Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (44 page)

At the beginning of the fifteenth century the convocation, or general assembly, of the Church asked the parliament to announce some action against the Lollards. They were still a small sect, but they appeared to be growing. They were finding an audience among the disaffected, and the spiritual authorities were worried about any possible consequences. So in 1401 an Act was passed against ‘a certain new sect, damnably thinking of the sacraments and usurping the office of preaching’. They were spreading sedition and insurrection. The bishops were granted the power to arrest and imprison any offenders. If they did not renounce their pernicious beliefs, they could in the end be burned ‘in an high place’ before the populace. This is the first time that the stake was appointed as the ultimate penalty for heresy. In the next century the fire would become one of the notable judicial sights of England.

The first to die was a London chaplain, William Sawtré, who had declared that the bread of the Mass remained merely bread.
On 26 February 1401, he was stuffed inside a wooden barrel at Smithfield and placed upon the flames.

In what sense did Wycliffe and the Lollards presage the general religious reformation of the sixteenth century? An affinity in certain doctrines, later promulgated both by the Lutherans and the Calvinists, no doubt exists. The detestation of the pope and the spiritual hierarchy, the denial of transubstantiation, the rejection of any worship of images and the increasing reliance on a vernacular Bible, are all part of the same general repudiation of the Catholic Church. Yet in the fourteenth century these attitudes were held only by a small minority. They did not spread very far, and were detested by a large proportion of the population. ‘I smell a Loller in the wind’, is the line given to one of the pilgrims in the
Canterbury Tales
. It needed another set of accidental circumstances, and another cast of characters, before the Christian faith of England could be reformulated.

In the fourteenth century, however, the religion of the vast majority of the English people remained utterly orthodox and familiar. There was no appetite for change, and no sense of an ending. The Church was part of the texture of life, as enveloping and as inescapable as the weather. England was in any case an island of saints, with the cult of English sainthood being encouraged from the twelfth century; seventeen Englishmen and Englishwomen of that century were beatified.

This was the land of the ecclesiastical style known as the Perpendicular, a peculiarly English form of architecture that flourished in the reign of Edward III. Just as Chaucer abandoned French for English, so the great masons of the latter half of the fourteenth century renounced the Rayonnant and Flamboyant styles of France. The greatest of all these English masons, Henry Yevele, died in the same year as Chaucer himself; his early patron, John of Gaunt, was also the poet’s patron. So there is a correspondence. Yevele worked at Windsor, Westminster, Canterbury, Durham and St Paul’s as well as superintending the building of many castles, chapels and collegiate churches throughout the country.

Perpendicular was a wholly and uniquely national style, first adumbrated in Gloucester Cathedral. The king introduced it in his rebuilding works at Windsor. It became the pattern for a myriad of parish churches, and is the dominant style for the rest of the medieval period in England. Perpendicular is plain and ordered, with soaring shafts of stone; on slender piers and high arcades there rests a vast and stately vault. The emphasis is always upon the vertical line. The effect is simultaneously one of simplicity and magnificence. It is an austere style, perhaps hastened by the more sombre mood of the country in the years succeeding the Black Death. Carving of too elaborate a nature was no longer fashionable; as the nave of Canterbury Cathedral will testify, the emphasis rested upon total effect rather than on curious detail. There was an instinct for unity.

The 9,000 parish churches of England were the centres of all communal activity, where the living were organized and the dead were commemorated. This was the place where the parishioners were baptized, married and buried. Royal proclamations were issued from the church; local elections were held, and local accounts audited, in the nave. The prized possessions of the community were held there in chests, under lock and key. Disputes were settled and negotiations undertaken, within the walls painted with images of the saints and the apostles. The sculpted forms of angels and saints looked down on the throng from the hammerbeam roof. Assignations, and trysts, were kept by the church porch. Each church had its own brewhouse, to make ‘church ale’. Many of the parishioners joined religious guilds, by means of which an altar or a side chapel was maintained with voluntary contributions. On the days of procession the members of the parish would walk in harmony around the church, sometimes showered with flowers and unconsecrated hosts known as singing cakes. The churchyard was used for Sunday markets, and for games such as wrestling and football. But it was also a sacred and even fearful place. The key to the church door was prized as a sovereign remedy against mad dogs, and the ringing of church bells exorcized demons riding in thunder and lightning. Church liturgy itself was deemed to be a
form of magical incantation, and sometimes the eucharist was preserved by those who had taken communion; the holy bread could be used to cure ailments or to ward off witches.

The Mass was part of village life; as it was performed before the altar in the chancel, behind the rood screen, the people would gossip and yawn and whisper. The chancel was maintained by the priest, while the nave was the responsibility of the parishioners. The rood screen itself, between the nave and the chancel, was a highly decorated wooden panel on which were painted or sculpted images of the Crucifixion or of the Day of Doom. The service was accompanied by a continual murmur of voices, except at the holy time of the consecration of the eucharist, and by occasional laughter. There was little, if any, preaching and very few pulpits.

Dogs and chickens wandered among the people, who stood or kneeled on the rushes or straw strewn over the earth floor. Sometimes the churchgoers just walked around, staring at the statues of the Virgin or the saints. Some attempt was made at seating in the thirteenth century, but pews did not become a familiar aspect of the church interior until the fifteenth century. Disputes over status were frequent. Who should first go forward for communion? Some of the congregation played chess, or even gambled with dice. Women brought in their needlework. Arguments might erupt, and fights might break out, in the course of the Mass. A bargain might be sealed with a handshake. Thus proceeded the vigorous and ebullient religious life of the fourteenth century, in which earth and heaven were inseparable.

