A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  At least in part in response to the emergence of Parliament as an institutional framework for the display of privilege, by the 1350s the heads of about seventy families in England claimed the right to be individually summoned to Parliament, as earls, barons or bannerets. Such ‘lords’ increasingly insisted that they constituted an ‘estate’ with rights, for example to trial by their fellow peers. The peerage itself included the twenty-one English bishops and the fifty or so abbots attending Parliament, these lords ‘spiritual’ being ranged in Parliament on the King’s right-hand side, the lords ‘temporal’ on the left. Precedence disputes within this group, as to who should sit or dine first, were increasingly common. By 1405, the King’s council was required to pronounce on at least three such disputes, between the earls of Warwick and Norfolk, Kent and Arundel, and the lords Beaumont and Grey.

  As early as 1337 Edward III had appointed his eldest son ‘duke’ of Cornwall, introducing to an England previously only familiar with earls, a title perhaps intended to rival the chivalric trappings of France and the empire (and incidentally to distinguish between Edward’s son and a former and notorious figure, Piers Gaveston, himself a mere ‘earl’ of Cornwall). The first non-royal duke, Robert de Vere, duke of Ireland, was created in 1386. There were also promotions as marquess (in 1385) and viscount (in 1440), so that by the late 1440s there were five dukes, two marquesses, nine earls and two viscounts amongst the English peerage.

  At the same time, amongst the knighthood, sobriquets emerged to distinguish the full-blown ‘knight’ from the ‘esquire’ or the mere ‘gentleman’. From 1413, it became a statutory requirement for personal status to be specified in actions at law. There was as much social distinction amongst the pilgrims of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as there would be today in the royal enclosure at Ascot, and the rise in social dignity of a figure such as Chaucer’s Franklin, a one-time sheriff and MP, with his baked meats and his house that ‘snowed’ with food and drink, his diet changing to fit the seasons in accordance with the latest medical advice, straddling the line that divided the lowest grade of gentility from the yeoman farmer below, suggests a society constantly in flux, with merchants, lawyers and minor estate officials all struggling upwards towards social respectability, and with marriage to a rich widow (young heiresses being reserved, save in romantic fiction, for husbands of their own class) being the means by which to rise most quickly.

  Amongst that level of the ‘lower upper class’ where thinking and strategic snobbery cohabit most easily, a world of difference distinguished the gentleman with his hall, his communal dining arrangements and his retinue of servants (a bare minimum of twenty-four, however decrepit or ill-dressed, for the ‘greater knighthood, according to the Liber Niger of 1471) from the mere yeoman farmer, even though the yeoman might command a far higher annual income and be in the process of buying up what remained of the gentleman’s estate. From the fifteenth-century gentry to the world of Jane Austen can seem only a minor imaginative leap, if we swap armour for top boots and allow for a rather less blunt approach to bodily functions. As if to symbolize this continuity, in hundreds of the parish churches of England, the effigies of fourteenth-century knights rub shoulders with the urns and monuments raised to their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century successors. Yet the squirearchy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would itself have found equivalents in the eleventh or twelfth centuries if only we possessed the sources and the sensitivity to probe such continuity. The interests of this ‘gentry’ class – horses, hunting, games of hazard, command of troops, food and drink, competition with those higher up the pecking order and contempt for those beneath, not least via the deliberate and competitive display of houses and furnishings, almsgiving and charity – have remained constants in English as of human society from the Anglo-Saxons through to very recent times. From the audience of Beowulf or the Chanson de Roland to the modern readership of Country Life or the novels of Jilly Cooper there stretch connections rather stronger than might be supposed.

  Without for a moment imaging that the social structures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were any more ‘complicated’ or ‘sophisticated’ than the phenomenally rich social fabric of the tenth or the eleventh centuries, it is nonetheless clear, not least as the result of the survival of far more records and documentary evidence, that late medieval society was subject to evolution and change. New and greater fears were articulated against the danger that one class, the aristocracy, might seize power that historically was supposed to be vested in a king working for the common interest of all. There was a diversification of titles and marks of social distinction, last witnessed in the twelfth century, that itself suggests a society in which claims to privilege and deference were being staked with greater vehemence, perhaps precisely because such privilege was coming increasingly under attack. The aristocracy remained a privileged kleptocracy, collecting land, money and the loyalty of men as and where the opportunity arose. But those immediately below the aristocracy – the gentry and knighthood – had acquired a new voice, complaining that the aristocracy were abusing their position to gain undue influence within the localities and to place a stranglehold of ‘magnate’ influence over English provincial society.

  Even here, however, we must beware exaggerating the extent of change. Local government, and the failure of the king and his court to bring good lordship to provincial society already lay behind a lot of the political manifestoes of the thirteenth century, not least behind the baronial ‘reform’ movement of the 1260s, led by an aristocracy which claimed a controlling interest within the King’s affairs precisely because it was capable of articulating the complaints and concerns of the knights and those lower down the social scale. By the 1320s, this aristocratic monopoly over politics, if not broken, had been openly called into question. The Modus Tenendi Parliamentum, composed as protest against the regime of Edward II, suggested that the lower clergy and the communal representatives of the shires should rank above the baronage and aristocracy in Parliamentary proceedings. As yet this was an aspiration rather than a reality. The Modus itself was composed within the circle of Thomas of Lancaster, to bolster rather than to undermine Thomas’ own highly aristocratic cause. Nonetheless, aristocratic privilege was increasingly called into question by a ‘gentry’ class unconvinced that aristocratic self-interest and the good order of society were compatible goals.

