england – Page 3 – It's More Fun to Be Jack of All Trades than Master of One

In Our Time: The Domesday Book

After a bit of a hiatus J and I once again listened to an In Our Time episode with our Sunday breakfast. As the programme itself is now on hiatus until late September we’re cherry-picking interesting looking recent(ish) episodes we haven’t listened to yet. Today we picked out the one on The Domesday Book from mid-April this year. The Domesday Book is a great survey of the land and land-holdings of England produced in 1086AD for William the Conqueror’s administration. The original manuscript still exists, and was still being referred to until relatively recently. The three experts on the programme were Stephen Baxter (Kings College London), Elisabeth van Houts (University of Cambridge) and David Bates (University of East Anglia).

They started, as always, by giving us some context for the subject at hand. In this case that meant a brief overview of the changes the Norman Conquest had made to the people of England. The Anglo-Saxon England of the 11th Century was one of the richest countries in Western Europe, which made it a tempting target for would-be rulers like the Danes and William the Conqueror. After William won at Hastings he used the rhetoric of legitimacy to establish his new regime, and to dispossess the Anglo-Saxon nobility of their lands. He declared himself to’ve been Edward the Confessor’s legitimate heir, so anyone who fought on the side of Harold was a traitor and thus their lands were forfeit. Although the aristocracy was almost completely replaced the underlying structure of the administration was not – the country was still organised into shires and hundreds within them. This was most efficient for William as it was already a working taxation system.

It’s not known why William decided to conduct this survey. Bates suggested (slightly tongue in cheek?) that one of the inspirations for it might be the biblical story of Augustus Caesar’s survey (which leads to Jesus being born in a stable). It probably served multiple purposes including valuation of everyone’s landholdings for taxation purposes, and for feudal purposes (how many men at arms each lord needed to provide and such like). It’s also important to remember that England was now part of an empire – William also ruled Normandy and had recently conquered Maine in modern day France. The focus of the empire was more on the French side of the channel – England’s role was provider of revenue and other resources. A comprehensive list of what there is to squeeze wealth out of would be useful in that context.

Once decided on it all happened very quickly – this is one of the impressive parts of it, that the 11th Century administration was capable of surveying the entire country and producing a (large) book with a summary of the data within seven months. The starting point for the data collection was the shire & hundred system. Possibly the major tenants (the lords etc) had provided overview details of their holdings as a basis for the detailed survey. The data was collected from each hundred via meetings with the villagers of the villages in the hundred. This was a multi-lingual event, the villagers would speak Anglo-Saxon, the higher levels of society & the clerks and data collectors probably were French speaking and this oral testimony would have then been written down in Latin.

After the data was all collected in documents for each shire or collection of shires this was then summarised into the final document (organised feudally by landholder rather than geographically as the original documents were). The Great Domesday Book contains the majority of the country, and was written by a single scribe. There is also the Little Domesday Book which was written by several scribes and covers Suffolk, Norfolk and (I think) Cambridgeshire – this isn’t duplicated in the other book, possibly because it was sufficiently well written and organised to make re-summarising unnecessary. Some large towns (like London and Winchester) are missing – there is space left for those as if the scribe expected to come back to it later. And also most of the north of the country is missing – North Yorkshire, County Durham, Northumberland and most of Cumberland. This is probably because they weren’t part of the shire & hundred system.

The information recorded in the Great Domesday Book does vary across the country, but generally always includes land ownership and value at three points in the present & recent past. Firstly, the state of affairs on the day of King Edward’s death (in January 1066) – which is intended as the last legitimate point of Anglo-Saxon rule. Secondly what happened to the land after the Conquest in late 1066. And finally who owns the land now, and what it’s worth. This gives a good sense to the historian of what happened in the country after the Norman Conquest. It was also very useful for settling disputes in later centuries about who controlled what land – a bit hard to claim “my ancestors always had” if clearly written down in 1086 was something else.

All three experts were keen to talk about how much more there is recorded in the Domesday Book than just the dry facts of land value and ownership. It’s a great source for the social history of the time, and for stories about individuals. Elisabeth van Hout talked about what we can glean from it about what happened to the women who were widowed in the Norman Conquest. You can see the patterns of marriages (mostly like forced) as a way of conveying land in their names to new Norman lords. At lower levels of society there’s at least one story where the land is in 1086 by a Breton soldier who has it by right of the woman he fell in love with (this is the only time the word “love” is used in the survey – I think she said it was in the Little Domesday Book).

There is also a lot of evidence about the effects of the imposition of the new Norman regime on the country. The Harrying of the North is the best known example of land being laid waste after the Conquest but there are also many other smaller scale examples. Baxter explained that laying waste to the land means the destruction of the property – burning buildings and land, killing livestock, taking away or destroying grain stores. This leaves the people who live off that land with no food, and no way to replace it. In towns this destruction of property was often partly intended to clear land for the new castles and cathedrals that William was building to assert his authority and control his new territory. The entries in the Domesday Book show the reduction caused to property value even a decade or two after the land in question was laid waste.

William the Conqueror probably never saw the completed work – he left England for his lands on the continent with a lot of money raised through taxing the English “as was his custom” (according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) in 1086 and never returned (he died in 1087). As I mentioned at the start the Domesday Book was used as a reference in land disputes for many centuries afterwards, even down to relatively modern times. And it was also used in the late Middle Ages by villagers who wanted to prove they had the privileges accorded to a royal manor in 1086. In several cases villagers would club together to buy an excerpt from the Domesday Book which they hoped would demonstrate their status – often they were wrong, but obviously would’ve had to pay anyway.

An interesting programme – I’ve always been a bit fascinated by the Domesday Book since we did a project on it at school in 1986 – it was a country wide thing, generating a new “Domesday Book” 900 years on from the original. I thought it was up online now, but I think that may’ve been transitory which is a shame (although I haven’t searched very hard so I may be wrong).

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Part 10)

The last section of the book I’m reading about Plantagenet England is about the society and people of the era. Prestwich starts the first chapter in this section by noting that whilst society was very stratified in this period the boundaries weren’t rigid and well defined (or least not in ways that historians can be sure of now). However, you can divide the society at this time into four rough groups – the great lords (both lay & church), the knights, the peasants and the merchants. This chapter deals with the first of those groups.

The Great Lords

The great lords were the higher nobility and there are a variety of phrases used in official documents of the time that can define them to one extent or another. The “prelates, earls and barons” is one, the “magnates and nobles” is another, or “earls, barons and magnates”. Also “magnates” can be used on its own. It’s easy to work out who the earls and the bishops are from the surviving documents, and they are well defined – it’s a specific title generally relating to a place.

The earls were the elite of the nobility. There were 30 titles during this period (1225-1360) not all of which were in existence for the whole time, and some individuals could hold multiple earldoms. This means there were very few earls at any one time – for instance in 1300 there were 9. The title itself was mostly honourific – they had few special duties and not much extra income from earldom related sources. Because of their status they had to attend the king when required, and were always summoned to parliament whenever it met. Some earldoms came with ceremonial duties (like carrying a particular sword during the coronation), some had military ranks attached (i.e. the earls of Norfolk and Hereford held the office of Marshal and of Constable during this period). So being an earl was mostly about status – one of the things that so annoyed the earls about Gaveston was his habit of giving rude nicknames to (other) earls. So rather than talking about (the earl of) Lincoln he would refer to “Burstbelly”.

Earls were wealthy – newly created earls were generally granted lands worth around 1,000 marks/year, which gives a feel for the minimum appropriate wealth (1 mark is 2/3 of a £). The title of an earl (which he was referred to by) related to a specific county, but that wasn’t necessarily where the earl held most lands. They also had symbolic swords, granted along with the title. During the 14th Century they started to wear coronets, and they were permitted the most costly clothing (like cloth of gold trimmed in ermine). Generally they also made much of their heraldic symbols, and used them to decorate their possessions and clothing.

During this period there wasn’t much continuity in the various titles. If there was no direct male heir, the family name died out and the lands (and titles) would be divided amongst the female heirs. That wrinkle in how inheritance worked was something I’d not learnt before – primogeniture for sons, but divided for daughters. Prestwich looks at the statistics for earldoms being extinguished (no valid heirs) and comes to the conclusion that whilst there seems to be an unusually high number of sonless and childless families, that’s probably just by chance as it’s such a small sample group rather than due to any underlying cause. Prestwich also spends a couple of pages considering the royal attitude towards extinguishing and granting earldoms. Events in Henry III’s reign encouraged Edward I to be very conservative about creating new earldoms, and to be keen to control the power of those that existed. Edward II and Edward III had more need to create new earldoms, because they had family to provide for. It was also important for the King to have enough earls – being accompanied by several earls enhanced the prestige of the King’s court, particularly important on foreign trips. And there was a general policy of granting earldoms to those related by blood to the royal family, in the hope this would keep them loyal.

