The Road Not Taken Read online

  More importantly, significant socio-economic changes occurred in English society in the years 1381–1450. Villeinage was in significant retreat, Richard II’s threats notwithstanding, as the inroads of market forces and the cash economy made themselves felt. Increasingly, labourers were released from serfdom into land tenure at fixed rents. A switch from customary to leasehold and copyhold tenure was increasingly noted on the manorial court roll. Many landlords abandoned demesne cultivation and farmed out parcels of land to contractors at a set fee. A prosperous peasantry came to the fore, with numerous families nudging up into husbandman and even yeoman status. By 1450 the yeomanry were the dominant class in the English countryside, and some former yeomen were even breaking through into the ranks of the gentry: the Paston family of Norfolk is the best-known case.53 Wages rose steadily, despite the Canute-like efforts of the authorities to prevent this; there was a further statute in 1389 allowing justices of the peace to set official pay rates. The defiance of all the variants on the original Statute of Labourers was partly a function of economic laws which no royal decree could alter, and partly reflected caution on the part of the authorities. For the sake of credibility they had to insist on the spirit of wage freeze but ignored the letter of reality, largely because they were afraid of provoking another mass outburst like the Peasants’ Revolt.54 The south-east, scene of the most vicious atrocities on both sides in 1381, was, if not yet the garden of England, a prosperous and tranquil oasis of hedged and wooded landscapes, home of myriad flocks of sheep and an abundance of agricultural produce: wheat, barley, oats, rye and beans. There was a thriving timber trade and even a new woollen cloth industry, almost more important than wool production itself. The diet of the common man had improved, with meat and fish now sometimes present on peasant dining tables and, as a result, life expectancy climbed to thirty-five by 1450.55 The authorities were also more inclined to turn a blind eye to minor infractions of the poaching laws, as long as general elite credibility was not impugned.56 In pure socio-economic terms, with the pressures of the seigneurial system no longer so important, no glaring fiscal demands as in 1381, and the government concentrating its repressive powers mostly on religious heresy, the approach to the mid-century of the 1400s should have been peaceful enough, had there not been countervailing political currents. Yet even at the socio-economic level two trends might have worried the more thoughtful observer. Rising prosperity and rising expectations were precisely what underlay the 1381 rebellion, and here was the same pattern being repeated in the identical counties: Middlesex, Essex and Kent. Moreover, the status of urban craftsmen and artisans had not significantly changed since 1381, yet the irritant of a failing judicial system, corrupt ministers and incompetent misgovernment was particularly irksome to them.57

  Furthermore, by 1450 there were uncanny parallels with the situation seventy years earlier. Discontent against government by cliques and favourites ran in tandem with anger over the incompetent prosecution of the endless wars in France. By the 1440s Henry VI was widely regarded as a disastrous monarch – a feeble-minded idiot, incompetent in government, an incubus in finance and a pawn in the hands of royal favourites. Henry VI wanted peace with France and favoured the peace party of Cardinal Beaufort and William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk. Beaufort and Suffolk engineered Henry’s controversial marriage with the domineering Margaret of Anjou. Charles VII agreed to this marriage provided Maine and Anjou were ceded to him; this shameful sacrifice was at first concealed from Parliament.58 The marriage of Henry and Margaret in 1445 was widely unpopular, and to the long list of Henry’s other faults and crimes was added that of suspected murder in 1447. In that year the Duke of Gloucester was arraigned for treason, at the behest of Suffolk, Beaufort and the third important favourite, the Earl of Somerset. Gloucester died in custody, the victim of either an assassin or starvation, neglect and prison-associated disease. Henry then promoted Suffolk and Somerset to dukedoms. The heir presumptive, Richard, Duke of York, was packed off to Ireland as governor, while Somerset departed to pursue a half-hearted conduct of the war in France.59 Beaufort died in 1450 but another powerful prelate, William Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury, proved another Henry VI stalwart, spearheading the Church’s assault on Lollardism. Just below the level of Suffolk, Beaufort and Somerset was another trio of widely detested royal favourites: James Fiennes, 1st baron Saye and Sele, who acted as lord chamberlain and lord treasurer, and Thomas Daniel and John Tresilian. Saye had his power bases in Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, Tresilian in Cornwall, and Daniel in Norfolk and Suffolk.60 This motley congeries of royal favourites, all ultimately under the thumb of Suffolk, were bywords for corruption. Gangs of their thugs terrorised the countryside, burning, looting and murdering; the courts, directed at every turn by Suffolk, gave no redress. Officeholders appointed by the favourites were past masters of corruption; extorting and levying fines and taxes but not passing them on to the Exchequer. Goods such as cattle and cereals were routinely seized as ‘royal purveyance’ but never paid for. Intimidation, cattle rustling, threats, blackmail, pay-offs, shake-downs and extortion were just some of the crimes perpetrated by men above the law, who further outraged parliamentary opinion by elevating to the Privy Council men below the customary rank of hereditary peer. The instances of corruption and injustice were particularly marked in East Anglia and the Home Counties, above all Kent.61

