The crisis came early on Friday 5 May and moved fast. Before sunrise, ‘on the morne, by the spring of the day’,10 William and his gang came up the road ‘with all the diligence that they could, makeing a great and horrible shoute upon the said officers, servants, and tenants.’ The archbishop’s men, attempting to get away, made for the ford over the Swale at Brafferton, crossed the river, where the footbridge now is, and rode up past the church into the main street of Brafferton-Helperby.
Here they met Plumpton’s roadblock. Desperately the Archbishop’s gang looked for ways of escape, some finding ‘a long straite lane’ along the back of the village; others got out ‘by breaking of an hedge into a feild’.11 But Plumpton and his men were not happy with frightening their enemies. They pursued them out of the village on to the dark wet boglands of Helperby Moor, riding after them for more than half a mile, shouting at them, as they had all morning: ‘Sley the Archbishop’s Carles’ – an Old Norse word meaning ‘men’ – and ‘Would God that we had the Archbishop here.’12 The brutality was unforgiving. The Plumpton mob killed Thomas Hunter, a gentleman, and Thomas Hooper, a yeoman, even after they had given themselves up to their pursuers. They were killing prisoners in cold blood. A man called Christopher Bee, one of the Archbishop’s affinity,
was maymed, that is to say, smitten in the mouth and so through the mouth into the throat, by the which he hath lost his cheeke bone and three of his fore teeth, and his speech blemished and hurt, that it is not easy to understand what he speaks or saies, and may not use therefore the remnant of his teeth and jawes to th’use of eating, as he might before.13
Others were maimed and left for dead out on the moor.14 Those not beaten, stabbed and cut by the Plumpton men were robbed and terrorized, their horses, harness, gold and silver all taken from them, gentlemen, yeomen, artisans and labourers alike. Plumpton was left in possession of the field, his war transferred from the wet fields of France to the springtime green of the Vale of York, his status enhanced and his future good.
When people think of the English gentry, this may not be the picture that comes to mind: the unforgiving assertion of violent authority in a disintegrating world; the application of the habits of war to a legalistic, economic and almost domestic dispute; the gathering of one’s people, ‘the affinity’, as a form of self-promotion; the crude gang identity of those shouted taunts. But there can be little doubt that this triumph stood William Plumpton in good stead. Within two years his feudal superior, the young Harry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, had put him in charge of all the Percy estates and castles in Yorkshire. The crown had rewarded him with a gift of twenty mature oak trees, felled and trimmed, delivered to Plumpton Hall. He was now steward of the castle at Knaresborough and a Justice of the Peace, and was to become Sheriff or chief law officer of Yorkshire and a few years later of both Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, each appointment for a separate year. The violence at Brafferton was a mark of Plumpton’s willingness to impose his authority, even if it was at the cost of murdering gentleman and yeoman prisoners. That entrepreneurial virility, in the unravelling word of mid-fifteenth-century England, was the most valuable quality a man could have.15
The Plumptons were loyal followers and tenants of the Percy Earls of Northumberland. They had even imitated the Percy coat of arms (yellow lozenges on a blue background), merely differencing it, as the heralds said, with five red scallop shells. Visually and heraldically the Plumptons bound themselves to their feudal overlords. They were gentry; they had no claim on nobility, but were part of the same knightly world inhabited by the truly great.
But as gentry they were heavily involved in the dirty details of local government. They had held and ruled the manor at Plumpton since the twelfth century, and others higher in the Pennines, including the beautiful limestone woods and meadows at Grassington in Upper Wharfedale, and the Airedale manors of Steeton and Idle. William’s father had married an heiress who brought still more and richer lands in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire. Like many of the medieval gentry families, the Plumptons had their place, their centre, but were attached to others across the country. They were lords in their own country but tied to their feudal superiors. They could be summoned at will by the earls or by the King. They travelled, as Justices of the Peace, and as Sheriffs of all the counties in which they held their lands and as Members of Parliament in Westminster. They were local grandees but with a national perspective. They pursued without hesitation their inferiors. And they were fuelled by ambition, a desire not only to preserve the name of Plumpton but to enhance it and enlarge it, to insulate it from the shocks of mortality and the failure to breed.16
The Brafferton affray was symptomatic of this gentry life: it borrowed from the world of martial glory; it asserted lay and royal authority in the face of the church; it required competence in command; it played fast and loose with legal niceties; it relied on a sense of local loyalty; and it did not hesitate to do dreadful deeds. It may also have looked at the time like the beginning of Plumpton’s ascent to greatness.
