THE PENGUIN HISTORY OF BRITAIN
I: DAVID MATTINGLY Roman Britain: 100–409
II: ROBIN FLEMING Anglo-Saxon Britain: 410–1066
III: DAVID CARPENTER The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284*
IV: MIRI RUBIN The Hollow Crown:
A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages*
V: SUSAN BRIGDEN New Worlds, Lost Worlds: Britain 1485–1603*
VI: MARK KISHLANSKY A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714*
VII: LINDA COLLEY A Wealth of Nations? Britain 1707–1815
VIII: DAVID CANNADINE At the Summit of the World: Britain 1800–1906
IX: PETER CLARKE Hope and Glory: Britain 1901–2000, 2nd edition*
A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages
ALLEN LANE
an imprint of
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First published 2005
1
Copyright © Miri Rubin, 2005
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
EISBN: 978–0–141–90800–7
1 Famine and Deposition, 1307–1330
3 An Empty Land and its King, 1377–1399
4 Usurpation and the Challenges to Order, 1399–1422
5 ‘For the world was that time so strange’, 1422–1461
6 Little England and a Little Peace, 1462–1485
Photographic acknowledgements are given in parentheses.
1. Zodiac Man, British Library Egerton 2572, fol. 50v (British Library)
2. Edward III granting the Black Prince the principality of Aquitaine (Bridgeman Art Library)
3. Women throwing corn to hens and chickens, British Library Additonal 42130, fol. 166v (British Library)
4. Virgin and Child, Eaton Bishop Church (Eaton Bishop Church/Bridgeman Art Library)
5. Bamburgh Castle (Corbis)
6. Effigy of the Black Prince, Canterbury Cathedral (Canterbury Cathedral/Corbis)
7. Battle of Crécy, British Library Cotton Nero E II, fol. 152v (British Library)
8. Effigy of Walter de Helyon, Much Marcle Church (Much Marcle Church/photograph by kind permission of David Mocatta)
9. Death of Wat Tyler, British Library Royal 18 E I, fol. 175 (Bridgeman Art Library)
10. Frontispiece to Chaucer’s manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Manuscript 61, fol. IV (Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)
11. Wilton Diptych, National Gallery (by kind permission of the National Gallery of London/Corbis)
12. Richard II receiving the Earl of Northumberland, British Library Harley 1319, fol. 37v (British Library)
13. Henry Bolingbroke claiming the throne, British Library Harley 1319, fol. 57 (British Library)
14. Effigies of Henry IV and Queen Joan of Navarre on their tomb in Canterbury Cathedral (Bridgeman Art Library)
15. Duke of Clarence effigy, St Michael’s Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral (Corbis)
16. Henry V with the English poet Thomas Hoccleve (Corbis)
17. Battle of Agincourt, Lambeth Palace Library 6, fol. 243 (Bridgeman Art Library)
18. The Duke of Bedford worshipping Saint George, British Library Additional 18850, fol. 256 (British Library)
19. Thomas Mac William Burke, MS 1440 fol. 21v (The Board of Trinity College Dublin)
20. Henry VI gives the Earl of Shrewsbury the sword of the Constable of France, British Library Royal 15 E 6, fol. 405 (British Library)
21. Manchester misericord, Manchester Cathedral (Manchester Cathedral and Manchester University Art History Department)
22. King’s College Chapel, Cambridge (Corbis)
23. Parchment illustrated with historical passages from the life of Edward IV and his pedigree, British Library Harley 7353 (Bridgeman Art Library)
24. Image of a clandestine marriage, British Library Royal 6 E 6, fol. 286v (British Library)
25. Obverse of a rose-noble of Edward IV (Bridgeman Art Library)
26. Wenhaston Doom, St Peter’s Church, Wenhaston (Rector and Churchwardens of St Peter’s, Wenhaston and Blythweb Ltd, http://www.wenhaston.ws)
The first history book I ever bought was Dorothy Stenton’s volume of the Pelican History of England. Although in paperback it was an expensive treat for a poor undergraduate in Jerusalem in the 1970s. To the pleasure of buying it was added the thrill of rummaging through the shelves of the most old-fashioned of scholarly bookshops, Ludwig Mayer’s. Since then much has come and gone, in Jerusalem, in my life, in our book-buying habits, and in the practice of history. Like that much treasured book, The Hollow Crown aims to share historical reflection, discovery and enthusiasm with those who love and cherish history, but who have not made it their vocation. It is the product of the quarter-century of my life as a historian, but it is not for historians alone. The French have an excellent term to describe the intended audience – le grand publique – the great public, the many who devote some of their leisure to reading and visiting, and finally asking: How did we get here? How have we become what we think we are? How different are we from those who lived before us? What may we choose to learn and what to discard from the dizzying range of human experience which history reveals?
I say this book is not primarily for historians, or even history students, but it could not have been made without the incorporation of the intelligence, diligence and commitment of hundreds of workers in the historical fields: academic historians, historians of art, students of medieval literature, miners of archaeological remains. While writing The Hollow Crown I came to realize just how many historians there are in Britain today outside the universities: people who research and publish excellent scholarship while preserving archives, teaching in schools, guarding historic sites, curating in museums; how many continue to study and write long after retirement, or during years at home while caring for children.
