Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (36 page)

We may grow weary of the life and death of kings but in truth, for an historical account of medieval England, there is no other sure or certain touchstone. The general current of the nation persists beneath the surface of action and event but, as a result, it is not susceptible to chronology. The institutions of the state are similarly outside the historical record. They can be inferred and described, at rough intervals, but there is really no appropriate timescale. Administrative history has no proper narrative. This is also the case with the life and development of the English towns. As for the English people themselves, they can be glimpsed fleetingly in political ballads and in court records. Of their suffering, and of their pleasures, little is known. They are largely absent from the written record simply because they were not considered important; they were not worthy of representation.

They emerge, however, in certain manorial accounts. We may read for example, in the accounts of the manor of Sutton, of Stephen Puttock. He was a
nativus
who, at the end of the thirteenth century, lived and worked on the prior of Ely’s land in that manor. He owed labour services to his lord and was obliged to pay certain fines or taxes at the ritual moments of his family’s life. He had to pay a fine, for example, when he married each of
his two wives; his sister was similarly taxed when she was married. He was also fined when he failed to carry out his labour services; he may have been negligent in planting or harvesting his lord’s crops. Yet he was a significant man in his own village. He had a large holding of his own land, and was appointed both as reeve and as ale-taster in his community; he was also frequently selected as a juryman. He was an acquisitive purchaser of land, buying it in parcels of several acres at a time. Stephen Puttock was a man of his time, taking part in an unconscious life of custom and tradition. He was unfree, but he was prosperous; he was a labourer, but he was also a landowner. He was part of a nexus of duties and obligations, but he was also a prominent part of his community. He has now returned to the soil of England.

Another means of access to the general life of the period comes in the now voluminous court reports. They provide of course a haphazard account, based upon civic or criminal offences, but they are suggestive. The fowler, Robert, spends a great deal of money but no one knows how he earns it; he wanders abroad at night, so he is suspected. John Voxe was fined fourpence for cutting down two ash trees on his land. Another man was fined for fishing in his lord’s pool. Ranulph, the fishmonger, goes out to the oyster boats in order to buy up their catch before it reaches the market. Three men were arrested as ‘common breakers of hedges to the common harm’. The butchers of Sprowston bought infirm pigs cheaply, and then sold sausages unfit for human consumption. John Foxe, a chaplain, was fined one penny for attacking William Pounchon with a knife. Walter of Maidstone, a carpenter, brought together an assembly or parliament of carpenters at Mile End in order to agree on a policy to defy the mayor. The butchers of Peterborough were reminded that they must cleanse the churchyard of all filth and bones that their dogs brought into it. Certain people made ‘a great roistering with unknown minstrels, tabor-players and trumpeters’ to the grave disquiet of the entire neighbourhood.

Here is another vignette of medieval England. John and Agnes Page, from a village in Kent, took John Pistor to the manor court. Agnes Page had purchased John Pistor’s wife in exchange for a pig worth 3 shillings; John Pistor was happy with the arrangement for
a while, but eventually he asked that his wife be returned to him on payment of 2 shillings. The bargain was agreed, but Pistor did not pay the sum. The jury found against him.

We may sense here a life more intense and more arduous than our own; it was at once more sensitive and more irritable. The contrasts of life were more violent, and the insecurities more palpable. This evidence is all of a piece with a strident and often violent society where the growing number of people provoked collision and unrest.

It has been estimated that by the beginning of the fourteenth century the population had reached in excess of 6 million. The figure, in isolation, means nothing at all. But it is salutary to realize that it was not matched again until the latter part of the eighteenth century. The England of Edward I was more populous than that of Elizabeth I or of George II. So in the relatively crowded conditions of the early fourteenth century, land was at a premium. The woods and underwoods were cleared. Farming land was often divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller parcels, owned by men who also earned their living as carpenters or shoemakers. But many landless men were also available for hire; wages, therefore, were not ordinarily very high. Great pressure, and competition, existed within all sectors of the economy. The first ‘strike fund’, to support workers who refused to do mowing services, was organized in 1300.

The condition of England was made infinitely worse by a series of harvest failures from 1315. The price of bread, and other essential commodities, rose and rose. ‘Alas, poor England!’ one chronicler of the time wrote. ‘You who once helped other lands from your abundance, now poor and needy are forced to beg.’ This was one of the worst periods of English social history, and may act as a suitably troubled context for the last years of the reign of Edward I as well as the unhappy reign of Edward II. It might have been said at the time – the kings of England do nothing but harm.

20

The hammer

Edward was known as ‘the hammer of the Scots’ but he could more pertinently be known as the hammer of the Jews. He exploited them and harassed them; finally he expelled them. Their crime was to become superfluous to his requirements. The history of the Jews in medieval England is an unhappy and even bloody one. They had arrived, from Rouen, in the last decades of the eleventh century; they were first only settled in London across a broad band of nine parishes but in the course of the next few decades they also removed to York, Winchester, Bristol and other market towns. The previous rulers of England, in the ninth and tenth centuries, had not welcomed them; Jewish merchants would have provided too much competition for Anglo-Saxon traders.

