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BY HILAIRE BELLOC

THE PATH TO ROME

ECONOMICS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

MARIE ANTOINETTE

ROBESPIERRE

DANTON

THE BOOK OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY

A HISTORY OF ENGLAND (TO BE IN 5 VOLS.) vou. 1. B.c. 55 To A.p. 1066 VOL. I. A.D. 1066 To 1348 VOL. Ill. A.D. 1348 To 1525

A History of England

A History of England

By Hilaire Belloc

Volume III Catholic England: III. The Later Middle Ages A.D. 1348 to 1525

With Twelve Maps

G.P. Putnam's Sons New York 8 London The Rnickerbocker Press 1928

Copyright, 1928 by Hilaire Belloc

Made in the United States of America

PREFACE TO THE THIRD VOLUME

Tuts, the Third Volume of my “History of England,”’ takes the reader from the Black Death to the end of the Middle Ages; which may best be put in the story of this country at the moment when—as it would seem in the summer of 1525—Anne Boleyn and King Henry VIII came to their arrangement.

It is true, of course, that the medizval system in thought and society had been passing long before, and that, by 1525, one is in the heart of a new world. But the case of England is a peculiar one, out of all Europe. In England the religion which had formed her society along with that of all Christendom, was artificially interrupted; after that interruption the country was never more the same. Therefore to take as a terminus the beginnings of the Reformation in this country (though they are late) is a natural division; just as the Battle of Hastings (though coming late compared with the general European origin of the Middle Ages) is for England a turning point.

In the volume which I here put before the reader there are not a few points in which he will find state- ments and arguments of a sort to which he is in general unaccustomed; that is, things set forth which are not those of the official text-books; and for this, as in the

14.8450 y

vi Preface

case of my first and second volumes, I must in this preface present a certain apology.

The principal of these is the presentation of Parlia- ment in those days as something of a totally different nature from what we mean by Parliament to-day. Accustomed as we are to hear about “constitutional developments,” “parliamentary title to a throne,” “constitutional action,” and all the rest of it, we forget that such ideas were utterly unknown to the Middle Ages. The government of England in the later Middle Ages was a popular monarchy, violently disputed as between the individual claimants, but never as to the character of its office. Beneath it, often reacting against it, but (like everybody else) accepting it at heart, was a group of very powerful men who as time went on were less and less feudal chiefs and more and more wealthy intriguers. Side by side with this method of govern- ment was the all-pervading influence of the Church, which was universal throughout Christendom and was the source of all Christian culture. In such a scheme the ““Commons’’—a couple of gentry summoned irregularly and for brief periods from each county, a few lawyers and monied merchants similarly called up from the towns in order to consult about special subsidies—took no very great place. They had their function, but it was not the thing of which men thought much when they considered the Government of England. There- fore to regard the period as one to be expressed in terms of Parliamentary development or to present Parliament as a major organ to the State, is unhistorical. It is “reading history backwards.” That is, unconsciously — thinking of the past in terms of modern times. What we call the “Parliamentary System’’ arose in England

Preface vii

as a belated result of the Reformation. It represented the success of the richer classes in their quarrel with the universal national crown, and ultimately their power to destroy that crown. Its first origins are to be discovered after the dissolution of the monasteries and the looting of religion by the wealthier classes had changed the centre of economic gravity in England, and had made the squires, and their colleagues the wealthy men of the towns, stronger than their king.

Next, the reader will note that I have made the Black Death a deciding factor in the corruption and decline of the Middle Ages. Europe, and especially England, were after the middle of the XIVth century greatly changed from what they had been during the true Middle Ages. I support the view that, in the main, this was on account of the pestilence.

This theory of course is none of mine; it has been put forward for now half a century with an increasing force, and has been so long before the mind of historians that there has been time for some reaction to arise against it. To attribute to the Black Death alone the great change between the true and the later Middle Ages would be folly indeed. The change is already be- ginning to show in the transformed character of society in France and in the transformed character of papal policy and reputation. Well before the Black Death the XIVth century had already presented a succession of French Popes and an altered tone in the attitude of the Pontiffs of Avignon from what had been that of the great medieval Popes—resident in, or driven from, but always associated with, Rome. The very clothes and habits of men showed the change coming. But in a brief and general outline it is essential to emphasize

viii Preface

what is the chief factor in each considerable develop- ment; and undoubtedly the chief factor of the great turn-over from the early to the later Middle Ages was, especially in this country, the Black Death.

I have in connection with this also emphasized what our text-books much neglect, and that is the rapid change in the language of Englishmen at the outset of the later Middle Ages. The thing we call English became the national tongue with the last generation of the XIVth century. There had been no such national tongue before.

Here, again, the critic may advance endless modi- fications of so general and simple a statement; yet that statement is the main truth. Those patriots rather than historians who prefer the illusion of English as a tongue spoken by Alfred, preserved through the centuries, slowly and gradually changing into its modern form, but always and essentially one with its past, will dis- agree. ‘Those who are familiar with the long survival of French among the upper classes, well on into the mid-XVth century, may criticize my putting the great change so early. The French of the English governing classes lingered much longer than the average reader of history has any conception of. All through the XVth century you find it in pockets, as it were—espe- cially at court. There is continual indication that men are bi-lingual where one would least expect them to be, and it is worth remarking that in the same French language follow, like links in a chain, the familiar writ- ing of William of Wykeham, of Henry IV, and, a century later, of Henry VIII in his love-making with Anne Boleyn: while after Flodden the younger Howard writes to the king of the battle, not in English but in French.

Preface ix

The old tradition of a bi-lingual society with French as the mark of its governing class died very slowly indeed.

But I believe my statement in the main to be true: a new amalgamated language, made of the old dialects and French, arose after the Black Death and became the general medium of national expression after 1400, welding the nation together.

Yet another point in what I have written which will receive, and may deserve, criticism is a continual insist- ence upon the importance attached during the Middle Ages to the Blood Royal. Yet if one does not recognize how much was thought of this, one can never under- stand the time. The idea to-day is absent from our political thought. We find it difficult, therefore, to stand in the shoes of those Englishmen of 500 years ago to whom the Lancastrian usurpation was a shocking thing and whose passions in the struggle of the Civil War following it were so violently aroused by the claims of right.

I have, of course, throughout the volume, main- tained an attitude hostile to the old official Whig caricature of the past, wherein any revolt of wealthy men against the Crown is praised, and all efforts at strengthening Popular Monarchy against such wealthy men is blamed. But I do not think I have exagger- ated the claims of Popular Monarchy in these strug- gles. Occasionally a disloyal faction would obtain considerable support, notably in London, and there were rebellions which had large minorities of the country behind them: or at any rate, of such part of the country as was free to move and to take up

arms.

= Preface

But like a pendulum swinging across a vertical standard, like waves oscillating below and above a certain mean level, all these movements were functions of that central Popular Monarchy which was dominant in the medieval mind. It is that institution which must be emphasized; for it is that institution the idea of which the modern mind has lost.

There is one last negative point I should like to make in connection with this volume. I have not in it empha- sized the general character of European civilization as the background against which all the island history should be read. I regret that I have not done so; but T think a successful achievement of such a task within such limits would be impossible. One can but allude to the degradation of the Papacy, the Great Schism, the corruption of the older medieval Church, the formation of the new monarchies and of the nations which they governed. For if the general story of Europe were presented, there would be no room for the particular story of England. Still I could not help feeling as I wrote what a pity it was that such limitations forbade a Just proportion in the narrative. For instance, the fall of Constantinople, the great advance of Turkish power, threatening the very heart of Europe, were vastly more important directly to our race and in- directly to the people of this country, than the Wars of the Roses; yet if the story of the Wars of the Roses has to be told within such limits as these, the shaking of Europe by the Turkish victories could only be men- tioned, not developed.

Certain other lesser points in the book which might challenge criticism, such as the comparative value of money, the death-rate during the Great Plague, the

Preface xi

numbers of armies, the legitimacy of the Tudor family, and a score of others, I will leave to the reader to judge; for I have, in each of these cases, advanced ample argument and authority for the positions I hold.

H. Bettoc.

Kine’s Lanp, SHIPiey, HorsuHam, November, 1927.

CONTENTS

CATHOLIC ENGLAND

I. Inrropuction To THE LateR MippLE AGES Il. Tue Buacx Dratu

III. Tue Lancastrian Usurpation

A. The Preliminaries: the last years of Edward III (July 7th, 1348, to June 21st, 1377— 29 years) ; ; : : :

B. Richard II (June 21st, 1377, to some date after the middle of January, 1400, but before March 12th of that year—about 2216 years) : : é ;

C. Henry IV (some time between mid-January and March 12th, 1400, to March 19th, 1413—13 years) : ; :

Henry V (March 19th, 1413, to August 31st, 1422—not quite 914 years) . ‘

D. The Loss of France (April 12th, 1422, to August 12th, 1450—over 28 years)

IV. Tur CHANGE Character of the Last Lifetime of the Middle Ages: Transition from the Middle Ages to Modern Times ‘ , :

Xili

53

100

192

220

261

XIV

Contents

V. Tue Enp or tHe MippieE AGEs .

A. The Restoration of the Right Line: The

Wars of the Roses (August 12th, 1450, to August 22nd, 1485—35 years) .

B. The Tudor Foundation: Henry VII (from

August 22nd, 1485, to April 21st, 1509 —231 years)

C. The End (April 22nd, 1509, to June 18th,

INDEX

1525—16 years)

PAGE

295

297

351

394

425

LIST OF SKETCH MAPS

MAP I.—Tue TuHeatre OF THE 100 Yrars’ WAR

II.—TuHE CampaiGcn oF Poitiers IlI.—Tue Battuerievp oF PoIriers

IV.—Epwarp III’s Faiuure In FRANCE

V.—Tue Usurpation or HENRY or LANCASTER.

CAMPAIGN OF SHREWSBURY VI.—Tue Campaicn or Henry V IN FRANCE VII.—Tue Fieitp or AGINCcOURT VIII.—Tue Loss or NorTHERN FRANCE

IX.—Tuer Wars oF THE Rosss

X.—LuDLOW AND THE CAMPAIGN OF TowTON .

FACING PAGE

56 60 64 76

THE 176

204 208 220 304 320

XI.—Tue Campaicn or BARNET AND TEWKESBURY,

1471

XII.—Tue Campaign oF BoswortH

xV

340

350

LIST OF GENEALOGICAL TABLES

DrEscENT BY PRIMOGENITURE FROM Epwarp III . 2 DeEscENT OF House or LANCASTER 2 A 4 >

Descent THROUGH THE BEAUFORTS OF THE LANCASTRIAN CLAIM ; E : . é : : : :

EFFECT OF CAMBRIDGE’S MARRIAGE WITH ANNE MortTIMER DEscENT AND Cxiaim oF RicHarp DUKE or YORK

RivaLt Cuamms oF YORK AND LANCASTER . ‘ ; DESCENT OF THE DUKE OF SOMERSET . ‘i : ; Tue NEVILLE CONNECTION IN THE Wars OF THE ROSES MarriaGE OF CLARENCE WITH WARWICK’S DAUGHTER .

Cuaims Prior To THAT OF Henry VII ; 3 ;

PAGE

DESCENT OF THE HOWARDS : i A Z 420-1

XVil

PRINCIPAL DATES WITHIN THE PERIOD

A.D. 1348. 1356. 1360. 1376. 1377. 1377. 1381. 1399. 1399. 1403. 1413. 1415. 1420. 1422. 1429. 1431. 1450. 1453. 1454. 1461. 1471. 1471. 1477. 1483. 1483. 1485. 1485. 1492. 1501. 1502. 1504. 1509. 1509. 1513.

OF THIS VOLUME

The Black Death in England.

Battle of Poitiers.

Treaty of Brétigny.

Death of the Black Prince.

Death of Edward ITI, accession of Richard II. Trial of Wycliffe.

Peasants’ Revolt.

Death of John of Gaunt.

Murder of Richard II, accession of Henry IV. Battle of Shrewsbury.

Death of Henry IV, accession of Henry V. Battle of Agincourt.

Treaty of Troyes.

Death of Henry V, accession of Henry VI. Relief of Orleans.

Burning of Joan of Arc.

Loss of Normandy.

Loss of Gascony and Guienne.

Protectorate of Richard, Duke of York.

Battle of Towton.

Battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury.

Murder of Henry VI, accession of Edward IV. Caxton’s Printing Press.

Death of Edward IV, accession of Edward V. Murder of Edward V, accession of Richard III. Battle of Bosworth.

Death of Richard III, accession of Henry VII. Treaty of Etaples.

Marriage of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon. Death of Prince Arthur.

Marriage of Princess Margaret to James IV of Scotland. Death of Henry VII, accession of Henry VIII. Marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon. Battle of Flodden.

XIX

A History of England

CATHOLIC ENGLAND Ill. THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

A.D.1348—a.pD.1525

VOL. Il1I—1 I

I

INTRODUCTION TO THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

ee 4° ha

~ 7

CATHOLIC ENGLAND INTRODUCTION TO THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

I rurN in this, the third volume of my History, to Eng- land in the later Middle Ages. I make of this a separate volume, because the period has a marked character of its own, and because we misunderstand the great change in Europe at the Renaissance and Reformation, if we see it as following immediately upon the full life of the medizeval world. ‘There intervened that strange mix- ture of advancing invention and declining virtue, of decaying institutions and growing material knowledge, of inflamed imagination, side by side with added ex- perience, new instruments, and slowly expanding com- merce and discovery which are the accompaniments of a great culture drawing towards its close.

The general history of Christendom and the par- ticular history of England is divided, as we have seen, into three main periods: the Pagan, the Catholic, and the period of disruption following upon the Reform- ation.

The Catholic period—a matter of a thousand years —falls into two main divisions: the Dark Ages and the Middle—the former running, in this country, roughly to the Norman Conquest, or a little earlier, and the latter, the Middle Ages, roughly from somewhat before the Norman Conquest, or the Conquest itself, to the beginnings of the Reformation in 1525.

5

6 A History of England

This last division, the Middle Ages, bears through- out certain characteristics which through all its changes make it recognizable and differentiate it from the Dark Ages which preceded it, but far more from the period of disruption which comes after. We know, by the character of architecture, of clothing, of allusions to the structure of society, whether we may call a thing or a document medizval or no. We perceive, throughout, the power of the Papacy, the hierarchical structure of society, very active enquiry upon intellectual things (different from and superior to the mere routine of the Dark Ages in such matters), great movements of men and armies, of pilgrimages, and of approaches to the seats of learning—and many other characteristic features.

But what is not so generally recognized, what is hardly ever insisted upon in our popular histories, is the very important truth that the Middle Ages them- selves fall into two well-defined divisions: an earlier, which we also may call the true Middle Ages, lasting roughly from the middle of the XIth to the middle of the XI Vth centuries, a period of 300 years; a later, from the middle of the XI Vth century to the turmoil of the Reformation, a matter of close upon two centuries. It is true, of course, of these two divisions of the Middle Ages that they merge one into the other, and that an exact dividing line cannot be drawn. But this will apply to any contrast in history. Contrasts are, none the less, vivid, and the contrast here—that between the earlier and true Middle Ages and their decline in their last 200 years—it is of particular importance to seize, not only in the general history of Europe, but more especially in that of this country, England, where the

Introduction to Later Middle Ages 7

contrast was more marked and its effect on our judg- ment of the nation’s story more pronounced.

A parallel may help us to understand how distinctly the later Middle Ages stand separate from the earlier.

We all know what is meant by the spirit and the external appearance of the XVIIIth century, and what a sharp contrast they present with the XITXth. Here, also, there is no exact dividing line; but there is a barrier- belt between them, not very wide—that of the revolu- tionary and Napoleonic wars. We see Europe as one kind of thing on one side of the barrier, and as another kind of thing on the other side. Beyond the barrier are the dynastic rivalries, the coloured and varied dress of men, the wig, the conventional sword at a gentle- man’s side, the social ritual, the classic literary ideal of the men between Dryden and Wordsworth: the contemporaries of Pope, of Johnson, of Voltaire. On the hither side are the sombre uniformity of costume, the national passions, the efforts at democracy, the Parliamentary experiments, the vast and rapid pro- gress of physical science, the mechanical transformation of our world. You cannot say, “The one ended, the other began,” with the fall of the Bastille or with Waterloo. But you can say, “Here are two worlds, and the transition from the one to the other was brief.”

In the same way, though the contrast is very dif- ferent in quality, there lies between the earlier or true Middle Ages, and the period of their decline, the later Middle Ages, a barrier of some twenty years or more, which begins a year or two before the central date of the century, 1350, and is coming to a close in 1370 and the succeeding years.

Now in this belt which divides two pictures of

8 A History of England

Christendom there falls, at the beginning of it, after the year 1347, for Western Europe as a whole, and in 1348 for England, one capital, decisive event: the Black Death.

Of how great its effect was we may judge later; but the point for us to note upon our first approach to the period is, that, whether as a landmark of the change or as a cause of the change (and it was very much more of a cause than modern criticism is yet prepared to admit), the enormous catastrophe of the Black Death is our point of departure. A plague fell on Europe such as had never been known before. It fell with an in- tensity and a suddenness as amazing as its volume; and things were never more the same.

Up to the Black Death, although society is full of change, and although much that had been noblest and most warm with life in the true Middle Ages is already beginning to grow old and harden, although the germs of later evils and developments are already apparent, the original tradition continues: then falls the mighty blow. At first society is stunned. Some few years pass and you begin to note change very rapidly accel- erating. Within a lifetime Europe is another thing. Europe is not another thing in the sense that it has suffered a transformation of its inmost nature, for its religion remains united and informing the whole. There is no loss of the past such as came later to those societies, notably our own, which fell away from re- ligious unity. Europe, after the Black Death, is not another thing in the sense that it is broken, as was Christendom, by the failure to maintain its unity after the XVIth century; but Europe is, after the Black Death, another thing in the sense that its colour and

Introduction to Later Middle Ages 9

tone have changed. Simplicity disappears, and some part of the old certitude. The externals of life, orna- ment, dress, delineation are becoming here exquisite, there fantastic. Authority is shaken and falls into a defensive attitude, sometimes querulous and at last even savage.

On this account have I taken the Black Death as the close of the one period and the beginning of the other. No one can properly survey that united Christ- endom of the 500 years prior to its dissolution without seeing in the midst of it this dark chasm of the great Pestilence; on the earlier side of which is a scheme of society still simple and standing in a strong clear light as of day; on the other, a scheme in part obscured and played upon by strange transforming lights: vivid hues as of artificial fires in a gloom.

The Middle Ages would have declined in any case: they were fatigued and were growing old; but the process was at once accelerated and warped by the Black Death. Change would have come; but that it came so rapidly and with such force and—if I may use the phrase—with such a “‘twist,’’ we must set down to that exceeding Plague.

To go so far as to call the Black Death the ultimate cause of the Reformation is an error. The ultimate cause of that tragedy lay in the minds of men, not in material things. Even in the story of England it is false to seek in a material cause the root of those accidents which preceded the loss of the Faith: the spiritual fever which broke out at the end of the XTIVth century, the Lancastrian usurpation, the final ruin of the Plantagenets,—all these came not from worldly accidents, but from within. Yet was it the

10 A History of England

Black Death which opened the door to what followed it here in England: sporadic heresy, repression, abomin- able civil wars destroying the chivalry of the past, the loss of the old national dynasty, and at last a brief tyrannical Tudor kingship which destroyed itself by its own act, when it enriched its gentry with the spoils of murdered religion.

If it be asked why the high importance of the Black Death was for so long ill-recognized, the answer is that the social organism of the Middle Ages was too strong for even such a blow to produce in it breaches of structure immediately apparent. Though stunned, as T have said, the edifice of Christendom did not totter under the blow, still less did it break.

Again, the magnitude of the event is masked by the fact that the same legal and social terms were used before as after it. Men thought before and after it in the same fashion. Therefore the real effects of the disaster were hidden. The Black Death might be said, by a metaphor, to resemble a shock which at first seems to have left but little effect upon a man, yet to which can soon be traced the arising in him of a mortal disease.