The main, and perhaps sole, frustration arising from the writing of this book has been the impossibility of acknowledging debts in footnote form. I aim to do justice to the most heavily used sources in the Essay on Further Reading at the end of this book, and have listed all sources in a full bibliography which is available on-line at http://www.history.qmul.ac.uk/staff/rubinbiblio.html. My reading and research at the Cambridge University Library was graciously supported by the assistance of Colin Clarkson, Lucas Elkin, Michael Fuller, Neil Hudson, Andrew Kennedy and Morag Law.
I name here with pleasure those who generously provided material as yet unpublished or who answered queries: Caroline Barron, Jim Bolton, Chris Briggs, Christopher Fletcher, Ian Forrest, Harold Fox, Barbara Hanawalt, Katie Hawks, Richard Helmholz, Brian Patrick McGuire, Marygold Norbye, Mark Ormrod, Danna Piroyanski, Ivan Polancec, Richard Smith, Craig Taylor, Anne de Windt and Edwin de Windt. As to the many friends who helped me along the years – over cups of coffee and tea in the Cambridge University Library or the British Library, at meetings and seminars and conferences – they know how grateful I am, and what fun it has been to make history together.
Some people must be mentioned by name. My young colleagues, whom I have seen grow from brilliant and blushing graduate students to confident and creative scholars – Anthony Bale, Chris Briggs, Christopher Fletcher, Ian Forrest, Julian Luxford, Ruth Nisse, Danna Piroyanski, Max Satchell, Phillip Schofield, David Stone, Marion Turner, Anna Whitelock – have kept me alert and abreast of their exciting ways of making history. I am delighted to thank, for his formative intellectual gifts, Richard Smith, who presides over the buoyant study of British rural societies; Mark Bailey, who combines subtle understanding of landscape with the best that economic history has to offer; Paul Binski, who knows English medieval art in all its forms as no other does, and is passionate and generous too; John Watts, who, together with the late and sorely lamented Simon Walker, has brought new grace and vision to the study of late medieval politics; Mark Ormrod, who always reminds us that Britain is part of Europe, and toils at the long history of state formation; Christopher Dyer, who has made the feeding, clothing and housing of medieval British people a central historical preoccupation, with a combination of erudition and common sense; Richard Britnell, who explores the creative forces of medieval exchange and town life; Paul Strohm and David Wallace, who have taught me how to read texts historically; Ira Katznelson, who excels in using contemporary politics as a historian’s tool, without shame; and Rees Davies, a luminous practitioner of histoire totale, a supportive friend and shining example in all my endeavours.
At Queen Mary, University of London, I am surrounded by wonderful examples of innovation in British History. My move from Oxford to London in 2000 brought me into touch with a wonderful new group of colleagues and friends. With some I run the European History Seminar – David Carpenter (the author of the volume preceding my own in this series), David D’Avray, Sophie Page, Brigitte Resl and Nigel Saul. From them and from the seminar’s alert and lively participants I have learned much that is offered in this book.
Thanks to Joan Stedman Jones I have come to know Herefordshire and the Marches well. She and Christopher Walbank, both lovers of everything historical, have served as my intelligent lay readers, and have contributed meaningfully to the book’s improvement. Christopher Brooke, Shulamith Shahar, Jon Parry and Gareth Stedman Jones turned their formidable historical minds to my draft; they read the volume closely and with the commitment of real friends. They indicated delicately points for improvements and have thus become partners in the book. My son Joseph Stedman Jones is the best possible companion on the trips and walks which have contributed to the making of this book.
I live in a very historically minded household. My partner is a historian, his son studies history, and our son, Joseph, once told me – after a visit to Castle Acre in Norfolk – that he is keen on castles and priories almost in equal measure. When he was six years old Joseph developed a passion for Shakespeare through viewing the History Plays, directed by Michael Boyd during the 2001 season of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Most mothers would consider this passion a blessing – and I definitely did – but it also dramatized the weight of history, story and drama, which we all carry with us when approaching any area of history, above all late medieval British history. I have acknowledged this fact by letting Shakespeare in so he doesn’t haunt us so much; his words will accompany us through each chapter, the ghost at the feast, less voracious, I hope, for having been allocated a space at the table.
I am grateful to David Cannadine for having chosen me for this task, and to Simon Winder, my editor at Penguin. Simon has read every word with the incision and sympathy of the talented historian that he is. I greatly enjoyed Penguin’s support towards publication: Janet Tyrrell’s editorial touch, Alison Hennessey’s care for images, and Elisabeth Merriman’s attentive coordination.
Writing this book feels like a homecoming – for I live in Britain, far from Chicago where I was born and Jerusalem where I was nurtured. This book is a gift to all those who have made Britain feel like home.
Several decisions have been taken in this book in order to facilitate the presentation of source material and familiarize the reader with the places and people discussed. In most cases personal names are offered in a modern English-language version, as are place-names; these are followed by the name of the county in which they are currently situated. Titles of books are given in their original language and spelling and are followed by an English translation. Sums of money are rendered in pounds (£), shillings (s.) and pence (d.), but occasionally the accounting term ‘mark’, which was equivalent to two-thirds of a pound, is used when the original document did so. I have translated most original sources, but have made use of a published modern translation of Chaucer’s work and a standard edition of Shakespeare’s poetry: Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, trans. David Wright, Oxford, 1986; William Shakespeare, The Collected Works, ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery, Oxford, first edn 1966.
