Not since the early thirteenth century, when the regulation of clerical costume, the ban on priests wearing scarlet or excessively luxurious cloth, was a leading feature of episcopal legislation, had the fear been so clearly articulated that the lower orders were getting above themselves and that society was collapsing for lack of proper respect for rank: wastrels were rising whilst merchants were living like pedlars and lords as mere ‘lads’, as the English poem Winner and Waster chose to put it. The Scrope-Grosvenor case of 1380s, in which two leading families contended before the court of the King’s constable for the right to bear the same coat of arms, and in which evidence was given by such celebrities as John of Gaunt, Geoffrey Chaucer and Owen Glyn Dwr, is itself an indication of the degree to which badges and outward symbols of rank were now being policed, to prevent the contamination of aristocracy by the lower orders, or the blurring of social distinction.
The livery badges of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – Richard II’s white hart, a symbol apparently first adopted by his mother, the Lancastrian collar of ‘S’s, apparently adopted as early as the 1340s by Queen Philippa, John of Gaunt’s mother, and representing the forget-me-not or ‘souveyne vous de moi’, ‘remember me’ (an early and comparatively innocent use of the SS symbol) – can be interpreted as calls to obedience and order rather than as radical new departures. Nor was nostalgia confined to the political elite. In 1377, the peasants of southern England looked to Domesday Book and the eleventh-century customs of their manors as the origin of the ‘Great Rumour’ that villeinage was about to be abolished. The ‘Law of Winchester’ which Watt Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 sought to reinstitute was probably this same Domesday law, since Domesday was known alternatively as the ‘Book of Winchester’. Even the Lollards, for all their supposed radicalism, can be seen as deeply conservative, attempting to cut through the elaborations of late medieval religion towards a rediscovery of primitive, Biblical truths. Those who persecuted Lollardy via trial and inquisition themselves drew on memories of the twelfth-century Cathars and upon fears that England, in ancient times the home of the early-Christian heretic Pelagius, was about to return to its ancient British and heretical roots.
Buildings and fine arts
There is a sense by the fifteenth century, not just that Englishmen had more material possessions, a better diet than that of their predecessors, more luxurious furnishings, access to better supplied markets, but of England itself being increasingly cluttered up with the debris of the English past. Men and women expressed nostalgia for a heritage that they believed to be vanishing or crumbling around them even as they reached out to record or preserve it or to acquire the consumer goods and fashions of an increasingly commercialized age. The cathedrals and churches raised by the Normans, originally new and shocking reminders of a social revolution, had been transformed even by 1350 into venerable and ancient reminders of a long vanished past. The age of epic had ended. Lincoln Cathedral had been rebuilt three times since the Norman Conquest, its final incarnation completed in the reign of Henry III. Thereafter, from the 1250s, whilst the cathedral’s masons repaired the old, and mended the damaged, there was no proposal to rebuild from scratch.
Partly this was the result of rising labour costs, which from the 1380s became positively prohibitive: estimates of the cost of building even a peasant cottage rose from 10s or 20s in the 1290s, to £3 for the simplest sort of dwelling by 1400, an instance of house-price inflation every bit as remarkable as that of the late twentieth-century property ‘bubble’. Partly, however, it reflects a sense of respect for the past: the appreciation of a heritage that was no longer to be pulled down and improved, but was regarded as something precious, to be admired and preserved. Henceforth, although the old might be tampered with, as with the rebuilding of the naves of Canterbury and Winchester cathedrals, or Richard II’s reroofing of Westminster Hall, it was already recognized that to build anew was not always to ‘improve’ upon what had gone before.
Abandoning the epic structures of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, challenging heaven in their height and scale, the later Middle Ages prized decoration and the sumptuous arts. Its greatest monuments are often on a modest or even a miniature scale: painted manuscripts and books of hours, or the remarkable gold and enamel toys exchanged as Christmas or New Year presents between kings, represented in England by the Dunstable swan, an exquisite gold livery badge perhaps associated with the Bohun earls of Hereford. The fifteenth century marked a high point in the painting of stained glass, and above all perhaps in the carving of alabaster. Beginning in the 1330s with the tomb of Edward II at Gloucester, alabaster, a distinctively English fine-grained form of gypsum quarried principally in Staffordshire and Derbyshire, became the stone of choice for the tomb effigies of kings, aristocrats and bishops. Whilst the very best stained glass continued to be imported into England from Burgundy, the Rhineland and especially from Normandy, rather than produced in the glass factories of the Weald of Kent, European buyers were only too keen to export English alabaster images of the saints, altar-pieces and other elaborately carved panels, a native English art, in its way just as remarkable as the bronze, ceramic and marble figures that Donatello or Lucca Della Robbia were in the process of fashioning for the churches, palaces and piazzas of fifteenth-century Florence. Pewter, made from an alloy 80 per cent tin and therefore dependent upon the Cornish tin deposits, used as an alternative to ceramics or glass for plates and drinking vessels, was another late-medieval export. Like the Opus Anglicanum of the Anglo-Saxons, these were mass-produced luxury goods, sumptuous arts that were distinctively English.