There’s not much in the sources about the countesses, but what there is tends to indicate that these high status & wealth women had some influence on the events of the day. Which is not surprising, but frustrating that we don’t know more about them. Prestwich talks about several notable women. Most of what is known about them revolves around their marriages, as you’d expect in chronicles from this era. But widows (of men with no heirs) could live out their lives as the landowner & head of their estates – and their power in this area was as much as any man’s, just they had much less power in politics.

Next down the social tree from earls were barons. Being a baron didn’t confer any rights or powers, rather it imposed some requirements on you (like paying a particular tax) so it wasn’t necessarily something people wanted. Barons did have a voice in parliament, which was formally recognised. For instance in the Ordinances of 1311 many matters were set down as requiring “the consent of the baronage”. Inconveniently for the later historian not all barons were summoned individually to parliament, so there aren’t complete lists surviving. The numbers who did get individual summons varied between a low point of around 30 to a high point of around 80. Generally Baron wasn’t used as a title, those who were barons tended to go by “Lord” and can be hard to distinguish from knights. As a result it’s difficult for the modern historian to be sure how many there were, or who exactly they were. Prestwich notes that one thorough survey (by a historian who published it in 1927) came up with 135 baronies, plus another 72 probables. So this is still a relatively small elite. Again the inheritance was by primogeniture for sons, but divided if there were only daughters – so sometimes baronies fractured into smaller pieces which may’ve all had the same baronial status. There was a reasonable amount of social mobility into the baronial class, with knights who distinguished themselves in battle or supported the right earl during a domestic conflict standing a chance of being granted lands that would confer that status.

Adjacent to the secular hierarchy was the clerical one. In the category of great lords we have the archbishops, the bishops and the greater abbots. Archbishops and bishops are well defined, but as with the barons the “greater abbots” are less clear. Not all of these men were of aristocratic birth, it was definitely possible to rise through the ranks as a clergyman. Bishoprics were often handed out as rewards to men who had held government posts. Some bishops were exceedingly wealthy, on a par with earls, others less so. The greater abbots were summoned to parliament, but otherwise their political role was relatively unimportant. Again they were often wealthy. The sources of the time judge abbots on their ability as manager of their monastic estates.

These great lords did not have a fixed address – the great lived in households which moved around between their various houses and court. The household comprised all the furnishing and so on that the lord moved with him, as well as his staff. Even a relatively low status member of the elite might have 25 staff in his household, spread throughout the various departments. This number doesn’t include any knights or men-at-arms who were retained, nor people like huntsmen or carters. A large household plus other employees for an important magnate might run to 200 or more. As well as the size of the household depending on the status of the lord, over the time period that this book covers there was a general increase in the size of the magnates’ households. Staff were generally provided with robes, and with food whilst at the household. They would also get wages, which might be paid by giving them the right to the rents from a particular estate.

Prestwich discusses in detail how this era had a mix of traditional feudalism and what’s known as “bastard feudalism”. In the first, the retainer holds lands from his lord and owes him service for them. In the latter, the retainer is rewarded for his service by cash (which may be rent from an estate). The two systems existed side by side during this period, and Prestwich is quite clear that he doesn’t see it as a transition from one system to another.

The castles and manor houses that these great lords built & lived in were overt expressions of their power. Although there weren’t any explicit restrictions on who could build a castle, it took wealth to do so. Generally the great lords built new fashionable residences when they could, but it wasn’t seen as necessary – more something to do when one could afford it. During this period residences were becoming more comfortable and less defensive, although it’s the military aspects that survive to the present day (being built from stone instead of wood).

The ceremonies surrounding death were another way for a magnate’s family to indicate their status. Elaborate funerals were important, as were ostentatious memorials (such as gravestones and monuments). Families tended to be buried in the same church for generations, although this could lead to arguments particularly in the case of women who had married more than once. Prestwich gives the example of Isabella (daughter of William Marshal) who married three times, and ended up with her body buried in Beaulieu, her heart in Tewkesbury and her entrails in Missenden. Other people worried about the anticipated bodily resurrection at the Last Judgement – sometimes a person was buried in multiple places, then later their body would be gathered back up by a relative to be reburied in one place. Also important for religious reasons was to provide money for services to be held after death, to ensure a short stay in Purgatory.

Prestwich ends the chapter by being a little scathing about anyone either contemporary or modern who tries to draw conclusions about “all the great lords”, because there’s too much variance between the individuals. The stereotype is of boneheaded brawlers, and some do fit this characterisation. Others don’t, in a variety of ways.

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The Spy Who Brought Down Mary Queen of Scots; Churches: How to Read Them

The title of the Channel 5 documentary The Spy Who Brought Down Mary Queen of Scots was a little misleading – it wasn’t about Francis Walsingham (the titular spy) per se, instead it was about the Babington Plot in 1586, Walsingham’s role in that and the consequences for Mary Queen of Scots. That relatively narrow focus also meant that they elided a lot of the background for why Mary Queen of Scots was under house arrest in England in the first place and just opened with her having been so for 18 years. Whilst I’m quibbling about their narrative choices, I shall also note that I didn’t much care for all their stylistic choices for imagery. In particular whenever there was “spy stuff” going on they used very modern imagery (CCTV cameras, racks of networked servers etc) which juxtaposed extremely oddly with their actors dressed up in Elizabethan costume quoting actual letters from the era!

Having said all that, I actually thought it was a rather good programme. First they explained the situation leading up to the Babington Plot – Mary Queen of Scots under house arrest in England, and as a Catholic and a relative of Elizabeth I’s she was a potential focus for rebellion or invasion. There had been previous unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Elizabeth I. Francis Walsingham (as Elizabeth’s spy master) was obviously concerned about communications to & from Mary Queen of Scots, and about the potential for trouble being stirred up by her or on behalf of her. The Babington Plot was the latest in a series of attempts to free Mary Queen of Scots – it began as a conspiracy between a group of disaffected Catholic noblemen, lead by a young man called Anthony Babington. Communications with Mary were routinely intercepted and monitored, so the conspirators recruited an English Catholic priest called Gilbert Gifford who had fled to France. Gifford returned to England and made his way to the brewers who supplied Mary’s household with beer – he devised a method of smuggling messages to her inside the bungs of the beer barrels and so communication was established. In this bit of the programme they also explained how difficult it was to be a Catholic priest in England at the time and showed us several priest holes in a country house of the era.

Mary was at first very cautious about how she responded to the messages – not just using a cipher and being circumspect with her words, but also being very non-committal about proposed schemes. Gradually, however, she began to trust and to believe that just possibly this time it was going to work and she would not only be freed but also put on the English throne. Finally in a letter she said something that could be taken as endorsement of the plot, and unknown to her this is where it all started to fall apart for her. Walsingham hadn’t been sitting by in ignorance of this plot – instead he’d had a hand in it from almost the start. He’d had his eye on Babington & the other conspirators, and when Gifford had been sent back to England with his first message Walsingham had him seized. He was turned into a double agent, and it was Walsingham who designed the method of getting messages to Mary Queen of Scots. All the letters sent this way were copied by Walsingham’s people and the cipher used in them was broken. When the damning message was sent by Mary Queen of Scots, Walsingham knew he had his evidence to convict Mary of treason – but just to be sure he had his codebreaker & forger add a postscript to the letter to make it more explicit before forwarding it on to Babington.

Walsingham then swooped in and arrested the conspirators. He also lured Mary Queen of Scots into behaving as if she expected a rescue, then arresting her. All were tried and convicted of treason. The men were hung, drawn and quartered but Elizabeth did not sign Mary’s death warrant for some time. Eventually she reluctantly signed, and then tried to countermand it but the warrant had been whisked off to where Mary was being held and Mary was executed within hours. The programme was very much on the side of this being Elizabeth genuinely changing her mind and regretting signing. But from what (little) I’ve read, I’d always picked up the impression of her wanting to have her cake and eat it too – putting on a good show of remorse after the fact but only when the deed was irrevocable.

Overall a good programme, my quibbles aside 🙂

Churches: How to Read Them was a 6 part series of half hour programmes about British church architecture and decoration that we’d recorded ages ago. It was presented by Richard Taylor and covered the history of churches from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. I wanted to like this more than I ended up doing. Not that I disliked it as such, more that it seemed a bit shallow at times but I can’t really articulate what I would’ve preferred. However it did show a nice selection of surviving examples of the various sorts of architecture & decorations that he was talking about in each episode.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 3 of Mud, Sweat and Tractors – series about the history of farming in 20th Century Britain.

Episode 2 of The Crusades – series presented by Thomas Asbridge about the Crusades.

Episode 2 of Fossil Wonderlands: Nature’s Hidden Treasures – Richard Fortey looking at three fossil sites that changed our idea of the past.

