In the Middle Ages, which cover approximately the period from the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066 to the end of the Wars of the Roses in 1485, England moved from being an almost exclusively agricultural feudal society to a society on the threshold of creating an empire. Medieval society was based on the feudal system, which can be said to have come of age in England under William the Conqueror. He introduced the idea that all land was the property of the crown to dispose of as the king thought fit. Large tracts of countryside were granted to the king's supporters, who, in return, were bound to pay rent and offer their services when required. This usually meant supplying a certain number of armed knights in time of war.
The lords would then rent their land to tenant farmers under similar conditions. These farmers were known as serfs, or villains, and their lives were overshadowed by extreme hardship. A serf was effectively the property of the lord for whom he worked.
He was not permitted to leave the land and go where he wished. If he tried to, he would be brought back and punished. Neither could he marry without the permission of the Lord, which was also required should the serf wish to allow his son or daughter to marry.
On the death of the serf, an heir had to pay a tax to the Lord before he could continue to farm, besides what was known as a heriot, often the best animal on the farm. On top of the burden of working his own land to feed his family, the serf had to spend about three days each week working on the land of his lord, a service rendered in lieu of rent, ploughing, sowing, harvesting, of course, but also repairing the manor house, building barns, and running errands to the local villages, a very time-consuming and tiring business. Dews, in the form of... produce constantly flowed into the Lord's stores. This system of bartering came about because of the lack of money in circulation.
The tasks of the serf could be extremely burdensome, although they did vary from manor to manor. As a serf, you might be expected to work on the Lord's land for just the harvest time, but you might also be expected to work perhaps three or four times a week. and then perform extra labour services on the Lord's land, work which was called boon work. But as a serf you were also required to perform other sorts of obligations.
For instance, if you wanted to pasture your pigs in the Lord's woods, well then you had to pay the Lord a certain kind of rent, probably a hog's head of wine or something like that. For all he undertook, the serf required the Lord's approval. However... As there were not enough people to work the land, the lord would be loath to turn anyone off his demean, and there were customs preventing a man's land from being taken from him, or his services and dues being too great a liability.
In that sense at least, the serf had security of tenure, and while the lord was permitted to chastise, he was not permitted to mutilate or kill his tenant. Any disputes that arose amongst the serfs themselves, or any agricultural grievances, were heard in the manor court. The manorial court essentially dealt with agricultural disputes, disputes over land, but it also dealt with the enforcement of the lord's rights. If, for instance, a serf had not paid his licence to get married, he would be punished by a fine in the manorial court. The court would be overseen by the lord's bailiff or steward who would gather the court together.
And the villagers themselves would also elect a reeve to speak for them. The defendant at the court would also be expected to gain or to gather oath helpers who would vouch for his honesty and his good name. But the court didn't often deal with major criminal cases.
Those tended to be dealt with by the royal justices. And indeed, the royal courts were places you could apply to get justice done on major land disputes. The judgment or doom was pronounced by the peasants, taking account of local oral and written custom.
Most people were serfs in the early Middle Ages, and although it was possible for a man to buy his freedom, the expense involved and the unwillingness of the lord to lose a labourer were often insurmountable barriers. If they were required under feudal custom to perform military service for the lord or for the king, and they found they didn't have the right military equipment, and they were not in any case trained for war, what they could do was pay a kind of tax called scutage, which released them from actually performing military service themselves. And scutage was also useful to the king, because quite often...
The king would prefer to actually have money in order to raise an army, pay mercenaries, and have a properly trained force rather than people who perhaps were not really military men. Early medieval England was a country of village settlements scattered amongst the great swathes of forest that belonged to the king, and which, to quote Richard FitzNigel, are the secret places of the kings and their great delight. There, away from the continuous business and incessant turmoil of the court, they can, for a little time, breathe in the grace of natural liberty.
The great difficulty in understanding medieval forest is that we simply don't mean the same thing by forest as any medieval thinker or indeed any medieval person. wood. To us, the word forest automatically suggests a wild place, trees, lots of trees.