Miri Rubin
Cambridge, September 2004
2. The units of governance in Wales
3. The counties and regions of Ireland
4. France in the Hundred Years War: the fourteenth century
5. France in the Hundred Years War: the fifteenth century
The counties of England
The units of governance in Wales
The counties and regions of Ireland
France in the Hundred Years War: the fourteenth century
France in the Hundred Years War: the fifteenth century
Some 5–6 million people lived in Britain around the year 1300. These men and women, young and old, were born and bred towards the end of a mighty phase of population growth, almost two centuries of extension of cultivation to new lands, decades which witnessed a vitalization of agrarian life and commercial exchange. This trend affected the whole of Europe. It meant that by 1300 there were some 1,500 market towns of varying sizes in England and Wales, a third of them in East Anglia. To such towns peasants brought their surplus produce, in them artisans organized workshops and produced goods that both peasants and town-dwellers could hope to buy. There were also some 10,000–15,000 mills – moved by water everywhere and in the north-east also by wind – which marked villages with their familiar shapes and accompanying millponds. The dramatic rise in Europe’s agrarian productivity, together with its population growth, in the century and a half before 1300 meant that those who held great estates and vast tracts of land were motivated towards improvement and better management, towards higher productivity of cash-crops: corn, barley, wheat – and wool. Wool was the prime export of England and Wales, some 40,000 sacks a year being produced from around 10 million sheep. All these were marketed in England and abroad, fetching good prices and high returns.
England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland were part of an integrated European system of exchange with two obvious foci – in the Mediterranean, and in the North Sea and the Baltic. The wool produced in Britain at the beginning of our period was worked into cloth in the Low Countries, where the dyes to colour them were also grown: weld, which provided the yellow hue, around Lille, madder for red around Ypres and Bruges, and woad leaves for blue, south of Ghent. It was widely appreciated that the rivers Humber, Thames and Severn formed Britain’s crucial communication system, allowing ready access to much of the country. There were eighty-nine ports in the British Isles. By 1300 those travelling to one of them – Hull or York, Poole or Dublin – encountered specialized structures on the waterfronts, in sea ports and river ports: warehouses, wharfs, inns, customs halls, with planking and provisions for removal of refuse, as well as customary arrangements for the hire of packing and loading hands. The Cinque Ports of the south-east gained special privileges in return for mustering vessels and transporting kings and armies. Those who chose to travel by road used a system which included iron-age ridgeways, partially paved Roman roads and Anglo-Saxon cartways, and forded rivers on bridges maintained by lords since the Norman conquest.
England’s manors were transformed in this period into market-oriented enterprises. To benefit from the possibilities of exchange, landlords used all their customary privileges, and above all the control of the un-free peasantry: control of their marriages, and access to some of their labour and much of the produce of their tenancies. The intensification of agricultural production took many forms, which differed by region: in movement from food grain to drink grain, in the rearing of dairy animals for meat, in the use of draught horses rather than oxen, and in the planting of legumes on lands while fallow. On the whole, before 1350 most manors were organized for the production of crops; after the Black Death pastoral husbandry became more attractive, since it was less labour-intensive. The wealth generated by manorial production and trade in agricultural goods allowed landlords to experiment with their lifestyle and comforts. The earliest surviving manor house, of c.1300, is at Little Wenham (Suffolk). It was built of brick, in Flemish style, and stands near the other important building of the manor, the parish church. But there were regions which were almost entirely pastoral: in Wales, Yorkshire, the Cotswolds. There were vast expanses of land which remained uncultivated. Thornbury Manor was the glory of the Clare earls of Gloucester, 10,000 acres in size, but at the beginning of our period only half of it was cultivated; the rest was woodland and marsh, a possible pocket of malaria in the Severn wetlands.
There were some very large cities in England around the year 1300: London with a population of 100,000, York with 13,000, Coventry and Norwich around 10,000. Hundreds of small towns dotted the countryside in England and parts of Wales, Ireland and Scotland. These formed a central feature of life by 1300: there were 50 towns of over 2,000 inhabitants, and some 650 with populations of 300–2,000. Smallholders grew crops to feed their families, but they also produced for the market. Around 40 per cent of grain was sold in markets, to which it was transported by stewards of estates selling surplus, by rectors of parishes, who collected tithes in kind from parishioners, and by peasants themselves. Such marketing provided the foodstuffs for some 200,000 families who worked in towns and cities and who did not produce most of their own food. Towns needed meat, and wood for heat and light; we find butchers and chandlers in even very small towns such as Kimbolton (Cambridgeshire), Alnwick (Northumberland) or Halesowen (Worcestershire). Attempts at town-creation sometimes failed; Brentford (Warwickshire) and Newburgh (Staffordshire) never quite thrived. While the spread of commercial possibilities is impressive, some areas such as Devon and Cornwall had relatively few towns. Most towns retained many traces of the rural life which flowed through them: these names have endured in Sheep Streets in the Cotswolds, as well as in lanes named after geese, hogs and dogs.