Moreover, so far as this country was concerned, the pageantry of Edward III’s great wars half conceals the larger event; and historians, affected by the chroniclers who watched that pageantry, missed the monstrous social trouble which lay behind the military show. Further, it must be remarked that the Black Death was not something unique, but only one of a whole series of its own kind, though so much exceeding the others as to produce a different result. Had the Black Death been unique, had grave pestilence been unknown to

Introduction to Later Middle Ages 11

our fathers, and its prodigious blow fallen unexpected, it would have affected the imagination of all so strongly that its true place in history would long have been fixed. It would have counted for more in our text-books than any battle since Hastings, or than any medizval event in England prior to Thomas Cromwell’s breach with Rome. But it was not unique of its kind; though excessive in degree, and vastly excessive, contem- poraries did not put it into another category from pre- vious epidemics, nor did posterity regard it as some- thing different in kind from later and lesser visitations.

Yet was the Black Death all I have said, and it produced the effect it did because it was an example of that just too much which so often makes a thing decisive. It was like the extra degree of heat which provokes a chemical change. The scourge of 1348 and the succeeding years was just more than the social health of our Western World, and particularly of England, could stand. Therefore it was that it so strongly affected the generations coming after it and made them different.

One excellent proof of the way in which the plague changed our world is the long misapprehension into which modern men have fallen upon the nature of the true Middle Ages previous to the middle XIVth century. One might almost say that our chief historical task to-day is the rediscovery of Europe as it was between the Black Death and the First Crusade; for our ideas of the Middle Ages are still in the main, and till lately were universally, drawn not from their healthy and vigorous youth, but from their later phase after the pestilence.

Consider all the external things which were thought

12 A History of England

‘medieval’? by the mid-XIXth century, by its popular historians and romancers—both those favourable to the past and those unfavourable to it.

It was (in their eyes) a time of architecture loaded with grotesque or elaborate detail, of plate armour, of detailed and exquisite miniature painting, of a quaint English interspersed here and there with fragments of French; of complicated stained glass, of strikingly pic- turesque and changing fashion in the dress of the wealthy, of a very sharp differentiation between laity and clergy, of a highly developed and multiple heraldry, of vivid and sometimes even morbid colour, of perpetual vigilant suspicion against, and repression of, heresy, of a perpetual burning of heretics as a leading feature, of exceedingly futile metaphysical debate. But all that, distorted as it is, is not a distortion of the earlier Middle Ages, it is a distortion and an exaggeration of the Middle Ages in their decline; of the Middle Ages after the Black Death. The true Middle Ages, the first great 300 years, are especially marked by simplicity, a sort of starkness: things made for use: direct effort. They are the time of chain armour, adding to it only such additions as were produced by strict necessity; of a plain, admitted, and secure social system easily func- tioning upon one plan; of heraldry practised for the sake of recognition in battle; of popular and few symbols; of the severe geometrical line in architecture; in philosophy, of profound and vital discussion—what is more, of arrival at fixed conclusions, a triumph which we to-day can hardly conceive.

It is well, in order to appreciate the difference be- tween the earlier and the later Middle Ages, to tabulate briefly the chief points of the contrast.

Introduction to Later Middle Ages 13

1. The earlier Middle Ages from, say, Edward the Confessor’s youth in the XIth century, up to the time of men living in the first part of the XIVth century (1030-1350), the manhood of Edward III, were Feudal.

The relations between a man and his vassal, between the lord and his tenant, servile or free, between the king or bishop and the towns which owed them service and revenue—the whole structure of society was ona known model, familiar to all; and (thisis an important point) its structure and character were consonant with the terms, legal and social, by which it expressed itself— words corresponded to things. In the later Middle Ages the feudal expressions continue, but the feudal thing is rapidly disappearing. The serf is no longer a serf, though his original conditions linger on much longer in some parts of the continent than in others. In England particularly the fundamental relation between the lord of the manor and his tenant, especially his servile tenant, changes altogether. The old words are main- tained—becoming less and less applicable to realities. The tenant, especially the servile tenant, of the earlier Middle Ages (the bulk of the population), owed service and dues in kind: his descendants commute these more and more for a money payment. The king of the earlier Middle Ages was a feudal chief, and under him the lesser feudal chiefs holding of him had each a sort of monarchical power over his own lands. The military structure followed that scheme exactly, and fitted in with it. In the later Middle Ages the military structure has changed, though the old feudal terms remain. Bodies semi-feudal are still levied during the Wars of the Roses, though the power of hiring soldiers with money counts more than the power of summoning them

14 A History of England

by social obedience; but in the end, before the Middle Ages are over, the feudal levy has disappeared.

2. The vernacular languages take root.

This powerful agent of change in all European society is of particularly strong effect in England, be- cause England alone of all the European realms, from being divided between two sharply differing forms of speech (the French of the well-to-do and the jargons of the poor), became of one language. Latin, of course, remains the universal tongue of learning and of religion, therefore of philosophy and of the most universal thought. But the local popular languages out of which the great literatures of Europe were to grow, arising in the course of the earlier Middle Ages, have become strong structures throughout their later part.

It is side by side with this growth of the vernaculars, the making official, so to speak, and fixed, of what had been no more than popular dialects, that there arises slowly through the later Middle Ages the feeling of nationality expressed in the new kingship and the separate identity of each realm, first very dim, then more conscious under the universal authority of Christendom.

3. There is the contrast of which I have already made mention more than once, between simplicity and complexity, between unconscious and direct action, and action contemplating itself and in peril of turning theatrical. It is not only a contrast between simplicity and complexity; it is also a contrast between growing technical skill and the older relics of crudity—sincere, but childish and barbaric. In sculpture we shall per- haps never reachagain the heights of the XIIIth century; but the later XIVth and the XVth centuries have a

Introduction to Later Middle Ages 15

subtlety in expression and divination of the soul in its infinite moods which the XIIIth had not.

In painting, the contrast is far more striking. There is a movement, at first slow, rapidly increasing in volume, away from convention, towards exactitude of reproduction, towards multiplicity of detail, and to- wards what we think to-day (at least in the arts) to be the representation of reality. One might put it by saying that painting became more and more mimetic, copying exactly what was before it: less symbolic; and yet the later medieval painting, growing into that of the Renaissance, had, oddly enough, more vision than the thing out of which it came. To use a term which has grown half ridiculous, but is exact, it yearned; and it tried to fulfil its yearning. The exquisite landscapes of the X Vth century, more and more exquisite, as the time proceeds, in their tiny detailed work, are a triumph.

Meanwhile architecture takes on a greater phantasy, and so does the dress of man, exaggerated in its efforts at surprise.

4. A contrast more difficult to assess, yet governing the whole, is the contrast in human mood. The later Middle Ages are filled with doubt which is emotional, with touches of despair, and often with something of that mundane indifference which is the product of despair. The thing is so difficult to express that I despair of expressing it, but you see it in the faces, you find it in the literature—not universally, but sporadically; above all, you find it in the actions of men. The strong Catholic code by which our Europe lived was still universally admitted, but it was less and less universally acted upon. By which I do not merely mean there were lapses from it—such there were at

16 A History of England

all times—I mean rather that a certain cynicism and routine had come into the practice of those lapses. But from a vague, intangible, though deplorably effective change of mood, so difficult to set down in words, let me pass to its main effect, the great contrast of all:—

5. The contrast in the condition of the Church.

One might put this most generally by saying that the structure of religion, which had been living and elastic in the earlier Middle Ages, was becoming, in the later, a thing of routine, which hardened. On the financial side especially was this apparent; while side by side with this went the loosening of the framework of authority by the partial failure of the Papacy, and to some extent by the degradation of monasticism—in certain cases and provinces, extreme.

As for the financial side of the Church, where it came into the daily life of all men (as it constantly did) it grew more and more out of touch with the realities of Christian life. Legal charges, burial dues, tithes, fees for marriage and baptism and licenses, services and rents to clerical bodies and officials as lords of manors, grew to appear, to those who paid them, a burden less and less related to the spiritual life. And as these evils increased in the mind of the lay masses who paid, corresponding evils increased in the recipients of these innumerable sums. What had formerly been a simple and necessary endowment for the avowed and realized object of supporting the priesthood and the sacramental mysteries of which the priesthood were the agents and stewards, tended to become a mere system of revenue. Before the Middle Ages reached their close you have the endowment of bishoprics, of parishes, of great monastic institutions, treated as simply sources of in-

Introduction to Later Middle Ages 17

come to be attached to this man or that, by favour or even purchase. Often the beneficed man was a lay- man, or a clerk not concerned with the duties of the office. At the same time arose a development novel, in scale at least, which we can clearly put down to the Black Death; an immense increase in the sums set apart for Masses for the dead. The disproportion be- tween such sums and other endowment, the great num- ber of priests it occupied, were to produce effects most ill. There came to be a sort of Fo preoccupa- tion with death.

There is a sense, of course, in which this pre- occupation cannot be exaggerated. To recognize the supreme importance of death, to face it, allow for it, provide for it, is the very mark of Catholicism. The Mass is the supreme sanction of that pre-occupation. But such endowment at the expense of other charities, connected in the public mind too often with mere wealth, contrasting with lives sceptical and debauched, becom- ing, as it were, one of the fashions of the rich and per- petually extending, was an irritant. The normal and rightful endowments of Masses for the souls of the dead became something of an obsession. While the Black Death had lessened the numbers of the clergy (we shall see in a later chapter how severely and how perma- nently) the clerical incomes remained, and they now were greatly swelled, especially towards the end of the period, by this fixed habit of leaving large legacies for the Masses to be sung for the souls of the wealthy dead. These sums left by the wealthy for the Sacrifice of the Altar to be offered in expiation had obviously no evil or novel doctrinal effect. In themselves they were all to the good. No poor man felt himself offended by

VOL. III—2

18 A History of England

them or his own case before heaven the worse. But they added an ill-proportioned excess to the clerical revenues.

Another element was added to the growing evils of the time in the matter.of the Church. The Black Death had suddenly and severely lowered the standard of instruction among the clergy. The necessity for hur- riedly providing new incumbents was the cause, and we have case after case of complaint. The level of clerical education was permanently affected, and with it the prestige of the clergy and their discipline.

Again, as I have said, the monastic institution was wounded, not only by the decline of its numbers (coupled with the maintenance of its old revenues), but by the diversion of that revenue from its true purpose. Men less respected than of old were taking directly a larger proportion of the wealth produced by others, and the clash between the old tradition and the later experience bore very evil fruits.

Side by side with all this went the degradation of the Papacy. It had begun before the great change—and was one cause of it—in the transference of the seat of the Papacy from Rome to Avignon. After the effort of the German Emperors to make themselves masters of the Church had failed in the XIIIth century, the XIVth saw, at its very origin, the emigration of the Papal court from the Tiber to the Rhone. Respect for the Vicar of Christ and the living principle of unity was weakened when men thought of the Supreme Head as someone not wholly independent, but—in some degree —a sort of subject to the French realm. The Papacy became a French thing. And while it thus became localized, and by so much of less authority, its revenues

Introduction to Later Middle Ages 19

prodigiously increased through an increase of centraliza- tion and of legal activity. After a long lifetime the evil was aggravated by a violent schism. The Papacy had settled in Avignon before the first ten years of the XIVth century were over, 1309. Seventy years later that great saint, Catherine of Siena, had brought it back to Rome; but the habit of a long lifetime prevailed. A Pope returned to Rome and was accepted for a few months, but so far had the respect for the office fallen that his own electors turned against him. A rival soon appeared, and for forty years Christendom was divided between the authority of two Popes, later even of three.

One manifest consequence of such an anomaly and disgrace in Christendom was the progressive weakening of the Papal Office. One Pope would outbid another to secure the support of this monarch and that. One set of European realms would be in one obedience, one in another, and the effort to increase either camp led the spiritual chief of it to every kind of bargain. To this deplorable chaos we owe the lay encroachment which everywhere threatened to create in the long run National Churches. Already Edward III had obtained complete right of nomination to great places in the Church as the price of his support of one Pope, and the conception of a hierarchy dependent upon the king was planted.

The schism further produced the dangerous, new, and happily transient attempt at substituting an oli- garcy of general councils for the unquestioned, age-long monarchy of Peter: a substitution not affirmed but almost practised. Had it taken root there was an end of Christian unity. I have said that the schism lasted

20 A History of England

forty years. But the quarrel was not really settled till long after that. Technically, the schism lasted only from 1377 to 1417. In practice it lasted, in its elements of anti-popes and conciliar quarrels with the Holy See, almost until the death of Eugene IV and the election of Nicholas V in the year 1447. For a whole lifetime —the lifetime of such a man as Henry IV’s half-brother, Cardinal Beaufort—men had grown accustomed to a despised and disputed Papacy.

After the quarrel was settled yet another evil appeared. The now united Papacy became, through the growth of the new nations, a localized power, no longer French, but perilously like a mere Italian princi- pate. It came to bea court, through nepotism almost dynastic, heavily concerned with its own politics of territorial aggrandizement or defence.

One more factor of dissolution afflicted this time during all its earlier part—the Hundred Years War. It had arisen, indeed, before the Black Death, though long after the departure of the Popes for Avignon; but it did not begin to affect the life of Western Christendom seriously till after the plague. The campaign of Crécy was not ruinous to population or wealth. The great and destructive marches and raids (Edward III’s to Brétigny, the Black Prince’s in the South and ending at Poitiers, the Massacre of Limoges, John of Gaunt’s great march down France, the ceaseless local struggles by which the French recovered the Plantagenet con- quests) all come after the Black Death. There followed, after too short an interval, the brilliant but exhausting campaign of Henry V, then the far more exhaustive and intense conflict between the Valois and the English

t Or even 1449 when the last anti-pope resigned.

Introduction to Later Middle Ages 21

crown, which was hardly ended at Chatillon. When the great Talbot fell before that place—in July, 1453— the Turk was already in Constantinople and the Middle Ages were in their agony. The raiding and counter raiding, the looting, massacre, and burning had gone on, intermittently, for a century.

All this ruin of lives and things had taken place in what was the heart of Europe and the centre of its cultural tradition, France. It had come after the Pestilence and, as it were, continued the evils of that horror. We read in our text-books of this battle and that, the recovery or loss of a town, the death of a leader. What we do not read, what we must visualize in order to appreciate the effect of such things upon the end of the Middle Ages, is the experience of the peas- antry and townsfolk. Nearly all had seen great bands of pillagers passing and re-passing for three generations. All that great and central section of Western Europe had become familiar with almost unceasing misery and incertitude, pillage, fire, and violent death. We know what later the Thirty Years War did to the Germans: the Hundred Years War may not have had so disastrous an effect on France, and indeed France was well on her feet at its close. But, combined with so much else, and coming in the very core of medieval culture, it killed the Middle Ages. A man who had heard, in childhood, of the last Plantagenet losses on the Garonne, would have heard, in age, the news of Luther’s protest. It was but one lifetime: nearly that of the Emperor Maxi- milian or Pope Julius IT.

The Hundred Years War spared England—though it drained England of wealth. But in England, as France was recovering, the civil war of the nobles, the

22 A History of England

Wars of the Roses, came to add its share to the burden. It could not be compared for destructiveness with the great conflict in France: it had but three short cam- paigns, largely local. But it had a moral effect of exhaustion out of proportion to the mere loss in lives.

In all these ways, religious and lay, what had been the admirably proportioned, strong and adequate social structure of the Middle Ages, broke down.

But during that failure, and more and more as it proceeds, we are astonished to observe a vigorous growth of new things. And it is the fact that these new and vital things were pushing up so forcibly in the midst of decline and death which renders an appreciation of the times so difficult. To one man the end of the XIVth, and the whole of the XVth, centuries are a breaking of day, a broadening of the light, the birth of the modern world with all its arts and manner. To another they are the corruption and lamentable disso- lution of the noble, the chivalric, the strongly founded Europe of our fathers.

The reader may see that, in my own judgment, ill and disease predominated, and this partly explains why the young life arising at the end of the Middle Ages, instead of making a new and happy Europe, warped and distorted our people into the disruption and chaos of the Reformation.

It is not always true that as one thing dies out another grows up to take its place. Sometimes, as in the case of the Mohammedan conquest, there is no transition whatsoever, but a violent clash; at other times, as in the case of the civilization of the Euphrates and the Tigris valleys, there comes slow death. But

Introduction to Later Middle Ages 23

with the Middle Ages we watch the singular process of the old becoming brittle and sere, and the new growing green and vigorous within the decaying sheath.

Side by side with the ageing and the dying of what had been the medizval social scheme was arising, not only what we have already noticed, new arts, but a new scholarship and a new thirst for knowledge. Serious criticism of documents begins to appear with the first years of the XVth century; paper, long known, spreads before the end of the XI Vth; artillery, used before the Black Death, ill understood till a generation after it, becomes a serious arm in the next lifetime and is the mainstay of the new kingships at the end of the age: it helps to destroy the last relics of feudal power. Printing, also of slow growth and at first insignificant, becomes a practical instrument of culture in the days which saw the end of Plantagenet rule in France: the first book in the new medium appears when Constan- tinople was falling and the Wars of the Roses were brewing. The re-discovery of ancient art begins and of its principles in building. The XVth century found Madeira, just after Agincourt. Before it ended it had seen the American coasts and rounded the Capes of Africa into the Indian Ocean.

The truth is that the medieval spirit, a product of its religion, had so great a strength of life within it that when the externals of an ancient culture began to decay, it was capable of bringing forth yet another world. For in nothing does the Catholic temper more contrast with its opponents, than in its quality of hope: its permeation with the spirit of resurrection. It feels perpetually the continuance of life within itself, using, manipulating, never succumbing to change. One of

24 A History of England

its chief antagonists *in our own day has well remarked that when an individual is sunk beyond bearing under the burden of his own conscience, he will, if he be a Catholic, take refuge in humility; but, if an anti- Catholic, in self-murder: of which alternative this critic would seem to approve. What is true of indi- viduals is still more true of a whole society. Our modern society, in so far as it has lost its religion, has despaired: and despair is even now destroying it. But the mood which it has rejected as an illusion, and which is the fruit of dogma—the dogmas of divine personality, of immortality, of an eternal justice—is a mood of life. So had it saved all that could be saved of the old Mediterranean culture when the high pagan culture perished; it was the baptizing of the dying empire which preserved its essentials. So now, as the Middle Ages failed, that same religion was strong to replace, tonurture a growth far exceeding what had decayed. For the Catholic temper is amood creative. It breeds, and, here again, was bringing forth a foison of new things.

Let not the error be imagined or entertained that those new things would necessarily have led to the disruption of Christendom, though they inevitably led to the disruption of its medizeval shell. The interest which the X Vth century showed in the writings, building, and art of Greek and Roman antiquity, in discovery, in added instruments of human action, in a new aspect of reality, the “‘growing of the light over it,”’ need never have shipwrecked Europe. Such an advance might well have, and could have, and should have, led to a modern time still united and still wholly Christian. The final disaster of the Reformation was due in nothing

t Dean Inge.

Introduction to Later Middle Ages 25

to necessity, but, I say again, to the perverted wills and cumulative sins of men. None the less is it im- portant to note that in all this story of the dying of the Middle Ages we are watching not only something dying, but something being born and becoming young and vigorous. It is the thing later to be the Renaissance; in its turn ruined by the wild religious anarchy of the XVIth century.

Now I have said that of all the provinces of Europe, England, with which we are here concerned, was most affected by the distinction between the earlier and the later Middle Ages. It is more necessary in reading the history of England to remember that distinction than it is in reading the history of any other province. There were many reasons which made the later Middle Ages so different in England from the earlier, but the three main reasons are the effect of the Black Death upon the language of the country.