In the Middle Ages, it simply meant an area which was surrounded by a legal cordon within which a particular law applied. There didn't have to be trees. It was perfectly possible to settle in that area, provided you paid the king for the privilege.
Now This difference between legal forest and physical forest makes it very difficult to understand because the words just don't mean the same. There is no doubt that kings enjoyed their hunting. We're told that William I loved stags as if they were his children.
And so those stags were protected by a series of very, very savage laws. Within the designated legal forest, the forest law, which was the king's law, ran. Probably the most famous forest statute, infamous I should say, is that of Richard I of 1198, which demanded castration and blinding for the illicit hunting of deer. And this has given forest law a very, very wicked reputation and generated a whole folklore on its own.
The hero is always the Robin Hood figure who subverts the forest law. kills the king's deer. The villain is always the sheriff. And this reputation, I might say, didn't stop with the lower classes, this reputation for the king's foresters.
At least 90% of the early medieval population were villagers. They farmed two, sometimes three, vast open fields, which could cover hundreds of acres. The land was divided into strips, Each farmed by individual serfs.
The strips tended by any one man were not necessarily side by side, but for convenience all strips would be ploughed in blocks, sometimes called furlongs. The lord of the village, of course, had his strips alongside each other in blocks distributed amongst those of the villagers. These fields made up his demeanour.
One of the great fields was left fallow each year, and the other planted with spring and autumn-sown crops. All work on the land required common action, as few of the serfs earned enough money to be able to work alone. Everyone's crops had to mature and get the same attention at the same point as everyone else's. The oxen and ploughs might be supplied by different people, combining their resources. This was the only viable means of getting the work done.
Haymaking and mowing likewise required the contribution of each member of the community. After the harvest, the cattle, geese and pigs of the whole community would be allowed to roam freely about on the fields. Nonetheless, there was little enough food to produce fat livestock before the animals needed to be killed and salted for the winter. Even the pigs were filled up with acorns and beech nuts.
For most peasants, life was lived on a knife edge, and one bad harvest could plunge them into the most wretched poverty and even starvation. Famine was not unusual, and one chronicler said that the men ate all kinds of herbs, even the bark of trees, or... Devour the meadow grass uncooked like oxen.
Small wonder that poaching, despite the forest laws, was a widespread activity. The villages were small, perhaps 100 or less inhabitants, of which many lived and died without leaving the community. The lord owned the largest house, although he may hardly ever have stayed there. In his absence, his steward looked after his affairs. The story of medieval agriculture is one of very profound contrasts.
boom and bust and very painful readjustment to changed circumstances. We start with a period of boom which extends certainly from 1100 and possibly before right through to 1300. Over that time, the population of England probably doubles, may even have trebled. The figures, as far as we can calculate them, are somewhere near two million, up to five and a half or six million. And we can see much of the evidence of this process today.
The Yorkshire Abbeys, the Welsh Abbeys show settlement probing higher and higher up river valleys into areas which had been barren. People are even beginning to talk in kinds of a sort of ag... Agricultural revolution on the pattern of what happened in the 18th century.
The windmill affected things quite profoundly. Horse harness was changing. Quicker markets, better communications, new crops. Many of the components are there.
But, of course, there's a price to be paid. The price shows in too many mouths to feed. There may also have been a change in weather patterns. We don't know. Interestingly enough, the 13th century is the last period before our own time when any significant quantity of wine has been produced in England.
The English kings of the Middle Ages did not stay at one castle or manor house only. Even if he did not spend a great deal of time abroad, like Richard the Lionheart, he moved from one of his estates to another. There may have been 14 or 1500 of them.
living from the produce. Edward I was known to have stayed at 75 in one year. The royal household accompanied him on these journeys, and the entourage was vast, consisting not only of family, friends and their servants, but of all the high officials and their servants, grooms, huntsmen, chamberlains, cooks, laundresses, together with those servants belonging to the king.
