Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (69 page)

Yet he maintained the magnificence of his court; as befitted a great king, jousts and processions and tournaments were organized on a grand scale. Tumblers and dancers were brought before him; he purchased or was given animals for the royal menagerie, and he liked to parade ‘freaks’ for the benefit of the courtiers. The king enjoyed gambling, too, and played card games such as Torment, Condemnation and Who Wins Loses. He liked to hawk and to hunt every day, and five falconers were enrolled in his entourage. He seems particularly to have enjoyed the company of ‘fools’ or jesters; at least five of them could be found in court at any one time, including Scot and Dick ‘the master fools’ and Ringeley ‘the abbot of misrule’.

Medieval humour is now perhaps an arcane subject. One phrase became a catchword in the fourteenth century. ‘As Hendyng says’ or ‘quoth Hendyng’ was a way of encapsulating a piece of wit or wisdom. ‘Friendless are the dead, quoth Hendyng’ or ‘never tell your foe that your foot aches, quod Hendyng’ or ‘Hendyng says, better to give an apple than to eat an apple’ were repeated in street and field.

Many jokes or puzzles were posed, and a game of question-and-answer was called ‘Puzzled Balthasar’. What is the broadest water and the least danger to walk over? The dew. What is the
cleanest leaf among all other leaves? The holly leaf, for nobody will wipe his arse with it. How many calves’ tails can reach from the earth to the sky? No more than one, if it is long enough. What is the best thing and the worst thing among men? Word is both best and worst. What thing is it that some love and some hate? It is judgment.

A thousand proverbs and sayings rose into the air:

The last sentence is redolent of the entire medieval period.

In the quieter times the king worked with his advisers undisturbed. Two of the most prominent of them, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, were set to harry and to prosecute the great ones of the realm. They dominated a small committee, called the Council Learned in the Law, specifically established to enforce the king’s rights and to collect the king’s debts. But they also had more informal ways of proceeding. If the eminent families spent little, and made no outward show, then they could spare a present of money to the king; if they spent lavishly, and lived in style, then they could afford to share their magnificence with the king. This was the ‘fork’ upon which the king impaled his victims.

Empson and Dudley also imposed fines or bonds upon the members of the nobility who had in any way breached the law. The earl of Northumberland was fined £5,000 for unlawful retaining. Lord Abergavenny was fined £70,000 for the same offence; Henry collected only £5,000 of that enormous sum, with the threat of seizing the rest if the lord did not behave satisfactorily. Anyone could be accused before a judge and, if he did not answer the summons, his goods could be confiscated and the presumed guilty
party imprisoned at the king’s pleasure. Thus did the king buy the obedience of those mightier subjects whom he did not trust. But he could not purchase their loyalty. He was feared by all, but he was not loved or admired by many. ‘All things’, wrote Thomas More of the king’s reign, ‘were so covertly demeaned, one thing pretended and another meant.’

As Dudley said at a later date, from the hindsight provided by a prison cell, ‘the pleasure and mind of the king’s grace was much set to have many persons in his danger at his pleasure, wherefore diverse and many persons were bound to his grace in great sums of money’. Dudley also confessed that he had illegally extorted money on the king’s behalf from eighty victims. The king had in effect established a financial autocracy, an absolutism all the more feared because of exorbitant fines and the threat of endless imprisonment. This was the legacy that he left to his son and heir, who became Henry VIII. He kept notebooks in which he jotted down his caustic or suspicious thoughts and observations about those around him; when a pet monkey tore up one of these books, the courtiers were according to Francis Bacon ‘almost tickled with sport’.

It could be said that, like Scrooge, Henry VII feared the world too much. Certainly, like Scrooge, he tried to protect himself with a wall of money. Yet he was avaricious with a purpose; he told one of his councillors that ‘the kings my predecessors, weakening their treasure, have made themselves servants to their subjects’. He did not intend to beg or borrow, only to extort with menaces. In the process the annual royal income increased by approximately 45 per cent, and he was one of the few monarchs in English history to clear his debts and to die solvent. He was also the first king since Henry V to pass on his throne without dispute.

Money was power. It enabled the king to protect his throne and his dynasty; Henry told the Spanish ambassador that it was his intention to keep his subjects poor because riches would only make them haughty. He may have become more harsh, and more rapacious, in his last years; but it is equally likely that his natural tendencies were reinforced by age. He was in declining health, and in the final three years of his reign he was more or less an invalid. In his will he declared that 2,000 Masses should be said for the
sake of his soul, within the space of one month, at sixpence a Mass. He died at his palace of Richmond on 21 April 1509, to general relief if not open rejoicing. ‘Avarice’, one noble wrote, ‘has fled the country.’ Yet the days of royal avarice were just beginning.

A conclusion

When we look over the course of human affairs we are more likely than not to find only error and confusion. I have already explained, in the course of this narrative, that the writing of history is often another way of defining chaos. There is in fact a case for saying that human history, as it is generally described and understood, is the sum total of accident and unintended consequence.

