A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  But the heart of the document was something much more powerful and especially extraordinary in that, although very much the instrument of the king and his government, it actually took pains to present the native homeland as not merely distinct from, but potentially in conflict with, its temporary royal personification. The claim, as in Snowdonia, was that the nation was its own sovereign. This had been heard before – in Oxford in 1258 – but never so eloquently as at Arbroath where the image of the free patriot is represented as one of a band of brother-survivors, the Maccabees bound to a leader, but never unconditionally. For if ever the lord Robert:

  should give up what he has begun and agree to make us and our kingdom subject to the king of England or the English we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights as well as ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our king; for as long as but a hundred of us remain alive never will we, on any condition, be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory nor riches nor honours that we are fighting but for freedom – for that alone which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

  In the mid-fourteenth century John Barbour’s poem The Bruce sounded the same powerful note:

  A! Freedom is a noble thing!

  Freedom makis man to have liking;

  Freedom all solace to man givis:

  He livis at ease that freely livis!

  In the England of Edward II, however, liberty and sovereignty seemed unnatural partners, and the possibility that a king might commit himself to a manifesto of national self-determination that might envisage his own overthrow should he betray the interests of his compatriots was wholly inconceivable. The lessons of Simon de Montfort had long been forgotten. Instead of the Provisions of Oxford, Edward II may have been wont to gaze for inspiration at the great gilt effigies in Westminster Abbey, which enshrined not just the bodies of his ancestors, but the fantastic infallibility of the imperial crown. At any rate, his entire disastrous reign was marked by a wilful disregard of anything that could remotely be considered the shared interests of the community of the realm. By heaping power, riches and favour on men who were transparently abusing government and justice for their own unscrupulous personal ends, Edward was, in effect, making himself not native but alien to his own country. The abhorrence of his homosexuality merely completed the sense in which, somehow, he was foreign to the kingship of England. The attempts to overthrow him, the first by Earl Thomas of Lancaster in 1321, which failed, and the second by his estranged wife Isabella with her lover Roger Mortimer, which succeeded, should not be taken as a reassertion of the Montfortian insistence on the primacy of the realm over the person of the prince. Isabella and Mortimer merely replaced one regime of selfish opportunism by another. But Edward’s deposition in 1327 (and his hideous death in Berkeley Castle, probably from a hot iron thrust up his rectum, a punishment sadistically calculated to match his crime), the uprising of London citizens that preceded it and the uninhibited glee at the dismemberment of the Despensers and the overthrow of their hated administration, all presupposed that a king could now be removed, even physically disposed of, if he appeared to the custodians of the community of the realm to be incompetent to protect it or viciously indifferent to his duties.

  So when Edward III, at the age of seventeen in 1330, shook off the guardianship of his mother and Mortimer, having the one made captive and the other beheaded, England seemed at last to have a Plantagenet who was conscious of the need to identify himself, publicly and unequivocally, with the community of the realm. His murdered father was encased in another golden tomb, but it was diplomatically placed, not in the sanctuary of the Confessor at Westminster, but at a decent distance in Gloucester Cathedral. Beyond his mother and her immediate associates there would be no vindictive witch-hunt for culprits in the overthrow of his father’s regime. Instead, the young Edward seemed to offer what the nobles, the Church, the burgesses, knights and free yeomen of England had long wanted to hear: the voice of a ruler who understood that effective government depended on consultation and consent rather than on force. It would be in Edward III’s reign that the Commons would assume they could petition the king on their grievances with the expectation they would be answered in statute law. And it would be in Edward’s reign that parliament asserted its right to be consulted on matters of war and peace and to consent to any special subsidies or taxes before they could be levied. In a proclamation issued the day after the seizure of Mortimer at Nottingham, the young king let it be known that ‘the affairs that concern him and the estate of his realm shall be directed by the common counsel of his realm and in no other wise’.

  This must have been good news. Not for the last time, it seemed, it had taken the rest of Britain to remind England how to be a nation.