Edward III had 500 knights with him, and his mother was said to have taken 60 ladies and damsels. But the king, apart from dictating the government of the country, was also the highest court of law. Sometimes alone, sometimes with his most important nobles, he dispensed justice. And justice depended on whether the king himself was just and skilled in the laws of the land. The Assizes were essentially codifications of legal procedures.
They were a laying down of what procedures you could go through in order to settle a certain dispute. If you had a claim over a plot of land, the Assizes laid out the way you went about prosecuting your claim. And essentially they... established that you applied for a certain kind of writ, one that suited your case, and then the writ would be returned to the sheriff, who would be required to gather together four law-worthy knights, who in turn would appear before the royal justices, and they would be required then to elect 12 other knights to act as jurors, and the jurors would settle the dispute. But they came about...
really in the 12th century because the king was in the process of establishing his royal court as the main courts of justice to whom people should apply and in essence he was trying to compete with the manorial court and also the church courts and by providing a more efficient kind of justice he would be able to satisfy the demand for greater justice. Life was precarious, but not without its pleasures. Strolling minstrels could be found entertaining at castles or in the villages for all festivities from weddings to Christmas and celebrations, such as the harvest home feast. given by the Lord to mark the end of the harvest, when everyone ate and drank as much and more than they should.
Minstrels not only gave recitations of heroic epics, Beowulf or the Legends of Arthur, for example, They also sang, juggled, tumbled and danced. In the towns, the guilds organised plays that showed scenes from the Bible, sometimes performed in churches, sometimes on large wagons. In the houses of the rich, jesters and musicians could often be found in permanent employment. The tournament was not only a sport, albeit a highly dangerous one, but also a means of making reputations and fortunes known.
from the prizes offered. For the king, it provided an opportunity to train his knights for battle. Fatalities were frequent during these bouts, which, through lack of rules until 1267, developed into bloody melees as teams of knights swarmed over large areas armed with swords. Later, the joust, a combat between two knights only, charging at one another with levelled lances, became the most popular.
I think one has to talk always about the knight and the tournament and Arthurian legend coming into being more or less together, because as far as we can tell, indeed they did. What's a bit more subtle to understand is that King Arthur, to a large extent, was a very good knight. is called into existence to control the forces represented by the knights. Now, the development of the tournament seems to have started very soon after 1100. We don't hear of it as a serious force or a threat. before that at all.
And it's connected in some way that we can't quite understand with the spread in the use of the stirrup. This gave the horsemen a firmer seat and, of course, made young knights very, very anxious to try out their mounts against each other. And the tournament seems to begin a little bit like a sort of motorcyclist's convention today. It was very unpopular. The powers that be were very much against it, even kings, because it just looked...
licensed rowdyism. We have a very amusing anecdote of 24 young knights deciding to meet in Bury St Edmunds in 1193 and hold a tournament against the abbot's ban. They did, they came and stayed in the abbey, they got drunk and the next morning they had to face excommunication as well as their hangovers.
The tournament in other words is a spontaneous bit of aggression by young males trying out their physical skills. The majority of people in the early Middle Ages had no education whatsoever, and working life gave them no time to acquire one, even if they desired it. But there were ways in which a son could attain an elementary education.
With the permission of the Lord, even a serf's son could be taught by the parish priest to read and write a little, so that he could read in the church service and attend to minor church work such as that of sexton or doorkeeper. It was then possible for him to rise to a better life as a priest. Monastery schools were exclusively intended for those wanting to become monks. Then there were grammar schools, which concentrated primarily on the teaching of Latin, the universal language of religion and learning all over Europe. Together with some mathematics, these two subjects originally made up the entire curriculum.
The history of all medieval education, I think, is like the history of so much else in the Middle Ages. It starts with a... bang.
It's a spontaneous growth, in some ways remarkably like the growth of knighthood, and to some extent the enthusiasm for education in the 12th and early 13th century exactly parallels the enthusiasm for fighting in a slightly more intellectual sector of society. Oxford was certainly established as a studium generale, a place where you could study all the known sciences of the time by about 1200. Cambridge followed by 12.9, a breakaway in fact from Oxford. Several other English cities, Northampton, Lincoln, Salisbury, all came fairly close to establishing seats of higher learning.