In Our Time: The Bluestockings

I’d always thought that “bluestocking” was just a Victorian pejorative for a woman who preferred learning to socialising, and that the term derived from the perceived frumpiness of said women. But the In Our Time episode that we listened to this Sunday disabused me of that notion. The Bluestockings were an influential intellectual “club” in late 18th Century England, which bore some resemblance to the French salons of the same era, involving both men and women. Only later did the term become gendered and pejorative. The three experts who discussed it were Karen O’Brien (King’s College London), Elizabeth Eger (King’s College London) and Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes University).

The Bluestockings were not originally conceived of as a movement, instead it grew organically out of informal gatherings hosted primarily by three London society hostesses for the purpose of rational conversation. In the 18th Century the term “rational conversation” meant something along the lines of “improving conversation” – it was about learning and educating each other. And this is in some sense in opposition to the normal etiquette of the time which frowned upon talking about anything you knew more about than the person you were talking to – particularly if you were a woman. The meetings happened about once a month, and members also corresponded by letter and published essays. Very unusually for the time women were not just permitted to attended, they were also heavily involved in organising these meetings and over time came to dominate them. The name Bluestocking, however, was derived from the male attendees – as the gatherings were informal some of the men would wear their everyday blue stockings rather than their court silk stockings.

One of the important hostesses at the beginning of the movement was Elizabeth Montagu. She was born a member of the gentry, and married into the aristocracy. She was a very intelligent woman, who took over running her husband’s coal business when she married and made her family incredibly wealthy. The experts explained that she opted out of the court social circle of the time – as it was stultifyingly boring, particularly for ladies in waiting. Instead she hosted her own gathers – which became meetings of the Bluestockings. She wrote many many letters and also published essays, including an influential one about Shakespeare. This was in reply to an essay by Voltaire, and Montagu was writing to restore Shakespeare’s reputation as an important playwright. The experts pointed out that this is period when Shakespeare isn’t all that well regarded – classical authors and classical styles are still held up as being inherently better than anyone writing in English could be. Montagu’s essay is an important part of overturning this consensus.

Montagu’s gatherings might’ve been informal, but they were still organised – she arranged the chairs in her room in a semi-circle and so everyone was talking to everyone (I think). Another of the society hostesses involved in these was even more informal – she dotted the chairs around the room in little groups before the guests arrived, this meant there would be many clusters of conversations going on. The informality of the English Bluestockings was a contrast to the French salons of this same era – they had topics decided in advance and were more formalised with some degree of rules about who could speak. Another contrast between the French & English models was that the French salons were politically and religiously radical – the Bluestockings as they began were not.

As the first generation of Bluestockings gave way to the next the movement began to become more restricted to women, and to become tarred with the association of the French salons with radicalisation. This is during a period where the establishment was particularly concerned about any hints of political radicalisation, because the French Revolution was an example of where that sort of thing could lead. On the other side of the coin the Bluestockings were seen as too conservative by the new generation of female thinkers – women like Mary Wollstonecraft. So the movement began to fade away, however it had the legacy of having promoted the concept of women as the intellectual equals of men at a time when that was practically unthinkable.

An interesting programme about something I knew nothing about before. I’d quite like to read a biography of Elizabeth Montagu, but a quick google suggests there’s no such thing. A shame, but the further reading list for the In Our Time episode lists several books about the Bluestockings so perhaps I’ll pick up one of them at some point 🙂

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Interlude)

In terms of page count I’m about three fifths of the way through Michael Prestwich’s “Plantagenet England 1225-1360” and in terms of subject matter I’ve just finished one of the two sections that the book is divided into. So this seemed a good place to take a small pause and think about what I’ve spent the last several months reading.

This section of the book was “Politics and Wars” and contains exactly what it says it will – the politics and governance of England, plus the various internal and external wars. Prestwich hasn’t divided it up by the reigns of the kings, instead he’s drawn boundaries based on whether the country or regime could be thought of as in crisis/unrest or in recovery/good times. To some degree that does match with the change in monarch – the character & popularity of the King has an effect on how incipient crises are handled and whether they develop or smooth out. Edward I and Edward III both appear to’ve been charismatic and astute enough to sooth ruffled feathers when need be or to put down pending rebellion if that were necessary. Henry III and Edward II on the other hand were too keen to reward their closest friends or family, and didn’t pay enough attention to making sure everyone else liked them too.

Date
1216		Henry III takes throne
1225	Period of unrest begins
1227		Henry III reaches majority
1265	Simon de Montfort dies
1266	Period of recovery begins
1272		Edward I takes throne
1294	Period of crisis begins
1307		Edward II takes throne
1311	Period of Crisis gets worse
1312	Piers Gaveston dies
1327		Edward II deposed, Edward III crowned (but Isabella and Mortimer rule)
1330	Period of recovery begins	Edward III reaches his majority

The links in that table go to my posts about those chapters of the book. The other three subjects in this part were Anglo-Welsh relations (including the conquest of Wales), Anglo-Scottish relations (including a couple of attempted conquests of Scotland, and Bannockburn) and Anglo-French relations (including the initial phases of the Hundred Years War, which is an attempted conquest of France) – the external wars of the era. So there’s a fair bit of politcs and of wars to cover in this era!

One of the narratives that Prestwich doesn’t really dwell on is that this is a transitional era for the English monarchy. Before this, from William the Conquer to King John (and particularly from Henry II onwards), the English King also has large landholdings in France. And in some ways although the title of King of England was the most prestigious one the men in question were more concerned with their French lands and would’ve thought of themselves as part of French culture (as I understand it). King John loses almost all these French lands, and pretty nearly loses England too. And his successors turn away from France – putting more effort into rebuilding control of England and then trying to consolidate the whole of the island under their rule (with varying degrees of success). At the end of the period Edward III is looking back to France and this book ends with him holding large amounts of territory in France – but the centre of gravity has shifted. This is no longer a French nobleman who is on the English throne, instead it’s the English King who has conquered part of France (with an eye to conquering it all).

The two themes that Prestwich is highlighting are the development of the army during this period, and the increasing formalisation and growth of Parliament. As I said in my writeup of the last chapter I’m probably least interested in the nitty gritty details of army organisation. However I think the main point is that at the beginning of the period the army is organised on a primarily feudal basis, and by the time of the Hundred Years War most of the army is recruited and paid on a contractual basis. And there’s been a shift from a more patchwork assemblage of independent groups to a cohesive fighting force with a reasonable proportion of trained soldiers. Also towards the end of the period the leaders of the army are beginning to have a chance to learn from previous wars – some of the same men are in charge in Edward III’s Scottish campaigns as are in charge in the French wars.

In terms of the development of Parliament the main narrative is an increasing formalisation and codification of the relative powers of King and people (where people = nobility, but down to the level of Knights and representatives of counties not just the true elite). Magna Carta was signed in King John’s reign, just before the scope of this book, and it’s re-issued and re-iterated several times during this 135 year period normally at a point when the King has had to be forced into backing down on something. At the beginning of the period the people who have to agree to taxation are mostly the top elite, and larger parliaments are rarer. By the end of the period there’s a sense that even the Commons (not the peasants, but people like Knights in shires) must be asked before they are taxed – and Parliament is beginning to consist of the same larger cross-section of society every time. And because of the way taxation works at this period this means that this cross-section of society get some say in the political direction of the country. When the King requests a tax Parliament normally asks for some concession from him in return – and often during the reigns of Henry III and Edward II this was where disputes would start to topple over into crises.

The monarch at this time is interestingly balanced between being separate from his nobles and being first amongst equals. He’s anointed by God and this does still make him sacrosanct (not the case even a little after this period) – look at the way Edward II is deposed in favour of his legitimate heir. Or how after Simon de Montfort won a civil war he didn’t put himself in Henry III’s place, instead he set up an elaborate council to “help” Henry III rule. So the King is the King even when you think he’s screwing up, but if you’re one of the elite you feel entitled to input on the major decisions and to an opinion about whether or not the King is doing a good job. Hence the civil wars which were about getting the King to do the job properly in the interests of the realm and not just himself. This wasn’t an untouchable “I am the state” type ruler.

On other subjects – Prestwich has chosen to address the role and activities of the Church in each chapter as it becomes relevant. I can see why that choice makes sense, but it’s left me with no clear idea if there is a unifying story to the Church’s relations with the Crown during this period. Perhaps because I’ve read it too spread out, or perhaps there isn’t a cohesive narrative there. Notable by its almost complete lack of mention is the Black Death – I think because the political ramifications of the large drop in population only really start to show up outside the scope of this book. And there will be more discussion of the impact of the Black Death on society in the second half of the book.

The next part of the book will cover the social history of the era, starting with the elite – the great lords and ladies.

