CHAPTER XIII

THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES

§ 112. The Nobility.

THE period from the Peasants' Revolt (1381) to the first few years of the reign of Henry VIII. (1509-1548) presents many interesting features. In it we come to the close of mediæval life, and begin the more modern history of our country. There are several important changes going on, yet, on the other hand, the main aspects of social life remain the same; for the permanence of social features is characteristic of mediæval times.1 We may, therefore, take the facts presented in the previous section as giving us the outlines of a picture which, in all important points at any rate, lasted till the first half of the sixteenth century. The lives of the peasants and working classes were probably the same for quite a century. But meanwhile important social and economic changes were taking place.

In the fifteenth century, to take the highest ranks first, the great nobles and feudal lords were at the height of their power and splendour; but their glory was as that of the sun before it sinks suddenly out of sight amid a bank of stormy clouds. Fierce, ambitious, covetous, and unrelenting, greedy both of power and of land, they were nevertheless the political leaders of a people whom they alternately terrorised and cajoled, and they recognised the circumstances which their position entailed. In their huge fortified houses and castles they kept enormous retinues of officers and servants, all arranged in distinct grades and provided with regular allowances of food and clothing.3 Their households were arranged upon a scale of almost

1 Froude, History, i. p. 1.

2 Cf. Stubbs, Constit. History, Vol. III. ch. xxi. p. 542.

3 Ib.,

p. 538.

royal magnificence, and yet the most accurate accounts 2 of income and expenditure were duly kept and audited. The baron's castle was both a court for the neighbouring squires, smaller nobles and gentry, and a school of knightly accomplishments and culture for their sons, while the huge kitchens and wardrobes afforded a continual market to the agriculturists and tradesmen of the district.3 His progresses from one establishment to another made him known all over the country, and increased his political prestige and popularity. The houses of the Bishops and other great church dignitaries, and some of the larger monasteries, rivalled those of the barons in their magnitude and influence. The nobility and the great officers of the Church had, in fact, an amount of wealth and power which they have rarely surpassed at any time of their history.

That power was also largely increased 5 in the fifteenth century by the practice of enclosing land, to which we shall refer later at greater length. The nobles saw that land meant both power and wealth, and grasped more and more of it as time went on. The Great Plague and the practical freedom of the villeins had indeed tried them sorely at first, but now a new use for land was springing up, with a new system under which the services of their villeins were no longer required. I refer to the growing demand for wool, not only for foreign export but for home mauufacture. The growth of home manufactures encouraged sheep-farming on a large scale, and sheep-farming led to the change from arable to pasturage which is characteristic of the fifteenth century. So field was added to field, pasture to pasture, enclosure to enclosure, and the great lords rejoiced anew in the wealth derived from their broad acres. The evils of maintenance and livery were increased; the power of the nobility grew continually, often

5 S. R. Gardiner, Students' History of England, i. 321.

6 It was hardly because of the exhaustion of the soil that landowners turned arable into pasture, as Mr Gardiner (ut supra) seems to suppose. The land got rest under the system of fallow.

7Cf. Mrs Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, i. 44.

at the expense of their poorer neighbours;1 the Crown, till the accession of Henry VII., was far too weak to control the barons that stood round it; the great families plundered the country, until at last, quarrelling among themselves for place and power, they became their own destruction, and assured their speedy ruin and decay in those suicidal conflicts known as the Wars of the Roses.

§ 113. The Country Gentry.

4

Next to the greater nobility, and constituting in some measure a link between these and the yeomen, came the large body of knights and squires or country gentry,3 allied to the nobility by claims of birth and descent, very often as ancient as those of the haughtiest baron, but by their income and rural habits often not far removed from a well-todo farmer, The income of a knight might be placed at £200 a year, of a squire £50, and while a substantial yeoman could rarely attain the former sum, he might easily surpass the latter." The household of the country gentleman was modelled on that of his greater neighbour, the noble, and was often in consequence more elaborate than we should have supposed necessary for his rank. But food was abundant and cheap, and money wages were not high, while very often the servants were his own poor relations." In the cultivation and management of his estate the knight or squire found occupation and amusement; and his share of public duty, both in county court and in musters and arrays, was by no means light. He was hardly ever merely an "absentee landlord," but "lived of his own" on his own land, while a journey to London was the event of a lifetime, and not an annual occurrence. His life was simple and rough-nay, even, according to our modern ideas, 1Cf. Paston Letters (ed. Arber), Vol. I. 13-15, and Denton, Fifteenth Century. pp. 296-301.