25

The commotion

Richard of Bordeaux was ten years old at the time of his coronation as Richard II. He was the son of the Black Prince and thus closest in blood to the dead king. In the summer of 1377 he was led to Westminster Abbey under a canopy of blue silk borne on spears of silver, and he lay prostrate before the altar as the choir sang the litany. By the end of the long ceremony the boy was exhausted, and was taken to a private apartment in Westminster where he might rest. On the following morning the prelates and the magnates met in a great assembly to choose twenty-four of their number to form a minority council. It might have been thought that the young king’s eldest surviving uncle, John of Gaunt, would have taken precedence; but, having ensured that some of his supporters were part of the council, he withdrew with his followers to Kenilworth Castle. He may have been awaiting events.

The boy king assumed the crown at a time of murmuring and dissatisfaction. The shortage of labour, as a result of the pestilence, meant that the great landlords were trying to exact as much work as they could from their unfree tenants; the legislation prohibiting any rise in wages, although only intermittently effective, was still the cause of much complaint. General discontent had also been aroused at the heavy burden of taxation; war supplies were always needed as a result of unsettled business with the French. Only a
few days before the coronation, the forces of King Charles V had plundered Rye and burnt down Hastings.

Yet the king’s first real test came four years later, when he was confronted by the greatest rebellion in English history. At a meeting of parliament in Northampton, in November and December of 1380, ‘a great and notorious rumour’ spread among the Commons about a ‘dreadful thing’ that had taken place in York; a group of rebels, armed with swords and axes, had broken their way into the guildhall of that city and driven out the mayor. They were protesting about the level of taxes imposed upon them by the royal court.

Nevertheless, the Northampton parliament decreed a poll tax three times more exacting than the last. It was the third such tax in four years. A poll tax, literally a tax on every ‘poll’ or head, was a wholly inequitable mode of taxation; rich and poor paid the same alike, with the proviso that the richer people had the means and opportunity of evasion. So the greater burden fell upon the poor. Widespread unrest followed, naturally enough, and judicial officials were sent to the more disobliging areas in order to ensure collection. The commissioners in London declined to carry on their unwelcome work, for the good reason that it had become too dangerous.

The men of Essex were the first who refused to pay; on 30 May 1381, at Brentwood, a royal official was attacked and driven off. The revolt quickly spread to Kent, Suffolk, Norfolk and Hertfordshire, encompassing some 340 villages. It is pertinent that these were the counties most affected by the pestilence; they were the areas most likely to feel the effects of economic instability and insecurity in the wake of the vast mortality. Change, in medieval society, was always unsettling. In Essex and Kent, also, the labour laws were most strictly imposed. Here, if anywhere, are the causes of rebellion.

The Kentish rioters occupied Canterbury and released all the prisoners held in the archbishop’s prison, among them a cleric known as John Ball. The rebels went on to burn the rolls of the county on which the estimates for taxation were written. On the following day the crowd broke open Maidstone Prison and freed its inmates. They already had a clarion call. ‘John Ball greets you all and gives you to understand, that he has rung your bell.’

The movement grew much more dangerous when, on 11 June, the rebels of the various regions agreed to march or ride upon London. That was the centre of their woes, the home of the lawyers and the royal officials. It has been estimated that some 30,000 men were now on the road. The men of Kent, always the most fierce, went northwards, while the men of Essex came from the east and the rebels of Hertfordshire from the north. The Hertfordshire men made a camp at Highbury, while the men of Essex rested and waited at Mile End. It was at this point that they were informed of risings all over England. Riots erupted in Norwich and in St Albans, in Winchester and in York, in Ipswich and in Scarborough.

The Kentish men, under the leadership of Wat Tyler or Wat the tiler, gathered on Blackheath on 12 June. The king had retreated to the Tower of London for safety, but on 13 June he and his most trusted councillors agreed to meet the main body of protesters on the heath. The royal party sailed in four barges down the Thames in order to land at Rotherhithe, but too many rebels were clustered on the south bank to allow a safe landing. The young king could now quite clearly hear the terrible shrieks and cries that would soon echo through the streets of London. A chronicler reported that the rebels ‘made such a great clamour that it really seemed as if the devil himself had joined their company’. The barge returned to the Tower.

The royal retreat inflamed the rebels. Tyler now led his people to the city itself. They stormed the Marshalsea, in Southwark, and freed its prisoners. Another party burned the tax records held at Lambeth Palace. Then they made their way across London Bridge. The people of London refused to allow the city gates to be closed against them; they sympathized with the cause. They, too, were oppressed by royal exactions on behalf of an unpopular war. The crowd surged along Fleet Street, opening the Fleet Prison and pillaging the lawyers’ quarter of New Temple. The Londoners, now invigorated by their example, burned down the residence of John of Gaunt, the Savoy Palace, and killed many of his officials. As the leading nobleman of England, during the minority of the king, Gaunt was the most hated.

The young king surveyed the scene of looting and burning
from a window of the Tower, and asked what should be done. No one knew. But at fourteen he was old enough to think for himself; he would ride out to Mile End and address all of the rebels. He hoped that this would draw them from the city into the eastern suburb, and thus allow his court and household to escape from the Tower. In this, he was only partially successful.