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Shakespeare and His World (Course on Future Learn)

Shakespeare and His World was a 10 week course on Future Learn which finished just a couple of weeks ago. The course was run by Warwick University and presented by Jonathan Bate (with Jennifer Waghorn as moderator). And in the 10 weeks it covered a huge amount of ground! Each week focussed on a particular theme and there were 6 or 7 video lectures, each of which featured an object from Shakespeare’s time – most of these were from the collections of the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, and most of the videos were filmed there. And eight of the weeks featured a particular Shakespeare play, which also illustrated the weekly theme. We were looking at both what the plays told us about the time they were written in, and what contemporary events & things influenced the writing of the plays. As well as this we also looked a little at the plays as plays rather than historical items – their themes & characters and so on. Obviously in the time available all of this was covered at a fairly superficial level – an overview rather than anything in depth, but there were normally links to places to find out more about the featured objects and some ideas for further investigating the plays.

Week 1 was an introductory week which looked at what we know of Shakespeare’s life story and also set him in context as an Elizabethan playwright and poet. We also read Venus and Adonis, one of Shakespeare’s poems. The second week was the first one with a play, The Merry Wives of Windsor. The theme was Shakespeare’s time in Stratford, in particular his schooling, and this was a good play to illustrate it because although the town in the play is Windsor there’s internal evidence that suggests Shakespeare was actually basing it on Stratford. And he made use of the sorts of people he would’ve known growing up to provide characters for the play – in particular there’s a small part for a schoolboy called Will which is generally assumed to be an author-insert.

Week 3 used A Midsummer Night’s Dream to focus on the theatre in Elizabethan England – chosen because of the play within a play sequence. Week 4 was about war, using Henry V as the illustrative play. Bate made the point in this week that Shakespeare was a war poet for the first half of his career – England was at war with Spain in this period – so Henry V isn’t just looking back to former glories but is also saying something about contemporary events in particular the defeat of the Armada. Week 5 moved on to look at finance, using the Merchant of Venice. As well as the obvious use of Shylock the moneylender to think about how Elizabethan money & finances worked, we also looked at how Shakespeare often used Venice as a mirror for London. And of course we also covered Elizabethan attitudes to Jews, as well as looking at how Shylock has been portrayed through the ages since the play was written. Shakespeare himself seems to be making a more nuanced point than some later stagings of the play.

I’m afraid this is turning into a bit of a laundry list, but I’m trying not to go into too much detail otherwise this post will go on forever!

Week 6 used Macbeth to look at witches and medicine. Because of studying the play at school around 25 years ago I was expecting the bits about witches, but I hadn’t really thought about what the play tells us about medicine of the time before. Sadly the discussion section for this week (about similarities and differences between modern & 16th Century medicine) got over-run by people enthusing over herbal remedies being better than “all those chemicals” and misplaced nostalgia so I stopped reading it before my blood pressure rose too much. The seventh week used Othello to look at the interactions between Christendom and the Islamic world. Again Shakespeare is more nuanced than some later stagings of the play – the villain of the play, after all, is Iago who is a white Christian (although notably with a Spanish name). Othello the Moor is basically a good man who is led astray by Iago’s playing on his insecurities.

The eighth week looked at what Classical culture meant to the people of Shakespeare time, and also to look at how “the East” was regarded. The illustrative play chosen was Anthony and Cleopatra which obviously gives us an image of orderly moral Rome vs the opulent decadence of Egypt. And it was also a play designed to appeal to James VI & I by implying he occupies the place of Augustus in his own time, seen in the play as unifier and peacemaker. Week 9 was the last week with a play – fittingly this was The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last solo authored play. This was used to illustrate the “Brave New World” of the Americas that the Stuart age was beginning to successfully colonise. And also to think about how the art of the theatre was similar to the art of magic in The Tempest so Prospero’s final speech retiring from his art can be seen as Shakespeare’s final speech too. And the last week was a brisk trot through Shakespeare’s legacy looking at how he grew from being regarded as one of the Elizabethan playwrights into “the Greatest Playwright of All TIme”.

I’m glad the information, including videoes & links, is still available on Future Learn for those of us that did the course – I’m not sure I got everything out of the course that I could and some weeks I definitely skimped on due to lack of time. Even tho by the end I was thinking it had out stayed its welcome a bit (8 plays in 8 weeks is a lot to read and contemplate) I’m glad I did it 🙂

Heart vs Mind: What Makes Us Human?; The First World War; How to Get Ahead; Precision: The Measure of All Things

We finished three different series over the last week so I wasn’t going to write about any of the one-off programmes as well, but Heart vs Mind: What Makes Us Human? irritated me sufficiently that I wanted to say why! The premise of this film was that the presenter, David Malone, had always thought of himself as a wholly rational person but then his life had become derailed – his wife had started to suffer from severe depression and it was as if the person she had been no longer existed. In the wake of that, and his responses to it, he started to think emotions were more important to what makes us human than he’d previously thought. So far, so good – I mean I might quibble about how it’s a known thing that no-one’s really totally rational and we know that the mind affects the body & vice versa; and I might wonder what his wife thinks about being talked about as if she might as well be dead. But those are not why I found this programme irritating.

I found it irritating because the argument he was putting forward had the coherency and strength of wet tissue paper. He took the metaphorical language of “brain == reason; heart == emotion” and then looked for evidence that the physical heart is the actual source of emotions. There was some rather nice science shown in the programme – but whenever a scientist explained what was going on Malone would jump in afterwards and twist what was said into “support” for his idea.

For instance, take heartbeat regulation. It is known that there are two nerves that run from the brain down to the heart and they regulate the speed of the heartbeat. There is a physiologist in Oxford (I didn’t catch his name) who is looking at how that regulation works. It turns out there is a cluster of neurones attached to the heart which do the actual routine “make the heart beat” management. The messages coming from the brain tell the heart neurone cluster “speed up” or “slow down” rather than tell the heart muscle to “beat now; and now; and now”. Interesting, but not that astonishing – I think there are other examples of bits of routine tasks being outsourced to neurones closer to the action than the brain is (like the gut, if I remember correctly). Malone took this as proof that the heart had its own mini-brain so it would be possible for it to generate emotions. And so it’s “like a marriage between heart and brain with the brain asking the heart to beat rather than enslaving it and forcing it to beat.”

There were other examples of his failure to separate metaphor from reality – indeed his failure to realise that there were two things there to separate. Take, for instance, the metaphor of the heart as a pump. Malone hated this metaphor, so industrial and mechanical and soulless. Practically the root of everything wrong with modern society! (I exaggerate a tad, but not much.) However, the heart undeniably does pump blood round the body. So he looked at visualisations of blood flowing through his heart (another awesome bit of science) and talked about how beautiful this was – as the blood is pumped around the shape of the heart chambers encourages vortices to form in the flow which swirl in the right way to shut the valves after themselves on the way out. Which is, indeed, beautiful and rather neat – and I learnt something new there. However Malone then carried on about how we shouldn’t keep saying the heart is a pump because the complexity of the heart’s pumping mechanics are too beautiful to be reduced to what the word pump makes him imagine. Er, what? Saying you can only imagine pumps as simple metal cylinders with pistons says more about paucity of your imagination than the pumpness of the heart.

I think part of my problem with this was that I’m not actually that much in disagreement with him so it was irritating to watch such a poor argument for something reasonable. I too believe Descartes was wrong – you can’t separate mind from body. The mind is an emergent property of the body. And there is feedback – our mental state, our emotions and beliefs, affect the body and its functions. Our physical health and physical state affects our minds. It’s not surprising to me that it’s possible to die of a broken heart (ie mental anguish can affect the physical system including disrupting heartbeat potentially fatally in someone whose heart is already weak). But this is not because the metaphor of the heart as the seat of emotions is a physical reality. It’s because mind and body are one single system.

None of us are rational creatures. Emotions are a central part of what makes us human. And metaphors do not need to be based in a physical truth to be both useful and true.

(I also get grumpy about people who think that explaining something necessarily robs it of beauty but that’s a whole other argument. As is the one where I complain about the common equation of industry with ugliness.)

Moving on to what I intended to talk about this week: we’ve just finished watching the BBC’s recent 10 part series about The First World War. This was based on a book by Hew Strachan, and used a combination of modern footage of the key places, contemporary film footage, photographs and letters to tell the story of the whole war from beginning to end. Although obviously the letters were chosen to reflect the points the author wanted to make, using so many quotes from people who were there helped to make the series feel grounded in reality. It was very sobering to watch, and the sort of programmes where we frequently paused it to talk about what we’d just seen or heard. It wasn’t a linear narrative – the first couple of episodes were the start of the war, and the last couple were the end, but in between the various strands were organised geographically or thematically. An episode on the Middle East for instance, or on the naval war, or on the brewing civil unrest in a variety of the participating countries.

