Foundation

by Peter Ackroyd

  The French lines broke and dissolved; a retreat, and a general panic, ensued. In the confusion the French king and his son were captured by the English forces. It was a fresh calamity for the native army. King John was escorted to England by the Black Prince, and a truce of two years was agreed. When John was taken through the streets of London, it became a festive occasion for the citizens as the captive king was led in triumph to Westminster Hall where Edward III was waiting to greet him. It was a thoroughly medieval form of captivity. He was released on the surety of his son but, when his son escaped from England, he voluntarily returned to resume his life as a prisoner. He could not endure the dishonour of violating the terms of the agreement. Four months after his return to London, he died of an unknown disease. The king’s body was then sent back to France.

  Edward resumed hostilities after the time of truce, but a campaign in the winter of 1359 did not supply the overwhelming victory for which he had prayed. He was, however, still in the ascendant. So in 1360 a treaty was reached in which Edward agreed to renounce his claim to the French throne in return for full sovereignty over Gascony, Calais, Guienne, Poitou and Ponthieu in northern France. The Black Prince set up his own court at Bordeaux, the capital of the duchy of Guienne. All seemed to be set fair for English power across the Channel but in 1369 the new French king, Charles V, known as Charles the Wise, reasserted his feudal rights over all the territories of France.

  The Black Prince defied him, but all of his martial vaunts proved useless in the end. The English prince contracted dropsy and grew too weak to lead his forces into the field; there were in any case no set battles, the French king proceeding by raid, sortie and ambush. This reconquest of French land by stealth was eminently successful, and five years later Charles had taken back almost all of the duchies and provinces once claimed by the English. A truce was then formulated that continued until the time of Edward III’s death. All of Edward’s spoils, acquired at the expense of so much blood and suffering and cost, were one by one stripped from him. Only Calais and parts of Gascony were left. His quest for the French crown was ineffective and ineffectual. This continual see-saw, this claim and counter-claim, demonstrates the futility of the entire conflict. Its major consequences, as we have seen, were wholly domestic in the fashioning of an independent parliament and the formation of a national system of taxation.

  Edward of Woodstock came back to England, where he lingered in ever declining health for six years. The morbidity of his symptoms served only to emphasize the sickness at the court itself, where the absence of any military success infected the atmosphere with rancour and suspicion. The ageing king no longer seemed to be wholly in command of affairs and was widely rumoured to be in thrall to his mistress, Alice Perrers; much of the government of the realm, therefore, devolved upon one of his younger sons, the duke of Lancaster known as John of Gaunt. Unlike his older brother, however, John was not widely popular. It was believed that a group of councillors around the king were exploiting the resources of the exchequer for their own ends. When a parliament was called in the spring of 1376, for the purpose of raising fresh taxation, the Commons refused to continue their deliberations until certain ‘evil counsellors’ had been removed from the king’s side.

  The Good Parliament, as it became known, wished ‘to make correction of the errors and faults of the realm if such are found to exist’. It proclaimed itself to be assembled ‘on behalf of the community of the realm’, and then moved against corrupt courtiers and merchants who had conspired to defraud the country. They were impeached, and sent to trial before the Lords. One or two of them fled the country; others were dismissed, imprisoned, or forfeited their property. It was an early test for the efficacy of the Commons, which had shown itself to be capable of determined action. It was not representative of some supposed popular freedom, however, since it proved to be equally capable of rebuffing the demands of the peasants and labourers. In the following year it introduced the ‘poll tax’ which was feared and hated in equal measure. The members of the parliament house were concerned only with the interests of their own particular ‘community’ of the realm.

  The Black Prince died during the sessions of the Good Parliament, and his father followed a year later in 1377. It is said that Alice Perrers took the rings from his fingers as he lay upon his deathbed in the palace of Sheen, but this may be no more than a morality tale. The baubles of glory had already been stripped from him in France. He had achieved nothing much of his own volition, but during his reign of fifty years England itself had acquired a more coherent or at least more organized national life.

