CHAPTER V
England in the Fifteenth Century
1399–1509

I. KINGS

HENRY IV, having reached the throne, found himself challenged by revolt. In Wales Owain Glyn Dwr overthrew the English domination for a moment (1401–08), but the future Henry V, now Prince of Wales, overcame him with dashing strategy; and Owen Glendower, after leading a hunted life for eight years in Welsh fastnesses and crags, died a few hours after receiving full pardon from his gallant conqueror. Synchronizing his rebellion with Glendower’s, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, led some nobles of the north into an uprising against a king unable to keep all the promises he had made to them for their aid in deposing Richard II. The Earl’s reckless son Harry “Hotspur” (unwarrantably lovable in Shakespeare) led a hesitant and inadequate force against the King at Shrewsbury (1403); there the youth died in foolish heroism, Henry IV fought manfully in the front ranks, and his gay wastrel son, “Prince Hal,” displayed the bravery that would win Agincourt and France. These and other troubles left Henry little time or zest for statesmanship; his revenues limped behind his expenditures; he quarreled tactlessly with Parliament, and ended his reign amid fiscal chaos and the personal tribulations of leprosy, prolapse of the rectum, and venereal disease.¹ “He departed to God,” says Holinshed, “in the year of his age forty-six... in great perplexity and little pleasure.”²

In tradition and Shakespeare Henry V had lived a free and frolicsome youth, and had even conspired to seize the throne from a father incapacitated by illness but tenacious of power. Contemporary chroniclers merely hint at his revels, but assure us that after his accession “he was changed into another man, studying to be honest, grave, and modest.”³ He who had romped with topers and tarts now dedicated himself to leading a united Christendom against the advancing Turks—adding, however, that he must first conquer France. He accomplished his proximate aim with astonishing speed, and for a precarious moment an English king sat on the throne of France. German princes sent him homage, and thought of making him emperor.⁴ He rivaled Caesar briefly in the planning of campaigns, the provisioning of his armies, the affection of his troops, and in exposing himself in all battles and weathers.

Suddenly, still a youth of thirty-five, he died of fever at Bois-de-Vincennes (1422).

His death saved France, and almost ruined England. His popularity might have persuaded the taxpayers to rescue the government from bankruptcy; but his son Henry VI was, at accession, only nine months old, and a disgraceful sequence of corrupt regents and inept generals sank the treasury into irredeemable debt. The new ruler never rose to royal stature; he was a delicate and studious neurasthenic who loved religion and books, and shuddered at the thought of war; the English mourned that they had lost a king and won a saint. In 1452, imitating Charles VI of France, Henry VI went mad. A year later his ministers signed a peace acknowledging England’s defeat in the Hundred Years’ War.

Richard, Duke of York, governed for two years as Protector; in a cloudylucid interval Henry dismissed him (1454); the angry Duke claimed the throne through descent from Edward III; he branded the Lancastrian kings as usurpers, and joined Salisbury, Warwick, and other barons in those Wars of the Roses—Lancastrian red and Yorkist white—which through thirty-one years (1454–85) pitted noble against noble in the indefatigable suicide of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, and left England impoverished and desolate. Soldiers demobilized by unwonted peace, and loath to resume the chores of peasantry, enlisted on either side, plundered the villages and towns, and murdered without qualm all who stood in their way. The Duke of York was killed in battle at Goldsmith’s Wakefield (1460), but his son Edward, Earl of March, carried on the war remorselessly, slaughtering all captives, with or without pedigree; while Margaret of Anjou, the virile queen of the gentle Henry, led the Lancastrian resistance with unblushing ferocity. March won at Towton (1461), ended the Lancastrian dynasty, and became, as Edward IV, the first Yorkist king.

But the man who really ruled England for the next six years was Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. Head of a rich and numerous clan, possessed of a dominating and yet engaging personality, as subtle in statesmanship as he was brilliant in war, “Warwick the Kingmaker” had fathered the victory at Towton, and had raised Edward to the throne. The King, resting from strife, dedicated himself to women, while Warwick governed so well that all England south of the Tyne and east of the Severn (for Margaret was still fighting) honored him as in all but name the king. When Edward rebelled against the reality and turned against him, Warwick joined Margaret, drove Edward from England, restored Henry VI to nominal power (1470), and ruled again. But Edward organized an army with Burgundian aid, crossed to Hull, defeated and slew Warwick at Barnet, defeated Margaret at Tewkesbury (1471), had Henry VI murdered in the tower, and lived happily ever afterward.

He was still only thirty-one. Comines describes him as “one of the handsomest men of his age,” who “took no delight in anything but ladies, dancing, entertainment, and the chase.”⁵ He replenished his treasury by confiscating the estates of the Nevilles, and by accepting from Louis XI, as bribes to peace, 125,000 crowns and a promise of 50,000 more per year.⁶ So eased, he could ignore a Parliament whose only use to him would have been to vote him funds. Feeling himself secure, he surrendered himself again to luxury and indolence, wore himself out lovingly, grew fat and jolly, and died at forty-one in the amplitude of his person and his power (1483).