By the end of the 13th century, figures like the great Franciscan scientist Roger Bacon have given English science and philosophy a reputation across the continent. Now where I think the educational experience of the Middle Ages parts company with so much else in medieval history is in the reaction to the Black Death. There is no contraction. Rather, the survivors seem to have got the idea that they had a better chance of getting on if they were qualified. And education becomes less and less associated with promotion within the church, and more and more...
associated with success in secular life. And the whole thing is summed up very nicely in a parent's report, one might say, of the 1470s, where Margaret Paston says of one of her sons that she would rather have him a good secular man than a lewd... It was becoming more and more common too for lay children to be attached by the payment of a fee onto an ecclesiastical school.
And this of course creates the basis for the apparatus round which in later centuries the English boarding school would grow. So it's not too much to say that some of the groundwork of English education was established in the later 15th century. For most children, their education was more practical.
The village child would be taught the crafts that their parents knew, besides helping with the farm work. The son would learn to thatch, hedge, smith. or do carpentry, while the daughter, who also helped on the farm, would cook, spin, weave, and learn how to preserve food by salting and drying. They would also learn about herbs for curing illnesses. But perhaps the best education for a boy was that given by a master to his apprentice.
An apprenticeship of seven years to a stonemason or carpenter would open up a world of greater freedom for a boy than he would ever have found on his father's smallholding. In the later Middle Ages, from the 13th century on, he would perhaps join one of the craftsmen's guilds. A guild essentially is a religious association and its object is to...
Provide for the interests of its members in this world and ease their passage into the next. Now, one dimension of that function, of course, the protecting the interests of members in this world, is very similar to that of a model. and a great deal of the apparatus of the modern trades union, the procession, the manor, does indeed come from the Guild, particularly the sense of solidarity and the sense of obligation that animate. to trades unions, all that comes from the guild.
On the other hand, the guild never loses its religious foundation. That's why we have, for example, the Coventry guilds participating in the mystery plays. The armourers always did the crucifixion, of course, because their trade equipped them to interpret that part of the gospel story.
So the great difference between a medieval guild and a modern trade... union is that the medieval guild cuts up and down through society and it has to be remembered that many top people belonged to trade guilds. The Trinity Guild in Coventry for example counted among its members not only the Earl of Warwick but the Dukes of Northumberland and Lancaster as well.
So by no means is the guild always necessarily biased towards a particular class in society. Craft guilds were simply a subdivision which was associated with a particular trade, whether it was the grocery trade, whether it was the tiling trade, whether it was the masonry trade. For the son of a lord, the way was open to become a knight. The best way, in fact, to become a knight was obviously to be born the son of a knight. And once one achieved adolescence and a little bit beyond, you could, as a son of a knight, go through various ceremonies.
particularly which would end usually in a tournament where perhaps there would be a mass knighting when lots of young men would be knighted at the same time. There might also be a ritual going through a special bath. There might also be a kind of religious element attached to the knighting of the son of a knight. But, of course, if one wasn't the son of a knight, it was much more difficult to enter that exclusive status. And one had to perhaps perform great deeds of arms and be noticed by an aristocrat and therefore be knighted.
Or one could serve in a noble household and gradually build up influence, gain a bit more land through the land market, become a sheriff, justice of the peace, and finally get knighted in that way. The church was the main purveyor of education in the Middle Ages, and it is the monks who we have to thank for some of the finest medieval magic. manuscripts. Time nor money were of consequence to them as they recorded their world on parchment or vellum. But letters from kings, bishops and barons, the law courts and tax rolls all tell us of the affairs of the Middle Ages.