  CHAPTER 5

  KING DEATH

  THE EVE OF St John, 23 June 1348, was a festival of fertility in Dorset, as everywhere else in medieval England. The wheat was ripening, and on this one night, lit by a great bonfire, the unmarried women of the village, flowers in their hair, could flirt with impunity. But in Melcombe, on Weymouth bay, death, not life, was having its way. The first Englishmen were dying of the plague. The bacillus Yersinia pestis had disembarked at the port along with some Gascon sailors from the Plantagenet province that was already riddled with the infection. It was carried to Melcombe in the guts of fleas. They might have been the human flea (Pulex irritans), or they might have been the rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopsis), getting a free ride on the bodies of the rodents that lived with ships and their cargoes. The fleas passed on the bacillus, either through their faeces, expelled into the air for humans to inhale, or through their bite, regurgitating the organism into the bloodstream before settling down to a hearty meal. It took no time at all for the bacillus to make itself at home in southwest England. The Melcombe casualties would have died within four days after detecting the beginnings of the swellings at groin or armpit that signalled the contamination of their lymph nodes. If they had drawn the disease into their lungs, they would have hacked bloody sputum for two days before expiring. Anyone close enough to catch the plague from droplets of coughed-up blood or mucus would be well on their way. Within eighteen months almost half of the population of Britain would be dead.

  The king of England was supposed to be a doctor. More than any other of his predecessors, Edward III liked to ‘touch for the king’s evil’, using his sacred magic to heal thousands of sufferers from scrofula at a time. But this was not a malady but a plague, and in the high summer of his long reign Edward Ill’s mind was on other matters: the inaugural ceremonies of the Order of the Garter, for example. Edward founded the order, which was bestowed on knights and nobles who had distinguished themselves as valiant companions-in-arms, imagining it as a pious company, the reincarnation, of course, of the knights of the Holy Grail. So a new chapel, a place of devotion and beauty, had to be built for its solemnities at Windsor. It would be dedicated to St George, the late third-century dragon-slayer who had been the patron saint of the Byzantine armies and whose cult had been adopted by the English crusaders. For the reredos screen at the back of the altar alone, immense quantities of pure white Nottinghamshire alabaster were used, transported to Windsor on ten enormous wagons, pulled by eighty horses. On the feast of St Lawrence, 10 August 1348, the founder-knights, Edward’s Bediveres and Percivals – in fact, Sir John Grey and Sir Miles Stapleton, Sir Bartholomew Burghersh and Sir James d’Audeley, together with twenty-two more – all clad in blue robes and sporting their badges, filed into the chapel in pairs, the lines parting to seat themselves behind either the king or the Black Prince. They faced each other across the chapel like the opposing tournament teams they were and attended to the anthems, the pieties and the blessings. As they looked at the stone carving of St George, they must have inwardly rejoiced that he had proved too strong for the likes of the opposition, the patron saints of France and Scotland, St Denis and St Andrew.

  The king, too
, could not have been entirely immune to a beguiling sense of his invincibility. The previous decade had witnessed military marvels so stupefying that they could have come about only with God’s express sanction. In 1329, summoned by Philip VI, the new Valois king of France, to do homage for his province of Gascony or else forfeit it, Edward knelt at the feet of his liege lord. Eleven years later he had thought better of the obedient gesture, proclaiming himself king of France instead and adding the fleur-de-lis to his arms to make the point heraldically. The claim was not as preposterous as it might now seem. In 1328, the Capetian line of kings had died out. Through his mother, Isabella, Edward was the grandson of Philip IV, who had reigned from 1285 to 1314, but the French succession traditionally passed through the male line only, which had given the Crown instead to the son of one of Philip IV’s younger brothers. The ensuing war, which would last more than a hundred years and bring untold misery to both sides, opened therefore with the usual exchange of parchment but proceeded quickly to lances and arrows. The arrows had the better of it. In 1340, at the mouth of the river Zwijn, off Sluys (L’Écluse), in Flanders, English and French ships locked together while their archers and men-at-arms slaughtered each other on a floating battlefield. Two hundred French ships were captured, thousands of men were killed, wounded and drowned, so many that if the fish could speak, went a favourite jibe, they would have learned French. Six years later an even more comprehensive annihilation was visited on an enormous French army at Crécy in Normandy. There the English faced not just the French but Flemish and German knights as well as Genoese crossbowmen. But they were all pierced like pincushions by lethal downpours of arrows from English and Welsh longbowmen.

