Foundation

by Peter Ackroyd

  Violent struggles also took place between the students and the townspeople. A skirmish at Swyndlestock Tavern, in the centre of Oxford, led to a bloody affray in 1354. The landlord’s friends rang the bell of the church of St Martin, the signal to alert the people of the town. A crowd gathered and assaulted the scholars with various weapons, whereupon the chancellor of the university rang the rival bell of the university church of St Mary. The scholars, alerted, seized their bows and arrows; a pitched battle between the two factions lasted until night fell. On the following day the townspeople sent eighty armed men into the parish of St Giles, where many of the scholars lodged; they shot and killed some of them, when once again the university bell was rung and a large assembly of Oxford pupils set upon the townspeople with their bows and arrows. But they were outnumbered. 2,000 people of the town advanced behind a black flag, crying out ‘Slay! Slay!’ or ‘Havoc! Havoc!’ or ‘Smite hard, give good knocks!’ These were the war cries of the medieval period. A general carnage ensued, with many deaths. All the scholars of Oxford seem to have fled, leaving the university empty for a while.

  Less violent diversions can also be cited. An inspection of the pupils of Magdalen College, Oxford, in the very early years of the sixteenth century, revealed that ‘Stokes was unchaste with the wife of a tailor … Stokysley baptised a cat and practised witchcraft … Gregory climbed the great gate by the tower and brought a Stranger into College … Pots and cups are very seldom washed but are kept in such a dirty state that one shudders to drink out of them … Kyftyll played cards with the butler at Christmas time for money.’ Other students were accused of keeping as pets a ferret, a sparrowhawk and a weasel.

  It is perhaps not surprising that, in a society of very young men, casual and sporadic violence was common. The students entered the university at an age between fourteen and seventeen, where they embarked upon a course of study that lasted for seven years. Grammar, rhetoric and dialectic were taught in the first three years; these disciplines were followed by arithmetic, astronomy, music and geometry. The students attended lectures and tutorials, but they also disputed among themselves in formal debates. Disputation was an important aspect of medieval life in every sphere. The examinations themselves were entirely oral and were prolonged for four days. The successful candidate would then be given the title of Master of Arts. The more learned moved on to the study of theology; that pursuit took another sixteen or seventeen years, more or less consigning its devotees to an academic life.

  The learning promulgated in Oxford and Cambridge was not all of a scholastic kind. More informal schools, established in the two towns to take advantage of their general reputation, taught lessons in conveyancing, accountancy and commercial law; these were frequented by the sons of the greater farmers and landowners, and by the administrators of such estates, to keep abreast of the ever more complex world of property ownership and property speculation. A great enthusiasm for knowledge of a practical nature can be observed in this period.

  The appetite for education was in any case instinctive, the natural child of emulation and ambition in an expanding world. By the beginning of the thirteenth century every town had its own school.

  I would my master were an hare,

  And all his books were hounds,

  And I myself a jolly hunter:

  To blow my horn I would not spare!

  If he were dead, I would not care.

  So wrote the author of a fifteenth-century poem, ‘The Birched Schoolboy’. The schoolmaster sat on a large chair, often with a book in his lap, while the boys were grouped on simple benches around him. He would dictate the rules of Latin grammar, for example, while the boys would scribble them on wax tablets or chant them in unison. Schooling began at six in the morning and, with appropriate breaks, concluded at six in the evening. Another verse describes the life of the boy out of the schoolroom. When he was young, John Lydgate

  Ran into gardens, apples there I stole,

  To gather fruits I spared not hedge nor wall,

  To pluck grapes from other men’s vines

  I was more ready than to say my matins,

  My lust was to scorn folk and jape,

  To scoff and mock like a wanton ape.

