1
PARAMETERS
The Wars of the Roses were the longest military and political upheaval between King Stephen and Charles I. Did the Wars result from fundamental weaknesses in the social and political systems? Or did they mark merely the lowest point in two centuries of under-performance? In actuality they were a wholly exceptional epoch. A deep economic recession (‘The Great Slump 1440–1480’)1 and consequent royal impoverishment coincided with unprecedented foreign intervention and popular unrest, which would have strained any political system, however strong and healthy it was. The crisis headlines in the textbooks overlook the underlying harmony and stability. Central government, local government, the judicial system and the economy operated throughout uninterrupted and indeed almost unimpaired. It was not that fifteenth-century England was in turmoil bar a few brief interludes of peace, but that only occasionally and only briefly was normal life disrupted by political crises. It is the systems rather than the events that are the subject of this book.
Behind every system lies the people, perhaps two millions strong, who comprised and contributed to society both individually and in the mass. Society is always shaped by its members, who formulate and constantly modify its rules, which in turn shape, channel and eventually constrain human energies. Such structures are themselves slowly modified in arrears to fit contemporary realities as society gradually evolves. When any society outgrows the rules, the rules have to be altered. Such was the case in fifteenth-century England.
Any political system is a facet of society. Although ostensibly authoritarian and hierarchical, the English monarchy depended on the consent both of its greatest subjects – the magnates, aristocracy and urban oligarchies that comprised the politically active nation – and increasingly of the commons as well. No English king could outrage the values and expectations of these groups and survive. Royal government and royal laws evolved alongside society, more frequently through agreement in parliament and through the actual practice of enforcement and neglect than through violence and revolution.
The fifteenth century in England was a phase within long-lived political and social systems that lasted for many centuries, that already existed by the twelfth century and continued into the seventeenth and even beyond. ‘Relatively little structural change took place in English society between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries’, wrote Professor Stone long ago. Even the English Revolution, Professor Laslett implied, marked no serious break: ‘a national social revolution’ was ‘not in question in the seventeenth century’.2 It makes sense to consider the central social organisation of bastard feudalism over the five centuries 1150–1650 and to argue that the boundaries at each end are artificial and could be extended.3 The pre-industrial economy and its attendant society make sense up to the Industrial Revolution of the mid-eighteenth century. No sharp or permanent changes in social and political systems within these centuries were more significant than the continuities uniting them. This is not to say that the Wars of the Roses or the mid-fifteenth-century slump did not matter, but that they failed to break the mould and to institute long-term fundamental change. Neither politics nor society could be static. The structures inherited in 1399 were transmitted to Tudor historians somewhat modified, yet remained familiar enough to Shakespeare and the audiences of his history plays. Contained within this book, therefore, there is a concept of progress, as what was inherited very slowly alters, but not a notion of progress with a moral component, a defined ending, determined theme, or inevitable objective. The present is not better than the past. Even our own present is being rapidly superseded.
The terminal dates that this book observes are 1399 and 1509. These mark important political events, not structures, for which relevant timespans are longer and merge gradually into something else rather than change sharply at precise moments. Historians, however, need definitions and boundaries if they are to understand the past and to communicate that understanding to others. They have to impose limits to their discussions if they are not to become too broad to be meaningful. Hence the dates to which this book is confined, the long fifteenth century that has become hallowed by custom, at least for late medieval historians.
2
POLITICAL CULTURE: Past political cultures
Late medieval people were like ourselves. We have not evolved. Mankind has undergone no discernible biological change since written history began, let alone over the past five centuries. It follows that we can empathise with our fifteenth-century predecessors, imagine ourselves in their situation, and understand why they acted as they did. We appreciate that the past differs from the present: the circumstances, the context, have changed. It seems much more than a century ago that ‘great household was still a most potent force in every aspect of the English life’.1 If the rural Gloucestershire of his youth in the 1920s had become a lost world to Laurie Lee thirty years on,2 how much more striking (if gradual) have been the transformations from medieval to modern. Researching past circumstances is what historians and archaeologists are for. Once the facts are established, as they generally are, we can place ourselves in our fifteenth-century predecessors’ shoes, we can locate ourselves in their England, we can reconstruct and understand what they were going through, and why they behaved as they did. Professor Richmond’s twenty-year immersion in the Paston Letters revealed that ‘the parameters of the political culture’ were ‘much the same, resemble closely [and were] more or less synonymous with those of our political culture’.3 We too can be late medieval magnates. Clad in appropriate armour, bearing bows and arrows, on the correct site and briefed precisely on events, we can reenact the Wars of the Roses and even improve on the results. Some of us do.