He left two sons: the twelve-year-old Edward V, and Richard, Duke of York, aged nine. Their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had for the past six years served the state as chief minister, and with such industry, piety, and skill that when he made himself regent England accepted him without protest, despite his “ill-featured limbs, crooked back, hard-favored visage, and left shoulder much higher than his right.”⁷ Whether through the intoxication of power, or a just suspicion of conspiracies to unseat him, Richard imprisoned several notables, and executed one. On July 6, 1483, he had himself crowned as Richard III, and on July 15 the two young princes were murdered in the Tower—no one knows by whom. Once again the nobility rose in revolt, this time led by Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. When their modest forces met the King’s far larger army on Bosworth Field (1485), most of Richard’s soldiers refused to fight; and—lacking both a kingdom and a horse—he died in a desperate charge. The Yorkist dynasty ended; the Earl of Richmond, as Henry VII, began the Tudor line that would close with Elizabeth.

Under the blows of necessity Henry developed the virtues and vices that seemed to him demanded by his place. Holbein pictured him in a Whitehall fresco: tall, slender, beardless, pensive, humane, hardly revealing the subtle, secret calculation, the cold, stern pride, the flexible but patiently obdurate will that brought England from its destitute disintegration under the sixth Henry to its wealth and concentrated power under the eighth. He loved “the felicity of full coffers,” says Bacon,⁸ because he knew their persuasiveness in politics. He taxed the nation ingeniously, bled the rich with “benevolences” or forced gifts, made avid use of fines to feed his treasury and discourage crime, and winked as judges fitted the fine not to the offense but to the purse. He was the first English king since 1216 who kept his expenses within his income, and his charities and generosities mitigated his parsimony. He devoted himself conscientiously to administration, and skimped his pleasures to complete his toil. His life was darkened with perennial suspicion, not without cause; he trusted no one, concealed his purposes, and by fair means or dubious he achieved his ends. He established the Court of Star Chamber to try, in secret sessions, obstreperous nobles too powerful to fear local judges or juries; and year by year he brought the ruined aristocracy and the frightened prelacy into subordination to the monarchy. Strong individuals resented the decline of liberty and the desuetude of Parliament; but peasants forgave much in a king who disciplined their lords, and manufacturers and merchants thanked him for his wise promotion of industry and trade. He had found an England in feudal anarchy, a government too poor and disreputable to win obedience or loyalty; he left to Henry VIII a state respected, orderly, solvent, united, and at peace.

II. THE GROWTH OF ENGLISH WEALTH

Apparently nothing had been gained by the Great Revolt of 1381. Many servile dues were still exacted, and as late as 1537 the House of Lords rejected a bill for the final manumission of all serfs.⁹ The enclosure of “commons” was accelerated; thousands of displaced serfs became propertyless proletarians in the towns; the sheep, said Thomas More, were eating up the peasantry.¹⁰ In some ways the movement was good: lands approaching exhaustion were renitrogenated by the grazing sheep, and by 1500 only 1 per cent of the population were serfs. A class of yeomen grew, tilling their own land, and gradually giving to the English commoner the sturdy independent character that would later forge the Commonwealth and build an unwritten constitution of unprecedented liberty.

Feudalism became unprofitable as industry and commerce spread into a national and money economy bound up with foreign trade. When the serf produced for his lord he had scant motive for expansion or enterprise; when the free peasant and the merchant could sell their product in the open market the lust for gain quickened the economic pulse of the nation; the villages sent more food to the towns, the towns produced more goods to pay for it, and the exchange of surpluses overflowed the old municipal limits and guild restrictions to cover England and reach out beyond the sea.

Some guilds became “merchant companies,” licensed by the King to sell English products abroad. Whereas in the fourteenth century most English trade had been carried in Italian vessels, the British now built their own ships, and sent them into the North Sea, the coastal Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. The Genoese and Hanseatic merchants resented these newcomers, and fought them with embargoes and piracy; but Henry VII, convinced that the development of England required foreign trade, took English shipping under governmental protection, and arranged with other nations commercial agreements that established maritime order and peace. By 1500 the “merchant adventurers” of England ruled the trade of the North Sea. With an eye to commerce with China and Japan, the farseeing King commissioner] the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, then living in Bristol as John Cabot, to seek a northern passage across the Atlantic (1497). Cabot had to be content with discovering Newfoundland and, in a second voyage (1498), exploring the coast from Labrador to Delaware; he died in that year, and his son Sebastian passed into the service of Spain. Probably neither the sailor nor his King realized that these expeditions inaugurated British imperialism, and opened to English trade and colonists a region that would in time be England’s strength and salvation.

Meanwhile protective tariffs nourished national industry; economic order reduced the rate of interest sometimes to as low as 5 per cent; and governmental decrees rigorously regulated wages and the conditions of labor. A statute of Henry VII (1495) ruled

However, the worker rested and drank on Sundays, and on twenty-four additional holidays in the year. “Fair prices” were set by the state for many commodities, and we hear of arrests for exceeding these figures. Real wages, in relation to prices, were apparently higher in the late fifteenth century than in the early nineteenth.¹²

The revolts of English labor in this age stressed political rights as well as economic wrongs. Semi-communistic propaganda continued in almost every year, and workingmen were repeatedly reminded that “you be made of the same mold and metal that the gentles be made of; why then should they sport and play, and you labor and toil?—why should they have so much of the prosperity and treasure of this world, and ye so little?”¹³ Riots against enclosures of common lands were numerous, and there were periodic conflicts between merchants and artisans; but we hear too of agitations for municipal democracy, for the representation of labor in Parliament, and for a reduction of taxes.¹⁴

