Foundation

by Peter Ackroyd

  York returned from Ireland ten weeks after the battle, and bore about him all the appurtenances of royalty. He no longer dated his letters according to the years of Henry’s reign, as was the custom, and he bore the arms of England on his banners. He arrived as the parliament in Westminster, summoned by Warwick, was beginning its proceedings; his trumpets sounded as he made his entrance, and a drawn sword was carried before him. He then made his way towards the vacant throne and put his hand upon it as if to claim possession; this unexpected and unlawful act was greeted with surprise and dismay by the lords assembled. It looked as if York had miscalculated his popularity, and underestimated their residual loyalty to their rightful king.

  He demanded to be installed as the monarch. When asked to make a courteous visit to Henry he replied that ‘I know of no person in the realm whom it does not behove to come to me and see my person rather than that I should go and visit him.’ The king himself was too frightened to encounter York. The lords demurred at York’s demand, and passed the question to the judges; the judges in turn refused to meddle in such ‘high matters’ and passed the problem back to the lords. The question was ‘above the law and past their learning’. In any case no man wished to perjure his oath of loyalty to the anointed sovereign. In his incapacity Henry had become the emblem of his age; the senior members of the realm were struck by indecision. Emptiness ruled at the heart of government.

  Eventually the lords, in English fashion, proposed a compromise. Henry would retain the crown but, on his death or at the time of his willing abdication, York and his heirs should succeed him. Since York was ten years older than Henry, the lords were playing a game of wait and see. When the king accepted this proposal he was effectively disinheriting his son, and stripping him of his rightful inheritance. But he was in no position, and perhaps in no condition, to remonstrate on the matter. The feelings of Queen Margaret on the issue of succession are hardly in doubt; but for the moment she was on the run. She retreated with her son to Wales, but then fled to Scotland; she left her forces under the command of the earl of Pembroke, Jasper Tudor, half-brother to the king. So the Tudors properly enter English history. Jasper Tudor was the fruit of an unlikely marriage when Katherine of Valois, the widow of Henry V, became the wife of a junior courtier by the name of Owen Tudor. The older Tudor had joined his son on behalf of the queen. No one, however, could possibly have imagined the ultimate success of his family line.

  By the end of 1460 the queen reappeared in the north of England, having persuaded the great lords of that region to support her against the Londoners and the south-easterners. She mustered some 10,000 armed retainers, as York and Salisbury marched north to meet them. Battle was joined outside Wakefield, in the course of which both York and Salisbury were despatched; it was for the Lancastrians some recompense for the slaughter at St Albans and Northampton. The head of York was wreathed in a paper crown, and placed on the southern gate of the city of York known as Micklegate Bar. It bore a sign saying ‘Let York overlook the town of York.’

  So it seemed that Margaret of Anjou had won, with the benefits flowing to her son as well as to a weak and feeble king; but Henry himself remained in London, in the control and at the mercy of Warwick. That magnate had not marched north with his allies, but had remained behind to protect what was now a Yorkist administration at Westminster. According to the agreement reached by the lords between the king and York, the heir to the throne had now become York’s son, Edward of March. Two young Edwards, Prince Edward at the age of seven and Edward of March at the age of eighteen, were now pitted against one another.

  Edward of March had in fact already taken to the field in defence of the Yorkist inheritance. He marched at the head of his army, with the aim of preventing the Welsh forces led by Jasper Tudor from aligning with the main body of Lancastrian troops in the north. At the beginning of February 1461 he encountered the Tudors in Herefordshire, at a place known as Mortimer’s Cross. Before battle was joined the unusual appearance of a parhelion or sun dog became visible in the air, where by means of small ice crystals a second sun seems to appear beside the first. The soldiers on the earth knew nothing of ice crystals, of course, but the manifestation of two suns suggested some great change in the direction of the world. Two sons were, after all, in conflict. And there were about to be two kings of England.

  The victory was won by Edward of March; Jasper Tudor fled, but his father was not so fortunate. Owen Tudor was taken to the block where he was heard to murmur that ‘the head shall lie on the stock that was wont to lie on the lap of Queen Katherine’, the widow of Henry V whom he had married. His head was carried from the scaffold and placed on the market cross of the local town. It was here that a madwoman combed his hair and washed the blood from his face.

  Margaret was already marching towards London, emboldened by the death of York; the Tudors were unable to join her, of course, but still she moved steadily to the south. All the while she allowed her troops to pillage and plunder the lands of her Yorkist enemies through which they passed. Warwick mustered his army in London to prevent her from entering the capital, where most of his power and resources lay; he took the king with him, as a form of insurance. He must also have hoped that Margaret would not attack an army that effectively held her husband hostage.

  His hopes were misjudged, however. On 17 February 1461, the Yorkists and Lancastrians met once more at St Albans, but on this occasion the Lancastrians were successful. The king was rescued; he had been placed for safekeeping a mile away, where it was said that he laughed and sang beneath a tree. Many of the leading Yorkist nobles were slaughtered. Warwick fled the scene with a handful of companions.

