A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  This was not yet a world of individualists, cut loose from the interconnected obligations of feudal society, but it was a world in which, suddenly, self-help seemed not just desirable but urgent. And this was as true for the structures of belief as it was for the structures of social power. Despite all the prayers and processions and penances, it seemed that God’s wrath was not yet assuaged by gestures of tearful contrition, for the plague came back in 1361 (and after that in twenty- to twenty-five-year cycles), taking not a half but certainly a quarter of an already shrunken population. From the beginning, a disproportionate number of its victims had been priests, whose obligations to minister to the sick and dying had put them in the front line of the epidemic. The decision in 1349 that the last rites could be received from the laity when there were no priests around to do the job, although strictly temporary, must already have made inroads into the clergy’s absolute monopoly on the sacraments, and it may well have encouraged those who were understandably fearful of being struck down to prepare themselves as best they could against the day when they might be struck down in their prime. Increasingly, salvation seemed a do-it-yourself project. For some of the boldest, this sense of having been left bereft by the institutional Church led them dangerously (or excitingly) close to heresy. The Oxford scholar John Wyclif taught that the priesthood was not indispensable for salvation and that, in the words of scripture, each Christian might find the true way. His gospel ‘mumblers’ or Lollards were initially saved from formal charges of heresy only because Wyclif himself had powerful protectors, especially Edward Ill’s third son, John of Gaunt, whose enthusiasm for Lollardy was passed on to a small but influential group of knights.

  For less audacious souls, however, it was possible to pursue the personal road to salvation in ways that were sanctioned, rather than proscribed, by the Church. For the humble this might be a pilgrimage to the shrine of a saint like Becket, whose intercession might be implored for the sins of the pilgrim. But those who had the means could take out an insurance policy against being struck down by King Death without having had adequate time to prepare themselves to be properly commended to God’s mercy. This was a chantry. It was based on the idea, widespread for the first time after the Black Death, that, pending final judgement, souls did time in the stony limbo of Purgatory where they atoned for their transgressions. The chantry was a sum of money, which was given in advance of one’s death either to establish a special chapel or simply to designated clergy to chant masses for the soul. So much money would pay for so many monk-hours of chanting, and the time spent in Purgatory would shorten accordingly. If in doubt, give big was the rule – the conspicuously pious Henry V, for example, left enough money for 20,000 masses to be said within a year for his soul and another 5000 for the Joys of Mary!

  Even as they shelled out in advance for a reserved space in heaven, the mighty and the moneyed were acutely aware that King Death was apt to laugh at the pretensions of rank. The years of the Black Death saw the popularity of the story of the Three Living and the Three Dead, in which a trio of handsome young kings out for a day’s sport are abruptly confronted by three cadavers, each in a different state of decomposition. The three living pipe up, in turn, ‘I am afraid’, ‘Lo, what I see’ and ‘Methinks these devils be’. Back come the other three, ‘Such you shall be’, ‘I was well fair’ and ‘For God’s love beware’. The furthest gone of the gruesome threesome continues with a little homily:

  Know that I was head of my line

  Princes, kings and nobles

  Royal and rich, rejoicing in wealth

  But now I am so hideous and bare

  that even the worms disdain me.