In June 1450, a large and disciplined force of peasants and town laborers marched upon London and camped at Blackheath. Their leader, Jack Cade, presented their grievances in an orderly document. “All the common people, what for taxes and tallages and other oppressions, might not live by their handiwork and husbandry.” ¹⁵ The Statute of Labourers should be repealed, and a new ministry should be formed. The government accused Cade of advocating communism.* ¹⁶ The troops of Henry VI, and the retainers of certain nobles, met the rebel army at Sevenoaks (June 18, 1450) To the surprise of all, the rebels won, and poured into London. To appease them the King’s Council ordered the arrest of Lord Saye and William Crowmer, officials especially hated for their exactions and tyranny. On July 4 they were surrendered to the mob that besieged the Tower; they were tried by the rebels, refused to plead, and were beheaded. According to Holinshed the two heads were raised on pikes and carried through the streets in joyous procession; every now and then their mouths were knocked together in a bloody kiss.¹⁷ The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Winchester negotiated a peace, granting some demands and offering amnesty. The rebels agreed and dispersed. Jack Cade, however, attacked the castle of Queens-borough in Sheppey; the government outlawed him, and on July 12 he was mortally wounded while resisting arrest. Eight accomplices were condemned to death; the rest were pardoned by the King, “to the great rejoicing of all his subjects.”¹⁸

III. MORALS AND MANNERS

The Venetian ambassador, about 1500, reported to his government:

The English might have answered that most of this description, mutatis mutandis, would fit all peoples. Assuredly they were a vigorous stock, in body, character, and speech. They swore so heartily that even Joan of Arc regularly called them Goddams. The women too were plainspoken, talking of matters physiological and genetic with a freedom that might shock the sophisticates of today.²⁰ Humor was as coarse and profane as speech. Manners were rough, even in the aristocracy, and had to be trained and tamed by a rigid code of ceremony. The lusty spirit that would agitate the Elizabethans was already formed, in the fifteenth century, out of a life of danger, violence, and insolence. Every man had to be his own policeman, ready to meet blow with blow and, at need, kill with a steady stomach. These same powerful animals could be generous, chivalrous, and, on occasion, even tender. Tough warriors wept when Sir John Chandos, the almost “parfit knight,” died; and Margaret Paston’s letter to her sick husband (1443) shows how timeless and raceless love can be. We should add, however, that this same lady almost broke the head of her daughter for refusing to marry the parental choice.²¹

Girls were brought up in protective demureness and modesty, for men were beasts of prey, and virginity was an economic asset in the marital mart. Marriage was an incident in the transfer of property. Girls could legally marry at twelve, boys at fourteen, even without their parents’ consent; but in the upper classes, to accelerate property transactions, betrothals were arranged by the parents soon after the children reached the age of seven. Since love marriages were exceptional, and divorce was forbidden, adultery was popular, especially in the aristocracy. “There reigned abundantly,” says Holinshed, “the filthie sin of lechery and fornication, with abominable adulteries, speciallie in the king.”²² Edward IV, after sampling many loves, chose Jane Shore as his favorite concubine. She served him with wanton fidelity, and proved a kind friend at court to many a petitioner. When Edward died, Richard III, possibly to parade his brother’s vices and disguise his own, forced her to march through London streets in the white robe of a public penitent. She lived to a destitute old age, despised and rejected by those whom she had helped.²³

Never in known history had Englishmen (now so law-abiding) been so lawless. A hundred years of war had made men brutal and reckless; nobles returning from France continued to fight in England, and employed demobilized soldiers in their feuds. Aristocrats shared with tradesmen a greed for money that overrode all morality. Petty thefts were innumerable. Merchants sold shoddy goods and used false weights; at one time frauds in the quality and quantity of exports almost ruined England’s foreign trade.²⁴ Commerce on the seas was spiced with piracy. Bribery was almost universal: judges could scarcely judge without “gifts”; juries were paid to be friendly to plaintiff or defendant or both; tax collectors were “greased” to let exemptions slip readily from their palms; recruiting officers, like Shakespeare’s Falstaff, could be induced to overlook a town;²⁵ an English army invading France was bought off by the enemy.²⁶ Men were as mad for money then as now, and poets like Chaucer, having denounced greed, practiced it. The moral structure of society might have collapsed had not its foundations been mortised in the simple life of common men and women, who, while their betters plotted the wars and mischief of the time, maintained the home and carried on the race.

All classes except merchants and prolétaires lived in the country for as much of the year as they might. Castles, being no longer defensible since the development of cannon, were slowly evolving into manor houses. Brick replaced stone, but modest houses were still built of wood and mud. The central hall, once used for all purposes, lost its old size and splendor, and shrank into a vestibule opening into a large living room, some small rooms, and a “drawte chamber” or (with) drawing room for intimate converse. Tapestries hung on rich men’s walls, and windows—sometimes of stained glass—brightened the once dark interior. The smoke of the hearth, which formerly had escaped through window, door, and roof, was now gathered into a chimney, and a massive fireplace dignified the living room. Ceilings might be timbered, floors might be tiled; carpets were still rare. If we may trust the literary rather than accurate Erasmus,

Beds were sumptuous with carving, flowered coverlet, and canopy. The dining table, in comfortable homes, was a giant masterpiece of carved walnut or oak. Near it, or in the hall, stood a cupboard, sideboard, or dresser where table plate was “dressed”—i.e., arranged for display or ornament. The “parler”—a room for talking—was preferred for meals.