  Anger caused by chaos and incompetence at home was raised to a new pitch when Suffolk and Somerset displayed their sublime ineptitude abroad. The extent of the gathering debacle in France was masked by the marriage with Margaret of Anjou and the pause in the Hundred Years War which resulted, yet Suffolk and Somerset suddenly offered gratuitous provocation by launching a surprise attack on Fougères in Brittany in defiance of the existing truce. The French claimed the British were trying to detach the Duke of Burgundy from allegiance to his overlord, the King of France, and resumed hostilities.62 The English then showed that treachery had virtually become a reflex action in the miasma of Suffolk-inspired corruption by making an unprovoked attack with privateers on an annual salt convoy leaving the Bay of Bourgneuf (23 May 1449). 110 ships were taken, 50 from Hanseatic merchants and 60 from the Flemings and the Dutch. The exploit was an unprovoked attack on peacetime trade, cold-blooded piracy in anyone’s terms; not surprisingly, the masterminds proved to be the redoubtable trio of Daniel, Tresilian and Saye. The raid pointed up the low moral stature to which the Lancastrians had fallen by midcentury.63 This unsavoury event occurred just when Somerset and Suffolk, by their attack on Fougères, had made Normandy super-vulnerable to a French counter-attack. In July 1449 Charles VII repudiated the truce and sent his armies into Normandy. His troops swept in and quickly took Coutances and Saint-Lô: Rouen itself surrendered in October 1449.64 Suffolk was forced to go cap in hand to Parliament to request emergency war taxation, but the Commons was unmoved by the emotive stories about how Normandy was being lost. They had had enough of Suffolk. There was a financial and economic crisis in 1449–50 with declining yields from taxation and adverse terms of trade at the very time the inept Suffolk had reopened the war in France. Parliament flatly refused any increase in taxation, and its motivation seems to have been threefold. In the first place the declining tax yields were largely caused by the many exemptions Henry VI had granted to his stable of favourites. Moreover, the Commons did not trust the cronies and sycophants around the king to spend the money properly or wisely. Thirdly, the Commons tended to view Normandy as a separate entity from Lancastrian England and took the view that it was essentially nothing to do with them.65