1. After 300 years of a society in which French had been the dominant idiom, spoken not only by all that governed, but by all that directed and was educated in the community, there came with the later Middle Ages 200 years in which a language mainly based upon the old popular dialects, but still something new, a language which alone can properly be called English— the language which we speak to-day—grew to be universal throughout the country. It gained all the middle classes, the smaller squires; it became familiar to the greater nobles, and even to the court. It ended, a little * before the Middle Ages were over, by being

* Roughly, 1370 to 1380 is the decade in which this new amalgamated English tongue begins to become the general tongue of gentlemen. But

26 A History of England

the tongue of the whole people, from king to beggar, and so it has since remained.

Discussion as to whether this new fixed conversa- tion among all men in England is to be called a new language: whether we may say that what we to-day call English—the language we all use and know—first appears mature and recognizable among the men who lived through the last half of the XI Vth century; whether before their time there had been no true “English” language in our present use of that expression, may, like every other debate, be turned into a barren discus- sion of terms.

Certainly a mixed language (a little “Celtic,” much more Latin, many terms peculiar to this island and of unknown origin—‘“‘boy,” “girl,” “‘leg’—but in most of its simplest words and in all its characteristic sounds what is called ‘““Teutonic’’), spoken in several dialects, had been known from the early part of the Dark Ages as the tongue of the Angles; and this little group of people had come, without a doubt, as mercenaries or pirates (more probably both), from the Bight of Heli- goland.?

French is still the main idiom of the highest classes till far later, and of the Court till, say, 1460; while it remains a secondary language at Court for generations.

*It will be remembered that “Teutonic” does not mean some imaginary aboriginal German tongue, but what was in common to many barbarians al- ready, before their speech affected England, profoundly affected by the Latin and Greek of the civilization with which they mingled. Thus ‘‘Shield,” “Road,” ‘‘Book,” ‘‘Ship,” “‘Silver,’’ are Teutonic words—but all from the Roman empire and its Greek and Latin as Wiener has proved.

2 May we derive “Engle,” “Angle,” from Angulus? It is what one would expect. A powerful universal civilization has its sailors upon every sea. They give a name to a peculiarly shaped stretch of sea coast upon its bound- aries: a place where the shore, as the mariner follows it, turns sharp round by 90 degrees: the sailors call it “The Corner,” “Angulus.” That name naturally

Introduction to Later Middle Ages 27

Certainly the various dialects which, under the influence of the Catholic Church, gradually advanced from the Pagan East Coast across the island, right up to the Exe in Devonshire and to the Welsh hills, came to be called by the Xth century, or even perhaps the IXth, collectively “English.” Certainly the fixed— what one might almost call the classical—form of one special dialect, that of the Court of Winchester (vaguely termed Anglo-Saxon), was theaccepted, official, written and spoken language of the governing class of England up to the XIth century. The continuity of mere name is obvious: just as there is a continuity of mere name between the Lombard compatriots of Pope Pius XI and the Lombards of Gregory the Great, or the Roumania of the Great War and the Romans of the Dacian campaign, or Brittany and Britain. But if we consider not names but real things, we shall decide that this glorious instrument which we are fortunate enough to inherit, the English tongue, is a XI Vth century thing. “Early English,’ “Middle English,” and the rest of the recent academic jargon are terms unhistorical and propagandist: set to a brief. The plain historical truth, free from modern religious and national bias, is that, from some little time after the Black Death, and as a consequence of it, there has been used and written by educated Englishmen the language we to-day call English; that before the Black Death educated Englishmen spoke French; that before Edward

connects itself with the scattered and few barbarians living there, and deeply influenced, like their neighbours the Saxons, by the Roman culture which permeated them with its trade, in whose armies they served, of which they were the fringe, and from which they obtained nearly all the rude arts they

knew.

| 28 A History of England

the Confessor’s reign educated Englishmen spoke Anglo- Saxon, which, most emphatically, is not English.

You can pick out one short sentence after another from an Anglo-Saxon document and transliterate it so that it is identical with a modern English sentence. But it remains true that any considerable passage of Anglo-Saxon, in its original forms of the Dark Ages, or in the gradually changing dialects of the early Middle Ages, is to the modern Englishman a foreign tongue.t While all that comes after the Black Death, if it be put into modern spelling, save for an archaic word here and there, is to the modern Englishman fully comprehensible, and, indeed, recognized at once as his own familiar speech. Not only has it in the main his own vocabulary; it has (which is much more important) his own spirit; his own order of thought.

All things are continuous. All life comes from a microscopic egg, and there is no definable living thing, from a nation to a weed, which is not embryonic before itis mature. That is true, obviously, of language. But it is equally true that only the final thing matured is capable of definition, and English—meaning by that word the instrument which we use with such joy and power to-day—is an utterly different thing from the talk of the Dark Ages, and essentially the same thing with the talk of Chaucer.

Again, throughout nature, two things unite to form a third; a man may prefer to trace his lineage up the one

* Here are a couple of dictionary samples. We say, “‘At times it seems pleasant.” The Anglo-Saxon would be, ‘‘Dhe heo myrige heviltidum gethuht sy.” We say, “He cured many of their wounds.’ The Anglo-Saxon would be, ““Lacande monigo of teissum.” We say, “The sky splendid with stars.’ The Anglo-Saxon would be, ‘Upheofon torhtne mid his tunglung.” And so on!

Introduction to Later Middle Ages 29

line or the other, but he is himself: he is not his ancestry. In the same way, neither in soul or body is the English language French or Anglo-Saxon. It is itself. The English language was produced by welding and fusion, under shock, of two things: the upper class French of the XI Vth century, and those native dialects which French had already profoundly influenced (affecting their order, reducing the complexity of their word- endings, introducing French words here and there) but which were still mainly Germanic in the popular mouth.

The French tongue, which had been the universal medium of all directing thought and government, had spread over a wider and wider social area in England for 300 years, from at least the accession of Edward the Confessor to the beginning of Edward III’s reign. This language it was which had formed the mind of early medieval England. Its simplicity, its logic, very much of its vocabulary, govern our language still.

The various Saxon (and Angle) dialects of the Dark Ages sank down during the Middle Ages into the populace. They differed from district to district; and they were more and more modified by the use of French all around (by the superiors of the labourers, small farmers, and the rest), but they still remained different as late as, say, 1300, from what was the general speech of 1400.

I have already pointed out the best familiar parallel by which we moderns can understand this state of affairs, at the end of what may be called the “French period,” of English talk just before the Black Death. It is the condition of Wales—and especially of North Wales from about a lifetime ago. There you had two

30 A History of England

things—modern English and Welsh. The gentry talked English; so did the administrative classes, the clergy, the heads of the police, and so on. A few of them knew Welsh and were proud to know it, but none of them thought in Welsh. Most of them had a Welsh accent, except those of the wealthiest class (just as in Edward IIl’s earlier years the English gentlemen speaking French as their only tongue, yet spoke it with an accent which the northern Frenchman laughed at). The labourer, the small farmer, the fisherman, talked Welsh, and most of them knew no English. But a considerable minority had a smattering of English, and nearly all of them had a few words of English without which they could hardly have carried on. In between was the group of classes, neither of the lowest nor of the highest in wealth and opportunity, who were Welsh- thinking for the most part, but bi-lingual in expression.

The parallel is not exact—no historical parallel is exact. The Welsh had behind them a high culture and a fine printed popular literature. They had the Welsh Bible and the Welsh hymns, and an immense tradition of 2000 years. The Anglo-Saxon dialects of early medieval England had nothing of the sort. Welsh challenged English as a classical language. The edu- cated Anglo-Saxon court language had disappeared centuries before 1300 and nothing resembling it re- mained but the dialects of labourers and the lower middle class, divided into any number of local forms.

Nevertheless, for a modern man to understand the English of Edward I and Edward II, and even the earlier years of Edward III, the best picture he can | call to mind is still North Wales. Just as to-day an Englishman goes to Carnarvon or Bangor, talks English

Introduction to Later Middle Ages 31

_ In the towns without any doubt of being understood and is at once answered by those whom he addresses, so Simon de Montfort, or Gaveston, a long lifetime after him, would travel in England talking French with- out any doubt of being understood wherever he went, and of being answered at once in his own tongue. Now and then he might come across some oaf who grinned and could not answer, but it would be an exception, unless he chanced upon an isolated place. The castle in which Edward II was murdered, for instance, was full of serving men who drank ale on their benches and talked some dialect of their own, Anglo-Saxon in tex- ture. But their superiors, who ordered them about, spoke to them in French, and they knew enough French to understand.

By 1370, say—or a little later—the small lord of the village was talking English. The educated men when they did not write in Latin were, some of them, begin- ning to write (to each other) in English.

At Crécy in 1346 you would have heard the King, his officers, many of their dependents, speaking French, and most of them French only. The archers were speaking their native local dialects, and Welsh and Cornish: there would have been a considerable class corresponding to our non-commissioned officers, through whom contact of command was kept up, who were bi-lingual. But at Agincourt in 1415 all could, and very nearly all did, speak what to-day we call “English.” Had we been present we should have been understood.

What would have happened but for the Black Death it is not easy to surmise. Perhaps the country would have remained bi-lingual to this day—as Brabant has. In the Brussels of the XIIIth century one heard official

32 A History of England

and governing French all about one, but a populace which, in its private life, talked a kind of Dutch. You have the same thing in Brussels to-day. Perhaps the standard French of the vocal classes in England and the various popular dialects would have amalgamated— already French was having its strong effect before the Black Death on what lay below. In that case we should have now been speaking a language not unlike modern English, but with far more French words in it. It is even conceivable, as a third hypothesis, that the upper- class French would have gradually ousted all other forms, especially if an Anglo-French nation had come into existence.

What did happen was the somewhat sudden per- meation, after the pestilence, of the Upper speech by the Lower, and their amalgam in the form we use to-day and call the English language.

I repeat: Under the tremendous blow of the Black Death these two disparate elements fused and produced a third thing, which is English. There was such disloca- tion of social life that the special training of the wealthier children was not maintained; that posts clerical and other—normally kept for a certain social standing—were filled rapidly, of necessity, almost at random. The effect was fully felt in about twenty years—or a little more—and by the days of Richard II the transformation was accomplished.

The French tongue continued thenceforward as a special, cosmopolitan, no longer national, thing. Henry IV thought in French, no doubt, and usually wrote in it, but he could talk English. Henry V probably thought in French, but he was presumably bi-lingual, even in his mind. Henry VI, again, would be French

Introduction to Later Middle Ages 33

from the nursery, but talked English with those about him after he was grown up; and, below the court, French was a foreign tongue to the generation which fought the Wars of the Roses. Take any muniment room in England, and you will see that the native, natural expression of the directing Englishman, in which also he addresses his inferiors (and they under- stand him), was French before the Black Death—but in half a lifetime, or less, after the Black Death, English.t

2. Mainly as an effect of this revolution in language, you have a national feeling growing and strengthening in England during the later Middle Ages, as, indeed, it was growing and strengthening elsewhere, particularly in France. But here it grew more rapidly and strongly than elsewhere. This national feeling shows itself in a hundred ways: to some extent in architecture, more in institutions; it is fostered by the brilliant wars of Edward III in France; it is exasperated by their failure at the end of the XI Vth century; it is vastly enhanced by the new triumphs abroad of Henry V; it becomes permanent, and remains a factor latent throughout all the later Middle Ages, and at last was used with determining effect by those who profited from the loot of religion after the Reformation.

3. Lastly, you have in England more than elsewhere, and in opposition to what was going on in France, a grave loss in the old sanctity of kingship; for the later Middle Ages are in England the story of the Lancastrian usurpation, of the murder of the legitimate king by his

1 Perhaps the most illuminating piece of chance evidence on the great change is this: that men noticed as an innovation that schoolboys in the generation after the Black Death were beginning to be made to construe their Latin into English, not French, for the first time.

VOL, IlI—3

leh A History of England

cousin, of the popular indignation thereat, of the conse- quent legitimist (Yorkist) counter-claim to the throne, and of the welter which we call the Wars of the Roses. The Lancastrian usurpation, though it deals with a dynasty, that is, with a small number of important men out of millions, is not a mere court story. It is a story profoundly affecting the whole state of England, and must be properly emphasized as the third of the great marks which distinguish England of the later Middle Ages from England of the earlier.

Such is the general aspect of the disturbed 200 years which we are about to enter. I have emphasized, I think not unduly, the importance of the Black Death as perhaps the main cause—certainly one of the main causes—of the change, and a cause of greater effect in England than anywhere else in Christendom: to a more particular description of that decisive blow I will next turn.

a eae 7 J ’ "z ee = i ns on gd -

II THE BLACK DEATH

Tue fearful catastrophe of 1348-52 was not known to its own generation, nor (perhaps) for some centuries, by its modern name of “The Black Death.” That only seems to have become a common term long after to distinguish it from later visitations, as from the Great Plague of London in the XVIIth century.

_ It seems to have approached us thus:—

We find it first, probably, in China, some years before, in the early *40’s of the XI Vth century—perhaps in 1344 or 1343. It appears to have been at once recognized as differing in important features from any other recorded trouble of the kind: especially in its rapid effect—killing within three days. It was probably bubonic, and spread by the agency of insects—but all that is mere surmise. We must always beware in history of the influence of modern physical science with its tendency to see in everything immutable simple and permanent laws of similar cause and effect in all ages. The truth would seem to be that the great diseases of our race vary most perplexingly from age to age: they vary not only in degree but in kind. A new one may arise to-morrow; one most familiar to us may disappear or become insignificant. We boast we are immune from such mortality to-day. It is but boasting.

37

38 A History of England [1s4s-

The Black Death, then, is first certainly found in the Crimea, where the town of Genoa had a flourishing colony, Calfa (near Sebastopol). This town was be- sieged in 1346 by a vast Tartar horde. The besiegers were suddenly stricken with the plague, and died in heaps. Next it attacked the besieged. Ships bringing refugees from Calfa conveyed the infection to the Mediterranean. They touched at, and communicated it to, Constantinople, to Sicily (in the autumn of 1347—the first land in the West to suffer), and finally brought it almost simultaneously to Venice and Genoa by January, 1348—and what followed was appalling: something the like of which in degree had never been known before in our race.

Here, as we approach the statistical consideration of the Black Death, it is important to appreciate the nature of this evidence. In doing this, our first duty is to neglect and abandon the silly modern academic habit of despising general contemporary judgment. Be- cause in the old Chroniclers such judgment is not usually detailed (though it sometimes is so), and because it is of a rough outline sort, we are asked to reject it as worthless: “medieval,” “uncritical” —words used to conceal contempt for a civilization of Catholic culture.

Contemporary general judgments are always the best guide to the main immediate effect of any event, and we do right to follow them. On the other hand, we must criticize them, not, as pedants do, by regarding as final an appeal to fiscal documents (which were never drawn up with the object of giving vital statis- tics), but from the nature of the case.

For instance, we know that the plague spared children rather than adults. When, therefore, we are

1359) The Black Death . 39

told that in such and such a town such and such a proportion perished, we may safely consider that the phrase is applied rather to the adults and to the out- ward civic life of the place than to the whole population, including infants.

But, on the other hand, when we have particular numbers given we ought to accept them, and we may be certain that the general impression produced upon the survivors at the time is a good basis for our own conclusions so many centuries after.

The plague first fell, then, upon Sicily. Next upon Venice and Genoa.

Tt fell upon these great Italian maritime cities with an awful fury. We have it on the most excellent con- temporary evidence that the majority of both those noble republics were carried away—and at once. The highest estimates given are perhaps exaggerated—six- sevenths of the whole population of Genoa; seven-tenths of Venice—but without doubt more than half the people perished in.each port. By April it had come down into Northern Tuscany, and by May to Orvieto: Petrarch, in Parma, heard in that same month of his Laura’s death in Avignon, and wrote the pregnant sentence, “‘Posterity will call the story a fable”: so overwhelming was the wave. His own brother was sole survivor out of a monastery of thirty-five.

The pestilence struck Marseilles contemporaneously with Venice and Genoa, that is, in January, 1348. The Bishop and all his chapter died. Ships drifted about the sea bearing crews all dead. Narbonne was de- populated; and as its old port, already slowly dying out, needed energy and numbers to keep it dredged, that ancient maritime capital has never recovered, and

40 A History of England [1s48-

stands to-day, with its half-finished cathedral, like a fossil. Nor is the cathedral of Narbonne the only witness in stone to that abrupt chasm in the life of the Middle Ages. Siena stands there to this day, a mere beginning, with fragments of what was to have been by far the greatest church in Christendom scattered about the town. Beauvais is but transepts and a choir. Here in England the Parish Church of Great Yarmouth bears the same witness. I give but three examples at random out of hundreds.

In the papal territory of Avignon 150,000 died. It reached Paris in the early summer, Normandy before the end of July, 1348. As that summer passed it diminished in the South, and was there faded away before winter, when here in the North it was in full course.

The summer of 1348 was well advanced and England was still free. As late as the middle of August the Bishop of Wells was ordering Friday prayers that it might not cross over from France—but already Death had invaded.

It was on the 7th of July, 1348, that the Pestilence landed in this island: at Weymouth.

The port (then higher up stream and across the river at Melcombe Regis) was then a large one. It had furnished nearly as many ships as Bristol for the siege of Calais.

All that harvest of 1348 was very wet, and the bad weather went on right to the beginning of winter, and even the eve of Christmas. That may account for the astonishing severity of the scourge in this country, for it would seem as though England suffered far more than any other large district: more than any save the ex-

1352] The Black Death 4l

ceptionally (and early) stricken ports of the Mediter- ranean, in spite of our northern air. A wet harvest is the peculiar recurrent calamity of an Atlantic climate. It has its effect to-day: in the Middle Ages it was a disaster. It meant less food and a hampering of all social activities. Coupled with the lack of sunlight and with the soddenness of the ground, partial famine may account for the exceptional violence of the disease in England. But that factor may be exaggerated. For when the scourge reached Ireland that country was in a moment of prosperity—yet the mortality was fearful. And here, in England, it ran its worst through 1349 and on into 1350 and later. It was like a fire which dies down and then spurts up here and there in belated flames. As late as 1352 it was perhaps at its worst in Oxford: and, with the mention of that place, we can give chapter and verse for one violent and strikingly local effect of the blow that struck the English Middle Ages asunder. Fitz Ralph, the Archbishop of Armagh, was Chancellor before the visitation. He was familiar with the rolls. He testifies to a scholar-population of 30,000: eight years after, in 1357, the same witness tells us there were not a third of that number; before the end of the century they had sunk to less than 6000.

These figures not only illustrate the plague; they illustrate also the density of medieval population— 30,000 males above the age of childhood in one occupa- tion in this one town alone. Indeed, here, as in so many other cases, the modern attempt to belittle the nu- merical strength of medieval England breaks down. An Oxford of 30,000 scholars was an Oxford of at least 50,000 all told—and there is no reason to doubt such figures. To say that careful registers were not kept,

42 A History of England [1348-

and that contemporary witnesses could not keep a roll, is to show ignorance of the time. Never were the details of life—especially in expenditure—more care- fully recorded.

I have not space for much detail, even upon this capital affair, in such limits as this book imposes on me. Let me quote but a few typical figures.

Norwich had a very large population. Apart from its suburbs, it counted sixty parishes—certainly 60,000 souls: perhaps 100,000, probably more. Record of the mortality was kept, was seen, and was quoted before the document was lost. The total number killed here by the Black Death was 57,374. Some twenty years later more than twenty parishes had disappeared, ten wholly, fourteen so much as to render parish work useless.

Yarmouth, far smaller (the spit of sand on which it rose was still growing), lost some 7000.