From the 1440s onwards William’s public career could not have been clearer. He stayed loyal to the Northumberlands and to the Lancastrian crown which he and his father had both served with such honour in France. He acquired local office and with it influence and riches. And at least to begin with, his policy for his family and its name followed the same well-defined path. He had been married when he was twelve in 1416 to a local gentry girl, Elizabeth Stapleton, and on his return from the French wars in 1430, a son, Robert, had been conceived, born the following year. A younger brother, William, was born four years later. With this male inheritance, the future of the Plumptons seemed secure and Sir William took a mistress to whom a further two sons were born. So powerful was the patriarchal mandate in this class that they too were called William and Robert.17
This phenomenon, which was common to the gentry throughout the centuries, was especially marked in the Plumptons: William Plumpton’s father was called Robert, his grandfather William, his younger brother Robert and his eldest son William, his younger son Robert, his elder bastard son William, his younger bastard son Robert, yet another son Robert – of whom much more below – and his grandson William. It is as if these people’s genes did not belong to them. They were no more individualized than pieces on a chess board, all Plumptons but there to play a role. In an age both obsessed with the transmission of value from one generation to the next and struggling with the erosion of knightly values, each successive Robert and William must have felt that burden more acutely than the last.
Elizabeth Stapleton, the boys’ mother, died in the early 1440s and in 1446 Sir William embarked on elevating the prospects of the next generation. His eldest son, Robert, now fifteen, was married to Elizabeth, the six-year-old daughter of a great Yorkshire and Westmorland magnate, Lord Clifford. They were ‘wedded at the chappell within the castell at Skypton’.18 The Cliffords’ castle remains complete, a muscled, stony northern fortress at the head of Skipton market, but the chapel in which these children were married is now a bruised and broken wreck, the mouldings on its roof timbers still there but with later windows and doors crudely knocked through its walls. In the 1440s, it was glorious, a family shrine to northern warlords. Here, a Clifford retainer ‘John Garthe bare [Elizabeth Clifford] in his armes to the said chappell’, where her young Plumpton husband was standing waiting for her. It is the most poignant image in this story: a small girl carried into her marriage and her destiny, no choice, little understanding, the men of the cloth, a blessing, a party, smiles, drinks, toasts in the great hall of the castle, the stranger of a boy, a young man, her husband, smiling down at her. It was agreed, as usual, that they were not to ‘ligg togedder till she came to the age of xvi yeres’.19
Sir William Plumpton settled wonderful lands on the pair: manors and estates in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, including among many others Edensor, where Chatsworth now stands. For the privilege, he also paid Lord Clifford a fee of £4
0, two-thirds of a year’s income from his manor at Plumpton.20 For William, this was an elevation: the knight’s dream of transition to the nobility was made more likely by such an alliance. The descendants of young Robert and Elizabeth might at least have the money to support the status and dignity of a barony. For old Lord Clifford, his daughter’s marriage to such a boy was not only profitable but politically useful. The marriage of a peer’s daughter to a knight’s son required less of a dowry than would be asked for by a peer, as the increase in status made up for the lack of cash. And Plumpton, with his undoubted vigour, and a connection which Clifford valued with the Lancastrian Earls of Northumberland and the Percy family, was a form of mutual insurance, an element in the power grouping set against the other great northern family, the Yorkist Nevilles, with their power base in the north-west, hated by the Cliffords and with whom the Percys were on the point of a long and brutal feud. Political, martial, personal, dynastic, financial, status conscious, courtly, handsome and splendid: the Clifford marriage can only have warmed Sir William Plumpton’s heart.