8

2 Cf. Gardiner, Students' Hist. of England, i. 321 and 323.

3 Stubbs, Const. Hist., III. xxi. p. 544.

From the Black Book of Edward IV. (Stubbs, u. s., p. 538).

So we conclude from the well-known case of Latimer's father; Latimer, First Sermon before King Edward, in the Preface to the Northumberland Household Book, p. xii.

• Stubbs, Const. Hist., III. xxi. p. 548.

8 Ib.

7 Ib.

coarse; but he generally did his duty according to his light, and knew pretty thoroughly the needs and the business of his agricultural neighbours; and when at last he was laid to rest in the village church where he had worshipped in pious but easy-going fashion all his days, he was probably regretted by the people of the manor far more than many a greater but less useful man.

§ 114. The Yeomen.

3

Next to the country gentry came that large and sturdy class of yeomen who, for some centuries, formed the real strength of English rural life. Their importance begins to be marked from the reign of Henry II. (1154-1189) onwards, but in the fifteenth century they had come more than ever to the front. They are recognised by the election act of 1430 A.D., which conferred the county franchise on every "forty shilling freeholder," though forty shillings by no means represented the income of a substantial yeoman. Their ranks were strengthened, after the economic changes to which I have before alluded, by the newer class of tenant farmers, who now, together with the smaller owners and freeholders, made up what is called the yeomanry. In this class there was every gradation of income, from that of the forty shilling freeholder to that of the rich tenant farmer, who rivalled perhaps the squire himself, though of course a freeholder might equally be a rich man and the tenant farmer barely worth a couple of pounds. The yeomanry, by the income and social position of its richer members, was connected with the gentry; by its agricultural occupations, and by the poverty of the smaller tenants and freeholders, with the labourers and poorer tenants in villeinage. Thus from baron to villein there was a closely-connected gradation of ranks, though the word "villein " had practically lost all its old significance, and after the reign of Richard II. is never found in the Statute books.5 Freeholder, tenant, and 1 Stubbs, u. 8., p. 552.

2 The famous statute 8 Henry VI., c. 7, which was not repealed till the 14 Geo. III., c. 58.

3 Stubbs, Const. Hist., III. xxi. p. 552.

• Froude, Hist. of England, i. p. 12.

♦ Ib., p. 554.

villein alike were now merged into the yeomanry, except in those cases where a man had become merely an agricultural labourer. Politically, they were a very important element, for the forty shilling franchise must have included nearly all of them, and though the country gentry monopolised Parliamentary representation, their election depended on their yeoman constituents.1 It was the yeomanry, too, who served on juries, chose the coroner, attended the sheriff's court, and assembled with arms which they themselves provided in the muster of the forces of the shire 2 to follow their King, if need were, across the Channel, and win victory and glory for their leader on the battlefields of France.8

§ 115. Agriculture and Sheep-farming.

The condition of the labourer we have seen already, and we may now therefore turn to the condition of the chief industry with which he was connected. Agriculture, as regards its methods, was still more or less stationary, but important changes were taking place, both among the tillers of the soil and in the uses to which the land was put. We have noticed the growth of the tenant farmer and yeoman and the emancipation of the villein, and now we note the appearance of the sheep farmer on a large scale. For his appearance in this century there was indeed more than one cause. In the first place, the silent but steady growth of home manufactures since the days of Edward III.5 had by this time begun to create a considerable home market for wool, in addition to the already existing market among the manufacturers of Flanders. That was no doubt the chief cause. But, besides this, sheep-farming offered to landlords a cheaper and easier method of using their land than other branches of industry, from the fact that it required

1 Stubbs, u. 8., p. 557.

2 Stubbs, u. 8., p. 552.

3 Cf. the remarks on yeomanry in war in Green's History, i. p. 421.

4 As evidence of this growth we may quote from a treatise by Sir John Fortescue, Commodities of England (written some time before 1451), where he mentions English "woollen cloth ready made at all times to serve the merchants of any two kingdoms."

Above, p. 127.