I shan’t remotely attempt a recap of a 10 episode series, instead I’ll try and put down a few of the things that struck me while watching it. The first of those was that there is so much I didn’t know about the First World War. This wasn’t a surprise, to be honest, I’ve not really read or watched much about it and didn’t spend much time on it at school (having given up history pre-GCSE). But I’d picked up a sort of narrative by osmosis – the Great War is when Our Men went Over There and Died in a Brutal Waste of Life. And that’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. Even for the Western Front – the British narrative is all about it being “over there” but (obviously!) for the French and the Belgians this was happening in their country and in their homes. One of the sources used for this part of the war was a diary of a French boy – 10 years old at the start, 14 by the end – which really brought that home. And (again obviously) the Western Front and the French+British and German troops weren’t the only participants nor the only areas of conflict. I thought separating it out geographically & thematically was well done to help make that point.

It was odd to note how much the world has changed in the last century. Because there was film footage of these people – dressed a bit too formally, but looking like ordinary people – the casual anti-Semitism and racism in their letters and official communications was more startling than it would’ve been from more distant seeming people. Things like referring to Chinese or African troops as “monkeys” in relatively official documents. I’m not saying that racism or anti-Semitism have vanished in the modern world, but there’s been a definite change in what’s acceptable from politicians and so on.

Throughout the whole series the shadow of the Second World War loomed. Obviously no-one knew at the time how things would turn out (tho it seems one of the French generals did make some rather prescient remarks about only getting 20 years of peace at the end of the First World War). But it’s rather hard to look at it now without the knowledge that hindsight gives us. Which ties in with my remark about anti-Semitism above, because one of the things that changed cultural ideas of “what you can say about Jews” is the Holocaust. And other hindsight spectres included the situation in the modern Middle East as set up in large part by the First World War, and of course the Balkans too.

Interesting, thought provoking, and I’m glad I watched it.

Very brief notes about the other two series we finished:

How to Get Ahead was Stephen Smith examining three different historical courts and looking at both the foibles of the monarch and the ways a courtier at that court would need to behave & dress in order to succeed. He picked out a selection of very despotic rulers – Richard II of England, Cosimo Medici of Florence and Louis XIV “the Sun King” of France. I wasn’t entirely convinced about Smith as a presenter, a few more jokes in his script than he quite managed to pull off, I think. But good snapshots of the lives of the elite in these three eras/areas.

Precision: The Measure of All Things was Marcus du Sautoy looking at the various ways we measure the world around us. For each sort of measurement (like length, or time) he looked at how it had evolved throughout history, and at how greater precision drives on technology which in turn can generate a need for even greater precision. I think I found this more interesting than J, because I think it’s kinda neat to know why seemingly arbitrary units were decided on when they could’ve picked anything. I mean the actual definition settled on for a meter is arbitrary (the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second) but there’s a rationale for why we decided on that particular arbitrary thing (the definition before the definition before the current one was that it was 1/10,000,000th of the distance from the north pole to the equator).

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of Churches: How to Read Them – series looking at symbolism and so on in British churches.

Krakatoa Revealed – somewhat chilling documentary about the 19th Century eruption of Krakatoa and what we’re learning about the certainty of future eruptions of Krakatoa.

24 Hours on Earth – nature documentary looking at the effects of the diurnal cycle on animals and plants. Lots of neat footage and a voiceover with somewhat clunky and distracting metaphors (“Soon the sun’s rays will flip the switch and it will be light” !?)

Episode 1 of David Attenborough’s First Life – series about the origins of life and the evolution of animals.

Tyndale Society Study Day (10 May 2014)

Last Saturday was clearly the best day to hold a study day – there were three different ones on that date that J & I between us found interesting. The one I chose to go to was organised by the Tyndale Society who are a group whose primary interest is in the life and works of William Tyndale (who translated the Bible into English in the early 16th Century). I’m not a member of the Society myself, I just spotted a poster advertising the study day a few weeks ago & signed up for it. The subject of the day was Ipswich as a late medieval port of the type whose trade & shipping links helped the spread of Reformation books, and three men with Ipswich links who played a significant role in the Reformation. It was held in St Peter’s by the Waterfront which was for a brief moment in its history the chapel for Cardinal Wolsey’s school in Ipswich. As well as the four talks there were a couple of (very short) walks to see relevant places in Ipswich – the weather was good for just long enough at just the right times for those! One of which included our lunch in the cafe attached to Dance East (nice soup & sandwiches, if a little basic). There were also a selection of books for sale (I picked up “Late Medieval Ipswich: Trade and Industry” by the third speaker, Nicholas Amor). And a rather fine (and jaunty) model of a medieval Cog:

(All photos are links to flickr, the whole album is here.)

“Thomas Wolsey as Educationalist” John Blatchly

The first talk was given by John Blatchly who is a local historian, former Head of Ipswich School and currently chairman of the Ipswich Historic Churches Trust (which includes St Peter’s by the Waterfront in the churches it looks after). After a preamble about himself and the Ipswich Historic Churches Trust he talked to us about Cardinal Wolsey, concentrating on his links with education and with Ipswich. Wolsey was born in Ipswich, the son of Robert Wolsey & his wife Joan (née Daundy). I’m sure Blatchly said he was born and lived at the Black Horse Inn – but there’s a plaque on the wall near Curzon House that suggests he was born in that part of Ipswich instead. He was born in 1470 or 1471 – this is known because on Maundy Thursday of 1530 he washed the feet of 59 old men, one for each year of his life so far.

Wolsey was first educated in Ipswich, and went to Magdalen College, Oxford at around the age of 15. A biographer of Wolsey’s writing not long after his death said that his early education was good, through the encouragement of his parents and masters. Blatchly explained that this was unlikely to be Robert Wolsey’s influence. Robert Wolsey was an innkeeper and butcher (at the Black Horse) and there are records of him appearing in court rather a lot. He was fined for several misdemeanours like letting pigs roam freely and so on. Thomas Wolsey’s mother was rather better born than her husband. Her brother was patron of St Lawrence Church, and was likely the person who encouraged the young Thomas Wolsey and got him his good education.

Blatchly mostly skipped over Wolsey’s career in the church and his involvement in Henry VIII’s government. He did, however, give us a flavour of the man with a digression on his attitude to heraldry. Obviously as the son of a butcher & innkeeper Wolsey had no coat of arms himself – and so he made one up with symbols that he felt suitable. Wolsey’s mistress, and mother of his children, was the daughter of a Thetford innkeeper which sounds a bit like Wolsey seeking out someone of a similar background to his own – but Blatchly felt her being the sister of the archdeacon who was Wolsey’s confessor was far more signficant. Their son was called Thomas Winter (discretely not using Wolsey’s name, nor his mother’s name). It would’ve been rather indiscreet for Thomas Winter to do the canonical thing of using his father’s coat of arms with an indicator of bastardy, so Wolsey made him a new one too. Blatchly said there’s some evidence that Winter was a spendthrift, so one of the symbols on his coat of arms is coins which are perhaps a nod to this tendency.

Wolsey was not on the side of Reformation as a theological/political movement, but he wasn’t against the idea of dissolving a few priories when he could “make better use” of the money. He dissolved several (I think Blatchly said generally in Norfolk and Suffolk, and no longer vibrant communities) to pay for his great educational foundations. These were Christchurch College in Oxford (taken over by Henry VIII so it still exists) and Cardinal College of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Ipswich. One of the dissolved priories was what has become St Peter’s by the Waterfront. This included the church and sat on a site of around 6 acres. So what Wolsey did was to dissolve the priory and convert the church into a chapel for his college. The rest of the site was then used for the college. After Wolsey’s fall from grace the College was abandoned – the church became a parish church, the institution of the college became the ancestor of Ipswich School and the fabric of the college mostly went to London to build Whitehall.

Blatchly also talked about Wolsey’s retirement plans – he was intending to live in Curzon House next to his new Ipswich College. This was inhabited by the Curzon family at the time, but they agreed to move somewhere else (although never had to, because Wolsey fell from grace). The house itself no longer exists (there’s a rather ugly modern building in its place) but Curzon Lodge, where visitors were put up, still does. Blatchly also explained about the statue of Wolsey as an educationalist which sits outside the modern Curzon House, and after his talk he took us all on a short walk to see the statue and the Lodge (and another 15th Century merchant’s house which is now the Thomas Wolsey pub).

John Blatchy talking about the Wolsey Statue

“John Bale” Oliver Wort

The second talk of the day was given by Oliver Wort, about John Bale who wrote many books and was a Protestant Reformer. The Ipswich connection is that Bale was born in Suffolk, and spent 30 years as a Carmelite friar first in Norwich and later as the prior of the Carmelite house in Ipswich. He then converted to Protestantism, and spent 30 years as a Protestant writer. Bale wrote extensively in both his incarnations but most modern scholarship concentrates on the later Bale and ignores his earlier writing. Wort feels this is foolish – whilst the later Bale is important, his formative years were as a friar and this did have an influence on his later thinking.

