TWILIGHT OF THE MIDDLE AGES ( 1381 – 1485 )

 

Although the wearisome daily round of a farm labourer changed little during the fourteenth century, society was slowly being transformed nevertheless, and there was beginning to be discerned a gradual shift in the balance of power. Not only were industrious peasants increasing their holdings in the aftermath of the Black Death; not only were those who had no holdings successfully pressing for higher rewards for their labour; but landlords were being obliged by the labour shortage to let land either for money rent or for payment in kind, while many of their tenants were becoming quite prosperous yeomen farmers whose interests were more closely identified with those of the lesser gentry than with those of landless labourers. The Pastons, for example, the well-to-do Norfolk family whose correspon­dence provides so illuminating a picture of late medieval domestic life, had but lately risen from the lowly estate of husbandmen bound to the land for life.

The landscape in which these people spent their lives had been changing for some time, too. The years immediately before the Black Death had been an era of economic decline:large areas of land had fallen out of agricultural use; water had poured back over acre upon acre of drained fenland; and the foundation of new towns came almost to an end. The Black Death had much accelerated this depression and it was to be many years before the process was reversed. Indeed, the decline in arable farming continued long into the next century as the demand for wool and its price increased and ship after ship sailed with exports to the Continent. To create more land for sheep, arable fields were made into pasture; and whole villages were destroyed and their inhab­itants evicted to make way for new flocks. At the same time the fortunes being made by wool farmers and wool mer­chants were being used to create the buildings which are still so distinctive a feature of the English scene. In nearly every English county, by wealthy tinners in Devon and Cornwall, as well as by individuals and communities doing so well in the wool trade, churches were being built and reconstructed in the style known as Perpendicular, the last stage of Gothic, a style distinguished by large windows with a predominance of vertical lines in their stone tracery and regular horizontal divisions, and by the kind of fan vaulting to be seen in the cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral. Beautiful examples of Perpendicular churches can be seen, for example, in Wiltshire at Steeple Aston, in Somerset at Huish Episcopi, in Norfolk at Salle, in Gloucestershire at Cirencester; in Suffolk at Long Melford as well as at Lavenham where, indeed, the whole town is a monument to the prosperity of the wool and clothing trade of the late Middle Ages.

In Kent, too, and in the north-west Midlands are numer­ous examples of the comfortable houses being built by mer­chants and yeomen farmers whose wealth, if not power, was beginning to rival that of the old ruling class. Castles were still being built as well as houses, several of them brick like Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire and Herstmonceux in Sussex; and these, with more doors and many more windows, were becoming — while still formidable enough in appearance — more like homes than fortresses, since the increasing use of gunpowder and the power of cannon had rendered the most sturdy defences vulnerable to assault.

Bricks were not a new building material. Imported from the Continent and known as Flanders tiles, they had been used since the beginning of the thirteenth century when Little Wenham Hall had been built on the borders of Suffolk and Essex. This, however, was an unusual example until the brick buildings of France attracted the attention of knights fighting there. The English word ‘brick’ from the French ‘brique’ did not even enter the language until 1416; and the town wall at Kingston Upon Hull, built in the second half of the fourteenth century of locally-made bricks, was probably the first major public work to be constructed in England of this material. Thereafter brick became much more com­monly used even in districts where the local material was stone, as at Compton Wynyates in Warwickshire. Two and a half million bricks were used in the building of Eton College in the ten years after its foundation in 1440.

The heyday of brick had not yet come, however. Most houses were still of timber or stone. So were most late medieval bridges, several of which still survive, notable examples in stone being those over the Camel at Wade-bridge in Cornwall and over the Thames at Abingdon in Oxfordshire. Also, of course, of stone were the finest mas­terpieces of the Perpendicular style, such as the West Front of Beverley Minster, Eton College Chapel and the Chapel of St George at Windsor, which was dedicated to the obscure third- or fourth-century martyr who, for reasons unex­plained, had become England’s patron saint. This chapel was begun in 1478 by Edward IV, determined to outdo Eton College Chapel, the nearby foundation of his rival and victim, Henry VI.