‘Here we deceive ourselves. We have fallen into a common fallacy. ‘Our characteristic failing … is the complete inability to meet the past on its own terms and value it for its own sake.’4 Assuming that medieval notions of contract were like our own ‘is extremely dangerous’, writes Professor Green. ‘The longer I have worked on the Middle Ages the more alien and remote they have come to seem to be.’5 Even professional historians seldom agree what the facts and events mean. Our subjects did not help us. ‘For much of the medieval period’, K.B. McFarlane wrote, ‘the evidence for motive is almost entirely lacking.’ We lack the statements of motive that can be taken for granted even for the Tudor era that immediately follows. We therefore deduce intentions from actions. Such deductions are inevitably crude, over-simplified and reductionist. Too often they are expressed in cynical terms of material self-interest and self-preservation. Rampant individualists, even in our society, are conditioned by values and social norms. Of course such material considerations mattered to fifteenth-century people; but what they saw as materially vital, such as the continuance of their family names and titles or the salvation of their souls, were not necessarily what we expect today. We must not presume that late medieval motives were less complex and late medieval people more consistent than we are today.
The application of third-millennium assumptions or commonsense to past scenarios seldom explains what actually happened. Even commonsense or reason has changed its meaning, so that what our medieval predecessors thought reasonable often appears to us perverse. ‘Though to modern minds apparently spurious’, their arguments were ‘rational in terms of criteria that were familiar to the authors’.6 The reverse also applies. Twenty-first-century judgements are too often anachronistic. Almost every day politicians and broadcasters denounce some aspect of our present as medieval, usually out of ignorance. Fifteenth-century England, its society and politics, bastard feudalism and the Wars of the Roses, its leaders and people have too often attracted hostile historians whose preconceptions prevent them from understanding the past on its own terms. ‘This means that now, as never before’ – and how much truer is this now than of 1959! – ‘there is a danger of underestimating the importance of aristocratic and hierarchical principles in English history … of aristocratic leadership and the great household before the twentieth century.’7 Worse than that, for some ‘it is only a matter for indignation’ that the great had such thickly staffed households or a reasonable presumption ‘that aristocrats were an antipathetic group of superfluous parasites’. Was chivalry more than ‘a polite veneer’ or ‘loyalty chiefly a literary device, only active … when self-interest (or mutual interest) binds man and lord together’? Most historians approve of Henry VII’s despoliation of his nobility and Edward IV’s destruction of his brother Clarence. Such prejudices can be multiplied, creeping even into apparently sympathetic histories – for no historian, however hard he tries, can wholly exclude his own age from his work – and get in the way of historical understanding. Perhaps present-minded assertions that ‘gentlemen behave badly’ and even ‘that dukes will throw their weight about’8 are relevant to us today – the author knows no dukes – but they are valueless as keys to the cultures of the past. ‘We fail to realise that at the time these things seemed both natural and momentous’, lamented Professor Myers, and thus ‘miss an important element in the spirit of the age and the dynamic forces of its society’.9 When we deduce from first principles, still more when we resort to modern political prejudices, our assumptions diverge radically from those of the fifteenth century; and so too, consequently, do our conclusions.
The past is not separated from the present merely by physical and material conditions, by facts and figures, but by the whole climate of ideas. We cannot bridge this divide merely by reconstructing the context. We need to enter the spirit of the age: the first principles that operated within the set of circumstances that we have indeed established by our research and which caused our subjects, so often, to act differently from ourselves. ‘The first and greatest task of a historian’, wrote Namier, revealingly quoted by Carpenter, ‘is to understand the terms in which men of a different age thought and spoke and the angle from which they viewed life and society’.10 We have too easily discounted ideas and principles as primary sources of motivation.
Monty Python’s Terry Jones strikingly illustrates the point. Roman attitudes to gladiators contrast with those current today. If ‘the idea of killing living creatures for sport horrifies a lot of people today’, how much more shocking is gladiatorial combat, which made a public spectacle of murder and which everyone would condemn.
Go back those 2,000 years and the reverse is true. There is not a single Roman writer who condemns the business of public killing in the gladiatorial games … The Romans believed that it was beneficial to watch people being killed. Not just good entertainment, but morally valuable. It made people into better Romans.
Today we empathise with hunted foxes and would pity doomed gladiators.
We think that compassion is one of the noblest human virtues – that, in fact, you can measure the quality of a civilised society by its level of compassion for the weak, the poor, for those who suffer. By that standard, Rome may not deserve to be called civilised at all, because in the ancient city compassion was regarded as a moral defect. Seneca, the stern voice of Roman republican virtue, said it was an emotion that ‘belonged to the worst sort of people – old women and silly females’.
