A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Here matters might have rested, with Wycliffe’s supporters as covert puritans operating on the far extreme of opinions that the Church was prepared to tolerate. Philip Repyndon, initially one of Wycliffe’s most enthusiastic disciples, returned like other Wycliffites to the orthodox fold, preferring to work from within the Church in order to institute reform. Repyndon died in 1424 as bishop of Lincoln. A hint as to the continuing extremity of his puritanism occurs in the terms of his will, in which he demanded that his body be left naked and unburied in a sack placed outside the church of St Margaret in Lincoln Cathedral close, there to be food for worms. Only the town crier was to announce his death, and every penny that he possessed was to be given to the poor, even the black cloth on the bier being given away as clothing. Needless to say, these conditions were ignored. Repyndon was instead buried simply but decently in the cathedral’s south-east transept. In the history of the established Church, propriety has generally trumped sincerity.

  ‘Popular’ Religious Belief

  Since 1066, England had never been a nation particularly troubled by heresy. Even so, there had been alarms. As long ago as the Council of Oxford in 1222, which had promulgated the most significant series of decrees for the government of the Church enacted before the 1530s, the fear of false prophets was already on the minds of those in attendance. A priest who had converted to Judaism and been circumcised was handed over to the local sheriff to be burned. A layman who had allowed himself to be crucified, so that he might bear the wounds of Christ, and his companion, a woman who claimed to be Mary the mother of Christ and who had fashioned a chalice out of wax so that she might celebrate Mass (a male prerogative), were both condemned to be walled up, either as involuntary hermits or in order that they might be starved to death. In the 1230s, a Dominican inquisition had been briefly appointed for Yorkshire with the King’s support, at much the same time that the Dominicans were rooting out heresy and burning heretics in Flanders and in Languedoc, almost within sight of the King of England’s bastides and fortified towns of Gascony. In the reign of Edward II, the Templars were suppressed in England just as elsewhere in Europe, albeit without quite the hysteria that attended their condemnation in France.

  Throughout this period, the laity were regularly questioned and tested for the orthodoxy of their faith, if not by an inquisition then in accordance with local episcopal legislation that made confession, the examination of conscience and the rooting out of sin a model of how false belief might be segregated and destroyed. A great deal of the expression of ‘popular’ religious belief caused alarm to the Church authorities. May Games and mell suppers, the Feast of Fools and the play of the King and Queen were all barely tolerated by episcopal synods. The veneration of holy wells, prayers and charms for sick livestock, love potions, an alarming interest in pagan or pre-Christian sites, and even a taste for strange images, such as the ‘horrid cross’ (imported from Germany, that great source of the macabre) apparently showing Christ as if he were being torn apart on a gibbet, condemned by the bishop of London in 1305, suggests a community of religious belief that was not entirely at ease with itself and which the Church authorities insisted be carefully policed. In 1313, at Bexley in what is now suburban Kent, a man named Stephen le Pope (itself a name highly suggestive of megalomania) is said to have made stone and wood images of gods in his garden and to have worshipped them. On the same night, he murdered his maidservant. He was clearly mad, but his madness itself reveals the hysterical potential of much late-medieval religion.

  Women in religion

  The Church, then as now, was made especially uncomfortable by the religious role claimed by women. Houses of nuns continued to flourish, from the poorest anchoresses (female hermits) to Chaucer’s prioress with her lapdogs and her cockney French. It was for women that a large proportion of saints’ lives written in French were composed in the thirteenth century, and later in Middle English, the assumption being, even as early as the 1240s, that nuns needed to confess, to read their prayers and to conduct their devotions not in the Latin of the schools but in the vernacular. It is nonetheless a remarkable fact that, throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Church was reluctant officially to canonize more than a handful of female saints. Even the holiest of female hermits, Julian of Norwich, author of a series of mystic ‘Shewings’, again written in English, failed to achieve official canonization.

