Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present

by Lawrence James

  On Warwick’s calf is the Order of the Garter, a token that he was one of an exclusive knot of peers and knights who enjoyed special royal favour. It had been founded in 1348 by Edward III as part of his self-conscious promotion of the Arthurian cult, contrived to raise the prestige of the monarchy and signal to the world that Camelot had been restored. The order was dedicated to St George and confined to twenty-six distinguished lords and knights each of whom was ‘un gentil homme de sang et chevalier sans reproche’ (‘a gentleman of lineage and a knight beyond reproach’). All were bound by the Order’s motto Honi soyt qui mal y pense (‘Shame to him who thinks ill of it’), which was a coded warning against perfidy and faction. The Earls of Arundel and Huntingdon, who had objected to royal policies some years before, were not invited to join. Knights of the Garter were to keep faith with each other and their King. Not that Edward III was likely to provoke unrest among the nobility; his French wars were enriching them and his tournaments gave them the chance to add lustre to honour won on the battlefield.

  Jousts were the theatre of chivalry and propaganda for the social and political order. One fifteenth-century tournament opened with the declaration that it was a celebration of ‘Chevellerie . . . by which our mother Holy Church is defended, kings and princes served and countries kept and maintained in justice and peace’.7 This assertion justified the ascendancy of the entire knightly order and the aristocracy which stood at its pinnacle. Its wealth and mystique are conveyed by the spectacle of knights in burnished armour with jewelled accoutrements riding massive caparisoned and armoured warhorses and attended by squires and pages. Such wonderful sights and the thrilling mock combats supplemented the iconography of the Warwick chapel.

  Popular, secular romances taught knights and noblemen how to behave. This literature proliferated after 1300 and was widely read for diversion and instruction. Scenarios encompassed fantasy with fairy tales and magic (like those of the Knight of the Swan) and familiar reality with temperamental clashes within families, sibling jealousies, forced marriages, kidnapped wards, sexual desire and profitable marriages. As in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, there were battles, and prolix descriptions of armour, clothing, jewellery and the menus of feasts.

  Readers were constantly reminded of chivalric propriety and custom: in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, which was first published in 1485, when Gawain first meets Arthur, the King promises to ‘do unto you all the worship that I may, for I must by reason you are my nephew, my sister’s son’. Family obligations mattered and without doubt Warwick would have behaved in a similar fashion to any of his kinsmen and women. He would also have appreciated how fictional knights accumulated honour through valour, uprightness and the daily exercise of such knightly virtues as ‘mesure’ (inward restraint and moderation), generosity and courtesy.

  The perfect knight was also a creature of aesthetic sensibility. According to the literary chivalric ideal, he was a fearless warrior distinguished by his taste and creative accomplishments. He lived surrounded by objects of beauty: tapestries, intricate gold and silverware, jewellery and illuminated books filled his home. He commissioned the building of castles and churches and the objects which adorned them.

  Noblemen practised as well as patronised the arts. Chaucer’s squire ‘could make songs and poems and recite’ as well as dance, draw and write. This virtuoso would have been welcomed in any noble household. Open-handed hospitality was a chivalric virtue and it was incumbent upon a host to offer sophisticated entertainment to his guests. ‘A dalliance of damsels’ who read from chivalric romances diverted the guests of Sir John Berkeley, a Leicestershire knight who died in 1398.8 Visitors to Wressle Castle in Yorkshire in the early sixteenth century were treated to ‘interludes’, religious and secular plays and concerts performed by the Earl of Northumberland’s musicians and choristers.9

  Providing such entertainment was a sign that a host possessed that equipoise between refinement and bravado which was so prized. Berkeley had acquired it: he had won honour on the battlefields of France, was a celebrated huntsman and maintained a cultured household. For the aristocracy, there was never any incompatibility between cultivation of the body and the mind and senses. Moreover, and this is too often forgotten, noblemen had to be literate in order to read the accounts and legal documents involved in the running of their estates.

