The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only) Read online

  Their growing discontent was exacerbated by a series of taxes levied on everyone and known as poll taxes, the third of which, imposed in 1381 and three times as heavy as its predecessor, was not graded by rank as that one had been. There were violent and evidently spontaneous protests against this tax and its often corrupt collectors in widely separated parts of the country, in Essex and Suffolk, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Kent. In all of these counties and elsewhere armed bands, villagers and townsmen, rose in arms. Manors and religious houses were attacked; lords and priors were murdered; and the cries went up, ‘Death to all lawyers. John Ball hath rungeth your bell!’

  The men of Kent and Essex marched on London, after plundering Rochester and Canterbury, releasing Ball from Maidstone gaol and destroying all lawyers’ houses on the line of march. Their leader was one Walter, perhaps an ex-soldier, a man who worked on the tiling of roofs and was consequently known as Wat Tyler. Under Tyler’s command, the rebels encamped at Blackheath where they waited for an interview with the king, Richard II, who was then only fourteen years old. The king agreed to appear personally before the rebels, but pressure of the crowds prevented him from landing at Greenwich; and, as the frustrated rebels entered Southwark and broke down the doors of the Marshalsea prison, he returned to his refuge with his mother in the Tower. The rebels, having plundered Lambeth Palace, burning books, accounts and furniture and smashing open wine casks, crossed London Bridge, joined by the London mob. They made their way to Fleet Street, opened the Fleet prison, destroyed the lawyers’ rolls in the Temple; attacked foreign artisans, broke into the houses of the city merchants and, so the chronicler Froissart said, ‘fell on the food and drink that was found. In the hope of appeasing them, nothing was refused them … They destroyed several fine houses, saying they would burn all the suburbs, take London by force, and burn and destroy everything.’ The Savoy Palace, home of the king’s uncle, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, was burned to the ground; the Tower was besieged. On 14 June, the king, who from his room in the Tower had looked down upon the mob, ‘howling like men possessed’, managed to arrange an interview with the rebels at Mile End where, among other concessions, he granted their requests for the abolition of feudal services and their right to rent land at 4d an acre. Satisfied, some of the rebels went home. Others remained, however, and meanwhile the violence continued with renewed fury.

  Before leaving the Tower the king had advised Simon of Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor, as well as his other threatened ministers, to seize the opportunity to escape by one of the watergates and to slip away downstream. But as Sudbury appeared on the river stairs he was recognized by the rebels and the London mob still congregating in thousands outside; and, as he hurriedly retreated within the walls, they stormed across the causeway and the drawbridges, smashed their way through the gates, poured into the outer yard and then into the inner bailey. Pushing their way through the Great Hall and into the Wardrobe, they ransacked the kitchens, bedchambers and armoury, and forcing down the door of the Queen Mother’s private apartments, they smashed her furniture, tore down the hangings from the walls and cut her bedclothes into ribbons. The queen herself, smuggled out of the Tower in the confusion by her pages, managed to escape and was rowed away upstream. But in the Chapel of St John the shouting rabble came upon the Archbishop, Sir Robert Hales, the Lord Treasurer, John of Gaunt’s physician, and John Legge who had devised the poll tax. They were all at prayer before the altar. Dragged away from the chapel, down the steps and out of the gates onto Tower Hill, where traitors were executed, they were beheaded one after the other. Their heads were stuck on pikes and carried in triumph around the city.

  The next day the king met the rebels again, this time at Smithfield, the open land north-west of the tower where horse sales were held in more peaceful times. Further concessions were made to the rebels: all bishoprics and all lordships, except that of the king, would be abolished; the estates of the church would be confiscated; the rebels would be pardoned and emancipated. But the insolent arrogance of Wat Tyler, who rode right up to the king, his ‘horse’s tail under the very nose of the king’s horse’, made the mayor of London, Sir William Walworth, a fishmonger, lose his temper. Riding forward and calling Tyler a ‘stinking wretch’, he knocked him clean off his horse with the flat of his broadsword. As he lay on the ground one of the king’s squires dismounted and stabbed him in the stomach, killing him. Seeing this, the rebels cried out in horror, and brandishing their weapons they advanced upon the king’s retinue. But with remarkable self-control Richard trotted forward to hold them back, calling out to them, ‘Sirs, will you kill your king? I am your captain. Follow me.’ And he led them north towards the fields of Clerkenwell.

