The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  Most pilgrims, however, were on their way to or from one or other of the pilgrimage shrines of England of which there were about sixty or seventy. Two of the principal ones were at Canterbury and Walsingham. Thousands of pilgrims flocked to Canterbury to make offerings at the shrine of St Thomas Becket who had been murdered in the cathedral by four knights on the evening of 29 December 1190. Thousands more made their way to Walsingham where the miraculous statue of the Virgin was bedecked with jewels and where so many precious gifts had been bestowed upon the place that Roger Ascham – after visiting the celebrated shrine of the wise men of the East at Cologne – came to the conclusion that ‘the three kings be not so rich as the Lady of Walsingham’. Pilgrimages were also regularly made to the shrines of St Edward the Confessor at Westminster, of the holy Confessor Cuthbert at Durham, of St Swithin at Winchester, to Waltham where a miraculous cross of black marble had been found in the days of King Cnut, to Beverley, Lincoln, York and Peterborough, and to Glastonbury where St Joseph of Arimathea had, so it was said, deposited the chalice of the Last Supper and where the Glastonbury Thorn had sprung up from his staff.

  Pilgrims returning from these places generally wore badges or emblems associated with them, little metal flasks of well-water with holes so that they could be sewn on clothes, medallions depicting the supposed features of a saint, and sometimes such a variety of other favours, vernicles and brooches that they looked like the man in Erasmus’s dialogue who is asked by his sceptical friend in astonishment: ‘I pray you, what arrays is this that you be in? Me thynke that you be clothyd with cockle schelles, and be laden on every side with bunches of lead and tynne. And you be pretely garnyshed with wrethes of straws, and your arms is full of snakes eggs.’

  The curators of shrines vied with each other in the attractions they had to offer and were constantly endeavouring to increase their supply of holy relics for the greater profit of their church or monastery or order. The College of St George at Windsor possessed parts of the skulls and skeletons of at least sixteen saints, including a section of the jawbone of St Mark with fourteen teeth; a piece of the brain of St Eustace; the fingers of St George; a candle end and a girdle which had belonged to the Blessed Virgin Mary together with a fragment from her tomb and some of her milk; a thorn of Christ’s crown; part of his supper table; a slither of wood from the Holy Cross; and, next to a large iron money-box with numerous slots for the offerings of pilgrims, the bones of John Schorne, a priest who had possessed an astonishing power of curing the ague and who had once forced the Devil into a boot.61

  Abbeys which had no such enticing relics to offer would occasionally employ an artist to manufacture an image which looked as though it were capable of working miracles. Thus, one Yorkshire abbot ordered a crucifix to be made for the choir of his chapel. ‘And the artist never worked at any fine and important part, except on Fridays, fasting on bread and water,’ wrote one of the abbot’s successors towards the end of the fourteenth century. ‘And he had all the time a naked man under his eyes, and he laboured to give to his crucifix the beauty of the model. By the means of this crucifix, the Almighty worked open miracles continually. It was then thought that if access to this crucifix were allowed to women, the common devotion would be increased and great advantage would result from it for our monastery.’ Unfortunately in this case the scheme did not prove profitable. Numerous women came to see this to them extraordinary example of sculpture made from a nude living model; but they came from curiosity and the abbot found that the expenses incurred by his having to receive them were far greater than the offerings they made to his monastery.62

  7 Tournaments, Pageants and Miracles

  For Sir Walter Scott chivalry was the shining glory of the Middle Ages, an institution and a code of ethics to be considered worthy of comparison with Christianity itself. Certainly the ideals enshrined in the Arthurian legends, the bravery and loyalty of the knights, their magnanimity in victory, their sense of noblesse oblige, their courtly manners, their honour of womanhood, their gentleness, not only in the sense of gens, men of race and of good breeding, but also of mercy and consideration, were all qualities to be admired. The heroic knights of the Round Table to whom, like their king, wrong was ‘exceedingly loathsome and right ever dear’, rode through a magical and dreamlike world as paragons of courage in their battles with dragons and evil giants and as models of constancy in their service of ladies whom they rescued from oppression, disgrace and death. Bound ‘never to do outrageously, nor murder and always to flee treason, also by no means to be cruel, but to give mercy unto him that asketh mercy … and always to do ladies, damsels, and gentlewomen succour upon pain of death’, they are seen living up to their vows; and if the knightly code was, in fact, frequently violated, it nevertheless, as Maurice Keen has shown, remained the object of universal veneration.1

