A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Return of the Black Death in 1374–75 in the same epidemic that had hastened Coucy’s departure from Lombardy thinned more hearths and reduced the tax yield. The recurring outbreaks were beginning to have a cumulative effect on population decline as they did on the deepening gloom of the century. In the poll tax of 1379 four villages of Gloucestershire were recorded as making no returns; in Norfolk six centuries later, five small churches within a day’s visit of each other still stood in deserted silence on the sites of villages abandoned in the 14th century. As before, however, mortality was erratic and there was no lack of land-hungry younger sons, poor relations, and landless tenants ready to take over ownerless property and keep land in cultivation.

  Religious unrest was also disturbing the public mind and found its voice in an Oxford theologian and preacher, John Wyclif. Seen through the telescope of history, he was the most significant Englishman of his time. The materialism of the Church and the worldliness of its representatives were old complaints common to all Europe, but they were sharpened in England by antagonism to a foreign papacy. As elsewhere in Europe, there was a deep craving to detemporalize the Church and clear the way to God of all the money and fees and donations and oblations that cluttered it. In Wyclif the political and spiritual strains of English protestantism met and were fused into a philosophy and a program.

  Master of Balliol when he was 36, he stimulated anti-clericalism and gained attention by his stirring sermons. On the issue of secular versus spiritual authority, he carried further the dangerous thoughts of Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham and found himself champion of the English struggle against the supremacy of papal law over the King’s courts and against the payment of revenues to the papacy. As King’s chaplain in the 1360s he formulated ideas very attractive to the government on the relationship of church and state. In 1374 he served as the King’s envoy in the effort to reach a settlement with the Pope.

  In the year of Coucy’s visit Wyclif metaphorically nailed his thesis to the door in the form of a treatise, De Civili Dominio (On Civil Authority), which proposed nothing less than the disendowment of the temporal property of the Church and the exclusion of the clergy from temporal government. All authority, he argued, derived from God, and in earthly matters belonged to the civil powers alone. By logical progression and in harsh polemic filled with references to the “stinking orders” of the friars and “horned fiends” of the hierarchy, his theories were soon to lead him to the radical proposition that the priesthood should be disestablished as the necessary mediator between man and God.

  Wyclif’s peculiar achievement was to express both national interest and popular feeling. For decades Parliament had complained bitterly of the income withdrawn from England by foreign holders of rich benefices like the haughty Cardinal Talleyrand de Périgord. The amount was said to be twice the revenues of the crown, and Church property in England was estimated at a third of the land of the realm. The selling of papal letters of authority by impostors was a wide abuse extended by a regular business in forged papal seals. Immunity of the clergy from civil justice, leaving a lay complainant without redress, was another cause of resentment. Most of all, people minded the unfitness of priests. When a priest could purchase from diocesan authority a license to keep a concubine, how should he have better access to God than the ordinary sinner? Priestly susceptibility was such that when a man confessed adultery, the confessor was not allowed to ask the name of the partner lest he be inclined to take personal advantage of her frailty.

  The venality if not lechery of the parish priest was usually a result of his being underpaid, which led to the necessity of selling his services; even the Eucharist might be withheld unless the communicant produced an offering, which made a mockery of the ritual. Judas, it was said, sold the body of Christ for thirty pieces of silver; now priests did it daily for a penny. Frivolity was another complaint: vicars were scolded by their bishops for throwing candle drippings from the upper choir stalls on the heads of those below, or conducting “detestable” parodies of the Divine service “for the purpose of exciting laughter and perhaps of generating discord.” Worldly clerics were censured in 1367 for wearing short tight doublets with long fur- or silk-lined sleeves, costly rings and girdles, embroidered purses, knives resembling swords, colored boots, and even that mark of the Devil, slashed and curling pointed shoes.

