Foundation

by Peter Ackroyd

  A vignette of Henry VI may be included here. On one occasion, in the 1450s, he visited Westminster Abbey in order to mark out the site of his tomb. He ordered a stonemason to scratch with a crowbar the position and dimensions of the vault that he wished to be built in the floor of the abbey. He did not require a monumental tomb; he wanted to rest beneath the quiet stone. As he conferred with the abbot, he leaned on the shoulder of his chamberlain; the king was then only in his thirties, but he was already tired with the demands of the world. There has rarely been a wise king in England, let alone a good one. But it is still possible to concede a certain amount of sympathy to a man who seems to have been wholly unsuitable for the duties of kingship.

  It is often said that the opposing sides in the Wars of the Roses were engaged in an act of mutual destruction, and that the noble families of England were noticeably thinned as a result of the fighting. In fact the pressure of time and circumstance always worked against the survival of any noble house, and it has been calculated that in any period of twenty-five years a quarter of the nobility left no sons to inherit their titles and so lapsed into inconsequence. There must always be a steady flow of ‘new blood’ to keep the governance of the land in good health. The Wars of the Roses did not interrupt what was essentially a continuing process.

  In a larger sense, too, the world went on its own way despite the immediate disturbance of the wars. The fact of conflict of course weakened the body politic, and loosened the ties between the realm and the nobility, but there is no evidence of general desolation or dislocation. Few towns or cities were affected by the disturbances, and only those in the immediate vicinity of the battles would have suffered from the factional struggle. The vast resources of the Church were not touched, and in general the clergy remained as distant observers of the conflict. The law courts at Westminster were still in session and the judges rode on circuit throughout the country. The French chronicler and historian Philippe de Commynes remarked at the time that ‘there are no buildings destroyed or demolished by war, but the calamities and misfortunes of the war fell only upon the soldiers, and especially on the nobility’.

  There is also no sign of economic decline as a result of the wars. By the 1470s there was a resurgence of trade, a trend in which the king himself took an active interest. The author of the Crowland Chronicle states that Edward ‘in person, having equipped ships of burden, laded them with the very finest wools, cloths, tin and other products of his realm, and like a man living by merchandise, exchanged goods for goods …’. The appearance of a merchant king helps to disperse any notion of economic degeneracy. ‘There is no small inn-keeper, however poor and humble he may be,’ an Italian observer wrote, ‘who does not serve his table with silver dishes and drinking cups …’

  In any case the life of a nation is perhaps better compared to a sea than to a pond. Exhaustion and renewal, decay and growth, occur simultaneously. So it was that in 1476 William Caxton established in the almonry of Westminster Abbey the first printing press in England. Ten years later the first water-powered pump was introduced to a coalmine at Finchale near Durham. In 1496 the first blast furnace in England was operating at Buxted in Sussex. This industrial revolution was already provoking complaint. A parliamentary Bill of 1482 declared that hats, bonnets and caps made ‘by men’s strength, that is to say with hands and feet’ were infinitely superior to those ‘fulled and thicked in fulling mills’. At the same time very many humble people were still living on the land in the same conditions as their Saxon ancestors.

  36

  The staple of life

  Among the bare fields and deserted gardens of the derelict Roman villas grew wild garlic and onions. ‘I grow very erect, tall in a bed,’ runs one Anglo-Saxon riddle on the onion, ‘and bring a tear to a maiden’s eye. What am I?’ The essential ingredient on the poorer tables, however, was that derisory ‘mess of pottage’ for which birthrights could be sold. The richer Anglo-Saxons ate wheaten bread, but bread of rye or barley was more common. They also consumed vast quantities of pork, the pigs grown fat on the inexhaustible supplies of acorns and beech-nuts to be found in the woods and forests of the country. The smallholder might also have a few razor-backed pigs on the common land. Venison and poultry were popular among the more wealthy Englishmen. Supplies of fish, among them salmon and herring, were plentiful. Horse-flesh was sometimes eaten. For many centuries large knives and coarse wooden spoons were the extent of the cutlery, the meals often eaten out of communal bowls. Then ‘after the dinner they went to their cups,’ according to one chronicler, ‘to which the English were very much accustomed’. A weak ale, compounded with various spices, was the drink of choice. But the Anglo-Saxons also consumed a drink known as ‘morat’, essentially mulberry juice mingled with honey.