Digging up the past
Just as the mining of Cornish tin or Derbyshire alabaster was a semi-industrialized concern, so the digging up of the past was already, by the fifteenth century, a very ancient and respectable pursuit. Richard of Cornwall, the brother of King Henry III, had been licensed in the 1250s to excavate barrows and ancient graves in the west of England and to keep whatever treasure might be found. In the 1180s, King Henry II is said already to have ordered a search for the bones of King Arthur at Glastonbury, and these same bones were reburied there a century later by Edward I. It was perhaps from these Glastonbury excavations that Westminster Abbey claimed to have come into possession of King Arthur’s seal, set in beryl, still being displayed in the 1480s. Again at Glastonbury, around 1400, a local monk named John wove a wonderful tale, in part copied from earlier histories of his abbey, in part newly spun, in which Glastonbury’s claim to the relics of St Patrick was fiercely defended and in which King Arthur was revealed to be a direct descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, the attendant at Christ’s burial who was said to have collected a portion of Christ’s blood in a ‘grail’ identified as the cup used at the Last Supper.
According to legend, Joseph had travelled to England where he had founded Glastonbury Abbey in 63AD. This claim was of more than merely local significance. Since 1378, Christendom had been thrown into turmoil by the simultaneous election of two popes: one still based at Avignon commanding the allegiance of the kings of France, the other once again resident in Rome and recognized by the kings of England. To heal this ‘Schism’, a series of councils was held, in which the representatives of the various churches of Europe were seated and granted precedence according to the date at which their nations had first accepted the word of Christ. If Glastonbury had been founded as early as 63AD, then this would render the English Church the oldest in Europe, far senior to the French. Not surprisingly, French and Spanish churchmen sought to pour scorn upon Glastonbury’s legend. The Glastonbury monks responded with a highly politicized exercise in archaeology, claiming to have excavated a tomb identified as belonging to Joseph of Arimathea, the news of their find being communicated both to Henry V and to the Council of Siena in 1424.
Books, libraries and archives
It was not only at Glastonbury that a sense of the past was strongly felt. The most impressive and ancient of all English monuments, Stonehenge, in
Wiltshire, had first been noticed in writing by Henry of Huntingdon and Geoffrey of Monmouth, who had suggested that it had been magically transported by Merlin from Ireland. Not until the fourteenth century, however, did illustrations and crude ‘maps’ of the stones begin to appear. Similar drawings were still being produced in the 1440s. At Bury St Edmunds and at St Albans, attempts were made to draw up ‘Books of Benefactors’, not merely listing but attempting physically to portray the chief figures of the monastic past, even down to highly Disneyfied drawings of King Offa or Cnut. Other written reminders of the past were assiduously preserved and copied. At St Albans, Thomas of Walsingham, the most significant chronicler of the early fifteenth-century, not only wrote his history as a deliberate continuation of the earlier work of Matthew Paris, but ended his career composing an Epitome of Norman history, in which he joined up the events of his own lifetime to the duchy’s earliest chronicles, running from Rollo in 911 AD to Henry V’s conquests after 1417.
A similar interest was shown in the old English past. Although it was immensely popular in the twelfth century, only two surviving manuscripts of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the greatest of Anglo-Saxon books written in Latin, survive from the century after 1200. By contrast, no less than eighteen survive from the fourteenth century and a further eleven from the century after 1400. Bede himself was not canonized until 1935, but his grave at Durham was already, by 1400, being exhibited as a curiosity and potential shrine. Other English saints became the focus of revived attention. Requests had been made ever since the 1220s for the canonization of Osmund, first Norman bishop of Salisbury, but it was not until a further campaign of petitioning, in 1457, that the Pope officially recognized Osmund as a saint. At Winchester, the remains of the Anglo-Saxon St Swithun were translated to a major new shrine as late as 1476. Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, whose merits as a saint had never been recognized by the papacy, was rediscovered in the 1360s by John Wycliffe and his followers, who assiduously read and recopied the manuscripts of Grosseteste’s works that they found mouldering in the library of the Franciscan convent at Oxford, recognizing in Grosseteste one of the earliest and most outspoken critics of the Pope’s claim to worldly rule.
As this story suggests, the libraries of medieval England were themselves increasingly piled high with the lumber of several centuries of literary and intellectual endeavour. In the fourteenth century, in an era when all books had to be consulted as handwritten manuscripts, many of them very rare, attempts were already being made by the Franciscans of England to compile a register listing all of the principal authors and texts required for study, a finding list cross-referenced to where precisely in England the books of these authors might be read. This guide, the so-called Registrum Anglie, was itself then used by Henry of Kirkstead, prior of Bury St Edmunds, who not only catalogued the more than 1,500 manuscripts that were already to be found at Bury, but compiled biographical and bibliographical registers of his own, listing as many monastic authors as were known to him with details of where, amongst more than 180 other English locations, their works might be consulted. Endeavours such as this, involving travel and communication amongst dozens of individual libraries, not only produced the first ancestors of Google and the properly annotated searching aid, but some of the earliest scholarly investigations of the identity of authors, the precise attribution of their works, in short exactly the sort of thing that medieval historians are still engaged in writing more than 600 years later.