  Great prelates of noble family were as lordly as their lay peers, dressing their retinues in uniform and traveling with squires, clerks, falconers, grooms, messengers, pages, kitchen servants, carters, and porters. Charity was gone from them, wrote Langland; bishops of the Holy Church once apportioned Christ’s patrimony among the poor and needy “but now Avarice keeps the key”; Charity was once found “in a friar’s frock, but that was afar back in St. Francis’s lifetime.” His fellow poet John Gower, speaking “for all Christian folk,” denounced absentee priests, and bishops who added to their great incomes by taking bribes from rich adulterers, and arrogant cardinals in their red hats “like a crimson rose opening to the sun; but that red is the color of guilty pride.”

  When, from denouncing such priests, Wyclif reached the point of denying the validity of the priesthood itself as necessary to salvation, he was to strike at the foundation of the Church and its interpretation of Christ’s role. From that point he moved ineluctably to the heresy of denying transubstantiation, for without miraculous power the priest could not transform the bread and wine into the true body and blood of Christ. From there the rest followed—the non-necessity of the Pope, rejection of excommunication, confession, pilgrimages, worship of relics and saints, indulgences, treasury of merit. All were to be swept away under Wyclif’s broom.

  In replacement he offered the Bible in English, translated by his disciples, that it might bring religion to the people in a form they could understand without need of the priest and his meaningless Latin doggerel. No other act of a religious reformer would cut more sharply into the thousand-year establishment of the Christian Church, but this was still some years ahead. In the seventies the movement of dissent called Lollardy, from a word applied to Flemish mystics meaning “mumbler,” was preparing the way. While Lollardy was greatest among the common people and lower clergy, it spread, too, among knights and some great nobles who resented the clergy’s hold on political power. The Earl of Salisbury removed all statues of saints from his chapel, earning the title of “derider of images, scoffer at sacraments,” and there were others called “hatted knights” who refused to uncover when the host was carried through the streets.

  Wyclif’s ideas and the crown’s needs fitted together like sword and sheath, accounting for the strange alliance that made him a protégé of John of Gaunt. His theory of disendowment, which maintained that nobles could repossess the lands their ancestors had bequeathed to the Church, put a doctrinal floor under Gaunt’s desire to plunder the rich ecclesiastical establishment. What Henry VIII succeeded in doing a century and a half later, John of Gaunt already had in mind in 1376. Meanwhile the losses of territory in France, for which the clerical Chancellor, William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, and his fellow ecclesiastics in office were held responsible, served to oust them from government. The Lords in Parliament resolved in 1371 that none but laymen “who could answer for their misdeeds in the King’s courts” could henceforth hold the offices of Chancellor, Treasurer, Barons of the Exchequer, and Clerks of the Privy Council.

  The adverse tide in France was not stemmed by the change. Merchants and landed gentry were not happy to see the money squeezed from them in taxes dissipated in the horribles expenses et incredibiles of the Duke of Lancaster and his suite at Bruges. The envoys spent their time—according to the censorious monk of St. Albans, Thomas Walsingham, who hated Lancaster because of his anti-clerical policy—in “rioting … revelling and dancing” at a cost of £20,000. If Walsingham’s Chronicon Angliae is suspect for its animus, it is also invaluable for vivid information about a hectic time.

  The people’s loyalty was
severely tried, too, by purveyance—that is, the King’s right when traveling to commandeer supplies for a number of miles on either side of the road, and also for the provisioning of the army. Purveyors “seize on men and horses in the midst of their field work … on the very bullocks at the plough” so that “men make dole and murmur” at the King’s approach. What had been a nuisance was raised in wartime to economic tyranny. Nobles in charge of military organization profiteered on war contracts, as did royal purveyors and the clerks who made payments from Exchequer funds. Coastal towns suffered from the billeting of troops while they awaited transportation overseas. Trade declined owing to the disruption of shipping, ransoms no longer flowed in a golden stream to nourish the economy, and such ransoms as did come in were kept by the crown to pay English troops and release English prisoners. Installments on King Jean’s ransom had reached only three fifths of the total when King Charles stopped payment on the renewal of war and, indeed, demanded return of the money as reparations. By now England was growing poorer, not richer, from the war.