  The diet of the Normans was not very different, since the agriculture of the country was not materially changed by the invasion. The status of the lord, however, was such that he could eat only wheaten bread. When land was granted to him, it had to be capable of growing wheat; soil that could not bear that crop was of little value to him. That is why few Norman settlements were established in the higher and colder grounds of the Pennines, of Cumbria and other northern regions. The Normans were found among the wheat. They made their bread in the form of buns or cakes, often marked with a cross. They particularly enjoyed a form of gingerbread that was known as ‘peppered bread’.

  One difference was evident. They preferred wine to the native ale or mead, and much of it was transported from France. A twelfth-century philosopher, Alexander Neckam, stated that wine should be as clear as the tears of a penitent. He also declared that a good wine should be as sweet-tasting as an almond, as surreptitious as a squirrel, as high-spirited as a roebuck, as strong as a Cistercian monastery, as glittering as a spark of fire, as subtle as the logic of the schools of Paris, as delicate as fine silk, and as cold as crystal. The language of the wine connoisseur has not notably diminished in fancifulness over the centuries.

  Through the medieval period little interest was evinced in what were once known as ‘white meats’, namely cheese and butter and milk. They were associated with the diets of common people, and were therefore to be avoided. Milk, however, was mixed in sweet confections. Olive oil, rather than butter, was used in cooking. Fresh fruit was considered to be unhealthy, and the most common vegetables were scorned except by the poor who considered them to be a kind of free food. The land was so fruitful that, in a good season, it may have been possible for a poor man or a wanderer to survive from the fields and hedges alone. Peas and beans, leeks and cabbages, could also be stolen from the small garden adjoining every cottage. ‘I have no money,’ Piers Plowman complains in the month before harvest. ‘I have a couple of fresh cheeses, a little curds and cream, an oatcake and two loaves of beans and bran baked for the children. I have some parsley and shallots, and plenty of cabbages …’ It is possible, therefore, that the diet of the poor was healthier than that of the rich.

  By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the meat had become highly flavoured with spices such as aniseed and liquorice. The richer families preferred strong and even coarse flavours. It is otherwise difficult to account for the attraction of the grampus and the porpoise even to royal appetites. The ‘sea-calf ’, known in more recent times as the seal, was also a delicacy. The tongue of the whale, another royal dish, was either boiled with peas or roasted. Strongly flavoured birds, such as the peacock or the heron or the bittern, were also on the menu. ‘Powdered salmon’ was salmon sprinkled with salt. The smell of the conger eel was said by one enthusiast to be so wonderful that it would make a dead man sniff.

  The first English cookery book, The Forme of Cury, was written in the late fourteenth century by Richard II’s master cooks – ‘cury’ meaning the dressing of food. A dish of shelled oysters and hare’s flesh must be flavoured with honey. Pork is to be fried and then mixed with saffron and raisins. Pheasant could be mingled with cinnamon and ginger. Spices were not used to disguis
e the taste of less than healthy meat; they were used for their own sake, and were part of the predilection for strong flavours. They were also used to colour the meats and other dishes; indigo turned the food blue, and saffron converted it to yellow; blood and burnt toast crusts provided the red and the black.

  It is instructive that in The Forme of Cury, and in other compilations of recipes, there is seldom any mention of the quantities of the necessary ingredients. Medieval units of measurement are in fact always vague and imprecise. There was no need, or desire, for exactness. It was not a ‘scientific’ age. So gross underestimates and overestimates, at least by the standards of modern accuracy, were likely to be made. The monks of Ely believed that their isle measured 7 miles by 4 miles (11.2 by 6.4 kilometres), whereas in fact it had the dimensions of 12 miles by 10 miles (19.3 by 16 kilometres). It was declared, in the reign of Edward III, that there were 40,000 parishes in England; there were in fact fewer than 9,000, a huge error in one of the most basic measurements of the country. When we read in the sources that ‘innumerable miracles’ were attested at a site of pilgrimage, or that the king led an army of ‘fifty thousand men’, we may be given leave to doubt the claims.

