knowledge. A book now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford carries his own autograph: ‘Cest livre est A moy humfrey duc de gloucester’; he had bought it from the executors of Nicholas Bildeston, once Dean of Salisbury (d. 1441). He had similarly bought books from the executors of Thomas Polton, Bishop of Worcester (d. 1433), a man of extensive European experience, an English representative at church councils and a royal diplomat. Like his brother John Duke of Bedford, who was host in England to the leading Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini between 1419 and 1422, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester became a patron of men of letters. He had two Italian secretaries in succession – Tito Livio Frulovisi and Antonio Beccaria – and by the 1430s humanistic texts were dedicated and presented to him as a recognized and appreciated patron.
Advice on comportment and behaviour was garnered not solely from conduct literature written by clerics, but from the experience and reflection of political and civic actors. William of Worcester, for example, was secretary to Sir John Fastolf, and with him served with the Duke of Bedford in Normandy between 1422 and 1435. He composed the Book of Noblesse for his ducal patron. In it contemporary politics mingled with translations from Cicero on the all-important subjects of friendship and old age. Worcester’s book of conduct was adapted for Henry VI’s use, and then for that of his adversary Edward IV. Magnates sought tutors for their sons from among university scholars familiar with the new learning: Lord Tiptoft chose Master John Hurley of University College, Oxford, to teach his son (the future Earl of Worcester) and offered him his first benefice. Hurley in turn travelled with the young man on his study tour to Padua and later on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In the service of great men, those of lesser status could none the less travel, go on pilgrimage, visit great homes and be involved in momentous business.
Similar to Worcester’s Book of Noblesse and, like it, aimed at moulding personality towards public life, was the book written by Peter Idley for his son Thomas in 1445–50. Idley was a substantial landlord with estates in Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Middlesex, Surrey, Hampshire and Worcestershire. He benefited from several royal appointments, such as Bailiff of the Honour of Wallingford, and received in the 1440s several royal exemptions and favours. He was not socially exalted but was well connected (to the Earl of Suffolk and his wife), and was a shrewd observer of the vicissitudes of politics and the challenges of royal rule. His book of guidance provides political advice and moral counsel, as well as religious instruction. Above all, he recommends moderation in style and loyalty to carefully chosen friends. He describes in detail the many types of counsel and their givers, and recommends discretion in all: avoid advice of a drunk, of a fearful man, of a wrathful person or of those who had lost favour and then returned to it. His is a map of the many pitfalls which a man of standing might encounter in public life, an analysis of the political culture and social fabric of mid-century England, criss-crossed with vying loyalties, conspiracies and public challenges to authority.
Political life and much social interaction depended on an effective king and magnates whose intricate connections with their regions linked them with practically every person living there. Just as the quality of royal governance trickled down and affected the political body, so did that of magnate power. Magnates could support the proper provision of justice, but their neglect or active partisanship could breed a sense of lawlessness and corruption. Gentry families of varying degrees of wealth and status were enfolded within the magnate’s affinity. When such men fell out, and consequently feuded, magnate authority could encourage resolution, even peace. When this failed, local repercussions were quick to follow, and in turn a wider disaffection born out of disappointment touched the whole political community. During the Fanhope–Grey dispute between two major families in Bedfordshire, which began in 1437, Lord Fanhope and Lord Grey appeared in the county court sessions, accompanied by armed followers. This forced local political society to take sides, and unsettled title to land among tens of families. In Wales, gentry families were particularly powerful in this period, in the almost total absence of resident magnates. Administrators and office-holders and many ex-soldiers rose to high administrative and honorific titles for the first time since the Glyn Dŵr rebellion.
Scholarly and forensic works reflected local political awareness of these complexities. We may call such work ‘antiquarian’, studies in search of title and precedent, in support of contemporary claims. This was not a new practice, but as law required more written evidence than before, a forensic antiquarianism developed, by secretaries for titled masters. Following his research, John Rous developed a unique argument against enclosure which he brought to the parliament of 1459 at Coventry, seeing it as harmful to the architectural heritage of England. He showed that in Warwickshire depopulation followed enclosure, and that buildings on enclosed lands suffered decay, like the ‘splendid gate-house which Joan, Lady Bergavenny had built for her husband’. Whereas religious houses had always been careful to maintain their archives, this period sees the gentry families doing the same. Sir John Byron of Clayton in south Lancashire kept some 300 deeds in his treasury, while Sir Geoffrey Mascy of Tatton (Cheshire) mentioned in his will the bequest of his archive to his heir. This is not to say that deeds were not kept before, but rather that archival awareness and order, often provided by the services of clerical secretaries, became part of the magnate and gentry household.
In some cases this research was enabled by skill in Latin, and from reading of Roman history and the acquisition of rhetorical skills. When he visited England in 1419 the peripatetic Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini declared that the English were ‘barbarians’ and that in their country one must give up all hope of finding a book, meaning a humanist book. But by 1440, the Benedictine monk John Whethamstead, who later become Abbot of St Albans, reported that a ‘Cabalinian fount’ gushed in Oxford and a ‘Cirren stream’ ran through Cambridge, where ‘we join with the Muses in the singing of extraordinary melodies’. These muses inspired men such as William Gray, who gained his MA at Balliol in 1434, to a life of scholarly travel which took him to Florence, Padua, Ferrara and Rome before he became Bishop of Ely. When he died in 1478 his substantial library passed to Balliol College, the place where he had first learned to love books. Gushing rhetoric was deployed by Oxford University in the sycophantic missives which it poured on Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, in pursuit of his patronage and the bequest of his books. Aristocrats and scholars shared the taste for humanist letters; in 1453 the university elected its first aristocratic chancellor, the twenty-year-old George Neville, a lover of books, who was also the younger brother of the Earl of Warwick.
Participation in European styles and use of continental artists involved discerning application of modes and styles to an English context. The Book of Hours of Henry Beauchamp Duke of Warwick, of sometime between 1439 and 1446, displays the accomplishment of French illumination, but it is also recognizably English in style: a scene of King David facing God, at the beginning of Psalm 26, is set in an English pastoral landscape, with windmills and walled towns in the background. Alongside the scriptural texts is a whole-page figure of St John of Bridlington, a very English prophet. Similarly, c.1430–37, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester had his likeness inserted into his Psalter. This is a magnificent English ducal figure, kneeling in front of Christ, who is presented as the Man of Sorrows, rising from his tomb and bleeding into a chalice. Education, wealth, a deep acquaintance with French culture – fostered in England by prisoners such as Charles of Orléans and, through marriage, by Margaret of Anjou – and Italian learning produced in this generation a group of English magnates of great cultural influence, with the power to set trends among artists, writers and musicians.
The trends in religion, literature and learning were matched by movements of goods and money. Tracts about travel and routes for navigation were the subjects of contemporary writing, while the highly sophisticated tract Libelle of English Policy of c.1436–8 was an exercise in political economy. It analysed England’s well-being as the product of its commerce, over which the king and council had such great influence. Here was a document aimed at policy-makers, one which recommended a shift in English political priorities. It advised vigilance over Wales (always a potential flashpoint for rebellion) and that Ireland be secured as a source of untapped wealth, away from dependence on links with western Europe.
Here is integrated thinking which linked policy, economy and political stability, and which recognized the ethnic and regional variety of the king’s subjects. For regional differences and variation in wealth determined degrees of safety, mobility and lifestyle, habits in consumption and even susceptibility to disease. Informed attention to lifestyle choices is evident in all areas, although least among rural working people, who still ate bread, vegetables and dairy products, and meat only rarely. There was a truly regional set of diets, with trans-regional trade in delicacies and in cereals. Rye was the main bread-corn in parts of Norfolk and Worcestershire, barley in north Suffolk. Game was available in forest areas, cider and perry was drunk in Herefordshire.
Although associated with medieval diet in the modern popular imagination, the sucking pig was a great rarity, for pig was not the animal it later became: it was small, hard to feed in the winter, and it was a delicacy. People were eating more fish; monks already had well-stocked fishponds, and now great landlords were investing in the creation of ponds as they moved away from arable. The Duke of Norfolk, for example, restocked six of his ponds in 1460 with pike, perch, roach, tench, bream and carp. Fish could also arrive from abroad; indeed it was the only merchandise which ships could bring back from many Scandinavian ventures. In May 1457 the Valentine left Newcastle-on-Tyne for Iceland, with goods of Thomas Castell, William Haysand and eight of their associates. It carried wool cloth, butter, meat and beer and returned with salted herring, eels, monkfish, salmon and oysters.
Food was cheap, and took up a small proportion of household expenditure. The rest was used on other goods. A proliferation of manufactures and services was increasingly evident in hundreds of small towns and even in villages. The leather industry was the second largest after textiles, and it provided a whole series of goods from buckets and belts to saddles and bottles, which were modestly priced. While 1423 saw the foundation of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in London, with the patronage of Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, medical services were also dispersed throughout the land in villages and towns. Thomas Fayreford offered treatment in Somerset and Devon in the 1440s, and was in demand by a wide social range of patients. He wrote up at length his case-notes about the treatment of Lady Ponynges, but he also served less exalted figures. On his extended tours in the countryside he cared for a miller and a cook, some priests, and several patients whom he treated in their village homes. Thomas Fayreford offered not only his personal ministration, but sold ointments of his own making. He may even have dispensed amuletic cures, like the piece of inscribed parchment which hung around a patient’s neck, its efficacy enhanced by masses and the eating of paeony root. Medical services were purchased from professionals, but traditional charms were recommended by relatives or neighbours. A popular charm for the staunching of bleeding was
Christ was born in Bethlehem
And christened in river Jordan.