One of the reasons for concentrating on his later life comes from Bale himself – as a convert he was very keen to disavow his Carmelite past and repeatedly got irritated by people who referred to him as Friar Bale. Bale published one of the first autobiographies in English, which was the fourth iteration of his own account of his life over a 20 year period (the first three were as essays at the back of books he wrote). Wort made the point that it’s necessary to take Bale’s words with a large pinch of salt. In Wort’s preamble to this talk he gave us a flavour of John Bale the man – he had somewhat of an ego. In books that he wrote he wasn’t just content to put his name on the title page and perhaps at the end. Instead he made sure his name was repeated throughout, and constantly in the text referenced the fact that these were the opinions of John Bale. In one of his books there was even a puzzle to do with the capitals at the start of each chapter, which when solved spelt out “BY ME JOHAN BALE”. This occasionally backfired – in his autobiography (which has his name on each page as part of the title) his name is at least once spelt “BAAL” instead of “BALE”. Particularly amusing as this was one way that ardent Protestants referred to the Pope.

So the autobiography is in all its incarnations the work of a man who is keen on presenting an image of himself to the world. Wort suggested that this is probably not just ego, Bale may also have been trying to overwhelm the reader with his new convert status and hoped they’d forget the earlier conformist Friar Bale. Taking it with a pinch of salt the autobiography gives us what is likely to be a historical overview of Bale’s life. He was born in 1495, and became a monk in Norwich at the age of 12 (in 1507). He was educated at Cambridge, starting in 1514, and graduated as a Bachelor of Divinity. After this he rose swiftly through the Carmelite ranks, becoming Prior in Ipswich. In 1536 he left the Carmelites to become a priest. And after his conversion to Protestantism (1537ish? I haven’t got a note of what Wort said) he wrote plays at court for a few years (writing the first English history play). He fled into exile after Cromwell’s fall, and only returned when Edward VII took the throne. He also spent the years of Mary’s reign in exile abroad, returning when Elizabeth became Queen.

Wort explained that the four different versions of the autobiography can tell us something about Bale’s changing sense of himself and the ways that religious conversion was seen in England at the time. The details change depending on the political climate of the time that it was written, in particular the details of the moment of his conversion (which become more elaborate and specific). His marriage is positioned in the later versions as the capstone sealing his conversion but closer to the event he doesn’t refer to his wife at all – perhaps he was keeping her secret because it was illegal for him as a priest to marry, perhaps he didn’t actually marry her till later when it became legal! The autobiography might also be better referred to as an autohagiography. For instance Bale repeatedly compares himself to the apostle Paul, giving a whole host of (rather tenuous) correspondences between their lives. At the time this attracted rather heated disagreement from other writers about the ego involved in appropriating an apostle’s life for one’s own self-aggrandisement.

“Ipswich, a Late Medieval Port” Nicholas Amor

The third talk was after lunch, and started with a walk along the Waterfront to Isaacs where we looked at the (outside) of the oldest part of the building, which is a 15th Century merchant’s house and would’ve existed during the time period that Nicholas Amor was talking to us about.

Nicholas Amor talking about the Medieval Waterfront

Ipswich has been a port since Anglo-Saxon times, and one thing Amor told us on the walk was that when the new university buildings were built there was an opportunity for archaeologists to dig there. The Waterfront area is where the medieval port was – the river ran past there at the time (nowadays the course of the river has changed and the Waterfront is on a canal that forms the Wet Dock). Amor’s specialisation is the late medieval period, particularly the 15th Century when Ipswich was an important port. During this century Ipswich had trading links as far afield as Spain, Iceland and the Baltic – but no trans-atlantic links and no Mediterranean trade either. The bulk of the trade, however, was with the Low Countries. Amor has compared the trade through Ipswich in the 1390s, the 1460s and the 1490s to get a picture of how it changed throughout the 15th Century. This is a period with a lot of unrest in England and wars with France, and you can think of the 1390s as a sort of golden age. Trade goes significantly downhill across the whole country by the 1460s – Ipswich actually does rather better than other places because of a high concentration of German merchants operating in the town. By the 1490s trade has improved but not back to the levels of the late 14th Century.

One question he looked at was why was Ipswich important at the time. One of the reasons is changes in the wool trade in the 15th Century. Wool could only be shipped through ports designated as staples – where the wool was taxed. In the 14th Century staples were in a selection of English ports and Ipswich wasn’t one of them. In the 15th Century the staple was in Calais, so it didn’t matter which English port you shipped from so long as you went there. Ipswich is conveniently located close to London and the Stowbridge Fair (an important wool market near Cambridge). It was also a quick journey from there to Calais. Another factor that made Ipswich more important than other East Anglian ports was that its position relatively far upriver made it safer. For instance nearby Harwich was sacked by the French during the 1440s, but Ipswich never was. This meant that even though the Crown would’ve preferred to move trade to Great Yarmouth it wasn’t ever a successful move.

At first wool was the biggest export from Ipswich, later in the 15th Century its importance declined. Suffolk wool was actually quite low quality, Amor said this was because the sheep have too easy a life in East Anglia – not enough poor weather to make them grow dense wool. As wool was taxed by quantity rather than quality Suffolk wool wasn’t worth legitimately shipping to Calais, instead it was smuggled to Flanders cloth makers who wanted cheaper wool. East Midlands wool was better quality and so was the majority of the legitimate trade (and so is mentioned in the customs records that Amor has used in his work). During the 15th Century the importance of the (export) cloth trade grew and much less wool was exported to cloth manufacturers in the Low Countries. Suffolk became the industrial heartland of England at the time, manufacturing the bulk of the cloth a lot of which was then exported via Ipswich. Wine imports were also an important part of the trade through Ipswich until the loss of Gascony to France in 1453, after which significantly less wine was shipped. Beer imports were important at the beginning of the century, but by the end it was being exported back to the Continent.

The merchants involved in this trade changed over the century. At the beginning a lot of them were local, but towards the end of the century there were many more foreign merchants living in and trading through Ipswich. The big players traded with Gascony and Spain – the long haul destinations. Smaller merchants operated to & from the Low Countries. In the mid 15th Century trade was much less lucrative – the loss of Gascony was part of this, and the ongoing war closing off markets at random was another part of the reason.

Sadly Amor ran out of time before he could finish his talk – the walk had taken longer than originally planned which ate into the time.

“Thomas Bilney” Andrew Hope

The fourth and last talk was another biographical talk, this time about Thomas Bilney and given by Andrew Hope. Bilney was a Cambridge academic and one of the first such reformers to go out to preach and talk to the ordinary parishioners. The Ipswich connection is that in 1527 Bilney went on a preaching tour of East Anglia, including a visit to Ipswich in May of that year. The bulk of Hope’s talk was focussed on what we know about the sorts of topics that Bilney preached about, and what sort of reformer Bilney actually was. This last is a topic of some debate with no clear answers – even the authorities at the time weren’t sure. When he was arrested they drew up two different charge sheets while trying to figure out which heresy to charge him with – a Lutheran or a Lollard.

The two possibilities are quite different in terms of their social constructs. Lollards are a community, who meet face to face. It had existed as a movement for around a century at the time and generally Lollards became Lollards because they knew people (like their parents) who were already Lollards. At the time, however, Lutherans in England were primarily isolated academics who had read the pamphlets and books being brought through ports like Ipswich and had experienced a moment of intellectual conversion like John Bale. Bilney falls between the two groups – he is an academic, and is isolated rather than part of group, however from what we know of his preaching he agrees with some of the Lollard thinking. For instance Lutheran thinking says that pilgrimages don’t confer salvation or any sort of de facto spiritual merit. Bilney in his preaching goes beyond this in a very puritannical direction, in much the same way the Lollards do. But it’s not clear if he read some of the more radical Continentals, or if he came to these conclusions via conversations with Lollards that he preached to.

One topic of his preaching was against the use of miracles to imply that God approves of pilgrimages. This was the standard Catholic answer to people who doubted the worth of shrines and pilgrimage. But Bilney picked up on a biblical reference which says that Satan will be on the loose after the year 1000 AD, and used this to argue that this so-called miracles were the work of the devil (this also comes up in Bale’s writing). Bilney also preaches on salvation using terminology from both the Lutheran and Lollard schools of thought. For instance he uses the term “mediator” for Christ, which is really only used in Lutheran texts but he couples this with the Lollard imagery that praying to a saint is like putting the head at the feet. He also preaches against the Papacy, with a rather clever argument that it’s put itself in the position that conscience should take, and that conscience should be the temple of the Holy Ghost. This is clever because conscience as an idea wasn’t the same as it is now – one of the important questions of the era was how come there seems to a cross-humanity consensus on right and wrong (like, murder is bad, that sort of thing). So the medieval thinkers postulated that there is a conscience that is responsible for this, a sort of collective thing that some people were more in touch with than others. The official position of the Church was that when they put forward rules of behaviour this was them channelling this conscience and letting everyone know what it said – so if you were in doubt about the moral course, you just asked the Church. So Bilney was taking an existing concept (the Church is in some sense the conscience of society) and arguing that this was bad and that one’s own individual conscience was more important. There is evidence that his preaching on this topic is taken up by local Lollards who start using his terminology and ideas about conscience.