London was struck as late as Michaelmas, 1348. The episcopal registers are lost, so we have no such exact record as we have elsewhere of the clerical mortality. Nor have we any exact general record. But there are interesting fragments of evidence which, pieced together, give us some view of the enormous mortality in the capital. London was by far the largest city in the kingdom—and densely packed. Within the walls it had more than twice the parishes of Norwich. Now we have definite record, cited much later, but cited from contemporary inscription, that in one principal cemetery made specially for the occasion some 50,000 were buried—and there were many others. We find that even in the wealthier classes of London the mortality multiplied by more than 10, for the wills

1352] The Black Death A3

proved in the Court of Hustings during the plague year are 222, to an average of 22 only in the three preceding years. We know, also, from this record, the climax. It was in April and May, 1349. Here let it be remarked that this multiple of 10 is strikingly con- firmed in a very great number of separate instances. Where one person died in a normal year, ten died in the year of pestilence. Now nothing is more con- clusive as evidence to a fact in history than such convergence of independent statements, general and particular, official and popular. Thus in diocese after diocese you find the multiple of ten reached, approached or exceeded in the registers of new incumbents. Like the episcopal registers of London those of Sussex (Chichester) are unfortunately lost, but wherever record remains—or almost—the evidence is the same, as we shall see in a moment when reference is made to Exeter (Devon and Cornwall), Winchester, Hereford, etc. But this multiple of ten coincides curiously closely with the general popular estimate of losses among the adult population. We must, of course, eliminate merely rhetorical or foolish, loose expressions such as “nearly all the human race perished’’; or that in the Eulogium: “Hardly a home or hamlet in which all or most did not die.”’ Even these are good evidence to the effect produced by the business, and we can easily understand how they came to be written when we consider that in case after case of which we have detailed evidence, all a religious community, or all but one, or all but two, all a chapter, all the tenants of a manor, or part of a manor, are taken. Still, such phrases, I repeat, are not statistical evidence—but registers are. And when we find ten times the normal

44 A History of England [1s4s-

death-rate appearing in men of clerical age, it must mean the loss of from very much over a third to nearly, or quite, half the population. Our modern death-rate is no guide, applying as it does to the highly artificial conditions of an urban population, where an omni- present machine of organized medical aid, controlled water supply, and enforced innumerable regulations, all tend not only to lower the death-rate of the normal and healthy, but, far more, to preserve for an added span lives doomed or imperfect.

To turn to other examples: Bristol suffered quite exceptionally. It suffered on the scale of Genoa and the ports of the Mediterranean, where, in its first attack, the pestilence wiped out cities wholesale. Contemporaries call the deaths in Bristol “almost the whole strength of the town,” that is, the adult life of the place came to a standstill. There is no reason to disbelieve them.

Bodmin is not, and never was, of any great size. In the Middle Ages it was but a small market town. Yet in Bodmin no less than 1500 people died, and in one house—that of the Augustinian Friars—all died but two. In the Cistercian house of Newenham, out of twenty-six religious, twenty-three die. Of the brethren and sisters in the hostel of Westminster, all die but three. Of the great Benedictine monastery attached to the Abbey, the prior dies, and probably more than half the community, for before the plague was over thirty-seven are noted as buried.

There is record of whole villages perishing; or, at least, all users of the village monopolies, such as the mill. For example, in the Manor of Cookham in Berkshire, all the service-tenants of the manor are killed in the plague time.

1352] The Black Death 45

A mass of evidence has accumulated through Eng- lish and French research since the original and decisive essay published more than thirty years ago by Cardinal Gasquet (upon whose work I have principally relied, for it is the best general survey).

Some scholars have manipulated this evidence in an attempt to prove that contemporaries were wrong; did not see what was before their eyes. I have already expressed my suspicion of their motives and methods. It is the academic fashion of our day to deny the catastrophic in biology and geology. The prejudice extends to history. But though minute research from the manor rolls tends, indeed, to show that the distri- bution of mortality was uneven (in Hampshire, for instance, one can map out belts of differing losses in service-tenants as established by Heriot payments, and those belts show varying intensity in the severity of the plague) the worst parts amply balance the best. Moreover, a host of chance details confirm the contem- porary judgment of the Black Death’s enormity. We have public officials renewed once, twice, and even thrice by cause of death in the same year—as, for instance, two Archbishops of Canterbury, three Mayors of Oxford. Consider, among cases of whole parishes being apparently wiped out, such an one as that of Hartlebury in Worcestershire. It loses by death all the tenants who can fulfil their feudal work upon the land. Perhaps some of the children survived, perhaps the tenures mentioned do not cover the whole ground; indeed, this is probable. But the roll is one of seventy- six tenures, and though in many of these lists calculation by manor rolls is insufficient, yet such a number of heads of families in such a small place must account for

46 A History of England [1348-

the majority; and if all the service-tenants died, it is a guide to the mortality of the rest; the entry is simple and clear. No service could be performed, and the revenue failed entirely. Again, the Royal Manorial Land at Carlisle is waste five years later because there is no one to work it.

The clerical records are, of course, more complete, and they are most illuminating. There may be cited, for instance, the case of Norfolk. The clerical mortality there was more than ten times that of normal years, and in a certain small number of parishes, as many as three incumbents are named and died one after the other. The proportion is much the same everywhere. In the West Riding about half the clergy die; in Nottingham- shire somewhat more than half; in Derbyshire, nearly half. To an average of seven new incumbents a year in that county, you leap in the plague year to sixty- three—a multiple not of ten, indeed, but of nine. But in the diocese of Hereford the average of 13 new in- cumbents leaps to a total of 175—a multiple of 1314! —and even so, there seem to have been over forty parishes left vacant. ‘The multiple for Hampshire, again, is ten; and though Bath and Wells gives the lower multiple of seven, one may, counting the dioceses that are over 10 per cent., average that figure, as I have said, fairly well over all England. Of the bene- ficed clergy ten times more died in the plague year than in a normal year.

It is unfortunate that the episcopal registers of London, which would have given us such valuable evidence upon the time, have disappeared; but we — have London items which are illuminating. We find notes of ecclesiastical property in that diocese affected

1352] The Black Death 47

by the plague; a manor in which, out of eleven of one class of tenant, eight have died; and there is no one to replace them: presumably they have no heirs. Again, in another little sidelight, wood that has been cut presumably before the plague and cannot be sold; in another the receipts of the manor court are halved.

In the county of Buckingham nearly half the beneficed clergy die. In the diocese of Exeter their deaths in seven months alone are ten times the normal number of a whole year. The yearly average of new presentations before the plague is thirty. From January to July, 1349, we find 306.

If we turn to monastic houses, the record, where it has survived, is even more startling; a thing perhaps natural to numbers living in community, though the religious houses, with their ample space, good water, and cleanliness are also favoured. For instance, in one monastery in Wiltshire, Ivy Cross, you have an ex- perience to which, as we have seen, the continent bears witness, all the community save one is swept away. Half of St. Swithin’s in Winchester; nearly half the great foundation of Hyde, in the same town. The same story at St. Albans; the same in Glastonbury. Not one, perhaps, of these great establishments ever again reached the old numbers; most of them are found at the dissolution declined to half, or less than half, what they were in the XIIIth century and in the early XIVth.

Another very striking instance of the mortality is the large number of cases in which tenants of a manor are recorded as having left no heir; and you even find not a few instances of this among the wealthier classes, where the seeking out and finding of a distant heir would be a more common matter.

48 ~ A History of England [1s48-

The marvel is not that life should have changed, but that the social structure survived at all. We owe it to the strength and continuity of medizval institutions, to their exactitude in working, and the original sim- plicity of their organization, as also to the willing acceptation of them by the society they supported, that our civilization did not perish and that life “‘carried on” intact across the chasm. But re-arrangement throughout the whole body of the nation could not be avoided: great landslips after such an earthquake. No rigidity of discipline and tradition could avoid such. Society was saved. But it was never again what it had been at the summit of our culture in the preceding century of St. Louis, St. Dominic, St. Thomas, Edward of England, Innocent IV. From the Black Death all Christendom and England, in particular, are transformed.

The effect was not sudden. It is never so even after the most violent shock. We do not yet know what posterity will remark of the Great War, nor what fruits that calamity is to bear. Ten years have passed, and as yet the world in which we live is still apparently up- on the model, and externally much the same, as that of the last day of peace in 1914. Menace, but not yet the fulfilment of menace, is abroad. The generation which was already mature when the storm broke was formed and is not to be unformed. The young who cannot remember the older conditions are not yet—or now but barely—taking their place in life and moulding the time. It is their maturity at the earliest which will mark the change. - .

So it was with the Black Death. Not the men of the king’s age—men approaching their fortieth year—

1352] : The Black Death 49

were essentially affected by its results, nor even the lads who, like the Black Prince, had fought at Crécy. But those who were born from 1340 onwards, or there- abouts—men of Wycliffe’s generation, the younger con- temporaries of John of Gaunt—these were the men who showed in their new disturbances and ills the magnitude of what had passed in their childhood or before their birth. They were the inheritors of a changed world.

VOL. III—4

Ill V. THE LANCASTRIAN USURPATION

(From THE Buack Deatu, 1349, TO THE FALL oF CHERBOURG, 1450—101 YEars)

51

IIT THE LANCASTRIAN USURPATION (A) THe PRELIMINARIES

The last years of Edward III (July 7th, 1348, to June 21st, 1377—29 years)

Tue hundred years which open the decline of the Middle Ages—from the mid-XIVth to the mid-XVth centuries (1350-1450) may best be called, in England, “the Lancastrian Usurpation,” for that is the great political event which gives the time all its character: no mere dynastic quarrel, but one profoundly affecting the English people as a whole and determining their future.

Nature of the Lancastrian Usurpation.—It begins with rather more than a decade—1349-1362—which is filled with the last efforts of Edward III in France, their failure, and the appearance of John of Gaunt, fourth son of Edward,‘ as the chief figure in English life: on his emergence into prominence he is in his first vigour, 22 years of age, the representative by his marriage with its heiress of the royal house of Lan- caster, and bearing the title of its duchy: far the richest and most powerful man in the country, and

t For title of Lancaster, see table on p. 74.

53

54 A History of England

becoming all important as his elder brother, Edward the Black Prince, sickens and dies.

On his nephew, Richard IT’s, accession (as a child) the Lancastrian influence is dreaded but kept in the background biding its time. After John of Gaunt’s death his son, Henry, strikes at the right moment (1399), and by force snatches the crown from his cousin Richard the legitimate king. This usurper is crowned as Henry IV. His son, again, Henry V, has great military success in France, leaves a child, Henry VI, who is crowned King of France and England; but the position is lost, the English garrisons are driven out till the last of them in Normandy (Cherbourg) surrenders in 1450, and the disasters of the new usurping dynasty give his chance to the legitimate heir, Richard, Duke of York: with this began the Wars of the Roses and the full Lancastrian usurpation was at an end.

It shook the tradition of legitimate monarchy in England, weakened the State both by attempting more than it could achieve abroad, and by being compelled, from its insecurity of title, to yield to, and compromise with, the wealthy who, as squires and merchants in the House of Commons, become far too powerful. It de- pressed the smaller folk. It lost its control over, and left uncorrected, the hierarchy of the Church, thereby making possible later the Reformation. It is, in general, the symptom and the companion of the medieval end in England.

Politically, the end of Edward III’s reign, after the Black Death, is the breakdown of a programme, of an intention, and of a national mood. And all this is connected with the breakdown of a personality—that of the King. The programme was the ancient tra-

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56 A History of England fis4g-

ditional programme of restoring the inherited power of the Plantagenet crown overseas. The intention was an intention directing the strength of the State towards that end. The national mood was one of glory in mili- tary achievement and of confidence in its final results— and all these failed England in the end of Edward III's reign, the England lessened by plague. The power overseas was ruined, the intention of preserving it was abandoned, the national mood, begun in high hope and content, ended in suspicion and a sense of failure; for Edward III, who was the soul of all this affair, sank in mental power and became at first disturbed, and later paralyzed, in will.

We miss the point of the period if we take Poitiers as a sort of pendant to Crécy, and we lose the whole character in a fog of conflicting details if we try to follow the innumerable army actions and counter- actions which fill nearly twenty years of gradual sur- render to the French monarchy. Poitiers was a victory just as Crécy had been, and had even greater apparent fruit; but that fruit never matured; for the King was failing, and his heir, the most famous soldier of the time, the Black Prince, was not destined to carry on the fame or the effort of his father.

Therefore may ail that time be called the “Pre- liminaries” of the Lancastrian Usurpation, which was slowly increasing its threat as the years went on.

The first years after the Black Death were a truce, so far as foreign war was concerned.

Within the realm they were marked by that violent fluctuation in prices which always accompanies a great | numerical disturbance, whether a universal war or a universal plague. We shall deal, in connection with

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1450] The Lancastrian Usurpation 57

the Peasants’ Revolt, thirty years later, with the economic effects of the Black Death as a whole. It is - enough to note here that they begin to appear imme- diately after the pestilence in the form of an effort to regulate wages during the abnormal scarcity of la- bourers.

The social troubles beginning with the Black Death. —These years also saw the small beginnings of what was later to be a serious spiritual disturbance. A sect of half-mad penitents appeared, wandering round Europe and even reaching England. From their public, self-inflicted scourgings they were called Flagellants. This—the earliest heretical enthusiasm bred by the chaos succeeding the plague—had little popular effect, and was foreign in origin; but it was a symptom.

At the same moment is clearly apparent a strong new ferment of jealousy between the mass of English- men and their lords. The moral basis of feudalism had been weakening long before the plague: the moral tie between lord and dependent—down to the last link be- tween the manorial lord and his former serfs—had been long growing fainter. It received through the Black Death a wound which never closed. The spiritual force upon which feudalism had ultimately reposed was not to be the same again, especially here in England. There arose once more—and within thirty years it had be- come powerful—the original, ever recurrent challenge to the ancient connection between great wealth and high status: the denial of the right of powerful men to be rich or rich men powerful. The growth of a common language had something to do with this passing appetite for equality, but more the strain of a great disaster. For under such strain the mass of poor men feel their

58 A History of England [1849-

common quality with the rich. There is a sort of implied bargain at the back of poor men’s minds that they are to be preserved from disaster by the wealthier classes, as the least that the privileged of this world can do for the unprivileged. And when disaster comes, whether in the shape of a great war (such as that through which we have just passed) or of an over- whelming pestilence, such as the Black Death, respect for wealth is shaken. But the enthusiasm for equality does not last.

Renewal of the war with France, 1355.—The fighting in France did not begin again until five years had passed from the decline of the worst of the plague. The technical occasion of the renewal of war was a bargain between the two crowns which failed through the strength of public opinion: a bargain whereby Edward renounced his claim to the Crown of France on condition that he should be recognized by the French King as full sovereign of the southern provinces on the Garonne, of which he and his ancestors had retained feudal hold, when, and after, all else had been lost, under John.

It is due to the trouble at home.—But it is a better explanation of the new campaign of 1355 to regard it as following upon the social difficulties at home. War was still popular, it was still taken for granted in Eng- land that the great national soldier and king would triumph again as he had done in the past nor was that expectation disappointed. And Edward and his son by the early success of the new war, delayed those worst social effects of the pestilence in England which had thoroughly weakened the French provinces. The fact that the French population was thus shaken by

1450) ‘The Lancastrian Usurpation 59

the plague is another factor in the situation which must not be forgotten. The bonds had been loosened, especially the bond between lord and tenant, and that was an advantage to the invader.

Double plan of attack.—The plan was for a double attack from north and from south. The king was to march from Calais up the Paris road. The Black Prince, who was now in full vigour of young manhood in his twenty-fifth year, and already famous throughout the West, was to march eastward and northwards from Bordeaux.

The Black Prince’s raid through Southern France, 1355.—The first part of the plan broke down. John, now King of France, since his father Philippe’s death in 1350, avoided the engagement, and wasted the country before Edward’s march. The King of Eng- land did not even reach Amiens; he was back in Calais within ten days. But the southern expedition under the Black Prince bore more fruit. Its object was to cut off southern revenue from the French king, and the devastation was horrible. It was a great plundering raid begun in the first days of October, 1355, and carried all over the Langue d’Oc, burning village and town, failing before the strongholds of the cities, but destroying the private houses and looting everywhere. It went right across to the Mediterranean, and, simul- taneously, the Black Prince’s father, having failed in the north, returned to England to meet a Scotch inva- sion, and similarly harried all the eastern coast of Scotland up to the Forth.

The campaign of Poitiers, 1356.—The next year, 1356, the Black Prince began a new raid starting as the first had done from Bordeaux and Gascony. He had

60 A History of England [1849-

but a small column, but already there were in it not a few commanders who were English-speaking. He himself, of course, was a French-speaking man, holding a court of the same speech; and it is to be noted that he never entered into the Gascon spirit or troubled to speak the Gascon tongue. He was northern French altogether: true Plantagenet. His force was of only 12,000 men, and his business was not to undertake a campaign, but to pillage and capture men for ransom. He marched right up as far as Vierzon and to the Loire, generally avoiding the difficulty of a stronghold, and only pillaging the open country. From in front of Tours he turned back, following down the old Roman road that takes one southward through Poitiers to the Garonne. His little army was still intact; his baggage train loaded with spoil.

When we read of these recurrent devastating marches by Scotsmen into North England, by English- men into Scotland, by Welshmen into the Marches, by Englishmen into Wales, by Anglo-French armies throughout France, we shall make nonsense of the time if we think of them as modern campaigns, or their expressions of destruction as literal and universal. Had they been modern armies with a definite object of complete success in the tradition of the revolutionary wars and of Napoleon, the things we read of them— their perpetual activity—would have meant the de- struction of our civilization. But they were not that. When you hear that a place was burnt, it does not mean that it was wholly destroyed: it means there was ran- dom looting and the burning of some few wooden houses.

You do not find the main buildings destroyed; you do not find even the glass in the churches suffering. The

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1450] The Lancastrian Usurpation 61

narrow track through which an army passed was heavily burdened, in part pillaged, barns and occasional houses ruined, but even in the worst cases (as in that of Limoges, which we shall come to in a moment) the expressions of the time are general and exaggerated, and must not be taken literally. Things were bad enough in all conscience without that, and it is some- thing of a marvel that on the top of the Black Death all these twenty years of sporadic war should not have permanently lowered the vitality of French society.

The Valois King of France, John, had gathered against his Plantagenet cousin a great army to push back these raiders under the Black Prince. It con- centrated at Chartres.

The Black Prince, marching down from near Tours by the main road, went through La Haye to Chateller- ault, and then, having a force too small to attack any considerable town and burdened with loot, left the Roman road and struck east of Poitiers, making for Breuil, La Chaboterie and Nouaillé by side lanes. Near Nouaillé was a ford over the little river Miosson; he proposed to cross there, reach the main Bordeaux road at Les Roches, and so get clean away, having avoided the obstacle of the forest of Mouliére by passing to the west of it.

The King of France, coming in pursuit from Chartres, crossed the Loire at Blois and reached La Haye after the Black Prince had left it. He was a day’s march behind, getting into La Haye just as the Black Prince was marching into Chatellerault. The King of France had need of recruitment and munitioning in Poitiers. He made forced marches east of the forest of Mouliére to Chauvigny, then to St. Julien. As his

62 A History of England [1349-

rearguard was passing the farm of La Chaboterie it was seen by the Black Prince’s vanguard, which, after delays, was coming down from the north. Even then he thought he could get away while John was in Poitiers.

The Battle of Poitiers, Sept. 19th, 1356.—His little force was leaving, on Saturday, September 17th, the farm of Maupertuis (which is about 41 miles south- east of Poitiers), and was making for the crossing of the deep ravine of the Miosson, which runs to the west of that place, and so proceeding on his retirement south- ward with his booty, when he appreciated that King John of France and his great host were so close at hand that if he continued his retirement he would be caught in column of route and destroyed.

We must appreciate at this famous moment the character of the two opposed forces. King John’s feudal army was far larger than the Black Prince’s little column, now 7000 to 8000 fighting men. It was not under a true united command, for, as I have said, it was still purely feudal, though with many mer- cenaries: not a few German. But the number of trained and experienced and properly armed mounted men alone was larger than the Black Prince’s command. A contemporary observer and soldier on the Black Prince’s side put the enemy at 8000 mounted men at arms and 2000 archers with arbalests. The mass of the rest was a half-trained or wholly untrained rabble of footmen, as was always the case with these very large sudden levies.