Because of the austere conditions in which lord and peasant lived, glass for windows was a luxury rarely seen except in churches. Everyone wore garments that would keep out the wind and the cold. Men of authority, from the king downwards, wore cloaks, long and full, reaching to the feet, occasionally with short sleeves and undersleeves to the wrist, if they were working or went hunting.
They wore a short cloak stretching to the knee and a gown beneath of the same length. The gown, which in its varying materials of silk, linen or wool, was universally worn by monks, royalty or clerks, was generally made in one piece. Belts, girdles and shoes or boots were plain, with the shoes and boots made of leather, pointed at the toe and without heels.
The peasants wore shorter clothes. Tied around the waist, maybe with a woolen cord, but of roughly knee length. This enabled them greater freedom of movement in their labours.
Over their heads, they often wore a hood. By the 14th century, dress became more elaborate, closer fitting and with a greater variety of colours and fabrics in use. The medieval town... would often be protected by earthen ramparts, ditches and gates, outside of which spread the fields and common pastures that belonged to the townspeople, the Burgesses. The streets were dirty, as people simply dumped their rubbish outside the houses.
I think one has to imagine great extremes, great poverty and also great wealth. You have to imagine the streets squalid. Perhaps with pigs, dogs roaming, the smell of dunghills, cesspits, the stench of the slaughterhouses, the stink of rotting meat, putrid fish, and very poor housing conditions. As the population increased, so it became more usual for those men who were also craftsmen to devote more and more time to their weaving, baking or carpentry. and pay for their farm work to be carried out by others.
Gradually, more and more people were loath to work as serfs and desired more freedoms. The great lords, who often found themselves in dire need of funds to support their war efforts, for example, became happy to grant charters of freedom to the serfs in all aspects of life in return for money. Thus, as the Middle Ages progressed, Many people and their towns began to prosper and grow. The Middle Ages gave birth to two famous written works, documents that fascinate us still.
The first was Doomsday Book, written in 1086 at the instigation of William I. It's a great deal easier to say what the Doomsday Book was not than to say what it was. The difficulty is, of course, that it's not a survey and it's not a census. And historians often treat it as both.
This makes it difficult. I think the best way I can put it is to say it's something between a white paper on an international crisis and a tax return. It has to be put in its circumstances.
In 1085, William the Conqueror was facing a very nasty international crisis with a threatened Danish invasion backed by one of his sons. He needed to know fast what... of backup and support he could get. So he sent his commissioners through the counties which he controlled, asking them who the tenants were, what service they could expect, and what the value of the lands they held.
was and more important perhaps what it had been 20 years earlier in the time of King Edward. Now the resulting document of course gives us a very impressive picture of English society, above all a moving picture of English society. We see English society not just in 1086 but in 1066 as well and we see what has changed between. It's a tremendously useful document, there is nothing else like it.
anywhere in Western Europe, no other document so complete. The second was Magna Carta. King John, who reigned from 1199 until 1216, following the death of his brother Richard the Lionheart, was tyrannical and weak.
Pope excommunicated him, and the barons united and decided to curb the king's powers. They marched on London, forcing the king to flee to Windsor. The rebellious nobles confronted him at last in a field known as Runnymede between Staines and Windsor. There, he was forced to affix his seal to the Great Charter.
In Latin, the language in which it was written, it was called Magna Carta. It's, to some extent, an attempt at crisis limitation. John is forced to accept concessions, or rather to grant concessions. They're extracted from him, they're not an act of will. not a voluntary act, and say the Magna Carta is an attempt to get back to the good old days.
It's an attempt to limit the exploitation, to establish an organised system of justice, to establish a new organised system of feudal arrangements, to limit taxation, and a number of very specific points which relate precisely to what John has been doing, to the clique of foreign mercenaries he's built up around him. so the foreigners are not to have particular offices, they're to be kicked out of England. In the end, at the end of the charter, an attempt to ensure that those concessions will be enforced. A committee of 25 barons who, if the king steps out of line, they will act and make sure he gets back into line.
