In June 1381 the masses suddenly and violently withdrew their consent to the social order. For four days the nobility trembled as they never had before. Upwards of ten thousand peasants had occupied London, seized the Tower and murdered royal ministers and officials. Individual noblemen were insulted. Suddenly, the world seemed to have been turned upside down and for a few moments it seemed as if this arrangement might become permanent. At Smithfield, then just beyond London’s Walls, Wat Tyler, the leader of the insurgents, confronted the fourteen-year-old Richard II and demanded a social revolution. The rebel’s mood was nervous and menacing. He demanded the extinction of the nobility: ‘No lord shall have lordship in the future, but it should be divided among all men, except the King’s own lordship’. Churchmen would be stripped of their estates and, to complete the new order, all men would be free to fish and hunt game. A few minutes later, Tyler became involved in a scuffle with one of Richard’s attendants and was mortally wounded. The King rode forward instantly and calmed the rebels, convincing them that he would now be their leader.1
Ironically, given his future fate, Richard II had saved the social order and with it the nobility. It was already preparing a counterattack, for, while he was winning the hearts of the insurgents, a detachment of armoured knights and squires appeared. Two days of humiliation and impotence rankled and some asked the King permission to behead ‘at least two hundred of the criminals as a warning to posterity that the knightly order was of some worth against the rustics’. Richard forbade a massacre because he thought that many of the victims may have been present under duress. Judicial and extra-judicial chastisement followed, with noblemen and knights to the forefront. A poet later wrote:
Man beware and be no fool:
Think on the axe and the stool!
The stool was hard, the axe was sharp,
The iiii [fourth] year of King Richard.2
Had the social system been in jeopardy at Smithfield? Or were already dramatic events embellished by clerical chroniclers determined to reveal the sheer evil of an uprising directed against God and the Crown. After all, a royal herald was reported to have seen two devils among the insurgents. Fearing for his soul, Jack Straw, who was Tyler’s lieutenant, confessed on the scaffold that the rebels had planned to kill all the King’s escort and any lords who opposed them. Straw’s admission confirmed Tyler’s ultimatum: the rebels wanted an egalitarian society, proof that they were the enemies of God.
Straw’s revelations confirmed the worst fears of the nobility and clergy. As with terrorism today, the Peasants’ Revolt spawned paranoia and alarmism. There were suspicions of a secret, diabolic conspiracy. Its guiding spirit was John Ball, a vagrant priest who had served as the rebels’ prophet and chaplain. Since the 1360s he had been preaching seditious sermons on the couplet:
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then a gentleman?
This challenge to the scriptural sanction for human inequality was indirectly complemented by the contemporary academic theologian, John Wycliffe. He argued that God could not give ‘civil dominion’ to a man and his heirs, which threw into question the validity of a hereditary aristocracy. Yet he urged submission on the poor: ‘if you be a labourer, live in meekness and truly and willingly do thy labour’. Nonetheless, it suited the Church to connect Wycliffe’s heretical doctrines with sedition and depict his followers, the Lollards, as enemies of both itself and the state. Heresy and sedition went hand in hand and by suppressing it the nobility served its own interests.
Some clergymen blamed the 1381 uprising on a collective moral lapse by an aristocracy which had neglected the moral obligations of chivalry and succumbed to the sin of the rich and self-indulgent Dives. The point was eloquently made by the Dominican Nicholas Bromyard, who imagined the poor appealing for justice at the gates to Paradise:
Oh just God, mighty judge, the game was not fairly divided between them and us. Their satiety was our famine, their merriment was our wretchedness, their jousts and tournaments were our torments, because with our oats and at our expense they did these things. Their plenty was our scarcity. 3
God had punished an aristocracy which had forfeited its authority through overindulgence and callousness towards the poor.