  In a world of much casual and spontaneous violence the beating of children was customary and familiar. Agnes Paston beat her daughter, Elizabeth, ‘once in a week or twice, and sometimes twice in one day, and her head broken in two or three places’. Elizabeth herself was twenty years old at the time. Agnes Paston also ordered her son’s schoolmaster to ‘truly belash him’ if he was disobedient. The sentiment would be expected from a loving mother. It was advised that a child should be beaten until he or she admitted guilt and cried for mercy. But childhood was not simply a world of whips and blows. Many educational manuals espoused the cause of gentleness mixed with firmness; excessive punishment was generally denounced.

  Thomas More, who was born in 1478, believed that three out of every five of the English people could read; that might be an overestimate, and he might only have been considering the men and women of London, but it is testimony to the growing literacy of the country. The development of the unfamiliar medium of printing, in the latter decades of the fifteenth century, created a new audience with new skills. This was the age in which the poster and the handbill came into use and in which some of the larger towns had libraries. The Guildhall Library, established in 1423, exists still. Four new grammar schools were established in London in the space of one year. In the last decades of the fifteenth century free schools were endowed at Hull, Rotherham, Stockport, Macclesfield and Manchester.

  Schoolboys were not allowed to dice or to use bows and arrows on the premises; they were, however, given time and opportunity to engage in the more suitable sport of cock-fighting. ‘Wehee!’ was the cry of liberation from the schoolroom. It was an age of ‘leaping about’, of running and of wrestling. Birds were snared or brought down with sling and stone. Bede recalls that in his youth he had engaged in a primitive form of horse-racing.

  The medieval schoolboy played croquet, football, skittles, marbles. Tennis was played against a wall rather than across a net, with the palm of the hand rather than a racket; rackets were not introduced until the end of the fifteenth century. ‘Cambuc’ was a form of golf, with a curved stick known as a ‘bandy’. Skating, with skates made out of bone, was popular. A game known as ‘tables’ resembled backgammon. Chess was common and there were circular chessboards; stray chess pieces have been excavated from medieval dwellings. Card games were not introduced until the middle of the fifteenth century. Bowmanship was important; in ‘penny-prick’ an arrow was fired at a hanging penny coin. Dice were very frequent. ‘You shall have a throw,’ one schoolboy tells another in a schoolbook of the 1420s, ‘for a button of your wristlet.’ Play is as old, and as ever renewed, as the world.

  35

  The lion and the lamb

  The new king, Edward IV, was according to Thomas More ‘a goodly personage, and very princely to behold … of visage lovely, of body mighty, strong and cleanly made’. A contemporary chronicler, Dominic Mancini, writing just after Edward’s death, gave a more ambiguous account. ‘Edward was of a gentle nature and cheerful aspect; nevertheless should he assume an angry countenance he could appear very terrible to beholders.’ Of course it was one of the duties of a king to appear very terrible, especially one who had succeeded Henry VI; the previous king had been more lamb than lion. Mancini went on to report that ‘he was easy of access to his friends and to others, even the least notable. Frequently he called to his side complete strangers, when he thought that they had come with the intent of addressing or beholding him more closely.’ Come, he might have said. Look at me. Yes. I am your king. ‘He was wont to show himself to those who wished to watch him, and he seized any opportunity … of revealing his fine stature more protractedly and more evidently to onlookers.’ He had a voracious appetite and, like many gourmands, he often vomited in order that he might eat again. In tim
e this affected his girth; More commented that in his later years he became ‘somewhat corpulent and boorly, and nevertheless not uncomely’.

  In his youth his pride was touched with vanity, and like many previous monarchs he indulged in the theatrical and spectacular aspects of kingship. In the first year of his reign the keeper of the great wardrobe spent a little over £4,784 on clothes and furs for the king’s person, an extraordinary sum when the average annual wage of a labourer was approximately £6. He draped himself in cloth of gold and crimson velvet, in tawny silk and in green satin. He owned hundreds of pairs of shoes and slippers, hats and bonnets; he wore amethysts and sapphires and rubies in abundance. They were talismans as well as jewels. The amethyst gave hardiness and manhood; the sapphire kept the limbs of the body whole; if poison or venom were brought into the presence of the ruby it became moist and began to sweat. Edward possessed a toothpick made of gold, garnished with a diamond, a ruby and a pearl.