To save oil, the main meals were taken in daylight: “dinner” at ten in the morning, “supper” at five in the afternoon. Men wore their hats at table, to keep their long hair from getting into the food. Forks were reserved for special purposes, like serving salad or toasting cheese; their English use in the modern manner first appears in 1463.²⁸ The knife was supplied by the guest, who carried it in a short sheath attached to his girdle. Etiquette required that food should be brought to the mouth with the fingers. As hand kerchiefs were not in use till the middle of the sixteenth century, men wer requested to blow their noses with the hand that held the knife rather than with that which conveyed the food.²⁹ Napkins were unknown, and diners were warned not to clean their teeth on the tablecloth.³⁰ Meals were heavy; the ordinary dinner of a man of rank included fifteen or twenty dishes. Great lords kept great tables, feeding a hundred retainers, visitors, and servants daily; Warwick the Kingmaker used six oxen a day for his table, and sometimes fed 500 guests. Meat was the national food; vegetables were scarce or shunned. Beer and ale were the national drinks; wine was not as plentiful or popular as in France or Italy, but a gallon of beer per day was the usual allowance per person, even for nuns. The English, said Sir John Fortescue (c. 1470), “drink no water, unless at certain times upon religious score, or by way of doing penance.” ³¹

Dress was splendid in the aristocracy. Simple men wore a plain gown or hood, or a short tunic convenient for work; moneyed men liked furred and feathered hats, flowered robes, or fancy jackets bulging at the sleeves, and tight high hose which, Chaucer’s parson complained, “shewen... the horrible swollen members, that seemeth .... hernia, and eke the buttocks... as it were the hindre part of a she-ape in the fulle of the moon.” Chaucer himself when a page, had a flaming costume with one hose red and the other black The long pointed shoes of the fourteenth century disappeared in the fifteenth, and shoes became rounded or broad at the toe. As for “the outrageous array of wommen, God wot that though the visages of somme of them seem ful chaste and debonaire, yet notifie they,” by “the horrible disordinate scantinesse” of their dress, their “likerousnesse” (lecherousness) “and pride.”³² However, the pictures that have come down to us show the alluring sex tightly encased in a plethora of garments from ears to feet.

Amusements ranged from checkers and chess, backgammon and dice, to fishing and hunting, archery and jousts. Playing cards reached England toward the end of the fifteenth century; today they still dress their kings and queens in the fashion of that time. Dancing and music were as popular as gambling; nearly every Englishman took part in choral song; Henry V rivaled John Dunstable among the outstanding composers of the day; and English singers were acclaimed on the Continent. Men played tennis, handball, football, bowls, quoits; they wrestled and boxed, set cocks to fighting, baited bears and bulls. Crowds gathered to see acrobats and ropewalkers perform the feats that amused antiquity and amaze modernity. Kings and nobles kept jugglers, jesters, and buffoons; and a Lord of Misrule, appointed by the king or queen, superintended the sports and revels of Christmastide. Women moved freely among men everywhere: drank in taverns, rode to the hounds, hunted with falcons, and distracted the spectators from the combatants at tournaments; it was they who, led by the queen, judged the jousters and awarded the golden crown.

Travel was still travail, but nobody seemed to stay home—a bad mark for monogamy. Roads were mud or dust, and robbers made no distinction of race, sex, class, or creed. Inns were picturesque and dirty, stocked with roaches, rats, and fleas. Nearly every one of them had a Doll Tearsheet for sale, and virtue could hardly find a bed. The poor went on foot, the well-to-do on horseback, usually in armed companies; the very rich used newfangled horse-drawn coaches—reputedly invented by a fifteenth-century Hungarian in the village of Kocz. Lordly carriages were carved and painted and gilded, cushioned and curtained and carpeted; even so they were less comfortable than camels, and as undulant as a fishing smack. Ships were no better than in antiquity, or worse; that which brought King John from Bordeaux to London in 1357 took twelve days.

Crime flourished. Towns were too poor to have any but unpaid volunteer police; but all males were required to join in the “hue and cry” after a fleeing criminal. Deterrents were sought in severe penalties for the few who were caught; burglary, larceny, arson, and sacrilege, as well as murder and treason, were punished with hanging on any convenient tree, and the corpse was left as a warning to others and a feast for crows. The practice of torture-both on the accused and on witnesses—developed under Edward IV, and continued for 200 years.³³ Lawyers abounded.