Historians have disagreed on precisely what the peasants wanted in 1381, and, more importantly, on whether they were all of the same mind. One cannot be certain that the chroniclers faithfully reported the exchanges at Smithfield or whether Straw spoke the truth on the scaffold. What matters is that contemporaries were so scared by the events of 1381 that they were willing to believe both. A surprisingly level-headed analysis was offered by Sir Richard de Waldegrave, the Speaker of the House of Commons, which assembled in the autumn. Addressing both houses, he conceded that the ‘poor commons’ had endured ‘great outrages’ at the hands of ‘various servants of our lord the king and other lords of the realm’. This stifling oppression had goaded ‘the mean commons to rise and commit the mischief they did’.
There had certainly been provocation. Moreover, and this is astonishing in the light of what had occurred in 1381, landowners had believed that the docility and forbearance of the peasantry were limitless. The poet John Gower summed up this attitude when he likened the placidity of the peasants to that of the oxen and pigs they tended. When the lords and knights reasserted their military power at Smithfield, observers revealingly noted that they herded the cowed peasants like sheep. Yet for a few days the peasants had been like wolves, a metamorphosis which gave the knightly order a brief but profound psychological shock.
Nonetheless, anyone who owned land would have been all too well aware of the changing temper of the peasantry during the massive economic disruption of the previous thirty years. Rent rolls and the records of manorial courts presented a stark picture of dwindling revenues and bloody-minded peasants. ‘Sheep died of murrain, husbandry at great loss and tenements ruinous’ was the surveyor’s report on the condition of John of Gaunt’s once flourishing fenland manor of Methwold in the 1380s.4 Like the rest of the country, Methwold was slowly and painfully convalescing from an unprecedented sequence of natural calamities. There had been intermittent harvest failures and famines between 1315 and 1322, the Black Death pandemic of 1348–49 and subsequent, lesser outbreaks over the next thirty years. In 1300 the population had been between 4.5 million and 5 million, and by 1400 it had fallen to 2.25 million. It did not begin to rise until the end of the fifteenth century.
Demographic disasters played havoc with land, labour and food markets. As a result the economic balance of power shifted away from landowners to tenants and labourers. Most important of all, chronic depopulation knocked away the main prop of economic feudalism, hereditary serfdom. Serfs had never been efficient labour units, for they required close supervision and undertook obligatory duties to their overlords resentfully. From 1350 onwards, masses of serfs liberated themselves; they fled from manors to compete in an open labour market in which wages were soaring. The most ambitious hoped to acquire capital and tenancies.
Landowners reacted with legislation to outlaw the free market in labour. Using their dominance in Parliament, they passed successive Statutes of Labourers which froze wages at pre-1349 levels. The criminal and seignorial courts enforced serfdom, and captured serfs were dragged back to their manors where they had been born and where the law demanded that they stayed. Lawyers sifted manorial records to uncover evidence of the ancestry of serfs who alleged that they were freemen. All these efforts to put back the clock failed. The machinery of coercion could not cope with the problem and the routines of agriculture compelled landlords to make the best bargains they could with employees. The alternative was unploughed fields and unharvested crops.
Attempts by landowners to deploy legal sanctions to reverse economic trends created a steady accumulation of frustration and anger among the peasantry. These were exacerbated by the poll taxes of 1377, 1379 and 1380 which placed intolerable burdens on the poorest. The cash was needed to fu
nd the war against France, which had entered a disastrous phase. French and Castilian warships cruised unopposed in the Channel and launched amphibious attacks on south coast ports. Noblemen and knights were blamed for having neglected their duty to protect the kingdom and the lives and homes of its weakest subjects. Economic and military feudalism were failing.
Minatory tax officials collecting the poll tax in Kent and Essex triggered the insurrection in May 1381. As it spread, peasants directed their animus towards overbearing landlords (in particular the abbeys of St Albans and Bury St Edmunds), middle and lower-ranking royal and manorial officials, and judges and magistrates who had enforced the Statutes of Labourers. Wherever possible, insurgents burned manorial documents and with them evidence of serfdom. A day before he made his radical demands at Smithfield, Wat Tyler had asked Richard II for the abolition of serfdom and a uniform rent of four pence per acre for arable land. He also demanded a repeal of the detested Game Laws. The King agreed.