On Sunday, the 18th, the Black Prince put most of his force in line before the farm of Maupertuis, a couple of miles south of the French camp and facing it. He seems at first to have intended it for a rearguard to

1450] The Lancastrian Usurpation 63

hold off a French attack while he got the valuables and waggons away beyond the ravine of the Miosson. Later, however, when a general action was forced, he brought back all his men to the field.

The modern reader is curious to note how, in such a situation, there was still an attempt to prevent fighting. The Papal Legate, Cardinal Talleyrand-Périgord, got the King of France to state terms, and the young Black Prince was ready to accept them, “saving his honour and that of his army.” Edward was willing to give up his booty and his captives, and to promise not to fight against John for seven years. But John was persuaded by one of his bishops and certain of his nobles to demand the Prince and a hundred of his gentlemen as prisoners of war. The King of France, therefore, with his great host, was in the wrong, by the standards of the time and by our standards, too, when he prepared to engage on the morrow in a battle which seemed to promise certain victory.

The startling Plantagenet success that followed, the dispersion of the Valois army, and the capture of the King of France himself was not, however, as at Crécy, the effect of a novel tactical instrument. Poitiers was not an archers’ battle. It was the effect of lax political discipline; of the federal character of the French State; the breaking-up of one and then another division on the French side, and the clenching of the affair by a Gascon force of Prince Edward’s (under the Captal de Buch, a Pyrenean lord) coming unexpectedly in flank upon what was left of the French feudal army, and the charge of Prince Edward’s own men-at-arms under the advice of an English gentleman, Sir John Chandos. It was on the Monday, September 19th, at

64 A History of England [1349-

about 9 o’clock in the morning or a little earlier, that contact was taken between the King of France’s men and the rearguard of English and Gascons which the Black Prince had left in front of Maupertuis to cover his retreat.

John’s army was ordered in a special fashion to meet what were known to be the new Plantagenet tactics which had triumphed at Crécy ten years before, and the dispositions were made under the advice of a Scot, Douglas, in the King of France’s service. It was drawn up, of course, in the regular, the invariable, medizval order of three columns, which in turn would deploy into line and enter action: the first under the king’s son, the Dauphin Charles, the second under the king’s brother, Orleans, the third under John himself. But the special feature on this day was the taking of nearly all the best elements—over 4000 men at arms—from the depleted columns and sending them forward as a vanguard to close with and encumber the longbowmen, who possessed such superiority in numbers and effi- ciency of missiles. Three hundred picked knights first—to be sacrificed in the first attack, and to exhaust the Plantagenet quivers as they fell; then a large group of mounted German mercenaries and the crossbowmen with their arbalests.

The plan succeeded. The vanguard, in spite of the Welsh-English longbow, got home, and the whole line became a struggling mass of two opposed and nearly equal forces.

Then came the first determining event. Warwick, bringing back a small force from the columns which had, that early morning, been sent off in retreat through the ravine, appeared on the flank of the French line and

MAP III

Heights above the Sea ia English feet- Contours at 15 FeeE

EY Py Ae V BS

ee’

cetanieX 2 “Waggons i “Parked beyond River

THE BATTLEFIELD OF POITIERS

1450] The Lancastrian Usurpation 65

enfiladed it with the fire of his few archers. He could effect that surprise from the nature of the ground, which falls very sharply just at the left end of the English down on to the ravine. Warwick, climbing up the steep bank from the river, was hidden till he topped the rise, and then he was right on the flank of the enemy.

This surprise threw the French vanguard into con- fusion, but the effect was not final. The Dauphin’s column—dismounted men at arms—came on and con- tinued the pressure. He had quite insufficient numbers, and he had to meet fresh men whom the Black Prince, like Warwick, had brought up from the ravine. He fought well, and the losses on the Plantagenet side were severe, but far worse on that of their inferior opponents, who fell back.

Then came the second determining event. The French second line, under Orleans, caught in the falling back of the Dauphin, broke and fled. The king’s line remained, but it was quite inadequate to the task of retrieving that day. Of the trained fighting men in the three columns, nearly half had been sacrificed in the vanguard. John may have had 2000 trained men— not more—under his direct command. The rest were worthless. The battle was already won when, about 11 o’clock, they came forward. The Black Prince mounted his men, knowing that the end was coming. He sent a Pyrenean lord, the Captal of Buch, to ride far round the right and take the last forlorn charge of the French in the rear. He had his standard bearer, Woodland by name, display the great banner, and him- self charged with all he had. John’s troops were sur- rounded, John himself captured. And so ended the day of Poitiers.

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Nature of the victory of Poitiers——The importance of this battle has, I know not why, been largely missed. It has been quoted with special insistence as an example of the success of the longbow. Obviously, it was not that. Crécy had been that ten years before, and Agin- court was that a long lifetime afterwards. But Poitiers was emphatically not that, it was one of those battles which were won much more by incompetence on one side than by skill on the other. It was won through the detestable organization of Orleans’ command—a third of the remaining attacking force after the vanguard was used up—and through miscalculation on the possi- bility of using fully armoured men on foot; at the end, through the lack of observation on the left flank, when Captal de Buch appeared and effected the final surprise.

The longbow failed. All its ammunition had been exhausted quite early in the struggle, and the French king’s men-at-arms had got well into the mass of the Black Prince’s archers, and were fighting hand to hand with the Welsh and English and Gasecons long after the archery fire had ceased. What broke the French was exhaustion, through abominable staff work, and fi- nally the Captal’s flank attack.

Poitiers has been quoted also as an example of the lack of cohesion in a feudal force. That again is true of Crécy, and it is not quite so true of Poitiers; the French king’s feudal force had fair mechanical cohesion, but there was bad organization and thoroughly rotten morale in one critical division, which dispersed without reason.

The real (and high) importance of the battle lay in the capture of the French King, and in the effect this had upon the society of all his realm. This personal

1450] The Lancastrian Usurpation 67

catastrophe very nearly destroyed all that toilsome gradual structure of the Capetian monarchy, built uv through 400 years.

Character of the French monarchy.—The story of the Capetian monarchy discovers these crises over and over again. It was saved repeatedly by chance or the good genius of the Gauls. Looking back to-day on the rise and continuance of the great throne of the West, we see it as one majestic process; but to those who lived through its centuries it was a succession of mortal perils. It might have been destroyed by Normandy and Flanders within a century of its foundation. It was within an inch of toppling over the edge centuries later when Louis XI was playing cat and mouse with Burgundy. It was in apparent dissolution, later again, when the nobility of France went Protestant in flocks a hundred years later. It was even at some risk in the mid-seventeenth century. But it survived. It was per- petually saved: until it committed one fatal blunder in permitting a foolish admixture with German blood, which turned it sluggish and destroyed its communion with the nation. But for that the crown of Hugh Capet would have survived the XVIIIth century, and would be the dominant power to-day. In its absence are sundry parliamentarians. But to return to John and Poitiers.

Effect of the capture of the French King.—The monarch was to the society of the French XIVth cen- tury—had already become to that society—what the English gentry were to be to the English XVIIIth century. Take away the monarch and the arch of society crumbled.

The abortive treaty of London, March 24, 1359.— The immediate result of John’s capture was one of

68 A History of England [1s49-

those moments of anarchy into which the French periodically fall, as a preliminary to swarming again like bees. The States-General was no substitute, in that vast federal territory of many provinces, for the Crown. The city of Paris could only act in isolation, the countrysides were a welter, the peasantry were rising everywhere, and it looked for a moment as though the unity of the French State had dissolved. To see the consequences as they really were, one must skip more than two years of negotiation between the captor and the captive, and come straight to the document which was signed in London on March 24th, 1359.

Its main provision was this: the King of France recognized the King of England as independent Sover- eign of all that Henry II had held as feudal inferior to the King of France. It was a complete severance of half its provinces from the French State, and the end of France as a European unit.

We must not deceive ourselves by ea ie the real independence of the great feudal lords 200 years before, in Henry II’s time. It is true that a Duke of Normandy, a Duke of Brittany, a Duke of Aquitaine, was possessed of the powers which a sovereign possesses. He taxed, he coined money, he raised armies, he levied war; all ordinary civil justice ended in his court. He was the main authority, and the only civil authority, connected with the great Church appointments. But in his own mind, and in the minds of men, he was none the less the dependent and the inferior of a still higher feudal lord, the king in Paris; and each feudal unit thus held could be in theory (and was, as we know, in practice later) reassumed by the over-lord, the king.

1450] The Lancastrian Usurpation 69

So true is it, that a habit of thought is the bond of society. The feudal idea governed all that relationship. Henry IJ, the Plantagenet, was a king in England. He was not a king beyond the seas; just as to-day a man may be an absolute owner of land in the country, but however long his lease, however secure his tenure, how- ever important his house, may only be a lease-holder in London, subject to all the servitudes of lease-holding. Save for the feudal idea, medieval France was not. Let the French King release the feudal bond, and France ceased to be.

By this signature, given in London on the 24th March, 1359, all Normandy and Maine and Anjou and Brittany, the whole mass of Aquitaine in its fullest definition, everything between the Garonne and the Pyrenees, passed in full sovereignty to Edward III. Had the thing gone through there would have been created a great bi-lingual kingdom, the governing ele- ment in which would have been still, for the most part, French-speaking, the centre of which would have been in the Court of Westminster, which the newly forming common English language of its subjects was about to enter.

What the outcome in history would have been if this treaty had been carried out we cannot tell, save that it would have been enormous in scale. The fact that the treaty was not carried out has confused the exceptional gravity of the moment in the eyes of many historians—who have the advantage of knowing what the future was to bring—but in the eyes of contem- poraries that tremendous capitulation was very real, and seemed final. Upon such terms only could John obtain his release; and to the immense territory thus

70 A History of England [1349-

abandoned was specially added Calais and the county of Ponthieu (the dowry of Edward III’s mother), com- manding the Straits of Dover.

Effect in France of the Treaty of London.—The news of the surrender raised violent protest in the States-General and in the capital of France; a protest which was confusedly but unanimously echoed in the provinces. The direct result of that protest was not a reaction capable of setting the French nation up again. It was the exact opposite. What it produced was a new invasion by the King of England far more serious, on a far larger scale, more powerful and coming much nearer final success, than had the very partial advan- tage of Crécy, or even the supreme luck of Poitiers.

Edward’s new great expedition of November, 1359.—Here was an army on the march out of all proportion in size to those highly disciplined but small raiding bodies, which had achieved the two earlier victories of 1346 and 1356. With such an army and with France in its then condition, Edward might very well hope to be crowned and anointed at Rheims: to step into John’s shoes, and to establish that United Kingdom of the Plantagenets from the Pyrenees to the Scotch borders, and perhaps to the Grampians, which all his ancestors had dreamed of.

He attempts to enforce his claim.—Edward’s winter march to Rheims in 1359, and Paris.—What his great- grandson, Henry V, so nearly did, Edward also, on this occasion, nearly did, though in another fashion. The campaign which thus all but changed the colour of Europe was remarkable for its winter character. It showed that Edward intended to take full advantage of the moment: France exhausted by the plague, dis-

1450) | The Lancastrian Usurpation 71

tracted and chaotic through the king’s capture; him- self with a large force intact, and his territory un- touched. His great host set out in three columns by three marching roads (it was too large for a single line) in the November of the year 1359. It advanced straight on Rheims, and sat down to besiege the town, to take it, and therein to celebrate the coronation of its General. Such force as the crippled and distracted French regency could gather dared not challenge Edward’s great columns in the field; it only harassed their march. *

What seems to have made Edward fail was, strate- gically, that his effort overreached itself; the task was beyond its powers. After nearly seven weeks of siege the attempt to reduce Rheims was abandoned, and in that deep winter the host went on south-eastwards towards Burgundy; the terror of it was such that the Duke of Burgundy ransomed himself from invasion by a vast payment. Edward’s columns, presumably heavily reduced by such an effort in such a season, turned towards Paris, and sat down before the walls of the city on April 7th, 1360.

There is something of 1812 on a small scale about the whole story, though the result was not so immediate; indeed, on the surface, the result was a triumph.

Paris was not taken any more than Rheims had been. But John’s people were in a defeated mood. Negotiations for peace were begun, they were debated at Chartres, and concluded in a little village just out- side that town; a place called Brétigny? on which

«The modern English reader will be amused to hear that young Chaucer was in that army of Edward’s in 1359. What is more, he was captured!

2If you take the little tramway which crosses the Beauce S.E. from Chartres to Domeville, you come to Brétigny about 4 miles out.

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account the whole affair is generally known as the Treaty of Brétigny; though, as we shall see in a moment, a better term (were not the name of Brétigny conse- crated by use) would be the Treaty of Calais.

Treaty of Brétigny, May 8th, 1360.—Ratified at Calais, October 24th, 1360. The articles of that famous draft confirmed all the southern cessions of the Treaty of London, and they were signed on the 8th of May, 1360. It seemed, indeed, the final achieve- ment of a great soldier and the crowning of his chief campaign. It greatly helped the consolidation of English social unity which the language was so rapidly cementing. The triumph of it was felt throughout England, and when it was finally signed on October 24th at Calais, the French king released, and the great struggle apparently at an end, one might have thought that Western Europe had been transformed.

But with one essential modification.—But here intervenes a strange accident. There was one verbal change between the draft at Brétigny and the final docu- ment ratified at Calais. I donot pretend that a slight and ambiguous verbal change on parchment could ever be the cause of the revolution that followed, but it served at once as a pretext and as a symptom of what lay behind the minds of the French negotiators.

Its terms.—All the better half of France which had been Plantagenet fiefs: Aquitaine, Poitiers, Anjou, Normandy, Maine, the central mountains, and Calais itself, and the County of Ponthieu, as well, were to go to the Plantagenet for ever; but under these terms, “to be held as the King of France had held them.” It was a phrase apparently straightforward enough, and meaning—one would say—“‘in full sovereignty,” but

1450] The Lancastrian Usurpation 73

one could quibble with it. For instance, the King of France had been since 1204 Duke of Normandy also. But he could—or, rather, a hired lawyer could— maintain that he held Normandy not as king but as duke. So any one who “held” it in future as he did, could hold it as duke and would have to do homage. Much more important was a mere omission which pre- sumably the French negotiators arranged. In this final document, ratified at Calais on the 24th October, 1360, there was no mention in specific terms of the King of France’s abandoning his right fo the allegiance of his former subjects in the ceded territories. It was implied, of course, in all that went before; but it was not definitely stated. They could plead that they still held themselves to be King John’s men.

The ambiguity was made use of. In what followed, it was the moral basis, or excuse in feudal morals, for the ousting of the Plantagenet. And what an example all this quibbling is of the decay which had come over the old sincere feudal spirit of the earlier Middle Ages!

From the Treaty of Brétigny to the death of Ed- ward III is a matter of seventeen years.

John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.—Those seven- teen years play little part of a positive sort in English history. They form, however, the period when the new English-speaking England of the later Middle Ages was forming. At their close the men who had been active before the Black Death were already old. The men in public life could not remember the earlier time. They depend upon two main influences—the premature senility of the king, who had hitherto been

74 A History of England [1s49-

so great a soldier in Western eyes, and the continued rise of the Lancastrian name: that is, the increasing power and influence of—at last the real governance of England by—Edward III’s fourth son, John, born in Ghent in 1340, called thence “John of Gaunt,’ now married to the heiress of the great Lancaster property, and formally created Duke of Lancaster by his father at this time (1362). *

This last, the overshadowing of England by Lan- caster’s wealth, is the real note of the time.

We get as yet no sight of the Lancastrian usurpation above ground—but the seed.is sown. When nearly all that had been won by the Treaty of Brétigny had been lost—that is, within some two years or a little more of Edward’s death—the thing is apparent. Nor would the Lancastrian branch take the place it does in history had Edward’s eldest son, the Black Prince,

*THE HOUSE OF LANCASTER

Henry IIT So Se ee | | Edward I Edmund Crouchback (made Earl of Lancaster, 1267) Edward II | | Thomas, 2nd Earl (led Henry, 3rd Earl rebellion against Edward III Edward IT) Henry, 4th Earl (made Duke of Lancaster, a royal title, 1361) JOHN OF GAUNT = Blanche, heiress to Duchy

(his father-in-law being dead became Duke of Lancaster by right of his wife)

Henry IV

1450] The Lancastrian Usurpation 75

survived; but in him, as in his father, there was a weakness of blood, which came, we must suppose, from the perpetual inter-marriage of the Plantagenets; he died before his time and before he could become king.

Causes of his preponderance.—What it was in his younger brother, John of Gaunt, which bestowed apparently greater vitality, or at any rate greater energy, upon him, it would be difficult to say. What we do know is that he had a very large and constant revenue from his marriage with the immensely rich heiress of the Lancastrian house, and that wealth, perhaps, counted most of all factors, save one, which was a certain mixture of cunning tenacity and far- sightedness. You find it in John himself, in his son Henry of Bolingbroke, in his grandson, Henry V. It en- tirely disappeared in the great-grandson, the last Henry of that line: saintly, too much distraught, forgiving, defeated, unfortunate.

Edward III, the father, helped such a career in his younger son John. In giving first his father-in-law, and then himself, the title of duke, he did a new thing. “Duke” (which in their conversation and official docu- ments, outside Latin, was ‘“Duc’’) was a French title, the idea of which was closely connected with royalty. To give a man this novel badge in England meant the emphasizing of his connection with the throne. Edward had made his eldest son, the Black Prince, ‘“‘Duke”’ of Cornwall when he was still a little boy in 1336—but that was part of the “appanage” of Cornwall: of Royal land handed over to provide income to the heir. Henry of Lancaster, the father-in-law of John of Gaunt, had been made Duke of Lancaster in 1351 as the king’s

76 A History of England [1s49-

wealthiest relative—and that was a precedent. But, anyhow, after 1362, John of Gaunt’s possession of such a title made him seem nearer the throne.

We must also remember that his health—an im- portant factor—was far superior to his elder brother’s, and that he was ten years younger. When the Queen, Philippa of Hainault, died in 1369, leaving her husband prematurely aged and incapable of active rule, John of Lancaster was a vigorous young man of under thirty. Edward the Black Prince was already a decrepit and ailing man in middle age.

This period, onwards, then, from Brétigny may properly be called the beginning—but only the faint beginning—of the Lancastrian usurpation. Abroad, the Black Prince was getting great renown in a bad cause: fighting in Spain upon the side of Pedro the Cruel. It is an interesting story, especially interesting as a campaign, with its use of the Pass of Roncesvalles in winter, the outflanking of the Basque Hills, and the fine victory of Navarette; but it does not concern directly the history of this country, save in so far as it continues to illustrate both the military value of Edward III’s son and the strength and cohesion of the trained troops of English origin. At least, this cam- paign only affects English history in so far as that it was the origin in the Black Prince of the disease which was to kill him. As for the fruits of that Spanish campaign: to England there were none (it was not a Plantagenet enterprise, but a personal one), and even the Black Prince’s ally reaped nothing of it in the long run. He was killed by his brother in less than two years after the victory of Navarette, which Edward had won for him, and that brother took the throne in security.

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EpWARD III’s FaiLurE IN FRANCE

1450] The Lancastrian Usurpation 77

Loss of the French conquests.—Causes thereof.— Meanwhile, all the results of Edward’s fighting in France collapsed. As to the pretext of the French recovery, it was of little importance morally or his- torically. The ambiguity of the Treaty of Brétigny had left it uncertain, when the articles were finally signed at Calais, whether the old Plantagenet fiefs abroad, reassumed by Edward III’s crown, were to be held in full sovereignty or no, and had even left it un- certain what full execution was required on either side to make the treaty of final effect. But the cause of the French recovery was mere numbers coupled with the length of time that had passed since a true social unity had existed between the feudal lords of England and the feudal lords of Normandy, Poitiers, Guienne— ‘nearly 150 years. Added to all this was the new divi- sion in language. Already in 1362 the speech of the Chancellor opening the King’s Parliament had been made in English. In 1363 the pleadings of the courts were allowed in English (though, in fact, a mixed French jargon continued for generations, and English legal terms to-day are a clot of fossil French) and, before Edward’s death in 1377, the mass of the Plantagenet officer class and administration was English-speaking: still knowing French, but not thinking in French: knowing it as a learnt tongue.