And as the river stood like a stone
the blood of N. may stand.
In the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit Amen.
In medical care as in religious life variety allowed people to make choices. Those who offered services and produced goods aimed to establish themselves in protected niches which secured employment and profit. Professionals, such as John Somerset, royal physician and Chancellor of the Exchequer, combined medical provision and the search for prayer: he founded in 1446 at Brentford End (Middlesex) the Hospital of the Virgin and Nine Orders of Angels, for nine sick persons. Hospital foundations of the period tend to specify medical aims more clearly and provide for treatment, where earlier houses tended to concentrate on shelter and hopeful prayer.
Most urban manufacturers and service providers worked and traded from within guilds. In face of the recession of the mid-century, each guild attempted to regulate its numbers, dominate supply of raw materials, and maintain profits sufficient for all members. Guilds supported members and demanded loyalty. The Grocers’ Company of London enrolled its ordinances in 1444, with the huge penalty of £20 against any member who divulged secrets or harmed another member. Guilds offered advantages by developing collective awareness of demand, fashions and market-niches for their products, but also through the nurturing of patronage and the acquisition of political power. Some guilds saw an influx of immigrant workers, as, for example, the Goldsmiths, who annually admitted tens of ‘Dutchmen’ – a catch-all adjective for northern Europeans – into their company in the 1440s. As we have seen, the cities within which guilds operated were governed by oligarchies of councilmen and headed by annually elected officials, such as aldermen, chamberlains and mayors; election to these bodies and posts was operated through and for the guilds.
In London a political struggle was at play between artisans and merchants, between those who produced and those who bought, distributed and sold at great profit. Through a subtle interplay of their wealth and court patronage, the guilds of tailors and drapers tussled over primacy as governors of their city. When the experienced, if outspoken, Ralph Holland, tailor and draper, was passed over twice for election as mayor of London in 1439 and 1440 (election which was made by the incumbent mayor out of two names put to him by the Council of Aldermen), an armed political force of artisans came together, even as the guild’s lawyers were arguing their case in council and Chancery. The struggle over political power and the right to assess and examine the quality of cloth sold in London and its fairs dealt with real economic advantage, which in a period of economic stagnation mattered greatly. It is out of such sensibilities that a political sentiment emerged, one which led men to argue about rights of representation in urban government and the force of royal writs, and to attack directly London politicians such as John Paddesley, goldsmith and mayor, who was chosen over Holland in 1440. Indeed, in the following year, Ralph Holland was promoted and unofficially pronounced mayor against Paddesley’s own candidate.
Sons were allowed to replace father, and thus inherit the right to be freemen, in York as in London. At the same time, internal guild politics led to constant assessment of the remits of membership: in 1434 journeymen blacksmiths were welcomed back to the blacksmiths’ social and religious club, the fraternity of St Loy, where the group’s cohesion could be promoted by the master blacksmiths, the employers. Tailors sought a large and strong membership, even allowing those not in the craft to join their social and religious grouping, the fraternity. Every aspect of social and political organization in London was scrutinized in a contracting economy and an uncertain political climate. Even magnates were drawn into the circle of London politics, as they had been during the 1390s: Humphrey Duke of Gloucester probably paved the way to the tailors’ acquisition of a royal charter, while his wife enrolled in the company’s livery, a sort of honorary membership, in 1434.
While many towns and ports experienced serious contraction in trade and population, London fared better than provincial towns in the fifteenth century. It had the advantages of buoyant demand generated by a political centre and the international stream of visitors which displayed its importance and taste. London attracted people of talent, those who sought to benefit from opportunities in training and advancement. Men could enter into positions of influence and prestige in London and its surroundings. Such a man was Alexander Anne, younger son of a Yorkshire gentry family, who, as a lawyer, became a member of the drapers’ company, under-sheriff, escheator, recorder, and served three times as representative in parliament for Middlesex. Conversely, Londoners maintained links with their places of origin, and are found holding land in small communities, such as the London merchant who owned a house in Buntingford (Suffolk).
Such mobility through professional service made the categories of social status quite porous. The term gentleman applied to those who held substantial tracts of land, generating income, according to the Statute of Additions of 1413, but the variety of avenues which endowed status and reward created ambiguity over precedence and honour. Brothers pursued different careers and gained connections in different spheres. How are we to understand the case of two brothers, the Barets of Bury St Edmunds, one gentle and the other not? John Baret held land outside Bury, which his brother, a merchant, inherited upon his death. The survivor remained in Bury while holding the land; was he a gentleman? In London such questions were perhaps less important, as the city generated its titles and offices, but in provincial society it mattered more. The move to the city did not necessarily mean loss of gentle connections and aspirations. Robert of Ardern, to take another example, was not a knight, but he was the second largest landlord in Warwickshire, with £113 annual income in 1436, and therefore was seen as a leader among the 500 or so men who constituted gentle society in the county. Local landed men of substance made their views known. In 1439 a turbulent meeting of the Norfolk county court saw the sheriff exit in a huff, protesting against the presence at the gathering of some 500 men, not the 40 who had been summoned as qualified members of local political society. There were clearly more men who were interested and involved in politics, beyond the group of knights alone. In 1445 parliament grappled with this reality and produced the statute which restricted eligibility for election to parliament to substantial men with £100 or more in annual income.
London’s wealth, the ambition and influence of its leading groups, were also displayed in the incessant activity of rebuilding of public edifices, especially churches: All Saints, Fulham, became distinguished by a Kentish-type perpendicular style; St Michael’s, Wood Street, boasted a bell-tower from 1429, and an aisle was added to St Olave’s Jewry in 1436. This was not the splendid rebuilding that the wool-churches of East Anglia and the Cotswolds underwent, but a well-planned campaign of extension and decoration, aimed at catching up with styles and displaying prosperity. The effort was both collective and individual, for the parish retained its place as a favoured space for display: parishioners hung their arms from roof beams in All Hallows, Staining, St Mildred’s Poultry, St Peter, Cornhill, and St Olave, Hart Street. In neighbouring Westminster some building work was always in progress. Then, as now, a good craftsman was to be cherished. Westminster Abbey showed its appreciation of good masons by providing them with maintenance packages and thus securing their services. The mason William Thornwerk and his wife Elizabeth were granted a corrody – lifelong maintenance – in the abbey in 1445–6; John Randolf, who was granted his corrody in 1450, lived on to enjoy it for forty years.
Within communal buildings – churches and guildhalls – texts and ideas circulated, reflecting contemporary political preoccupations. Urban chronicles regularly reported and interpreted national events. The records of London companies display a particular fascination with pomp and pageantry. Such events which passed through London streets were important in several ways: they reflected some of the affairs of magnates and royals, while their very shape and colour were the product of extensive purchasing from mercers and goldsmiths, and employment of the City’s carpenters and painters. The continuity of corporations also meant that recording the events of the day – such as Margaret of Anjou’s pageants of 1445 described in the Goldsmiths’ book – meant that they were there to be studied by the Goldsmiths of the future.
English towns were home to diverse groups of people: long-standing burgess families and civic leaders lived side by side with recent arrivals from the country, southerners and northerners, as well as with migrants from France, Germany and the Low Countries. A city which was well governed and offered decent accommodation could attract traders. Even small towns, such as Coleshill (Warwickshire), boasted four inns; the construction of an inn built in Andover (Hampshire) in 1444–5 cost £300. In the west Midlands and Welsh Marches English and Welsh mixed, and in the north, Scots and Irish; there were German shoemakers in Truro (Cornwall) and Maldon (Essex). Such mixed environments, in which neighbours might be known as ‘Scott’, ‘Pycard’ or ‘Brytan’, were shattered during hostilities between home countries or regions. Following the rupture in Anglo-Burgundian relations, there were anti-Flemish riots, above all in London, and a requirement that some 1,800 Flemings take an oath of loyalty. A Frenchwoman felt sufficiently at home in 1448–9 to leave 12d. as a gift to her parish church of St Mary’s, Sandwich (Kent), and a Dutch woman left 6d. for its wainscoting. But the French raid on Sandwich in August 1457 – an attack 4,000 men strong – hit churches and dwellings, and must have changed attitudes to French people, at least for a while.