  Space and time were fluctuating and essentially indefinable. An acre of land (0.4 hectares) could be measured in three different ways. Various time systems, such as the regnal year or the papal year or the liturgical year, could be chosen. The charters and memoranda of the period were, before the thirteenth century, largely undated; a bond might give the year of transaction as ‘after the espousal of the king of England’s son and the king’s daughter’ or ‘after Gilbert Foliot was received into the bishopric of London’ which we know to have been 1163. Many people were unsure of their exact age; one old warrior, John de Sully, claimed to be 105 and to have fought at the battle of Najera in 1367. If that is correct, then he had carried arms at the age of eighty-seven. The father of another old soldier, John de Thirwell, was reported to have died at the age of 145. The hour of the day was measured by the shadows cast by the sun; clocks were not introduced until the fifteenth century, but they were heavy, cumbersome and not necessarily precise. The time measured by the church bell was that of the canonical day from prime to vespers. And everyone knew that a yard was the length of the king’s arm. What else could it be?

  37

  The king of spring

  Edward IV was at last king without rival; the birth of a son to the queen in sanctuary at Westminster, followed soon after by that of another infant boy, suggested that the line of York might stretch onward indefinitely. But he had two brothers – George, duke of Clarence and Richard, duke of Gloucester – who at some later date might make their own claims for supremacy.

  The younger brother, Gloucester, was rewarded for his loyalty during the commotions of the previous years. From the autumn of 1469 he was constable of England, and led his own supporters in the king’s battles against the rebels; he had also sailed with Edward in flight from King’s Lynn to Holland and, at the climactic battle of Tewkesbury, he had led the vanguard of Edward’s army. For services rendered, therefore, in the spring of 1471 he was made Great Chamberlain of England; this was the position once held by Warwick. Gloucester was also granted much of Warwick’s territory in the north of England and, from this time forward, he became the champion and warlord of the northern territories with his base in the great castle of Middleham in North Yorkshire. He was given the hand of Lady Anne Neville, Warwick’s younger daughter, who had been married to the unhappy Prince Edward; the fifteen-year-old girl was now in alliance with the man who had helped to destroy her family, but it was of course more prudent to marry one of the victors. Romance was rarely to be found in the royal estate.

  The older of the two brothers, Clarence, was the greater threat or perhaps just the greater nuisance. He had already proved himself to be disloyal to the king, in his temporary alliance with Warwick and Margaret, and now he turned furiously against his younger brother. He wanted to be Great Chamberlain; he wanted the Warwick lands of the north; he also wanted the lands owned by Lady Anne Neville herself. The brothers challenged one another in a set debate before the royal council, and both were applauded for their eloquence. Clarence, however, emerged as the temporary victor; he was given Warwick’s estates in the midlands, as well as the title of Great Chamberlain. Yet Gloucester still retained his hold over the north.

  In the period after his victory Edward prosecuted his erstwhile enemies with great dispatch. It was said that the rich were hanged by their purses and the poor were hanged by their necks, but in truth the king was interested in taking money rather than lives. The cities that had opposed him, such as Hull and Coventry, were deprived of their liberties and then fined for their restoration; individual magnates who had supported Margaret or Warwick were also penalized. The records of the parliament house are filled with reports of taxes, acts of settlement, attainders and forced contributions to the king’s purse which were known without a trace of irony as ‘benevolences’. Yet he could be generous as well as severe; many former foes were taken back ‘into the king’s pardon’ and prominent Lancastrian clerics such as John Morton entered his service. Morton later became bishop of Ely and archbishop of Canterbury.