A futher, purely military, reason of the breakdown was that the forces at work on either side, quite diverse, were suitable to the French effort after Brétigny, un- suitable to the English. The English were better suited for marching successfully through invaded land and challenging pitched battles against superior numbers, for the Plantagenets had trained armies largely pro-

78 A History of England [1s49-

fessional, a greater cohesion, a concentration of every kind—territorial, financial, and political—which the Valois had not; but on the other side there were very great numbers, innumerable castles and walled towns, the lords and people of whom were in sympathy with Paris, the necessity, therefore, for a highly dispersed Plantagenet effort, and a growing (though still obscure) feeling of nationality—at any rate, north of the Gar- onne—which was emphasized by the increasingly national character of the English forces with their new language spreading among the governing classes (the Black Prince and his court never learnt it fa- miliarly: they were wholly of the French culture to the end), and with their distinct national organization under arms: less feudal, more professional.

The hero of the French recovery was du Guesclin, but he was only the greatest of a swarm. The whole land was filled with the French recapture of castles, raid, and counter-raid, with a general increasing bal- ance month after month against Edward’s power over- seas.

The massacre of Limoges.—There was a crisis more than seven years after the treaty. King John, who had been captured at Poitiers, and for whom an enormous ransom was due, had returned to London as a prisoner and died there (at the Savoy) in the spring of 1364. In January, 1369, the new King of France, Charles, de- manded homage for Aquitaine from the Black Prince. Edward would wisely have compromised. He offered to give up his claim to the crown of France, and to yield his shadowy rights over Normandy, Anjou, and Maine on condition that he might be full sovereign of the south and west. But the one thing to which the

1450] The Lancastrian Usurpation 79

mass of the French nobility would never submit was the alienation of French territory from the feudal bond —however vague—which bound the whole country to Paris. They urged their king to make war; and from May, 1369, the re-conquest was rapid. Not only did the French fill the Channel with their ships, but the special efforts of the Black Prince and of John of Gaunt himself were like blows struck against quicksand. They penetrated the country with strong forces. It closed up behind their marching. The Black Prince, already broken by disease, avenged his honour by a fearful massacre of the people of Limoges. In his eyes the sur- render of Limoges to the King of France’s men was treason, for the citizens had assented, and he believed himself their true lord. That was his excuse; but the horrible thing was worthless in effect, and the unfortu- nate man guilty of it, who watched it from a litter in his illness, might as well have saved himself the cruelty.

He was a dying man—though it took him six years to die. During those six years he hoped and even believed that his little surviving son, Richard, four years old in the year of Limoges—to become King of England while yet a child—would carry on the glory of the legitimate line. The Black Prince was fortunate in that he died without foreseeing what was to come.

John of Lancaster marched right through French territory from north to south, and gathered no fruit from that expensive, prodigious effort, which cannot be called a campaign. All the prestige of Edward’s military story was gone. Even the hold on Southern Scotland, which had been tenaciously maintained with varying fortunes, failed. On the continent the break- down was complete.

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The remaining Plantagenet possessions in France by 1374.—By the end of 1374 the Plantagenets, still firmly fixed in Calais, held elsewhere no more than the seaports of the Garonne and the Adour, some few in- land strongholds, and here and there a castle on the Dordogne. All for which these wars had been fought, save Calais, was lost; and, in the south, less was now in the real possession of the English Crown than had been before the war was begun—thirty-seven years before.

Death of the Black Prince (June 8th, 1376).—The last three years of the reign dragged on. The king was sunk in an approach to imbecility; his son John really reigned. It seemed inevitable that he should be at least regent when the child Richard should succeed, and he was manifestly himself considering his chance of the throne, especially after his elder brother, the Black Prince, was dead (June 8th, 1376).

Death of Edward III (June 21st, 1377).—On June 21st, 1377, Edward, no longer remembering Crécy or any other thing, a man not yet sixty-five—in appear- ance eighty, white, weak, long-bearded, nursed or neg- lected by the intriguing woman who held him in his palace of Eltham—could just see the Crucifix held before him (while his servants plundered the rooms of the house), shed a few tears, whispered a word or two, and died.

To this critical moment, when the king lay dying, when the Black Prince was dead, when his son, a young child of ten, was nominally King of England, when John of Gaunt was attempting to master the realm, belong a number of disturbing movements in the social and religious life of the country: a widespread

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ill-ease between tenant and lord, an open preaching of revolution in which the name of John Ball is most prominent, an anti-papal or anti-hierarchic ferment which took a number of forms (some contradictory of others), and in which the best remembered name is that of Wycliffe. They merit a passing examination.

A Dynasty is important.—I have insisted throughout these pages on the importance of personality in king- ship during the Middle Ages. It was to remain the chief matter of society till long after the Reformation. When kingship was disturbed by the incompetence, senility, or childhood of a king, all the community was affected, as is to-day an industrial nation by excep- tional economic strain. Such a situation, therefore, as that of the years 1376-84 might be compared for its character of crisis in England with the years termi- nating and following the Great War.

Yet even more important than this turmoil in the moral forces of government was its coincidence with the universal crisis throughout Christendom in the matter of the Papacy (which was now entering its deepest period of degradation, the Great Schism) and the maturing of the fruit sown by the Black Death. For, as was remarked upon an earlier page, the full social effect of a great disaster or change is not felt till those fixed in character before its advent are grown old or are dead. By 1376-77 the men who had been of active service in the State prior to the Black Death, the men who were then thirty and more, had passed their sixtieth year. The new generation, whose formative years had followed the Black Death, and which had therefore felt the real effect of it upon themselves, as their elders could not, were now in the saddle.

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Chief of these by far was John of Gaunt, the young Duke of Lancaster. In 1376-77 he was still in his thirties, and had round him in a shifting group the various prominent, talented, or merely intrusive men who could take advantage of the nation’s misfortunes. Englishmen were embittered against authority, which had lost all the brilliant trophies of Crécy and Poitiers, save Calais and a greatly reduced hold on Gascony. Their fellows had been driven from France. But Lancaster, after all, had made the final effort to retrieve the situation, and though he had failed, that effort was remembered. His plotting for a usurpation (which finally succeeded in the hands of his son), was un- popular. The people always stood by their rightful king, whatever his faults or incapacities, and the little child who succeeded to Edward III’s senile decay and death was their anointed head. Instinctively, the populace felt that an unlawful ousting of the lawful line would benefit, at their expense, those masters of theirs, , the village lords and the wealthy churchmen, against whom their souls were now rebellious. But, none the less, John the Prince was in by far the strongest position for leadership, and one and another large group of malcontents or fishers in troubled water would succes- sively rally to him.

Of such groups, one was the mixed and confused but large and increasing one which was at issue—from very varying motives—with the official Church: those few enthusiasts who were impatient with its sterility and legalism, or indignant with evil living or avarice in some of its members, the more numerous who had lost respect for the clergy through the permanent lowering of clerical culture after the pestilence, the largest body,

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by far, whose very simple motive was relief from the bur- den of Church and monastic rents and dues or the less excusable hope of being able, in some convulsion, to loot that treasure. Among these malcontents the most frequently heard name was that of John Wycliffe. (The archaic spelling is customary, though even in his own time one gets it in the more modern form of Wiclif; to- day we should probably have the name as Wickliff.)

The position and career of John Wycliffe-—The position of the man himself, and his whole personality, have, of course, been absurdly exaggerated. This was inevitable from the fact that he appears in connection with the first important heretical movement in an England which, long after the confused political situa- tion which thrust him forward was forgotten, more than 200 years after his death, became in the XVIIth cen- tury definitely anti-Catholic. While that revolution was accomplishing the obscured name of Wycliffe, hardly in the first class even during his own lifetime, was revived by the reformers of the X VIth century in connection with the propaganda of their at first small and unpopular school, and in a hundred years had be- come unduly famous. Save for that historical accident, the success of the Reformation in England, he would hardly be remembered outside theological lecture rooms.

But though the modern position of the man is mythical and inflated, he was not without his minor place in that diseased generation, produced throughout Europe by the effects of the plague. At any rate, so many modern Englishmen are still excited by his name, that a modern English history must delay to notice it at some length; though reluctantly, for such a digression is out of scale.

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John Wycliffe took his name from the village of Wycliffe, which stands on the Yorkshire bank of the Tees, just opposite Barnard Castle, and, likely enough, was connected with the French-descended nobles of that manor. By an ironic accident which we often find curiously associated with such movements, this family remained Catholic in sympathy long after the mass of the nation had lost its religion after 1605, and some fraction of the local people maintain Catholicism to this day.

We do not know when he was born, but certainly late in the first half of the XI Vth century; he took his doctorate in 1372 and, allowing him to be of age when he began his studies, that might put the date of his birth about 1335. He was, then, of the batch not out of their teens when the Black Death fell, and of the generation which was affected by its re- sults. He was on the foundation of Balliol (naturally enough, as the lords of Barnard Castle were the founders of that college), and may have been mas- ter of the little place during a short period, some- time later than 1356, and earlier than 1361; but there is no reasonable doubt that he had already been made head of another small foundation in the uni- versity called “Canterbury Hall” as early as 1365. This establishment had been started by an Archbishop of Canterbury with a provision that the master should be a religious. But Wycliffe was a secular priest. The irregularity was noticed. In 1367, therefore, he was turned out by the Archbishop of the day, and a religious of the Mendicant Orders put in his place. Wycliffe appealed to Rome and lost his case by a decision given in 1371.

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This was the natural origin of his antagonism to the Mendicant Orders and, for the matter of that, to the Papal See.

I say “there is no reasonable doubt” upon the matter, though, of course, it has been argued against by recent scholars attempting to find a less obvious origin for a perfectly normal source of grievance.* Any- thing can be argued; but the contemporary evidence is quite clear. A grievance against the government of the Church, or of religious against seculars, or of secu- lars against religious, is a commonplace throughout the medieval history of Christendom.

The interest of Wycliffe’s career does not lie in his personal motives for his quarrels. It lies in the fact that he was a man of energy with a good following in the university, whose grievance happened to coincide with a great political movement. In this he could be used—and was used—by men far more powerful than himself: to wit, by the men who were now beginning the Lancastrian usurpation. The official organization of the Church was with legitimacy, that is, with the rightful Plantagenet line; with Richard’s succession to power, and that of his children after him. Therefore the Lancastrian party was at issue with that organization on its political side.

They found ready to hand, Wycliffe, with already some following in the university, and already remark- able for his propagation of sundry old theories which had been floating about a long time, and which had

1In the heat of religious fervour even this plain piece of history has been challenged. It has been pointed out that there may have been two John

Wycliffes: one head of Canterbury Hall, the other the pamphleteer. It is not mathematically impossible, but it is about as likely as two Benjamin Jowetts in

Victorian Oxford.

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crystallized in the works of a great man of the previous generation, also connected with Balliol, FitzRalph, Archbishop of Dublin. In the Universities of Europe, generally, these theories which Wycliffe copied were more connected with the great name of Marsilius of Padua.

Wycliffe had maintained, with a special vigour, two general ideas (among others), which had no particular connection except that both conformed with his private grievances. The first was that the Mendicant Orders (Franciscans and Dominicans) were taking too much power and depriving the ordinary secular clergy of revenue rightly their due; the other was the much more general thesis that the right to property, coming as it did ultimately from God, was dependent upon the owner’s being in a state of grace.

There was, I say, nothing original about this con- tention: it was a very old way of attacking those whom one thought to have too much money or land or right of presentation to livings. It was the natural refuge of those who objected to the power of property where they discovered what seemed to them an unjust exercise of it; but people who denounce one form of wealth nearly always play into the hands of another rival form of wealth; and this weakening of the sanctity of property by absurd theories did not threaten great wealth. It only promised a chance for rich laymen to despoil rich churchmen.

The whole thing was very like the modern Socialist movement, which, attacking the principle of property by an abstract, metaphysical whim, is found, while denouncing landowners and employers small and great, to be playing directly into the hands of international

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finance. So Wycliffe played into the hands of the immensely wealthy Lancaster and his hungry faction.

Wycliffe, full of his grievances against Pope and Friars, took over FitzRalph’s work on “Divine Domin- ion” and began attacking, to begin with, the financial power of the Church, illogically mixing it up with an attack upon the monks. He himself, of course, was all the while enjoying not only one benefice, but two, and stoutly claiming a third. This again is what we find in all such theorists. The Socialist to-day is commonly enough a man of property, and often a rather grasping business man at that.

The old heretical theory against absolute right to property, thus revived by Wycliffe, appealed strongly to a generation which was by this time filled with the results of the Black Death, just as Socialist theories al- ready appeal to-day to a Europe which has suffered the shock of the Great War; and just as international finance is using our modern disturbance, so did the beginnings of the Lancastrian usurpation use Wycliffe and his following at Oxford.

The hierarchy drew up from Wycliffe’s pamphleteer- ing eighteen propositions to be submitted as heretical to Rome. They are all of them capable of defence in the abstract (e.g. that an excommunication may well be an error of temporal judgment or a wicked act, leaving the excommunicated morally immune); but the ten- dency of the man’s teaching was clearly to attack the power, and especially the financial power, of the hierarchy, and even the discipline of the Church. There was, however, no savour of that special spirit which we call, to-day, Protestantism. For instance, Wycliffe is very insistent on the right of any priest to

88 A History of England [1849-

absolve—because his object is to protest against the power of ecclesiastical superiors to reserve cases. The truth may be put generally by saying that the move- ment of 1377 and 1378, in which Wycliffe’s was the most prominent name, was no more connected with the spirit of what is called to-day Protestantism than the XVIIth century support of ale against spirits was a forerunner of modern teetotalism.

The Lancastrians defended Wycliffe in a sort of riot which took place in St. Paul’s Cathedral, but the complicated political intrigue of the day also led to his being supported at moments by the opposite party, who wanted the advantage of his popularity; for there is no doubt that his defence of the ordinary priest’s income against incursion, and his attack upon papal financial exaction, had given him such popularity. He was in the Parliament of 1378, presumably called in as a Doctor of Theology, for we must always remember that it is a false reading of history to regard the medi- zeval Parliaments as highly defined bodies, let alone as governing bodies—all that is a much later conception.

Before going on to the next development of the situation, we must remember that this disturbance in men’s minds coincided with the Great Schism, and came after a long train of events weakening the official Church throughout the century.

Since 1309 the Papacy had been removed from Rome and seated in Avignon. That town (once a hotbed of the Albigensian movement) had fallen from Toulouse to the King of Paris, had gone as endowment to the kingdom of Naples, had been sold by it to the Papacy in 1348. It was not technically subservient to the French Crown. Nevertheless, the Papacy at

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Avignon became a French thing. The electing cardinals came to have a French majority.

The Papacy had become a French thing, just when — the national feeling against France was becoming con- scious and was inflamed by victory. Further, it was lowered in men’s eyes by a new series of legislation against papal claims of which “Provisors”’ and “Pre- munire”’ are the catch-words. I will describe it under the next reign when we come to the main statute of 1393. The last of the French Popes, Gregory XI, did, indeed, leave Avignon in 1376, and died in Rome in 1378, and then followed the election of an Italian, Ur- ban VI. But the cardinals who had elected him be- came dissatisfied, and later in the same year elected another Pope—Robert of Geneva—Clement VII—and he went to live at Avignon. Henceforward, for nearly forty years there were two and (at the end) three rival Popes, each with his “obedience”; France and England, for instance, taking opposite sides. The effect on disci- pline may be imagined.

Of course, like everything in history that excites religious passion, the story of the trouble has been warped and its effect put vastly out of proportion. There was a constant effort to heal the schism, and dur- ing all its duration men held as firmly as ever to the papal institution, in spite of a quarrel on its rightful occupancy. The thing had no doctrinal effect save a novel attempt to ascribe hitherto unheard-of powers to a General Council. Still, such as it was, the doubt on who held the final authority relaxed the power of that authority in principle. The rivals could not pro- nounce with the majesty of superiors. They had to court the support of governments, and such a state of

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things gravely lessened the moral power of the Holy See.

Meanwhile, something very much more important than Wycliffe and his pamphlets had taken place—and that was the coming to a head of the great social disturbance caused by the Black Death.

That shaking-up of society had, though men did not know it, severed the roots of the feudal system. Feudal terms were maintained, the feudal concept remained alive for generations, but the feudal fact was rapidly disappearing. The serf was turning into the peasant. Money payments, originally exceptional, beginning to be familiar before the plague, after it more and more rapidly ousted personal service on the lord’s land; and money rentals gradually ousted the realities of personal tenure. As nearly always happens with revolutionary movements, it was not the suffering, still less the weakness, of the rebels which produced rebellion. On the contrary, it was the opportunity and the strength of those who felt themselves to be oppressed which made the revolutionary movement possible. It is not the misery of those who rise so much as their power to — rise which does the trick, and the well-fed peasant half-owner, the (less numerous) well-paid labourer, was formidable.t Long before Wycliffe was heard of, men had been going up and down England—the one whose name has come down to us permanently is that of the priest, John Ball—fiercely declaring against the in- justice of organized society, with its inequalities, the oppressions suffered by the mass that tilled the land, and the unrighteous advantage of lordship, clerical and lay, over common humanity. There is no direct con-

« A day’s wages in 1378 gave a week’s essential food for one man.

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nection between Wycliffe’s movement and this big social upheaval: they were even largely contradictory (e.g. Wycliffe’s hatred of Franciscans, the peasants’ support of them). But this indirect connection—a common discontent with a world in which institutions no longer corresponded with social facts.

I will speak of that considerable movement—one of those many vigorous popular armed protests in which the English of old excelled and of which the last was to be crushed in blood under Elizabeth—in its own place. Meanwhile, we must bear it in mind as con- temporary with the action of Wycliffe and his com- panions. It was just before the Peasants’ Revolt that Wycliffe added to his other activities in discussion certain dissertations upon the Real Presence.

Here, again, we must beware of reading history backwards. It was no new thing for a man who found himself prominent and a leader to take up, as a sort of badge, some theological debate. Minute discussion up- on mystery was the intellectual occupation of the time, and a man in Wycliffe’s position almost owed it to his own reputation to start something of the sort. There is, indeed, some vague connection between his almost incomprehensible argumentations round and about the real presence of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, and his general irritation with the power of the official organization of the Church. But it is a great historical error to make too much of it. It was no serious dis- cussion. It had no effect on the thought of the time. It soon died out. It had no relation of cause and effect to the much later fundamental denial of the XVIth century. Moreover, there was nothing original in it. Every attack upon the Church for generations past had

92 A History of England [1s49-

brought about some argufying or other upon the most profound of all Christian mysteries. It was a subject too tempting to be avoided; and (as we saw in the case of Berengarius) the first awakening of the European mind from the Dark into the active Middle Ages, before the Crusades, at once provoked a violent discussion on the nature of the Presence.

Moreover, Wycliffe was never personally con- demned. He died (and died at Mass) in the enjoyment of his benefice and, presumably, in the enjoyment of the Faith within his own heart. Certain of his followers were made to retract. But he himself was not disturbed, and the impression left upon anyone who will read his explanation of his views is that he is trying, in such explanation, to make clear how really orthodox he is; just as Pelagius had done hundreds of years before, and as the apologists of Jansenius were to do centuries later.

Much more important as a piece of policy was the setting up of the dead text of Scripture as a counter authority against the living voice of the living Church. It was an obvious move, for the authority of Scripture was everywhere and always admitted. But the special opportunity now found in England was the presence at last of a universal vernacular tongue, the thing we call “English” to-day.

Here two historical facts which still have an un- familiar sound even to-day—but facts all the same— must be emphasized :—

(1) It is possible, but not probable, that Wycliffe and his companions were the first to translate the whole of the Scriptures into this newly

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consolidated national language which we call English.