The bridegroom was dead within three years, aged eighteen, from an unknown illness, and the marriage of course was unconsummated. But too much was riding on the alliance with the Cliffords for the boy’s death to alter the arrangements. The young Elizabeth Clifford, now aged twelve, was married again in 1453 to Robert’s younger brother, William Plumpton, now aged seventeen, the same terms applying. That is how it had to be: girls did not walk to their weddings; boys stepped up when their brothers died; Williams followed Roberts; and girls complied.
All apparently remained well with the Plumpton enterprise. England was drifting into civil war, but civil war might be an opportunity for a man of his stamp. Sir William was pursuing his personal enemies through the courts both in Yorkshire and in Westminster with unparalleled toughness, crushing his victims with teams of expensive and effective lawyers. He took part in 1459 in the English battles on the Scottish border and emerged from them with martial credit. In the same year a granddaughter, Margaret, was born to Elizabeth and two years later another granddaughter, another Elizabeth, joined her. Daughters and granddaughters were poor currency compared with a male heir, but they were at least a sign of fertility. All might yet be well. There was no reason the Plumpton name would not continue happily into the future.
At Plumpton itself, the towered sandstone hall, with its own chapel of the Holy Trinity, was richly decorated and furnished.21 Some twenty servants worked and lived there. Silver-chased hunting horns and salt cellars were part of the furnishings. The family chapel, where they worshopped with their own full-time priest, had rich silk dressings for the altar and for the priest himself. The Plumptons had beautiful clothes: cloaks ‘furred with martyns’,22 a coverlet of red satin and a canopy of white silk. Men and women wore silvered belts and girdles, amber beads and gold, sapphire and emerald rings. They had books and psalters covered in red satin and red velvet. The little children learned French and could speak it by the time they were four.23 In the great fishponds which are still at Plumpton, bream, tench and pike were raised for the table.24 Rabbits, hares and pheasants came from the Plumptons’ beautiful manor at Grassington in Upper Wharfedale. Game, including venison, came from the wide open stretches of Knaresborough forest. The house was well armed with stocks of bows, swords, shields, armour and the pole arms with which the retained men were fitted out. The hall itself, the heart of the manor, was decorated with those coats of arms which reflected the dynastic and land-gathering enterprise on which the family was embarked: Plumpton quartered with Foljambe (his mother’s family from Nottinghamshire), Plumpton with Stapleton (his own wife’s), Plumpton with Clifford (his son’s).25
In the cold and frozen spring of 1461, catastrophe overtook them all. A letter from the Lancastrian king, Henry VI, on the run at York, was brought by messenger to Plumpton. Edward IV, known to Lancastrians as the Earl of March, had been declared King in London on 3 March and was now on his way north to destroy his rival. Henry and the whole Lancastrian affinity to which Plumpton had pinned his hopes and loyalty were now to fight for their lives. The letter was endorsed on its outer sheet: ‘To our trusty and welbeloued knight, Sir William Plompton.’ Unfolding it, he read:
By the King. R[ex]H[enricus]
Trusty and webeloued, we greete you well, and for as much as we haue very knowledg that our great trator the late Earle of March hath made great assemblies of riotouse and mischeously disposed people; and to stirr and prouocke them to draw vnto him he hath cried in his proclamations hauok vpon all our trew liege people and subjects, thaire wiues, children, and goods, and is now coming towards vs, we therefore pray you and also straitely charge you that anon vpon sight herof, ye, with all such people as ye may make defensible arrayed, come to vs in all hast possible, wheresoeuer we shall bee within this our Realme, for to resist the malitious entent and purpose of our said trator, and faile not herof as ye loue the seurity of our person, the weale of yourselfe, and of all our trew and faithfull subjects.
Geuen under our signet at our cyty of York, the thirteenth day of March.26
Another of the same kind required him to gather the royal tenants from Knaresborough forest. The world of a fifteenth-century court, even in terminal crisis, shines out of these urgent, affecting, courteous and explanatory letters: no fear of violence; an exquisite care in dealing with men of Plumpton’s sort; an underlying brute reality; a dream of Arthurian perfection, already in its fading hours; the prospect of a final battle, a Camlann for real; reliance on the formal, feudal love of a king and dread of his kingdom disintegrating; recognition that ‘the weale of yourselfe’ relied on the bonds of loyalty which, in a kingdom now with two embattled kings, were already broken.