The Lollards of the time must’ve felt like this was a new dawn. They had been living as a heretical community for over a hundred years, and suddenly academics and mainstream thinkers are putting forward viewpoints that are close to what the Lollards believe. There’s a general idea that areas with a strong Lollard presence become strong Protestant areas, and Ipswich is an example of this. But it’s important not to assume this is always the case.

Hope finished up his talk by telling us a bit about the end of Bilney’s life. Bilney was arrested as a heretic, as mentioned before, and examined – and eventually abjures his faith. It’s clear that he’d struggled with his identity before (Lutheran or Lollard) but after this he became unsettled and struggled with the tension between his belief and the fact that he’d saved his life by denying his beliefs. After 3 years of this he went to Norwich and practically baited the authorities into arresting him – he preached and handed out tracts written by William Tyndale. After being arrested he was sentenced to death by burning at the stake (the only sentence possible for this second offence). Even though Bilney sits in this odd position between the Lollard and the Lutheran traditions of reform his influence in Cambridge at this time was second to none, so he was an important part of the English Reformation.

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Part 9)

The last two chapters of Part II (Politics and Wars) of this book are about the relationship between England and France during the period the book covers, focusing on the Hundred Years War which starts during Edward III’s reign. I’m lumping these two chapters together because the second one is specifically about the English army of the time, which is a subject that I acknowledge is important but am not that interested in personally.

England and France

Prestwich opens the chapter by noting that although with hindsight we see the Hundred Years War (kicking off in 1337) as a coherent thing that’s different in kind to preceding wars, this wasn’t the case at the time. Before King John (so before the scope of this book) the English Kings had control over vast lands in what is now France but after John’s loss of most of this to France all that was left on the continent for the English King was Gascony and even that was disputed by the French. Prestwich lays out how this duchy wasn’t worth much to the English crown in a monetary sense and it wasn’t terribly culturally similar to England. So its worth was mostly as a point of principle and as a base for re-expanding English control to their “ancestral lands”. There had been various campaigns in France in the early years of Henry III’s reign, with not much success. Then in 1259 the unstable domestic situation – which was building up to civil war (which was talked about in the first chapter of this part of the book) prompted the English to negotiate for a more lasting peace with the French. In return for being allowed to control Gascony Henry III gave up his claims to the rest of the lands, plus agreed to do homage for Gascony. Prestwich notes that given how arrogant Henry III was, this clearly wasn’t seen as humiliating for him at the time otherwise he wouldn’t’ve agreed to it even if it was sensible.

In hindsight, this treaty of 1259 can be seen as setting up the tensions that would result in the Hundred Years War. But in the medium term it was a stunning success and relations between England and France remained good for over 30 years after this treaty. In 1286 Edward I even did homage to the new French King as he was bound to do by the treaty terms. So far, so friendly. But tensions started rising not long after. Edward I reorganised the government of Gascony in a way that meant he was taking a more active role in it. And this was happening against a backdrop of the French crown being eager to assert their own royal rights wherever possible (for internal political reasons, I think, so again the fact it was Gascony was almost irrelevant).

War broke out in 1294 sparked by rivalries between sailors from English ports (in Gascony) and Breton sailors. Originally the English tried to keep a friendly relationship with France. Edward I’s brother Edmund and the Queen of France (and her mother-in-law) actually negotiated a treaty that Edward considered binding. It had a complicated series of events to follow, but after Edward did his part the French did not follow through with theirs so Edward felt duped. But Prestwich says it’s more likely that the French Queen just didn’t have as much authority and influence as she thought she did – so she was acting in good faith but wasn’t actually able to make a binding treaty.

Unlike Henry III, Edward I had an actual plan for his war with France. The main goal was to keep Gascony, but it was easier to actually campaign in Normandy. And Edward also masterminded a grand alliance pulling in various other European courts on his side – Flanders, Germany, Brabant, Holland, Guelders. But even having a plan didn’t guarantee success and the English were lucky that the French King was both cautious and fooled into thinking their army was larger than it really was. A truce was agreed in 1297, but peace treaty negotiations dragged on until 1303. In the end what was agreed was that everything should revert to the pre-war situation and friendly relations should be cemented by marriages between Edward I and the French King’s sister, and the future Edward II and the French King’s daughter.

However, you can’t realistically pretend that a war didn’t happen and tensions remained between the two countries. The legal status of Gascony meant that technically nobles there could appeal against the English King’s judgements to the French King, and they were encouraged to do so. Edward II also kept putting off the whole “paying homage” thing. So in 1324 war broke out again – a war that the English didn’t really want and the French weren’t terribly enthusiastic about. Peace was negotiated by Isabella, Edward II’s wife and sister of the current French King, mostly because she had personal reasons for wanting peace. Again the treaty was a restoration of the prior status quo, and Isabella’s son, the future Edward III, came to do homage on his father’s behalf for Gascony. And again this was more part of Isabella’s personal political manoeuvring than done on behalf of her husband – this is the jumping off point for the invasion of England by Isabella and Mortimer that results in the removal of Edward II from the throne.

For the first 10 years of Edward III’s reign there is an uneasy peace, and in 1329 when the first Valois King of France takes the throne Edward did homage to him for Gascony. Relations break down gradually over the early to mid 1330s. As well as the issue of Gascony the interference of France in Anglo-Scottish relations and of England in Franco-Flemish relations was important. There was also a failed crusade that Philip VI of France was going to lead – the Pope cancelled it because peace in Europe could not be guaranteed. Philip thought this was Edward’s fault. There was also the question of who was the rightful King of France. By French succession laws descent via the female line was invalid, so Edward III had no claim to France. By English succession laws he had a better claim (as the past King’s nephew) than Philip VI did. However by doing homage for Gascony he’d tacitly abandoned his claim. In 1337 he changed his mind and in 1340 he altered his coat of arms to include the French coat of arms. When writing to Continental rulers he started to call himself “Edward by grace of God King of France and England and lord of Ireland” (when referring to himself in English correspondence he put England first…). Prestwich suggests that this isn’t necessarily all because Edward wants the French throne – it’s more about getting the Flemish onside, if they can claim to be supporting the legitimate King of France then their position is much stronger than it is if they are rebelling. It’s also about asking for more than you necessarily want in the hopes when you negotiate it’s only down to your true position.

The first phase of the Hundred Years War runs from 1337 to 1340. This was fought much like Edward I’s war in the 1290s, expensively and with the help of allies. The English are a bit more successful however, in particular winning a naval battle at Sluys that did a lot to secure the English coast from French raids. The treaty of Esplechin in September 1340 was the end of this phase, with both sides promising a 9 month truce in all arenas including Scotland and Gascony.

The next phase of the war runs from 1341 through to 1355. War restarted using a succession crisis in Brittany as an excuse with the French and English backing different candidates. This was important as it gained Edward III more allies in French territory and access to more landing sites on the French coast. In 1346 Edward III himself undertook an extraordinarily successful campaign starting near Barfleur in Normandy and marching via Caen to the Seine (indeed nearly to Paris itself) and then north to the Somme eventually meeting the French in battle at Crécy. Pitched battles were actually rare, although Edward did have some reason to court them as winning a battle would be regarded as proof that God was on his side. The success of this campaign was very important, but wasn’t followed up – in part because of the crisis of the Black Death in 1348. However the English definitely had the upperhand in the bits & pieces of fighting that followed over the next several years even if there weren’t many more set piece victories.

In 1353 there was some attempt to negotiate a peace but both sides felt they still had more to gain if they kept on fighting, so nothing was worked out. The next phase of the war started in 1355, and Prestwich titles this “The Black Prince’s War” – Edward III’s son & heir lead the most succesful campaigns of this five year period, mostly raiding expeditions through southern France from Gascony. The major victory of this period was in 1357 at Poitiers when the French King was captured. For 2 years after this there were attempts to negotiate peace and ransom of the French King which didn’t really go anywhere. A final campaign by Edward III in 1359-60 ended this phase of the war. The English desire to continue was damaged by a disasterous storm that devasted the campaigning army, which meant they entered negotiations in a more concessionary mood than previously. Peace was negotiated in May 1360 at Brétigny – Edward III got Gascony, Poitou and several surrounding areas in full sovereignty in return for giving up his claim to the throne of France.

1360 is the end of the scope of this book, so to finish up the chapter Prestwich just notes that the peace lasted only 9 years. And mostly foundered on the actual implementation of the treaty.