  The Peasants’ Revolt as it was later to be called was over. The mayor galloped back to the city to raise a volunteer force and soon had the rebels surrounded. Tyler’s head was cut from his corpse and displayed on London Bridge. John Ball who had fled from Smithfield was hanged, drawn and quartered in the presence of the king at St Albans and his quarters were displayed in four other towns as a warning to traitors. Jack Straw, another leading rebel, whose followers had burned down the Priory of St John, Clerkenwell, was also executed and his head displayed on London Bridge. Other rebels, both in London and in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and other counties where simultaneous revolts had also erupted, were severely punished. The promises made to them were withdrawn on the grounds that they had been obtained under duress. The poll tax was abandoned, however, and Parliament thereafter became more than ever determined that the king should not endeavour to supplement the income which he drew from traditional and hereditary rights and land by exceptional taxes except in special circumstances and with their approval. It was to be very many years before the violence and repercussions of the Peasants’ Revolt were to be forgotten.11

  4 Churches, Monks and Friars

  On Sundays the villagers entered the church, dipped their fingers in the stoup of holy water, crossed themselves, then stood in the aisles whispering to each other, occasionally moving across the rush-covered floor of the nave to murmur a greeting to a friend or to share a muttered joke, the voice of the priest rising above their own, the Latin words of the service familiar in their ears, though rarely intelligible, except for the Paternoster and the Ave in which some of them would join. On the walls all around them were paintings, some of them frightening pictures of Judgement Day and Souls in Torment; and at the east end where the priest stood were the benches and pews for the clergy, for the lord and his family and for the parish clerk. There were no seats for the rest of the congregation; and, if a priest gave a sermon, the people in the nave would sit down upon the rushes. Sermons, however, were not given nearly as regularly as conscientious bishops would have liked. There are no pulpits in English churches of a date earlier than the middle of the fourteenth century. Nor was music often heard during ordinary services until the fourteenth century when organs began to be installed. But there was often much loud noise from the congregation. The Knight of La Tour-Landry described a service evidently far from unusual, in which there was such ‘chattering, laughing, jangling and jesting aloud’ that the priest ‘smote his hand on the book to make them hold their peace; but there were some that did not’.1

  Priests were in what were known as Major Orders, but there were also thousands of men in Minor Orders, clerks, accountants, doctors and lawyers. In the Earl of Northumberland’s household, for example, there were no less than eleven upper servants in orders, apart from the family chaplain. These included the surveyor, the almoner, the earl’s secretary and his children’s master of grammar.2 Such men, having been tonsured as all university students and even some grammar schoolboys had to be, were classed as clerics and, having at least enough Latin to read a verse of the Bible, could claim benefit of clergy, which meant, originally, that if charged with a felony they could be tried only in an ecclesiastical court. The Major Orders were divided into two classes, those, lik
e monks, living in seclusion and subject to the regula of a religious order, and known therefore as regular clergy, and those, like priests, living in the world (in seculo) and hence known as the secular clergy. In all there were perhaps as many as 40,000 ordained men in England in the thirteenth century, that is to say, one for about twenty-five or thirty of the adult population.3