(2) It is nearly certain that this final and complete Wycliffite translation has now disappeared; at least, that no copy of it can be discovered.

I have said that these historical statements are still very unfamiliar. Therefore, at the risk of digression, the proofs of them must be advanced.

(1) It is possible, but not probable, that a Wycliff- ite translation was the first complete translation of holy writ into what we call “English,” z.e. the then new language which is essentially what we speak to-day.

It is possible because, as a new universal and stand- ard tongue common to manorial lord, scholar, and peasant, the language had not held such a position for more than quite a few years when these discussions on the hierarchy and their authority began. A set of men setting out to compile a translation of the Vulgate for Englishmen at large early in the last quarter of the XIVth century may be compared to a group of men setting out to write a complete history to-day of the Great War. There is no reason, other things being equal, why one group, setting out to write it with the unorthodox object of cracking up Germans and Turks should not publish a little before another orthodox group setting out to write it with the object of cracking up the allies. The opportunity is so recent that either group may be first in the field.

But, on the other hand, it is not probable that Wycliffe and his followers issued the first complete English vernacular Bible, for two strong reasons :—

94. A History of England [1349-

(a) A negative one. In all the voluminous Wy- cliffite remains there is not a trace of the claim to be the first in such an effort. There is plenty of insistence upon the appeal to Scripture against the Church or the author- ities of the Church, but no statement of the absence of a text or novelty of providing one. It is difficult to believe that if so great a labour had been a complete innovation its initiators. would have been indifferent to their position. Indeed, such an indifference would be unique in the history of literature. And if it be asked why, with a vernacular Bible in existence, a second one was at- tempted, the answer is that men in opposition prefer their own instruments. There are numerous copies of the English Prayer-book. Yet a man wishing to prove that it permits the Mass might well reprint it with a pre- face of his own for comment.

(b) A positive argument. When the ecclesiastical authorities proceed against Lollard versions of Scripture they specifically mention hereti- cal origin; and the copies they order to be sought out and seized are not translations as such, but only translations objected to on account of their origin, and presumably the unorthodox comment. attached to them. They seem to take for granted an orthodox version, and are at pains to forbid only one particular sort of version, to wit, a version - made by a private individual without the leave of his ecclesiastical superiors.

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(2) It is nearly certain that the version which Wy- cliffe and his followers compiled has disappeared, save for one unfinished copy, and that what modern people have come to call “‘Wycliffe’s Bible” is not Wycliffe’s Bible at all, but the orthodox English version of the later Middle Ages.

There have come down to us in a great number of manuscript copies a vernacular English Bible of the XIVth century. It is now generally known as Wy- cliffe’s translation, and, on the premise that it was so, a great and scholarly edition of it was prepared in the mid-XIXth century. When the two arguments in favour of its being the Wycliffe version are set forth they will be seen tobe strong and even, if the re- butting arguments are unknown or unheard, over- whelming.

(a) We have remaining a draft translation in several hands reaching almost to the end of Baruch, connected with and in part actually bearing the name of Hereford, one of Wy- cliffe’s Oxford followers. This version can be represented as an original from which the widely disseminated vernacular versions, though different in idiom, may have been derived.

(b) We find that a very few of these copies have a prologue tacked on to them. It presents some passages which are strongly Wycliffite. This prologue is printed in our standard edition as an integral part of the work, and it is the opinion of competent scholars that these plainly unorthodox, and as plainly

96 A History of England [1349-

Lollard passages, are not interpolations, but one with the whole preface.

But the opposing considerations are more powerful, and would seem, cumulatively, conclusive:—

(a) There is no early or continuous tradition that the vernacular (of which we have so many examples that it was evidently the accepted version) is the Wycliffite version. The statement that it is so comes very late, and with no connected chain of tradition sup- porting it.

(b) The Wycliffite preface has no direct relation to the Bible on to which it is tacked, and is only found so attached to very few examples.

(c) In the New Testament part, where lies the temptation for an opponent of Catholic or- thodoxy to give to the Latin forms new and plausible English forms supporting his thesis, no unorthodox term appears. Yet in the cor- responding movement of over a century later so obvious an opportunity is naturally and necessarily taken.

(d) Why should the vernacular we have be quite different in construction from the Wycliffite original — as we possess it, t.e. down to Baruch? Under what necessity were they to re-write all they had done, and to re-write it in a quite different style? There are many similarities of order and words, but the very essentials of idiom and language are different (e.g. in the form of the past tense—and much

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else). There is no record, hint, or tradition of any such re-writing—and no kind of necessity for it. It is only imagined by moderns. There is neither proof nor likeli- hood of such a thing.

(e) Witnesses of Tudor period recall a long-existing orthodox vernacular version regularly read and widely known. Sir Thomas More knows of it, so does Caxton long before him, and Cranmer testifies that the gradual disuse of the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue was re- cent—a thing, due, presumably, to the fear of the authorities, in the X Vth century, that common reading of the Scriptures in the popular tongue would be used for the pur- poses of heresy.

None of these five points is decisive, and each indi- vidually can be protested. If the tradition is late, yet there is no counter tradition that the version we have is not Wycliffe’s. If the Lollard prologue is rare, that may be because men were afraid to exhibit it, and be- cause it was generally destroyed. The absence of un- orthodox terms may (though this is more difficult to accept) be due to habit and routine in the use of orthodox equivalents for the Latin (e.g. Priest for Presbyter, Church for Ecclesia, where the Greek-read- ing heretics of the Reformation would render “Elder” and “‘Congregation”’). Even though the vernacular we have is in a different diction from the Wycliffite original, it may have been re-written. But the sixth point is very strong, and I think, taken with all the rest, final. It is as follows:—

VOL. IlI—7

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-(f) The vernacular version we have is found every- where in the most orthodox surroundings, and just where an heretical version (pursued, hunted down, forbidden by authority, de- stroyed when found) could never have been. It is in the royal library of a saintly king; it is treated as a thing specially cherished, magnificently produced; it is the treasured possession of great monastic houses; it is given as a splendid gift by a monarch who was remarkable for orthodoxy to one of the most conspicuous convent foundations of his time, Sion. How could a version denounced and, as far as possible, rooted out, be at the same time in such a position of splendour and respect?

We may, of course, neglect to-day the old myth that the medizval Church, apart from its struggle with the last heresies, discountenanced the use of vernacular renderings. There had always been such renderings of essential portions of Scripture from the earliest ages, and a continual use of illustration from the Old and New Testaments. As a matter of fact, contemporary with the English vernacular version of Richard II’s reign, there is a French one on the continent, and a German one, and one in Czech; for the mediszeval Church relied strongly upon the Bible, and continued in that epoch, as the Church had done from her earliest origins, to cite the text perpetually, in office and sermon and private composition.

It should be obvious that a certain book, the whole Bible, was not now for the first time put into the

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hands of the people: such a MS. was worth in our money some £200. One might as well talk of a right to practise medicine being put into the hands of the people to-day. In a sense, the Bible—like medicine to-day—was already in the hands of everybody, and entered into daily life in a fashion which we to-day can hardly conceive; in another sense—like medicine to-day—it was accessible only to a few, because of its cost and rarity; it could only exist in the very expensive form of manuscript. But vernacular versions every- where existed in the West, and seem to have been thought a matter of course until the final struggle with a rising opposition to orthodoxy.

Apart from Wycliffe’s activity in making a vernacu- lar version, he sent out popular preachers (some of whom, by the way, were regularly licensed by the dio- cese in which they worked), but these do not seem to have had much effect. What did gradually arise from this disturbance of thought was a sect of enthusiasts called “‘Lollards,”’ who based their religion on what we call to-day “revivalism’’—a sort of enthusiastic per- sonal worship diverted from tradition. We shall come across a typical member of the sect, Oldcastle, early in the following century, between thirty and forty years on.

We cannot say that the particular Lollard ferment of the late XI Vth and early X Vth centuries continued in England “underground,” after its suppression and natural exhaustion. That idea is an illusion born of the fact (which we know, and the XVth century did not) that a later and more formidable reaction against the Church was to arise a century later abroad. In England_nothing remained after the lifetime of the

j4.@ 459

100 A History of England [1849-

original and strong Lollard movement but occasional, sporadic, individual enthusiasms, very rare, which had little to do with the national life. And though it is true that discontent with the multiple and often ill-used Church revenues was very deep—especially in London—when the first storm of the Reformation broke over Germany, yet it is also true to say that of doctrinal discontent there was hardly anything in the general life of Englishmen after the lifetime of Wycliffe’s younger followers.

(B) Ricuarp ITI

(June 21st, 1377, to some date after the middle of January, 1400, but before March 12th of that year—about 221% years)

Accession of Richard II, June 21st, 1377.—Every major event in the decline of the English Middle Ages after the Black Death may be used to illustrate the profound change which had come over society.

Effect of the Black Death now fully felt— What happened at the accession of the Black Prince’s son, and what happened when he was deposed; what happened in between—all the reign—manifest a social spirit, an attitude towards the governance of the realm, which a long lifetime before would have been impossible. Not but that there had been revolt upon revolt and shock after shock against the throne in the true Middle Ages— that was in the nature of feudalism; but now feudalism had lost its principle of life, and the difficult hold which the boy Richard had on his crown, his losing it in manhood, have a different savour altogether from the generation in which his great-grandfather, Edward II, had been attacked, deposed, and murdered.

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It is the cause of Richard’s fall_—The reign of Richard ITI is that second step in the disastrous Lancas- trian usurpation, which was only made possible by a profound change in the mood of men: that descent into. the decay of medieval things which so much robbed anointed kingship of its sanctity that the true line could be ousted by a regicide cousin. It is the first enduring and essential tragedy in the great story of the Plantagenets. All earlier violent evils in that line had left the sanctity of legitimate inheritance intact. But Richard’s fall was a sacrilege. The populace, of course, remained in the old tradition of reverence for the right of blood; but the times had turned evil. In an Oxford suddenly decayed to a third of what it had been before the plague, the Lollard emotional anarchy was spring- ing up. Conversely, the official Church had begun its long sliding down into corruption. In the towns the moral authority of corporate government was rotted with plutocracy, and the masses hated the rich few who controlled and co-dpted their brethren to the Commons. In the fields the manorial machinery was breaking down, and the old customary and natural re- lation of free and servile tenant to lord, still present in legal right, was no longer a social reality: it had been replaced by a permanent antagonism. It was in a society so rent and invalid that the sombre act was played out. What we have to watch in England be- tween 1377 and 1399 is the very gallant struggle of a brave, impetuous, royal boy growing into a young man- hood, beautiful, and always challenging and ready for horsemanship and arms, against a few very rich men who take advantage of the public discontent, the lack of revenue, to attempt his coercion for their advantage.

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At first the young king succeeds in affirming his legitimate power. But all the while a too-powerful and too-silent cousin, John of Gaunt’s son Henry, his own exact contemporary,' is watching him. At last, just as he and Richard reach the full maturity of their thirty-third year, Henry attacks by treason, over- throws, and violently grasps the throne. He has himself crowned king under the title of Henry IV, and murders the man he has betrayed. The evil succeeds and goes unpunished, to the lasting hurt of England; and that it should be so we must put down to the passing of the chivalric temper. That, in brief, is the episode of Richard of Bordeaux, Plantagenet.

Fear of immediate Lancastrian usurpation.—In the first days of the lad’s succession there was a general expectation that John of Gaunt would seize control.

He was now a man in the fulness of his mature man- hood, in his thirty-seventh year. He had possessed the vast wealth of his inheritance and of his marriage, com- bined, for sixteen years. He had been far the great- est man in the kingdom, and had really governed the kingdom once and again: especially in his father’s last years, when he had held power by a shameless under- standing with the woman Perrers. But the English people resented this threat to the rightful Plantagenet and the accession of the child was not too difficult.

It is delayed.—Edward was not yet dead when the leaders of London sent to the royal boy at Sheen and bade him come to the Tower. This was in that same day on which Edward died, the 21st June, 1377, and

« Henry was born three months after Richard, at Bolingbroke, in Lincoln- shire, on April 3rd, 1367.

101 | The Lancastrian Usurpation 103

Richard was not yet eleven years old. The child was crowned with magnificent ceremony, and the Duke of Lancaster took the occasion to emphasize his homage and immediately after to support the naming of a Council of Regency, in which he took no part. He retired to one of his estates, Kenilworth, and though he kept friends in the Council, for the moment he did no more. This policy he continued in the first Parliament of the reign, which met that autumn; he spoke openly on the rumours of disloyalty that had run against him, and made a public profession of adherence to the throne.

This first Council and Parliament was remarkable for a point in procedure which was that two great merchants of London were empowered at the demand of the Commons to receive the money of a special tax just granted for the prosecution of the war with France, and to watch its expenditure upon the object for which it had been given.

No real power in Commons during Middle Ages.— It is a very false reading of history to mark stage by stage a supposed advance in the powers of the House of Commons. From its crystallization into a permanent institution during Edward III’s reign to the beginning of aristocratic control over the declining monarchy under Elizabeth, the House of Commons never had power. Its character developed; points in its routine of action appeared successively—such a process is in- evitable to the story of any organism. But in essential character the Commons remain till the Reformation a body for discussing and agreeing to special, abnormal, though frequent, other than the regular national reve-

t He was born at Bordeaux on January 6th, 1367: the second son of the Black Prince. His elder brother, Edward, had died in 1370.

Tone A History of England [1349-

nue, a body for presenting grievances or drafting pro- posals, and a body whose presence was rather doubt- fully required side by side with the peers for the full ratification of any really important new law.

England till the Reformation governed by King and Council. Since then by the gentry.—More than that it was not. But even this new function in the third estate is proof of the decay of feudalism. The House of Commons meant the landed gentry (with a sprinkling of the greater gentry also, the near relatives of the magnates) and the more important of the merchant class in the towns. So long as feudalism was a living thing, the hierarchy of society made the Tenants in Chief stand for all that depended upon them in a broadening set of links, which came down at last to the villein or serf upon the land. And the towns had their lords, as the country village had—usually the king. But with the passing of the feudal idea, any man of sufficient substance and of free birth tended to count as a separate unit. As such men were far too numerous to be consulted singly (though the richer of them were also consulted singly, and especially for financial pur- poses), the representative institution came to stand for the fiscal power of squire and merchant: their ability to pay taxes and the amount they could supply. Through that main function it came to stand also on rare occasions as a symbol of the general opinion of all wealth below the great fortunes of the. magnates. But the making of laws, the decision of policy—all that which, since the destruction of popular monarchy in England remained till yesterday in the hands of the gentry, was, throughout all the time of which we are here speaking, normally reserved to the king, acting

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normally but not by any means always, with the advice of his Council; and this was, by right, of his own choosing. On chief occasions he conferred with and took the sense of the peers, that is, the bishops and mitred abbots of the realm, and such great lay barons, some fifty in number, whom he chose, or whom it was customary to summon.

Yet the full Parliament, king consulting with peers, and commons attending apart, was an institution which men desired to preserve and strengthen. A yearly Parlia- ment was from time to time a floating ideal, and it would not have been even that but for a certain vague repre- sentative quality about it which was never forgotten.

Three futile campaigns in France, 13'78-1380.—In the year after Richard’s accession there was a continua- tion of the now disastrous war with France in the field of Brittany, led by John of Gaunt, and without result. Its futility filled the fighting season, and, a second expedition having been sent out and destroyed in a storm at sea, in the year following, 1379, a third attempt was made under Buckingham, John of Gaunt’s brother, in 1380, marching from Calais right across the north of France; again without result. The only real interest of these expensive failures to English history is that, coming on the top of an increasing pressure for money, the legacy of the earlier defeats, they were the causes of the great tax which in its turn led to the Peasants’ Revolt.

The situation was distantly comparable to that which we saw, in the last volume, leading to the crisis under John. The taxable area had shrunk enormously through the losses in France, yet the expense of the war had risen.

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The Poll Taxes, 1377-1379-1380.—The great Poll Tax of 1380.—It was yet another sign of how the feudal concept of society was disappearing that the levy for meeting the expenses of the Breton war (during and after the event) took the form of a personal tax: a poll tax. It was on the 5th November, 1380, just after the last expedition to Brittany had failed, and while Buck- ingham was passing the winter there inactive, awaiting the better season to return, that the crisis came. Already, just before Edward III’s death, the principle of a personal tax had already been adopted. It was at the rate of 4d. a head, and insufficient. The object now—1379—was to raise £50,000. There was an attempt at rating every family in the country, and even single men and women as well; and the general popular basis was that of 4d. upon the great mass of the people, with a rising scale which reached two-thirds of a pound with the greater merchants, from a pound up- wards with what had been the feudal class, including the smaller territorial gentry and the greatest mer- chants, but in no case exceeding the assessment of John of Gaunt and his brother, which was still under £7. It is curious to note how much the idea of social rank came into all this. The scale was a mixture of assessment by income and assessment by position, and fell much more heavily upon the mass of the populace than upon their superiors. It was very indifferently gathered, and reluctantly paid, and brought in less than half what had been expected. Such a failure brought the crisis to which I have alluded. On that 5th of November, 1380, the Chancellor told the Com- mittee of Lords and Commoners mixed, who had been appointed to survey expenditure, that £160,000 must

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be found—and the sum was declared intolerable. At last £100,000 was agreed on, and upon December 6th, after a month’s discussion, the Commons granted a second poll tax, which was designed to produce the whole sum in a somewhat novel fashion.

We must watch the experiment very carefully, be- cause a misunderstanding, whether of its nature or of its arithmetic, may mislead us on the most important historical points: such, for instance, as that of the number of the population, with which I propose to deal at some length.

The theory was that every individual in England over fifteen should pay Is. The original words are: “De chescune laie persone du Roialme qui sunt passez VPage de xv ans.”’* Each village or town was to fur- nish as many shillings as it had adults—the poor help- ing the rich, but the very poorest couple paying at least 4d, and the average man even in a poor place, Is.

First let us appreciate what that meant in the social value of money, comparing that time with this. The working man in regular employment to-day in our towns must get, if he has a family, something like £2 10s. a week, if he is not to be dependent upon extra help in some form; and on that sum a man and his wife and three or four children are hard pressed. In the country the very lowest wage is less, but the agricul- tural labourer is the exception: there are occasional supplements to his low income, and he has an artificially low rent. It is fair to say that with the great bulk of our population about £130 a year of our modern money

1 The official French continues, though by this time most of the private conversation of the lower gentry was in the New English. The king and the court and the higher gentry still spoke French, and a very large belt of educated men was still bi-lingual.

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is the standard of a labouring family, and from £200 a year upwards the payment of a trained artisan.

Real meaning of the tax at that time.—Now, in the latter half of the XIVth century, when a scale was drawn up for what were regarded as good and sufficient wages (a sort of maximum beyond which the man who depended on wages was not to go), the craftsman, such as a carpenter, got 2d. a day, and the lowest labourer 144d. Taking out the festival and other days when money was not earned, you may multiply that sum by anything between 250 and 275, and say that the suffi- ciently paid smaller craftsman required something more than £2 and less than £2 5s. a year to keep himself and his family, and the poorer common labourers more than 30s. and less than 35s.

Social value of the sum demanded.—We have here, then, a wage payment in money for a year in the late XIVth century, less than the same for a week in 1927. This is a vastly greater difference than the mere purchasing value of gold in the two epochs would suggest. It is a multiple of at least 60. The multiple for the mere purchasing power of gold is more than 35 but less than 40.: Taking the time as a whole their shilling was not our £2, but it was not far short of it. Yet the multiple in wages is a multiple of at least 60. This is not accounted for by what we should call the lower standard of living, but rather by a different way of living. Meat and ale were usually plentiful and cheap: white bread much dearer in proportion than it is to-day; but rye bread as cheap (nearly) as our

*I am not taking the official index number, which is drawn up with a

political object, but the real cost of a working man’s living, counting in this what he would have to find if he paid a competitive, unsubsidized rent.

