The fifteenth century’s persecution of minorities perhaps represented nothing new. Twelfth-century Englishmen had massacred Jews and Flemings. In the thirteenth century it had been Frenchmen and Italian clergy (set upon in the 1230s by a band of semi-outlaws led by a Yorkshire knight acting under the pseudonym ‘William Wither’ or William ‘the Avenger’). This proud tradition of xenophobia was still alive to the revolting peasants of 1381 who massacred the foreigners of London. What was different about the persecution of Lollards was that they were not strangers but neighbours, more English than many of the churchmen and bishops who ordered their burning. Their persecution may have allowed the rest of the community to cohere, just as the modern segregation of pederasts or smokers is reckoned to allow the majority to sleep more complacently at night. Nonetheless, the fears to which inquest and persecution gave rise, that Christian society was itself infiltrated by conspirators and undermined by plots, should not be underestimated. The fifteenth century was a century in which society began to root out heretics from within. It was also a century in which the upper classes began killing one another with unprecedented regularity and enthusiasm, seeing ‘treason’ or ‘conspiracy’ behind ever turn in the political road. From the enquiries into the activities of the Lollards, via the civil wars of the 1460s and 70s, through to the seventeenth century’s burning of witches (in medieval England a rare event, though known in Ireland as early as the 1320s) can be traced a direct and not necessarily very comfortable path. The sense that society was corrupted from within, that even the King’s military household could become a nest of heretics, and that the upper classes were riddled with traitors determined upon self-slaughter, merely added to the existing fear that endemic plague and pestilence were signs of God’s disfavour. So much for the idea that society ‘coheres’ around the persecution of its minorities.
Outlaws
Of course, not all secrets are necessarily guilty, nor all lawlessness necessarily a threat to the silent majority. Despite the apparent efficiency of royal and episcopal spy networks, there was a vast gulf between ambition and achievement in medieval policing. Sir John Oldcastle managed to disappear into hiding for three years, despite being the most wanted criminal in England. John Ball, the radical preacher of 1381, had been in hiding or under threat of arrest for nearly twenty years before he was eventually incarcerated in Maidstone gaol. Their contemporary, the Welsh rebel, Owen Glyn Dwr, managed to live beyond the reach of royal justice for at least fifteen years. Outlawry, the legal placing of criminals beyond the protection of the law, was as old as the Anglo-Saxons, who had offered outlawry and exile as an alternative to death to convicted felons. It could be delivered as a sentence in court. It could also be actively sought by the criminal. From even before 1066, certain great churches, most famously Durham and Westminster, claimed the right to award sanctuary to those who fled to their precincts, with entire quarters both of Westminster and the city of Durham recognized as lying within such special jurisdictions. The future King Edward V was himself born in Westminster sanctuary in 1470, during the temporary disgrace and exile of his father, King Edward IV.
Elsewhere, each of the 30,000 or more parish churches, chapels and cemeteries of England was recognized as conferring rights of sanctuary upon felons who sought refuge there. Provided that the sanctuary-seeker had not yet been tried or convicted, they were permitted a forty-day stay, fed by the parish priest and guarded by the local community both to ensure that they did not simply escape into hiding and they were not killed by their victims’ families or removed from sanctuary against their will. At the end of these forty days, they might officially ‘abjure’ the realm, swearing an oath to travel by the King’s highway as far a port of embarkation, generally Dover, and there take ship beyond the realm of England. On Dover beach, where they were to remain until a ship could be found to take them (generally to France, the Channel Islands or Scotland), they were to remain in public view, entering the sea each day up to their knees or neck in token of their willingness to depart. Such exiles were branded on the thumb with a capital ‘A’, to denote their status as ‘abjurers’. Should they return without official pardon, or wander from the most direct route to their port of exile, they were deemed to ‘carry the wolf’s head’, being subject to summary execution by anyone they encountered. Indeed, any community which failed to apprehend and kill such outlaws was itself, in theory, subject to the full rigors of royal law.
