Authors: Thomas B. Costain
The Society of the Bardi were perhaps a little more careful and astute. Beginning in 1328 they promised to find him £20 daily for the expenses of the king’s household and to give him £16,140 for a period of 807 days, the loan to be protected by a lien on customs receipts. The king continued to go to them when the flatness of the royal purse threatened to thwart him in his magnificent designs. He was loaned £100 for the funeral of his brother, John of Eltham, £300 as a gift for his still dearly beloved Philippa, £97 and some shillings and pence (arrears for nearly three years) for the upkeep of the royal menagerie of lions and leopards in the Tower of London.
But the Italian sources of financial aid were not more helpful to the king than the colossus of the north, this bold, far-seeing, shrewd Yorkshireman, the aforesaid William de la Pole. If there had been a tendency in those days to give extravagant titles in trade as is done in these modern times when we have Napoleons of this and Caesars of that, William de la Pole would undoubtedly have been called the Midas of the Midlands or
the Wizard of Wool. This remarkable merchant produced in 1339 the funds which Edward needed for his campaign in France of that year, the colossal sum of £76,180.
These figures are so far above the financial horizons of previous reigns that they serve to demonstrate more vividly than anything else the sudden upsurge in the world. The winds of trade were blowing high and strong and men were beginning to dream wondrous dreams. If Edward had seen fit to employ this strange deep prosperity (deep because it went right down to the roots of society) in strengthening the polity of the state instead of tossing it away on the bloody battlefields of France, his fame would have been everlasting and his place in history higher even than the reputation he was to win at Crécy and Poictiers.
It may have been due to the beginning of this new wealth and the resultant improvement in living conditions that sumptuary laws were introduced at this time. The holders of feudal power and wealth could not tolerate, it seemed, the growth of what might become an aristocracy of trade without an effort to maintain social barriers. Sumptuary laws were intended to check extravagances and the moral decline which grew out of them, also to prevent the sinful adornment of the body in foolish fashions, such as the toes of shoes which curled so high that they had to be tied to the ankles. This type of law had originated far back in history, in the days when paternalism was rampant in Greece. Houses were not permitted then which required more than the ax and saw in building, and women were not allowed to adorn their bodies in expensive clothes, although an exemption was granted to prostitutes.
In the laws which were passed at the stage of history with which we are dealing there was a tendency to depart from the original purpose and to impose restrictions solely for the maintenance of class distinctions. In Scotland it was declared by law that no man under the rank of baron was permitted to have baked meat and pies. Tasteless stews were deemed good enough for commoners. In England servants of the lower rank were forbidden to spend more for clothing in the course of a year than three shillings fourpence. No servant was allowed more than one dish of meat or fish a day. The wives of prosperous citizens were not permitted to wear dresses made of silk.
Fortunately the people of England were not slavish in their obedience to these irritating laws. The merchant’s wife clothed her plumpness in silk and laughed at the lawmakers. If a maidservant had spent her yearly allowance on clothes and craved a new ribbon for her hair, she bought it. In Scotland many bellies belonging to Scots of low degree were filled with good baked mutton in spite of King Jamie I, who had passed the law against it. But the purpose back of these snob decrees stuck in the craws
of the good burghers and their wives. Writing centuries later, Adam Smith summed it up with the words, “the highest impertinence and presumption in kings and ministers.”
The semi-renaissance in England was reflected in a more general desire for education. There had been grammar and chorister schools long before the Conquest, but these were conducted by the chancellors of the great churches. The spread of knowledge among the lower classes was limited largely to portions of the country within the sound of cathedral bells. It was in the matter of university training that the fourteenth century demonstrated a sudden surge of interest.
A degree of antiquity has sometimes been claimed for Oxford which the facts do not bear out. The town at the junction of the Thames and the Cherwell, nevertheless, had for two centuries been collecting colleges around the administrative center growing out of the activities of one Robert Pullen and was in a position to respond to the sudden desire of the nobility and the wealthy classes to aid in further progress.
Balliol College had been established in 1263 by the one-time King of Scotland. His widow had carried on the design, the original statutes being issued in 1282.