  Berkeley’s distant cousin Thomas (‘the Magnificent’), fifth Lord Berkeley, simultaneously raised pheasants, hunted, commissioned illuminated books, founded a grammar school and was the patron of the Cornish scholar, John Trevisa. He lived with his patron in Berkeley Castle in the Vale of Gloucester, where he translated theological texts into English and, at Lord Berkeley’s insistence, injected them with anti-clerical opinions.10

  After his wife’s death in 1392, Berkeley ordered a finely executed brass from a London tombmaker. It remains in Wotton-under-Edge church and its now lost inscription contained the touching lines:

  In youth our parents joined our hands, our selves, our hearts,

  This tomb our bodies have, the heavens our better parts.11

  This monument must have deeply impressed Berkeley’s neighbours, for two (a knight and a wool exporter) chose the same workshop for their brasses which equalled his in scale and quality.12 A cultural trend was already underway: the aristocracy dictated patterns of taste which those below were eager to imitate, particularly if they were on the way up in society. What pleased the eye of Lord Berkeley was, for that reason alone, an object of desire.

  Berkeley was one of a growing number of peers with literary and intellectual interests. Although historically remembered as a political bruiser, William de la Pole, first Duke of Suffolk, wrote love poetry in French and English and his library contained French romantic fiction, a Latin treatise on statecrafts and English religious handbooks.13 Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, translated various French works into English, some of which were printed by his protégé, William Caxton. Printing first came into England by way of aristocratic patronage.

  Architecture has always been about power. Medieval cathedrals and castles were blatant statements of the spiritual supremacy of the Church and the temporal supremacy of the Crown and the aristocracy. The sheer size and the richness of the ornamentation of these buildings demanded awe and supplication from all who approached them. All required onlookers to look upwards.

  Castles were first built in the decades after the Norman Conquest, and were like nails driven into the countryside: they were where knights and barons lived and they were also places of refuge and defence. The magnate could defy the world from his castle and to prise him out of it required a time-consuming and expensive siege. By the late fourteenth century, the growing efficiency of artillery had made the castle militarily redundant. But it kept its grip on the imagination of the aristocracy. Massive gateways, high towers and battlements were the prime ingredients of the aesthetics of power, and so peers continued to build castles until the early sixteenth century.

  New styles and new materials were applied to an old concept by Ralph, Lord Cromwell, who demolished his ancestors’ defensive castle at Tattershall in Lincolnshire and began building a new and very different one in 1434. The second Tattershall castle was a four-storey tower block built in brick with airy rooms lit by broad windows and heated by massive fireplaces with painted heraldic stonework. Cromwell’s badge of a tasselled purse was prominent and reminded visitors that he was Treasurer of England, one of the highest offices in the state. Valence tapestries hung on the walls, adding to the impression of colour and sumptuousness. A fastidious peer who enjoyed comfort, Cromwell had a fireplace in his bedroom and a private lavatory, and he and his wife slept in a four-poster bed hung with cloth of gold and blue damask.14

  When completed and furnished, Tattershall was one of the first examples of the architecture of pure prestige. Its turrets and crenellations were misleading: this was not a stronghold, but an edifice that puffed Cromwell as a rich aristocrat with local and national power. Si
milar declarations of social and political eminence would be made on an even grander scale by aristocratic houses over the next four hundred years.

  Cromwell’s pride and egotism were tempered by that chilling sense of sinfulness which the Church insisted haunted everyone, whatever their rank. Without direct heirs to inherit his fortune, he diverted large swathes of his estates for the construction of a collegiate church in which priests and choristers would sing masses for his soul in perpetuity. Charity accelerated the soul’s ascent heavenwards and so Cromwell endowed almshouses for the infirm poor. A free grammar school was attached to the college and Cromwell funded scholarships to Cambridge for its brightest pupils. Ignorance was evil: it hindered Christians from understanding the scriptures and reduced the flow of clever young clerks into the Church and those professions and trades for which literacy was essential. The advancement of learning was a social and religious duty for all noblemen.