  Another consequence of his reign is of equal importance. Edward III’s early victories at Sluys and Creécy, and his capture of Calais, had augmented the sense of national identity. The people may not have cared a whit about Edward’s claim to the throne of France but they understood the force of arms against ‘strangers’. The news of battles was issued from market crosses and church pulpits, spreading quickly throughout the entire country. English merchants, rather than Italian or German traders, were now in charge of the country’s business. In the port of Hull, for example, English exporters of wool had made up only 4 per cent of the total in 1275. By 1330, it was almost 90 per cent.

  ‘I kan noght construe all this,’ a character remarks in Piers Plowman, ‘ye most kenne me this on Englissh.’ It is worth remarking that Chaucer began his poetic career at the court of Edward III. His first verses were written in courtly French but the power of the vernacular overcame his literary conventionality; it is a measure of the strength of spoken and written English that Chaucer now celebrated it as worthy of comparison with the classical tongues. In Troilus and Criseyde, and more especially in Canterbury Tales, he created or adapted a language that was capable of the highest lyric flights and the most vulgar comic effects. It is already the language of Shakespeare. Within Chaucer’s lifetime English replaced French as the language of school-teaching, and in the reign of the next sovereign it became the language of the court.

  Human ingenuity is unceasing. The first mechanical clock was introduced to England in the reign of Edward III. It marks the demise of the feudal and seasonal world no less plainly than the advent of the longbow and the decline of the serf. The first reference to a crane, working in a harbour, comes from 1347.

  24

  The night schools

  In the reign of Edward III there arose the greatest disturbance within the Church since the time that Augustine imposed the primacy of Rome upon the English at the end of the sixth century. In the succeeding 800 years the Church had become part of the governance of England, with all the obligations and dangers that implies. It had become rich. It had remained powerful, with its principal servants becoming the chief administrators of the king. The bishops were effectively the king’s clerks, chosen and promoted in a complex hierarchy of service; they had their own small armies of knights and retainers, sometimes leading them into battle.

  The Church was by far the greatest landowner in the country, and therefore the largest employer. Many saintly and devout clerics could still be found, but the majority of the clergy had gone the way of the world. The bishops and abbots, for the most part, lived in great state and luxury. The lowlier monks also lived in conditions of comfort, with the obligations of prayer and study offset by the more familiar pursuits of hunting or hawking. They gambled and they drank; they often pursued women where they did not lust after boys.

  The secular clergy, better known as the parish priests, were often unlearned. They may have had to till the land and gather the harvest together with their parishioners. They were of the earth. Many no doubt offered spiritual consolation, and administered the sacraments with due care, but others set no such good example. They lived openly with their mistresses, and neglected their duties. They were in the marketplace and the alehouse more often than they were in the church. The people of Saltash in Cornwall, for example, complained about their priest to the dean of Windsor. ‘He is deaf,’ they wr
ote, ‘and cannot hear confessions except to the scandal of those confessing; he is a discloser of confessions, because he gets drunk and reveals the confessions of parishioners … he sells the sacramentals to his parishioners, and refused to minister the last rites to those labouring in the final stages when he was asked.’

  In times of famine and plague, of course, the piety of the people in such matters as individual prayer and mortification was all the more plaintive and fervent. At a slightly later date, manuals of devotion became more popular among the literate. This did not amount to a rejection of the authority of the Church. The institution was taken for granted, but fresh avenues of access to the divine were required by the pious. Some, however, questioned the wealth of the Church; some knights and London merchants, in particular, were opposed to clerical pretensions in every sphere of social and economic life. In the parliament of 1371 they argued that the lands of the clergy should be taken over for the sake of the public purse.

  The life and career of John Wycliffe must be placed in this context. He was himself in holy orders, a Fellow of Merton College in Oxford before becoming Master of Balliol College at the same university. He was a doctor of divinity, and in that profession he had acquired a great reputation both as a teacher and a writer. He became known as ‘the flower of Oxford’, and was held by many contemporaries to be ‘the greatest clerk that they knew then living’. He held two ‘benefices’, two rural parishes that he did not visit but from which he collected the revenue. He had also come to the attention of the king’s court, and was granted a retainer for his services to the Crown.