The first practical response to the public desire was given in 1314 when Walter Stapledon, Bishop of Exeter, who has been encountered already in these pages and most creditably, founded Exeter College, providing a foundation for twelve scholars, eight to be drawn from Devonshire and four from Cornwall. The scholars sent up under this arrangement were accommodated at first in Hert Hall, which had been erected around the turn of the century by Elias of Hertford.
Merton College began a little earlier, the estates of Walter de Merton having been turned over in 1264 for its maintenance. The scope of this institution would be enlarged in 1380 by the foundation provided by John Wyllyot, who had served as chancellor of Merton from 1349. Still later, in the last quarter of the century, the Merton library would be built on the gift of William Rede, Bishop of Chichester.
Even Edward II, whose interest in education had never been remarked, founded Oriel College in 1326. The idea originated, it seems, with Adam de Brome, his almoner. The college was dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin and did not receive its final name until twenty years later. A tenement called La Oriela had occupied some of the land which the college finally pre-empted for its own use.
Queen’s College, started in 1340 by Queen Philippa’s chaplain, Robert
de Eglesfield, was always to be associated with royalty. The Black Prince was entered as a student, but there is nothing to indicate that he ever attended a lecture. However, Henry V was at Queen’s and it has been the rule for the consorts of English kings to serve as patronesses. Most of the students came from the north of England, and the Eglesfield scholarships were limited to natives of Cumberland and Westmorland.
The same tendency to create colleges where ambitious young men could acquire learning was apparent at Oxford’s great competitor, Cambridge on the Cam. Here Peterhouse College was founded in 1284 by Hugh de Balsham. Pembroke College (from which emerged a stream of great graduates) was begun in 1347 by Mary de St. Paul, the widow of Aymer de Valence, who had figured prominently in the Scottish wars. Trinity Hall was founded in 1350 by William Bateman, Bishop of Norwich.
The students who allied themselves with these halls and colleges were undoubtedly outnumbered at this time by those who did not receive nominations to scholarships but went to Oxford or Cambridge with little in their pockets. Generally these poor students found places with one of the many groups who rented small houses under the management of semi-learned officials known as
principilators
. They slept and had their meals in these halls, most of which were given wildly facetious names, at a cost which sometimes did not exceed a penny a week. They enrolled for lectures under men of some recognized worth. The lectures were held generally in the vestibules of churches or in rooms at inns, the students sitting on the reed-strewn floors. For warmth in winter, there being no fires, they would squat close together, knees hunched up to provide a resting place for ink and quill and parchment. Most of them were content with the Trivium, which consisted of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, as well as Latin. Some of the more ambitious of them attempted to scale the heights of the Quadrivium, where arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music were also taught.
Classes would begin as early as the hour of prime (six o’clock!), which meant that the students would be up at dawn and indulging in hasty toilets in front of the community
skeel
, a wide wooden bucket. The scholastic labors would continue throughout the day, but the students would have plenty of energy left for frolics in the town after dark, carried on in taverns and on the streets at the expense of the somewhat more sober citizens. There was always an open state of war between Town and Gown.
It will be seen from this that the national conscience was awakening to the need for education, a steady flame which would burn undiminished through all the centuries ahead in which dynastic wars and religious persecution would nearly succeed in plunging the world back into the darkness.
In writing of Oxford, the memory is revived of a very great man who was at the university around the middle of the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon. He occupied a room in a small stone tower at Folly Bridge, and it was there, perhaps, that he had discovered the explosive possibilities in a combination of saltpeter, sulphur, and charcoal, which later was called gunpowder. He did not realize that he had thus uncovered the secret of a weapon which would revolutionize warfare, but others had stumbled on the fact in time to have gunpowder play some part in the wars of Edward III. A writer named John Barbour is responsible for the statement that cannon (called at the time
cracys
) were used by the English king in his 1327 invasion of Scotland. There are records of the existence of small cannon in the Tower of London in 1338, together with a barrel of gunpowder, and that in the same year in Rouen there was an iron funnel called a
pot de feu
which would spray forth metal bolts. That the government of England had been awakened to the potentialities of this new weapon was evidenced in an order issued by Edward in 1346 to buy up all the saltpeter and sulphur in the kingdom. There is nothing in the records, however, to prove that cannon were planted around Edward’s windmill at Crécy or concealed in the hedges at Poictiers.
