Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (2 page)

Of all the changes between 1066 and 1536 perhaps the least significant was the size of population. There were about two million people in England 1066 and about three million in 1535.There had been four million to five million in Roman Britain, and about 1300 the population rose to some six million, but famine, disease (including the Black Death) and the changing patterns of families' working lives halved this by 1450, and recovery was slow.

But who the two million or three million people of our period were, and where and how they lived, changed very greatly. Snapshots of the kingdom at each of those two dates, 1066 and 1536, show two utterly different worlds.

In the middle of the eleventh century barely 10 per cent of the population lived in towns. A community qualified as a ‘town' in
Domesday Book
if it had more than 2000 inhabitants, and there were only 18 such communities. Even London was tiny – perhaps no bigger than present-day Sittingbourne. England was an entirely agricultural country, and its bishops were based in villages.

It was also a society in which wealth was concentrated in the hands of even fewer people than it is today. Analysis of the
Domesday
survey reveals that about 10 per cent of the island's inhabitants were slaves – people who were bought and sold and who could not own property. The labouring classes above them (cottars, bordars, villeins), who made up 75 per cent of the population, were unfree, obliged to perform service on their lords' lands. Five per cent of this society owned everything, landwise.

The Norman invasion made the divisions in English society even more pronounced than they had been.

There was virtually no literacy outside the Church, and such books as were produced were laboriously hand-copied in monasteries. The ruling class had neither language nor culture in common with those below them. The country lived under a form of martial law, in which whole communities were held responsible if a member of the occupying power was killed.

By the early sixteenth century, however, this was all ancient history. Slavery was long gone, villeinage had, for practical purposes, disappeared and the land was worked by free farmers who paid rent. Towns were now significant urban centres, with their own charters and independent oligarchic democracies. The towns were already old, and many people saw the corporations that ran them as ossified defenders of ancient privileges, blocking industrial initiative.

For there were, indeed, new industrial developments that were already making England prosperous, but they were to be found in the countryside or in unofficial, unincorporated towns.

London had become a major city, and its population was dominated by artisans, tradesmen and educated professionals involved with the court and the law. About 60 per cent of its citizens could read, and there was a ready market for printed books.

England was a very legalistic society, ready to go to court at the drop of a hat. Even the poor could use the law against the rich. Proceedings were in English, and trial by jury was well established.

Our story is not about a long period in which nothing much changed, but about how the England of 1066 turned into that of the early sixteenth century, a story of lives lived in a world that was in a constant state of change.

HOW THE RENAISSANCE CREATED ‘THE MIDDLE AGES'

Well into the sixteenth century English architects were still cheerfully refining and developing what was then the modern style of architecture – the soaring, light and airy Gothic that had been all the rage for the last three or four centuries. But modernity was, paradoxically, somewhat out of date. On the Continent, fashion had turned the clock back to imitate the antique styles of ancient Greece and Rome. The Renaissance was not a new, fresh start – it was backward-looking and conservative.

In the end it proved irresistible, even in the somewhat marginalized kingdom of England. In rejecting the modern in favour of the antique, the Renaissance constructed a mental bridge that reached back to the Roman Empire, without having to paddle in the swamp that lay between. That swamp became the Middle Ages:

The Renaissance, it should be said, is a term almost as meaningless as ‘medieval', though it does have the merit of being used by people who actually lived at the time. The word was coined by the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch, who condemned those who lived between the fall of Rome and his own time as the inhabitants of a Dark Age: ‘Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage.' By the time England caught up with the Renaissance, in the mid-sixteenth century, it was essentially over. Historians have proposed that the Italian Renaissance came to the end of its run on 6 May 1527, when Spanish troops looted Rome.

But the idea of a middle age of darkness and ignorance had been launched on the world, and it did not go away. According to Jacob Burckhardt's celebrated book,
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
, published in 1860, medieval people were not even individual human beings, but existed only as members of some corporate group. One section is entitled ‘The Development of the Individual'. The English writer John Addington Symonds, whose huge work
Renaissance in Italy
was published later in the century, thought the history of the modern world was a history of freedom, and that achieving this freedom had required a sudden leap forward out of the darkness and bondage of the Middle Ages into the glorious light of the Renaissance.

The Romantics of the late nineteenth century began to be intrigued by what they saw as the mysterious glow and gloom of the Middle Ages and, dressed in interesting flowing robes and mocked-up suits of armour, went exploring there with candles. They came back with tales and paintings of a magical, fairy-tale world of knights in shining armour and wan damsels in distress, of bold outlaws and Bad Kings, of alchemists in league with the devil and saintly holy men, of downtrodden peasants and cunning minstrels.

In this fantasy land there was no sense of historical change; the medieval world was essentially timeless. The lack of individual identity which Burkhardt had claimed as a mark of medievalism meant it was convenient and helpful to understand this place in terms of stereotypes. And those stereotypes have become standardized and generalized to the point where everyone now ‘knows' what it was like to live in medieval England. An unholy alliance of nineteenth-century novelists and painters with twentieth-century movie-makers has created a period of history that never existed.