In areas of intense ethnic awareness, a slur on identity could result in real harm, and thus people sued those who defamed them with suggestive ethnic labels. In the Peculiar Court of the Bishop of Durham in 1453 two women were charged with claiming that a Durham monk had been born in Scotland, and between 1453 and 1456 cases were brought for such malicious defamation as ‘Scottish priest’s whore’ and ‘Welsh priest’s son’. The shifting political realities in a border region faced people with legal and personal dilemmas. In 1442 Robert Lynton attempted to prove that he was English since he was born in Jedburgh at a time when it had been English. The subsidy which was imposed on aliens in 1440, 1s. 4d. per head, was exacted in the north from those deemed to be Scots, usually servants and labourers, and from Anglo-Irish, who protested about this to parliament in 1441. To the intricacies of status, privilege and prejudice in English and Welsh towns can also be added claims to special treatment for the enclaves created by religious institutions. The history of cities like Exeter or Norwich is a story of struggle between townsmen and cathedral over jurisdiction, over the exaction of contributions to the defence of the town, and over the right to try criminals who might have only a tenuous link to such an institution, yet sheltered under the immunity which it offered.
Like London, middling towns elected citizens into offices which were meant to promote the general good. A glance at the accounts of the treasurers of Cambridge for the year 1445–6 shows an array of minute regulations which aimed at control of the quality of goods, and the generation of civic income: fines for unlawful sale of ale, for trade in Rhenish wine, for sale of Irish yarn. Licences for workers were sold at 1s. 8d. for a cordwainer or a huckster, 2s. 4d. for a shearman, 3s. 4d. for a master-glover. Over the century which followed the Black Death, and all over Europe, special attention was paid by officials to provision of clean water, removal of noxious foods and materials from public spaces, and dealing with persons considered anti-social. In Coventry in 1442 local prostitutes were required to wear furred hoods, and in 1448 ordinances dealt with obstruction of the common ditch which flowed through the town, and with the removal of animal intestines deposited behind the butchers’ row. Perhaps in response to repeated petitions in parliament about people who became rich by owning ‘stewes’, or brothels, ordinances were promulgated for Southwark, by its lord the Bishop of Winchester (William Waynflete). These attempted to regulate prostitution and especially the coercion of women into it because of poverty.
This period saw a dramatic shift in the role which England and Wales played in European trade in wool and its products. Between 1420 and 1460 the balance of trade shifted, with the 1430s as the point at which cloth exports overtook those of wool. Whereas in 1420–24, 4,628 sacks of wool were exported from Hull, only 2,062 were exported in 1430–34, a decade later. At the same time the overall export of cloth grew from £41,750 worth in 1421–30 to £89,660 worth in 1441–50. A reorientation of the wool economy was under way, shifting the emphasis from production and distribution of the wool clip, already in place since the twelfth century, to the creation of networks of production, collection and sale of cloth which depended on the involvement of thousands of small manufacturers. Hectic diplomatic activity fostered the trading treaties which linked England not only with Italian merchants – well-established and situated in London – but with the Hanseatic cities and trade ports in Zeeland. The great merchants were pleased with the advantage allowed them as they traded as a staple from Calais, a city with a vast hinterland protected and patrolled by English garrisons and troops.
Much of the wealth produced and circulated in towns and cities was linked in some way to wool, England’s main source of income. The taxes imposed on wool sales and on finished woollen cloth provided the crown with a substantial part of its income. In the making of wool into cloth several interlocking processes of production were involved, and a wide range of expertise went into the final product. By mid-century English wool had lost ground to Italian and even Spanish produce, but demand for woollen cloth of high to medium quality remained buoyant. A Commons petition of 1455 claimed that foreign merchants bought cloth for ready money all over the country and thus forced prices down, to the detriment of native cloth merchants. The Libelle of English Policie similarly recommended that the terms of credit to alien merchants be limited to six months, combining a monetarist argument with an aggressive view of national economic well-being. The benefits from this trade varied greatly by region, as did resulting losses when production was affected by war or by natural calamity. The endemic murrain caused the death of cattle and sheep in Staffordshire, Dorset and Herefordshire in 1439, and in Lincolnshire in 1442. Yet in areas such as Wiltshire and the Cotswolds those who invested in the making and the sale of cloth prospered: in Castle Combe in Wiltshire, whose river turned a fulling-mill, fifty new houses for clothiers were built in the first half of the century.
The best wool to be had in the fifteenth century came from the sheep of the Cotswolds and Lindsey in Lincolnshire. Religious houses with large flocks were in many ways favoured producers, as they sold directly to wool merchants, in some cases Italian merchants. As the market now favoured cloth over raw wool, a whole array of skills and crafts developed in the towns of wool regions: jobs were plentiful in Yorkshire and the Cotswolds for spinners and dyers, crafts in which women’s work was much favoured. Work in towns was organized within guilds, to which women had little official access, but under which their work was organized. Villages were becoming centres of production, and clothiers employed agents to deliver the wool and collect the product from rural workers. One such was Robert Collinson of York, who, in his will of 1456, asked the poor workers of many villages of the West Riding to forgive any excessive profits he may have made out of their labour. Such awareness of the ethics of business coincides with contemporary pastoral treatises, which listed types of usury, analysing the many injustices and sins inherent in the habitual forms of exchange, profit-sharing, lending and investment. One such text opens with the words: ‘usury shows itself in many manners’, and lists twelve types of lucre.
Nowhere was the wealth from wool and cloth so publicly evident as in Suffolk and parts of Essex. Even today one is struck by the ambition, quality and sheer size of the communal enterprises initiated by wool towns. Guildhalls and, above all, churches were rebuilt on a large scale, though towns complained about the cost of maintaining walls, buildings and communal halls. The building of a Blythburgh, a Walberswick, a Lavenham or a Long Melford church required the interest and local attachment of a few prosperous families and dedicated individuals. These vast enterprises of real-estate management, building, employment, patronage and taste brought work to the community. Agents hired skilled masons, carvers and painters for their expertise, and imported objects and images which might never have been seen locally before. The purchase, hire, planning and accounting were the business, privilege and duty of churchwardens – community officials whose role was growing in prominence and weight. Chosen from the ranks of substantial tenants of the village, or well-off and respectable worthies in an urban parish, they often had to dip into their own pockets to plug the gaps in budgets, but above all they were charged with authority and enjoyed the related prestige. The churchwardens’ task of providing the parish with the wherewithal for worship – vestments, plate, props – was complemented by the expectation that they cast an ever-vigilant eye over parishioners in their business, high and low. Parishioners frequently chose them as executors for their wills; many testamentary bequests were left towards the fabric of parish churches.
The chronology of building differed by region: in Yorkshire there was little new building after 1450, Suffolk peaked in the later fifteenth century, and Somerset in the sixteenth. Styles were regional too. Clerestories – registers of clear windows high above the nave – aimed at letting in as much light as possible. That particular magnificent feature of Blythburgh church was characteristic of Suffolk, and was never found in Kent or Cornwall. Similarly, the east of England developed the octagonal font – the font with eight carved stone panels, seven showing a sacrament and one the crucifixion – a catechism in stone. Specifically East Anglian too were the painted rood-screens with rows of saints and martyrs. In 1436 Litcham parish commissioned its own, with female saints on the north side and male ones on the south – twenty-two figures in all, ranging from universal Christian heroes such as St Helena or St Agnes to the very local William of Norwich, a boy believed to have been killed by Jews in the twelfth century. An erstwhile mayor of Norwich, Ralph Seagram, commissioned two panels for his parish church of St John Maddermarket around 1445. Their warm reds and golds depicted Saints Agnes and Laurence and Agatha, and, among them again, William of Norwich.
Local achievements inspired imitation, which in turn created local styles: the document commissioning the building of Walberswick’s tower over the period 1426 to 1441 stipulated that it should resemble that of Halesworth. The tower of the church of Wymondham in Norfolk was meant to rise above the central tower of Wymondham Priory. The rood-screen area was elaborated, with additions of rood-lofts and ubiquitous staircases leading up to the rood, with some generous examples in the Cotswolds and the west, as in Burford (Oxfordshire) and Wimborne Minster (Dorset).
Early or late, elaborate or modest, the projects of building were remarkable for the prudence which collective scrutiny brought to them. The accounts of the rebuilding of the chancel of Hardley church (Norfolk) in 1457–8 record the employment of a master-carpenter by the church’s rector St Giles’s Hospital, Norwich; he was to provide the timber, the expertise and the labour. The chancel building was put in the hands of a Norwich mason, Robert Everard, who in turn provided the labour and the stone, building material which was to be shipped from Norwich on a barge. Four workers supported the master-mason at 3½d. a day, and they were also fed while working. A plumber joined the works in 1460–61 once the roof was up, and in the following year William Glayster worked on four windows for the chancel: in 1462–3 he also undertook the glazing of the east window for 33s. 4d. Over six years £21 9s. 1d. was spent, distributed in keeping with seasonal rhythm, stage by stage. A mason such as Robert Everard had a flourishing business in such repair and extension in Norfolk parishes, with additional responsibilities for work in Norwich Cathedral. Similar care and progress, step by erected step, was evident in the building accounts of St Martin’s church in Coney Street, York, of 1447–52. Robert Seman, local vicar between 1425 and 1443, had left in his will funds for the completion of the rebuilding he had begun in his lifetime. Here too executors’ vigilance and regular and relatively small periods of payment – fortnightly to masons – are in evidence. Executors, craftsmen and parishioners saw the dead vicar’s bequest turn into a reality.