  It was not just a matter of personal aggrandizement, although of course that played a large part in the acquisition of wealth. One of the purposes of becoming king was to become the richest person in the land. But it was also a way of asserting the wealth and status of the kingdom; it was a display of national power. So self-love, and self-aggrandizement, can be construed as devotion to duty.

  Of course that kingdom was still divided or, at the least, unstable. The survival of Henry and his son was a serious embarrassment to the new monarchy, especially since the Lancastrian dynasty had many loyal followers in the west as well as the midlands of the country. Edward had no power at all in the far north, where the old king was just over the border in Scotland. The largest part of Wales supported Henry, who also commanded more supporters among the magnates of the country. Thirty-seven noble families had fought for him and with him; only three of those went over to Edward’s side.

  So the new king had to shore up his defences, as far as that was possible, partly in order to prevent the French from taking advantage of any internal confusion. He brought many previous Lancastrian supporters under the cover of his good lordship, principally by granting them territory; he was forced to trust, and to favour, those who had offended against him. Where the Lancastrians could not be reconciled, they were arrested or eliminated. The earl of Oxford and his son, for example, were beheaded at Tower Hill on charges of treason.

  A commission of judges proceeded through twenty-five shires and eight cities in order to pursue political malcontents. No great set-piece battles were being fought but, in the first two years of his reign, there was probably more fighting than in any other period of the war; in 1461 he took under his control the estates of 113 enemies. This was the territory granted to his supporters. In that year he also created seven new barons.

  The king then found it convenient to create a foreign crisis; it helped him to raise money for his own purposes and to unite his subjects in common enmity. In the spring of 1462 he claimed that the new king of France, Louis XI, was set to destroy ‘the people, the name, the tongue and the blood English of this our said realm’. Edward can be considered the first English king who eschewed France altogether; he had no French possessions to defend, other than the garrison town of Calais, and was truly king of England only.

  In the following year the exchequer was asked to provide the requisite funds to raise an army and a fleet against his manifold enemies at home and abroad. It was supposed that the king would march against the Lancastrian supporters in Northumberland and elsewhere, or that he would invade Scotland; in the event, none of this came to pass. He did not lead his troops into battle. ‘What a wretched outcome,’ one fifteenth-century chronicler reported, ‘shame and confusion!’ Yet it would be wrong to consider Edward as an inactive king. He arranged truces both with France and with Scotland. He took his court to York, and from there he supervised the slow domination of the northern shires.

  From the beginning Edward proved himself to be a strong king; he was an expert administrator and had concluded that the survival of his throne depended upon financial and political stability. In an age of personal kingship this was necessarily a very heavy burden on the monarch, whose presence was required everywhere and whose authority had to be imposed directly. He kept a close scrutiny on commerce and on his customs revenues; he summoned members of the London guilds in order to guide or harangue them. Thousands of petitions were delivered to him every year. It was said that he knew ‘the names and estates’ of nearly all the people ‘dispersed throughout the shires of this kingdom’, even those of mere gentlemen. A king who had won his throne by force could not be aloof or detached; he had to remain at the centre of human affairs. He needed goodwill as well as obedience. That is why Dominic Mancini described him as being ‘easy of access’. It has been said that Edward began the movement towards the ‘centralized monarchy’ that characterized the Tudor period; but in truth he had little choice in the matter. It was not a bureaucratic or administrative decision; it was personal instinct.