Vast tracts of the countryside, between a third and a quarter in England, were forest: forest by physical character and forest in legal status. For this landscape acquired its own legal character, with an array of forest officials – established already by the Anglo-Norman kings – who enforced the exclusive rights of kings and lords to timber and fruit, game and wildlife. Their powers were great; they could search homes and persons, seeking incriminating remains – a skin, some offal. And where officials held great powers there was the temptation to bribe and be bribed. It is not surprising that some of the most evocative and enduring ballads, plays and songs in English have the forest as their stage, forest officials and poachers as their characters.
In forests – Dartmoor, the Forest of Dean, Epping – unusual and interesting communities developed. They benefited from the demand generated by the occasional presence of the royal or aristocratic households nearby, as well as from a varied habitat. The town of Brill, for example, was the centre of manufacture and exchange in Bernwood Forest (Buckinghamshire), and in it some of the finest domestic pottery was produced – cooking pots, skillets, herring dishes – perhaps inspired by the needs of the neighbouring royal parties, and exported throughout the east Midlands. A subtle understanding of the uses of trees guided rhythms of planting. Timber was used for the ubiquitous fires of cooking, heating and industry. Ash wood was preferred for its regular flame, over sparking chestnut, or conifers with their smoky resin; beech’s even heat was good for industry and cooking. Oak was the backbone for durable construction of houses and ships.
There was a great intimacy between people and the local landscape, the main stage for most people’s lives. The countryside offered some gifts, like the colour of its vegetation, or the texture of its soil. Some of this backdrop changed with the seasons, and so people used holly and ivy at Christmastime, willows for Palm Sunday processions, hawthorns for May Day and roses for the summer feast of Corpus Christi. Herbals contain fine and careful drawings of leaves, fruit and list their properties, for cooking and the preparation of cures as well as of poisons. This knowledge was practical, but it could also be turned into a poetic celebration: the abundant carving of leaves on the capitals of the chapterhouse columns at Southwell Minster (Nottinghamshire) displays excellent craftsmanship, based on finely drawn models, and expresses the desire to exhibit talent while celebrating the diverse genius of Creation.
Fleeting leaves were thus set to endure in solid stone. The most enduring colours of the landscape were of the rocks from which building and carving stone was cut: the dark and crystalline stone of Cumbria, or the warm-tinted light stone of Yorkshire, which then changes into the dark stone of the Pennines and, further east, the iron-rich brown stone of Northamptonshire. In the many river valleys the rich combination of water, stone and leaf produced settings such as Swinbrook, a village of golden Cotswold stone, at the rise of the river Windrush, with willows on each bank.
Few peasants held holdings sufficient for their subsistence – which required about thirty acres – and therefore many serfs and the members of their families offered their labour to others. English villages in particular contained a high proportion of members who held only very small amounts of land. So tenants laboured on seigneurial lands – often known as demesne lands – for a daily wage often paid in a combination of coin, produce and food rations. In the east of England substantial tenants were more common than elsewhere, and they sometimes employed their less fortunate neighbours. When such hard-pressed smallholders failed to thrive, their better-off neighbours were able and keen to buy their lands. In those parts of Ireland settled by English colonizers from the later twelfth century, tenants held large tenancies in free tenure and traded in the produce of wool and hides.
By the beginning of our period the trend of growth and extension had reached its peak in many regions, and was probably being reversed in some. Population growth meant that many rural tenants could not provide land for their sons and daughters. The demand for land sometimes inspired cooperation between landlords and peasant communities: reclamation of land in the Welland marshes (Kent) and in the Somerset Levels, drainage in Holland (Lincolnshire) and the building and maintenance of sea defences. As competition for land intensified, relations between peasants and their lords became acrimonious. Episodes of rancour and violence against the demands of lords multiplied in the decades which precede our point of departure.
These lords were rarely met or confronted in person: about a third of English manors were held by religious institutions, which were represented by stewards, laymen accountable to an abbey, cathedral or priory. Great magnates held about a quarter of the land, and were also represented by administrators, whose presence and influence were most intensive on estates in Wales and Ireland. Conversely, the fortunes of some families such as the Despensers or the Mortimers were intimately bound up with the holding of lands in the Marches with all the authority and the access to armed men that this situation allowed. The fortunes of all those involved in rural life – the landlords who benefited from the marketing of agricultural produce, the serfs who worked to produce food, the local worthies who supervised agrarian work on estates – were affected by the devastation of the Great Famine of 1315–22, with which this book begins. The landscape and their minds alike were marked by the loss and destruction caused by a run of years which produced nothing but rain and mud.
Politics were linked to patterns of land-holding in rural areas, and to trading wealth and office-holding in towns. Land-holding defined men’s access to county and parish politics, as well as to office-holding on behalf of magnates or the crown. Their role as jurors in local administrative frames – the county, and its subdivision, the hundred – was paramount in dispensing justice. Marks of their status and ambition were as locally situated as were their lands. Sir Simon de Drayton chose to be represented after death in the glass of his parish church of Lowick (Northamptonshire) in a position of homage. This image evoked the web of obligations by which his land was held, and on which his authority over the lives of tens of parishioners was based. He contributed to the rebuilding of the parish church; he served as representative in parliament eleven times, and as commissioner of array three times. His deterrent power sometimes turned into outright violence: he was accused of abducting a woman, gouging out her eyes and cutting out her tongue. His family continued to maintain and adorn this fine church. Sir Ralph Greene of Drayton (d.1415) hired craftsmen from Derbyshire to make the tomb chest with brasses which can still be seen, with the effigies of himself, his wife and two dogs. For all the influence and power to subordinate that men like the Greenes had in their locality, this was by no means a society marked by deference alone. A lord was ‘good’ as long as he earned loyalty; if he acted badly – as Sir Simon may have done – opinion could be reversed quite swiftly, and with it the loyalty of politically active free men. The period produced its iconic figures of charismatic leaders in the name of utopian equality. John Ball, who preached during the uprising of 1381, echoed scripture to support a demand for political change: ‘In Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free.’
