by Dan Jones
By the fourteenth century, however, a great number of serfs had been set free, and their labour dues had been combined with or replaced by cash rents. Villages might contain a mixture of serfs and freemen, and there were degrees of hierarchy within the village, well below the level of the lord. Many whose ancestors had been serfs had managed to wriggle out of the bonds of tenure, acquired free legal status and started to speculate in land, employing other men and women from their villages, protecting their property in law and adopting the mindset of the upwardly mobile.
But for all, the bond of lordship remained strong. Whether land was rented, owned or occupied in return for forced labour, lordship was a two-way relationship and the great landowners of England wielded considerable political and legal power over the lesser. The lord, sitting as judge in his manor court, ultimately protected the property of his tenants, which affected everyone in the area. Should a village man find himself in a dispute; should his son be crippled or his daughter kidnapped; should his home be burned or his land stolen; should he wake up to find his sheep’s throats slit, or their wool shorn and ghosted away in the night, it was usually to his lord he turned for restitution, protection or judgement.
There were, of course, disadvantages. Some lords had a nasty habit of screwing every last advantage out of their position and could insist on claiming various irritating slices of often meagre peasant incomes, such as a sweetener when a daughter married, or a fee on inheriting a father’s property. Villagers were expected to turn out as the rent-a-mob when the lord required muscle in disputes with his neighbours. (They were largely untrained in the martial arts-although skill with a longbow was a hallmark of the English army in the fourteenth century, only the knightly classes had the spare time and money to become truly dangerous. When called to battle, the lower orders mainly provided crossbow fodder.) And they might be called upon to defend the realm itself. For some this meant battle on the Continent; for others, especially villagers on the south coast, the fourteenth century was one of intermittent defence against burning and looting by French raiding parties.
Yet despite the occasional irritations, and the intrusions of life’s grimmer realities, the various strata of English society had lived in relatively peaceful coexistence since at least the days of the Conquest. Medieval life was acutely hierarchical, with a sense of place in the world inseparable from ideas of Christian duty and the belief in a divinely ordained order of the universe. Charity and paternalism on the lords’ side was largely reciprocated by deference and respect for authority on their tenants’. Villages could not be policed in the sense that we would understand it now, and a sensitive lord understood that he had to work his estate management and local government through the existing village hierarchies. More senior men in the village were needed to perform administrative tasks for the lord, and to broker potentially unpopular lordly demands with the lesser men of their communities.
The two-way relationship was reinforced by the ample scope that existed for rising up through the ranks. The path out of drudgery and toil was well trodden. William Wykeham, bishop of Winchester from 1367 to 1371, was probably the son of a peasant. Clement Paston, a plough-pushing fourteenth-century churl, founded the letter-writing Pastons of Norfolk, one of the fifteenth century’s best-known gentry dynasties. If the relationship was managed correctly, there did not need to be perpetual strife between lords and tenants, and for the most part, there was not.
In 1381, though, there was a violent and total rejection of lordship. Hostility to the ancient social structures produced the ‘merciless destruction’ prophesied by Gower. The common multitude rose, and yielded, just as predicted, to neither reason nor discipline. Why?
The answer is complex, and the only way to unravel the rage of the rebels in 1381 is to delve deep into a society that had been creaking into an unfamiliar shape during the previous thirty years. There was no single event to blame for the revolt but several burned fiercely underneath. The most important was the arrival of the most ruthless killer England had seen then, or has seen since: the Black Death.
The Black Death arrived from continental Europe, probably via the Channel Islands, in the summer of 1348. Bristol, Southampton and Melcombe Regis (now Weymouth) suffered first, and from the ports the plague spread at a rate of between one and five miles a day, wiping out almost half of the English population. Sufferers succumbed to one of three equally nasty variations: the bubonic plague, in which buboes or tumours as big as eggs or even apples would appear on the neck, armpits and groin, bringing death within a week; a second variation, spread by the breath, attacked the respiratory system, and usually killed its victims within forty-eight hours. A septicaemic version also appeared, attacking the blood system, which led to internal haemorrhaging, causing dark blotches grimly referred to as ‘God’s tokens’ all over the body.