  This was one invasion that Edward Ill’s realm had not prepared for: the invasion of the space of the living by the dead. There was a chilling sense, peculiar to the world of the Black Death, that the borders between backyards and boneyards had collapsed and that perhaps one might not, after all, as the skeletons warned, be able to buy one’s way to salvation. Tomb effigies that proclaimed (as in the case of Christ) a triumph over death were, perhaps, premature. So another kind of tomb that positively revelled in the idea of death as the great leveller became fashionable in Europe in the late fourteenth century. It was called a ‘transi’ tomb (literally, and appropriately, meaning ‘gone off’), and it was meant to advertise the tomb-dweller’s redeeming awareness of his own reduction to a heap of dust and maggots. The most elaborate of the ‘transi’ tombs were double-decker affairs, designed to contrast, as shockingly as possible, the way we might like to imagine ourselves remembered with the way we really are after death. The top deck would display the deceased in the splendour of his bishop’s robes, but beneath the grandeur would lie the truth, a pathetic cadaver, carved to show the flesh eaten away and the skeleton brittle and frail. The ‘transis’ were meant to provoke those who saw them not only to timely penance but also to offer prayers for the soul of the departed. Archbishop Henry Chichele, who designed the first ‘transi’ tomb in England for himself, made sure it was finished and consecrated in 1425 (twenty years before he actually died), so he got to show it off to admiring visitors to Canterbury. ‘I was pauper born,’ reads the inscription, ‘then to Primate raised, now I am cut down and served up for worms . . . behold my grave whoever you may be, who will pass by, you who will be like me, after you die, horrible in all things, dust, worms, vile flesh.’ And just in case the ‘transi’ didn’t do the trick, Chichele founded All Souls College as an academic chantry where the Fellows were obliged to pray for the founder’s soul and to keep the tomb painted and spick and span. They still do.

  The fervent insistence on the equality of death did not, of course, prevent some of those tombs from being more equal than others. The tomb of the Black Prince, who died – to great and general sorrow – in 1376 at the age of forty-six, has the usual cautionary inscription warning admirers: ‘Such as thou art, so once was I/As I am now, so thou wilt be.’ But the sombre modesty of the sentiment is somewhat belied by the prince’s having commissioned the tomb from his architect Henry Yevele and ordering that it be carved from the finest Purbeck marble, with ‘our leopard helm placed beneath the head’, a painted wooden canopy or tester above him, with a picture of the Holy Trinity as if receiving him into paradise, and a complete set of fake armour, including gauntlets and shield, so that the prince could embark on his last campaign: the march out of Purgatory.

  The death of the Black Prince, ‘the comfort of England’, whose martial fame represented the continuity of the Plantagenet warrior state, cast a long shadow over a political landscape that, through all the social and religious disruption triggered by the Black Death, had remained remarkably stable. Learning from the mistakes of his predecessors (and his own errors, earlier in the reign), Edward III made sure to co-opt the ‘community of the realm’ represented in parliament as a partner in the spectacular expansion of the dynamic, multi-national empire that was Plantagenet Inc. Just as rural England had adjusted to the changing realities of the land and labour market by making property and money, rather than birth, the determinant of status, so the military enterprise of the realm had also become a matter of business rather than honour. The king and his great nobles no longer seriously expected their tenants-in-chief to supply them with soldiers as a matter of pure feudal obligation. Instead, mobilization of knights, foot soldiers, archers and siege machinery was put on a contractual basis, with a tariff specified for the different kinds of military personnel (two pence a day for a foot soldier), animals and hardware and for a specific period of time. Theoretically, such sums might be payable in advance, which meant that the king might have to go to parliament to ask for a ‘subsidy’ (for which read tax) or levy a sum on the wool trade or go to the Italians again. But often enough the campaigns were se If-financing, with built-in bonus-incentives for success, since the aristocratic captains knew that in the event of victory they would be able to lay their hands not only on plunder but on the immense sums needed to ransom their prisoner
s. Even after the Crown took its hefty 33⅓ per cent cut from the proceeds, there was still ample to go round, as the great fortunes left by Edward’s principal commanders testify. The Earl of Arundel, for example, who fought both at Sluys and Crécy, left £60,000, most of it gained from the fortunes of war. And one of the founder members of the Order of the Garter, Sir Bartholomew Burghersh, got £6000 from the king for handing over his prisoner, the Count of Ventadour. Many of the great Edwardian castles – both redoubtable moated fortresses and architectural works of art, such as Bodiam in Sussex, which was built by Sir Edward Dalyngrygge – were entirely funded from military enterprise.