The letters mark the beginning of the crisis in William Plumpton’s life. He gathered the men of his household and those of Knaresborough forest and armed them. The young Lord Clifford, Elizabeth’s brother, and the Earl of Northumberland were doing the same across the whole of the north of England. Young William Plumpton joined his father, and the entire Lancastrian affinity marched south to meet the Yorkists. The huge armies, 40,000 on each side, met in the lanes, on the open fields and in the sharp stream valleys between the villages of Towton and Saxton just south-west of York. It was Palm Sunday, 29 March, and desperately cold. Heavy snow showers blustered between the armies all day. ‘This deadlie conflict’, according to Holinshed, ‘continued ten houres in doubtfull state of victorie, uncertainlie heaving and setting on both sides’.27 Heaving and setting: the seismic movements of a mass of armed men. The dead choked the streams, making dams and bridges in the water, and the river Wharfe ran red with their blood. Fighting men had to drag the bodies out of the way to clear a space so that others could be killed. About 28,000 men died, ‘all Englishmen and of one nation’,28 as Holinshed wrote mournfully, more than the number of British dead on the first day of the Somme, the bloodiest day in English history.
Archaeologists have excavated a mass grave on the edge of the battlefield. It was hastily dug, only eighteen inches deep, and held 43 bodies tightly packed into a space six feet by twenty. In the words of the archaeological report, they were the ‘casualties of an extremely violent encounter’.29 Most of the Towton dead had been hit over and over again, suffering ‘multiple injuries that are far in excess of those necessary to cause disability and death’. The cuts, chops, incisions and punctures all clustered around the men’s heads and faces.
Ears had been sliced away, eye sockets enlarged and noses deliberately cut off. Very few of the wounds were below the neck, on parts of the body protected by armour. The archaeologists thought that the wounds had probably been delivered when the victims were already on the ground, helpless, dead or dying ‘in a position that did not allow them to defend themselves’. It was savage and enraged mutilation. ‘Many were left in a state that would have made identification difficult.’30 Nor were these men – who as usual had been stripped of their armour after they were killed but before th
ey were thrown in the grave – a crude peasant horde. Analysis of their skeletons has shown that they were stronger than the medieval norm, ‘appearing similar to modern professional athletes’.31 Many had clearly trained in lifting, thrusting and throwing. Several had old, healed wounds. Their upper bodies were developed symmetrically, the result of having been trained from childhood in the longbow, which requires strength in both the string-pulling and the bow-holding arms. The trace elements in their bones have also revealed that they had been fed on the best medieval diet: plenty of protein, much of it from fish. These were the best young men the country had. But there was nothing polite, graceful or chivalric about their dying. The Towton mass grave is a monument to brutality, terror and rage, a frenzy of killing and destruction, a dirty desecration of defenceless victims, among the elite warriors of late medieval England. It is a world in which Sir William Plumpton would have been entirely at home.
The Lancastrian cause was broken at Towton and Plumpton’s world collapsed with it. Each side knew this was a fight whose victors would not spare the defeated – ‘This battle was sore fought,’ the chronicler Edward Hall wrote, ‘for hope of life was set on side on every part’32 – and that alone explains the scale of destruction. Plumpton’s son William, aged twenty-four, was killed, lying anonymous among the thousands of Lancastrian dead, drowned or mutilated in his grave. The young Lord Clifford, his brother-in-law, aged twenty-six, a brutal warrior and murderer of prisoners, known as the Butcher, lay there with him, thrown like others into some anonymous body pit, stripped and unrecognized, after he had been killed by an arrow in the throat. The Earl of Northumberland, their feudal lord, mortally wounded, staggered off the field and made his way to York, where he died too. An affinity was destroyed that day, between sons and brothers, cousins and brothers-in-law, the whole spreading set of connections that made up a political-social-familial world. It was a community, as Gawain says in the Morte Darthur, which had ‘gone full colde at the harte-roote’.33 The Lancastrian peers were attainted, their heirs deprived of lands and titles. This was revolution by butchery, no less traumatic than the events of the 1640s and just as deep a cut into the body of England.
The Gentry Page 3