The deterrent power represented by a man of violence, such as Simon de Drayton, benefited his dependants, but it also contained the seeds of destruction when the peace based on reciprocities between peers and neighbours was shattered. The law, as well as sermons and romance literature, aimed to curb the violent prerogative of such men. A much-cited maxim from antiquity – a reworking of Aristotle and Juvenal – claimed that true nobility is proven in good actions and character, rather than by bloodline alone. It called for courtliness, largesse, loyalty and prowess in privileged men and women. A truly noble person was free and autonomous, but also servile to a set of moral maxims, and ultimately to God. Yet the competitive nature of knightly pursuits was always apparent: in the bearing of certain names and titles, in rich attire, in the carrying of weapons, in a residence sometimes adorned by protective defences against imagined attacks – moats, gates, towers – and in the ever-present accompaniment of grooms, squires and dogs. While thousands of men considered themselves knights, only tens of families were of magnate status with constant and enduring roles in national and international politics.
At all degrees of gentility families and individuals were bound through interlocking notions of good lordship; and while lordship could be won, it could also be lost. The terms which determined and expressed these changes may be called a political culture. This political culture acknowledged the king, the product of dynastic succession, around whom claims to enjoy and administer several territories were realized. These claims were enacted and tested in every locality, as with the 13,000 communities defined as villages for the purpose of taxation in 1334. The political system touched every village with an average of some 400 heads around 1334 (and 200 a century later). In each such village tens of men were involved in public life through law enforcement, regulation of communal resources (meadows, rivers full of fish, the grain remaining in harvested fields for gleaning), through by-laws, in offices such as juror or churchwarden or assessor, or reeve of the manor. Great regional magnates created the overarching frame of trust in the law, the royal law enforced by and for local people. Thus assured, communities allowed local men – those most trustworthy, most prosperous, most sensible, most vociferous – to participate in the many interactions to which their communities were subject. For they were answerable to customs of the manor, by-laws of their village, the canon law of the church, for the crimes committed in their hundred, to the court of their country, and in the Marches to the peculiar institutions of peace-making which these distinctive regions developed. There was much governance. Many institutions and their working depended then, as ours still do, on the charisma of those who made them work.
Land and the lives tied to it were held and managed by – apart from the great religious institutions – royal administrators on behalf of the crown, and a few tens of magnates. Upon these few depended the effectiveness of the kingdom as a war-state. These men represented exalted families and landed interests accumulated over decades and centuries, through royal grant, through purchase, through marriage and through conquest. Magnates’ spheres of influence were immense, for in their persons and households many aspects of the state were embodied: the operation of the law, leadership in times of war, protection against invaders in border areas, preferment for all those lesser free men and women who held lands and positions from them. Magnates held a whole array of offices, titles and honours as keepers of royal parks, protectors of the North or Welsh Marches and lieutenants of Ireland or Gascony. In addition to the magnates were bishops, whose estates were as vast, but who were free from the imperative of dynastic succession, although they too preferred and promoted members of their families and households. Since marriage was prohibited to priests, their contribution to their families’ fortunes was made through diplomacy and administration: they contracted marriages, negotiated for truces and treaties. They also devised fiscal pathways which enabled kings and magnates to fight wars and protect the joint enterprise of England, Ireland, Wales, Gascony – the enterprise which may be called Britain, for it certainly concerned more than England, though it was British in different ways at different times.
English or British or French? The Hollow Crown deals with people whose affinities ranged from the Orkneys to the Pyrenees, who lived in lowland zones like most of England, and in highlands like north-west England, Wales and the Western Isles. The kings who ruled this empire were dynasts who spoke French most of the time and who had each a different set of loyalties and experiences. Edward II, for example, had a French wife and a French mother and a Gascon best friend; Edward III a French mother and Flemish wife; Richard II a Bohemian wife and later a French wife; Henry IV crusaded in Lithuania; Henry V grew up as a very Welsh prince, as Edward II had done; Henry VI was a boy-king of France; Richard III grew up in France and Yorkshire; and Henry VII hardly knew England at all before 1485. All these men and those around them felt comfortable speaking in French, some did in English, and most recognized another language – Flemish, Welsh, Gascon. They diverged greatly in formative influences yet participated similarly in a European aristocratic culture.