Perhaps we judge the age too harshly, forgetting the barbarities of our enlightened century. Sir John Fortescue, Chief Justice under Henry VI, thought more highly of his time, and wrote in its honor two works once renowned. In a dialogue, De laudibus legum Angliae, he praised the laws of England, gloried in the right of trial by jury, mourned the use of torture, and, like a thousand philosophers, warned princes to make themselves the law-abiding servants of the people. In Monarchia, or Governance of England, he compared France and England patriotically: in France men could be condemned without public trial, the States-General was rarely called, the King levied taxes on necessities like salt and wine. After so exalting his country, Sir John concluded that all governments should be subject to the pope, usque ad pedum oscula—“even to kissing his feet.” ³⁴

IV. THE LOLLARDS

Archbishop Arundel, in 1407, reaffirmed the supremacy of canon or ecclesiastical law over all secular legislation, and condemned as a major heresy any rejection of a papal decree.³⁵ Recovering from Wyclif, the Church grew stronger in fifteenth-century England, and rising wealth overflowed into its coffers. “Chantries” were now a frequent form of contribution:-persons expecting death paid for the building of a chapel and for the chanting of Masses to expedite their souls into paradise. As some twenty bishops and twenty-six abbots sat in the House of Lords with only forty-seven laymen, the Church controlled the major chamber of Parliament. To offset this, Henry VII—and later Henry VIII—insisted on the right of the kings to nominate the bishops and abbots of England from the eligible clergy; and this dependence of the hierarchy on the monarchy eased the clerical surrender to Henry VIII’s assertion of royal supremacy over the English Church.

Meanwhile Wyclif’s Poor Preachers continued to spread their anticlerical ideas. As early as 1382 a monastic chronicler reported, with frightened exaggeration, that “they multiplied exceedingly, like budding plants, and filled the whole realm.... You could scarce meet two men on the road but that one of them was a disciple of Wyclif.” ³⁶ They found their readiest audience among the industrial workers, especially the weavers of Norfolk. In 1395 the Lollards felt strong enough to present to Parliament a bold statement of their principles. They opposed clerical celibacy, transubstantiation, image worship, pilgrimages, prayers for the dead, the wealth and endowment of the Church, the employment of ecclesiastics in state offices, the necessity of confession to priests, the ceremonies of exorcism, and the worship of the saints. In other pronouncements they recommended that all should read the Bible frequently, and should follow its precepts as superior to the decrees of the Church. They denounced war as unchristian, and luxury as immoral; they called for sumptuary laws that would compel a return to simple foods and dress; they abhorred oaths, and substituted for them such phrases as “I am sure,” or “It is sooth”—i.e., truth; already the Puritan mind and view were taking form in Britain.³⁷ A few preachers mingled socialism with their religion, but most of them refrained from attacking private property, and sought the support of knights and gentry as well as of peasants and prolétaires.

Nevertheless the upper classes could not forget their narrow escape from social revolution in 1381, and the Church found in them a new readiness to protect her as a stabilizing force in the community. Richard II threatened with arrest the representatives of the Lollards in Parliament, and reduced them to silence. In 1397 the English bishops petitioned the King for the execution of impenitent heretics “as in other realms subject to the Christian religion,”³⁸ but Richard was loath to go to such lengths. In 1401, however, Henry IV and his Parliament issued the famous statute De haeretico comburendo: all persons declared by an ecclesiastical court to be persistent heretics were to be burned, and all heretical books were to be destroyed. In that same year William Sawtrey, a Lollard priest, was burned at the stake. Other Lollards were arrested, recanted, and were treated leniently. In 1406 the Prince of Wales presented to Henry IV a petition alleging that the propaganda of the Lollards, and their attacks on monastic property, threatened the whole existing fabric of society. The King ordered a more vigorous prosecution of the heretics, but the absorption of the bishops in the politics of the Papal Schism temporarily deflected their energy from the hunt. In 1410 John Badby, a Lollard tailor, was condemned by the Church, and was burned in Smithfield Market. Before the faggots were lighted “Prince Hal” pleaded with Badby to recant, and offered him life and money; Badby refused, and mounted the pyre to his death.³⁹

The Prince came to the throne in 1413 as Henry V, and gave his full support to the policy of suppression. One of his personal friends was Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, whom some of Shakespeare’s audience later identified with Falstaff.⁴⁰ Oldcastle had served the nation well in the field, but he tolerated and protected Lollard preachers on his lands in Herefordshire and Kent. Thrice the bishops summoned him to trial; thrice he refused to come; he yielded, however, to a writ from the King, and appeared before the bishops (1413) in that chapter house of St. Paul’s where Wyclif had stood trial thirty-six years before. He affirmed his sincere Christianity, but would not reject the Lollard views on confession or the Eucharist. He was condemned as a heretic, and was confined in the Tower of London; forty days’ grace was allowed him in the hope that he would recant; instead he escaped. At the news the Lollards around London rose in revolt, and tried to seize the King (1414). The attempt failed, and some leaders were caught and hanged. Oldcastle hid for three years in the mountains of Herefordshire and Wales; finally he was captured, hanged as a traitor, and then burned as a heretic (1417), state and Church both demanding their due.

As compared with other persecutions, that of Lollardry was almost moderate; the executions for heresy numbered eleven between 1400 and 1485.⁴¹ We hear of several Lollard congregations surviving till 1521; as late as 1518 Thomas Man, who claimed to have converted 700 to Lollardry, suffered death at the stake; and six more were burned in 1521.⁴² When Henry VIII divorced England from Rome, and the nation accepted the change without revolution, the Lollards might have claimed that in some measure they had prepared the way.