So the great movements of the period, as described in the present narrative, may seem to be without direction and without explanation except in terms of day-to-day expediency; in that sense they are without historical meaning. What seem to be, in retrospect, the greatest and most important changes tend to go unnoticed at the time. We may take the slow progress of the English parliament as an example. The government of king with parliament was not framed after a model; the various parts and powers of the national assembly emerged from occasional acts, the significance of which was not understood, or from decisions reached by practical considerations and private interests. The entry of knights and townsmen, later to become known as ‘the Commons’, provoked no interest or surprise. It was a matter of indifference.

Everything grows out of the soil of contingent circumstance. Convenience, rather than the shibboleth of progress or evolution, is the agent of change. Error and misjudgment therefore play a
large part in what we are pleased to call the ‘development’ of institutions. A body of uses and misuses then takes on the carapace of custom and becomes part of a tradition. It should be noticed, in a similar spirit, that most of the battles fought in medieval England were governed by chance – a surprise charge, or a sudden storm, might decisively change the outcome. This should come as no surprise. Turmoil and accident and coincidence are the stuff of all human lives. They are also the abiding themes of fiction, of poetry and of drama.

One result of historical enquiry is the recognition of transience; the most fervent beliefs will one day be discredited, and the most certain certainties will be abandoned. Opinions are as unstable and as evanescent as the wind. We may invoke, with George Meredith, ‘Change, the strongest son of Life’.

The history of England is therefore one of continual movement and of constant variation; the historian, propelled onward by these forces, has scarcely time or inclination to glimpse the patterns of this ceaseless activity. Thomas Babington Macaulay once wrote, when surveying the passage of English history, that in the course of seven centuries a ‘wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most civilized people that ever the world saw’; at the beginning of the twenty-first century it would perhaps be difficult to pay the same compliment. We cannot find what he called ‘progress’ in the morals or in the culture of the English nation.

Yet we find something else of much greater interest and importance. From the beginning we find evidence of a deep continuity that is the legacy of an unimaginably distant past; there seems always to have been an hierarchical society with a division of labour and of responsibility. Yet there is a different kind of continuity, largely unseen and impalpable. The nation itself represents the nexus of custom with custom, the shifting patterns of habitual activity. This may not be a particularly exciting philosophy of history but it is important to avoid the myth of some fated or providential movement forward. Below the surface of events lies a deep, and almost geological, calm.

Many examples are to be found in this volume. The polity of England, for example, seems always to have been highly centralized; the political system was integrated; the legal and administrative
systems were uniform. We have seen that, from at least the time of the building of Stonehenge, England has been a heavily organized and administered country. Unlike the provinces and sub-kingdoms of France or of Spain, or the fissiparous states and duchies of northern Europe, or the city-states of Italy, England was all of a piece.

Other forms of continuity are also evident. Modern roads follow the line of old paths and trackways. The boundaries of many contemporary parishes follow previous patterns of settlement, along which ancient burials are still to be found. Our distant ancestors are still around us. There is a history of sacred space almost as old as the history of the country itself. Churches and monastic communities were placed close beside the sites of megalithic monuments, as well as sacred springs and early Bronze Age ritual spaces. I have already noticed that the churchyard of the parish church of Rudston, in East Yorkshire, harbours the tallest Neolithic standing stone in England. The pilgrim routes of medieval Kent trace the same pattern as the prehistoric tracks to holy wells and shrines. We still live deep in the past.

Continuity, rather than change, is the measure of the country. It has been suggested that the cities and towns of England decayed at the end of the Roman occupation. But this is pure speculation. They may simply have changed their function while preserving their role as the centres of administration. The urban population remained, thus continuing a tradition of town living that can be glimpsed within a Neolithic settlement in Cornwall; in 3000
BC
the enclosure, surrounded by a strong stone wall, accommodated 200 people. Can this be understood as an early English town? A village or small town at Thatcham, in Berkshire, has been in place for 10,000 years.

In the countryside, there is even greater evidence for continuity. The Anglo-Saxon ‘invasion’, for example, was once deemed to mark a decisive break with the past. Yet in fact there is no discernible change in agricultural practice. In historical terms there are no ‘breaks’. We have seen that the same field systems were laid out by the Germanic settlers; the new arrivals preserved the old boundaries and in Durham, for example, Germanic structures were
set within a pattern of small fields and drystone walls created in the prehistoric past. More surprisingly, perhaps, the Germanic settlers formed groups which honoured the boundaries of the old tribal kingdoms. They respected the lie of the land. The Jutes of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight took over the prehistoric lands of the Belgae; the East Saxons held the ancient territory of the Trinovantes, and the South Saxons established themselves within the prehistoric borders of the Regnenses. They even retained the same capitals. The sacred sites of the Saxons, at a slightly later date, follow the alignment of Neolithic monuments. All fell into the embrace of the past. The evidence suggests, therefore, that the roots of the country go very deep. Even now they have not been severed.

In this volume there have been endless variations upon the same principal theme or themes – the uneasy balance between the sovereign and the more powerful nobles, the desire for war pitted against the overwhelming costs of conflict, the battle for mastery between Church and sovereign, the precarious unity of monarch and parliament, are all part of this narrative. There are also enduring fault lines that create discord and crisis. We may mention here the barren attempts to regulate social life, the slow decay of the feudal order, the antipathy to central government in the shires, the rivalry of noble families in local affairs, the blundering efforts to regulate foreign and domestic trade. Identical political and constitutional problems recur again and again; it could even be said that change occurs only when the same factors combine in different ways.