Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (25 page)

14

The lost village

The deserted village of Wharram Percy lies on the side of a valley, by the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds. Its church, of St Martin, lies in ruins; earthworks mark the lines of habitation, rectangular mounds where the small houses once stood and sunken hollows in the grass where lanes and roads once ran. Remains of the manor house, and of a longhouse, survive together with the outlines of smaller houses of chalk. Most of the stonework has gone under the earth, however, covered by grass and weed. The life of the village has departed, but it has left traces of its existence that have survived for hundreds of years.

There are more than 3,000 deserted villages in England, mute testimony of a communal past. An old market cross stands alone among the trees of Stapleford Park in Leicestershire; the market, and the village, are long gone. A line of buttercups, springing from the moist soil beside a wall, will outline a forgotten boundary. The inhabitants of these villages left for a variety of reasons. Fire, famine and disease did their work through the centuries; successive stages of depopulation also crept over the countryside. Some villages were razed to make way for sheep pasture, and the villagers forcibly evicted by the lord of the land. Thus in the village of Thorpe, Norfolk, 100 people ‘left their houses weeping and became unemployed and finally, as we suppose, died in poverty and so ended
their days’. The Cistercian monks were known for their practice of eviction.

The excavation of Wharram Percy, over a period of fifty years, has discovered evidence of successive rebuilding of walls and parts of walls. The pattern of settlement seems to have been formalized in the tenth century, with the individual houses erected in rows along the two principal streets. A manor house was built at this time, with a second manor house following three centuries later. This second manor is known to have contained a hall-house, a dovecote and a barn. Throughout the entire period the surrounding land was being farmed for wheat and for barley; sheep and cattle were being raised; flax and hemp were grown.

Some of the original houses were long, approximately 15 by 50 feet (4.5 by 15 metres), with animals living at one end and people at the other. These longhouses were inhabited in the same period as simple two-room cottages that were of variable size according to the resources of the particular owner. The cottages were originally made of timber, but the wood was replaced with stone in the late thirteenth century. A continuous process of building and rebuilding took place, so that the village seems to breathe and move. The cottages had ‘back gardens’ that led down to a ‘back-lane’, which divided the village from the adjacent farmland. There were two millponds, and a triangular green. On the green were two stock pounds. One of these circular pounds, however, might have been used as an arena for cock-fighting or for bull-baiting.

Yet this utterly medieval landscape is deceptive. Since the site of the village is determined by the presence of six springs in the immediate neighbourhood, it is clear that the territory would have invited earlier English settlers. The archaeology of field-walking has found a Mesolithic site in the immediate vicinity of the village, as well as evidence of wood clearance in the Neolithic and Bronze ages. The presence of stone axes and flints suggests continuous human occupation of the area. In a hollow, just to the south of the church, successive levels of earth or ‘hill-slip’ were found that can be dated continuously from the Neolithic to the late medieval period. Beside the church of St Martin, on a natural terrace, were found the remains of a grand burial of the Iron Age. It must always have been a sacred place. Under the first manor house was found
evidence of a Romano-British building. Under the village itself have been uncovered traces of three Romano-British farms with trackways running beside them. There are also the remains of two buildings from the sixth century in the Saxon style.

The continuity of human life at Wharram Percy can still be seen, therefore, persisting for many thousands of years from the time when the first scattered settlers made a camp in this place. Indeed it is likely that the shape of the village itself was determined by the layout of the prehistoric fields. Its life persisted until the need for pasture declined or disease intervened. The population of Wharram Percy began to fall in the fifteenth century, and the village was finally deserted at the very beginning of the sixteenth century.

Wharram Percy is not an isolated example. It just happens to be the only village in England that has been so exhaustively documented. This suggests, although it does not prove, that there are many other English villages with prehistoric origins. No one can dig to find them because the ground is still inhabited. The history of the oldest settlements in the country lies buried in the silent earth. It is possible to conclude, however, that the sites of Mesolithic and Neolithic settlements still flourish.

15

The great charter

It was said of King Richard I that he cared only for the success he carved out with his own sword, and that he was happy only when that royal sword was covered with the blood of his enemies. He had the ferocity, rather than the heart, of a lion. As a whelp, too, he had his fair share of fighting; as we have seen, his adversaries were often the members of his own family.

Although he was born in Oxford, in the autumn of 1157, his ancestry was thoroughly French. As duke of Aquitaine he ruled over a vast dominion that may be compared to England in terms of wealth and prestige; it was in no sense an appendage of the Angevin Empire but, rather, at the centre of it. Yet in France he was only a duke; in England, he was king. That made all the difference. He had no interest in, or care for, the country itself; he just wanted to be known as sovereign by divine right. At his coronation in the autumn of 1189, he was stripped down to his breeches with his chest bare; the archbishop of Canterbury anointed him with chrism or holy oil on the breast, head and hands. This was the sign or token of sacral kingship. He then donned the ceremonial robes, and was crowned. It was usual for the archbishop to take the crown and lay it on the king’s head. Richard pre-empted the gesture by handing the crown to the cleric. It was a characteristic act of self-sufficiency. Certainly he looked the
part. He was tall, at an estimated height of 6 feet and 5 inches (1.9 metres); in the twelfth century, that made him a giant; he had strong limbs, a good figure and piercing blue eyes.