  January 1450 saw a number of dramatic events. One of Suffolk’s acolytes, Bishop Adam Moleyns was sent to Portsmouth with money to pay the expeditionary force being fitted out for the relief of Normandy. Foolishly, the bishop decided to siphon off some of the money for his own use, was found out and executed by an angry crowd of some 300 soldiers and sailors. Before his death a confession was extracted from him which implicated Suff
olk and his coterie in the defalcation.66 Learning of this, the Commons moved to impeach Suffolk for treason, on the grounds that he was in effect plotting with the French for the downfall of England. At this very juncture, on 24 January, Thomas Cheyne raised the standard of revolt in Kent. Gathering together the burghers of Dover and Sandwich, he published a list of traitors to be beheaded: on the list were Suffolk, James Fiennes (Lord Saye), William Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury and Lord Dudley. Cheyne and his men marched on Canterbury, but on 31 January Cheyne himself was captured by the royalist forces, taken back to Westminster, charged with treason and hanged. A yeoman named Nicholas Jake also tried to head a rebellion in London and was likewise executed.67 The Portsmouth rebels, however, continued defiant and took to flying the French red battle flag as their rebel emblem. Finding that the defeat of Cheyne did nothing to quell the rising clamour for his favourites’ punishment, Henry VI bowed to the Commons and banished Suffolk for five years. To the enraged rebels this was tantamount to letting him off scot-free, and his exile did nothing to defuse the tense atmosphere in London. Suffolk made good his escape from the country on his way to continental exile, but as the ship taking him to Europe was sailing south from Ipswich it was intercepted somewhere in the Channel by a ‘pirate’. Suffolk was taken aboard the pirate vessel, given a mock trial and executed.68 As if that was not a dramatic enough event, news of it was received in London at the precise moment tidings came in of a terrible English defeat at Formigny near Bayeux, which definitively delivered Normandy to the French for all time. Suddenly, in addition to insurrection at home, Henry VI faced the very real possibility of a French invasion. It was a classic case of ‘malice domestic, foreign levy’.69

  Meanwhile in Kent the spirit of Thomas Cheyne was far from extinguished. Temporarily subdued rebels, furious at his execution, coordinated plans for a general rising. The main medium used was the series of annual fairs held at places like Rochester, Sevenoaks and Heathfield in Sussex; it is likely that the rebels swore oaths to support each other. Some say fiery preaching by itinerant preachers was another important conduit of rebellion.70 The rebel profile was more interestingly nuanced than in 1381, largely because the traditional tripartite model of clergy, nobility and peasantry was beginning to break down. This time there were far more artisans, guild members, merchants, yeomen and even members of an inchoate middle class than under Wat Tyler’s banner. Masons, stone-roofers, dyers, tailors, thatchers, carpenters, smiths, cobblers, weavers, tanners, butchers and bakers are frequently mentioned in the chronicles – what one historian uncharitably calls ‘the rabble without a cause’.71 In contrast to 1381, the rebels tended to be young and unmarried, with no marital or family responsibilities. Forty-shilling freeholders were particularly prominent. Their significance is that they can almost be described as part of a ‘middle sector’, for a minimum net revenue of forty shillings a year made one eligible to vote in local elections and to serve on juries. The forty-shilling men particularly resented the incursion of the central government and its corrupt placemen into local affairs and their meddling in counties where they (the forty-shilling men) were supposed to hold sway.72 Insofar as the peasantry took part in the 1450 rising, it was the rich variety – the ‘upper peasants’ – who came to the fore. Henry VI was faced, then, with a knowledgeable and articulate foe when the rebels mustered at Rochester. Their grievances were lucidly set out. In the first place they wanted reassurance on the wildest of all rumours, which was that Henry VI intended to lay waste Kent and turn it into a wild forest in revenge for the Cheyne rising and the Suffolk murder. They called on the king to resume his lost demesnes, to claw back the Crown revenues he had given away and hence his power and dignity; to banish all the kinsmen and progeny of Suffolk and to extirpate all pro-French traitors (i.e. the peace party); to punish all involved in the death of the Duke of Gloucester and the loss of territories in France; to remove all the abuses of law imposed by the royal household and corrupt officialdom; to end the rigging of elections, the arbitrary procedures of justices of the peace and other court officials, and the depredations of tax collectors.73