  Most priests, if their superiors are to be believed, were neither dutiful nor competent. They were ‘dumb dogs’, Archbishop Stephen Langton asserted; while Archbishop Peckham complained in 1281, ‘The ignorance of the priests casteth the people into the ditch of error. The folly and unlearning of the clergy, who are bidden to instruct men in the Catholic faith, sometimes tendeth rather to mistaken than to sound doctrine.’ Roger Bacon agreed with him: ‘Clerks and country priests recite the Church services, of which they know little or nothing, like brute beasts.’ Although some came from rich and even noble families, a large proportion of priests were of peasant stock and seem to have come to holy orders by way of assisting at services as a boy, by acting as server or ‘holy water clerk’, and then, perhaps, having picked up some skill at reading and writing and a little Latin from some helpful parson, by attending a grammar school. Most of them were poor, despite the glebe land, which was assigned to them by the manor, and the tithes, which, if too strictly demanded, alienated them from their even poorer parishioners. Many were obliged to work on the land as though they were peasants themselves. Others, like the uncouth and lazy fellow in Piers Plowman, went about from village to village ‘singing for silver’, offering such services as they were licensed to perform to any who could pay for them. Those resident in a parish generally lived in small, dark houses little more comfortable than those of the peasantry around them. The annual value of their livings, even in the middle of the fifteenth century, was only about £9, and although this might seem a lot compared with the £3 or so that a peasant with about twenty acres might be able to spend on his family, the priest usually had to find money out of his stipend for service books, the upkeep of the chancel and occasional alms.4

  The reports of diocesan visitations revealed a lamentable situation. These reports were compiled after the bishop’s representatives had been to every parish to gather evidence from clergy and ‘synodsmen’ or sidesmen. They were intended to note faults rather than to record virtues; but the evidence of widespread malpractices which they present seems incontrovertible. In many places priests, like several of their bishops, lived openly with wives and children, despite the stern prohibition of the Lateran Council of 1074 and the many subsequent demands from Rome, Canterbury and diocesan synods. John Peckham, the Franciscan who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1279, felt obliged to rule that priests’ children should not inherit their father’s benefices. Also, in many parishes, the clergy were notorious tavern-haunters. A visitation in Oxfordshire revealed that in nearly a third of the parishes the parson was an absentee, and that in nearly half the church was in need of extensive repairs. In the city of Norwich in 1373 ten clergy were accused of incontinence, one of them with two different women, Beatrice and Juliana, for which he was fined 5s. In Devonshire in 1301 the parishioners of Clyst Honiton reported that the chancel was so ruinous that Mass could not be said at the high altar, that there was no chalice and that ‘all other appurtenances of the church’ were insufficient. Thirty years later, in the same parish, the priest was reported to be unchaste with three different women, one of them the wife of a sidesman. At Dawlish a priest ‘hath kept his concubine for ten years and more, or longer still; and, though often corrected on that account, he incorrigibly persists’. In another parish the clergy spent ‘their time not in offering to God due sacrifice of praise, but rather in gabbling through the service, with frequent interruptions of vain and unprofitable discourse, and unlawful murmurs to each other’. At Marychurch, where the priest was suspected of embezzlement, there was neither pyx nor chalice, and the sidesmen said

  … that the vicar puts all sorts of beasts into the churchyard, whereby it is evilly trodden down and foully defiled. Item, he appropriates the trees in the churchyard that are blown down, and uses them for his own buildings. Item, he causes his malt [for his brewing] to be prepared in the church, and stores his corn and other things therein; whereby his servants, in their exits and their entrances, open the door, and at times of tempest the wind comes in and is wont to [loosen the tiles] … He often absents himself and stays at Moreton-Hampstead, sometimes for fifteen days, sometimes for eight.5

  A visitation carried out in the admittedly rather more than usually disreputable diocese of Hereford in 1397 found only forty-four of 281 parishes well administered. In the remainder priests were accused of fornication with their maidservants or with their parishioners’ wives, of neglect and absenteeism, of allowing their churches to fall into disuse and even into ruins. One rector was charged with threshing his corn in the churchyard, another with drunkenness, yet others with setting themselves up as tradesmen, with lending money at exorbitant rates, with refusing to conduct funerals or baptisms, with forging wills, with selling the Sacrament, with disclosing confessions made under the Sacrament of Penance, with seducing women in church, and even with practising Black Magic.

