A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  As a halfway house between feudalism and capitalism, historians of a Marxist tendency have striven to imagine a society of ‘bastard feudalism’, introduced from the 1280s onwards, in which chivalry and knighthood rubbed shoulders uneasily with mercenary warfare and the cash nexus. Like a lot of Marxist imaginings, this one too has proved a chimera. Money had always been fundamental to the feudal contract: there were mercenaries in the army of William the Conqueror, and in the twelfth century probably more knights served the King for cash than were ever rewarded with land. William Marshal, himself the embodiment of the feudal ideal, complained vociferously in the 1180s that his wages were insufficient, and was supported in his conquests in Leinster and on the battlefield of Lincoln by a military following (fifteenth-century historians, using a new term for an old concept, would call it an ‘affinity’ or ‘retinue’) only a couple of dozen of whom were recruited because they held land from the Marshal estates, most of them serving for hard cash and in effect for life, not just as knights but as administrators, counsellors and friends in all of the later functions that are attributed to the affinities of ‘bastard feudalism’.

  In the thirteenth century, it is true, grants of land were increasingly restricted and policed, in part because of the fear that knights rewarded with land, like other servants granted land rather than money, became possessed of the means of freeing themselves from the very obligations of service which such land was intended to reward. The tendency was towards contracts for shorter terms and for pay or other material rewards, away from grants of land in theory made in perpetuity to bind not just the grantees but their heirs and successors. Nonetheless, warfare, or at least the claim to command men in battle, remained both an obligation and a badge of pride amongst the upper classes. Chaucer’s knight may have been intended as a figure of satire, or perhaps merely as a gentle mockery of the crusading warrior in an age of failed crusades. In either case, he continues to rank at the very head of Chaucer’s band of pilgrims. Amongst the ‘rising’ families of the fifteenth century, knighthood remained an essential first step on the social ladder upwards.

  Snakes and ladders: social mobility

  A very few examples must suffice. William de la Pole began his career after 1310 as a wine merchant of entirely unknown parentage, trading out of Hull. At a time when the royal household was consuming the annual equivalent of 600,000 bottles of wine, for the most part imported from Gascony, through Bordeaux, William’s connection with the court wine trade led to his rise within the government of Hull, then at court as chief butler from 1327. A wealthy man at a court starved of credit, William began to advance loans to the crown, at high rates of interest. This in turn encouraged other merchants, in both wool and wine, to channel their own lending activities via the de la Pole firm, so that by the 1350s William was in effect acting as chief middle man between the English mercantile community and the crown, lending sums of over £100,000 in the opening years of the war with France. Through dealings that were distinctly shady, and despite two attempts by Edward III to rein in his profiteering under the threat of impeachment, William became an indispensable agent of crown finance. His brother was knighted in 1340, and William himself was summoned as a baronet to Parliament in 1339. Having wriggled free from charges of forgery and embezzlement that might have made a Robert Maxwell blush, and having bought up a great collection of manors, especially associated with the wool trade of the North Riding of Yorkshire, he lived just long enough to see his son, Michael de la Pole, summoned as a peer to the Parliament of 1366.

  Michael de la Pole, knighted in 1353, married a Suffolk heiress and, via the affinity of Edward III’s son John of Gaunt Duke of Lancaster, entered the service of Richard II, assisting in the negotiation of the King’s marriage. Chancellor in 1383, created Earl of Suffolk two years later, he was impeached on charges of mishandling public funds and eventually forced to flee abroad, attempting to enter Calais with his head and beard shaved, disguised as a Flemish poulterer with a basket of capons under one arm. He died in Paris in 1389, but his lands and his earldom were restored to his eldest son, Michael, the second earl who, perhaps not surprisingly, kept out of the orbit of the court, concentrating instead upon the creation of a regional power network based around Hull and his father’s estate at Wingfield in Suffolk, where a moated castle and a chantry college were built as symbols of family power. The second earl died of dysentery during the siege of Harfleur in 1415, followed shortly by his eldest son, another Michael, who was killed fighting at Agincourt. The earldom thus passed to a younger son, William de la Pole, admitted as a Knight of the Garter in 1421 (the Nobel prize of late-medieval social climbing) and in 1448 created first Duke of Suffolk, amongst the greatest and most controversial figures in the politics of Henry VI’s reign, eventually beheaded in 1450. By a marriage between the first duke’s son and a sister of the Duke of York, the de la Poles were brought, in six generations and only 160 years from the obscurity of a wine merchant’s business, to within grasping distance of the crown. John de la Pole, grandson of the first duke, was recognized in the 1480s, informally, as heir to King Richard III. If King Richard had not been killed at the Battle of Bosworth, it is at least conceivable that the great-great-grandson of a Hull wine merchant might have ascended the English throne.