This book sets out to examine and deconstruct some of those stereotypes, and replace them with real people living in a changing world. The reality of those 400-odd years is far more interesting, surprising, moving and disturbing than the stereotype landscape.

The strange ‘maps' of the world – the so-called
mappae mundi
– that thirteenth-century map-makers created, carry images of a world populated by creatures with their heads in their chests or big feet over their heads – but this does not mean the map-makers actually lived in such a world. Nineteenth-century imaginers of medieval England often took the material of the past too literally and ended up constructing their own fantasies.

In a quite comical recent book,
The Lord's First Night
, Alain Boureau investigated the truth of the old story that a feudal lord had the right to sleep with the bride of a vassal on her wedding night. From
The Marriage of Figaro
to Mel Gibson's
Braveheart
, this has been the ultimate symbol of feudal barbarism. Of course, it is a complete fantasy – like the chastity belts knights are supposed to have locked on to their wives when they went on crusade.

But this
droit de seigneur
was certainly mentioned in medieval sources. It was described as an ancient custom, in the fourteenth century when supporters of the king raised it as a spectre to rally public opinion against local lords.

Which just goes to show, you should not believe everything you read in books.

CHAPTER ONE

PEASANT

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

B
EING A PEASANT DURING THE MIDDLE AGES
must qualify as one of the worst jobs in history – but then we're only guessing because the peasants didn't leave much record of their lives. Except once, in the summer of 1381, when they left an indelible mark on the history of England.

It was quite astonishing. From out of nowhere, it seemed, tens of thousands of ‘peasants' converged on London. Two large armed bodies of ‘commoners and persons of the lowest grade from Kent and Essex'
*1
burst through the gates of the City of London and wreaked havoc. They demolished the home of John of Gaunt and some buildings around the priory of the Hospital of St John. The next day, the rebels in London burst into the fortress-palace of the Tower. They dragged out the prior of the hospital, who was the Royal Treasurer, along with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chancellor and a couple of other notables and beheaded them on Tower Hill.

It was the first and last large-scale popular uprising in English history.

By the end of that day there had been quite a massacre. In one place about forty decapitated bodies were lying in a heap, ‘and hardly was there a street in the City in which there were not bodies lying of those who had been slain'. The Archbishop's head was displayed on a pike on London Bridge, with his mitre nailed to his skull.

This was, of course, the so-called ‘Peasants' Revolt'. The poet-chronicler Jean Froissart, writing shortly afterwards for a readership in the courts of northern France and the Low Countries, felt he needed to explain who the English peasantry were, and what they were complaining about:

It is customary in England, as in several other countries, for the nobility to have great power over the common people, who they keep in bondage. That is to say, they have a duty to plough their lord's lands, to harvest his grain and bring it in, to thresh and winnow it. They also have to harvest his hay and cut his wood and bring it in. They are obliged to perform all these duties for their lords, and there are more of them in England than in other countries. That is how they serve the prelates and nobles. These services are more oppressive in the counties of Kent, Essex, Sussex and Bedford, than anywhere else in the kingdom.

Disaffected people in these districts became restless, saying they were too severely oppressed; that at the beginning of the world there were no slaves, and that no one ought to be treated like one unless he had committed treason against his lord, as Lucifer had done against God: but they were not like that, for they were neither angels nor spirits, but men like their lords, who treated them as beasts. They would no longer put up with this. They had determined to be free, and if they did any work for their lords, they wanted to be paid for it.

The Chronicles of Froissart
, Bk. II, ch. 73

Froissart had no sympathy with the insurrection, and did not think peasants had anything to complain about. In fact, he said their lives had become too easy – the trouble was ‘all because of the ease and riches of the common people'. Nonetheless, his description helps to reinforce the stereotype of peasant life as being nasty, brutish and short.

A ‘village' was where the lord of the manor kept his villeins – men who were bound either to the land itself or to his personal service, and who lived with their wives and children in wretched cottage hovels. They worked partly for themselves but for up to three days a week for their lord (and gave him a share of their produce) and also had to give a tenth of their crop – a tithe – to the Church.

Illiterate, uncouth, little more than an animal, the medieval peasant cuts a wretched figure in our imagination. Froissart's belief that it was dangerous to allow this savage, servile underclass too much scope for troublemaking makes a grotesque kind of sense.

But much of what used to be assumed about ‘peasants' is completely untrue. So untrue, in fact, that even the title ‘Peasants' Revolt' is now no longer used by professional historians, who have lost confidence in Froissart's description. Froissart, it turns out, was not a very reliable social commentator.

ORDER IN CHAOS

The rising was not the mindless insurrection of brutalized semi-slaves. It was highly organized and carefully prepared. For a start, many areas of the country rose virtually simultaneously, which indicates that peasants had the capacity for organization on a much larger scale than the purely local. Then there is the interesting chronicle report that, in order to maintain coastal defences against the French, the rebels in Kent decreed that: ‘none who dwelt near the sea in any place for the space of twelve leagues, should come out with them, but should remain to defend the coasts of the sea from public enemies . . .'