  It is reported that Henry was overjoyed to see his immediate family once more and, in his excitement, he knighted his young son. The seven-year-old boy in turn knighted some thirty of his followers. Margaret, with the king in her possession, now stood close to the gates of London. It was reported in the chronicles that ‘the shops keep closed, and nothing is done either by the tradesmen or by the merchants. Men do not stand in the streets or venture far from home’. They had heard the news of the devastation wreaked by Margaret’s troops in the north of England. John Paston wrote to his father that they ‘are appointed to pillage all this country, and give away men’s goods and livelihoods in the south country, and that will ask a mischief’.

  On hearing the news of Margaret’s advance, Edward of March – who was now after his father’s death the duke of York – left the site of his victory by the Welsh border and took his forces east to intercept her; he met Warwick in Oxfordshire, close to the Cotswolds, and together they moved towards London. Their purpose now was to occupy the city and to declare Edward to be the lawful king. The citizens were disposed to accept them, and the gates were shut against Margaret of Anjou.

  When Edward arrived, he was greeted by the Londoners; the streets were crowded with his supporters and he took the crown almost by acclamation. His right to the title was proclaimed, at St Paul’s Cross and elsewhere, while Henry VI was declared to have forfeited the throne by reneging on his agreement to make York his heir. On 4 March Edward entered St Paul’s Cathedral, and then proceeded in state towards Westminster where he was crowned as Edward IV. All those present did homage to him, as he held the sceptre of Edward the Confessor. They chanted the refrain:

  Verus Vox, Rex Edwardus

  Rectus Rex, Rex Edwardus.

  He was the true voice and the rightful king. He was nineteen years old and, at a height of 6 feet and 4 inches (1.9 metres), a commanding figure. He was every inch a proper king. The ambassador from Burgundy said that ‘I cannot remember ever having seen a finer looking man’.

  Yet Henry VI could still be construed to be the anointed sovereign; he was not dead, and he had not abdicated. So effectively two kings of England reigned. Two suns were visible in the sky. A seventeenth-century historian, Thomas Fuller, put it perhaps more vividly in The Holy State and The Profane State where he remarked that ‘they lived in a
troublesome world, wherein the cards were so shuffled that two kings were turned up trumps at once, which amazed men how to play their games’.

  Edward took steps to resolve this unsatisfactory situation by going in pursuit of Margaret and of Henry. On 29 March the two armies met at Towton in Yorkshire, the royal family having taken the precaution of returning to York to await developments. They were right to do so. Edward won a signal victory on the battlefield; the conflict, held in a snowstorm, is thought to have involved some 50,000 soldiers of whom approximately a quarter perished. Much of the Lancastrian nobility were destroyed. Henry and Margaret, together with their son, escaped into Scotland. The old king, if we may call him that, was to remain at liberty for another four years as an emblem of the surviving Lancastrian claim to the throne. Only the first part of the Wars of the Roses was over.

  34

  The world at play

  Many miniature jugs have been found in the soil of medieval dwellings; they have been interpreted as toys for children. The son of Edward I was given a miniature cart as well as the little model of a plough. From an excavation in London was removed a toy bird, made out of lead and tin; in its original state it would have rocked on a horizontal rod, at the same time as its tongue would appear and reappear from an open beak. Miniature faces were made out of tin, with large ears and eyes and spiked hair. For the very young, rattles were made. Glove puppets were common. Dolls of wood or of cloth were known as ‘poppets’. Tops were called ‘scopperils’ or things that jump about. Hobby-horses were small wooden horses. So the children played as they have always done. But the call of the world was not far distant. The boys were trained in wrestling and in shooting with bow and arrow. They were taught how to imitate the calls of birds, and how to tell the time from the shadows cast by the sun. The girls were trained in weaving, in sewing and in laundering.

  Childhood did not last for very long. In the time of the Saxons the age of adult responsibility was twelve at which point the boy or girl could be set to proper full-time work, in the fields of the country or in the streets and markets of the town. In later centuries a boy was criminally liable from the age of seven and could make his will at the age of fourteen.

  The more fortunate were granted an education. Some children were given to the monks at a very young age, and were never seen again in secular clothing. The child’s hair was shaved from the round area of the scalp, so that he already resembled a monk. His cloak was taken from him at a special Mass as the abbot declared ‘May the Lord strip you of the old man.’ The boy was then given a monk’s cowl with the words ‘May the Lord clothe you with the new man.’ One elderly monk recalled how in 1080, at the age of five, he began school in the town of Shrewsbury where ‘Siward, an illustrious priest, taught me my letters for five years, and instructed me in psalms and hymns and other necessary knowledge’. A long tradition of clerkly learning already existed.

  From the seventh to the eleventh centuries, in fact, the cloister schools of the monasteries provided the principal means of education; the lessons included those of grammar, rhetoric and natural science. The art of singing was also taught. They are not dead institutions. The school of St Albans, established in the tenth century, is still in existence at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The grammar school of Ely, now known as the King’s School, also has an Anglo-Saxon origin; one of its boarding houses is reputed to be the oldest residential building in Europe. The present grammar school of Norwich was instituted in the eleventh century. Many other examples can be found.