  The de la Poles were the most spectacularly successful of all the nouveaux-riches of late medieval England. Nonetheless, albeit on a more modest scale, there were plenty of other families that could claim to have risen from invisibility to riches within only two or three generations. Like the de la Poles at Wingfield, Sir Edward Dallyngrigge, scion of a minor dynasty of knights from Dalling Ridge, near East Grinstead, sank the profits of his service in the French wars into a moated manor house that had come to him by marriage to a local widow. There, at Bodiam in Sussex in the 1380s, he built one of the greatest fairytale castles in England, complete with moat and drawbridge, with all of the requisite battlements and turrets. Ostensibly, Bodiam was intended to assist the county’s defence against the threat of a French invasion. In reality, it lay more than ten miles inland, a mere shell with no keep and little prospect of defence in wartime. This was knighthood and chivalry displayed after the manner of Walt Disney, still as gorgeous and as utterly impractical today as it must have seemed to Sir Edward Dallyngrigge’s successor who, in 1641, at the height of the English Civil War, preferred to sell the castle as building stone rather than take any steps for its fortification.

  On the opposite side of the Kentish Weald to Bodiam, John Pulteney, of obscure Leicestershire parentage, rose via the trade in wine and wool to become one of the King’s principal suppliers of the equipment of war. Knighted in 1337, mayor of London on four occasions during the same decade, he built a manor house at Penshurst, whose great hall still forms the nucleus of Penshurst Place, later home to Sir Philip Sidney, the author in 1580 of the Arcadia, one of the greatest celebrations of English pastoral, in which the fluting of shepherds and shepherdesses mingles with the clash of knights in tournament. Much that is most beautiful and apparently timeless in the English countryside is in fact the creation of men like Pulteney, tied to the counting house: profiteers, arms dealers and worse. A contemporary of John Pulteney, from a family that had imported wine via Ipswich, had established himself by the 1330s as a vintner or wine seller in Thames Street, in London’s Vintry ward. His name was John Chaucer, and his son, Geoffrey, was destined to become a poet even more famous than Sir Philip Sidney.

  Pulteney himself died during the Black Death of 1349. At about the same time, in Gloucestershire, the wife of William Whittington of Pauntley gave birth to a third son, christened Richard who took to the mercer’s trade, dealing in silk, linen and luxury small goods. By the 1380s, Richard was one of the principal suppliers to the royal court, with an annual turnover of more than £1,000 and with the wealth and contacts, like William de la Pole before him, to begin advancing loans to courtiers and ultimately to the King. Like John Pulteney in the 1330s, Richard Whittington rose to be
come three-times mayor of London, ducking and weaving his way around the political turmoil of the 1390s. Having no children, Whittington became one of the greatest sponsors of the charities of fifteenth-century London, transforming the church St Michael Paternoster into a college and almshouse. He also contributed to the building of libraries at Greyfriars and Guildhall, to the costs of installing fountains in the City (by this stage already a place of piped water, with strict regulations against the pollution of what remained of the city’s rivers by such noxious trades as tanning or butchery), and at St Martin Vintry to the construction of a longhouse combining a public lavatory and almshouse, which today might be accounted a rather peculiar arrangement, but which once again was intended to reduce the health hazards associated with a teaming and still expanding urban population.