  What does the still impressive ensemble of castle and church say about the nature of aristocratic taste and culture? Cromwell was certainly vain, anxious about his salvation, aware of his obligations to society and driven by a strong sense of dynastic pride. He was the last and most illustrious member of a line which deserved a permanent memorial to command the respect and wonderment of posterity. Memory mattered to all noblemen, which was why Richard Beauchamp allocated several thousand pounds to his tomb and chapel at Warwick.

  Cromwell got at Tattershall what he and other aristocrats wanted: an imposing church in which the arrangement of space, light and colour conveyed a sense of holiness, and prompted admiration for the piety of the man who had footed the bill. As for the overall design, this was dictated by the prevailing Perpendicular style, which lent itself to spectacular displays of stained glass. Large windows were filled with images of Bible stories, legends of the saints and representations of the sacraments and the creed. Heraldry told the onlooker who had paid for this religious instruction. Tattershall’s now sadly depleted glass was purchased by the foot: images of the Seven Sacraments cost eighteen pence, the Magnificat fourteen pence.15 Individual designs were left to the glaziers, who relied on stereotypes from pattern books. Here, as in the overall design of a church, the aristocratic patron was happy with conservative convention.

  Meticulous care was taken for the preservation of memory. Its constituents were honour, ancestry and devotion to chivalry. All were rendered on tombs with effigies of the deceased in stone, brass and the less durable wood, which fell out of fashion in the early fourteenth century. These tombs were striking objects in churches and cathedrals: effigies were gilded and painted and brasses burnished and inlaid with enamels. Funeral iconography proclaimed the chivalric virtues. Knights appeared as young, strong men wearing the most up-to-date armour with swords hung at their hips and spurs on their heels. At their feet were lions, symbolising courage, or hounds, symbolising loyalty. Their wives too were young, elegantly dressed in the most fashionable gowns and with elaborate and often jewelled headdresses.

  Patrons wanted images which proclaimed status, and artists responded. James Reames, a London marbler with a string of aristocratic and noble patrons, knew exactly what they desired and provided it. In 1466 he agreed to make a brass for Richard Willoughby from Wollaton near Nottingham. He had asked for ‘the image of a man whole armed except the head in the best harness [i.e. armour]’ with his head on helm with the Willoughby crest of an owl and standing on the Willoughby badge of a whelk. His wife was to be portrayed ‘attired in the best with a little dog with bells about its neck at her feet’. A design had already been prepared and there were detailed instructions as to the shields of arms on the tomb.16 This rare contract confirms all the iconographic evidence as to the conventional features of honourable memory. Physical verisimilitude was ignored: the armoured figure of Willoughby was a standard pattern which Reames used for other clients. What mattered was the inference of earthly perfection, the inscription and, of course, the heraldry.

  An idiosyncrasy appears on the effigy of an unknown, early fourteenth-century knight at Pershore in Worcestershire: he holds a hunting horn in his hand. It was a symbol which had a triple significance. Hunting was the exclusive pleasure of knights and lords, who had legal rights of ownership over the beasts, birds and fish which inhabited their parks, woodlands and ponds. This allowed them to eat venison, hares, rabbits and wildfowl, delicacies forbidden to lesser men and women. The right to kill and consume game set knights and lords apart from other men, a distinction they were determined to uphold.

  Wild animals, birds and fish were a very vulnerable form of property which was protected by a sheaf of Game Laws passed by Parliament from the mid-fourteenth century onwards. This legislation was a blatant case of the nobility’s selfishness and was deeply resented by peasant farmers and labourers, who were banned from snaring rabbits and hares. Poachers were criminals and were punished for a form of theft that challenged the social dispensation and sometimes was a satisfying revenge of ‘us’ against ‘them’. Revealingly, in 1451 a large gang of yeoman farmers and labourers calling themselves ‘servants of the queen of the fairies’ and disguised by false beards and blackened faces broke into the first Duke of Buckingham’s deer park at Penshurst in Kent. They were good archers and they shot and carried off eighty-two deer. This was profitable vengeance on a peer who had been prominent in the judicial retribution after Jack Cade’s rebellion and had had a part in hanging many Kentishmen.17

  Hunting was a pastime which filled the abundant spare time of the nobility and enhanced individual status. The accomplished huntsman basked in the admiration of his peers, and in the private satisfaction of knowing that he had acquired in the chase that nerve, hardiness and coordination of mind, eye and muscle that were invaluable on the battlefield. Hunting prepared a martial elite for the rigours of war, and for this reason alone the right to pursue game had to be the monopoly of knights and noblemen.