  He had an interest in the administration of justice, too, and in the first fifteen years of his reign he travelled all over the kingdom for his judicial visitations. In the first five months of 1464, for example, he attended the courts at Coventry and Worcester, Gloucester and Cambridge and Maidstone. Several reasons can be adduced for this activity. Pre-eminent among them was his effort to check or punish violence between the noble families; he had a personal interest in preventing riot or disorder that might threaten the security of the various counties. He intervened in a struggle between the Greys and the Vernons of Derbyshire, for example, and closely interviewed the retainers of both sides. He made much use of the commission known as ‘oyer et terminer’, designed to hear and determine felonies or misdemeanours in an expeditious manner. It was composed of his own men, from the household or from the court, and of local magnates who could not be easily coerced.

  The commissioners were not always successful, however, in summoning witnesses. The senior knights of Herefordshire confessed to them that ‘they dare not present nor say the truth of the defaults before rehearsed, for dread of murdering, and to be mischieved in their own houses, considering the great number of the said misdoers …’. In the early years of Edward’s reign, when the final outcome of the struggle between the Yorkists and Lancastrians was still in doubt, private violence had by no means abated.

  The king’s own legal practice, however, was far from perfect. He regularly interfered with the process of the courts to ensure favourable judgments in the interests of his most powerful supporters. He never prosecuted the retainers of those men upon whose loyalty he relied. This was of course not an unusual procedure for any king, whose rule relied more upon realpolitik than any judicial principle. Edward also had a vested interest in efficient or at least swift justice, since the revenues of the courts greatly augmented his income.

  Another aspect of his character can be noted. One contemporary chronicler remarked that he had a liking for ‘convivial company, vanity, debauchery, extravagance and sensual enjoyment’. These do not seem to be mortal offences in any king but, rather, the proper setting for the projection of authority and sovereignty. In the next sentence, after all, the chronicler goes on to praise the king’s acute memory and attention to detail. Yet Edward made one decision in his private affairs that had more serious consequences. In the spring of 1464 he secretly united himself with a commoner in a marriage that emphasized his passion rather than his judgment. Elizabeth Woodville was a widow with two children; and, unlike most royal brides, she was English. She was not altogether common, however, since her father was a knight and her mother a widowed duchess. It was reported that, having decided that she would be a queen rather than a royal mistress, she had resisted the king’s advances. Edward was known to be libidinous and to have had many sexual liaisons, but it seems that Elizabeth was the first to have refused him. A rumour spread through the courts of Europe that in desperation he had even put a knife against her throat. Yet she held out, to her ultimate sati
sfaction.

  The king’s choice was a cause of some dismay to those who believed that a king should only marry someone of royal blood. The fact that he married her in secret, slipping away from his courtiers on the first day of May 1464 with the pretence of going hunting, suggests that he himself knew that he had married beneath his rank. It was also believed preferable to marry a virgin. A newsletter from Bruges in the autumn of 1464 observed that ‘the greater part of the lords and the people in general seem very much dissatisfied at this and, for the sake of finding means to annul it, all the nobles are holding great consultations in the town of Reading where the king is’. Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, had already begun negotiations with the French king on the matter of Edward’s marriage to Louis XI’s sister-in-law. Those plans were now in disarray. The ‘consultations’ of the lords, however, were meaningless. As a friend of Warwick remarked, ‘we must be patient despite ourselves’. On 29 September 1464, Warwick and the duke of Clarence, the king’s younger brother, escorted Elizabeth Woodville into the chapel of Reading Abbey where she was honoured by the assembled company as their lawful queen.

  In the following summer Henry VI was captured; since the defeat at Towton he had retreated to Scotland and to the various loyalist castles of northern England. He was effectively a king in hiding, and such was his invisibility that Edward was not sure in which county he was being concealed. Margaret, in the meantime, had taken refuge on her father’s lands in Anjou. The old king was seen at a dinner given by his supporters in Ribblesdale; he fled the area, but was betrayed by a monk. He was eventually caught in a wood known as Clitherwood, just on the border of Lancashire, and taken back to London on horseback with his legs tied to the stirrups; it is reported that he wore a straw hat, and was pelted with rubbish by some abusive citizens. He remained in the Tower for the next five years, with a small party of courtiers enlisted to serve the prisoner known only as Henry of Windsor.