  At the same time, the aristocracy was itself challenged not just from below but from above. A great magnate such as Thomas of Lancaster in the north Midlands or Hugh Despenser in the West Country, remained very much a power to himself, able to pack juries and to subvert the King’s writ more or less whenever it suited. Yet the lure of the court, and the riches that royal patronage alone could confer, the very fact that, for all his financial difficulties, it was the king who remained sovereign, not merely first amongst equals, with far more wealth and patronage at his disposal than any other magnate, ensured that even the richest of the rich and the most powerful of the local super-magnates continued to focus their attention upon the court and upon the national as opposed to the purely local political scene. There thus developed a significant divide between centre, focussed upon the pursuit of favour and glory at the king’s court, and locality, with its essentially provincial concerns.

  Ties between the gentry and the court, between periphery and centre, were in theory strengthened by attempts to ensure gentry participation in local government: the emergence of the office of magistrate, associated with the enforcement of royal legislation such as the Statute of Labourers (1351) intended to control wages, or local inquests into crime or public works, against ‘trailbastons’ or armed gangs, via special commissions ‘to hear and complete’ (‘oyer et terminer’). In practice, there was nothing especially novel about such measures. The participation in government of local knights as jurymen and coroners had been a central feature of the legal reforms of the twelfth century, and had been stressed again in Edward I’s legislation of the 1280s, comma
nding the appointment of two constables within each hundred of the shire, to ensure that the locality maintained a proper watch against wrongdoers. As long ago as 1181, Henry II’s Assize of Arms, itself merely reiterating Anglo-Saxon, pre-Conquest traditions of defence and watch, had required all freemen with property worth £7 (which would have included the upper levels of the yeomanry, not merely the knights) and all burgesses living within towns to equip themselves with a bare minimum of weaponry – mail coat, iron helmet, spear. Such requirements were regularly repeated thereafter, albeit with archery practice now replacing the skills of the spearman.

  Law and disorder

  This was a society organized not merely for war but for self-defence, in which the carrying or ownership of lethal weapons was a legal obligation rather than a controversial privilege. Despite the insistence after 1285 that local constables be appointed, and despite Edward III’s use of sergeants-at-arms as enforcers of his authority within the counties, there was still nothing remotely like a professional police force to maintain law and order. Nor was lawlessness a new development of the fifteenth century. As early as the 1230s, the pass of Alton in Hampshire had been a notorious haunt of criminal gangs preying upon the trade passing between London, Winchester and the Channel ports. They were still there in the 1260s when they were joined by Adam Gurdun, a local forester and landowner who had sided with Simon de Montfort against the King and thereafter turned outlaw. Gurdun’s hideout was stormed by the future King Edward I, with later accounts claiming not only that Edward had met Gurdun in single combat, but that Gurdun’s bravery won him Edward’s respect and friendship. The story itself is myth (Gurdun was in fact imprisoned and released only after the payment of a stiff ransom), but a myth suggestive of the ambiguous reaction that outlaws could inspire. On the one hand they were a menace to public order. On the other they appeared to cock a snook at laws and law-makers judged harsh and unreasonable.

  Criminality had been rife even in the reign of a ‘strong’ king such as Edward I. Over a five-day period in May 1303, a criminal gang headed by Richard Pudlicott had broken into the vaults under the royal palace at Westminster and made off with treasure initially valued at £100,000 (approaching £1 billion in modern values). The abbot of Westminster and forty-eight of his monks were imprisoned in the Tower of London on suspicion of being accessories to the crime and, although they were subsequently released and Pudlicott himself was hung, this was perhaps the most daring robbery of any king until 1671 when Captain Thomas Blood managed, albeit only for a few minutes, to take possession of the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London, crushing the crown inside his cloak and stuffing the orb into the breeches of an accomplice.

  Other more successful gangs flourished in the fourteenth century. One at Ashby Folville in Leicestershire, for example, was led by the local lord, Eustace de Folville, responsible in 1326 for robbing and murdering one of the barons of the King’s Exchequer and six years later for the kidnap and ransom of a notoriously corrupt royal justice. Another was the associated gang led by James Coterel, a Derbyshire knight involved in murder, kidnapping and extortion throughout the Peak District, yet, despite the outlawry of his associates and his own attachment for murder in 1331, he was sufficiently well-protected to die officially pardoned in 1351. As late as the 1370s, Langland’s Piers Plowman, was insisting that ‘Folville’s laws’ might be the only means by which the poor could recover those things wrongfully plundered from them by the rich.