The small enterprise of a single parish brought together regional talent and trans-regional wherewithal. The stone was quarried in Northampton and travelled on barges through the Wash to Yarmouth and from there to Norwich, then to Brandon and finally by road to Hardley. Northamptonshire exported not only stone, but masons; those who helped rebuild Harston church (Cambridgeshire) around 1445 were men of that region. The roof for this church was probably made on site, but such roofs could be imported from centres of high-class building such as Essex and Cambridgeshire. Yet despite imported talent and materials, building it was a local affair. The churchwardens were the people on the ground; they lived near the church and were able to monitor its progress. Within the communal space of the church it was still possible for individuals, families or groups to mark out areas or times of special significance.
Churchwardens may have been public-spirited but they were often intrusive and heavy-handed. They supervised the provision of parish charity through the management of parish almshouses, as in Elsworth (Cambridgeshire) in 1451, but they also reported on parishioners’ behaviour. What was high-spirited to some seemed downright antisocial to others. It is probably such parish worthies who brought offenders to the attention of constables or church authorities, like the men who repeatedly presented to the manorial court of Ramsey recidivist tennis players in the 1420s. The churches whose improvement they supervised are a more pleasing trace of their activities than is their informing and reporting on private conduct and speech.
Most people lived on the land, and the living was not bad in the 1420s and 1430s, though it was to deteriorate soon after. In the south-east pastoral economy flourished, as it did in the Cotswolds and Oxfordshire. A map of Boarstall (Buckinghamshire) survives from around 1444, and it shows clearly the structure of the manor: the common fields, the church, the gatehouse to the manor house, and some 200 acres of deer park. In Shropshire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire the torn fabric of exchange, travel and work, the legacy of Glyn Dŵr’s decade, was being painstakingly rewoven. Although many peasants still held customary lands, few lived as unfree persons. Manumission was a common feature of the first half of the fifteenth century: in 1439 fellows of Merton College, Oxford, lords of Kibworth Harcourt (Leicestershire), stopped using the term nativus (serf by birth) of their tenants there. In 1447 Richard Duke of York freed all bondsmen in his Cydewain lordship (Powys) for the sum of 1,000 marks, thus generating income for himself and providing the benefits of legal freedom to the men and their families.
A flexible attitude developed to adjustment of rents and services where lords sought to secure continued settlement and production. Yet some lords were more intent on monitoring change and enforcing their rights. In the records for Aldborough, in the bailiwick of Knares-borough, part of the Duchy of Lancaster, a return to the old rent is noted, after a reduction agreed during ‘these mediocre years’. In 1449–50 accounts of the soke of Winchester recorded that the lord allowed a tool-sharpening mill to be built as long as it did not compete with his own seigneurial fulling-mills.
The mark of unfree birth remained on hundreds of manors until the sixteenth century, but most of its practical daily implications – curtailment of movement, occupation, work – were felt no longer to apply. Peasant holdings were diverse affairs, with a growing emphasis on cottage production and the rearing of livestock. Many households held more than one tenancy, with all the related responsibilities to maintain buildings and appurtenances. In Watford (Northamptonshire) in the 1430s the lord of the manor even paid his tenants to maintain the housing stock. On the Pelham estate of Laughton (Sussex) tenants carried wood and grain, stacked hay and ploughed demesne land. Such households were headed by men or by women, but in either case they blended into the routines of husbandry and village cooperation.
Cooperation remained vital to the maintenance of livelihood, and manorial courts were used to monitor it. In Havering (Essex) those who failed to dig out their ditches, or keep culverts open to allow the easy flow of water in this area of the Thames estuary, were presented to court and fined. If a protective wall collapsed, the fields would be flooded, and so procedures for monitoring and enforcing obligations still remained crucial, even if these were no longer attached to notions of personal servility. A wider range of offices for surveillance was in place within rural communities, and these brought most men – even modestly landed tenants and lessees – into the ambit of public action and authority.
The extent to which local office-holding impinged on the lives of men and women is made clear from the survey conducted in 1452 of the work and privilege of the forester of Bernwood Forest (Buckinghamshire). The job description had evolved over the preceding 200 years, from the period when payments for pasturing livestock were made in hens and eggs. By the mid-fifteenth century the forester was supervising the use made by those with common grazing rights, and punishing those who infringed them. He collected the dues by season: from Ambrosden and Blackthorn in Oxfordshire came 24 hens at Christmas, 24 bushels of oats at Easter, together with 240 eggs and 240 autumn work-days. The men of Brill paid ‘smoksylver’ of a penny a year for the right to collect dry wood in the forest, while those of Boarstall did an autumn day’s work in return for the privilege. The forester’s duties entailed the holding of a meeting, the swainmote, at which infringements were investigated and punished.
Around the royal forester were a whole series of local men serving the king in this manner as verderers and woodwards. Such appointments – and some men held several – created webs of authority and power that touched on a plethora of activities, as essential to the quality of life as they were mundane. In this manner royal privilege and presence were locally felt. The abundant resources of river and forest provided necessary food for smallholders and were a pleasurable pursuit for comfortable countrymen. The Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle was composed after 1413, a guidebook for the beginner and enthusiast alike, with instructions on making hooks and placing bait; lines were made of white horsehair. Men were fined for over-fishing, fishing with baskets and poaching, while others fished for sport.
Lives everywhere were marked by the institution of marriage and by related widowhood. Marriage underpinned the ability of local men to undertake the many public tasks that were their privilege and their ambition. Because it was so central, it was also the subject of constant review. The canon law of marriage, which emphasized freedom in entering the marriage bond, stood in stark opposition to the patriarchal framework of family life and property-holding. Clandestine marriage, when it could be validated, was a binding marriage, and this opened many possibilities for transgression of parental preference: in Ireland there were many cases of clandestine marriage between people of English and of Gaelic origins. A case which reached the court as abduction, following a father’s complaint against his daughter’s man, might be described by a less disapproving witness as elopement. Violence within marital relations was present both in the poetical imagination, which presented it frequently and vividly, and in practice. As Chaucer had been before him, Sir Thomas Malory, the author of Morte d’Arthur, was twice presented to court for raptus, or abduction (from which the modern word rape has developed). On two occasions in 1450 he was accused of seizing Joan Smith, having broken into her husband’s house, and of stealing goods. He was tried for neither case.
The ease with which marriage could be contracted by consenting people often brought a legal as well as a physical response from angry fathers and brothers (Plate 24). Court cases record the mundane circumstances which produced marriages: meetings in kitchens and barns, taverns and warrens, away from parental eyes. John Brogeam, an Englishman, worked for an Irishman, whose daughter Mabina Huns he married clandestinely. In 1448 Mabina sought annulment of this marriage on the grounds that John had already been married to another woman. The evidence which ensued showed just how displeased his friends were at his liaison with an Irishwoman. The couple did finally (re-)marry years later, a union celebrated in the local church of Stackallan (co. Meath). In 1455 in Drogheda a witness confirmed that consent had been pronounced in English in a barn ‘on a clear day’.
In Ireland, as in Wales and England, marriage produced most of the business for ecclesiastical courts, displaying not an absence of adherence to church law, but rather a knowing use of the possibilities which it offered in defiance of parental choice and family expectation. Yet parental choice was most often coercive and all-controlling, bound up as it was with the fortunes of families and their lands. Sir William Plumpton of Plumpton in West Yorkshire arranged child-marriages for his offspring: his son Robert was betrothed in 1446 to the six-year-old Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Lord Clifford of Skipton-in-Craven. When Robert died before the marriage was realized, his brother William replaced him, marrying Elizabeth in 1453, in keeping with a clause which their father had knowingly inserted into the earlier marriage contract. After William died, probably at the Battle of Towton in 1461, his father also arranged the marriages of the fatherless infant grand-daughters, Margaret and Elizabeth.
Canon law also controlled probate of wills, and here too a question touching women’s rights was open to discussion, namely whether a woman could make a valid will while married. Canon law allowed women the right, which could be upheld in ecclesiastical courts; common law emphasized the husband’s control over the wife and her property, probably with more success as the fifteenth century progressed. Women of the landed classes became embroiled in lengthy legal processes, as their inheritances and widow’s portions were fought over by heirs. This turned women to cooperation with lawyers and male kin, but also, as the ample family papers of the Amburghs show, involved them in legal correspondence, hospitality and consultations during their widowhood and even into subsequent marriages. Joan Amburgh was called in 1443 to deal with the release of her late husband’s prisoner, several years after her spouse’s death.
While we have seen women act independently and effectively in many spheres of life, visual and textual representations of them as scatty, chatty, unreliable and frivolous nevertheless continued to be produced, the fantasies of learned and less learned minds alike. Although these accorded little with the lived experiences of most people, they were demeaning and demoralizing to women. A maxim which recommended that women ‘penses molt et parles pou’ (think much and speak little) adorned the walls of Whalley parish church (Lancashire), just as the figure of the little devil Titivullus, who recorded the idle chatter of women in church, appears on a misericord in Ely Cathedral. Another misericord, in St Lawrence’s church, Ludlow (Shropshire), depicts a woman in a horned headdress and a bridle, which marked her as a malicious gossip.