They will do to John, in some ways, what he has been doing to his subjects. The church was omnipresent in the lives of the medieval citizens, the priest, a very important person in the village. He was a free man, but also a farmer, tending strips of land given in return for his church duties. He also had the right to take one-tenth of each man's produce each year, besides fees for special services such as marriages and burials.
The superstition still existed, however, alongside Christian religion and witchcraft. The superstition of the evil eye was a potent force. People began to worry more and more about the devil and eternal damnation. On the social side of things, the church clearly, I think, saw the service as just part of the normal run of the peasantry in that three-fold structure where the peasants are there to support the knights and support the church on top of them.
They're the ones who simply foot the bill to provide the... labour and the cash in the long term. As far as serfdom itself goes, there doesn't seem to be any worry about it, the element of human rights beneath human dignity or anything like that.
And in some respects, the church exploits... just as much as anybody else did, as much as the secular lords did. I mean, the monks, the bishops, the great religious houses would all have serfs on their estates to start off with.
And following the normal pattern of the lords, they would gradually release a few at a time, sometimes hill villages, as economic pressures dictated. Where there does seem to be a slight difference is that the church, if anything, was perhaps more reluctant than the secular lords to liberate the serfs as time passed, particularly in the late Middle Ages. although you get regular dribbles and drabbles of records where serfs are being liberated, manumitted, their freedom being sold to them. And it's quite a nice case actually in the early 16th century where the Abbot of Shrewsbury had sold somebody's freedom to them and then seized the document back and claimed they were again a serf just to get them back under the thumb. So they were trying to play it all ways, exploiting as much as they could.
Art was not neglected in medieval life, and here too the church was important, being rich enough to employ artists or use the talents of the clergy themselves. Apart from the glorious stone and wood carving of the Gothic style, there were the illuminated books which were famous throughout Europe. Increasingly, professional illuminators were employed to supplement the output from the monasteries.
Wall paintings could be found in local churches and great houses, either depicting biblical scenes or the portraits of nobility. In the 14th century, the stained glass windows also portrayed the likenesses of benefactors. These windows developed into works of rich, sumptuous colouring.
Sculpture was also well represented, not least in the shapes of the effigies of the nobility. Chaucer was the first great literary artist to raise the English language to the level already attained by contemporary French and Italian. Praised as the father of English poetry, his works are rich, marvellous tapestries of words, his storytelling powers unequalled, except by Shakespeare and Dickens.
From 1338, the Hundred Years'War with France began over French resentment at England's rule in land in southwest France, and Edward III's claim to the French throne. These wars brought the great victory at Agincourt, and the emergence of the Maid of Orléans, Joan of Arc. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the feudal horsemen were the military elite. Knights wore more chain mail, and their armour became more elaborate and expensive. With the result that many men decided to forego the honour of being a knight and paid scootage rather than be burdened with the cost of armour and the heavy horses required.
Freeman too were required to render military service and maintain equipment according to their status. Of course, those fighting at the bottom of the scale were very lucky to have any equipment at all. The army that got to Agincourt...
was practically fighting in bare feet and shirts, and right the night before the battle, King Henry was negotiating to get his troops out in what they were wearing. Properly equipped, of course, the archer would be expected to have a padded jacket. which would give him some protection, but essentially he was expected to keep out of danger. Your man-at-arms going beyond that would have a male shirt and possibly some protection, some plate protection on the upper part of his body. Once you get to the heavy horsemen, of course, by 1400 you've got very, very sophisticated armament indeed, covering the man cap à pied, head to foot.
It's, I think, a misconception to say that this was necessarily heavy. A heavy cavalryman was actually carrying rather less in weight than a modern marine. It's also not true to say that it made him immobile. He was expected to be able to fight on foot.
One of the great difficulties that the French army had at Agincourt, of course, was precisely that it tried to fight on foot and found that after advancing a mile and a half across a ploughed field in an October downpour. it was a little bit difficult to do any fighting because they had no energy left. But there's one last point that I think needs to be made, and that is that the extremely beautiful and sophisticated armour that we see in museums to this day tends to be tournament armour.