Henry VI’s grandfather, the eldest surviving son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and known as Henry Boling­broke after the Lincolnshire Castle where he was born, had supplanted his cousin, Richard II, in 1399 and had become the first of the Lancastrian kings. In Westminster Hall — the splendid Norman banqueting hall built by William II which is the only surviving part of the original Palace of West­minster — Henry had called out in English, long since the language not only of ordinary people but also of the law courts, ‘In the name of Fadir Son and Holy Ghost, I Henry of Lancaster challenge this Rewme of Ingland and the Corone.’ The Archbishops of York and Canterbury had led him to the throne vacated by the deposed Richard II and, soon after­wards, he had been anointed with the oil which the Virgin Mary had miraculously given to St Thomas in his exile.

Yet while accepted by Parliament, Henry IV was no more able to come to satisfactory terms with its members than his predecessor had been. Beset by financial and administrative problems, by conspirators in his own country and by rebels in Wales, he fell ill in 1412 with what the chroniclers described as leprosy but may well have been syphilis with which leprosy was then often confused. He died in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster Abbey, where he had been praying before St Edward’s shrine, and was tuned in Canterbury Cathedral, where his magnificent tomb lies behind the high altar.

His son, Henry V, who was crowned in a violent snow­storm in April 1413, was every inch a soldier. The back of his neck and the sides of his head were shaved, as the heads of soldiers were, so that his hair, thick, brown and uncurled, looked like a round fur cap. He was considered a handsome man, though the long and prominent nose, the thin eye­brows, the high smooth brow, the very red and tightly com­pressed lips and the heavy lantern jaw are features no longer admired. His energy was legendary and men looking at him found grounds for hope that his father’s reign, which had opened with usurpation, rebellion, plague and persecution and had ended in fear, lassitude and gloom, would be fol­lowed by a new age, as brilliant and adventurous as that of the young King’s great-grandfather, Edward III.

Henry was certainly as anxious to fulfil that dream as he was to engage in some foreign adventure which would dis­tract the attention of his enemies from problems at home and from his far from indisputable title to the English throne. Reviving the claims of his ancestors, he required the return of territories that had been granted to Edward III by the Treaty of Brétigny and later demanded the French crown by right of succession from his great-great-grand­mother, Isabella, daughter of Philip IV. And at Agincourt on St Crispin’s Day 1415, in an astonishing pitched battle which lasted barely three hours, his depleted, exhausted and hungry army routed a French force four or five times its size, losing no more than a hundred men to the enemy’s seven to ten thousand dead. After this extraordinary

victory, Henry was able to impose humiliating terms upon the French King whose daughter he married and whose heir he became. The leadership of all Christendom was now within his grasp and his thoughts turned to a new crusade against the Infidel. But his health broke down in the summer of 1422 and at the age of thirty-five he died at Vincennes. His body was embalmed and brought home to England to be interred in Westminster Abbey in a resplen­dent tomb beneath the Chantry of Henry V.

He left England in the care of a regent and a baby king who eventually, having neither his powers of leadership nor his degree of parliamentary support and having to contend with the rising force of French national pride and its inspired epitome, Joan of Arc, was to lose all that his father had fought for by the time the Hundred Years’ War ended in 1453.

Henry VI, who was only eight months old at the time of his accession, was to lose more than France. A kind, simple­minded man more interested in his religious observances and benefactions than in government, he lost his reason in 1453 and his life in 1471 when, a prisoner in the Tower, he was found dead in his cell, having passed away, so it was announced, out of ‘pure displeasure and melancholy’.