As people across Europe began to sicken and die, the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio called the Italian epidemic a sign of God’s wrath. The Scots, meanwhile, rashly adjudged it a sign of God’s specific wrath at the English and ‘were accustomed to swear “be the foul deth of Engelond”’.2
But the plague made no distinction between Scots and English, and it had little respect for social hierarchy. Nobles and gentry across Europe tried their best to avoid the plague by shutting themselves away in their houses, but the plague was too virulent. Remedies prescribed included posies of flowers held by the nose, drinking and debauchery in taverns, isolation at home, bleeding and prayer. None worked, and though the richest in society could afford to sample the more extravagant medicines (King Edward III, suffering from dysentery, was once prescribed an electuary of ambergris, musk, pearls, gold and silver, which cost £134, or around three knights’ yearly incomes combined) they did not escape untouched. Archbishops died in the same agonies as their subordinates and dioceseans: in July 1349 the Pope consecrated the new archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bradwardine, in Rome. He died of the plague within two days of his return to England. The common people of England died in such great quantities that their bodies were often simply piled into trenches by the willing few who could be found to dispose of them. An accompanying plague among oxen and sheep left the countryside littered with carcasses ‘rotted so much that neither bird nor beast would touch them’.3
The grim mortality caused great alarm across Europe, but in England the economic effects of the plague worried the government just as much. In 1349 Edward III rushed out a royal command-the Ordinance of Labourers. ‘Because a great part of the people, and especially of workmen and servants, late[ly] died of the pestilence,’ read the proclamation, ‘many seeing the necessity of masters, and great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they may receive excessive wages.’ In other words plague survivors could suddenly become rich. Having scrabbled for work in an employers’ market before the Black Death, the English lower orders could suddenly name their price. This was very worrying. The official response-ratified in the 1351 parliament as the Statute of Labourers-was to set up a rigorous system of wage and price fixing, setting out maximum daily rates of pay for almost every profession imaginable. Farmers, saddlers, tailors, fishmongers, butchers, brewers, bakers and every other labourer and artisan in England were prevented from charging more than pre-plague prices for their goods or work; and they were committing a crime if they did not ‘serve him which shall so require’-meaning they had to work wherever and whenever they were instructed. Punishments were tough-three days’ imprisonment in the stocks for first offenders, fines (300 per cent of the offending mark-up for shopkeepers who hiked their prices) and imprisonment for the obstinate.
From the day it was published, the Statute of Labourers was greeted with a mixture of hostility, contempt and point-blank refusal. Even in an age devoid of economic theory, the sheer injustice of tampering with natural supply and demand was obvious. So was its futility. As demand for workers raced well ahead of supply, the law quickly became unworkable. But that did not stop landowners trying to enforce it.
Wage demands rose and rents crashed in the absence of tenants to fill the land, and the greater landlords found the basis of their fortunes crumbling. Prosecutions under the new labour laws rocketed. By the 1370s, 70 per cent of legal business in the king’s courts involved the labour legislation, and this-along with lords’ newly enthusiastic use of their own private manor courts to force workers to perform as much labour service as possible-quickly sowed a culture of discontent and resistance to the law among the lower orders.4 Far from protecting them, the royal law was being used to harass them, to question their right to earn their worth, and to prevent them from acquiring and protecting their property.
From the position of the aristocracy, however, the labour laws made good sense. The sudden affluence of the rough-and-tumble village folk was threatening the divine and visible order of society just as much as the state of their private wealth. Rather than a fair rise in the value of labour, they saw what the Statute of Labourers called ‘the malice of servants who were idle and unwilling to serve after the pestilence without taking outrageous wages’.5 They began to see ambitious and wealthy villagers adopting habits above their station, dressing smartly and affecting the appearance of their betters. Gower, writing in characteristic animal allegory, described how ‘the asses now took it upon themselves to enjoy jewelled saddles and always have their manes combed’. So in 1363 Parliament approved a reissue of the twenty-five-year-old sumptuary laws to attempt to preserve a visible distinction between the classes. The laws restricted the wearing of furs, or the increasingly popular pointed shoes, to nobles (who were allowed toe extensions of up to 24 inches), gentlemen (12 inches) and merchants (6.5 inches). They also forbade the lower orders to eat anything but the most basic foodstuffs.
For the workers, suddenly feeling the full weight of royal law, the legislation was a gross affront. It attacked not just the wages in their pocket but their dreams of betterment. Society had loosened its strictures on social advancement during previous generations-now all that was under threat, and the spectre of a new serfdom loomed over villages across the English countryside. It was not, perhaps, the old manorial system, but the laws seemed gradually to be reinstating the misery of bondage by any other name.
All this tension, then, was growing worryingly obvious as the 1370s advanced. It did not need a visionary like Gower to see it. Soon the commons in Parliament (which mainly represented and contained members of the gentry) began to complain of greater and greater hostility from the lower orders, who ‘have made confederation and alliance together to resist the lords and their officials by force… and they threaten to kill their lords’ servants if they make distraint upon them for their customs and services’.6 All across the country there was resistance. There was a real sense that the English lower orders were gaining a sense of their own independent power. As a threat to society and the godly composition of the realm, this was very worrying. In the medieval world-view, consistent relations between the estates of society was a founding principle of Christian order.
And yet powerful economic forces prevailed. Egged on by unscrupulous itinerant lawyers, villagers all over the country were known to be making attempts to secure free status in the royal courts. Whole villages began to claim special status under the terms of the Domesday Book, arguing that this ancient document proved their freedom from all number of lordly claims on their labour and wealth. The autumn of 1376 had given birth to the ‘Great Rumour’, a movement that had taken place across the fertile heartland of the south. Villagers started employing lawyers and instructing them to apply for “exemplifications” of Domesday.7 (These were certified copies of the section of the Book that reported on the state of the village at the time of the Norman Conquest; copies that were presented neatly with an impression of the Great Seal of Chancery on the front.)