William the Conqueror brought them to England because he had found that in Normandy they had been good for business; in particular they provided access to the silver of the Rhineland. The Jews of Rouen may also have helped to finance his invasion of England, in return for the chance to work in a country from which they had previously been barred. Another reason can be given for the favour they found with the king. Since Christians were not allowed to lend money at interest, some other group of merchants had to be created. The Jews became moneylenders by default, as it were, and as a result they were abused and despised in equal
measure. But they did not only lend money; they were also moneychangers and goldsmiths. They exchanged plate for coin. They provided ready money, a commodity often in short supply.

The Norman kings of England, therefore, found them to be very useful. They could borrow from them but, more profitably, they could tax them. They could levy what were known as ‘tallages’, and succeeding kings were able to take between a third and a quarter of the Jews’ total wealth at any one time. As a result the Jews, in the twelfth century, were afforded royal protection. No Jew was allowed to become a citizen, or to hold land, but the neighbourhood of the Jewry was like the royal forests exempt from common law; the Jews were simply the king’s chattels, who owed their life and property wholly to him. They were granted the protection of the royal courts, and their bonds were placed in a special chamber of the royal palace at Westminster. A Jewish exchequer was established there, with its own clerks and justices.

In return for royal favour the Jews brought energy and prosperity to the business of the realm; their loans helped to make possible the great feats of Norman architecture, and the unique stone houses of Lincoln and Bury St Edmunds are credited to them. Jacob le Toruk had a grand stone house in Cannon Street, in the London parish of St Nicholas Acon. The Jews also introduced the more advanced forms of medical learning, and were able to serve as doctors even to the native community. Roger Bacon himself studied under rabbis at Oxford.

More dubious legal tactics were also enforced. William Rufus decreed, for example, that Jews could not be converted to Christianity; he did not want their number to fall. That may not have been a very Christian act, but William Rufus was never a very good Christian. He supported the Jews partly because it offended the bishops; he enjoyed causing affront to his churchmen.

That royal protection did not necessarily extend very far. At the time of the coronation of Richard I, in 1189, some Jews were beaten back from the front row of spectators; the crowd turned on them, and a riotous assault began upon the London quarters of Jewry. The incident became the cause of fresh outrages as the news of the attack spread; it emboldened native hostility, and gave an excuse for further carnage. 500 Jews, with their families, took
refuge in the castle at York where they were besieged by the citizens; in desperation the men killed their wives and children before killing themselves. Richard was even then making preparations for his crusade to the Holy Land; violence and religious bigotry were in the air. His successor, John, renewed his protection in exchange for large sums of money. In 1201 a formal charter was drawn up, giving the Jews their own court. They were allowed to live ‘freely and honourably’ in England, which meant that they were here to make money for the king. Nine years later John took over all the debts of the Jews, living or dead, and tried to extract the money from the debtors for his own benefit. It was another reason for the barons’ revolt that led to the sealing of the Magna Carta.

Anti-Semitism was part of the Christian condition throughout Europe. The Jewish people were abused for being the ‘killers of Christ’, with convenient forgetfulness of the fact that Jesus himself was a Jew, but other more material reasons accounted for the racial hatred. By the middle of the twelfth century several prominent Jewish moneylenders had extended very large loans to some of the noblest men in the kingdom; men like the famous Aaron of Lincoln were the only ones with resources large enough to meet the obligations of the magnates. If they could be attacked or killed, and their bonds destroyed, then the great ones of the land would benefit. The myth that they were engaged in the ‘ritual murder’ of Christian infants became common at times of financial crisis, when the populace could be incited to take sanguinary vengeance. It is a matter of historical record that England took the lead in the execration of the Jews. The first rumour of a ritual crucifixion emerged in 1144, with the story of the death of William of Norwich, and thereafter the tales of ritual murder spread through Europe. England was also the first country to condemn all Jews as criminal ‘coin-clippers’, and the iconography of anti-Semitism is to be found on the west front of Lincoln Cathedral.

In 1239, during the reign of Henry III, a great census of the Jews and their debts was carried out. The representatives of all the Jews in England were then obliged to convene at Worcester and agree to pay over 20,000 marks to the king’s treasury. This measure effectively bankrupted some of them, which meant that their usefulness had come to an end. Fourteen years later, Henry III ordained
a Statute of Jewry that enforced a number of disciplinary measures, including the compulsory badge of identification. This was a token or
tabula
of yellow felt, 3 inches by 6 inches (7.5 by 15 centimetres), to be worn on an outer garment; it was to be carried by every Jew over the age of seven years. Two years later Henry investigated the death of a boy, Hugh, in Lincoln; he believed or professed to believe that this was a crime of ritual murder and, as a result, 19 Jews from that city were executed and 100 despatched to prison in the castle.

Edward I was even more ferocious. He ordered that certain Jews, who had been acquitted of the charge of ritual murder, be retried. In November 1278, 600 Jews were imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of tampering with the currency; 269 of them were hanged six months later. In 1290 he expelled all of the remaining Jews from his kingdom; they were now approximately 2,000. He did not take this step out of misplaced religious zeal; it was the measure demanded by the parliament house before they would agree to fresh taxation. In fact the expulsion was seen by many chroniclers as one of the most important and enlightened acts of his reign. The anti-Semitism of the medieval English people is clear enough. Some have argued that, in subtly modified forms, it has continued to this day.

21

The favourites of a king