  As if this were not sweet enough, in the same year, King David II of Scotland, the son of Robert the Bruce, was captured, wounded in the head by an arrow at Neville’s Cross in Northumberland, abruptly halting a Scots invasion, launched in support of the French. David remained a captive, intended to be ransomed back north were it not for the unflattering reluctance of the Scots to come up with the necessary funds. It seemed just a matter of time before Edward III became, in fact if not in title, the master of three kingdoms. No wonder, then, at the Christmas revels in Guildford in 1347, the court indulged its taste for the fantastic, with men and women disguised, head to foot, as dragons or swans, complete with pairs of wings.

  There was one sovereign, though, to whom Edward was forced to yield and he was King Death. A few weeks after the Garter ceremonies in St George’s Chapel, the king heard that his daughter, Joan, had died of the plague in Bordeaux on 2 September. She had been travelling, together with an immense red silk bed, to Spain where she was to marry the Infante Pedro of Castile. Edward’s personal motto at this time was ‘It is as it is’, a stoical device that must have sounded all very fine when surveying the grim carnage of the battlefield, but did not serve him well when faced with such heartbreak. For although he wrote to Alfonso XI that he consoled himself with the thought that Joan had ‘been sent ahead to heaven to reign among the choirs of virgins where she can intercede for our own offences before God himself’, and that she had been his ‘dearest daughter (whom we loved best of all as her virtues demanded)’, the king’s brave pieties were mixed with confessions of sorrow. ‘No fellow human being could be surprised if we were inwardly desolated by the sting of this bitter grief for we are human too.’

  The glow of his triumph cooled by the hand of death, Edward asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to organize penitential prayers in Kent, since the areas around the southern ports were most immediately stricken by the plague. But the archbishop had himself died of the infection on 23 August. The prior of Canterbury, who now had to pass on the royal command, began his letter to the Bishop of London with the word Terribilis: ‘Terrible is God towards the sons of men and by his command all things are subdued to his will.’ Just how terrible, few in the first weeks of the plague could scarcely have had an inkling.

  It had not been unexpected. The Italian mercantile and banking community in London had heard, through their correspondents at home, horrifying stories of cities in the grip of pestilence in the summer and autumn of 1347. In Venice alone 100,000 were said to have died, the cadavers dumped on the outer islands of the lagoon. Siena, Florence, Padua and Piacenza had all become hecatombs of the dead. The Genoese in London must have been especially alarmed, since it was their ships that had originally brought the disease to the Mediterranean from the Near East. According to Gabriele de Mussis, a Piacenza lawyer, the Mongol army of Kipchak Khan Janibeg, besieging the Black Sea port of Caffa in the Crimea in 1346, had brought the bacillus with it from the wild-rodent-infested steppes of Central Asia and had resorted to catapulting its own plague victims over the walls of the city, which was held by the Genoese: the earliest case of intentional biological warfare. ‘What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city and the Christians could not hide nor flee nor escape from them although they dumped as many of the bodies as they could into the sea. And soon the rotting bodies tainted the air and poisoned the water.’ By the spring of 1348 the plague had crossed the Alps into northern Europe and was moving inexorably through France and the Low Countries towards the Channel.

  It must have seemed that God had decided the human race had been a mistake. ‘What are you thinking of, merciful God, thus to destroy your creation . . . and to command its sudden annihilation?’ de Mussis asked in stricken bewilderment. As the scythe moved steadily through Europe, reaching into cities and remote villages alike, there seemed no getting out of the way. You knew when the plague was coming in your direction. Riders would report it and suddenly fall sick themselves. A customer minding his own business, who broke into a sudden, hacking cough in the middle of a crowded alehouse, would empty the place in seconds. Waiting for his own infection (which, sure enough, came), the Welsh poet Jeuan Gethin wrote feverishly, multiplying similes like spots breaking out on the skin:

  Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit; seething terrible wherever it may come, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden carried beneath the arms, a painful angry knob, a white lump. It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion; a small boil which spares no one. Great is its seething like a burning cinder, a grievous thing of ashy colour . . . an ugly eruption. They are similar to the seeds of the black peas, broken fragments of brittle sea coal . . . a grievous ornament . . . the peelings of the cockle-weed, a black plague like half-pence, like berries.