  The Black Prince, vigorous, intelligent and charismatic, was the symbol of this happy state of affairs, give or take a few million bodies in the ossuary. Even before he joined them, though, there was a creeping sense among the stakeholders of Plantagenet Enterprises that their years of unlimited expansion might be coming to an end along with the life of the chief executive. Edward I’s French conquests had been reversed by a resurgent French monarchy. Attempts to take money for new campaigns by taxing the wool and wine trades – already badly hit by a new outbreak of the plague in 1374–5 – were not well received in the country. The king himself was old and ailing and generally thought to be the captive of his mistress, Alice Perrers. His only option was to go to parliament and ask for, rather than demand, the necessary funds. This Edward hated to do and, as it turned out, with good reason. For parliament was in a feisty temper, as it often was when the monarchy failed to deliver uninterrupted good fortune. What made the Good Parliament of 1376 (as it called itself) different from earlier challenges to the Crown was the assertiveness of the Commons. Instead of the usual cap-doffing gathering, for the first time the knights and burgesses elected a Speaker, Peter de la Mare, who presided over what we would recognize as a genuine debate. Even the seating arrangements suggested something other than passive obedience. Instead of forward-facing ranks, seats were set around four sides of a lectern – in effect, a primitive dispatch box – and, one after another, members came to this lectern and delivered unsparing attacks on the chosen councillors of the king. Alice Perrers, her husband, William Windsor, and the London merchant Richard Lyons, who dominated the court, were, they said, neither ‘loyal nor profitable to the kingdom’. The Commons also let it be known in no uncertain terms that henceforth they expected the king to ‘live off his own’ – that is, that he should trim his ambitions and expenses to his revenues. John of Gaunt was outraged by this insolence but was forced to accept an inquiry into the conduct of the government and the impeachment of the most heavily criticized councillors as the price of securing revenue. The parliamentary purge was duly carried out, but in the end, on 10 July, parliament had the temerity to decline the government’s request for funds!

  By the time that a new parliament convened early in 1377, the Black Prince, who had let it be known that he endorsed the reform programme, was dead and the king’s own days looked numbered. The de facto regent in waiting, John of Gaunt, exploited the sense of national crisis and persuaded or bullied parliament into co-operation, and it obliged by undoing much of the reforming programme of its predecessor. But for the moment, the great engine of English ceremonial suspended politics. Edward III died of a stroke in June, the mark of the paralysis faithfully depicted on his tomb effigy. His body, carried on a bier by twenty-four knights dressed in black and walking to a slow march, was the last great Arthurian show of the Plantagenets. ‘To witness and hear the grief of the people; their sobs and lamentations on that day, would have rent anyone’s heart,’ wrote the chronicler Froissart.

  Edward’s successor was a child of ten, Richard of Bordeaux. Although the poet William Langland warned ‘woe to the land that has a boy for a king’, Richard II’s accession was greeted with jubilant expectation rather than apprehension. England needed a saviour, even if he was ten years old. The last wave of plague in 1375 had made it certain that the Black Death had not gone away, and the country’s sense of imperial invincibility had been abruptly thrown into reverse by the losses in France. Now it was less a matter of taking the war across the Channel than in preventing the French from landing at Dover. The passing of the Black Prince had robbed England of its expected captain, so Richard’s coronation became an occasion for a demonstration of faith in the future realm. After all, there had been no coronation in England for fifty years. Knights of the shire rode in from all over the country to be present at the spectacle. The conduits in Cheapside ran with Gascon wine, and a fake castle was built at the western end of the city, from which white-robed virgins threw golden scrolls at the yellow-haired boy as his procession passed by.

  As soon as it had been apparent that his father was dying, the emotional investment in the Black Prince had been transferred to his son. He, not his father, would usher in the reign of gold. His guardian and uncle, John of Gaunt, and his other uncles, Gloucester and York, had been preparing the boy for the weight of all these expectations. On 25 January 1377 they had orchestrated a great entertainment at the west end of the city, near Gaunt’s great palace at the Savoy, and 130 masked mummers paraded through the streets as emperors and popes for the public to hiss at. At dusk torches were lit and the villains met their match: John of Gaunt and his brothers, and little Richard, richly dressed for the fantasy that, in his case, was going to be real. Up came the chief mummer, grinning, and gave the boy a set of dice. They were loaded. He threw, he won, and his arms were heaped with golden prizes.