Very, very expensive, specially produced generally to order in the workshops of Milan, and probably not to be risked on the battlefield. Among the footmen, the bow and the spear remained the principal weapons. Prior to 1300, the bow had been short and light.
At about that time, the famous longbow made its appearance with a greater range and striking power. The warfare along the borders with Scotland necessitated the horsing of archers so that they could pursue the enemy and dismount to engage in battle. During the Hundred Years'War with France, English armies consisted of archers and men-at-arms in equal numbers.
The effectiveness of the archers in breaking up defensive formations prior to cavalry action was soon learned by English commanders and ignored at great cost, as in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. From 1348... England was struck with a natural disaster, the Black Death. This was the bubonic plague from Asia, which swept away at least one quarter of the population of Europe on its way to England and claimed the lives of half of the English population, which, at that time, was about four or five million.
In 1477, the population was still only... 2,200,000, some areas of the country had been completely wiped out. From 1348 until 1350, the plague ravaged the country. Once infected, the victim began to shiver, his temperature rose, and swellings appeared in the neck, armpits, and groin.
Death often came to the afflicted mercifully quickly, and they would be dead within 12 hours. The disease spread rapidly from Dorset and was soon over the border in Scotland. When it finally died down, towns and villages were almost deserted, with grass growing in the streets. In the field, crops rotted.
The first and most important consequence of the plague was that it kept on coming back. This is perhaps the most serious matter. 1348 and 1349 is just the start. It comes back again, 1369, 1375, on and on and on.
It's probable that the immediate loss of population amounted to about 40%. We can control this to some degree from the records of closed institutions like monasteries, presentations to religious benefices, but that wasn't the end. Probably the trough in the loss of population wasn't reached until 1430 or 1440. So the loss goes on for two or three generations after the plague before there's any turn up at all.
Now the immediate consequence of this of course is to create a labour shortage. People were aware of this from the very, very earliest moment. The most famous move against it, of course, is the Statute of Labourers, which was passed in 1351, and was a conscious attempt by the government in Parliament to peg wages of labourers and artisans at the level of 1346. Gradually, men began to question the status quo.
Men such as John Ball, nicknamed the Mad Priest of Kent. Or John Wycliffe, born about 1330, who taught at Oxford University and influenced the translation of the Bible into English. He spoke about the evils he saw in the church. His followers went out to preach throughout the country, the Lollards, as they became known by their detractors. The churches and monasteries they claimed were too wealthy.
And the clergy should spend their riches in better ways than on luxurious living. In 1381, when the wars in France were not going well and emptying the treasury, Richard II's ministers decided to impose a pole, or head tax, on every citizen, rich and poor, over the age of 15. Already burdened with heavy taxation and insufficient wages, which had caused riots, strikes and other disturbances for years, the people could stand no more, and a revolt broke out. In Essex, the tax commissioner, who had come to ask for more contributions, was set upon by the peasants who stoned him out of town. The rebellion spread all over Essex and Kent, with murder and beheadings written on the account of the rioters. A man named Watt Tyler was appointed as their spokesman and gathering support along the way and leaving a trail of violence behind them, the insurgents marched off to seek redress for their grievances from the King in London.
The first meetings with the King are relatively decorous and show considerable respect for the King's person. This is most important of all. They demand royal charters, therefore...
Admitting the government in its present form. What happens after this meeting, I think, is that a number of the moderates, a very large number of the moderates, chiefly from Essex, are satisfied with what they've got and go home. The hard men, at the hard core, are left to... cut loose in the city, and boy do they cut loose.
Now, sacking John of Gaunt's palace, that was just a little rowdy perhaps. There were plenty of other members of the nobility who would have been happy to sack John of Gaunt's palace at any time. Lynching the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chancellor, well, this is a bit more dodgy.
This is bad manners. Actually going off into the financial quarter and killing a lot of foreign visitors, no, no, that's not acceptable at all. That's downright bad for business.