In 1450 Reginald Pecock, Bishop of Chichester, published a book which he called, in the whimsical fashion of the times, Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy. It was avowedly a refutation of Lollardry, and assumed a vigorous anticlericalism among the people. It proposed to check these ideas not by imprisonment at the stake, but solely by an appeal to reason. The enthusiastic bishop reasoned so much that he fell in love with reason and in danger of heresy; he found himself refuting by reason some Lollard arguments from Scripture. In a Treatise on Faith he definitely placed reason above the Bible as a test of truth—a position that Europe would take 200 years to regain. For good measure the irrepressible Repressor added that the Fathers of the Church were not always to be trusted; that Aristotle was not an unquestionable authority; that the Apostles had had no hand in the Apostles’ Creed; and that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery.⁴³ The English bishops hailed the proud Pecock before their court (1457), and gave him a choice between recanting or burning. He disliked burning, read a public abjuration, was deposed from his see, and was segregated in Thorney Abbey to the end of his days (1460).

V. ENGLISH ART: 1300–1509

Despite anticlericalism and heresy, religion was still sufficiently fervent and opulent to raise English architecture to a minor peak of excellence. The growth of commerce and the spoils of war financed cathedrals, castles, and palaces, and glorified Oxford and Cambridge with the fairest homes ever built for learning. From the marble of Purbeck and the alabaster of Nottingham to the forests of Sherwood and the brick of any shire, the building materials of England were transformed into noble towers and lordly spires, and wooden ceilings almost as strong and handsome as Gothic stone vaults. The ugly tie beam that had crossed obtrusively from wall to wall was replaced by hammer-beam projections supporting with massive shoulders of oak the soaring arch above; in this manner some of England’s finest churches spanned their naves. So Selby Cathedral received an oak ceiling of ribs and bosses rivaling the lierne and fan designs that vaulted the abbey church at Bath, the choir at Ely, and the south transept of Gloucester with complex webs of stone.

Patterns in window tracery, wall paneling, and choir screens gave their names to successive architectural styles, overlapping in time and often mingled in one edifice. Geometrical Decorated Gothic (c. 1250–c. 1315) used Euclidean forms, as in Exeter Cathedral. Curvilinear Decorated Gothic (c. 1315–c. 1380) abandoned definite figures for freely flowing lines that anticipated with restraint the Flamboyant style of prance, as in the south rose window at Lincoln. Perpendicular Gothic (c. 1330–c. 1530) stressed horizontal and vertical lines within the usual Gothic ogive, as in Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey. The intense colors of thirteenth-century stained glass were now softened with lighter tints, or with silver stain or pale grisaille; and in these windows the pageant of dying chivalry competed with the legends of Christianity to let Gothic art reach its final splendor and decline.

Seldom has England known such an ecstasy of construction. Three centuries (1376–1517) labored to build the present nave of Westminster Abbey; in the long gamut of those years we may weakly sense the toil of mind and arm that went to make an unrivaled mausoleum for England’s best-behaved geniuses. Only less impressive was the reconstruction of Windsor: there Edward III rebuilt on a massive scale the great Round Tower (1344), and Edward IV began (1473) St. George’s Chapel, with its lovely choir stalls, fan vault, and stained glass. Alan de Walsingham designed in Curvilinear Gothic an exquisite Lady Chapel and “lantern” tower for Ely. Gloucester Cathedral received a central tower, a choir vault, a gorgeous east window, and spacious cloisters whose fan vaults are among the wonders of England. Winchester extended its immense nave, and dressed its new front in Perpendicular. Coventry built in that manner the cathedral that saved only its stately spire in the second World War. Peterborough raised its dizzy fan vault; York Minster completed its nave, west towers, and choir screen. Towers were the crowning glory of the age, ennobling Merton and Magdalen colleges at Oxford, Fountains Abbey, Canterbury, Glastonbury, Derby, Taunton, and a hundred other shrines. William of Wykeham used Perpendicular in designing New College, Oxford; William of Waynflete, another nonagenarian, followed suit in the Great Quadrangle at Eton; and Kings College, Cambridge, capped the age with a chapel whose windows, vault, and choir stalls might reconcile Caliban to education, and Timon of Athens to prayer.

There was a secular and matter-of-fact spirit in Perpendicular Gothic that perfectly suited the civic architecture of colleges, castles, fortresses, guild and city halls. It was in this style that the earls of Warwick, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, raised their famous castle near Leamington. The Guildhall of London, fane of the capital’s mercantile pride, was built in 1411-35, burned down in 1666, was rebuilt by Christopher Wren, and received in 1866 the new interior that succumbed to bombs in the second World War. Even the town shops took on, in their mullioned windows, a Perpendicular pattern that conspires with carved lintels, cornices, and projecting balconies to bewitch us with the charm of a departing glory.

English sculpture maintained in this age its reputation for mediocrity. The statuary made for church façades, as at Lincoln and Exeter, fell far short of the architecture it was intended to adorn. The great altar screens in Westminster Cathedral and St. Alban’s Abbey served as matrices for statues, but these are of too modest merit to add to the burden of our tale. The best sculpture was on funerary monuments. Fine figures were carved, usually in alabaster, of Edward in Gloucester Cathedral, of Dame Eleanor Percy in Beverly Minster, of Henry IV and Queen Joan at Canterbury, of Richard Beauchamp at Warwick. English sculptors were at their best in representing the flowers and foliage of their verdant land. Good carving was done in wood: the choir stalls of Winchester, Ely, Gloucester, Lincoln, Norwich stop the breath with their laborious beauty.