Terry Jones exaggerated,11 but his point holds good. Between the Romans and ourselves there lie not merely differences in intellectual principles but the values that permeate whole societies and civilisations. There is a cultural gulf. Fifteenth-century England was also a culture quite different from our own.
Direct avowals of motive do matter. There always were political and constitutional principles, convictions and beliefs that were consciously formulated and expressed, that impelled people into action, and for which, in the last resort, they were willing to die, in battle or at the stake. We should not doubt their force because we cannot share them. They are the tip of that iceberg of ideas that make fifteenth-century culture so alien to ourselves. There was an accepted constitutional framework within which politicians thought and acted, but political and constitutional ideas were never the sole source of political motivation or even of primary importance. Self-conscious principles are no more important in determining conduct than the unconscious and even subconscious ideas that condition them or, indeed, combat them or insidiously undermine them. Standards and prejudices instilled in childhood may predispose or even predetermine one’s political stance as an adult. Already there was a culture of childhood12 that may well have underpinned much that followed. We need also to allow for all those values and standards, criteria, assumptions and misconceptions, perceptions, attitudes and prejudices, conventions, customs and manners, myths, expectations and aspirations, sentiments and even instincts across the whole range of human experience from military prowess to potty-training. If human nature remains constant, much that we take to be natural and biological turns out to be culturally engendered. Even emotions and feelings, such as Terry Jones’ compassion or love for another human, are shaped by nurture, by formal education, example, social contact and environment. Our sense of humour and our sense of the pathetic are cultural phenomena specific to our own era.
What makes up a culture embraces the whole range of intangible notions that we all carry around in our heads. Some notions have long and learned academic pedigrees, which may well have escaped the majority of users. Most are inchoate and imprecisely formulated, many are potentially contradictory, and all are influenced by circumstances and vary from individual to individual. They certainly go beyond the ‘ordering, rationalising, contextualising, and articulating of conscious thought’.13 Fully to comprehend fifteenth-century politics, society and culture, we must assimilate all these notions, which is obviously impossible. We cannot psycho-analyse the dead.
Let us consider as illustration our families, into which we are all born and which we all take for granted. Today we presume a free choice of wedding partner by mature and consenting adults (the love match), monogamous marriage (one wife or one husband at a time), commitment to life-long marriage (until death us do part), the establishment of a separate household on marriage, the nuclear family of conjugal couple and offspring, breeding exclusively within wedlock, and remarriage on the death of a partner. Whilst we are aware of other societies that do things differently, that practise polygamy, child-marriages and arranged marriages, we consider their practices inferior, wrong, sinful or even illegal. Our society and our law discriminates against unmarried cohabitees, incest, bastards, wife-beaters, child-abuse and bigamists. Despite galloping changes, such as divorce on demand, sexual liberation, universal contraception, artificial restraints on family size (2.4 children) and a growing acceptance of gay partnerships, marriage and parenthood, most people still regard our inherited conventions as normal and correct. Yet that is what is being discussed here in a fifteenth-century context: not human nature, biology, hormones or instincts, but conventions, which society once developed and which society can change; conventions that apply to our western society and that interlock. Britain today and fifteenth-century England share the convention of late marriage, normally between mature adults in their twenties and long after puberty, from which most of the other conventions listed above stem and with which they interact, which still differentiate our society from those with different practices elsewhere both now and in the past.14 Neither we nor fifteenth-century people think or thought about such matters very much. We take them for granted, presume them, infer from them, and act on them.
Conceptions of the family shape most aspects of the lives of its members and their relations with other families, larger units and even the state itself. A monarchical system has the royal family at its centre, is presided over by the head of that family who combines or has combined the roles of husband, father, brother and son (or female equivalent), and imposes administrative, financial and military obligations on the heads of every other family. Within the broad similarities of the families of today and yesteryear, however, there are differences over five centuries. Thus aristocratic marriages, even between mature adults, were normally arranged and teenage marriages were commonplace. Child labour was normal and most adolescents were boarded as servants with other families.15 A lower life-expectancy made for short marriages, many step-parents and orphans, more children per family but a higher wastage among them, relatively few – and younger – old people. There were variations between classes and regions and over time. Similar conventions in different cultures can produce different results.
Whilst the family is a fundamental building block of society, even this brief consideration indicates how extensive were its ramifications and the range of conventions that governed its operation and hence those aspects of society with which it interacted. No consideration has yet been given to the related issues of morality, upbringing and acculturation, gender, lineage and inheritance. A dozen attitudes were explored by Dr Horrox’s team in 1994 – attitudes to government, law, the aristocracy, service, religion, education and advancement, information and science, women, urban society, rural society, the poor, and death: in each case there was not one attitude to be considered, but many.16 Yet those examined scarcely scratched the surface. What ab...