Such representations were unpleasant, but they reflected little of a reality in which women were central to routines of work in homes and workshops. Most households which worked the land, manufactured goods, rendered services or administered manors depended at all levels on women’s labour, family connections and initiative. The barber John Stubbs, who ran a 36-bed inn, a brewery and a grain store in York in 1450, could not have done so without the full participation of his wife. Although excluded from guild membership, women worked in family workshops and trained apprentices. In her will of 1458 Emmot Pannal, the widow of a saddler of York, bequeathed her tools to the servant with whom she had worked, Richard Thorpp. Women’s work was crucial at every level of production. Among 153 widows identified on Sussex manors between 1422 and 1480 only 7.3 per cent remarried. As heads of households they had to hire and fire and plan agricultural routines with family members and hired hands. In 1453 in the Sussex Weald four widows attended the annual pig-fair – each with her herd. Women’s social contribution was central to maintaining community bonds: exchanges of gifts and goods and assistance between and within families were clearly vital in both towns and villages.
Law affected marital affairs, relations of parents and children, the disposition of neighbours towards each other, and the exchanges between land-holders and their tenants and labourers through the offices of manorial administrators. The law operated in many spheres, but most mundanely and minutely it enlisted the energy and time of better-off peasants, those who held a sufficient amount of land to provide a comfortable surplus, some of which might be reinvested in the community. Such people, as long as they maintained good reputations, were entrusted with a wide range of responsibilities: they were tax-collectors, agents of the manor court, jurors in courts of hundred or county, churchwardens, and active in village forums for debate and the enforcement of by-laws. They were accustomed to deploying legal formulae, even in Latin, and to reflecting on affairs regional and national too.
Similarly highly integrated were the economic, social and political spheres of the lives of free and landed families of parish and county gentry, and the aspirations they maintained. Such was the case, for example, of the family of a prominent civil servant and bishop whose activities spanned the life of Henry VI: Dr Richard Andrew, first Warden of All Souls College, Oxford. He reached this position through a sparkling educational career, which took him from the Oxfordshire hamlet of his birth to Winchester College for his grammar school education, and then to New College, Oxford, for his BA and higher degree. How did he come to benefit from the patronage of these august academic and charitable institutions? He was born at Adderbury, a manor of the Bishop of Winchester, in north Oxfordshire. Richard’s father held some land in that manor, but his uncle was a London grocer, prominent in Oxfordshire affairs. With his London links and a tenancy in the heart of wool-producing country, Richard Andrew’s father lived prosperously from a combination of husbandry and trade. The London connection may explain how his bright son came to the attention of the bishop’s circle. The country was criss-crossed by such networks of patronage, which often followed trails of business connections, regional origin, or shared experience in battle or civil service.
The appreciation of talent and the close monitoring of material resources were facilitated through rituals of hospitality and exchange which linked servants, neighbours and dependent clergy ever more closely to landed households and their spheres. Even the modest household of the priest William Savernake (d. 1460), who in the later part of his life served the Munden chantry in Bridport (Dorset) and whose weekly household accounts have survived, observed the rhythms of festivity and hospitality in the hard years of the 1450s. In January 1455 Twelfth Night was celebrated with a feast of sucking pig and goose, washed down with ale and garnished with pies from the local baker, all under the supervision of two cooks hired for the occasion, who used raisins aplenty in their cooking. Circles of friends were marked out for his favour: the rector of Bridport, two worthy local couples, the prior of St John’s, Bridport; and his party was joined after the meal by a group of tenants and neighbours. On such occasions links of work were solidified, information exchanged and loyalty celebrated.
The lifestyle of parish gentry was not so different from that depicted in the novels of Jane Austen. Regions were not isolated, but they did develop their own styles and trends. Local versions of the Christian story and local devotional styles developed too. Taste in religious patronage in mid-century Suffolk, for example, was consciously English: English saints, English texts and English style were their hallmark. Exalted women such as Isabel Bourchier, sister to Richard Duke of York, commissioned local men to compose suitable reading material in the English language. On Twelfth Night 1445 she requested that Osbern Bokenham (c.1392–1445), an Augustinian friar of Clare Priory (Suffolk), and a guest at her celebrations at Clare Castle, write the life of St Mary Magdalene in English for her edification. We gain here a glimpse of the local interaction of female patrons and religious writers, within the comfortable context of conviviality. Osbern could hardly have refused his hostess. For another woman, Katherine Denton, half-sister of the great clothier John Clopton, he wrote the life of St Katherine of Alexandria, a very popular early Christian martyr. He also wrote the holy biography of the fashionable St Anne, after whom Katherine’s daughter was named. Osbern developed some expertise in writing of pious women for pious women and, after his death, his lives of thirteen holy women, in Suffolk dialect, were collected and spread as Legendys of Hooly Wummen.
Similarly conscious of vernacular and local traits was literary production in Welsh: saints and visionaries were celebrated, as in the poem by Rhys Goch Eryri (c.1385–1448) on the death and vision of heaven experienced by Beuno of Clynnog Fawr in Arfon. The interest in local martyrs was enhanced by the witness and poetry of those who visited Christian shrines in more distant locations. Such visits sometimes inspired texts which could be read in the comfort of home. The jubilee pilgrimage to Rome in 1450 inspired Robin Ddu to describe it in Welsh, just as it inspired the Carmelite friar of King’s Lynn (Norfolk), John Capgrave, to write his The Solace of Pilgrims in English.
Gentry folk like the Stonors and Pastons habitually corresponded in English with great expressive ability and a richness of register on all matters of life: business, politics, family gossip and faith. Fifty years after Langland and Chaucer, English had become the language for most areas of work and play, and it resonated in unwritten forms of hymn and prayer, song and dance. Court poetry in elegant verse flourished in the works and then the heritage of Hoccleve and Lydgate, and new forms of expressive writing were turning romance from verse to prose. The prose romances, best exemplified in the work of Sir Thomas Malory and his Morte d’Arthur, were troubled literature for troubling times. The flow of verse allowed narrative to develop and touch the anxieties of readers’ lives – family strife, betrayal, sibling rivalry. This prose was roughly textured and was less stylized than the poetry of the 1420s and 1430s.
Anything could be expressed and written in English. Nuns learned their rules of conduct from English texts, surgeons their intricate operations, lawyers their law; and royal officials now deliberated in English. While people spoke English before, they now also saw it defining, expressing and inspiring all aspects of life and authority. They encountered it in public, displayed on bills and signs, delicately traced on the pages of books of hours, and less delicately on amulets worn hanging from a leather strap around the neck. Such written vernacular objects in aid of devotion were many and varied and came at a variety of costs and in different sizes and shapes. Small, handy pocket-books were made for domestic use, personal use. A book, 16 cm by 30 cm, which included the lives of Saints Margaret and Dorothy and a treatise on the Virgin Mary, may have been made for a busy woman’s pocket. Such reading gained occasional reinforcement from other forms of narrative display. Parishes pooled funds and hired players to enact sacred drama alongside the tales of Robin Hood: New Romney (Kent) had a play of the Resurrection in 1456, attended by people from other villages and towns.
Yet there were domains which seemed threatened by the cadences of the English language – a language not tethered by strict grammatical practice or uniform orthographic convention. It sometimes seemed too close to the local, the ephemeral, the passing, the regional, the factional, and so open to misunderstanding and imprecision, even error. There were sustained efforts to withhold whole areas of discussion and interaction from the English tongue, in keeping with Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of 1407 and 1409. Thus the sacrament of the mass was not to be discussed in vernacular parish instruction, Bibles in English were to be kept only for authorized use by monks and scholars, and Christ’s death was best contemplated through a few English authorized devotional texts. At the same time, those whose vocation forced them to reflect on the language and its capacities – such as preachers – expressed pride in its growing powers. John Lydgate placed himself in Chaucer’s tradition. In his poem The Life of Our Lady Lydgate called Chaucer ‘my master’, ‘a noble rhetor, poet of Britain’, who took the ‘rude speech’ of England ‘only to illumine it’. A lavish copy of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, with ninety illustrations to the text, was made in these decades, and was later owned by the writer John Shirley (d. 1456) (Plate 10). The frontispiece presents an imaginary scene of lords and ladies in rich attire, sitting in a rocky outdoors, around Chaucer, shown reading from his book at a pulpit. Arthurian lore was more pervasive. The epitaph inscribed on Arthur’s tomb at Glastonbury was copied into a book owned by Shirley. Humbler men, such as Henry Lovelich (fl.1425), a member of the London Skinners’ Company, developed writing into a hobby. He translated from French two Arthurian favourites: the history of the holy grail and the story of Merlin, probably for the delectation of his fellow craftsmen.
Intervention in reading matter and the matter of devotion was by the mid-fifteenth century decades old. Bishops were there to supervise teaching, license preaching and scrutinize the books in circulation. Mechanisms for detection of heresy were at work; Archbishop Chichele disseminated a standardized set of questions for interrogation of suspected heretics. These were used in individual cases as well as in occasional proactive campaigns of interrogation, such as that of the Bishop of Norwich between 1428 and 1431. Bishop Chedworth of Lincoln examined suspected Chiltern heretics in 1463 and 1464. The latter group displayed some cohesion in claiming to have learned a lot from James Wyllys, a ‘lettered weaver’ from Bristol. Adherence to the ideas disseminated by a charismatic preacher may well have created certain niches in belief. Like the religious ideas and practices deemed orthodox, much religious style and taste was regional and local in its appeal.
