If maintenance and the buying up of affinities were by no means new phenomenon, then the fifteenth century has nonetheless been presented by historians as a period of rapid social change. Social mobility is a difficult phenomenon to quantify, but recent estimates place the total acreage of land changing hands on the property market at well over 80 per cent in a county such as Warwickshire over the period 1350–1520, or two-thirds of the knights’ fees in Nottinghamshire over the course of merely three generations, a volatility which reflects the fall of old men and the rise of new on a scale normally associated with such supposed periods of social ‘crisis’ as the 1560s or the 1620s. Yet the thirteenth century had already seen the transfer of manors and knights’ fees on a very considerable scale, the rise of new men and the fall of old. ‘New men’ were themselves the target of criticism as early as the 1120s, amongst chroniclers whose immediate forebears had witnessed the greatest upheaval ever recorded in English history: the Norman Conquest after 1066, and the eruption into English society of hundreds if not thousands of landowners whose ancestors could certainly have rivalled the Pastons or the de la Poles in the lowliness of their origins.
Perhaps the truth is that society is always in a state of crisis and change. Whether there was anything quantifiably different about the rise of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century gentry, as opposed to the crisis between Normans and Englishmen after 1066, or between courtiers and county elite in the centuries either side of 1250, should not be allowed to obscure the greater evidence for continuity. In 1450, England was still an essentially rural society, with more than 90 per cent of its population established outside towns, with one or two per cent, constituting the politically active classes, relying upon agriculture and the land for the majority of their wealth. The sense that the social fabric was being entirely rewoven and that such concepts as aristocracy or deference were no longer benign necessities, was articulated in a new vernacular literature either championing or challenging the status quo, which in itself suggests unease and in particular that old patterns were being replaced by new. Similar sentiments had been voiced in the twelfth century, albeit in Latin rarely read by historians of the fifteenth century. Such sentiments are still voiced today, not least in the national newspapers, without anyone necessarily believing that society stands on the edge of a bottomless precipice of revolution and social unrest.
Liaisons dangereux
The great irony here is that the reign of Edward III witnessed not just the diversification of distinctions between the various orders of society but the first open recognition, at least since the time of Herleva, the mother of William the Conqueror, that the King himself might take a lower-status mistress and treat her as his wife. Edward III began a liaison with Alice Perrers in the mid-1360s, some years before the death of his queen, Philippa of Hainault, in whose household Alice had previously served. Alice herself was probably the daughter of a minor Hertfordshire knight, though hostile chroniclers claimed that her father was nothing more than a weaver or even a thatcher of other people’s roofs. Like a later Thatcher of the 1980s, herself regarded as low-born and tarnished by too close an association with trade, Alice proved a ruthless and successful operator, loathed with irrational fury by her critics. In 1375, by which time he was perhaps going more than slightly ga-ga, Edward III held a tournament at Smithfield in which Alice was exhibited to Londoners as the Lady of the Sun, hardly the most appropriate disguise for a low-born courtesan. In Langland’s Piers Plowman, by contrast, she appears as Lady Meed, the embodiment of avaricious worldliness.
Ironically, her downfall after the King’s death in 1377 was masterminded by Edward III’s son John of Gaunt, who by this time had himself entered into a liaison, subsequently a marriage, with a low-born member of his household, Katherine Swynford, daughter of a Flemish herald. Katherine bore John four children before their marriage was solemnized in 1396. These children, the Beauforts, became leading political players through to the 1450s, and it was a direct descendant, Katherine Swynford’s great-granddaughter Lady Margaret Beaufort, who transmitted the royal bloodline to Henry Tudor. Tudor himself was the grandson of a secret marriage between a low-born Welshman (without even a surname to advertise his gentility) and Catherine of Valois, daughter of King Charles VI of France, widow of King Henry V of England and mother of King Henry VI.
Another member of the royal family, Joan, from 1361 the wife of Edward III’s eldest son, Edward the Black Prince, and mother of the future King Richard II, herself a granddaughter of Edward I and the cousin of Edward III, had been secretly married in her youth to Thomas Holland, a minor knight of the royal household. The complications that arose here, when Joan married for a second time, potentially bigamously, to the Earl of Salisbury, when Holland became steward to Joan and her new husband, and when, using the profits of ransoms taken in the Crécy campaign, Holland launched a successful attempt to reclaim his wife by litigation at the papal court, almost beggar belief. They certainly rendered Joan, the ‘Fair Maid of Kent’, as scandalous a partner as any other selected by a future heir to the throne. The fact that all three of her husbands were amongst the knights of the Order of the Garter, newly appointed after 1346 (Joan’s husbands making up no less than twelve per cent of the Order’s original membership), is a remarkable indication of Joan’s charms. At the same time, it supplies yet another hint that the chivalry of Edward III’s court, and even his order of knighthood intended to be the most exclusive and chivalrous in Christendom, masked a rather seamier human reality.