  Tainted with the sin of Eve, their bodies more permeable than male bodies and therefore more open to the influence of demons and the Devil, women were mistrusted as oracles or purveyors of divine truth. Where the particular balance of the four ‘humours’ within the human body – black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood, a system inherited from classical antiquity – rendered men strong and steadfast, and adolescent males strong but inconstant, the cold and humid nature of the female humoral balance tended towards weakness and unreliability. Instead of championing the contemporary virtues of any Englishwoman, the Church emphasized the splendour and peerless sanctity of Christ’s own mother. The Virgin Mary became every bit as much the protector of England as she was already of the kingdom of France. Her shrine at Walsingham in Norfolk, supposedly founded at her direct command, as a copy in England of the Holy House of Nazareth where Christ had been conceived through the virtue of the Holy Spirit, attracted the patronage of several English kings. Richard II’s greatest surviving monument, the Wilton Diptych (a panel painting), shows the King kneeling before the Virgin and child, having just presented them with England symbolized by the banner of St George. Within the ferrule or stopper at the very top of the banner, only revealed in recent cleaning, is a miniature map of a green island, only a centimetre high, painted with trees and a white tower, set in a sea of silver leaf with a boat in full sail. England itself had become the Virgin’s dower.

  The stately magnificence of the Wilton Diptych represents one facet of English spirituality. A very different approach to the Church emerges from the life of the eccentric Norfolk woman, Margery Kempe. Born in the 1370s at King’s Lynn where her father was mayor, Margery was unhappily married to a local brewer by whom she had fourteen children, even the first of these births provoking a spiritual crisis (what we might today diagnose as post-natal depression). From this, Margery was rescued when Jesus himself sat down at the end of her bed to offer her comfort. Having at last persuaded her husband that they should live chastely, after 1413 Margery embarked upon an extraordinary career as self-appointed holy woman, consulting with both Julian of Norwich and bishop Repyndon at Lincoln. Her pilgrimages were to take her from Jerusalem to Rome, where her insistence on wearing white as a symbol of her chastity, her uncontrollable tears, her ‘roaring’ in church and her claims to have been mystically married to the Godhead caused more than a little alarm to her fellow pilgrims. We know all this because, having failed in an earlier attempt to employ a naturalized German with illegible handwriting to record her story, Margery was eventually able to dictate her memoirs to the local priest, becoming in the process the very first author of an autobiography written in English.

  Lollardy

  Since pilgrimages were a display of piety discouraged by Lollards, Margery Kempe was clearly no Lollard. Nonetheless, many of her contemporaries, including other semi-educated women from the diocese of Norwich, were attracted to Lollardy, not for its intellectual content so much as for its sense of pious extremity, of belonging to a secret yet elect body of Christians, knowing more and enjoying a closer relationship to their Saviour even than the priests in church. Before 1400, only a few English bishops took measures actively to pursue Lollardy. This changed, however, following the deposition of Richard II, very much at the personal initiative of Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury. Arundel perhaps hoped to use the pursuit of Lollardy as a negotiating tool with a court and a King, Henry IV, known to harbour knights sympathetic to the Wycliffites. The new King’s father, John of Gaunt, Wycliffe’s one-time patron, had broken with Lollardy after 1381, but, nonetheless, at his own deathb
ed had demanded that his body be left unburied and unembalmed for forty days, clearly in puritan expiation of his sins. The pursuit of heresy was also a means by which, after a distinctly uncomfortable start to his archiepiscopate in which he had been intimately involved in the deposition of King Richard, Arundel could stamp his authority both upon Church and state. Not for the first or the last time, the demand for strength and discipline was instituted by a leader who himself feared accusations of weakness.