  To these impulsive and generous heroes, sentiment was not weakness. They could weep, as Launcelot weeps, copiously like ‘a child that had been beaten’, and as soldiers were then never ashamed to do, as the followers of John Chandos did when he lay dying at the bridge of Lussac, crying ‘piteously’, so Froissart tells us, wringing their hands, tearing their hair and making pitiful complaint, ‘and specially such as were of his own house’.2

  The lower orders play no part in Malory’s narration of the Arthurian stories. Who the author was is a mystery. He was certainly a prisoner when he wrote Le Morte d’Arthur – that ‘noble and joyous book’, as it was described by Caxton who published it in July 1485 from the sign of the Red Pale in Westminster – though it is full of a strange sense of doom that foreshadows the ‘dolorous death and departing of this world’ of its great hero and his valiant knights. Yet, apart from his imprisonment and his longing for the day of his deliverance, little else is known about him. He may have been a Thomas Malory of Studley and Sutton in Yorkshire who was a prisoner of war in France, or he may have been Sir Thomas Malory, a Warwickshire gentleman who, after serving as Member of Parliament for his county, evidently turned to a life of crime involving accusations of cattle thieving, extortion, rape and attempted murder and culminating in his incarceration in the noisome prison of Newgate. Whoever he was, he allowed a peasant to appear only once in his narrative and then briefly and to receive a knock on the head for refusing to lend a knight his cart.3

  As Sir Edmund Chambers pointed out, ‘the distinction between noble and churl is fundamental’ to Le Morte d’Arthur. ‘If there are sparks of nobility in a cowherd’s son, like Tor, or a kitchen knave, like Gareth, you may be sure he will turn out to be a king’s son in disguise.’4 Such class distinctions were not confined to the literature which chivalry promoted. Ruskin, who regarded the Middle Ages with almost as benign an eye as Scott, noted chivalry’s contempt for the manual worker. Ideally the knight should protect the poor.

  What is the function of orderly knighthood? [asked John of Salisbury in the fourteenth century] To protect the Church, to fight against treachery, to reverence the priesthood, to fight off injustice from the poor, to make peace in your own provinces, to shed your blood for your own brethren, and, if needs must, to lay down your own life.5

  Yet a contemporary of John of Salisbury, Peter of Blois, Archdeacon of Bath, writes to a friend in a condemnation of chivalry which, while exaggerated in tone, was not unjustified:

  I cannot bear the vaunting and vainglory of the Knights your nephews … The Order of Knighthood, in these days of ours, is mere disorder. For he whose mouth is defiled with the foulest words, whose oaths are most detestable, who least fears God, who vilifies God’s ministers, who feareth not the Church – that man nowadays is reputed bravest and most renowned of the knightly band … Aspirants receive their swords from the altar in order that they may profess themselves sons of the Church, acknowledging themselves to have received their weapons for the honour of the priesthood, the defence of the poor, the avenging of wrongs and the freedom of their country. Yet in practice they do the contrary. If these knights of ours are sometimes cons
trained to take the field, then their sumpter-beasts are laden not with steel but with wine, not with spears but with cheeses, not with swords but with wineskins, not with javelins but with spits. You would think they were on their way to feast, and not to fight.6

  Knights did not always receive their swords from the altar as Peter of Blois suggests. There was an essentially religious ceremony which was performed by a bishop. There was also a ceremony in which the candidate kept vigil throughout the preceding night before an altar on which the sword was laid; the next morning he took a ritual bath, as the still existing Order of the Bath indicates, and then heard Mass before his spurs were put on and he was dubbed with the sword. But it was much more usual for the dubbing ceremony to be performed with the most perfunctory religious rites, or without any rites at all, and for the king or a noble to carry it out in a baronial hall or on the field of battle.7

  The devices emblazoned on the knight’s shield and surcoat as distinguishing marks in the muddle and fury of battle had developed into the intricate science of heraldry. The complicated symbols, allusive, allegorical, punning, artistically and skilfully arranged in coloured designs and handed down from generation to generation, were displayed on gatehouses and chantry chapels, on tents and standards, on plate and carriages and were never more proudly worn than when, announced by trumpets and heralds, the knight entered the lists to take part in a tournament.