Orthodox pronouncements were regularly available from parish pulpits, but the more adventurous words were those of scholars, who committed ideas to writing. In the 1440s and 1450s Reginald Pecock (d. 1460), as Bishop of St Asaph and later of Chichester, wrote with polemical fervour against the removal of the Bible from the laity, and against the shutting down of religious debate. He studied the example of Bohemia, a kingdom torn by civil war over religious dissent and ethnic identity, and warned against the eruption of such strife in England if a heavy-handed religious policy persisted. The state’s involvement in decreeing what could and could not be read only led to hypocrisy among believers, claimed Pecock; it stifled engaged discussion and the application of reason to important religious matters. His works in turn inspired debate and polemical retort, like The Sword of Solomon, written for the Oxford theologian Thomas Bourchier. Pecock’s views were also examined by the king’s council, which ordered the destruction of his works, while Pecock himself was sent in 1459 to spend his last days under house arrest in Thorney Abbey (Cambridgeshire). Similar, if more subtle and prudent, were the views on state intervention in religious life expressed by the Carmelite John Capgrave in his The Solace of Pilgrims of c.1450. Among his descriptions of the shrines of martyrs in Rome was that of St Cecilia’s church. The martyr was renowned for her habit of carrying the gospel in her breast: here he held up the example of an independent reader, a woman and her Bible, of the type that by the 1450s the church and state feared and condemned.
The most widely circulating ‘safe’ text for religious instruction remained Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, still in wide circulation two generations after its composition. But for the daily use of parish priests, bishops continued to provide useful handbooks. Bishops led the pastoral thrust and the provision of support for priests: John Stafford, Bishop of Bath and Wells (and later Archbishop of Canterbury), disseminated in 1435 a translation of the syllabus for parish instruction which had been formulated 150 years earlier by Archbishop Peckham. Several fifteenth-century manuscripts contain the Memoriale credencium – The Memorial of the Faithful – a handbook for the instruction of layfolk. Typical of the guidance imparted was the scheme of the works of mercy: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, harbour the traveller, visit the sick, comfort the sorrowful and bury the dead. This scheme of works was reinforced in some parishes by visual representations: feeding and clothing appear in Little Melton church (Norfolk), and on the south wall of Toddington church (Bedfordshire) the seven works of mercy are accompanied by images of the seven sins. Similarly, and somewhat later, in Blythburgh church (Suffolk) the carved poppy-heads at the bench-ends expressed visually the teaching on the seven deadly sins: avarice sits on a moneybox, slander sticks out her tongue, hypocrisy prays with prayer beads but with open eyes.
The vernacular came to encompass more and more of the space previously filled by Latin and French. But here was not solely a process of replacement; there were also more texts and genres about, and in them a variety of modes for religious expression. While the doctrines to be taught were never more clearly expounded, and the efforts to present them visually and spatially never more intense, their expression of personal taste was also sustained. Innovation and experimentation in form and content necessarily developed when so much was at stake in the formulation of religious opinion. The interiors of churches were habitually adorned with Creed windows, which were meant to remind people of Christian truth, as in Ludlow from c.1445–50. Doom scenes were painted to remind beholders of the punishment which might befall those who died unrepentant, and the Wheel of Life, like that in Kempley (Gloucestershire), interpreted the stages of the life-cycle and their concomitant moral dilemmas. Past and present were affected by worldly fortune; security and solace were only to be found in and through the church. It was back to basics according to the leading bishops, and those who wrote for lay people kept things simple: the Lord’s Prayer was the basis of all, the fount of all prayer. Or, even more simply, every good deed and good thought could be a prayer, a link to God, as the Disce mori (Learn to Die) taught: long or short, prayer was the touch of the Holy Spirit. Through prayer one was bound in a knot ‘so fast’ that it could never be severed.
By the mid-fifteenth century there even existed small parochial libraries, with collections of pastoral books as well as statutory service books. Rectors often left books to their parishes: John Edlyngton, rector of Kirby Ravensworth (North Yorkshire), bequeathed in 1457 to the library of Boston parish church a bible, a history and devotional texts. In 1439 the vicar of Hornby (North Riding) left a breviary to his church on condition that little boys did not soil it. A great interest in preaching materials is evident, not only in long-standing traditional collections, but in new translations from the Latin, and original contributions, such as the sermons of John Felton (d. 1434), vicar of St Mary Magdalen, Oxford. These vernacular collections served the parish clergy, especially those of urban churches. They were also avidly read by people who wished to keep abreast of new trends in religious instruction, such as the monks of Norwich and Worcester Cathedral chapters, who occasionally preached in parishes under their tutelage.
Parish clerks, those hired by the parish priest, or those attached to a chantry, or charged with private arrangements for commemoration, were also involved in other activities in the parish: education of the young, scribal services, and musical embellishment of the liturgy. Polyphonic settings created for the exclusive space of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in the 1430s, provided material from which widely known Christmas carols developed. These decades saw the incorporation of music into the provisions made by parish churches. Churchwardens’ accounts of these decades mention the purchase of organs, music books, and payments for refreshments offered to singers after particularly festive – hence musically demanding – services. Musicians were rewarded and could become prominent property-holders: at his death in 1453 the composer John Dunstable held tenancies in thirteen London parishes.
Some parish statutes specified the duties of care which priests and clerics were meant to observe. Those of c.1442–83 from St Stephen’s, Coleman Street, London, demonstrate just how much routine maintenance went into the preservation of decorum and the flow of services. The parish clerk assisted the priest in several liturgical and housekeeping tasks: ringing bells, preparing bread for the mass, visits to the sick, copying out music. The clerks were to avoid discord with each other or with the parishioners. The latter were to be addressed decorously, and their payments were to be requested ‘amicably’.
Among the many services rendered by clerks, education was in great demand, especially the teaching of Latin to the sons of merchants, lawyers and gentry. The workbook of Thomas Schort, a respected cleric and teacher in the diocese of Exeter between 1427 and 1465, contains examples for the demonstration of good Latin usage. At Bristol Newgate School his charges were sons of gentry families as well as of Bristol merchants. Their translation work reflects mundane and daily affairs: ‘I am sleepy for the weather is sleepy’, or, more puzzlingly, ‘The nearer the church, the further from God’, two sentences among tens for training in translation into elegant Latin. Similarly, John Elwyn, a clerk of Holderness, bequeathed in 1465 all his grammar books to the chapel at Hendon for the edification of the children studying at the local grammar school.
Education could provide the basis for a multitude of secular and religious careers, through the entry it provided into the acquisition of rhetorical and legal skills. For a privileged and fortunate few – those who secured patrons willing to support their education, and above all those who benefited from membership in a college – education at Cambridge or Oxford, and after 1410 at St Andrews or 1451 in Glasgow, was an opening for further advancement. Bishops, who were often also involved in royal administration, increasingly boasted higher degrees in law or theology. The higher university degrees – in Roman and canon law, in theology and medicine – led to careers in royal administration, diplomacy, high-level legal work, or even in academic scholarship and teaching. The hundreds who passed through university every year, many of whom never took a degree or completed a course of study, later found a place among the many occupations in England, Ireland, Wales and on the continent which required literacy. Indeed, when reflecting on the profusion of unlicensed and heretical opinion in England, Reginald Pecock opined that too many unsuitable people had access to universities, sowing confusion when they spoke publicly and authoritatively on complex religious issues. He preferred fewer degrees more sparingly given.
The religious life of the parish did not suffice for all. While Henry IV had concentrated on maintaining orthodoxy’s upper hand, Henry V used religious imagery for the exaltation of Englishness. In Henry VI’s years, under the guise of orthodoxy, a great production of styles and opportunities was under way. Women of gentry and aristocratic families lived active and edifying lives in nunneries. The nuns of Barking (Essex) enjoyed a high level of learning, to judge from the regular stocks of books and the broad range of texts which their library contained at this time. Enclosed religious life marked a woman’s elevated social status and offered an alternative to a marriage dictated by her father’s social and political ambitions. The women who served in the administrative offices of nunneries were faced with a wide range of challenges and contacts with the world. The records of visitations of nunneries tell us not only of the many lapses from monastic discipline – meeting lay people, chatter and dancing, irregular dress – but also of the administrative tasks which running a nunnery entailed. Nuns kept in close touch with family and friends in this period, and adorned their cells with keepsakes and personal belongings.
Men’s religious quests were more likely to take them far from home. Joining an order of friars – Franciscan, Dominican, Augustinian or Carmelite – was like joining the army: a friar might be posted anywhere in his native country or in his order’s service abroad. Male religious enjoyed more freedom than women in reinventing their physical appearance. Thomas Scrope, an ex-Carmelite, was known in Norfolk c.1425, in his hair shirt and sack, wearing an iron chain, preaching the gospel and proclaiming the new Jerusalem. Two former monks of Goldcliff (Gwent) served Bridgwater parish church (Somerset), and supported themselves by saying masses for the dead.