Personal and group identity is best thought of as a cluster of attributes and associations including aspects of age, gender, region, occupation, experience and training. Areas of identity are always heightened when they seem most different. The Anglo-Irish thought more about their Englishness than did those who lived in the Midlands, and they worked hard to acquire up-to-date political intelligence, just as they diligently commissioned copies of formative English literature, such as Piers Plowman or the devotional image-poem The Charter of Christ. Northern clerks promoted to posts in the royal chancery felt their Yorkshire sympathies acutely and gathered in regional groups of sociability and institutions for mutual help. Welsh students at Oxford dwelt for safety and amity in specific hostels, and then in a college – Jesus College – which still boasts its Welsh connection. Unmarried women created their minute religious group for the maintenance of a light in the church of Ashburton (Devon), as did the ‘bachelors’ of Bassingbourn (Cambridgeshire) and Boxford (Suffolk). A regional dialect was most clearly noted when heard among another region’s cadences. Language came to stand for homeland, and people enjoyed the creation of occasions for enacted nostalgia. Free men and women were expert at the work of association, of creating intimate and meaningful groups – such as the group of pilgrims so brilliantly conjured by Chaucer – treasured equally for those they included, and for those they excluded: in fraternities, Inns of Court, guilds, workshops, town councils, orders of chivalry. These were creations of tentative amity and support against the world’s bewildering diversity, marking us out from them.
The coming together in groups for the creation of enduring monuments to success, virtue and good taste had a profound effect on social provision, and on the fabric within which people worshipped and worked. Throughout our period people increasingly chose collective frames for efforts in religion and commemoration, in chantries for perpetual prayer on behalf of self, spouse or kin. King, bishops and aristocrats, civil servants and occasionally townsmen founded academic colleges at Cambridge or Oxford from the early fourteenth century, and grammar schools followed in the fifteenth. While hundreds of leper houses and small hospitals were founded in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, later provision for the poor was considered most effective when provided in supervised almshouses, mostly parish-related. The almshouse at Ewelme (Oxfordshire), founded by the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk in 1437, is a carefully designed, lavishly built and closely regulated institution for thirteen poor men and two priests, and can still be seen today. It was a charitable institution for destitute men but also one which generated commemorative prayer in perpetuity. Many such charitable institutions, like academic colleges, survived the Reformation, and endured with lands and buildings for generations, to inspire such works as Anthony Trollope’s The Warden.
As the efforts at consolidation and association were at work in local frames, Englishness is far harder to identify than the many local intersections and borrowings between regions which characterized life in the late medieval British state. Government provided coin, the law, weights and measures, and defined military goals to be achieved with the support of taxes. But the world into which these services and capacities were inserted was greatly varied. Thus Anglo-Irish magnates delighted in Irish music, poetry and the technology of war; the lords of the Marches married Welsh women; Shropshire merchants gathered and sold Welsh wool; East Anglian churches displayed Flemish-style stained glass; and London poets delighted audiences with seemingly archaic alliterative verse borrowed from the Midlands. Englishness may be perceived in a style of governance. The choice or duty to emulate it was an aspect of political hegemony: the exchequers of Dublin, Berwick and Caernarfon were meant to function ‘come est fait en Angleterre’, ‘as done in England’.
Everywhere the universal Christian story was a palimpsest of accumulations and innovations achieved over centuries. Perhaps identity is best understood and perceived by us as a particular set of habits and expectations, an aesthetic which sets apart an English crucifix from an Italian one; a set of family structures, which set apart English families – with late marriage and few children – from Welsh ones; expectations in relations of men and women which set apart property-holding English widows from Welsh ones who did not inherit. It may be perceived in the affinity felt towards the instruments of law and the operation of administration: free people used the English law knowingly in England, but common law was not available to remedy the grievances of Welsh people, who used brehon law for private affairs, while clerks and priests and bishops maintained a parallel system of canon law informed by principles of Roman law. Women acted fully in ecclesiastical courts, where they were allowed to give full expression to grievances and disappointment in marital life, but they acted in common law only through proctors and lawyers. Law created communities and individual expectation, and some of the stories which this book tells reflect the fluctuating degree of trust which people had for the law at different stages of our journey.
This book will introduce you to the world whose triumphs and tribulations inspired the brilliant re-enactment of Shakespeare’s history plays and also a comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor. Shakespeare was no historian; the centuries which lay between his lifetime and those of the Plantagenet, Lancastrian, Yorkist and early Tudor kings – and of their subjects – created a meaningful historical distance. Yet he was an astute student of rule and rulership, and himself lived in turbulent times, during which dynasty, loyalty, faction and religious identity were harshly tested in all regions of Britain, in the lives of people of all ranks and situations.
The Hollow Crown provides an entry into this world. Shakespeare is just one exceptional example of the use which Tudor writers and thinkers made of the late Middle Ages as the source of cautionary tales about rule, misrule and the vagaries of fortune. Shakespeare read such accounts and poetically dramatized historical figures, sometimes inventing physical traits, at other times rearranging chronology. The following chapters will describe and narrate the fall of kings. However, it does so with an eye for the varying repercussions which regime change had on the life and livelihood, security and sensibility of the wide range of soldiers and farmers, merchants and craftsmen, men and women in rural and urban communities ruled by the kings of England, who were also the kings of Wales and Ireland, dukes of Aquitaine and counts of Ponthieu. Shakespeare’s often arresting visions will help us reflect on the nature of historical memory and its contribution to local, regional and national identities.