  He was useful to certain members of that court, among them John of Gaunt, because of his avowed disdain for clerical wealth and privilege. He represented a genuine distaste, shared by some of the nobility and many of the gentry, for the temporal possessions of the Church. But he was a scholar who pressed ahead his arguments with a blithe disregard for the consequences in the world around him; he followed the light, or will-o’-the-wisp, of reason wherever it led him. He wrote in university Latin, and in books whose titles may be translated as On the Eucharist and On the Power of the Pope he denounced the claims and corruptions of the Church. No printing presses were of course then available to disseminate his message, so it was laboriously copied by hand.

  In these manuscripts he espoused the power of scripture, and suggested that the holy word of God was more important than the sacramental hierarchy of the Church. He believed in a version of predestinarianism, by which the elect were already known to God. There was no need for an elaborate machinery of Church power, which simply interfered between the individual soul and its maker. He taught that the king, rather than the pope or the bishops, was the fountain of grace in the land. He denounced the pope as the Antichrist. Friars and monks were repellent and superfluous. Wycliffe also condemned the worship of the saints as idolatry.

  More significantly, perhaps, he denied the doctrine of transubstantiation by means of which the substance of the bread and wine of the Mass was changed by miracle to the body and blood of Christ. His animus against the clergy was one of the commonplaces of the period, but his argument against the eucharist laid him open to the charge of heresy. It was said that he was a ‘wicked worm’ sowing the seeds of schism.

  It is not clear that one word of the supposed ‘Wycliffite Bible’, the first English translation of the entire body of Scriptures, was actually composed by Wycliffe himself; it seems to have been the work of his followers at Oxford, but they were undoubtedly moved by the same spirit of change. Wycliffe wanted the word of God to be made known directly to the people without priestly mediation. In particular he wished to deliver the Bible to the labourers in the field. The ploughman should be able to hear the word of God. The ploughman should also be able to interpret it in his own way and for his own purposes. This was where the Church drew the line. St Peter himself had stated that ‘no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation’ (2 Peter 1:20).

  Wycliffe was never charged or tried, and was allowed to retire to the parsonage of Lutterworth where he continued his studies in peace. But he was effectively silenced. In the following century, on the orders of the pope, his bones were dug up and burned. But in the 1370s no formal apparatus existed for the suppression of heresy. It was so little known, in fact, that no defence against it was considered necessary. Heretics were believed to be strange enthusiasts from overseas, like the Cathars of Languedoc or the Waldensians of Lyon and elsewhere. They were not, and never could be, English.

  Yet this university doctrine, promulgated by Wycliffe, was soon taken up by popular preachers and sectarians who rejoiced in his attack upon the pope and his stripping the altars of sacredness. His doctrines were discussed in small assemblies or ‘night schools’. These enthusiasts came to be known as Lollards, derived from the Low Dutch lollen or lallen meaning ‘to sing’. An informal network of Oxford scholars, grouped around Wycliffe, may have taught their lessons to receptive audiences. The connections can no longer be followed. ‘They have nothing more’, wrote one hostile contemporary, ‘than a certain appearance of humility of posture, in lowering of the head, abandonment of clothing and pretence of fasting; they pretend simplicity in words, affirming themselves to be burning with love of God and neighbour.’

  Burning or not, there did emerge a broad Lollard movement that espoused Wycliffe’s arguments as well as adding some of its own. The sacraments were dead signs. There was no purgatory, other than life on this earth, so Masses for the dead have no value. Bread could not be made holier by being muttered over by priests. Confession could only be effective if the priest was full of grace, but no such priest has ever been found. Prayers cannot help the dead any more than a man’s breath can cause a great ship to sail. Pilgrimages served no heavenly or earthly purpose. What is a bishop without wealth? Episcopus Nullatensis: Bishop of Nowhere. St Thomas of Canterbury had already been consigned to hell for endowing the church with material possessions. The pope is an old whore, sitting on many waters, with a cup of poison in his hands. Greater benefit could be derived from a cask of ale than from the four Evangelists. More eccentric propositions were sometimes entertained. One Lollard, William of Wakeham, believed that the land was above the sky.