  The assembled rebels soon elected Jack Cade as their leader, and here the problems of interpretation of the 1450 rising begin. The profile of Jack Cade is no clearer than that of Wat Tyler seventy years earlier. Almost nothing reliable is known about him. Some say that Cade was his real name, that he had been in the employment of Sir Thomas Dacre of Sussex but had fled the country after murdering a pregnant servant girl. This would align him with a documented John Cade, yeoman, who went into exile in 1449 and had his effects confiscated.74 Others claim that he was a disgraced physician named John Aylmer, who had married a squire’s daughter but then lost his reputation by dabbling in the black arts. On 8 July 1450 Cade would famously declare that his real name was John Mortimer, implying thereby that he was a scion of the high-born Mortimer family. The Mortimers were the descendants of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, second son of Edward III. Part of the anti-Henry IV coalition in the early 1400s, the Mortimers insinuated that they had a superior claim to the throne over Henry VI. What Cade’s objective was in claiming to be a Mortimer is uncertain; he cannot have been a genuine ‘pretender’ since all the famous Mortimers were both well known and the wrong age. He was probably claiming to be an ‘obscure cousin’ – that is an illegitimate son but one with royal blood.75 Another theory is that the Mortimers were linked to Richard, Duke of York (Mortimer was the family name of York’s mother), and that Cade was hoping to inveigle York into the rebellion or at least to ‘bounce’ Henry VI into assuming York’s collusion. It is known that there were Cades in the Kent of 1450, but the entire issue of pseudonyms and noms de guerre in this rising is immensely complicated, with the rebels further muddying the waters by using titles such as ‘King of the Fairies’ ‘Queen of the Fairies’ and, more predictably, ‘Robin Hood’.76 Cade’s deeds are clearer than his names. It is quite evident from the way he organised his army that he had a military background and had a high degree of martial skill, and the obvious presumption is that, like Tyler, he had fought in the wars in France. Some of his lieutenants seem to have been gentlemen, though in general the gentry properly so-called opposed the rebellion. Robert Poynings, a Sussex gentleman, was appointed as Cade’s second-in-command. Another senior lieutenant, Richard Lovelace, appears to have been an aged veteran of the French wars.77

  On 8 June Cade led his host in an advance on Canterbury. Quite how large his army was is disputed. Some of the chroniclers claimed that his effectives at the grand muster at Blackheath a little later were 50,000, but one has to take the way of the medieval writers with numbers with a large pinch of salt. More sober and reliable authorities put the total figure at 10,000–20,000, of whom maybe 4,000 marched with Cade to Canterbury.78 This was not a case of a poorly armed rabble pitted against professional troops but rather one set of yeomen and other groups against others similarly situated. The late medieval state had no significant standing army but called out forces when needed, largely the military retainers of noblemen or the levies of the ‘county array’. One of the factors that made it so easy for England to slip into the abyss of the Wars of the Roses in the mid-1450s is that the battles were waged between two sets of aristocratic retinues, not a standing army against ill-trained levies. There was little difference in 1450 England between the soldier and the yeoman farmer in terms of training and equipment; this meant of course that the State was extremely brittle – almost anyone could organise a force to overthrow it.79 The central government could not depend on the county militia to support it, for the composition and background of such a body made it most likely to be sympathetic to rebels. The county array, based on the ‘hundred’ and its constables, was always more likely to incline to rebels as it was a community force, not one commanded by the king. This is why some historians favour the formula that the pre-existing militia structure provided Cade with a pre-existing rebel structure.80 Moreover, most ordinary Englishmen were familiar with archery and bo
wmanship. One student of the period has graphically summed up the situation as follows:

  Far from being unarmed and placid rustics, a large portion of the English population owned and regularly trained with the most modern and effective weapons which existed in fifteenth-century Europe. Translated into twenty-first century terms, it was as if a flak jacket, helmet and assault rifle were household items as common as the family car, and the principal national recreations were the rifle range and the assault-training course.81

  Cade was less successful at Canterbury than Tyler had been. He drew up his army in the western suburbs, expecting to receive the joyful acclamation of the city, but after three hours nothing had happened. The lukewarm response of Canterbury to the rebels was part of a general ambivalence in Kent that had not been in evidence in 1381. The difference was that this time there was fear of a French invasion, and some of the Kentish folk felt that England should not be divided in face of such a threat. Whereas the effects of the Hundred Years War in Kent generally favoured Cade, as people were tired of being attacked in their person or property by hordes of ill-disciplined troops marching to and from the Channel ports, in some locales there was a countervailing view that this was the lesser of two evils. Rye and Winchelsea in particular had borne the brunt of French raids in 1448–50.82 After waiting in vain for three hours Cade took his forces onto the road to London.