A very strong case can be made for saying that what most peasants wanted was the removal of legal barriers to their future prosperity. Some eyewitnesses to the events in London claimed afterwards that many rebels began to go home once the King had made these concessions. At the same time, the insurgents were eager to pay off old scores against their immediate persecutors. They singled out one aristocrat: John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who was the richest peer in the country and uncle to the King, whom he allegedly plied with bad advice. The insurgents looted and burned down his London house, the Savoy palace, but could not get their hands on its owner, for Gaunt was in Scotland.
Charters extracted from Richard under duress were rescinded once the rebellion had been broken. Nevertheless, the uprising had taught the landowners that it was dangerous folly to use political and legal powers to preserve their economic ascendancy. A mood of resignation to economic reality replaced intransigence and intimidation. Reviewing estate policy in 1401, the Countess of Warwick’s officials concluded that ‘until the world recovers better’ they would have to lease lands on the best terms they could get. In the same year, the steward of Archbishop Arundel’s manor at Wrotham raised labourers’ wages ‘so that they should conduct themselves better in their lord’s service’.5 The Statute of Labourers was a dead letter, so too was serfdom, although a handful of landowners occasionally tried to enforce it in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The withering of serfdom ended economic feudalism. Henceforward, all landlords relied on cash rents and entry fines (paid in instalments) due from tenants after they had agreed new leases. For most of the fifteenth century, when holdings exceeded potential lessees, agreements tended to favour tenants rather than landlords.
In the meantime, sheep kept the nobility solvent. Aristocrats responded to the extended agrarian crisis by resorting to what we now call diversity. Thomas the fifth Lord Berkeley abandoned direct farming and rented out his rich grasslands in the Vale of Gloucester to cattle graziers.6 His neighbours the Beauchamp earls of Warwick adopted the conventional policy of turning arable land into pasture and investing in sheep. Their fleeces were sold to a Cotswold dealer William Grevel, an agent for Florentine importers. (Grevel’s descendants became landowners and, in the sixteenth century, earls of Warwick.) Sheep saved the aristocracy as they did the rest of the landowning class. Foreign and domestic markets for wool expanded during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and canny landlords responded by turning more and more arable land to pasture.
‘Beware for vengeance of trespass’ one poet warned the nobility after the 1381 rising. In common with the rest of the landowning class, the aristocracy had gone too far and used its power selfishly and, as events turned out, recklessly. It tried and failed to isolate itself from the economic upheavals and it nearly came unstuck. The aristocracy’s position had briefly been exposed as precarious and it had survived thanks to the presence of mind of the young Richard II and a later willingness to compromise.
This being said, it is extraordinary that the 1381 rebellion remained a one-off phenomenon which never really became implanted in the historical consciousness of either the nobility or the masses. It was a revolution which never happened, because ultimately the insurgents were satisfied by an adjustment to economic relations with their rulers rather than a root-and-branch change to the social order. As the events of the fifteenth century proved, aristocrats’ greatest enemies were themselves and not the peasantry.
4
Weeds Which Must Be
Mown Down: The
Wars of the Roses
1450–87
The Wars of the Roses were an aberration. The Crown and aristocracy lost sight of their primal duties: the preservation of just government and the maintenance of stability. Both were damaged by thirty-seven years of intermittent civil wars in which there were no ultimate winners. The Crown emerged in 1487 with its prestige and authority intact and enhanced, while a traumatised aristocracy had undergone a salutary lesson about the risks of going too far in the pursuit of power for its own sake. Thirty-five died in battle or on the scaffold and the victors confiscated the estates of the losers. The phrase ‘never again’ summed up the mindset of the survivors.
In an attempt to make sense of the conflict I have dealt with the wars in two parts. This chapter attempts to unravel the events and the next dissects the motives of the principal peers involved and the sources of their power. It is mostly about human vanity and selfishness; chivalry was seldom in evidence during the wars.