  The Lollards seem to have flourished in the towns, and along the trading routes between towns. It was the faith of the merchant and the artisan rather than the farmer or the agricultural worker. It was strong, therefore, in London and Bristol, Coventry and Leicester. We are talking of hundreds, rather than thousands, of adherents. Yet it was persistent, and provoked royal vengeance in a later reign.

  William Smith of Leicester was a ‘deformed’ man who became one of the new sectarians and set up a school in the chapel of St John the Baptist next to the leper-house in Leicester. He gave up the eating of flesh or fish; he avoided wine and beer; he walked about barefoot. He also taught himself to read and to write. One evening he and some of his disciples, sitting in a local inn close to the chapel, grew hungry. They had a supply of vegetables, taken from the fields, but they had no fuel with which to cook them. Then William Smith remembered a wooden image of St Katherine that lay in a corner of the chapel. ‘Look, my friends,’ he said, ‘God has provided us fuel; this image will be holy fuel. By hatchet and fire she will suffer a new martyrdom and perhaps, by cruel pains, arrive some time in the kingdom of heaven.’ He took up the hatchet. ‘Let us see if she be a true saint,’ he added, ‘for, if so, she will bleed; if not she will be good for fire to cook with.’ This reflects the true spirit of Lollardism, rejecting the images of saints as nothing but senseless idols. The incident was inconceivably shocking to the ordinary people, however, and Smith’s words were reported to the authorities of the town. He was ordered to walk, barefoot and bare-headed, in a procession from the church of St Mary’s in Leicester; he was to hold an image of St Katherine in his right hand, and kneel at the beginning, middle and end of the procession. The ceremony was to be repeated during the Saturday market of the town.r />
  Yet not all of the new faith were poor or disadvantaged. Sir Laurence of St Martin, Justice of the Peace, sheriff and MP for Wiltshire, attended Easter Mass in the spring of 1381 and received communion; he did not swallow the host, however, but spat it into his hand. He took it home and divided it into three parts; he ate the first part with some oysters, the second part with onions, and swallowed the remaining piece with his wine. His sin was observed and denounced. He was ordered to do public penance on every Friday for the rest of his life; he was to kneel before a stone cross that was carved with the images of his sin. He was also dismissed as sheriff. There had of course always been a strain of unbelief and as early as 1200 the prior of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, suggested that ‘there are many people who do not believe that God exists, nor do they believe that a human soul lives on after the death of the body. They consider that the universe has always been as it is now, and is ruled by chance rather than by providence.’

  Others did not travel so far in heresy. Certain knights and grandees favoured only elements of the new teaching. Some of them attended the preachings of the Lollards, armed with sword and buckler to protect the preacher from the insults of bystanders. These men were not necessarily heretics in any real sense; they were more interested in Wycliffe’s attack upon the clergy and the general wealth of the Church. Some were genuinely devout, however, and took part in that broad movement of lay piety known as devotio moderna which emphasized the inner life of the spirit and the individual’s humble love of God.

  At the beginning of the fifteenth century the convocation, or general assembly, of the Church asked the parliament to announce some action against the Lollards. They were still a small sect, but they appeared to be growing. They were finding an audience among the disaffected, and the spiritual authorities were worried about any possible consequences. So in 1401 an Act was passed against ‘a certain new sect, damnably thinking of the sacraments and usurping the office of preaching’. They were spreading sedition and insurrection. The bishops were granted the power to arrest and imprison any offenders. If they did not renounce their pernicious beliefs, they could in the end be burned ‘in an high place’ before the populace. This is the first time that the stake was appointed as the ultimate penalty for heresy. In the next century the fire would become one of the notable judicial sights of England.