  When Parliament met in 1376, the Commons, which existed only as an ad hoc body for purposes of consenting to taxes, gathered itself for political action. First it sought strength by association with the Lords, who represented the permanent Parliament and contained a strong anti-Lancaster faction prepared to challenge the Duke. A council of twelve, consisting of four bishops, four earls, and four barons, was drawn from the Lords to act in concert with the Commons. The lay leader of the group was Coucy’s former ward, the young Earl of March, who was married to Philippa, daughter of Lancaster’s elder brother, the late Duke of Clarence. She stood in line to the crown after the dying Black Prince and his nine-year-old son, Richard. Consequently her husband believed he had reason to fear the Duke of Lancaster, who was popularly credited with a wicked uncle’s designs on the crown.

  Lancaster indeed had his sights fixed on a crown, but it was the crown of Castile by right of his marriage to a daughter of the defunct Pedro the Cruel. He already styled himself King of Castile—or Monsieur d’Espagne—and probably had no serious intention of usurping his nephew’s rights; what he wanted was to end the war with France so that he could mobilize England’s forces to gain the Spanish throne. As President of the Royal Council, he was the real head of the government; he controlled his father, the King, by alliance with Alice Perrers and gained a reputation as a libertine by openly maintaining a mistress of his own, Katherine Swynford, widow of a knight killed in Aquitaine, whom he later respectably married and by whom he fathered the Tudor line. He lived in the splendid Savoy Palace on the bank of the Thames and enjoyed its terraces, rose gardens, magnificent collection of jewels, and the rest of the inheritance of his first wife’s father, the first Duke of Lancaster; in short, he possessed all the attributes of power and riches necessary for unpopularity and was widely considered to be a villain. The reputation, like his older brother’s as a paragon of chivalry, was probably overdrawn.

  Popular excitement as Parliament convened was heightened by the arrival of the Prince of Wales, who had himself carried to Westminster from his country estate to be present during the session. His purpose, in the shadow of death, was to obtain assurance from Lords and Commons of fealty to his son, but the public believed he had come to support the Commons against his brother, the Duke, whose ambitions he was believed to fear. In fact the Prince’s arrogant temperament was not one likely to welcome interference with the monarchy, but what counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact. Because the challengers in Parliament believed the Prince to be their supporter, they drew assurance and strength from his presence.

  The tumultuous assembly was held at Westminster, with the Commons meeting in the chapter house of the abbey and the Lords in the White Chamber of the palace nearby. As Earl of Bedford, Coucy could have taken his place among the Lords at the opening ceremony on April 28, but there is no evidence that he did.

  Taking the offensive, the Commons for the first time in its history elected a Speaker in the person of a knight of Herefordshire, Sir Peter de la Mare, who not accidentally was seneschal of the Earl of March. Critical moments often produce men to match the need; Sir Peter proved to be a man of courage, perseverance, and, in Walsingham’s partisan judgment, a “spirit lifted up by God.” On behalf of the whole House he brought charges of malfeasance against two of the King’s ministers, Lord Latimer, the Chamberlain, and Sir Richard Lyons, a rich merchant and member of the Royal Council who acted as the King’s chief agent with the commercial community, and also against Alice Perrers, who, it was said, “has yearly up to 3,000 pounds from the King’s coffers. The realm would greatly profit by her removal.”

  Latimer was a great noble and Knight of the Garter, a veteran of Crécy, Auray, and of Lancaster’s long march, a former Constable of Dover and Warden of the Cinque Ports. He and Lyons were accused by the Speaker of amassing immense fortunes by schemes and frauds to cheat the revenue, including the acceptance of 20,000 pounds from the King in repayment for a loan of 20,000 marks, the mark being worth two thirds of the pound.