Shakespeare was right about the Wars of the Roses. The dramatic hurly-burly of the second and third parts of Henry VI and Richard III may distort the chronology, but they tell us what happened and, more importantly, offer insights into the minds of the protagonists. Temperamentally, fifteenth-century aristocrats differed little from their Elizabethan successors with whom Shakespeare was familiar. Both were proud, quarrelsome, ambitious, jealous of their honour, inclined towards intrigue and prone to exaggerated gestures. At a tense moment during the Battle of Towton in 1461 the bombastic Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (the Kingmaker), declared with a flourish that he would kill his horse to prove his willingness to stand and fight. On hearing of the death of the Earl of Huntingdon in 1595, the Earl of Essex ‘tore his hair and all his buttons broke with the swelling of his stomach’.1
As for individual characters, the sheer nastiness of Shakespeare’s Richard, Duke of Gloucester, fits the historical nature of the man. Just before Christmas 1472, when he was twenty, Richard set about extorting property from the aged dowager Countess of Oxford. He bullied her in person and, unmoved by her ‘great lamentation’ and weeping, ordered her abduction from a nunnery to his London lodgings. There he and his henchmen broke her will by threats to kidnap and imprison her in Middleham Castle in Yorkshire, knowing that the ‘great journey and the great cold’ would kill the frail old lady.2 A creature of this stamp would have no qualms about murdering anyone who got in his way, and, of course, he did.
Shakespeare also understood that aristocratic haughtiness was an expression of lineage and honour. Listen to the Duke of Suffolk’s refusal to ask for mercy after he has been captured by pirates:
Suffolk’s imperial tongue is stern and rough,
Us’d to command, untaught to plead for favour.
Far be it we should honour such as these
With humble suit: no, rather let my head
Stoop to the block than these knees bow to any,
Save to the God of heaven, and to my king:
And sooner dance upon a bloody pole,
Than stand uncover’d to the vulgar groom.
True nobility is exempt from fear: . . .3
William de la Pole did not speak these words, but he would have applauded the sentiments.
The historical Suffolk was beheaded with six strokes of a rusty sword on the gunwale of a boat in May 1450 after he had been captured on his way to exile in France. He was the first aristocratic casualty of the Wars of the Roses. A considerable pro
portion of his countrymen, including the House of Commons, had made Suffolk the scapegoat for all that had gone wrong in the country since Henry VI had come of age in 1436. This was an exaggeration; what was not was Suffolk’s ambition, ruthlessness and ability to prevail upon a naive and tractable King. Henry stood by his favourite, halted the Parliamentary bill for his impeachment and banished the Duke for five years.
Henry’s intervention incensed his subjects across south-eastern England, who briefly usurped the role of Parliament by rebelling and demanding a thorough purge of Suffolk’s cronies from the government. When the king prevaricated, Jack Cade’s insurgents killed those they could get their hands on. Later, when the shipmen who had murdered Suffolk were charged, they defiantly claimed that they had acted for ‘the community of the realm’.4
Shakespeare presents the rebel leader Cade as a cats paw of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, who in a surreptitious and crablike way is aiming to overturn Henry VI and make himself king. The friends of Cade’s victims suspected something of the sort. They subsequently procured the indictment of York’s steward Sir William Oldhall for overseeing the writing and distribution of seditious literature during the spring and summer of 1450. This propaganda was produced to convince the public that York alone could save Henry VI from Suffolk and a pack of rapacious courtiers who plied him with bad advice and plundered his revenues.
The squibs and doggerel verses are instructive. They indicate the existence of public opinion among the literate (who encompassed most clerics, landowners and men and women engaged in commerce) and a willingness of an aristocratic faction to enlist it. Cade’s followers mouthed York’s propaganda; an early example of the aristocratic political movement seeking allies wherever it could find them. The stratagem worked, for, from 1450 onwards, the Yorkists convinced a large number of people that they alone could and would save the kingdom.
Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present Page 5