Edward III might be said to have been the first king in English history successfully to have played upon the image of a royal ‘family’, refashioning the dysfunctional Plantagenet brood of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries into one whose members acted together in peace and love. In the 1380s, a decade after his death, miniature gilt images of twelve of his children were placed around Edward III’s tomb chest at Westminster Abbey, complete with their heraldic arms, symbolizing harmony within the Plantagenet family as the embodiment of age-old national virtues. Yet, as with more recent attempts to broadcast such virtue amongst the houses of Windsor or Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, this was also a family whose liaisons, both outside marriage and outside social class, raised many an eyebrow.
Their kinship to such clans as the Beauforts, the Hollands or the Tudors, all rewarded with earldoms or dukedoms, was to bring the kings of England into potentially dangerous proximity to the English upper classes, themselves about to embark upon an unprecedented orgy of self-slaughter. It even threatened to establish cousinhood between the descendants of William the Conqueror and a mere English scribbler and composer of light verse: Geoffrey Chaucer, married to Philippa, the sister of Katherine Swynford, became uncle by marriage not only to an earl and a cardinal but to a future King of England, Katherine Swynford’s step-son, Henry IV.
There is one other consequence of these liaisons. As anyone who has made sense, or indeed failed to make sense, of the horrendous catalogue of cousinhood and kinship set out above will surely realize, historians of the fifteenth century are sometimes so busy compiling family trees, recalling the details of family alliances and attempting to make sense of the relations between second or third cousins that they forget either that they have readers to entertain or that their readers are unlikely, unless deranged or highly peculiar, to enter into these questions of kinship with quite the same degree of enthusiasm that they inspire amongst the experts. The snobbery with violence that constitutes fifteenth-century history can all too easily devolve into the worst sort of genealogical train-spotting, with John of Gaunt or Edmund Somerset cast in the role of the Flying Scotsman or the LMS Stanier Class 5 4-6-0 with (or without) exterior Caprotti valve gear.
Peasants
Perhaps, in our search for the real signs of change in society after 1350 we need to look not so much to the royal family, to the aristocracy or to the politically active gentry, but to a class thus far consigned to the role of a mere chorus in history: the peasantry, who tilled the land
, bore the brunt of taxation and who, throughout the fourteenth century had died from a variety of pestilences and natural or human disasters in anonymous and unquantifiable droves. Peasants in the Middle Ages have names, but rarely any more rounded identity. Peasant surnames, which develop earlier in England than elsewhere in Europe, themselves are a consequence of subservience rather than liberty, since they come to us chiefly from the rich sources recording taxation and justice imposed by kings and other lords. Collectively, peasant lives revolved around the great open fields cultivated on the edge of the village, assessed as so many plough-lands (bovates or virgates), divided into strips over which there was near permanent dispute. Some 90 per cent of peasant homicides took place in these fields or on the paths and roads that divided them, very often as a result of boundary disputes.
The peasant home, although a comparatively safe place, was very far from being a luxurious one. The old idea, favoured by historians who wished to see a dramatic and disastrous collapse in family values as a result of the rise of capitalism, was that peasants inhabited houses themselves generations old, in which large, extended families of uncles, aunts and cousins lived side by side. In reality, the house was a short-lived structure, built of wood and mud, its clay floor regularly swept and cleaned. A hole in the thatch allowed some (but one suspects never enough) of the smoke to escape. Such homes were intended to last a single generation, twenty years or so, before being razed and rebuilt.
There was a clear distinction here between peasant modes of life and the ‘big houses’ of urban merchants, the gentry or the aristocracy, often constructed of stone and intended to last. The gentry house revolved around its communal dining and its entourage of servants and dependents. Service, either to a great landowner, as a domestic retainer in a gentry house, as a retained labourer, or as the humblest of maids or menials in a yeoman farmhouse was one of the underlying pillars of English society. From at least the time of Beowulf through to the First World War, an extraordinary proportion of the population lived as servants in other people’s houses. By contrast, the peasant hut was reserved for a nuclear family, for the most part merely parents and children, living in close proximity to their livestock.
There were hazards to such an existence. Smoke and dust inflamed eyes already weakened by a diet of cereals from which vitamin A was notably lacking. The straw used for bedding and floor-covering provided an ideal breeding ground for fleas. Zoonotic diseases (those shared with or spread by animals) were unavoidable: internal parasites, ringworm, whipworm and tapeworm were transmitted from the faecal matter of domestic animals. Sheep scattered ticks. Bovine tuberculosis was acquired through the ingestion of infected meat or milk, and in its glandular form, as ‘scrofula’ or the ‘king’s evil’, was reputed to be treatable only through the touch of a king: by the reign of Edward I, as many as 1,000 sufferers, for the most part peasants, were queuing up each year at the royal court in order to be cured.
Modern health and safety officers would have been appalled by communal ovens (into which children could all too easily climb for warmth), wells and outside latrines (into which the unwary could tumble), and ponds (in which they could drown, especially at night, which was unlit save by moon and stars and, in modern terms, eerily quiet). Most collections of miracle stories of the English saints will include at least one or two instances of children who strayed too near building sites or mills. The King himself was occasionally called upon to exercise mercy by pardoning homicides accidentally committed by peasants, as for example on behalf of Katherine Passeavant, aged four, in 1249 imprisoned in the abbot of St Albans’ gaol because, opening a door, she had accidentally knocked a younger child into a cauldron of hot water from which injury the child had died. To judge from coroners’ records, nearly half of the fatal accidents that befell adult males involved carting or transport. Hernias (from heavy lifting) were common, and osteoarthritis, aggravated by cold and damp working conditions, has been diagnosed in as many as half of the skeletal remains of those involved in manual labour.