The Armies of Edward III’s French War

The most surprising thing about this first section of the Hundred Years War both from a contemporary perspective and with hindsight is how competent the English army was, even compared to the start of Edward III’s reign. In part this is down to experience – the Scottish wars during the 1330s meant that there were men who knew how to command, knew how to organise logistics etc. And also had learnt lessons about which tactics had worked and which hadn’t.

Prestwich goes into a lot of detail about recruitment for the war. It was a worry for the crown initially, so the offered pay was higher than in previous wars. The bureaucracy was simplified too with explicit contracts between crown and commanders that set out how many men they were to bring of what sorts in return for how much in fees. Pay wasn’t the only motivator – the chance of capturing a noble Frenchman who you could then ransom was another form of motivation. And general looting, pillaging and “living off the land” was encouraged on these campaigns. This last also reduced the burden on the English domestically as there wasn’t as great a need to supply the army with food etc as there had been on the Welsh & Scottish campaigns.

When considering the tactics used by the English Prestwich starts off by discussing contemporary explanations for the successes achieved. The English mostly put it down to divine approval, which Prestwich notes is marginally more believable than the French thinking that their failure is down to wearing short-cut clothes … There isn’t much if any written evidence of English introspection about their tactics, but clearly it must have happened as lessons learnt in the Scottish wars are successfully implemented (often by the same commanders) in the French campaigns. However experienced troops and high morale were perhaps as important as the specific tactics used.

Chivalry was important in the 14th Century, and this may account for much of the enthusiasm for the French wars of Edward III. It’s not clear if Edward III was deliberately encouraging the culture of chivalry for this sort of purpose, or if he actually just liked it himself. Prestwich also notes that our association of the 14th Century with a golden age of chivalry is partly just because of what texts etc have survived. For instance the Order of the Garter was founded in 1348 and survives to this day, but it was one of several such things and it’s not clear how notable it actually was at the time. And as always the reality doesn’t live up to the ideals – wars of this era weren’t notably more chivalric in practice than any other era. Looting, pillaging and so on still happened, brutality still happened, and the practice of high ransoms for nobles doesn’t seem to square with the honour & glory rhetoric either.

Prestwich devotes the last two pages of this chapter to the economic effects of the war between 1337 and 1360. There is no clear consensus on whether the war was profitable or detrimental to the English economy. Prestwich concludes that the costs of the war were high in terms of the increased taxation needed to pay for it, and were probably not entirely counterbalanced by income from plundering and ransom high though that was.

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The Plantagenets; Return of the Black Death: Secret History

The Plantagenets was a three part series about this dynasty of English monarchs presented by Robert Bartlett. He points out that this is the longest running dynasty of English kings, which I hadn’t realised – they stretch from Henry II (who takes the throne in 1154) right the way through to Richard III (who dies in battle in 1485). Bartlett covered them in chronological fashion, conveying some feel for the politics of the time and for the dysfunctional soap opera-like personalities and family relationships of the Plantagenets.

The first episode pretty much covered the context and then the first two generations of Plantagenets. Henry II actually ruled over a fairly large empire including not just England but quite a lot of what’s now France, which he’d acquired via inheritance and marriage. This part of the family is one of the more soap opera like bits – Bartlett explained the various rebellions against Henry by his own sons and even his wife. It wasn’t all internal family bickering however – this is also the time of Thomas Beckett and his murder after he fell out with Henry. The bickering and power struggles don’t stop after Henry’s death either. Richard the Lionheart rules England mostly in absentia and via first his mother then his younger brother John, with varying degrees of success. John succeeds Richard in a somewhat dubious fashion (a nephew, Arthur of Brittany, had a better claim but eventually meets with an “accident” in custody). John is also notable for annoying most of the aristocracy (this is the time of the Magna Carta) and for losing the bulk of the dynasty’s French lands.

The second episode covered the same era that my current non-fiction book is covering – from Henry III through to Edward III. But definitely aimed at a different audience in that Prestwich’s book is fairly dry and focused on the details and nittygritty of the politics, but Bartlett is pitching the TV series more towards the broad picture end of the spectrum. The focus of this era is shifting from the very French focus of the first part of the dynasty to a more English identity. Largely out of necessity, as John had lost most of the French lands. Conflicts between King & nobles in this time lead to the formation of Parliament as a key player in government. And the English Kings also start to look to the rest of the British Isles to satisfy their empire building tendencies – Edward I’s conquest of Wales, and the repeated attempts to control Scotland.

The third episode Bartlett called “The Death of Kings” – this is the decline of the Plantagenet dynasty into particularly bloody disaster. We start with Richard II, who was a great believer in the divine right of Kings and rather predictably alienated the aristocracy with this belief. He was deposed by a cousin of his – and was starved to death in custody. Bartlett positioned this as the first precedent of the deposition and killing of an anointed King, and thus the beginning of the end for the dynasty. I’d quibble, in that I’d see the deposition of Edward II as the first time that had happened in the Plantagenet dynasty – prior to that (like when Henry III lost a civil war) the King always remained King just not powerful in practice. But J pointed out that Bartlett was maybe drawing a distinction between being deposed in the name of your heir (ie Edward II -> Edward III) and being deposed by a relative who wouldn’t otherwise inherit. It does, at first, seem to’ve been a successful gambit by Henry IV and his son Henry V leads the dynasty to a new highpoint. Henry reignited a hot phase of the war with France, and was sufficiently successful to get himself declared the heir. Sadly he dies young (of dysentry) and while his infant son Henry VI does get crowned King in both England and France it isn’t to last – Henry VI isn’t a warrior King, in fact he’s pretty useless as a King at all. Bartlett didn’t have much time left in this programme to cover the Wars of the Roses in detail, instead focusing on the human side of it and getting us quickly to Richard III and the end of the Plantagenets.

I enjoyed this series – we’ve seen a few series Bartlett has presented and they’re always both entertaining and informative. It was slightly odd watching it at a point where I’ve recently read a much more detailed account of part of it because I did find myself thinking “well, yes, but what about …” rather more often than I would normally.

Keeping with the same general historical era we also watched Return of the Black Death: Secret History this week. This was right on the edge between interesting and irritatingly shallow. The most irritating bit was that before each ad break they did a little sequence of empty streets of modern London with a sinister figure standing on a rooftop and whispering the names of the dead. Once would’ve been OK, but over and over just felt like padding on an already pretty shallow programme.

The jumping off point for the programme was the excavation of some victims of the 1349 Black Death epidemic in London during the construction of Crossrail. They then talked about the extent of the epidemic, why we now think so many people died and what lessons we can learn in the modern era from this disaster. The programme showcased one historian’s research into the Wills of London merchants and tradespeople of the time – he’d used these to extrapolate to get a figure for the number dead. As presented on the programme it seemed somewhat of a stretch, so I rather hope that this was simplified too far! One bit of gimmickry that was actually very effective was that they staged readings of some of these Wills by people who looked like modern versions of the beneficiary of the will – like a teenage girl whose parents had both died within a month of each other. It was tastefully done and did humanise the data. They did some other chronicles and texts in a similar style, which was also effective.

The estimate they used was that 60% of the London population at the time died, and they all died within a few months. Londoners at the time were likely to be particularly vulnerable to disease because there had been a period of poor weather and bad harvests. But from talking to modern disease experts this is too fast for normal bubonic plague to spread and kill even taking that into account, so at first it was assumed this was a particular mutant form of the disease. However the skeletons that were dug up still had the disease present in their teeth, which meant that it could be sequenced and compared to the modern form. Surprisingly they were identical. The explanation was illustrated using some cases of plague from the early 20th Century in Shotley (near Felixstowe) – this too spread quickly and killed fast, and it’s known that this was a pneumonic form of the plague. The standard infection is spread by rats and their fleas, but if an infected person develops the pneumonic form then it is easily transferred from person to person – same disease, just a different place of infection and mechanism of spread. So this is likely what devastated London in 1349.

As well as using a modern example to look for explanations for the rapid spread, they also talked about how Edward III’s government’s response was not that far off a modern idea of how to handle things. Apart from the lack of good medical knowledge, of course. The particular example was that a cemetery was set aside for victims and steps taken to ensure the dead were buried rapidly but with proper ceremony. The expert from Porton Down talked about how this is necessary to keep morale up in the survivors, and indicated there are similar sorts of plans drawn up in case of disaster today.

Overall, a bit shallow and gimmicky but presented some interesting perspectives.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of Monkey Planet – series about the biology and behaviour of primates.

Episode 7 of The First World War – a 10 part series covering the whole of the war.

Episode 5 of Pagans & Pilgrims – series about the sacred places of Britain, presented by Ifor ap Glyn.

Britpop at the BBC – nostaglia programme about Britpop, using footage filmed by the BBC, mostly for Top of the Pops.