S
IR William de la Pole, the great Yorkshire magnate, was a man of parts. History deals only with his exploits and has little to say about the man himself. Clearly he was of good address and suavity of manner, for he conducted many missions requiring tact and polish, and he was for a number of years head of the Staple in Antwerp. He came up, however, in the wool trade, where fortunes could be most easily made, and there must have been something bluff and genial about him to stand on good terms with the hard-bitten raisers of sheep. The greatest breeders were the Cistercians, whose lands extended far and wide around their splendid monasteries in the north country, Fountains, Furness and Rievaulx, and it would be necessary for him to stand well with the heads of the order.
Pole’s father, also Sir William, and a man of prominence and wealth, is given as of Ravenser Odd and Hull. It was at Ravenser Odd that the son learned the wool business, but all his life he was counted a citizen of Hull.
Hull was called originally Wyke-upon-Hull, standing at the junction of the Hull and Humber rivers. Its importance as a seaport had been augmented mightily since Berwick had become the center of continuous warring and thus was cut off from peacetime activities. It was Edward I who obtained the town from the monks of Meaux and changed the name to Kingston-upon-Hull, although it was never called anything but Hull. It stood on a low plain and needed high dikes all about it. There was a saltiness and an independence about its people, as characteristic as the north country burr on their tongues.
There were two brothers, Richard and William, and they were gaugers of wine for the royal household as well as dealers in wool. When Queen Isabella had successfully invaded the country and removed her husband from the throne, the brothers advanced her the sum of two thousand
pounds to pay off the Flemish mercenaries and at the same time loosened their purse strings to the extent of four thousand pounds to assist in the financing of young Edward’s first and unsuccessful campaign against the Scots. This was held against them after Mortimer was executed and Isabella was packed off to Castle Rising. They were deprived of their offices as gaugers of wine and remained under a cloud for several years. Richard moved to London at this point, but William, deciding no doubt to devote himself to what he knew best, remained in Hull and waxed still more prosperous in buying wool and selling it for export.
He built himself a great house on Hull Street, now called the High Street. It may not have been as large and impressive as the one his son raised later, which was called Suffolk Palace, but William had, at any rate, a gatehouse three stories high, with a shield above it with his coat of arms, three leopard faces on an azure fess. To the left of the gatehouse was the great hall, capable of entertaining a king. The inner court was surrounded by many connected buildings, and around it all stood a high wall.
In 1332, when Edward was being drawn into another Scottish adventure by the ineffectual Edward de Baliol, he stopped at Hull on his way north. For a matter of twenty years or more the wealthy citizens had been building themselves fine homes in Hull Street. Among the dozen or more who had elected to congregate together were Sir Robert de Drypol and Sir Gilbert de Alton, and many others who had grown rich in wool. The roof of William de la Pole’s home stood high above all the others, and the honor of entertaining the king fell to him. He did it so magnificently that Edward, who enjoyed ostentation as well as any man alive, was both pleased and impressed. By way of return, he knighted his host and changed the chief magistracy of the town to a mayoralty, making Pole the first to hold that office.
The talk over the wine (an official gauger would be certain to have the choicest) must have been stimulating. By the time he took horse for the north, the king had reached a decision. He had seen much of William de la Pole before, of course, but this had been his first opportunity to talk with him man to man, free of ministers of state and the magnates who watched every royal move and gesture with distrustful eyes. Here was a man who knew how to make the money which was always needed so badly at Westminster. The king said to himself: “This is the one I have been looking for. Not another of these tiresome bishops who mumble in Latin and don’t know, I suspect, what a bill of lading is. I shall have now an instrument to my hand, a means of making all the money I am going to require before I am through with my cousin of France.”