The medieval equivalent of the tractor, the ox-cart or handcart, essential to harvesting and to the gathering of timber for fuel, was a dangerous and lumbering piece of equipment from which it was easy to fall, and under which it was all too easy to be crushed. With ale brewed from malted barley drunk in preference to water, available in almost unlimited quantities to those working the lord’s land, drunkenness was frequent and affected both men and women. Even so, and by contrast with the Russian peasantry of the nineteenth century described by Maxim Gorky, violence within such communities tended to be accidental and occasional rather than deliberate and habitual.
The disciplining of wives by husbands was advocated as a necessary duty: ‘For he that fails to beat his wife, will never wear the britches the rest of his life’. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, from a class somewhere between yeomanry and gentry, married for the fifth time to a much younger husband, dared tear out a page from a book that he was reading her about the wiles and wickedness of women. The husband struck her such a blow that she was permanently deafened. She, however, responded in kind, and there can be little doubt who it was in that particular household that henceforth wore the britches. In illustrations of peasant life, most famously in the Luttrell Psalter (made c.1340 for Geoffrey Luttrell of Irnham in Lincolnshire, and intended to emphasize the exalted but benign nature of his lordship), it is more often women who are shown chastising their husbands than men who are shown beating their wives. Women undoubtedly worked as hard if not harder than men, in the home, in the fields and in such tasks as brewing or spinning which were considered specifically female occupations. The husband-beater of the Luttrell Psalter wields a large broom that is itself perhaps an ale stake, the symbol stuck from the eaves of a house to indicate beer for sale. The English ‘pub’, often regarded as a traditionally male enclave only recently invaded by women, began its existence as the village alehouse, recorded from at least the thirteenth century. Generally, as in rural Ireland, it was a peasant home rather than a purpose-built tavern or inn, run by a female ale wife and supplied with ale, often as thick and cloudy as fermented bread, that she herself had brewed.
Within this world, there was a vast distinction to be drawn between the poorest labourers, barely able to support themselves, and the richer peasants, already, before the Black Death, accustomed to those habits of thrift and hard work which ensured their status as property-owners, able to save money and to lend it to their neighbours in return for favours or profit. In the Middle Ages, we are told, work was generally inefficient, small-scale and task orientated rather than determined according to time. In reality, the modern work ethic is by no means as modern as might be supposed. The very fact that the Church found it necessary to insist that everyone cease work on the Sabbath and on a series of the greater Church festivals (about twenty days in all during the course of the liturgical year), suggests that it was necessary to compel medieval peasants not to work. Manorial by-laws suggest that there were time restrictions and curfews, by the 1450s by clock hours, imposed on labour. Our first knowledge of the existence of alehouses comes from the 1190s, precisely because certain people, above all the clergy, were prohibited from entering them. Langland’s Piers Plowman was beset by ‘wasters’ who preferred singing songs to tilling the land, but Piers, who owned his own equipment and draft animals, was himself clearly a successful and hardworking kulak. The Luttrell Psalter is as full of illustrations of peasant hard labour as it is of peasants wrestling, setting dogs on a tinker, bear-baiting, or engaged in other ‘leisure-time’ activities. Even the shepherds’ flutes shown in the Psalter have a utilitarian purpose, not just to wile away the time in Arcadian sloth, but to summon their sheepdogs to their work.
Throughout history, from the eleventh century to the fourteenth, a large proportion of the peasantry was regarded as human property: a brood of animals belonging to their manorial lord. Heriot (the obligation by a peasant, when his lord died, to hand over the peasant’s best beast as a token
that all his property belonged to the lord’s successor), merchet (the obligation to pay a fine on the marriage of a daughter, in essence because such women and their progeny were now removed from the lord’s labour force), legerwite (a fine payable when such girls were deflowered, with or without marriage), boon work in cultivating the lord’s land without recompense as a natural consequence of the privilege of cultivating one’s own few strips of field: all of these marked out the peasant as unfree, unable to leave his servitude, unprotected by a large part of the law by which the freeman’s status was affirmed. The voice of the peasants themselves is first heard filtered through clerical spokesmen, through demands that the great do justice to their dependents and succour the hungry and the weak. From around 1300, a tradition of vernacular poetry emerged in which the sufferings of the poor take a particularly prominent place. This is poetry written by clergymen merely pretending to speak in the accents of the peasantry. Nonetheless, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the indignation that it expressed. Such protests increased beyond measure as a result of the famine and pestilence after 1315. The so-called Song of the Husbondman (and we might remember here that Clement Paston, ancestor of the Pastons of Caister, was himself by origin described as nothing more than a ‘husbondman’) laments, c.1320, a brutal existence, in which the peasant and his wife, her bleeding feet wrapped in rags, drive the plough whilst their baby lies in a basin at the end of the field and two other infants howl from cold and hunger.
A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485 Page 40