Pauses to think about memory will occur at a number of points in the book. Alongside the struggle for material security – food production, travel, exchange, taxation, warfare, nurture – and alongside the efforts involved in survival and betterment, people carried memory with them, within themselves. Memory was contained in every aspect of the built and tilled and shaped environment. People used churches, many of which had been built in the twelfth century, to which aisles were added in the thirteenth, great altarpieces in the fourteenth, and windows and rood-screens often in the fifteenth. They worshipped in buildings that were sometimes very ancient – like the vast Saxon church of the parishioners of Brixworth (Northamptonshire), or St Botolph’s, Hadstock (Essex), with its Saxon door. Most frequently they met in buildings which were a patchwork of many stages of construction and decoration, like Kilpeck (Herefordshire) with its unique blend of assertive Anglo-Norman shape in distinctive local pink sandstone and stylized indigenous carving. In these edifices memories of alliances and long-standing dynastic claims were crafted into stained-glass windows, painting of arms, tombs, banners, even cushions. A hectic culture of heraldic display drew the participation of parish gentry and magnates alike, as well as of townsmen, bishops and university colleges, in the adornment of buildings and the provision of furnishings.
Around half of the 9,000 parish churches of England were associated with religious houses, particularly those of the Benedictine and Augustinian orders. These houses collected the income from each parish – from tithes, from agricultural produce, from rents – and were obliged to supervise the upkeep of fabric and provision of pastoral care for parishioners by appointing a suitable vicar. The other half of parishes were under the patronage of magnates, gentry families or bishops, patrons who were expected to recommend candidates as rectors and vicars for the bishop’s approval. In parish churches there always was – and still is – something to look at, for such power and influence circulated through emblems. All types of patronage left their signs and marks, from elaborate tombs in and around the church, to inscriptions on the edges of windows or names carved on screens or altar railings.
Those who could not read apprehended their benefactors from the heraldic display, the signature of benefactors and patrons, who gave, and wished to be remembered. There were also less definite messages, spirited signatures of craftsmen and painters, messages in the carved ends of benches in church – a poppy, a woman, a monster – and for those who troubled to look, within the chancel, many more than the 3,400 surviving misericords, carved seats which displayed a whole array of local knowledge: proverbs, monsters, rhymes, fables, legends, in the working of chisel on wood. Old stories were elegantly told anew, to be discovered only by those who could gain access to the chancel – privileged or knowing, then as now. Such, for example, is the misericord at Chester Cathedral, carved c.1380, which depicts romantic passion in the shape of the Celtic ‘wild men’, or one carved ten years later at Worcester Cathedral, retelling a Norse tale of a clever daughter who became a queen. Even the Bible offered material for satire, such as the scene depicted in misericords in Ely Cathedral and in Ludlow church: Noah’s wife beating her husband for upsetting the household with his impossible building plans.
Some memories were very widely shared: of famine in the 1320s, of the plague in the 1350s, 1360s and again in the 1370s and 1390s, which halved the population; some were personal and to be shared with only a few, like Edward II’s memory of his executed friend Piers Gaveston, the trauma of bereavement visited on mothers and widows of the victims of war, or of civil war and rebellion. People carried within them regional memories too – of conquest in Wales, of Scottish raids in the north. Shakespeare captures well the pain and call for vengeance harboured by grieving mothers and wives in an imagined chorus of mournful women: Cicely of York (widow of Richard Duke of York, and mother of Richard III), Margaret of Anjou (widow of Henry VI and bereaved mother of Prince Edward), and Elizabeth Woodville (bereaved mother of the princes killed in the Tower). Each intoned the names of her dead, killed at the hands of her fellow women’s kin.
The memory of such loss was somewhat countered by the beneficial effect of rituals of consolation, of the joys of birth and regeneration. Marriage was a gesture of reconciliation which sought to join the bodies and substances of families into new lineages, mixing the best of both, with a measure of good will, all blessed as a sacrament. Indeed, this book will end with one such marriage, that between the Earl of Richmond/Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, a union which created a new dynasty, the Tudors, with its emblem, the Tudor Rose, made of the red and white petals of Lancaster and York. Yet rituals do not work magic, and the reconciliation they can offer is most effective when participants have exhausted all other means, exhausted each other. Arranged marriages between the great could also generate lengthy lawsuits and much rancour around issues of dower, inheritance and the multi-layered, many-generational families which characterized life then, as they do today. Where Christian ritual failed to heal with love, the law of the land was invoked – law, which in its several jurisdictions occupied a steadily growing number of men, and much time and effort throughout the period covered by this book.
The shapes of outdoor spaces contained and revealed local history – the work of women, men and nature. Names of fields derived from names of long-forgotten Danes who had settled the land, or of those who had reclaimed it from forest and meadows. Even within one large estate – such as that of the Bishop of Winchester – the variety of land and landscape dictated different rhythms of husbandry: Wiltshire, Hampshire, Sussex and the downs of Wessex were chalk, north-east Wiltshire was clay, and the Hampshire basin gravel. A single estate and its many different parts encompassed and demanded differing types of expertise and experience of even neighbouring villages and villagers. Place names and field names were so local that they would have meant little to someone living even a few miles away: how many knew where ‘oppermeadow’ was, or ‘le maltmilie’, or the enclosure known as ‘le Bigging’, all in Clare (Suffolk)? Yet these associations were not permanent and unchanging: the names of fields could be forgotten altogether as the use of fields changed. The surveyor of a tenancy in Medland (Cornwall) on an estate of the Arundels commented c.1408 that where farmland was turned to grazing land, and hedges had been beaten down, ‘the names of the fields are forgotten’. Communal space was also marked by strife, and by its outcome. The abbot of St Albans had a millstone placed at the entrance to the abbey following a dispute with the townsmen. This was to be a tangible reminder to his tenants that the abbey’s monopoly over milling was not open to dispute. They in turn took particular joy in smashing it up during the uprising of 1381, when they distributed pieces of the smashed stone as so many communion wafers to the crowd of onlookers.