Between 1376 and 1377, nearly 100 villages asked for copies of Domesday. Getting hold of an exemplification was not the most opaque legal process of all, but it demanded legal savvy, ready cash and good contacts with the legal system in London. That ordinary villagers were suddenly rich, smart and bold enough to engage with law and politics made landowners very uneasy indeed. And when legal machinations were combined in some cases with outright threats to kill and maim their enemies, England’s governing class began to worry that it would not be long before the threats became reality.
Added to this thick soup of social discord was the constant threat of war. From 1336, early in Edward III’s reign, England had been engaged in a bitter, bloody struggle with France. Historians have called it the Hundred Years War, although in truth it was fought intermittently for a mere six decades. In the beginning, with Edward III a young man, a competent general and a forceful political negotiator, the war went well. England claimed glorious victories at sea and on land, owing mainly to the English mastery of the longbow-which could send an arrow through French armour, and could kill a horse with little difficulty from long range. War focused the realm and charmed the nobility, and Edward III, with a keen eye for internal diplomacy, made the overriding object of his reign one thing, and one thing alone: to capture the French throne.
To any English king in any century, conquering France was a grand ambition. Not only was the French kingdom territorially larger than the English, it was also much more difficult to maintain an army separated by the Channel. It had to be supplied at least in part from home soil and any successfully annexed territory had to be defended by expensive garrisons. The costs could be onerous.
But if the costs were high, the prize was deeply alluring. To place England at the heart of European intrigue brought glory to the English Crown. It gave the native English aristocracy, who led the wars and embraced the culture of chivalry, a profound sense of martial purpose, while the rank-and-file recruits were always happy to visit France, where the chance of decent plunder was higher than when raiding the freezing border towns in southern Scotland.
In partnership with his son Prince Edward (known to historians as the Black Prince), the young Edward III claimed resounding victories across France. At the battle of Crécy in 1346, the king thrust the sixteen-year-old prince into the centre of a stunning victory over superior French forces; he emerged victorious, the French utterly defeated and many of their own nobility dead on the battlefield.
The successes piled up. Later in 1346 the Scottish king David II had been captured near Durham and the next year, back in France, the English had conquered Calais, providing them with a French port that would remain English for two centuries. But the high point came at Poitiers in 1356, when an army led by Prince Edward was stalking through south-west France and came upon the French army led by King Jean. Battle was given and the prince, using similar archer-led tactics to those deployed at Crécy, routed the French army, slew a great many of the French nobles and seized the French king.
The result of this victory was the Treaty of Bretigny, signed and ratified in 1360/61, in which Edward III laid claim to great swathes of French territory. This included Gascony, several counties in northern France and the area around Calais. King Jean was ransomed at massive cost, and the prestige of the English Crown was raised to truly incredible heights. Bretigny was the high point of Edwardian kingship. In many ways, it was the high point of the English fourteenth century, a time when France was the enemy, England the mighty victor and kingship at home was proud and strong.
But momentum was required, and after Bretigny, English fortunes began to wane. In 1364 the captive King Jean, still under ransom, died in London, and his successor, Charles V, proved an astute political rival to Edward, frustrating his ambitions in Flanders and Brittany, resisting his efforts to cement English influence in France and allying with the Castilians to oppose Prince Edward’s rule in Gascony. As Edward’s reign wore on, the glorious victories began to dry up, and the considerable expense of paying for an army in the field became an increasing burden on a country that simply could not cope with the demands of a protracted war footing. The Black Prince contracted dysentery on
campaign in Castile and suffered a lingering, painful death. At the same time, Edward himself grew increasingly feeble and senile, until by the 1370s his rule and his royal servants were under constant attack from the taxpaying classes, who were heartily sick of pumping cash into the yawning maw of a war bogged down in its own ambition. The dream, so nearly achieved and painstakingly won, was beginning to slip by.
In the parliament of 1376, with Edward close to death and the Black Prince fresh in his grave, the political community went on the attack. The focus was in the parliamentary commons, which comprised the upper middling ranks of English society-knights, town burgesses, large landholders and influential county men. They liked to complain of having been squeezed tightest by the war. Taxation hit them proportionally harder than the upper ranks of the nobility, while the costs of managing their estates had rocketed after the Black Death. They complained bitterly that they were ‘seriously distressed in several ways by several misfortunes such as the wars in France, Spain, Ireland, Guienne, Brittany and elsewhere’,8 and began to demand political reform.
The result was the Good Parliament, as shocking an expression of general political discontent as had been seen for more than thirty years. The king’s household was purged and his mistress, Alice Perrers, was severely castigated. The process of impeachment was used for the first time, aimed against royal servants who were widely blamed for the mismanagement of the war chest and the corruptions of the court. Richard Lyons, who was chief among the super-wealthy London merchants who partially bankrolled the war by loans to the Crown, and won royal favour in return, was impeached and imprisoned, as were several other key figures of the commons’ ire. This was a stark repudiation of royal government, which even the eulogies that attended the deaths of the Black Prince and Edward III, in 1376 and 1377 respectively, could not disguise.