Painting was still a minor art in England, lagging far behind contemporary work in Flanders and France. Illumination remained a favorite devotion; Edward III paid £66 ($6,600?) for an illuminated volume of romances,⁴⁴ and Robert of Ormsby presented to Norwich Cathedral an illuminated psalter which the Bodleian Library ranks as “the finest English manuscript” in its collections. After 1450 the art of the miniature declined with the rise of mural and panel painting, and in the sixteenth century it faded out before the novel miracle of print.

VI. CAXTON AND MALORY

At some unknown date in the fifteenth century a now nameless author produced the most famous of English morality plays. Everyman is an allegory whose characters are unprepossessing abstractions: Knowledge, Beauty, Five-Wits, Discretion, Strength, Goods, Good Deeds, Fellowship, Kindred, Confession, Death, Everyman, and God. In the prologue God complains that His commandments are ignored by nine men out of ten six days out of seven, and sends Death to remind the terrestrials that they must soon come to Him and give an account of their doings. In the space of a line Death descends from heaven to earth, finds Everyman meditating earnestly on women and gold, and bids him come into eternity. Everyman pleads unprepared-ness, asks for an extension of time, offers a thousand-pound bribe; but Death grants him only one mitigation—to be accompanied into eternity by some chosen friend. Everyman begs Fellowship to join him in the great adventure, but Fellowship excuses himself bravely:

Everyman appeals to Kindred, his cousin, who rejects the invitation because “I have the cramp in my toe.” Everyman calls upon Goods to aid him; but Goods has been so firmly locked away that he cannot be freed to render any help. At last Everyman entreats Good Deeds; she is pleased that he has not quite forgotten her; she introduces him to Knowledge, who leads him to Confession, who shrives him clean. Then Good Deeds descends with Everyman into his grave, and angelic songs welcome the purified sinner into paradise.

The author almost, but not quite, triumphed over an ungainly dramatic form. The personification of a quality can never qualify as a person, for every man is an irritatingly complex contradiction, unique except when part of a crowd; and great art must portray the general through the unique, as through Hamlet or Quixote, Oedipus or Panurge. Experiment and ingenuity would need another century to transform the dull morality play into the living Elizabethan drama of infinitely variable man.

The great literary event in fifteenth-century England was the establishment of its first printing press. Born in Kent, William Caxton migrated to Bruges as a merchant. In his leisure he translated a collection of French romances. His friends asked for copies, which he made himself; but his hand, he tells us, became “weary and not steadfast with much writing,” and his eyes were “dimed with overmuch lokying on the whit paper.”⁴⁶ On his visits to Cologne, he may have seen the printing press set up there (1466) by Ulrich Zell, who had learned the new technique in Mainz. In 1471 Colard Mansion organized a printing shop in Bruges, and Caxton resorted to it as a means of multiplying copies of his translation. In 1476 he returned to England, and a year later he installed at Westminster the fonts—perhaps the presses—that he had brought from Bruges. He was already fifty-five, and only fifteen years were left him; but in that period he printed ninety-eight books, several of them translated by himself from the Latin or the French. His choice of titles, and the quaint and charming style of his prefaces, laid a lasting mark on English literature. When he died (1491) his Alsatian associate, Wynkyn de Worde, carried on the revolution.

In 1485 Caxton edited and published one of the most lovable masterpieces of English prose—The Noble Histories of King Arthur and of Certain of His Knights. Its strange author had died, probably in prison, some sixteen years before. Sir Thomas Malory, in the Hundred Years’ War, served in the retinue of Richard de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, and represented Warwick in the Parliament of 1445. Lonesome for the license of war, he broke into the home of Hugh Smyth, raped Hugh’s wife, extorted a hundred shillings from Margaret Kyng and William Hales, broke again into Hugh Smyth’s house, and again raped the wife. He stole seven cows, two calves, and 335 sheep, twice looted the Cistercian Abbey at Coombe, and was twice clapped into jail. It seems incredible that such a man should have written that tender swan song of English chivalry which we now call Le Morte d’Arthur; but after a century of dispute it is agreed that these delightful romances were the product of Sir Thomas Malory’s incarcerated years.⁴⁷

He took most of the stories from the French forms of the Arthurian legends, arranged them in tolerable sequence, and phrased them in a style of wistful, feminine charm. To an aristocracy losing chivalry in the brutalities and treacheries of war, he appealed for a return to the high standards of Arthur’s knights, forgetting their transgressions and his own. Arthur, after outgrowing fornication and incest, settles down with his pretty but venturesome Guinevere, governs England—indeed, all Europe—from his capital a Camelot (Winchester), and requires the 150 knights of his Round Table t pledge themselves

Love and war are the mingled themes of a book resounding with the combats of incomparable chevaliers for dames and damosels beyond compare. Tristram and Lancelot cuckold their kings, but are the soul of honor and bravery. Encountering each other armored, helmeted, and visored, and hence with their identities concealed, they fight for four hours, until their swords are incarnadined and dull.

What a leap it is from this airy realm, in which no one ever worked for a living, and all women were “gentlewomen,” to the real matter-of-fact world of the Paston Letters, those living missives that bound a scattered family together in affection and finance in the England of the fifteenth century! Here is John Paston, who practices law in London or on circuit while Margaret rears their children and manages his property at Norwich; he is all business, stern, stingy, competent; she is all submission, a humble, able, timid wife, who trembles at the thought that she has offended him;⁵⁰ such were the Guineveres of the actual world. And yet here too are delicate sentiments, mutual solicitude, even romance; Margery Brews confesses to Sir John Paston II that she loves him, and mourns that the dowry she can bring him falls far below his state; “but if ye love me, as I trust verily ye do, ye will not leave me therefore”; and he, master of the Paston fortune, marries her despite the complaints of his relatives—and himself dies within two years. There were hearts tender and bruised under the hard surface of that disordered age.