Those loyal to the King were summarily executed at the block. Arson, plunder and blackmail were rife. The next day, a meeting was arranged at Smithfield, a square where cattle markets were held. Tyler was demanding not only the abandonment of feudal ties. He wanted the estates of the church confiscated and equal status for all men besides many other reforms.
When a disparaging remark was made about him, Tyler drew his sword, whereupon Mayor Woolworth struck him in the neck with his cutlass. Moments later, one of the king's squires ran him through twice with a sword. Tyler managed to utter the word, treason, before he fell dead.
Whether the murder of Tyler, the lynching, the destruction of Tyler, however you call it, whether that was planned and a put-up job, we don't know. I strongly suspect it was. Either way, there is no doubt at all that young Richard...
aged barely 13 at the time, comes very, very creditably out of the episode indeed. Even if he was primed to do so, he kept his head and exploited his position by riding towards the peasants and saying, I am your king, in truly splendid style. Once the peasants'revolt was over, only the progress of time would free the serf from his yoke of feudal labour.
A series of famous medieval conflicts began in 1455. They found their way into the history books as the Wars of the Roses and raged on and off for 30 years, changing England forever. There were three separate phases of these wars, with a hiatus between each. The House of Lancaster, its symbol the Red Rose, and the House of York with its White Rose, engaged in battles for the sovereignty of England with savagery that even the Middle Ages had not seen. In the 1440s...
1450s where you see the beginnings of the disputes, it wasn't really a dynastic dispute as much as one about patronage and power. Richard the Duke of York was a frustrated courtier, an aristocrat. who failed to get the influence he really wanted at court and ran a series of campaigns against the established courtiers who were the favourites of Henry VI. And indeed the first battle of the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of St Albans in 1455, ended as soon as the Duke of Somerset, who was one of the king's favourites, was killed by the Yorkist force. And at the bottom, I suppose, it was about the failure of Henry VI to rule as a king properly that led to disputes between his courtiers and finally led to this dynastic dispute.
The victories went from one army to the other, from one end of the country to the other. At the first battle of St Albans, the Yorkists won, as they did in Stafford, Northampton and Herefordshire. In Shropshire and Wakefield, where a trick led to the slaughter of many Yorkists, and in the Second Battle of St Albans, the Lancastrians had the upper hand.
During the 1450s, the main protagonist is Richard, Duke of York. who is constantly trying to assert his position at court, gain influence over the king, and finding himself totally thwarted in his ambitions. He is faced with a group of courtiers, particularly the Duke of Somerset. who is determined to keep Richard, Duke of York, out of his position at court.
And although the Duke of Somerset is killed in 1455, Richard of York is still unable to gain position at court because because Henry VI's queen, Margaret of Anjou, is determined that York should not have any kind of influence. One of the most vicious battles resulted in the biggest bloodbath seen in England until the 17th century. This was the engagement at Towton in Yorkshire. At first it seemed the Lancastrians had won the day.
A massed charge had driven the Yorkists from the field. But with the chaotic climax, the melee of dismounted men-at-arms wielding swords, axes and maces, the Yorkists were at last victorious. Edward of York became King Edward IV. But once Richard III had seized the throne, the wars flared up again. Henry Tudor, a Welsh prince, last survivor of the House of Lancaster, landed at Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire, engaged Richard in battle at Bosworth Field, and slew him.
With the death of the usurper, Henry assumed the kingship as Henry VII, and in marrying Elizabeth, the daughter of the Duke of York, blended the two houses into one powerful new monarchy. But the wars had brought about the end of the great English longbowman. No match for the new discovery, gunpowder.
The great feudal barons and lords were now all but extinct, leaving the king far more powerful than any of his subjects. With the end of the Civil War, the Middle Ages were also drawing to a close. Feudalism died out as more and more men gained their freedom. Trade abroad made men wealthy, and as the population increased, the English landscape was changed forever.
We may be forgiven for eulogizing on the Middle Ages, imagining a merry England that didn't exist. Even Chaucer fell into the trap of nostalgia.