Nor was it only monks who took to this sort of work. William of Worcester, the well-educated son of a Bristol saddle maker, secretary to Sir John Fastolf and hence involved with the Pastons in the execution of Fastolf’s will, was an early humanist and rediscoverer of the classical past who learned Greek and translated Cicero into English. He also toured England in search of antiquities and topographical curiosities, copying out what he found into a series of notebooks that very soon became valuable historical curiosities in their own right. At much the same time, John Rous of Warwick began writing his own antiquarian histories of the earls of Warwick (lavishly illustrated from tombs and seals), a history of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge (intended to disprove that the Greek mathematician Pythagoras was involved in the foundation of Cambridge), and a chronicle of the bishops of Worcester. Like William of Worcester, Rous deserves to rank as one of the first true antiquaries in English history, as interested in the development of styles of armour as he was in recording historic monuments or the population of the villages through which he passed.
As early as the reign of King John, when a man named William ‘Cucuel’ is recorded taking receipt of chancery rolls dispatched from the itinerant court, the kings of England had an archivist. The task of maintaining the royal archive nonetheless became ever more arduous and awesome as the thirteenth century progressed and the mountains of parchment began to pile up. Already by the 1320s, when they were listed by the King’s treasurer in a systematic ‘array’, the King’s records were being treated as a vast time-capsule, none of them more venerable or more famous than Domesday Book. By the 1420s, the records of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries were of little or no use in the day-to-day business of government. Some were occasionally consulted. Most were left undisturbed from one end of a century to the next. The very fact, however, that they were not destroyed but kept, catalogued and arrayed tells us something important about fifteenth-century attitudes.
England was now officially a nation with a past, with its kings as the chief guardians and symbols of that heritage. With an interest in the past, and with antiquarianism came the deliberate collection of old things, not just as religious relics but merely because they were self-evidently ‘old’. Richard Bury, bishop of Durham from 1333, author of the first surviving treatise on books as artefacts, scoured the secondhand book stalls of England in search of rarities. Autograph hunters are to be found as early as the 1390s, seeking out specimens of the handwriting of Abbot Thomas de la Mare of St Albans, ‘copious and untidy but speedy’, treasured in part because of the sanctity of the writer, in part as simple souvenirs. There was more than mere sentiment to such attitudes. Those who control the past generally possess the power to control the future. The processes of law, for example, in which the tracing of manorial descents, the verification of pedigrees and the proving or disproving of title occupied a central place, supplied a powerful incentive to historical research. It is no coincidence that one of the chief targets of the peasants of 1381 had been the burning of manorial records, and with them the proofs of hated servitude. It was by careful manipulation of the genealogical records of the royal family that such political coups as the Lancastrian seizure of power in 1399 and the Yorkist rebellion of the 1450s were brought to pass. In the fifteenth century, to adapt the words of T.S. Eliot, ‘England was now and History’.
Music
Of all the arts, it is music which best conveys nostalgia and the fleeting nature of time. Thomas of Walsingham, at St Albans, besides writing on history, composed musical treatises in which he discussed such matters as the duration of notes and rhythmic modes. Archbishop Arundel, chief hammer of heretics, offered a passionate defence of music in the liturgy, arguing, against the Lollards, that singers and pipers kept up the spirits of pilgrims and that more pious insight could be obtained from listening to organs and good singers than from many sermons. The great stained glass windows of the Beauchamp chapel at Warwick, built in the 1440s, are cluttered not just with objects that display the luxury and consumerism of the fifteenth-century gentry but with such novel musical instruments as clavichords and harpsichords. After Agincourt, Henry V, whose father was himself a composer of religious music, commanded that no songs be made of his victories. Even so, such songs survive, commemorating his siege of Harfleur and Agincourt itself, this latter (‘Our King went forth to Normandy, with grace and might of chivalry’) being perhaps the first English ‘pop’ song, or rather the first English football ‘chant’ still known to us.
England b
y the 1420s had a music, a history and a sense of destiny that were distinctively her own. Time itself seemed no longer to march to a divine but to a human rhythm, measured by clocks, in musical notation, by regnal years, even by the rise and fall of English dynasties. In 1399, England could boast one of the oldest established royal dynasties, only the fifth (or the third if one allows that kings Cnut and Stephen were mere offshoots of the dynasties that they usurped) to have ruled England in the 600 years since King Alfred. By 1485, three further dynasties had come, and in two cases gone. Time itself was being cluttered up with names, dates and events. Amidst such a landscape, past certainties were to be treasured, no longer to be discarded as so much junk.
FROM RICHARD II TO RICHARD III,
1377–1485
Richard II
The coronation of Edward III’s ten year-old grandson, Richard II caused delight to the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, latest successor to Matthew Paris as official historian at St Albans Abbey. According to Walsingham this was a day
A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485 Page 44