VII. THE ENGLISH HUMANISTS

We must not wonder that the exuberance of classical scholarship in the Italy of Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici awoke only a timid echo in an England whose merchants cared little for letters, and whose nobles were not ashamed of illiterate wealth. Sir Thomas More, at the outset of the sixteenth century, reckoned that some 40 per cent of the English people could read.⁵¹ The Church and the universities which she controlled were as yet the sole patrons of scholars. It is to the credit of England that under these circumstances, and amid the waste and violence of war, men like Grocyn, Linacre, Latimer, and Colet were touched by the Italian fire, and brought enough of its heat and light to England to make Erasmus, Europe’s arbiter litterarum, feel at home when he came to the island in 1499. The humanists, devoted to the study of pagan as well as Christian culture, were denounced by a few ingrown “Trojans,” who feared these “Greeks” bringing gifts from Italy; but they were bravely defended and befriended by great churchmen like William of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and, later, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, Chancellor of England.

From the time when Manuel Chrysoloras visited England (1408), some young English scholars caught a fever whose only cure, they felt, was study or lechery in Italy. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, came back from Italy with a passion for manuscripts, and collected a library that afterward enriched the Bodleian. John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, studied under Guarino da Verona at Ferrara and John Argyropoulos at Florence, and returned to England with more books than morals. In 1464–67 the monk William Tilley of Selling studied at Padua, Bologna, and Rome, brought back many pagan classics, and taught Greek at Canterbury.

One of his fervent pupils there was Thomas Linacre. When Tilley went again to Italy (1487), Linacre accompanied him, and remained twelve years. He studied under Politian and Chalcondyles in Florence, edited Greek works for Aldus Manutius in Venice, and returned to England so accomplished in diverse fields of learning that Henry VII summoned him to tutor Arthur, Prince of Wales. At Oxford he and Grocyn and Latimer constituted almost an Oxford Movement toward the classic languages and literatures; their lectures inspired John Colet and Thomas More, and attracted Erasmus himself.⁵² Linacre was the most universal of the English humanists, at home in Greek and Latin, translating Galen, promoting scientific medicine, founding the Royal College of Physicians and leaving his fortune to endow chairs of medicine at Oxford and Cambridge. Through him, said Erasmus, the new learning was so established in Britain that no Englishman need any longer go to study in Italy.⁵³

William Grocyn was already forty when he joined Linacre in Florence. Returning to England in 1492, he hired rooms in Exeter College, Oxford, and lectured daily on Greek, over the protests of conservatives who trembled lest the original text of the New Testament should upset the thousand-year-old authority of Jerome’s Vulgate Latin translation. But Grocyn was reassuringly orthodox in doctrine and rigidly upright in his moral life. English humanism never developed, as in some scholars of the Italian Renaissance, even a concealed hostility to Christianity; it treasured the Christian heritage above all intellectual refinements, and its most famous disciple found no embarrassment in being dean of St. Paul’s.

John Colet was the eldest son of Sir Henry Colet, a rich merchant who begot twenty-two children and served two terms as mayor of London. At Oxford the youth caught the humanist fervor from Linacre and Grocyn, and “eagerly devoured” Plato, Plotinus, and Cicero. In 1493 he traveled in France and Italy, met Erasmus and Budé in Paris, was strongly moved by Savonarola in Florence, and was shocked by the levity and license of cardinals and Alexander VI in Rome. On his return to England, having inherited his father’s wealth, he might have risen to high place in business or politics, but he preferred scholastic life in Oxford. Ignoring the tradition that only a priest might teach theology, he lectured on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans; he replaced Scholastic dialectic with criticism and elucidation of the Vulgate text; and his large audiences felt refreshed by the novelty of his method, and by his stress on the good life as the best theology. Erasmus, who saw him at Oxford in 1499, described him as a saint perpetually tempted to lust and luxury, but “keeping the flower of his virginity till his death,” scorning the easygoing monks of his time, and dedicating his fortune to pious uses and charity.⁵⁴

He was a loyal opposition in the Church, loving her despite her faults. Fie questioned the literal truth of Genesis, but accepted the divine inspiration of the Bible. He foreshadowed the Reformers in stressing the authority of the Scriptures as against ecclesiastical traditions and forms, in rejecting the Scholastic philosophy as an intellectual dilution of simple Christianity, in doubting the confessional powers of priests and the Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated bread, and in denouncing the worldliness of the clergy:

In 1504 Colet was appointed dean of St. Paul’s. From that high pulpit he preached against the sale of bishoprics, and the evil of plural benefices held by one man. He aroused an angry opposition, but Archbishop Warham protected him. Linacre, Grocyn, and More were now established in London, free from the conservatism and scholasticism of Oxford, stimulated by the visits of Erasmus, and soon to enjoy the support of the young Henry VIII. Everything seemed prepared for an English Renaissance that would move hand in hand with a peaceful Reformation.