Historians of the lands and people ruled by the kings of England are fortunate in having plentiful sources for study. Since the late Anglo-Saxon period these lands were much governed, by kings and by the church. The land was divided into counties (shires) and dioceses, the fundamental units of state and church administration, and was subdivided too: into hundreds and wapentakes, deaneries and parishes. The records of royal administration are plentiful: court rolls, tax returns, lists compiled by commissions of array which recruited to the king’s army, as well as accounts of the royal household and the returns by which sheriffs made themselves accountable to the Exchequer. Experiments in taxation resulted in some years in the imposition of a poll-tax, producing returns which listed payers by household in great detail, and which allow us to aim at approximate demographics, such as those with which this introduction began. Parliamentary rolls included petitions and the royal response to them, as well as records of treaties and diplomatic exchanges. To these can be added the thousands of cases from bishops’ courts, which survive in plenty from the late fourteenth century. These dealt with marriage, defamation, heresy, failure of oaths, and more, and provide some of the most vivid sources on the life of modest villagers and townsfolk. Since church courts allowed women to bring cases, they are a rich source for female voices, as these articulated (through the mediation of a court clerk, who often translated the testimony into Latin) the complaint, or provided opinion as a witness. All these sources reflect a vast range of political, economic and social activity and reveal the life experiences of subjects, often in their own words, recorded by a clerk, when they gave depositions to courts.
Most people lived on manors organized for production and social order under manorial customs, enforced by frequently held courts. Manorial court rolls and accounts of management of manors have provided in recent decades challenging material for an intimate encounter with the rhythms of work – day in and day out – which is the experience of most people at all times. Families and their tenancies – the land allotted to them for generations by their landlord, in return for payments in kind, coin and labour – are encountered in these parchment rolls, in the full array of behaviours and inclinations. There were lazy, headstrong, loyal and enterprising, rebellious and deferential serfs. Above all, they were vigilant and aware of opportunity and interest, as changing trends and events, sometimes far away, affected them and their dependants. We will encounter them in the records of manorial rolls at marriage and death, in conflict and when making a generous bequest to a son or daughter, when directed to mend a fence or pay a fine, or go to war. Occasionally lords commissioned comprehensive surveys of their lands – a local Domesday Book – and these described and often depicted the land and other important resources: fields, meadows, mills, ponds, forest.
Some rural folk chose to leave and go on the road, seeking work in another village or town, and as they moved they gained their freedom. So towns generate other types of sources: not so scrutinizing of daily labour, but alert to the regulation of quality, price and profit. In towns men were free to associate in craft groupings and they sometimes generated records which have survived, recording internal discipline, terms of apprenticeship, codes of practices of the guilds of goldsmiths, tailors, physicians, and others.
Most of our sources are thus the product of monitoring and even punitive institutions, and they are to be used by us with care, even cunning. Those who chose a religious vocation – in the relative seclusion of monasteries or in the engaged service of parishes, dioceses, universities and schools – often produced literatures of experience and guidance. Preserved in institutional or family libraries, much of their work has survived, despite the ravages of the Reformation and its aftermath. We are extremely well informed about religious services, the teaching to the laity, the more adventurous reaches of mystical life. Like many of the records of state, those of the church were also aimed at monitoring, correction and listing.
Social and political relations, as well as spiritual thoughts and yearnings, often inspired material expression or indeed marked a landscape. The Hollow Crown will bring together the insights gleaned from manorial records, from descriptions of fields and meadows, the teachings of the church with the stained glass and rood-screens that imparted them, the liturgy and its setting, the family and its home, women with their belongings – books, cooking utensils, clothes – kings and the poetry of complaint of disappointed subjects. It is hard to capture the sounds, or indeed the silences, of that world, but over two turbulent and testing centuries, the capacity of its people to change and think afresh will become abundantly clear.
Do not be surprised to find that the behaviour of the people whose lives make up this book resembles what you know about the behaviour of individuals and groups in your own lifetime. History loses none of its charm and importance when we admit the similarity of certain preoccupations and relations – with material security and achievement, with sociability, with family fortunes, the tension between generations, the camaraderie of work, travel and battle. Certain kinds of people or patterns of social behaviour may seem very familiar: the awkward effects of rapid social mobility, the sycophancy which power creates and maintains, the preoccupation of rulers with their image, the desperate double standard which prevails in judgement of male and female behaviours, the mixture of pomposity and public-spiritedness which characterizes civic leaders. What is most different about them is sometimes the most ineffable and elusive: smells and sounds, the shapes of nightmares. We can sometimes catch them in niches of our own contemporary world: when visiting a pilgrimage shrine in India or in Mexico, when passing through a market of fresh produce sold by the farmers who grew it in Sicily or Sri Lanka, when hearing the street cries of food vendors, when observing the rituals in the courts of monarchs and presidents. The historian’s craft is most importantly realized in guiding the reader through the recognition of the familiar and the shock of the different.