  With almost Victorian foresight, Whittington’s philanthropy neglected neither books nor sewage. Again, like the Victorians, he liked to see a prison decently kept. Newgate Gaol was rebuilt with part of the £7,000 that he bequeathed by his will.

  Bells, bullets and cannons

  Whether or not he owned a cat, and although his social origins were rather grander than the pantomime legend allows, the real Dick Whittington undoubtedly spent a large part of his life within earshot of the bells of St-Mary-le-Bow off Cheapside, the glorious thunder of brass bells being yet another of those means by which the late medieval Church sought to advertise its services and its authority. The oldest certainly dated church bell in England, from 1254, is preserved at Lissett near Bridlington, although the bell at St Botolph at Hardham in Sussex perhaps dates from only a few years after the Norman Conquest. The London bell-maker, Richard of Wimbish, at work in the reign of Edward II, and whose products would have sounded out across the city of Richard Whittington, was so well regarded that at least seven of his bells still survive to be rung today in parish churches from Devon to Kent and from Oxfordshire to Suffolk. We know this because, like some glass-painters and a few of the more exceptional masons and skilled artisans, Wimbish ‘signed’ his work. From the ranks of anonymous labour, the artist had been born.

  It was the technical skills of English bell-makers, with their ability to cast large quantities of bronze, that lay behind subsequent improvement to the cannon employed by English armies in the Hundred Years War. These new heavy bells had to be hung in a wooden ‘belfry’, itself a word first employed in English in the thirteenth century, derived from the French ‘berfroi’, a moveable wooden siege tower. The Chinese had invented gunpowder, but it was left to European bell-makers to combine the skills of the chemist with those of the metalworker and in the process almost literally to sound the death knoll of medieval knighthood. The ‘brasses’ with which fourteenth- and fifteenth-century gentry families chose to memorialize themselves in the parish churches of England were yet another by-product of the ascendancy of English metalwork.

  The Pastons

  The De la Poles, John Pulteney, Richard Whittington, even Richard of Wimbish the bell-maker, all grew wealthy through trade. The professions were another means by which men might rise. The Paston family, ultimately (from the 1670s) earls of Yarmouth, first emerges into the light of day in the opening decades of the fifteenth century, when William, son and heir to Clement Paston, a ‘good plain husbondman’ of Paston in Norfolk, obtained education at the local grammar school and then at the London Inns of Court, in effect England’s third university after Oxford and Cambridge. A successful career in the law culminated with his appointment as a justice of common pleas, and led to prestigious marriages, for himself and for his eldest son, John Paston, betrothed to the heiress to nine Norfolk and Suffolk manors. Via his wife’s family, John Paston, himself educated at Cambridge, entered the circle of Sir John Fastolf of Caister, a former member of the affinity of Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk and a veteran of the wars with France in which Fastolf, like Sir Edward Dallyngrigge of Bodiam, had greatly prospered.

  We know so much of the Pastons, of their rise, of the attempts by John Paston, after 1459, to dispute the will of John Fastolf, of the consequent scattering of the Fastolf fortune (a lot of it to Bishop Waynflete of Winchester, and thence to Waynflete’s foundation at Magdalen College Oxford) and of the ultimate success of John Paston’s sons who took up arms against Edward IV but who nonetheless made their peace with the Yorkist regime, because the family archive has survived: more than 800 letters to and from the Pastons, covering the years between 1420 and 1500. These ‘Paston Letters’ supply extraordinary insight into fifteenth-century attitudes. They are generally described as a ‘unique’ resource. In reality, an almost equally large and informative collection of letters, with an even broader coverage of the attitudes and alliances of the great, already survives from the early thirteenth century, from the correspondence of Bishop Ralph Neville of Chichester, chancellor under Henry III. What distinguishes the Paston letters from the Neville archive, apart from fact that the Neville letters have never been treated or published as a unified collection, is not so much their contents as their language. Both sets of correspondence describe local and national goings on, gossip, the gathering of intelligence for the furtherance of schemes to acquire or dispose of land. Neville’s exclusively male correspondents wrote in Latin, in elegant clichés that read awkwardly and impersonally when translated into modern English. The Pastons, by contrast, both men and women, wrote in a bold demotic English that can shock by its intimacy and its almost contemporary ring.