During the last years of his unhappy reign, his supporters had been fighting other claimants to the throne in the dynastic conflict known as the Wars of the Roses. The Lancastrians — represented by Henry VI and led by Henry’s Queen Margaret and the descendants of John of Gaunt by his mistress, later wife, Catherine Swynford — were the faction of the red rose, one Of the several emblems of their house. Their opponents, the Yorkists — led by Richard, Duke of York, a descendant of Edward III, and by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the most powerful noble in the realm, known as ‘The Kingmaker’ — bore the white rose. Intermittently, for thirty years, these two factions quar­relled and fought, causing havoc in the areas where they clashed, yet, when their armies had passed by, leaving the merchants and the great mass of the people to carry on with their work as in times of perfect tranquillity. At length the Duke of York’s son, Edward, emerged the victor, after deposing King Henry VI in 1461 and inflicting a series of defeats on the Lancastrians, culminating in their rout in 1471 at Tewkesbury.

With nearly all his leading opponents either killed in the battle or executed afterwards, Edward’s position was now secure; and as King Edward IV he set about restoring the finances of the Crown and the disrupted export trade of the country. Virtually dispensing with Parliament, so many of whose members had been killed in the recent wars, he raised money by all the other means open to him, taking care to ensure that all the revenues to which the Crown was entitled were collected and administered with the utmost efficiency.

Grateful to him for restoring order to the country and helping to give it a large measure of prosperity, the citizens of London regarded Edward as ‘the most noble of kings’. So did their wives, one of whom, Jane Shore, whose husband was a Lombard Street goldsmith, became the most cele­brated of Edward’s countless mistresses, giving her name to some of London’s most squalid eighteenth-century brothels. Over six foot three inches tall, handsome, auto­cratic and wonderfully energetic, Edward IV was a man of insinuating charm and friendly bonhomie. His subjects were prepared to forgive him much; and it was not until the end of his life that his debaucheries and increasingly un­scrupulous conduct turned them against him.

He died in 1483 and his thirteen-year-old son was pro­claimed his successor as Edward V. While awaiting his coronation the new King and his younger brother were lodged in the Tower; and it was announced that for the time being their uncle, Edward IV’s brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had been appointed to the office of Protector.

To some historians, Richard of Gloucester remains the monster that William Shakespeare portrayed. To others, discrediting the propaganda of those who defeated him,

he is a paragon. Undoubtedly he was not the sanguinary hunchback of popular imagination; nor was he guilty of many of the atrocious crimes attributed to him. Yet he was not a man whose character was out of tune with the ruthless spirit of his times; and, although there is no reliable evi­dence that he was responsible for the murders of Edward V and his brother, who never emerged from the Tower, there is also no evidence that he was not.

Whether responsible for the crime or not, he did not live to profit from it long. For on 22 August 1485 at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire, in the last battle of the Wars of the Roses, he lost his crown and his life to yet another claimant to the throne, Henry Tudor, the son of a Welsh knight, whose mother was a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt. Soon after his victory, Henry Tudor married Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth, thus uniting the Houses of Lancaster and York, a reconciliation symbolized by the red and white rose of the House of Tudor.

The fifteenth century was now drawing to a close. It was a century described by the Victorian historian, Bishop William Stubbs, as ‘futile, bloody and immoral’ and by a historian of our own day as the background to a society ‘violent, dirty and overdressed.’ But it was also the age of John Lydgate’s Troy Book and of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Moi-te d’Arthur; of Reginald Ely, the Norfolk mason, who built the first court of Queen’s College, Cambridge as well as the Chapel of King’s College; of Henry Chichele, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who founded All Souls College, Oxford; and of John Glasier who provided the College with some of its beautiful painted glass; of the carvers of William of Wykeham’s Chantry in Winchester Cathedral and of the monument in St Albans Cathedral to Henry V’s brother, Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, who presented his large col­lection of manuscripts to the Bodleian Library, Oxford where the splendid room in which they were housed still bears his name.

 

 

 

NATIVES

ROMAN BRITAIN

ANGLO-SAXON

Twilight of Middle Ages

HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET 

Crown and People

Tudor England

Early Stuart England

EMPIRE AND INDUSTRY

THE AGE OF REFORM

20th century

 

 

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