  The great continental problem remained with Louis XI of France. The French king had aided Warwick and abetted Margaret of Anjou, in their claims to the control of the English throne, and he was still encouraging the rebel Lancastrians who sheltered in his dominion. He represented a threat that had to be rebuffed. But if Edward had the will, he did not necessarily have the means. He entered negotiations with the neighbours of France, the dukes of Brittany and Burgundy, on a proposal for a triple invasion. These two duchies were subjected by feudal ties to France, but were in practice independent. Edward succeeded, at least, with Charles the Bold of Burgundy.

  On 4 July 1475 a large force of English troops sailed for Calais from Dover, prepared to meet up with the Burgundian forces. Edward was accompanied by the majority of the nobility, together with 15,000 men. He carried with him 779 stone cannon balls and more than 10,000 sheaves of arrows; he also transported cloth of gold, for sumptuous display, and ordered the building of a small house made of wood and covered with leather which he could use on the battlefield. It was a portable royal chamber.

  Charles the Bold did not live up to his name, however, and arrived at the garrison town with only a few supporters. He had left most of his men engaged in the siege of a town in Flanders. Edward, apparently moved to great fury, almost immediately began talks with Louis XI in order to broker some kind of peace. The French king was eager to oblige, not wishing for the distraction of foreign soldiers on his soil, and a month later the two kings met on a bridge at Picquigny near Amiens.

  A wooden barrier had been placed in the middle of the bridge, to ensure against any surprise attack, and the soldiers of both sovereigns were massed on either side. An impersonator, wearing the clothes of the French king, walked beside Louis. Three of Edward’s retinue were dressed in the same cloth of gold as their sovereign. It was a precaution. Edward approached the barrier, raised his hat and bowed low to the ground; Louis reciprocated with an equally elaborate gesture. ‘My lord, my cousin,’ Louis said, ‘you are very welcome. There is nobody in the world whom I would want to meet more than you’. Edward replied in very good French.

  A solemn treaty was signed in which Louis agreed to pay the English king the large sum of 75,000 crowns as well as an annual pension of 50,000 gold coins on condition that English troops left the country. Satisfied by what amounted to a bribe, Edward returned to England. It was also agreed that his eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, should marry the French king’s eldest son. In the usual manner of these arranged royal marriages, the proposal came to nothing.

  Edward returned richer if not exactly more glorious. He had said in advance of the expedition that he wished to regain English possessions in France and even to advance himself upon the French throne. This was the rhetoric of the period,
and was not necessarily believed. In any case the ambitions were misplaced. But if Edward had sailed with every intention of extorting a bribe from the French king, his mission had been admirably successful. Some evidence for this comes from a French historian who was with the court of Louis XI at the time. Philippe de Commynes states that Edward had begun to negotiate with Louis even before he left Dover. Commynes then goes on to speculate that Edward wanted to keep for himself all the money he had raised in England for the royal expedition.

  In that event he had been engaged in an act of dissimulation on a very large scale; in the months before the planned invasion, the patent rolls reveal the combined efforts of ‘carpenters, joiners, stonecutters, smiths, plumbers, shipwrights, coopers, sawyers, fletchers, chariot-men, horse-harness men and other workmen’ in preparation for war. The truth may be that the English king was ready for a range of different results. He was simply waiting on events, to see what chance or fortune would throw in his way on the principle that when nothing is ventured nothing is gained. The historical record is made up of unintended consequences and unexpected turns of fate.

  Edward did not publish all of the principles of the treaty made at Picquigny; but it soon became clear to the parliament house and the people of England that, as a result of the abortive French expedition, the king had been made richer and they had been rendered poorer. Yet Edward now was too strong to withstand.

  He soon deployed that strength against his own brother. Clarence had effectively become ungovernable. According to the Crowland Chronicle, the most reliable source of information for the period, he ‘now seemed more and more to be withdrawing from the king’s presence, hardly uttering a word in council, not eating and drinking in the king’s residence’. He had some cause for disaffection. On the death of his wife, after childbirth, it was suggested that he should marry the daughter of Charles of Burgundy; Edward refused to countenance such a union, because with the support of Burgundy, Clarence would become too powerful. For similar reasons Edward would not permit Clarence to marry the sister of the king of Scotland.