  Brought to England from France in the twelfth century, the tournament was originally a rough and tumble training-ground for a young knight, an opportunity for him to display his strength and prowess. It usually took the form of a ferocious mock-battle fought in an open field with numerous knights on each side lashing out at each other in their efforts to unhorse their opponents. Injuries were common; knights were sometimes so badly injured that they died of their wounds; while squires, overcome with excitement, joined in the mêlée and added to the violence and confusion. But since then, having been repeatedly and vainly banned by Henry III who feared that they would be used as excuses for baronial conspiracies, tournaments had become subject to stricter rules. The sorts of weapon which could be used were more severely limited; combats between two horsemen became more common than mock-battles between many; and, rather than brute force, skill and practised horsemanship were likely to bring victory. The contests were still dangerous, as the antagonists rode full tilt at each other in boarded enclosures in which barriers to prevent the horses colliding were not in common use until the fifteenth century; but the numbers of knights who were killed in a bone-shattering crash to the ground were nothing like as many as in the days of mass battering. The Church had at first frowned upon tournaments because of the bloodshed involved, had refused Christian burial to those who were killed in them, and had succeeded in getting them banned in England. It abandoned its opposition in 1316, however, when Pope John XXII was persuaded that they were an essential military exercise for potential crusaders.

  As well as an exercise in arms, the tournament had also become a form of love-play. Almost every knight had a lady whom he wanted to impress, to whom he prayed for victory, while also praying to Our Lady that, after victory, his prowess in the lists might be rewarded by an opportunity to demonstrate his prowess as a lover. After the jousts he would approach the stand where the ladies sat, remove his helm, bow to them and then return to his lodgings to await their verdict upon the prizes which it was in their gift to bestow. Having come to their decision, they would address the successful knight with formal courtesy:

  Sir, theis ladyes and gentilwomen thank you for your disporte and grete labour yt ye have this day in their presences. And the seide ladyes and gentilwomen seyen that ye, Sir——have done the best joust this day. Therefore the seide ladyes and gentilwomen gevyn you this diamonde and send you much worship and joy of yor lady.8

  Prizes of rubies and sapphires were presented to

  … the othir two next the best Justers. This doon then shall the heraulde of armes stonde up all on high. And shall say wt all an high voice: John hath wele justid, Ric[har]d have justid bettir and Thomas hath justid best of all, then shall hee that the diamount is geve unto take a lady by the hande and begynne the daunce.9

  On occasions the ladies did not merely award the prizes, but constituted the prizes themselves; for according to the ethos of chivalry an act of infidelity was no disgrace. Adultery had, indeed, become an accepted social diversion of the upper classes, with a recognized code of behaviour compatible with chivalrous ideas; and it was expected that a knight would have already made love to another knight’s wife before making a mariage de convenance himself. Provided he observed the manners of polite society and was prepared to fight and to die for the lady he professed to love, he might otherwise behave as he liked. As Dr Coulton put it, ‘woman-hunting was, it may be said, a normal sport’. Chastity girdles were not worn by ladies at court, since the virtue of a lady, if it were to be protected at all, must be preserved by the sword and not by the key in the manner of an Italian merchant.10

