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.
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