  In Westminster Abbey for his coronation the overture to the golden age continued. Richard had his shirt taken off him behind a golden screen, and his face, hands and chest were touched with holy oil. Perhaps as they listened to his little voice replying that he would, indeed, protect the Church, do justice to his people and respect the laws and customs of his ancestors, the assembly of nobles and clergy imagined that Richard would grow to fill the throne of his great-great-grandfather, Edward I, and the legs, now dangling over the Scottish Stone of Destiny lodged beneath its seat, would before long touch the ground and the boy would stand upright as a man. For now, though, while the bells tolled, he had to be carried from the abbey, and as he was borne along, one of his slippers came loose and fell off. But only the most nervous could have worried that this might be an ill omen. He was, after all, only ten.

  How was the child marked by all this and by the public deaths of his grandfather and father? Did he later recall the moment of his anointing as an apotheosis, his transformation from a little man to a little god? If early on Richard somehow became so accustomed to all the ceremonies and solemnities that he mistook himself for a junior messiah, perhaps this was just as well, since only someone with that inbred self-confidence could have managed to face down, at the tender age of fourteen, the most violent upheaval in the history of medieval England.

  It happened with terrifying swiftness, and it began in the corner of England one would least expect a rural uprising to explode – not in some destitute mud hole in the back of beyond, but in the most economically developed region of England, the belt of fertile country stretching from Kent over the Medway and Thames into Essex and East Anglia. The ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ of 1381 was, in fact, conspicuous for the absence of peasants. From the arrest records we know that most of the leaders in the southeastern counties were actually yeomen, the village elite, who served as reeves, constables, ale-tasters and jurors; the men who ran manorial courts and saw to the military musters. The beneficiaries, not the victims, of the crisis of the Black Death, these were the men who had moved into lots vacated by the plague-dead, who had driven hard bargains with their lords to contract for lower rents and had done well. Some of them, like Sir Roger Bacon of Norfolk, were knights. The Good Parliament of 1376 had been, they imagined, their cause. They had cheered the Commons when it clung to the nation’s purse strings and rejoiced when the court favourites had been sent packing. Now that John of Gaunt seemed to be running the country, they were damned if they were going to stand
idly by while they were robbed of their little fortunes to line the pockets of his hangers-on, including Joan of Kent, the Black Prince’s widow, or the treasurer, Sir Robert Hales. Listening attentively to these angry village notables were their natural constituents, the blacksmiths, alewives, fullers, sawyers and carters – the sort of people, in fact, who knew everyone’s business, had a bit of money and sometimes even a smattering of book learning. Their trades put them in touch with worlds beyond their parish, and they knew how to make an army out of those one rung down on the social ladder, the families barely above the poverty line, who had had to sell their labour to make ends meet and whose efforts to profit from the labour shortage of the Black Death had been stymied in 1351 by the Statute of Labourers, which had pegged wages at pre-Black Death levels. Even though the statute had proved of limited effect in a sellers’ labour market, the memory of it rankled.

  In their different ways, all these sections of the rural community thought of themselves as up and coming. Not surprisingly, it was in the second half of the fourteenth century that the legends of Robin Hood, with its message of injustices put right by a fellowship of equals under the leadership of a ‘true’ royalist, first became genuinely popular.

  The immediate provocation for the revolt was, naturally, a new tax, the poll tax of 1380, the pretext for which was the defence of the realm against another threatened French invasion. But John of Gaunt’s government made the serious mistake of imposing a tax that, for the first time, took no account of wealth and was levied at the flat rate of three groats (a shilling a head) per household. The response was predictable: fury and mass evasion, as entire families, sometimes entire villages, disappeared on to the roads or into the woods, where temporary encampments of tax-fugitives established themselves while they waited for the levy-men to go away. The usual corrective, of course, was to beef up the enforcers and collectors and to recruit local sergeants-at-arms, who knew the alehouses where they could winkle out the frauds and the runaways. But it was those men who went down to the woods who were in for a really big surprise.