  By the middle of the thirteenth century a new kind of tournament, referred to in 1252 by Matthew Paris as the Round Table, had developed. This was a social occasion, often lasting for several days, during which all kinds of sports were practised: wrestling, casting the stone and the lance, high jumping and long jumping, as well as the usual jousts. The knights who took part sat down to eat with their shields at their backs at a table, like that of King Arthur, so shaped as to set aside all distinctions of rank and quality. Such an event was held at Windsor Castle by Edward III in 1344 when, from all over England and from ‘parts beyond the seas’, ‘an indescribable host of people’ came to the castle ‘to delight in so great solemnity’. The feasts that followed the games and joustings were most lavish, ‘abounding in the most alluring’ of drinks; and, as the guests ate and drank, minstrels, wearing new tunics specially provided for the occasion, played in the gallery. Afterwards one guest recalled, ‘dances were not lacking, embraces and kissings, alternately commingling’.11 It was during a later tournament at Windsor in 1348 that Edward III founded the Order of the Garter, the oldest order of chivalry in Europe, the original members of which were mostly young knights who apparently wore a garter as their badge during the joustings.

  One of the most popular of all forms of tournament was that known as the pas d’armes in which a knight had to fight his way through a defended obstacle, or a series of obstacles, to his goal. At first these displays usually took place in open country where a bridge or a narrow file would be defended by the knight’s adversary; but by the fifteenth century it was more common for artificial obstacles to be erected in the shape of castle keeps, gateways or drawbridges. The knight would then appear in armour at the beginning of the course, driving up in a chariot or striding forth dramatically from a pavilion. An allegorical fantasy, involving a lady, would be devised to explain his presence there to the spectators; and he would then ride off to battle with the enemy.

  No one who was not a gentleman could take part in tournaments, but all conditions of men and women could watch, provided they could gain access to the ground. Most townspeople, however, were well content with the spectacles which could be seen from the windows of their own houses and workshops. Some of these were modest enough – a few students, perhaps, celebrating by marching through the streets with pipes, drums and flowers, or a group of apprentices with flags and the symbols of their trades. But there were grand spectacles, particularly those staged in London, such as water pageants; parades through streets beneath damask awnings, velvet-covered poles, escutcheons, shields and standards, tapestries, arches of halberds and triumphal bridges; or the processions, more splendid year by year, in which the mayor, or lord mayor as he has been commonly known since 1545, went to Westminster to receive the approval of the king to his election, going at first by road, then more often by river, and after 1452 in a magnificent barge rowed by silver oars.

  Almost every year pageants were staged in the streets to celebrate both na
tional and civic occasions, royal weddings and coronations, visits by distinguished foreigners and military victories as well as such events as the anniversary of the granting of a charter. By the middle of the thirteenth century in London it had already become an established tradition for the entry of the king into the city from his palace at Westminster to be marked by formal pageantry. The city fathers would meet the king and the officers of his household outside the city boundaries. They would then ride back into the city along a route beside which the citizens were paraded in the liveries of their respective trade guilds. By the end of the century the western limits of the city were marked by a chain which was stretched between posts across the road to Westminster; and by 1351 this boundary, known as Temple Bar, was more imposingly distinguished by a gate with a prison above it. Here in later times a ceremony was always performed – and still is performed – on state occasions when the sovereign wishes to enter the city: permission was asked of the mayor who offered his sword of state as a demonstration of loyalty; the sword was immediately returned and carried before the royal procession to indicate that the sovereign was in the city under the mayor’s protection.

  It was usual in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries for the royal party to proceed to St Paul’s, the fine Norman cathedral which had been built on the site of a Saxon building destroyed by fire in 1087; and, having heard Mass, to be escorted back to the Palace of Westminster, the various trade guilds competing with each other to make the grandest spectacle, the Fishmongers’ Company often apparently being considered the most ingenious and extravagant of all. In 1298 when the city celebrated the defeat of the Scots by Edward I at Falkirk, this Company, which had received its first charter twenty-six years before, outdid the other Companies as the ‘solemne Procession passed through the Citie [by] having amongest other Pageants and shews, foure Sturgeons guilt, carried on four horses; then foure Salmons of Silver on foure horses, and after them six and fortie armed knights riding on horses, and then one representing Saint Magnes’. In 1313 the Fishmongers excelled themselves when, in celebration of the birth of Edward III, they constructed a large ship in full sail emblazoned with the heraldic devices of the English and French royal houses.12