  One by one, members of the Commons, speaking in turn at a lectern in the center of the chamber, added their charges and complaints. The King’s councillors, they said, had grown rich at the cost of impoverishing the nation; they had deceived the King and wasted his revenues, causing the repeated demands for fresh subsidies. The people were too poor and feeble to endure further taxation. Let Parliament discuss instead how the King might maintain the war out of his own resources.

  Infuriated by the presumption of what he called “these low hedge-knights,” Lancaster threatened in private “to give them such a fright that they shall not provoke me again.” He was warned by an adviser that the Commons “have the countenance of the Prince your brother” and the support of the Londoners, who would not allow them to be touched. Biding his time, the Duke visited the Commons next day under a guise so gracious that members stared at him in amazement, but they were not diverted from pursuing the charges against Latimer and Lyons. They summoned as witnesses two former Treasurers and other officials, demanded to examine the public accounts, and conducted the proceedings as a formal trial. When all the evidence had been heard, the Commons cried with one voice, “Lord Duke, now you can see and hear that Lord Latimer and Richard Lyons have acted falsely for their own advantage for which we demand remedy and redress!”

  When Latimer demanded to know by whom and by what authority he was being indicted, Sir Peter de la Mare supplied the historic answer that the Commons as a body would maintain all their charges in common. At one stroke he created the constitutional means for impeachment and removal of ministers. Lyons thought to spike the process by sending the Black Prince a bribe of £1,000 concealed in a barrel of sturgeon. The Prince sent it back, but the King, in more comfortable cynicism, accepted a similar bribe with the jest that he was only taking back his own.

  Parliament found the charges proved. The two accused ministers and four subordinates, including Latimer’s son-in-law, Lord Nevill, steward of the King’s household, were judged guilty, dismissed from office and condemned to fines and imprisonment, although Latimer was shortly released on bail provided by a group of his friends. Even Alice Perrers was removed on charges of meddling in the law by sitting alongside judges on the bench and overawing them into decisions in favor of her friends. Miserably the King had to acquiesce in her banishment from court.

  The petitions of reform were accepted in the King’s name by John of Gaunt, who for the time being considered that he had insufficient support in the Lords to do otherwise. Besides annual Parliaments, the Commons demanded election of members by the “better folk” of the shires rather than by appointment of the sheriff. The petition for enforcement of the Statute of Laborers, with provisions for arrest and punishment of violators, reflected the growing antagonism between employer and worker. Likewise the growing antagonism to the papacy appeared in the petition for the exclusion of papal tax-collectors and prohib
ition of the export of money. No petition was made for peace, probably because the Commons believed the recent ill-fortunes in war had been due to the incompetent and corrupt leadership they were now replacing.

  To contain John of Gaunt—or “bell the cat,” as it appeared in Langland’s fable—and to maintain the reforms once Parliament had dispersed, a new Council was named of nine lords and prelates including the ex-Chancellor, William of Wykeham, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, a rather pedestrian character of non-noble birth. The youth of the Council was characteristic of the early age at which men exercised power. Apart from Wykeham and Sudbury, six of the seven other members, including William Courtenay, Bishop of London, were under the age of 34, two of these under 30, and one, the Earl of March, was 25. Their opponent, the great Duke of Lancaster, was 36, born in the same year as Coucy.

  Just as Parliament reached the peak of its accomplishment, the Prince fell into a fatal phase of his disease, complicated by dysentery. He grew so weak that he several times fainted and was thought to be dead. His chambers filled with doctors and surgeons, with the weeping and groaning of his followers and visits of the royal family for the final leave-taking. His sister Isabella and the Sire de Coucy came to the bedside to add their tears. John of Gaunt came, and the two younger brothers, Edmund of Langley, future Duke of York, something of a nonentity, and Thomas of Woodstock, unpleasant, violent, and ill-fated. In a parent’s sad survival, the King came amid “great lamentation” and “no one there could keep from tears in great desolation at the circumstances and the sorrow of the King taking leave of his son forever,” the fifth of his adult children to go before him.*