The evidence of coroners’ records (coroners being the principal supervisors of the process of abjuration) suggest that in any year, something between two hundred and two thousand abjurations took place in England, the wide disparity in the estimated figures here being itself proof of the degree to which such people were marginalized. Quite how many abjurers melted away into hiding before exile remains equally uncertain. Even so, as early as the thirteenth century, there were already substantial communities of ‘outlaws’ and runaways living on the social margins: escaped prisoners, runaway serfs, monks or nuns who had jumped their convent walls, abjurers of the realm who failed to depart overseas, all of these communities being forced to live in hiding within a society generally so close-knit that strangers were by their very nature an object of suspicion.
Many of them sought the anonymity of the urban crowd. Hence, as early as the twelfth century, the evil reputation of certain parts of towns as refuges for thieves and runaways. Prostitution was merely one amongst the many trades of this medieval ‘underworld’, albeit the trade which has perhaps attracted the most attention from modern historians, commemorated in street-names such as the ‘Grope Cunt’ alleys or ‘Maiden’ lanes to be found from Shrewsbury to London, and in the case of the greatest of the London bordellos, the ‘stews’ (from the Old French ‘estuve’ or stove associated with public bathhouses) of Bankside in the Bishop of Winchester’s jurisdiction south of the Thames, certainly in existence by the 1380s, probably for a century or more before that. In 1452, the Bankside stews were the subject of a detailed written ordinance, insisting, for example, that the stewholders be married men, warned against prostituting their own servants or girls who were sick or pregnant, and instructed not to beat or forcibly detain their workers or embroil them in debt as has been the habit of pimps and brothel-keepers throughout the ages.
The fact that these regulations specifically forbade the employment of veterans of the French wars as servants in the stews reminds us that military deserters were as ubiquitous a feature of London lowlife in the Middle Ages as they were of twentieth-century Saigon or Bangkok. The prostitutes (amongst whom the surname ‘Frow’, from the German frau was particularly common) were not to wear aprons (apparently a garment of respectability), nor were they to grab at potential customers or lure them into playing at cards, dice or other games of hazard. Having once accepted a customer’s money, they were not to limit the contract to a period less than one full night. On the major feasts of the Church, they were to leave Southwark altogether save between the hours of 11am and 1pm (apparently their principal daytime hours of business) on nights when a Parliament or royal council was being held at Westminster, presumably so that Parliamentarians, then as now, could seek relaxation from the strains and stresses of political life, in this instance secure in the knowledge that trading standards would ensure them a full night-time money’s worth. Once again we find ourselves here in a society where even unrespectable trades could be subjected to curfews and clock hours.
Meanwhile, the ability of those wanted by the authorities merely to melt away either into the crowd or the greenwood was a remarkable feature of medieval society and rendered outlaws such as Ball, Oldcastle or Glyn Dwr almost as famous in their day, and in certain quarters no doubt as admired, as Osama Bin Laden in his mountain cave. Celebration of the myths of the successful outlaw enabled the oppressed of medieval England to cock a snook at their oppressors. It is precisely in this period that the legends of Robin Hood first come properly into focus. Although not specifically referred to until Langland’s Pi
ers Plowman (c.1377), the legends themselves were far older than this. A variety of fugitives recorded in English courts from the 1220s onwards called themselves by some variety of the name ‘Robert Hod’ or ‘Robehod’, adopting, in places as far apart as Yorkshire and Berkshire, what must already have been a well-known pseudonym for a robber. The search for the ‘real’ Robin Hood is almost certainly a fruitless one. Nonetheless, by 1420, and as far away as Scotland, attempts were being made to place him within a specific historical context, originally in the reign of Edward I, moving in the 1450s to that of Edward II, only later, after 1520, claiming that he was a figure of the 1190s and the reign of Richard I. The first written stories of Robin survive from the 1450s, and have a Nottinghamshire setting. However the so-called Gest of Robin Hood, again from the fifteenth century, places him in Yorkshire, specifically in the bleak West Riding valley of Barnsdale, north of Doncaster. Other members of his fictitious gang joined him in the fifteenth century: Little John, Maid Marion and Friar Tuck, this latter associated with a real historical character, the murderous Robert Stafford, parson of Lindfield in Sussex, who called himself ‘Friar Tuck’ as leader of a criminal gang which terrorized Sussex between 1417 and 1429.