  Hereford diocese, however, was exceptional; and there were certainly priests enough in the Church who, like Chaucer’s parson, the brother of a ploughman, were ‘rich in holy thought and work, who truly knew Christ’s gospel and could preach it devoutly to parishioners and teach it’.

  Yet, as Chaucer well knew, the virtues of such parsons as these were offset by the only too common priest

  Who set his benefice to hire

  And left his sheep encumbered in the mire

  Or ran to London to earn easy bread

  By singing masses for the wealthy dead.

  The clergy, wrote John Wyclif,

  haunten tavernes out of all mesure and sterin lewid men to dronkenesse, ydelnesse and cursed swerynge and chydynge and fightynge … Thei fallen to [gambling] at tables, chess and hasard, and beten the stretis, and sitten at the taverne til thei hav lost their witt … and suntyme neither have eighe ne tonge ne hond ne foot to helpe hem self for dronkenesse.6

  In the next century there are still more records of parsons being arrested for coining, poaching and even highway robbery.

  Yet, although he appears often to have had scant respect for the priest and to have attended Mass on Sundays and on some holy days more out of habit than piety, the peasant’s whole vision of the world was in turns illuminated and overcast by thoughts of God and the Devil. The friars who came to preach on the village green, filling his mind with dreams of heaven and hell, the images on the walls of the church and the mystery plays which were performed there, stories of the miraculous properties of the nearby shrine (the one place outside the village which he was ever likely to see unless he went to a fair), the holy wells which had once been under the protection of pagan gods, the legends in which Christian and heathen heroes and villains were inextricably intertwined, the superstitious beliefs handed down to him – the magical qualities of consecrated bread which, placed beside his hives, would protect his bees, or if sprinkled over cabbage would keep off caterpillars – all these helped to make him aware of other worlds in which he would be rewarded or punished according to his deserts, worlds far beyond his village which was itself dominated by the church and by the manor which the Church as an institution taught him to respect.

  He had reason enough to find the ministers of the Church oppressive. First of all there were tithes to pay, and these worked out at about 10 per cent of a parishioner’s gross revenue; there were ‘great tithes’ on crops and cattle and ‘lesser tithes’ on all manner of other produce and possessions. The Vicar of Tadcaster in Yorkshire in 1290 was entitled to receive ‘lesser tithes’ on ‘wool, flax, pot-herbs, leeks, apples, cheese, butter, milk, eggs, calves, chicken, geese, hens, sucking-pigs, bees and honey’. Then there were Mass pennies to be contributed and occasional Peter’s pence, ligh
t-scot and church-scot and, most resented of all, the mortuary which could entail handing over to the Church the head of the family’s second best beast upon his death, the best having already been appropriated by the lord of the manor as heriot.

  These impositions led to widespread dislike of the clergy. In the early sixteenth century a Spanish envoy reported home from London, ‘Nearly all the people here hate the priests.’ And he might well have said the same a hundred years earlier. It was considered bad luck to meet a priest in the road, and passers-by were advised that if they did so they should ‘leave him on their left hand’. ‘Some men,’ it was said, ‘had [rather] to mete with a [toad] or a frogge in the way than with … any man of Holy Church.’7

  Much as the clergy as a whole were distrusted, however, and much as their impositions were resented, the church was accepted as the natural centre of village life – even though the peasantry rarely attended service there except on Sundays and on certain holy days – and in many parishes sabbath-breaking was considered a serious offence to be punished with both fines and beating. In 1450 in the diocese of Durham a man working at a mill ‘on the day of the Lord’s Ascension’ was sentenced ‘to go before the procession on three Sundays in his shirt and drawers, after the fashion of a penitent’, and was warned that a second offence would entail a fine of 10s. The next year two women caught washing linen on St Mary Magdalene’s day were sentenced to be beaten ‘with a hank of linen yarn’ and a man who mowed his meadow on St Oswald’s day was also sentenced to be beaten and to be publicly paraded about the village with a bundle of hay in his hands.