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wheaten bread; iron in all forms is very much dearer; but clothing a much smaller expense (although wool was much dearer) because a very simple form of gar- ment was the only thing demanded, and it was made to serve for a very much longer time. Then, again, the bulk of the population lived under their own roofs, for which they paid dues in the villages, but only a small minority what we call to-day “house-rent,” and that not competitive. What has happened in between has been the growth of the number of categories of expenditure; the number of things on which the modern man can or must spend money: his situation being such that, however poor, unless he fulfils a larger number of functions than his fathers were required to fulfil, he cannot carry on. At any rate, £100,000 demanded from a population of less than a million—probably only three-quarters of a million—families (the effect of the plague must be allowed for) meant the equivalent of a year’s livelihood for some 50,000 working families, or, say, from one-eighteenth to one-fifteenth of the population. Measured in terms of human life, this special extra tax of £100,000 meant to the England of young Richard IJ in mere money about what 40 millions means to-day; but the social meaning of such a sum was «The reader may be interested to test the scale by the simple method of seeing what one shilling would buy in 1381:— One shillings in apts Bold buy half a sack of wheat. a whole sack of rye or beans or oats.

as “s sf one-eighth of a cow.

“ “4 i six to eight hens.

$< ee “+ an ewe.

as A se one-third of a pig.

se “ 16 Ib. of butter. CY se se 250 eggs.

oe “6 Cs A week’s average skilled craft labour, such as a smith’s or carpenter’s.

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immensely larger; for to-day there is indefinitely more surplus wealth in the hands of the richer classes. The raising of £100,000 by direct taxation, involving the whole people, represented something more like our modern rates of very heavy taxation, and that falling directly and at one blow on all those who worked with their hands as well as on the well-to-do.

Now it should be self-evident to us as we read, and it was self-evident to the Commons of the day, that the poor people of England could not pay this rate of 1s. for each adult individual. It would be like asking each adult individual to-day to pay £4 on demand. For 1s. was the weekly wage of a sufficiently paid artisan; the weekly wage we are paying to-day for the same livelihood is about £4.

The rate of assessment.—What was done we have seen: the sum of Is. a head was to be treated as an average, and the individual incidence should be distri- buted by local assessors, so that the rich paid more than the average and the poor less. No individual, however, was to produce less than 4d., and that was heavy enough in all conscience: half a week’s wages. In point of fact, we have only to look at. the taxing lists to see what really happened. Nothing like the total number of individuals in England was approached.

It is clear that the local collector would go to a village and say, “I must get so much out of this village.” He would then make his enquiries, and see the maximum which he could possibly manage to ex- tort. Having done this, he sat down to make a list of the people, arbitrarily fixing to name after name the - conventional sum of 1s.; with higher sums from the few wealthy, and down to a groat—4d.—for the poorest.

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Particular example: Brockley.—The matter of popu- lation is so important to a true reading of the English Middle Ages, and it is commonly so wrongly put, that I must beg to detain the reader with a detailed example.

Here is an analysis of the village of Brockley: You have a knight and his wife, that is, the local gentleman and lady; they are assessed at 6s., or, as we should put it in social value to-day, from £10 to £12—the two between them pay no more. There are five substantial farmers in the village, each of whom is married; they pay from what to-day we should call £8 or £9 (note that the large farmer counts nearly as much as the squire) to what we should call £4 or £5 to-day. The others pay about £3 10s., that is, for the whole household; but the only people reckoned as taxpayers are the farmer and his wife. It would be ridiculous to imagine that in all these households there were no sons or daughters over fourteen, but there is no mention of any, nor do they pay taxes.

Then come the artisans of the village community. They are nine in number: smiths, carpenters, one weaver, and a carrier. Here, again, you have only the man and his wife in each case: no widower, no widow, no young people, and they pay what we should call to-day from £2 to £3 of our money, much as the smaller farmers do.

Then you get four people put down as “Labor- atores,’ which does not, of course, mean our modern word labourers, but rather people who added to the earnings of their little plots by working freely at a wage for other people in extra time. Note there are only four in the whole parish. All these four again are married, and are counted with their wives. It is the

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household that pays, and they pay heavily for such poor folk: 35s. to £2 in our money.

Lastly come four men with their wives under the title “‘servientes,’’ which, of course, has nothing to do with our modern word “servant,” but is roughly used to mean people whose whole time is occupied at a wage; for instance, we have a shepherd, John Alexander, and two important employees of either the knight or some big farmer, who pay £2 each.

Now, analyzing this list, we find for all the males of the village who pay a tax the number forty-three.

Of those forty-three only five pay the minimum tax of 4d., or, as we should say in our money, some 16s. We find the further remarkable fact that of the forty- three, thirty-seven are married and have a wife alive; only siz males appear unmarried or widowers and over fifteen! We further find (and this is really worth re- marking) only two unmarried women over fifteen in the whole list! Lastly—and I think most significant of all—we find only one repetition of names: no other sons, daughters, or even brothers over fifteen. In other words, we find no mention of the young people at all, nor even of a second generation living in the household and already married—with this one excep- tion. Remember that surnames were now in full use, and that all these people have a surname. You have Simon Smith, John Bowle, John Wright, and all the rest of them.

The one exception of the repetition of names is in the case of the Shortnecks. John Shortneck is a sub- stantial farmer who pays (in our money) £6, and you do get a Richard Shortneck, married, who, with his wife, pays about £2, and another Shortneck, an em-

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ployee of the farmer, who pays 16s. With these ex- ceptions, the mention of one daughter put down as doing work on a farm, and of one son, there is no repetition of surnames.

Now it is perfectly clear what such a list—and it is a typical case out of hundreds—must mean and can only mean. What was really taxed was not the indi- vidual adult, but the household. It is not likely that a large parish was tilled and all its crafts worked by. forty-three males over fifteen and their wives. It is still less credible that pretty well all these males over fifteen would be married—not widowers nor bachelor boys. It is utterly incredible that there should be in the parish only two unmarried girls of over fifteen years, and it is frankly impossible that with close on forty married men and their wives paying taxes there should appear only three young people unmarried in the whole list—if, indeed, they were young people at all. Finally, it is equally impossible that you should not have had in such a community, if all had been assessed to the tax, many of the same name, the grandfather and the son and the grandchildren. It is, I think, clear that the tax, though in theory rigorously personal, was at once interpreted in terms of medizval morals and society, and applied to families, and that even so the taxing lists (of which the highest' gives us under 1,400,000 over fifteen for all England, except Chester and Durham) do not give much more than selected heads of households and their wives, with very few additional items.

11377 gives 1,355,201 lay-folk over 14; 1380-1 gives 896, 451 lay-folk over 15. Is it not evident that a census differing by a third in three years is not a census at all?

VOL. 111—8

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Thus, apart from its interest as a cause of the great revolt, the Poll Tax of 1380 has an academic interest as the basis of many modern efforts to calculate from its returns the population of England at that date.

Erroneous calculation of population based on the taxing lists—We know, from the same general evidence as served us in showing the insufficiency of Domesday as a census, what the normal population of England was, with its known millions acres of ploughed land, to wit, 5 or 6 millions. We know that the Black Death had suddenly and heavily lowered that total to less than 4 millions, or even near 3. We must presume that in the intervening forty years there had been some recovery, in spite of recurrence of plague; but presumably not a complete one, as many young children had died in the Black Death and, with them, the potential parent- hood of the next thirty to forty years. We might guess, therefore, at the population in 1381 as nearly 4 millions.

When we turn to the taxing lists of 1381, a very large proportion of which remain to us, we find, as I have shown, that they are useless for our purpose. They are absurdly incomplete; or, rather, they make no pre- tence to completeness, and are nothing more than a sort of rough compromise between what was ordered (in a society without census or police) and what could be, or would be, actually paid: 1377 gave rather more than 114 millions over fourteen. Allowing for some slight increase (the country was still recovering), and setting that against the absence of the fourteen-year- olds, 1381 should have given, on the same basis as 1377, about the same numbers, 114 millions. As a fact, we have seen that far less names—about three-quarters

150) The Lancastrian Usurpation ris

—were returned than in 1377, and that alone is proof of the haphazard and conventional way in which both lists were drawn up: 1377 was a demand for 4d.; 1381 was a demand for 1s. The people grumblingly managed a certain amount of 4d.’s, but not, of course, anything like the full quota. When it came to 1s. they insisted on a much smaller amount of names going in, and were successful. For though extra pressure was brought in later to extort this very insecure tax, it had no full effect.

The most cursory examination of the lists is enough to show how insufficient were the official returns.

They bristle with dozens of anomalies. The per- centages of married, of the sexes, of the classes—which would in anything like a census show regular averages— vary enormously from place to place; and very nearly all are set down as paying the regulation shilling. You have occasionally lists of men without wives (as in Hythingham), and often wives without husbands. Titled and wealthy householders with half a dozen men serving them—and not a wench about the place; and perpetually—indeed, in nearly every list—the solemn recurrence of “Robertus Hunt et Uxor ejus,”’ “Petrus Attewell et Margeria Uxor ejus,” by the score and the fifty, with not a child among them!:

There is then nothing to make out of the Poll Tax lists save the certitude that England had very much more than 24% millions population (which is what 114

«Thus, quoting at random, 16 free married couples in one village. No children over 15! Fifty-five unfree and only 5 children in all over 15. Forty- eight free married couples, only 7 free people unmarried, and only 1 of these a woman. Thirty-five married and only 3 unmarried. Nine artisan families in one Suffolk village—and no children at all, etc., ete.

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millions over 15 would mean). How much more the lists do not help us to discover; but if we say some 4 millions as the population England had in 1381 we are not far off the mark. Before the Black Death it had had far more.

The Poll Tax the cause of the Rebellion, 1381.— Once we are clear upon the point that the theoretical scheme of the shilling Poll Tax of 1380-81 was in prac- tice intolerable, what follows is not difficult to appre- hend. The East and South-east of England rose. We must remember that the serf was not, of old, taxed by the State; it was not in his tradition. When feudalism was alive he was taxed in labour and dues for his lord, and his lord could “‘tallage”’ him at will, 7.e. come down on him arbitrarily for small sums. Feudalism was now dying. The English peasant, still technically unfree, was now almost céasing to be a serf: there were legal rights over him, but they were becoming an anachron- ism; that was why he could now be taxed by the State. But he was a man of tenacious social tradition, and these novel demands made on him by the State were, in his eyes, an injustice. He understood the capital levy. All wars till modern times were paid for by capital levies. But such levies were meant for the well-to-do and privileged, whom Parliament represented and spoke for. They had no right (he thought) to come down on him, who had only the capital of his few chattels and of the instruments of his trade, and who had no luck with Parliament. It was even a shock to him. One might compare it to an attempt to-day at conscription for a new distant and unpopular war on an even more rigorous system than the last. There had already been experience of one poll tax, grudgingly and only

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partially paid. This new and trebly larger one was not to be borne; and of course—apart from all this moral feeling—the major factor remained that the sum de- manded was altogether impossible. You cannot get the whole week’s wages of a well-employed artisan on demand, in cash (24rds at one stroke, and the last 14rd by Whitsuntide at the latest), out of every individual over fifteen in any community on the economic scale of late XIVth century England.

The Peasants’ Revolt begins, 30th of May, 1381.— The French wars dragging on, and dragging on in- definitely, had made the fiscal burden what it was in all France and England. The violent protest was not confined to England, but apart from this, the levelling effect of a great disaster—the plague—and its working through the previous half century was moving men. The last date for payment of the tax was, as we have seen, Whitsunday, June 2nd. The rising began in Essex, at Brentwood, where, in the court of the Tax Commissioner, the men of Fobbings, on May 30th, refused to meet the demand. When the lawyers were set to do the ferret-work against them, they murdered sundry of these and raised the country.

They were—by one account—led by a demagogic priest, who had been given the nickname of Jack Straw. The peasantry of Kent rose from two to three days later. (The start of the sedition is ascribed by legend to an assault on a girl in Dartford by one of the collectors. The collector was murdered.) All the west of the county was afoot in the same month of June; the town of Gravesend, getting help from Essex, rose in its turn. It is characteristic that the rising in one place was due to a man claiming a well-to-do towns-

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man as his serf, and bargaining for his enfranchisement at an enormous price.

Here we must note that the rising, once it fonk on strength, included many elements. The masses in the towns had a violent grievance against the little cliques of wealthy burgesses who held power—hence the London mob. The tenants of the great abbeys—not- ably St. Albans and Bury—had a different but equally violent grievance against clerical dues and rents of endowment, exacted with all the conservatism of the Church, and excluding rights of local government. Hatreds of all kinds were abroad: against foreigners, between factions even of the well-to-do. For a few of the gentry joined the insurgents, and there were alder- men of London found ready to help the rebellion and admit it into the city.

One element in the situation has been exaggerated through a confusion between medizval and modern conditions: the regulation of wages. After, the Black Death the sudden dearth of labour led to extravagant demands by those who worked at a wage.| Hence, in France and England especially, regulations beginning with a royal edict in 1349, a Statute of Labourers in 1351, and the policy repeated for a lifetime of regulating wages and forbidding the offering or taking of more than the statutory amount. It was a policy at once necessary and, on the whole, successful, as the world, after an interval of pure competitive anarchy, is beginning to discover. It was part of the morals of the day, and was not a main cause of the rebellion, because (1) it did not affect the mass of the population in those days; (2) it was on a principle which all at heart accepted. The rebellion arose not from the fixing of wages for

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labourers—a minority—but from over-taxation of what had become a free peasantry.

By the time that the Kentish men were marching on Londoncontemporaries estimated them at 100,000 men. ?

The strong egalitarian feeling behind the revolt.— They had in full the doctrine which is never lost among mankind, which is perpetually attempting to realize itself and as perpetually failing: the doctrine that men are equal, that their inequality is an artificial evil, that some drastic surgical act may do away with it, and that such an act should be performed at once.

The revolt spread with astonishing rapidity from north of Lincoln to the Channel. As is always the case with great popular movements, there was a strange mixture of policy. They destroyed the manorial records of old servitude; they killed the lawyers with a special ferocity—that logically followed from their principles. But they also were enthusiastic for the boy king, and oddly opposed—one large body at least—to the Duke of Lancaster, whose secret ambition was undoubtedly bad for England as a European State, but could not directly affect them or their claims. The Government was taken completely by surprise. The Black Prince’s widow, the king’s mother, on her way back from pilgrimage to Canterbury, rescued herself by her address and courtesy from the mob into the midst of which she fell.

The rioting in London.—That was on June 11th. Later she and the king and her little son; the Arch- bishop of Canterbury, Sudbury, who was Chancellor,

Such general estimates are, of course, not statistics, but it is one more out of scores of pieces of converging evidence supporting the conclusion of a large population in England during the Middle Ages.

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that is, chief minister and responsible for general policy; Hales, the Treasurer and minister directly re- sponsible for the collection of the tax; and a company of more than 100 altogether, gathered in the Tower. John of Gaunt was not there. The boy was taken down next day, June 12th, on the barge by the river to receive the petition of the great rebel horde at Rotherhithe or Greenwich, but his guardians—especially the Archbishop—were terrified by the reception that awaited them, and brought him back on the tide. It was an error, for a popular gathering can always be moved by kingship, and the insurgents were maddened at seeing Richard taken back. The rebels went on to Southwark, sacked the Archbishop’s Palace at Lambeth. Next day, June 13th, the alderman responsible for the bridge lowered it and they poured into London. The mob of London rose to join them, the rich houses were looted, particu- larly the Savoy. Lancaster’s magnificent palace was sacked and destroyed, its fine great hall blown up with gunpowder.: In the course of the day there seems to have been an attempt at discipline amongst them and the punishment of despoilers, but the accounts are contradictory. They showed a strong antipathy to foreigners, particularly to the Flemings, whom they murdered. It is interesting as an example of the separate nationalism that was already beginning to affect Europe in the failure of the Middle Ages, and which sprang from the new vernacular literature, the division in the Papacy, and the growing corruption of Europe’s universal church: her chief bond.

t““Trois barrels de poudre pour guns,”’ a fine specimen of the mixed double language of the time!

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The little royal party cooped up in the Tower sat in council all night. They had not the force to act in arms against this boiling mass outside. So what was done was a trick, for which the brave lad of fourteen who wore the crown must not be blamed, and the use of which its authors excused to their own consciences on the plea of constraint.

The rebels are defeated by a trick. June 14th, 1381.—The rebels hated the politicians but loved their king. They were told that the king would accept their demands if they would retire to Mile End. The boy made his Confession early in the morning of Friday, June 14th, and then rode out unarmed with a few equally unarmed companions about him, a perilous passage through a shouting mob, and found the enormous gathering at Mile End—again contem- poraries give us estimates, saying that it was 60,000— presenting simple demands, the elimination of all rights to forced labour, that is, of the remains of villainage; rented land under the plough to be at 4d., or, as we should say, about 16s. an acre’; and they wanted to be free—poor people to buy and sell in all the fairs and markets without paying toll; to have manorial courts abolished. A charter was properly drawn up, granting these requests; copies were delivered to the leaders, ~ sealed—by that piece of treachery the rebellion was destroyed, for those who had advised the manceuvre and used the courage of the boy king had no intention of keeping their word.

Wat Tyler killed—Wat Tyler, the Kentish leader,

tThe demand of revolutionaries as of nations struggling for freedom is often surprisingly modest at first. No more than a demand to have things a little easier than they are accustomed to. A common rent was 6d.—our “pound an acre.”” They were willing to pay 2/3ds of that.

ce A History of England [1349-

and Jack Straw, the Essex leader, led a small party against the Tower, seized and murdered the Arch- bishop, Simon of Sudbury. He had been a man pious, regular, a little weak, especially in his handling of the Lollards; but he knew his own defects, and would have abandoned a power he wielded too slackly. He had said Mass that morning in the Tower, and all day long awaited death. He died well. They ran at him calling him “Traitor,” for it was he as Chancellor who was responsible in their eyes for the evils they had suffered, and for the misleading of their king. He answered loudly that he was their archbishop and no traitor, but they beat him and put him to death; with him Hales, the Treasurer, who had directly ordered the collection of the tax; and perhaps three others. They frightened the king’s mother, who fainted, but did her no further harm. The whole thing was blazingly rapid. It had covered less than four days since the arrival of the great armed mob at the Thames from the South. We are only at the evening of Friday, the 14th June.

The courage of the king saves the situation. Sat- urday, June 15th, 1381.—Next morning, Saturday, the 15th, that fine young king, Richard, rode out again with quite a small company, but this time some of them secretly armed with mail below their cloth. He found the last remnants of the insurrection, some 20,000 men, in the great open space of Smithfield. Wat Tyler there rode up to him, and after a parley seized (some say) the king’s bridle; there was a scuffle, and Tyler was wounded by Walworth, the Lord Mayor, and put to death by the rest. His followers drew their bows upon the king, who at once showed himself Plantagenet:

1450) The Lancastrian Usurpation 123

he cried in his treble: “I will be your leader!’ led them out to Clerkenwell field, farm land outside the town to the north. There a whole thousand of armed mounted men were ready to receive the boy; he refused them leave to attack the rebels about him, whom he sent home; but strict discipline was re-established in the city of London, where no man not domiciled therein might pass that night save at the risk of arrest and immediate execution.

The pledge broken.—By the end of the month the gentry had begun to rally, and were coming in armed and mounted into London. On the 2nd July the end of the comedy was played, and the little king, with 40,000 of the gentry and their retainers at his back, was made to break his word.

The organized armed force of the noble class rode forth, trampling down the poor remnants of that sudden fire, and the thing was at an end; but not until fierce vengeance had been taken.

Meanwhile, Norfolk had passed through a popular insurrection better led, better organized, and more successful than that further south. For a moment it held the county—or at least much round the chief town—under a government of its own. But the Bishop of Norwich, a Despencer, and therefore a man of high lineage and fighting temper, crushed it. He had been absent westward on a visitation. He came back east- ward towards his cathedral city, reached Peterborough on the 16th of June, the day after the rebels had dispersed at London, rallied the gentry (some of whom, however, were with the