  The Black Death was a knock-out blow to a world that was already hurting. Paradoxically, fourteenth-century England (and the rest of Britain) was a victim of its earlier success. The humming economy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had triggered a population explosion, nearly trebling the post-Conquest population of England to around 4 million by 1300. Much of the land that could be reclaimed had been reclaimed – from forest, heath and marsh – and now there were simply too many bodies and not enough acreage to support them. At least 90 per cent of the population still made a living from the soil. For centuries people had lived in the same village world: a one- or two-room house, framed by timbers cut from nearby trees and filled in with a curtain of twigs and mud, the whole thing covered with limewash. The floors were dirt or clay, covered with straw to take the mud tracked in from the yard and the droppings of the chickens, geese and pigs that wandered freely through the house. The windows, if there were any, were unglazed. Food was cooked over an open hearth. Out beyond the ‘croft’, the little yard, beyond the huddle of houses gathered around the church, were two or three big, open, unfenced fields, which were divided into countless narrow strips – selions – each of them worked by the peasants of the village, free and unfree. The better off among them might have held many of these strips (seldom contiguous); the worst off would have had just a few, scarcely enough for subsistence. In return for the right to till them, to pasture their animals on the village common land or to have a share of animal feed from the common hay meadow, the unfree peasants would be req
uired to work a day or two for the lord’s own farm or to pay a substitute rent in money or kind. There were countless other burdens and extortions associated with unfree status. When someone in the family died, the best animal was due to the lord; when a marriage was made, yet another fee was liable. To make ends meet, most of these families needed an extra source of income. So the women brewed ale or carded fleece; the men resorted, when they could, to woodcutting or carting. It was, at best, a society on the edge of disaster.

  And in the decades before the plague, it seemed already to have dropped over that edge. A succession of catastrophically bad harvests leading to the great famine of 1315–16 had been followed by cattle murrain and sheep disease. (No wonder, when it too came to pass, the plague was greeted as another of God’s chastisements visited on the iniquitous.) The endless wars of the Plantagenets had sent the tax collectors into the villages more frequently than at any time in the previous century to lean on the reeves and the manorial courts so that they would fulfil their village quotas for the king. They, in turn, leaned on those who could least afford to give and were least able to resist. But with population pressing on resources, land and grain prices going through the roof, landlords were tempted to fence off their increasingly precious real estate, taking more land out of the manorial economy. With manual labour forced to sell itself so cheaply, farming their own lands directly suddenly looked like good business for the owners. When neither manual work nor strip farming could make ends meet, the worst-off peasants had no choice but to sell off their holdings, hoping to regain them when better times allowed. But always the prices seemed to go up and the prospect of returning to the way things had once been became ever more remote. The differences between the village fat cats – the men who were jurors and ale-tasters, who worked for the reeve and owned many rather than few strips and who now pounced on their opportunity – and the poor village mice became more and more marked. The reduction in alms-giving by the lords made this already difficult situation still worse, and as the many became poorer, their willingness to abide by the rules governing the collective management of resources and labour (ploughing, allocating strips, harvesting) even in deferential England, came under increasing strain. All sorts of little anti-social transgressions, neighbourhood spats – which in a world this tight amounted to high crimes – were becoming common. Gleanings reserved for the very poorest were being taken at night by villagers who just needed them. Animals were being pastured illegally in fields supposed to be left fallow. Ploughmen were caught ‘accidentally’ trespassing on their neighbours’ strip. Communities that had, as long as anyone could remember, worked through the shared acceptance of common rules, were now splintering into collections of self-interest.