In 1450 a whole series of long-term tensions and aggravating events combined to produce instability and violence of unprecedented diversity and range. It followed a year in which royal finances collapsed and the Exchequer no longer paid the salaries of state officials; and in which after the cession of substantial English holdings in France Charles VII continued his reconquest of Normandy. Those involved in policy and its execution – above all the most powerful man at court, William de la Pole Duke of Suffolk, and officials of his administration – were made to carry the blame. Ad hominem political attacks and humiliations followed: the estates of Reginald Boulers, Abbot of Gloucester were attacked, as he was pilloried for his role in the negotiations in France; the king’s chief adviser, Adam Molyens, Bishop of Chichester – a man who had risen from a humble Chancery clerkship – was murdered for his diplomatic role; Suffolk was accused of abuses of power and exiled, but was brutally murdered by sailors on the ship taking him to exile in France, and his body thrown overboard. There were storms too, and an accumulation of hardship caused by repeated taxation and provisioning of armies. Agricultural production had passed its worst decade, in the 1430s, and was probably improving. The conditions were ripe for unrest and political action, for men rarely march when the situation is at its worst, but rather vent their frustration when the family’s livelihood is more secure.
The sense of disorder touched not only the political classes but the country more widely. Sentiment was not so much directed against Henry VI, but pleaded for his vigilance and responsible engagement with those around him. Bills and political ditties warning against conspiracies appeared: there were traitors about, sworn into bands and the king should ‘let them drink as they have brewed’. More caustic was the Latin alliterative refrain:
O king, if you be a king, rule yourself, or be a king of nothing;
If you do not rule yourself well, you will have nothing but a name.*
Since the king did not act, others did.
Rulers are not blamed for the advent of bad weather, nor even for the recurrence of disease; people sought providential and moral explanations for those. But kings were weakened by bad management and corruption, by a failure of governance, and, as the events since 1381 showed, communities had a clear idea as to who the culprits were. Grassroots political culture nurtured an extraordinary loyalty to the king, and preferred to blame bureaucrats and advisers, whose evil influence was felt not only in court but in the management of their regional fiefdoms, thus affecting the life of modest people. There was not a single area in which the king’s advisers were doing well. Royal debt was worse than ever: at £372,000 more than double the £168,000 which had worried parliament in 1433. In Kent a movement of complaint stirred which called for the king’s repair of bad governance. A Welsh tradesman, Philip Corveser, was accused of calling on the Welsh to rebel against the English mayors of towns with which they traded at a disadvantage.
As is often the case, the sense of discontent came to be associated with a figure who attracted a great deal of blame and hatred – the culprit in 1449–50 was William de la Pole Duke of Suffolk. A veteran of Henry V’s wars in France, active on the royal council and then a prominent diplomat and courtier, Suffolk led the court which sought accommodation with France and an end to war. He was thus associated with the cession of lands to France in 1447, and to the loss of purpose in foreign affairs, together with mismanagement of the vast sums which had been allocated towards maintenance of French outposts and garrisons. When he sought parliament’s support and confidence in him in 1449, he found that gathering intent on impeaching him. Henry VI was able to commute the punishment to one of five years’ banishment. But Suffolk was never to return – murdered by sailors on his way into exile in France. Yet the men who killed him flew the banner of St George, loyal subjects of the king, doing dirty work on his behalf. In the territories once influenced by the Duke of Suffolk – East Anglia, the Thames Valley, Kent – his followers and relatives were exposed to ridicule and violence.
Discontent, violence and disorder were brewing in the south-east, and detailed accounts of the movement known as Cade’s Rebellion have survived. Unlike the events of 1381, it received a somewhat sympathetic depiction in London chronicles. In May 1450 Jack Cade led his men of Kent – joined later by a contingent from Sussex – on a parody of a royal entry into London. He was dressed in a blue velvet gown lined with fur, and crowned with a straw hat. He processed to London Bridge, Southwark and then back to Cheapside, while rumours abounded about rampages by disbanded soldiers in Southampton, and the beheading of royal advisers – all true. Cade and his men pinned their hopes on a champion, Richard Duke of York, who would help shore up royal rule. They claimed, ‘We blame not all the lords… nor all men of law, but all such as may be found guilty by just and true inquiry by the law.’ Like the rebels of 1381, they possessed a familiar as well as utopian idea of law as a tool for justice, and as a tool for social and economic redress in the hands of modest people.
While the men of Sussex were contemplating action, a more radical group emerged with slogans such as ‘the king is a fool’. They gathered in groups in market towns, demanding the lowering of rents below 2d. per acre. The autumn of 1450 saw these groups, composed mainly of artisans – tanners, shinglers, thatchers, dyers, masons, cappers, smiths – mostly young and unmarried men, gather to hear speeches and occasionally threaten tax-collectors, stewards, sheriffs and under-sheriffs. By 1451 rule had been re-established and judicial inquiries had sought out perpetrators, although almost all were pardoned.
What did the losses in France mean to the English crown and its people? A smaller number of captaincies, loss of life, and loss of prestige among magnates, whose reputations controlled regions in France, as well as in England and the Marches. Beyond the tens of magnates, there were thousands of gentry; loss in France created scenes which touched them, scenes such as those enacted in Paris, following the Siege of Pontoise of 1441, when English captives were processed in rags through the capital, fifty-three of them tied together and plunged into the river to drown. France had represented opportunity and fostered an ethos of service. While the military challenges of the 1430s and 1440s had exposed competition and divergent policies among England’s magnates, first between Beaufort and Gloucester, then between York and Somerset, France remained the central royal project. Defence of the royal title and lands there blended seamlessly with the very essence of the king’s expectation of loyalty and gratitude. As for the people of Normandy, they no longer feared English reconquest and opened their gates to French forces.
Shakespeare’s image of John Talbot Earl of Shrewsbury and his dramatic death with his son in the battle of Castillon (1453), the last battle of the Hundred Years War, is wholly inaccurate. Yet Talbot is a good example of an effective, loyal and responsible soldier and administrator, and there were others. The message he penned into the book which was his wedding-gift to Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou declared: ‘My sole desire is to serve the King and you well, even until death. Let everyone know: my sole desire to the King and you.’ Men like Talbot had been born into a kingdom which posed clear objectives and opportunities for military exploits, high-level military administration, and the related tasks of diplomacy. For lesser men there were many posts as captains of garrisons, under the direction of magnates appointed as lieutenants-in-chief. A man like Sir John Cressy, who died in 1445, is a good example of the numerous possible careers created by Henry V’s conquests and available under Henry VI, until 1453. In 1430, at the age of twenty-three, Sir John formed part of the coronation expedition, as a man tied by indenture to Thomas Lord Roos. In 1432 he moved on to the next official, the Earl of Arundel, and in 1435 led his own company of twenty-eight men-at-arms and ninety archers in that year’s expedition. He experienced defeat as commander of the garrison of Eu, taken by the French in 1436, and moved to the service of Richard Duke of York at Caen later that year. In 1441 he led another retinue which was part of the effort to defend Pontoise, and was appointed captain of Gisors in 1442. The last year of his life saw him in charge of three garrisons, until his death in March 1445. He was buried in his parish of Dodford in Northamptonshire.
Families extended their local links into the enterprise in France, maintaining abroad the loyalties and relations they harboured at home. The Standish family, for example, developed a link with the garrison of Pontoise: in 1437 Henry Standish was captain of the garrison, and several men-at-arms and archers bore that same family name. In the Welsh retinue of Griffith Don at Tancarville in 1438 half of the archers were Welshmen. Conversely, the reality of death, injury and dispersion, as well as of being taken captive or going native, meant that once in France retinue ranks had often to be filled by whoever might be willing and available. Men who had earned ransoms in France could retire with great homes, such as that of Sir Roger Fiennes at Herstmonceaux in Sussex, built in 1441. He used Flemish treasure as well as Flemish brick and workers to build this magnificent moated home, befitting a veteran of Agincourt, who also served as Treasurer under Henry VI. A whole legal and financial system supported the efforts of such men. Financial services developed to assist wartime transactions. For example, Filippo Borromei and Co. transferred £1,631 4s. 11d. from an account in their London branch in 1436 for the final payment of Sir Thomas Rempston’s ransom, incurred after the Battle of Patay in 1429.
The garrison system established under Henry V was effective for about a decade, but from the 1420s it came under pressure from the new technology of artillery, adopted by the French with the aid of foreign, mostly Italian, experts. The French efforts of the 1430s were patchy, but rather than passive defence they saw the action of ad hoc detachments – often with familiar Scottish soldiers – aimed at harassing a single town and its garrison. By the late 1430s English superiority was seriously challenged: Henry VI wrote after the fall of Castelnau-de-Cernès to the French: ‘it had been broke down during siege… by cannon and engines’. By 1450 it took only sixteen days to dismantle the walls of Bayeux. The initiative was with the cannons of the attackers, hardly matched by the tenacity of the defenders; in 1451 Bourg-en-Bresse (Normandy) surrendered after six days of heavy artillery action. John Talbot’s last battle, at Castillon, was similarly lost by the English to French gunners ‘through breaches made by artillery’. Reflections on the new technology were penned in English in the form of a paraphrase of Vegetius’s classic text on siege warfare.