It would be anachronistic, at best, to condemn Richard’s passion for warfare. Kings were supposed to fight, and a warlike ruler was considered to be a good ruler. If God looked kindly upon a monarch, he would bequeath him success in battle. It was one of the essential prerogatives, or duties, of sovereignty reflecting a period in which warfare was endemic. The two least militant kings of medieval England, Richard II and Henry VI, were widely considered to be failures; both of them were deposed and murdered. So military valour was crucially important.

One of the clues to understanding Richard’s not necessarily complex character lies in the code of chivalry with its accompanying concern for ‘courtly love’. Chivalry can on one level be understood as the practice whereby the laws of honour supersede those of right or justice. Thus in warfare knights would spare the lives and privileges of other knights, while happily massacring the women and children among the local population. Elaborate laws of warfare also governed the conduct of sieges. The cult of chivalry had as little connection with real warfare as scholastic theology had to do with daily worship in the parish church.

Richard liked to participate in tournaments. These were not the stage-managed jousts of the fifteenth century; these were real conflicts, staged over a large area of ground, between trained bands of knights. They closely resembled actual battle, with the provision that a dismounted knight had to retire from the field and give horse and armour to his opponent. Nevertheless fatalities and serious injuries were not uncommon. Tournaments were in fact so dangerous, and so disruptive, that Henry II forbade them in England. But they remained very popular in Aquitaine.

In that French region, too, the cult of courtly love flourished. It was an impulse celebrated by the troubadours of Provence and Aquitaine who in song and story celebrated the love of the female as the source of all virtue and pleasure. A knight fought for his lady; his love for her rendered him stronger and more courageous. Love was appreciative rather than covetous. Like the Platonic love of an earlier civilization – then generally between male and male –
it was a shadow or echo of heavenly harmony. A knight, in theory, was meant to be chaste and pious; the model of knighthood then became Sir Galahad. The two creeds of chivalry and courtly love are alike in being quite remote from the experience of life, but they did represent a pietistic attempt to place warfare and adultery in the context of a sacred world. All this directly impinged upon Richard I’s sense of himself and of his kingship. It was believed at the time that he possessed Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. And it ought to be remembered that Thomas Malory’s
Le Morte Darthur
was translated from a French romance.

The crown was no sooner warm upon the young king’s head than he began to prepare himself for a crusade against Saladin and for the recapture of Jerusalem. Crusades were very much part of the spirit of chivalry, for they had of course an ostensibly religious purpose. The crusading knight would be expected to prepare himself with vigils, fasts and prayers. The forces of Christ were meant to be pilgrims as much as soldiers. There grew up cults of military saints, such as St George and St Martin, and the roles of knight and monk were combined in the religious orders of Templars and the Hospitallers. For Richard, the third crusade could not have come at a more convenient time. The holy city had fallen two years before his coronation, and Richard had immediately ‘taken the Cross’. His opportunity had now come to bear it into combat. He is in fact the only English king ever to become a crusader.

For this purpose he needed money. He was in England for three months after the coronation, and in that short period he tried to sell everything he possessed – lands, lordships, bishoprics, castles, towns and court offices. He said that he would sell London itself if he could find a purchaser for it. The country was for him only an engine for the making of money. He seized all of his father’s treasure; he exacted loans; he increased the burden of taxes. The imposition he placed upon the kingdom in fact played a large part in the rebellion that led to the Magna Carta. The great lords were not rebelling against the rule of King John alone; they were fighting against the very idea of exacting Angevin kingship, made all the worse by the growth of a strong central administration.

The course of Richard I’s crusade does not directly impinge upon the history of England, except the extent to which the
finances of the country suffered for it. Richard proved himself to be an excellent soldier, and a competent administrator, in the difficult terrain of the Holy Land. He was able to take a fleet and an army to the eastern side of the Mediterranean, in the process capturing the valuable prize of the island of Cyprus; he had promised the leader of the island that he would not be put in irons. He kept his word, as any true knight would, and had silver shackles made for the restraint of the unfortunate man. More importantly he managed to stand his ground against Saladin, the most resourceful and capable military leader of the age. His angry will may be measured by the fact that he ordered 3,000 prisoners, whom he had captured at Acre, to be beheaded. He maintained the discipline, if not the affection, of his men. Usamah ibn Munqidh, a Syrian nobleman and soldier of the twelfth century, described the European crusaders as animals possessing the virtues of courage and fighting, but nothing else. That might be a description of the English king.