  A mere accident of language has rendered one set of letters dull and apparently archaic, another vivid and seemingly ‘modern’. It is questionable whether anything much more profound than this divides the fifteenth century from earlier periods. Between the gangs of warriors established around the great men of eleventh-century Normandy or the affinity of Sir John Fastolf in the wars of fifteenth-century France, there are as many points of similarity as of distinction. The fortune-hunting crusaders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, or the alien constables seeking service under King John were in many ways forerunners of the mercenary captains and ‘routiers’ of the Black Prince, or the great privateers such as Sir John Hawkwood, leading their ‘chevauchées’ of pillage and terror across fourteenth-century France or Italy.

  Maintenance and Livery Badges

  ‘Maintenance’, the buying up of a locality, its gentry and its agencies of law-enforcement by one particular magnate or courtier became a major source of complaint from the fourteenth-century onwards, with petitions regularly addressed to Parliament against such practices. With maintenance came the bestowal of livery badges – symbols of lordship worn by those retained by a particular lord – which themselves provoked outrage and came to symbolize the worst abuses of maintenance. Yet maintenance and badge-wearing were hardly radical innovations. Magnates, as early as the thirteenth century in the case of a William Marshal in Wiltshire or Berkshire, or a Richard of Cornwall in the south-west, had been very much powers unto themselves able, when it suited them, to subvert the King’s writ. In extremes, such men had to go into exile, as was the case for William Marshal after 1208, to avoid the full consequences of royal wrath. But even in the darkest decades of the fifteenth century, when royal authority was supposedly at its lowest ebb, political dissidents such as Richard of York did not consider themselves immune from the vengeful attentions of the crown. Richard of York in the 1450s, like William Marshal long before him, instead used Ireland as a base from which to relaunch himself into English affairs. Some 200 years before Marshal and 400 years before Richard of York, in the political crisis of the 1050s, Harold Godwinson had done precisely the same thing.

  Heraldry and the wearing of devices were a great deal more ancient than the introduction of livery badges to the houses of Lancaster or York. Metal badges had been worn by pilgrims, marked with the signs and symbols of St Thomas of Canterbury or St James of Compostela, long before they were appropriated as props of secular power. Tradesmen and artisans were already organizing themselves into guilds by the 1150s. By
1350, in London alone there were at least twenty such craft guilds or livery companies, some of them such as the Merchant Taylors or Goldsmiths already in possession of their own guildhalls, each with its distinctive badges, symbols and ‘livery’ of membership and its attachment to the cult of one or two particular saints: Joseph (and Noah) for the carpenters, St Peter (that great fisher of men) for the fishmongers, and so forth.

  Moreover, it would be folly to suppose that attachment to the affinity of one particular lord was the only means by which the identity of lesser men was expressed: in reality, society was onion-layered. The historians who have written on bastard feudalism have for the most part been academics, surrounded by their own coteries of pupils and admirers, convinced that patronage and deference are closed systems which, once established, abide for life. Retaining, according to this model, reduced those retained to the status of worshippers, unthinking acolytes of the Communist party, or house-elves in the following of Lucius Malfoy. In reality, as the disobedience or disgruntlement of many house-elves (or pupils) surely indicates, affinities are more volatile than this.

  At any particular crisis, attachment to nation, to locality, to trade, to lord, to religious sentiment, to family, to fraternity or caste, or even the desire to ‘go it alone’, might take precedence over other considerations. The tendency to suppose that because a man was retained for life, in peace and in war, in the household of a particular lord he necessarily became a mere automaton obedient to that lord’s will in all things is a tendency to be resisted. Just as the uncertain loyalties of the Anglo-Norman baronage after 1066 had been keenly sought, with knights rendering homage to a variety of lords even though their principal allegiance might lie elsewhere, so, four centuries later, the loyalty of one’s inferiors had not only to be purchased but maintained, often in the face of stiff competition from other equally attractive poles of influence or reward, not least in the face of competition from the King.