  In 1401, reinvestigating the heresy of a Norfolk chaplain, William Sawtre, first condemned by the bishop of Norwich two years earlier, Arundel found evidence that Sawtre had reverted to his condemned beliefs. As a relapsed heretic he was handed over to the King’s officers for punishment, and in March 1401 burned at Smithfield ‘bound, standing upright, to a post set in a barrel with blazing wood all around’. The punishment was all the more remarkable for having been carried out some weeks before the King formally promulgated the new statute by which it was justified, ‘De Haeretico comburendo’ (allowing for the burning of relapsed heretics). Sawtre is generally reckoned both the first Lollard martyr and the first criminal burned at the stake in England. In reality, burning had long been a punishment meted out in England to wives who killed their husbands (the crime of ‘petty treason’). A group of Cathar heretics unearthed in London in the reign of King John is said to have been summarily burned, and there were burnings again, as noticed above, at the Council of Oxford in 1222.

  Even after Sawtre’s execution, the statute against heresy was used only once or twice before 1407, when a temporary eclipse in the fortunes of Archbishop Arundel allowed a petition to be introduced to King and lords in Parliament, clearly Lollard inspired, calling once again for the total disendowment of the established Church. Catholic priests should henceforth live by the alms of the faithful. The money obtained from the sale of the Church’s lands and treasures should be employed in part to ensure that future kings had no need to call upon extraordinary taxation, for the rest to endow fifteen new earldoms, 1,500 knights, 6,200 squires, 100 new almshouses, 15 universities and 1,500 Wycliffite priests for pastoral duties. Anticipating Henry VIII’s disendowment of the Church by more than a hundred years, and even then far exceeding the Reformation settlement in its ambition (there were not to be 15 universities in England until the chartering of the University of Nottingham in 1948), this was not a proposal that had any chance of being debated let alone of success. Even so, it demonstrates that Wycliffite sentiments continued to command sympathy even within the political elite.

  Its probable author, Sir John Oldcastle, a Herefordsire knight with connections to the royal household, was also to prove Lollardy’s unwitting executioner. By marriage to the heiress of Lord Cobham, Oldcastle had risen to considerable wealth, with properties scattered across five counties and including Cooling Castle on the marshes north of Rochester. Archbishop Arundel sought to move against the heretics in Oldcastle’s household as early as 1410. However, it was the death of Henry IV and the accession of his son, Henry V, a King determined to display his orthodoxy, that gave the Archbishop his chance to act. Oldcastle was arrested and charged with heresy. Committed to the Tower, he escaped and in January 1414 sought to raise a rebellion, planning perhaps to kidnap the King amidst the celebrations of Twelfth Night. His conspiracy was betrayed. Forty of the conspirators were executed, seven of them by burning. The chroniclers, reflecting government propaganda, allege that 20,000 rebels had been waiting for the call to arms. In reality, there were never more than a couple of hundred. Oldcastle escaped, and was not recaptured until 1417, when he was at last burned as a heretic and outlaw. His reputation as a malign companion of the young Henry V lived on to inform Shakespeare’s Henry IV, where the character of the prince’s tutor was originally named Sir John Oldcastle. Protests from the then Lord Cobham, successor to Oldcastle’s barony, forced Shakespeare to think again, lighting, more or less by hazard, on the name of the Norfolk adventurer and patron of the Paston family, Sir John Fastolf. By such means was Sir John Falstaff, greatest of comic inventions, foisted upon an unsuspecting world.

  Oldcastle’s rebellion put an end to all flirtations between the gentry and the Wycliffite heresy. Tarred by its associations with treason and rebellion against the King, Lollardy was destined to become a low-status puritan sect, secretly maintained in the households of a few thousand devotees, for the most part semi-literate artisans, its flame kept burning by only a handful of fully committed evangelists and preachers. Before 1414, the heretics themselves had enjoyed international contacts, in particular with the Hussite movement in Bohemia (themselves protesting against the privileges of the clergy and demanding a return to a simpler ‘Bible’ Christianity). Oldcastle himself had corresponded with Prague. The burning of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance in 1415, and the subsequent outbreak of a Hussite rebellion threatening the rights not only of the Church but of aristocratic property, merely confirmed the assumption that Lollardy in England must be ripped out by the roots. Before 1414, there had been no systematic inquisition into its spread. After Oldcastle’s rebellion, and with one eye clearly focussed on events in Europe, bishops sanctioned systematic persecution of the English Lollards. In the late 1420s, for example, whilst the bishop of Winchester, Henry Beaufort, was leading a contingent on the crusade launched against the Hussites of Bohemia, the bishop of Norwich investigated the Lollard communities of East Anglia, burning four of the Lollard leaders (one of them a former skinner, the rest former priests) and imprisoning more than sixty sympathizers. A suspected Lollard ‘rising’ in 1431 resulted in yet another wave of persecution, and there were further burnings in London in 1440.