  The chase also stimulated all the senses. A fourteenth-century narrative of a young knight setting out one May morning in search of deer conveys the exhilaration and thrills of hunting. He watches the sun rising over the mist, there is dew on the daisies and primroses. Cuckoos, thrushes and wood pigeons are singing, ‘each fowl in that woodland more joyous than the other’. The huntsman sees a high-antlered deer in a glade and ‘stalked [it] full stilly no sticks to break’. At last he is within range and a single arrow slays the beast, which the hunter then cuts up in the correct manner.18 Art mirrored reality; this huntsman’s historic contemporary, the second Lord Berkeley, would spend nights in the open with his brother, waiting for daybreak and the chance to take deer, hares and foxes.19

  Hunting acquired its own arcane rituals and mystique. The knowledge and practice of these were as important in distinguishing men and women of noble blood as their coats of arms. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, an encyclopedic account of the lore of hunting and fishing was compiled by Dame Juliana de Berners, a knight’s daughter. It was printed in 1496 with the title The Boke of St Albans and proved immensely popular. Like so many textbooks it froze contemporary practice and made it permanent.

  Dame Juliana has not received the attention she deserves. Her veterinary advice to the huntsman, the falconer and the angler gives an insight into contemporary aristocratic attitudes, not least because the hierarchies of the human and animal world run parallel. The hunter’s quarry possessed admirable human qualities: the salmon was a ‘gentle’ fish and the bream was ‘noble’. Like their owners, dogs who scented and chased game were part of a stratified hierarchy. There were aristocratic, thoroughbred alants (forerunners of the modern mastiffs) and far, far below them were mongrels, who were tainted by their ‘churlish nature and ugly shape’. The rules of precedent dictated the ownership of falcons and hawks. As sovereign of all raptors, the gyr falcon could be flown only by a king, the peregrine was reserved for earls, merlins were for ladies and at the base of the avine ladder there was ‘a kestrel for a knave [i.e. servant]’.

/>   Dame Juliana laid down the correct terminology to be used in hunting. References to a ‘bevy of quails’ or a ‘deceit of lapwings’ (these and other of her collective nouns have passed into the language) identified the speaker as a true cognoscente and, therefore, of gentle blood. The dexterity with which a nobleman butchered the carcass of a deer revealed additional proof of rank and ancestry. He took the best meat for his own table, the liver and kidneys went to his huntsman and his dogs consumed the entrails.

  Legend posing as history, Christian doctrine and artistic conventions had been enlisted to underpin and perpetuate the ascendancy of aristocrats. All contributed to the cult of chivalry, which had transformed a purely martial elite into one which convinced itself and the rest of the world that it had hereditary virtue. This was innate and required careful cultivation, usually within the household of a knight and nobleman; the attainments of Chaucer’s squire had been acquired in his father’s household, where, among other things he had learned to be ‘lowly and serviceable’. Aristocratic superiority, like that of Dame Juliana’s thoroughbred hounds, was ultimately natural and, since the universe operated on principles laid down by God, legitimate.

  3

  Their Plenty was Our

  Scarcity: Resistance

  Aristocratic power was always conditional. It rested ultimately on the consent of the vast mass of the population which worked for a living and in various ways paid to support lords and knights. For all their skill at fighting, building castles and amassing servants, the nobles were always massively outnumbered: in the early fourteenth century, when the population was about 4.5 million, there were roughly forty hereditary peers and two thousand knights and squires. Submission to superiors was the will of God and the Church preached quietism to the masses, reminding them that riches and power were no passport to Paradise and that Christ cherished the poor.