The military resources of England and Wales in France had to be rethought and by 1452–3 men from garrisons in Normandy were redistributed among the seventeen garrisons of Gascony. It is this type of action which bred disappointment in leadership, sharpened by the collapse of future prospects. To these were added the hardships caused by incursions in the northern Borders, and the unsettling effect of news about them. Nor were there economic prospects to gladden the heart. A large variety of indicators bears witness to a decline in the incomes of big landlords – religious institutions and magnates – and there was a dearth of food in some years, especially the 1430s, exacerbated in the west Midlands by an outbreak of plague. No noble family collapsed because of economic hardship, nor even through the more frequent demands to pay ransoms. It was probably the gentry, the parish gentry, and smaller religious institutions that felt the collapse in demand for land and the price of produce most acutely. In north-east Kent, a good farming area, the falling demand for foodstuffs meant that lower seeding ratios were applied: on the Christ Church, Canterbury, estates in 1444, there was a drop from four to three bushels per acre for wheat, five to four for barley, and then for oats from six to five in 1444, four in 1447, and five in the 1450s. In parallel, livestock flocks were reduced, and fattened rather than kept for their milk and wool, produce hard to sell even to the markets of London and the Low Countries.
The faultlines which characterized groups and communities were exacerbated in an atmosphere of despair and distrust. Welshmen in English towns were arrested for suspected sedition, and tenants refused to provide services and in some cases disrupted work. There were real complaints and misery in the 1430s and 1440s, a rise in prices of the vital commodities which fed peasant families, sustained the income of land-holders large and small, and maintained the trading classes and their dependants, the providers of services and goods in cities. The export of broadcloth fell from 55,000 cloths on average in the years 1438–48 to 34,000 in 1448–71. The boom which had seen thriving cattle herds in the north-east in the 1430s and early 1440s ended with disease and the collapse of demand in the late 1440s. The sheep farming of Horsley Manor (Gloucestershire) brought little profit to Bruton Priory by 1444–52. Properties in towns fell in value; thus Oseney Abbey outside Oxford saw a decline in its income over the 1440s from £201 c.1435 to £170 in 1449. In town and country a chronic inability to collect rents and the resulting fall in rental income is apparent on the pages of letters, such as the correspondence of the members of the Paston family in Norfolk, and in the account rolls of manors. The accounts of the estates of the Bishop of Worcester demonstrate that resistance to payment of dues was organized, the result of real hardship. The European bullion crisis further made the payment of dues difficult, because of the absence of suitable coin. In the 1440s royal mints were producing only 5 per cent of the coin minted in the 1420s. Economic cycles and political inadequacy made the 1440s and 1450s very trying times for those who already had land and status, and miserable for those who depended on a fine balance of subsistence agriculture and small-scale exchange.
Out of the desires of the men of Kent, the power of dynasty, the confusion of magnates and the inability of King Henry to offer leadership arose a challenge by a most potent magnate, the king’s kinsman, Richard Duke of York. The petitions of the men of Kent singled out the corruption of royal officials, but Jack Cade also claimed to be associated with the Mortimers, and thus with the Yorks. By 1450 popular prophecies were circulating with an explicit demand to replace the king by the Duke of York. York had held a series of important and testing positions: Lieutenant of France and, most recently, since 1447 Lieutenant of Ireland. He had the lineage, the talent and the experience to make him an effective ruler, even an heir apparent.
York gained his experience in France, where his wealth often subsidized a large segment of English expenditure, debts which were never repaid. When Henry VI sent him to Ireland, an arena ripe for influence was opened to him. In the decades leading up to his arrival, English ambition in Ireland had all but crumbled, with effective rule over only a third of the nominally Anglo-Irish region. Rule was patchy outside the four counties of Dublin, Louth, Meath and Kildare. Ireland was different from Normandy, inasmuch as it had a political community integrated deeply into the English one. The initiatives for self-defence and tower-building of the 1420s, which offered subsidy for fortification, still remaining in Kilchief (Down) and Kilmallock (Limerick), had been all but abandoned in the years of Henry VI’s majority.
York was heir to substantial holdings in Ireland. Upon arrival there with 600 men in 1448 he led a force into county Wicklow and succeeded in restraining the O’Neills. In Ireland there was proof of dereliction, and it offered York the motive for and the means of organizing in relative autonomy. In 1450 he crossed the sea to his castle at Denbigh, and then marched through Wales and the Marches and on to St Albans and then to London, where he presented bills of complaint and grievance. His party used pamphlets and legal challenges in parliament, and always presented the duke as acting in the common good. In the parliament of 1450–51 Thomas Young of Bristol petitioned that York should be made the king’s heir, a step too soon and too far, for which he was arrested. But York came out the winner from his feud with Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset over policy in France, which resulted in his denunciation of Somerset as an evil counsellor, a greedy administrator in France, and unworthy of the king’s trust. As to York’s own qualities, these were made clear in the 1452 Shrewsbury Manifesto: he was full of worship and honour and manhood, and loyal to the king. When Henry fell ill in 1453 – and it is unclear what ailed him, but it affected his mind as well as his body – reforming York was the man most suited to the task of Protector. The Clare Roll, that genealogy of virtue and fecundity penned around 1453 by Osbern of Bokenham, led inexorably from Edward III’s loins to those of Richard Duke of York. It was a line presented through continuous progeny reared by good women, through Anne, York’s mother, back to Lionel, Edward III’s son (d. 1368). When it came, York’s claim was made to seem stronger than Henry IV’s had been: it had full dynastic force and was underpinned by demonstrable capacity and experience.
Protector York had the support of a large affinity: the Nevilles, his kin in the north, and the Earl of Salisbury. In 1454 he marched north to put down the Yorkshire rebellion led by the Duke of Exeter. But when the king regained his health, York’s control of council and position as deputy was revoked. This was a test of York’s ambition and loyalty. Would he step down and accept a more modest political role? He did not, and an encounter was forced between Yorkists and Lancastrians at St Albans in May 1455, in which Somerset lost his life. This was not a rebellion but a feuding confrontation, and after it the queen’s leadership was marked by the fear of York, who had emerged as all but heir apparent. In the next few years York and his son, Edward Earl of March, withdrew to Ireland and to Calais respectively, building up armies and avoiding confrontation until their forces and alliances were ripe.
In 1459 York was deemed a traitor, an accusation moved by Margaret of Anjou in fear for her son’s inheritance, and the Act of Attainder of the Coventry Parliament stripped him of land and office. York returned to England in 1460 to fight his case, landing at Redbank at the north-west tip of the Wirral on 9 September 1460. He travelled through the Marches to join his wife at Abingdon. The aim was to demand redress, for a second time. The Act of Accord of October 1460 did just that, and more. For it granted that after Henry VI’s death the Duke of York would inherit the crown, rather than Edward, the seven-year-old prince. The desire to replace an incompetent king with an able ruler was fulfilled at the expense of the sacred principle of dynastic continuity which all magnates greatly cherished in their own lives. It is easy to imagine the outrage and anxiety that such an accord prompted: the displacement of the hereditary principle, the dispossession of a prince. The chronicler of St Albans Abbey, among others, claimed that York had aggressively made his claim in parliament, disregarding the king, first demanding the crown and then settling for the accord. His real enemy now was no longer the king, but the queen, the mother of the dispossessed prince. Her forces were in the north, where the real opposition had concentrated. Marching northwards, York and his supporters encamped by Wakefield on 30 December 1460, where they were surprised by Margaret of Anjou’s force: York was killed in the battle.
The bills posted on the gates of York, where the Duke’s body was taken, were penned in a ripe political idiom, and the public humiliation of his corpse was political theatre in the round. Recounting the events, the monastic chronicler John Walthamstead inverted the story of Christ’s mocking and crucifixion: the body was crowned with a paper crown, and he was mocked: ‘Hail, King, without kingdom. Hail, King, without inheritance. Hail, Duke and Prince, without people and possession.’ After this mocking, York’s head was cut off and displayed on the gate of York, the city which had been his home, an act inspired by a Devon squire, James Luttrell. Here was a sorry end to the Yorkist claim, as Salisbury was executed on the next day at Pontefract, and York’s son Rutland was killed in battle.
But York’s ample progeny was moved to continue his claim, now spurred on by the deaths and humiliation of father and brother. Henry VI was still in London, alone, and it was to London that York’s son, Edward Earl of March, with the Earl of Warwick at his side, directed his ‘great force’ in February 1461. A London chronicle describes his triumph as an act of acclamation supported by magnates and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who did not believe that ‘Harry were worthy to reign’. On 4 March a gathering at St Paul’s declared the Earl of March King Edward IV, in a religious ceremony accompanied by sermon and litany. Henry VI went into exile in Scotland, while Margaret of Anjou and her son sought succour in France with a group of Lancastrians. London and the Commons hailed the new king.