Drama, ballads and minstrels
The audience for these legends and ballads was clearly widespread, both geographically and socially. Not just the rising yeoman farmer but the great lord in his hall listened to these stories, and by the 1430s they can be found referred to by the King’s judges, by a sheriff’s clerk, by monks, chroniclers, juries and even in petitions to Parliament. In 1473, Sir John Paston wrote to his brother complaining that a servant was on the point of departing his household despite the fact that ‘I have kept him this three years to play Saint George and Robin Hood and the sheriff of Nottingham’, presumably in some sort of household entertainment. Ballads and plays circulated throughout late medieval society, not just in the mystery or miracle plays that emerged from an ecclesiastical setting, organized by parish and trade guilds.
Drama and playgoing were only a step away from the liturgical dramas of the Church, and the performance of a successful preacher was in many cases the closest approximation that a medieval village or town could achieve to the modern cinema. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, free to gad about whilst her adulterous and drunken husband visited London, was more than happy to put on her best scarlet dress and to go the rounds of vigils and processions, preachings and pilgrimages, miracle plays and marriage feasts that, even in Lent, provincial society could supply. As early as 1306, an extraordinary array of harpers and minstrels and musicians is found in attendance upon the court of Edward I when he knighted his eldest son, the future Edward II, at Caernarvon Castle, and Edward II himself is to be found in the 1320s at Whorlton Castle in Yorkshire entertained by two local ladies, Agnes the Redhaired and Alice of Whorlton, who sang him stories of Simon de Montfort and other songs. The bursar’s accounts for the Cistercian monks at Fountains in the late 1450s include payments to a whole array of minstrels and players: to a blind minstrel 6d, to the boy bishop of Ripon 3s, to a story teller (‘whose name was unknown’) 6d, to the King’s minstrels 3s 4d, to a fool named Solomon ‘who came again’ 4d. Even Robin Hood’s livery of Lincoln green, his evident courtesy (stressed in most of the stories), and his desire to obtain not land but a position in a great man’s household, all speak to a fifteenth-century context, to a world of liveries and households and to the entertainment not so much of an audience of simple yeomen in their farmsteads but of great men in their hall.
The essentially subversive message of the Robin Hood legends was intended for recital not just before the peasantry, who might have appreciated Robin’s ability to outwit the rich, but before the rich themselves. Were we looking for a crisis in aristocratic self-identity, for a sense that the old order was changing, that peasants no longer wished to be protected but freed, that the paternalism of the aristocracy as a whole, like that of the Church, was more resented than welcomed, that the old ties of deference were being strained, and that chivalry and the essential futility of the medieval knight were already being challenged by those obliged to pay hard-earned silver in order to indulge the knightly taste for slaughter, then the adoption of Robin Hood by the upper classes is itself a most remarkable phenomenon. Like those modern patrons of the arts, delighted by the anti-bourgeois rantings of the avant-garde, yet supporting such patronage from expense accounts and family trust funds, the patrons of the Robin Hood ballads were perhaps aware that they were reading or watching entertainments intended to ridicule precisely the people who paid to laugh at them. Since at least the twelfth century, irony and an ability to see both sides of the picture have been distinctly English qualities.
Forests and demand for wood
There is another irony to the Robin Hood legends that makes them especially interesting. By the time that they came to be written down, after 1400, the very greenwoods whose revels they celebrated were being levelled and mapped. Today, we look upon the ancient trees of England as amongst the most venerable of historic monuments. Some yew trees are perhaps 2,000 years old. The Major Oak in Sherwood forest, with a girth of over thirty-three feet, is said have been planted at about the time of Magna Carta. The Bowthorpe Oak, at Bourne in Lincolnshire, is perhaps older still, so large that its hollow interior can seat twenty people for dinner. Even so, as early as the thirteenth century, such was the pressure on timber and forest resources that the very tallest oak trees were already in short supply. The builders of Wells Cathedral after 1220, looking for the longest and strongest beams, were already importing their oak from Ireland. Ships’ masts were fashioned from conifers rather than oaks, and so were easier to grow, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that timber in large quantities, including yew for bows and pine for ships, was imported from Spain and Norway throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The wars with France created an enormous demand for bow-wood: 7,800 bows and 13,000 arrows were ordered for the King in 1341 alone. Arrow shafts were made from the quicker growing ash, but, even so, such was the demand that in 1416, Henry V’s government had specifically to forbid the making of clogs from ash rather than from willow or alder. The ‘cruck’ building of peasant houses, which required massive single beams, yielded place to ‘trusses’ made of shorter lengths.