  It was widely believed that priests should also be schoolmasters, and a church decree of 1200 declared that ‘priests shall keep schools in the towns and teach the little boys free of charge. Priests ought to hold schools in their houses … They ought not to expect anything from the relatives of the boys except what they are willing to give’. Such schools remained in use throughout the period of this book.

  In the twelfth century a number of larger schools also emerged, as part of what has been called the ‘renaissance’ of that century in humane learning; they grew up beside the cathedrals, or beside the houses of canons, or in the towns reliant upon great monasteries. Their influence and reputation spread, and between 1363 and 1400 twenty-four new schools were founded. They became known as the grammar schools, despite the fact that grammar was not the only subject; the art of letter-writing was the subject of study, as well as the disciplines of record-keeping and commercial accounting. ‘Business studies’ began in the medieval period.

  A fortunate male child received his education at the court of the king or the nobles. If a superior spoke to him, he was trained to take off his hat and to look steadfastly in that person’s face without moving his hands or feet. He was taught to put his hand in front of his mouth before spitting. He was not to scratch his head and was to ensure that his hands and nails were always clean.

  Other forms of education were also available. An apprentice was chosen between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, and entered a formal bond by which he agreed to spend between seven and ten years with his master while learning the ‘secrets’ of his chosen trade. It was by far the most common way of fully entering the adult world, although of course it had its risks. It was not unknown for masters to treat apprentices very roughly, or for apprentices to absent themselves without leave. Apprentices also had a reputation for being unruly and even violent; one of their favourite games, when they found themselves in a group, was known as ‘breaking doors with our heads’.

  By the middle of the twelfth century Oxford had become well known as a seat of learning and of scholarship. At the very beginning of that century Theobald of Etampes was calling himself ‘magister Oxenefordiae’. It was the one place in England ‘where the clergy had flourished most’, according to Gerald of Wales who in 1187 gave a public dissertation there on the topography of Ireland. By that date more than twenty teachers of arts, and ten teachers of canon law and theology, are listed; it was reported in 1192 that the town was so filled with clerks that the authorities of Oxford did not know how to support them. A deed for the transference of property in Cat Street, around 1200, attests the presence of a bookbinder, a scrivener, three illuminators and two parchment-makers; so the ancillary trades of learning were already in large supply.

  Yet it was crime, rather than scholarship, that effectively formed the university. In 1209 a student killed a woman of the town and then fled. In retaliation the authorities of Oxford arrested the student’s room companions and hanged them. All the teachers and students of Oxford left the schools, in disgust, and dispersed to other places of learning. A substantial number of them migrated to Cambridge, where the second English university was then established.

  When the teachers of Oxford were persuaded to return in 1214 they insisted upon an official document to regulate the relationships between what at a later date would be called town and gown. That document, expressing the intention of electing a chancellor, became the source of the university’s corporate authority. Cambridge followed the same principle as Oxford and its first chancellor is recorded in 1225. Scholastic communities also existed at Northampton and Salisbury, but eventually they withered on the vine; otherwise those two old towns might also have hosted great universities.

  The universities had no public buildings, and the lectures were delivered in churches or in rooms hired for the purpose. The students lived in lodgings and inns. A Master of Arts could hire a large tenement, and advertise for scholars; he had created a ‘hall’ in which his pupils would live and learn. Tackley Inn, Ing Hall, Lyon Hall, White Hall and Cuthbert Hall were premises in which grammar was taught. Each of the halls specialized in a particular discipline or set of disciplines, but they were essentially unregulated. They could be riotous.

  The colleges of Oxford were first erected for the poorer students. Balliol College, for example, was endowed as a home for poor scholars by 1266. The founders of the colleges were the most prominent ecclesiastics and nobles, particularly of royal bloo
d; it was considered to be a religious duty, and the members of the college were pledged to sing innumerable Masses for the souls of their patrons. The fundamental intent of the college was to create learned clergy, and it was thus an adjunct of the Church in every sense. The fellows of Queen’s College in Oxford wore purple robes as a memorial to the spilled blood of Christ. Teachers very gradually moved to the more regularized life of these institutions, which by the fifteenth century had become individual houses of learning.

  The students themselves were classified as ‘northern’ or ‘southern’, with the river Nene (it rises in Northamptonshire, and runs for 3 miles (4.8 kilometres) between Cambridgeshire and Norfolk) being nominated as the boundary; the northern and southern contingents were often fiercely tribal, and the most trivial incident in a tavern or lodging house could provoke mass attacks one upon the other. Even the masters participated. A serious confrontation between southern and northern masters at Cambridge, in 1290, led to a general migration to the school of Northampton. The country was still in a sense divided into ancient kingdoms.

  In 1389 some Oxford scholars from northern England fell upon their Welsh counterparts, shooting at them in the lanes and streets of the town; they called out ‘War, war, slay, slay, slay the Welsh dogs and their whelps.’ They killed some, and wounded others; then they dragged the rest to the gates. Before they ejected them they pissed on them and forced them ‘to kiss the place on which they had pissed’. The chronicler adds that ‘while the said Welshmen stooped to kiss it, they would knock their heads against the gates in an inhuman manner’.