  In the meantime, the establishment of the office of magistrate and the measures taken to involve local lords and knights in the enforcement of law and order merely entrenched oligarchic interests, ensuring that, at a local level, within each region of a twenty-mile radius, political society was dominated by the half a dozen or so gentry families capable of imposing deference and obedience upon their inferiors. Such gentry families might themselves owe allegiance to whichever aristocratic affinity held sway in that particular region or county.

  Religion

  Across England, meanwhile, in thousands of parish churches the gentry advertised their own status and privilege through the building of elaborate tombs for their ancestors, and the establishment of chantry chapels to pray without cease that the souls of such ancestors might be released from purgatory into the eternal rejoicing of heaven. At least 900 such chantries were established in the fifty years to 1350, and a further 660 in the fifty years afterwards. Cheaper than the foundation of a monastery, chantries both emphasized the Church’s monopoly over the rituals and industry of death and helped to establish private spaces within what in theory was the most ‘public’ building of each village community, creating walled-off and physically segregated symbols of gentry or aristocratic privilege. Like today’s stretch limo or heavily built bodyguards, they served as very public advertisements of the desire and ability of the rich to use privacy as a means of achieving exclusivity.

  Added to the sense that society was controlled by powerful interests not necessarily devoted to the common good, warfare itself had begun to warp the social fabric. New defences, thicker and more effective town walls, the rash of castles scattered across the landscape, the fact that from the 1280s the kings of England were no longer merely at war within or on the fringes of their own realm but carrying a campaign of outright conquest, first to Wales, then to Scotland and ultimately to France, all of this ensured that war became prolonged and a great deal costlier.

  The effect here, above all after Edward I’s failure to subdue the Scots, was to instil viciousness and a mentality of revenge amongst the English political elite, whilst at the same time levelling the playing field between King and aristocracy. Where Henry II took a mere eighteen months to suppress rebellion in the 1170s, Edward II struggled for most of his twenty-year reign to establish his own authority over that of his earls. Where William the Conqueror had the resources to engage in near-permanent probing of the Norman frontier with Maine or Brittany, Edward III had to resort to extraordinary measures, and in particular to prolonged negotiations with Parliament and the wool merchants to finance his own far more extensive military operations in France. As a result of their obeisance to the cult of chivalry, itself an organized hypocrisy in which outward splendour and civility masked a reality that was violent and squalid, after 1340, like two rams in the same field, the kings of England and France were obliged, in the name of honour, to pursue aggression to the point of mutual exhaustion or death. At the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, according to the chronicler Geoffrey Baker, men

  trampled in their own guts whilst others spat out their teeth…The blood of serfs and princes ran down in one stream to stain the nearby river purple, and with this delicate nectar to frighten the fish.

  Chivalry itself was called into question, not merely because of the increasing costs or futility of war, but because new technology threatened to render knighthood itself an obsolete phenomenon.

  Technological advances in warfare and professional armies

  The great wonder weapon of the twelfth-century, the crossbow, was now outclassed by the English longbow, with its superior range and firing rate. The Italian crossbowmen who fought for the French at Crécy, their weapons already damaged in a thunderstorm, deprived of the coverings of hide (or ‘pavisses’) behind which they would normally have sheltered between volleys, were simply cut to pieces by the English archers. But at Crécy too there appeared another weapon, cannon fired with gunpowder, itself an import from China and the Far East. To begin with, these cannon created more noise than destruction. In the longer term, as the technical capacities of cannon improved, no manner of horse or knightly armour could withstand their effects. By the 1430s, hand-held firearms or ‘culverins’ had joined the armoury of the Hundred Years War, and were already only half as expensive as the larger steel crossbows with their costly cranking mechanisms. John Payntour, an esquire killed by a culverin shot at La Réole in 1442 was perhaps the first Englishman shot dead with a handgun. Already, four years earlier, cannon had claimed their first roy
al victim when Don Pedro, brother of the King of Castile, was decapitated during the siege of Capuana near Naples. With warfare an increasingly brutal and deadly business and with new technology rendering old methods absurdly ineffective, it has been suggested that even the ‘very perfect gentle knight’ of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was intended as satire: the battles in which Chaucer lists his particular knight as having engaged included some of the more notorious of fourteenth-century massacres. The age-old certainties of muscle, iron and horse-flesh inherited from the Roman and classical past were being consigned to redundancy. The five centuries from Crécy in the 1340s to the Crimea in the 1850s marked the slow but inevitable death agony of the principles of aristocratic leadership in war.

  New professional armies required new professional means of recruitment. The King’s armies were no longer raised on the basis of feudal service, of knights’ fees owed to a ‘feudal’ lord, but became fully monetarized and professionalized, even amongst the cavalry where the old ‘feudal’ levies were now replaced with knights serving for wages rather than personal obligation to their lords. With this came the introduction of indentures, a new instrument, in essence a two-part contract, one half kept by the recruiter, the other by the recruited, by which the captains of an army or greater lords raised retinues of knights or sergeants serving for a fixed number of months or years for fixed financial reward, in the ultimate extreme, in peace or war and for an entire lifetime of service. ‘Feudalism’ itself became a redundant concept, at best a shadowy series of tax obligations that themselves now spoke of an increasingly monetarized economy.