Our earliest proper estate or local maps date from much this same period. The forests themselves were becoming not so much a place of tall trees but of mappable coppices, harvested to supply unimaginably vast quantities of fuel for heating, for building and for charcoal, essential for the smelting of metals, the firing of glass and pottery, and incidentally for the burning of heretics. Like the royal navy, or the ships that carried English armies into France, this was a society whose very heartbeat was the thump of axe on timber. By 1400, the beat from English forests was becoming increasingly tachycardic. Meanwhile, the emergence of the coal industry as an alternative to timber, and especially of the trade in sea coal from the north-east, shipped by clinker barges to London, brought wealth to the fifteenth-century bishopric of Durham and to such great northern families as the Nevilles of Raby. The furnaces of the industrial revolution had yet to burst into flame. Black soot did not yet clog the public buildings of London. But, in various places, the chimneys had at least begun to belch a rather darker smoke. A village such as Chiddingfold, on the Surrey–Sussex border, today the very embodiment of picture-postcard charm, was in the fourteenth century a semi-industrialized settlement of charcoal burners and glass makers, supplying such great enterprises as St George’s, Windsor, and St Stephen’s at Westminster.
Hunting
The clearances and grubbing up of the forest settings of the Robin Hood ballads was not just an economic phenomenon. It posed a deeper conundrum for the aristocracy. Since 1066, indeed probably since Roman times, the forests of England had been a specifically aristocratic resource, with the hunting of deer as the ultimate advertisement of aristocratic privilege. To a peasant who saw his lord thundering on h
orseback across forest pathways and winter fields, there can have been few more obvious proofs of lordly privilege. Hunting manuals and the rituals of the hunt remained central to the concerns of the fifteenth-century gentry and aristocracy. Virtually all kings hunted, even the generally soft-sworded Richard II or Henry VI. Henry VI hunted, even though he is said to have abhorred the actual slaughter of game. His courtiers brought their hawks with them into church. Of Richard II’s favourites, Simon Burley was keeper of the King’s falcons, and Robert de Vere is said to have been killed whilst hunting wild boar. The greatest of the medieval hunting manuals, the Livre de Chasse composed in the 1380s by the southern French nobleman Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix, not only formed an essential item in every gentleman’s library but was translated into English by no less a figure than Edward, Duke of York, grandson of Edward III, killed at Agincourt in 1415. The hunting of deer was still regarded as the ultimate aristocratic pastime, even as late as the reign of Charles I. But the fox was already regarded as a beast of the chase, with fox hunting itself favouring a landscape cleared of timber. From a clear run across plough and the excitement of fences came the racing of horses, steeple-chasing and all those other pursuits that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were to replace the deer of old England as the true sport of kings. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, kings favoured Windsor in order to be close to their deer and their forests. By 1700, they had transferred their affections from the greenwood to the heath-lands of Newmarket or Ascot. Kingship had come out from the trees.
Social change
Nostalgia, a desire to return to a vanished Eden, a collapse in aristocratic self-confidence masked by ever greater demands for deference and ever greater emphasis upon aristocratic privilege, these are significant features of late medieval society to set against the impression that social change must always be equated with progress. The aristocrats of the fifteenth century no doubt seemed on occasion almost as futile to their contemporaries and dependents as they have tended to appear to modern historians. Nostalgia is perhaps the key emotion of the period. It can be found at all levels and in all social classes. In law, the Statute of Labourers or the Sumptuary laws of 1363 were attempts by the elite to legislate a return to former wages and to former modes of dress, allowing some but not all social classes to use family coats of arms, limiting the use of fur (itself one of the great industries of the forest) or silk to those who had traditionally been able to afford the cost of such materials.
A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485 Page 43