  Historians of the twentieth century, as always keen to imagine medieval society as if it were merely an offshoot of their own liberal concerns, have tended to argue that the persecution of heresy had both a good and a bad side. On the one hand ‘medievals’ were clearly at fault in denying the rights of religious minorities. At the same time, by clubbing together to burn a few heretics or massacre a few Jews, they asserted their own sense of community and greatly improved society’s ‘feel good factor’. This, of course, is a crude parody of the modern debate. It has nonetheless been asserted that, far from being inimical to the sense of community, inquisitorial procedures devised to counter the ‘threat’ of Lollardy presented ‘opportunities for the individual to become more involved in public action than he, or to a lesser extent she, had been before’. In an academic vacuum, this is no doubt true. The recruitment of large numbers of parishioners to spy and report on their neighbours, and the segregation of those who failed to comply with society’s norms, can no doubt be accounted a social good. In the same way, those today who report to the local council on the illegal dumping of garden waste, or the failure to sort plastic cups from tin cans in a bag of recycled refuse, can rest assured that they are securing their neighbourhood against the tentacles of the Antichrist. Whether it would be of even greater benefit to the community to burn all fly tippers, exterminate the burners of leaded petrol or arrange for the communal kicking of bigots and the illiberal, is best left to public (rather than academic) opinion to decide. In the meantime, there should be little doubt that heresy and its persecution had tragic human consequences.

  Some Lollard communities survived into the sixteenth century, merging in due course with the earliest exponents of ‘Protestant’ reform. As a result, as ‘proto-Protestants’, the Lollards themselves were taken up by Tudor historians keen to demonstrate how ‘primitive’ Bible-based Christianity had survived all of the corrupt excrescences of the Middle Ages to re-emerge as Protestantism after 1500. Archbishop Cranmer, the first of the Protestant archbishops of Canterbury, seems deliberately to have encouraged the destruction of the tomb of his predecessor, Archbishop Arundel, precisely because of Arundel’s association with the persecution of Lollards. The Lollards themselves, not least in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, were represented as keepers of a sacred flame fanned back to life by Luther, Calvin an
d their English disciples. The irony, surely not lost on sixteenth-century readers, was that the Lollards, with their secret meetings, their need to hide from the authorities and their outward conformity to orthodox opinion, resembled nothing so much as the Catholic recusant priests in hiding in England after 1570.

  Spies

  Spies and spying had already played a leading role in English warfare, both in Scotland and in France. As early as 1066, the Bayeux Tapestry shows what are clearly spies reporting back to William both on Harold’s landing in France and on the lie of the land before Hastings. ‘Explorators’ or spies were a ubiquitous feature of the Anglo-French wars after 1340, with paranoia against their activities rising to a frenzy of suspicion. Oldcastle’s plot of 1414 had been exposed by spies, with the government thereafter whipping up a deliberate and exaggerated propaganda storm, intended to give the impression that heresy and traitors lurked behind every corner. Ironically it was a Welsh spy, from a nation itself undone by English spying and propaganda, who in 1417 finally betrayed Oldcastle’s whereabouts to the authorities. At much the same time, in the build-up to the Agincourt campaign of 1415, Henry V had arrested the French ambassadors who came to discuss peace with him at Southampton, fearing that, having viewed his invasion fleet, they might betray his plans to his enemies. In warfare, as in his persecution of heresy, Henry V was determined to show himself an even more effective operator than the kings of France. With the instigation of a full-scale inquisition into Lollardy, spying itself joined irony, drunkenness and violence as a peculiarly English phenomenon.