The Road Not Taken Read online

  Incredibly, the schism took place when the Church was in danger from a variety of breakaway creeds that would finally burgeon with the sixteenth-century Reformation. In England this threat came mainly from the Lollards, with their dangerous heresy of viewing the pope as Antichrist and denying the ‘real presence’ in the eucharist. Although the Lollards were confusingly Janus-faced, opposed to official religion yet resolutely hostile to other religious ‘dissidents’ such as the friars, they benefited from complacency in the hierarchy of the cardinalate. It has been well said that the Church ‘by the fourteenth century was a gigantic multinational corporation devoted to the perpetuation of its own power, privilege and wealth’.22 Lollards apart, in England Catholicism manifested itself in an unseemly and bitter rivalry between the secular and regular clergy. Since Langland’s Piers Plowman was designed as a master study of Christianity, it is a mirror in which we can view a wide spectrum of religious attitudes and understand the roots of this antagonism. Langland’s detestation of friars is notorious, especially the Franciscans, whom he regards as having strayed from the path of St Francis into mere money grubbing. Particularly reprehensible was their habit of making confession easy in return for cash. By edging parish priests out of the principal role in hearing confession, the friars, thought Langland, were undermining its efficacy and sacramental status, as also the penitence that was supposed to go with it.23 Yet Langland emphatically did not believe that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, since, if anything, he regarded the anti-friar Lollards with even more abhorrence. Regarding all forms of communism or communalism as the mere enthronement of envy, Langland accused the friars of not really wanting to possess everything in common; what they coveted were the wealth and privileges of the elite. Langland’s hatred of friars merged with his equal detestation of beggars. He characterised as humbug the regular clergy’s selling point – that they rather than the secular clergy were the true Christians since Christ and his apostles had been beggars.24 Of course Langland can himself be criticised for his strictures on the mendicant orders: while excoriating them for begging and taking money, he seemed to forget that they were forbidden by their own rules to own land.

  Yet another concern for Langland was the growth of religious institutions and accretions that seemed to have nothing whatever to do with the teachings of Christ. Here he had the pardoners principally in mind. Pardoners were freelance religious functionaries who frequently overstepped their bounds by claiming falsely that they could grant absolution from sin. Pardoners carried a papal bull, which contained a formal statement of indulgence fixed with the seal of the bishops in whose sees they were licensed to preach. They were allowed to grant remission of the penalties for sin but not forgiveness from the sin itself. Needless to say, this distinction was too nice for simple peasants and artisans, and pardoners did nothing to enlighten their ‘marks’. Moreover, pardoners were not supposed to sell indulgences, merely ask for alms, yet many of them ‘sold’ absolute forgiveness of sins at a premium rate.25 The supposed regulation by bishops was usually a non-starter, for pardoners could bribe episcopal officials or bypass the bishop and go to the office of the local archdeacon for the necessary permission. Chaucer’s pardoner in the Canterbury Tales is a virtual compendium of the corruption habitually alleged against his confrères.26 Yet even without the problems of Lollards, friars and pardoners, the Church itself was riven with doubt and indecision, for it could not give a clear answer to the question: what is Jesus Christ’s essential teaching on poverty and inequality? Langland’s ‘solution’ to this was highly unsatisfactory. Attempting to square economic ‘realism’ with the clear teaching of Christ to give to the poor, he took refuge in the obfuscatory nature of original sin. Following the example of many senior churchmen he argued that ‘in Christ there is neither bond nor free’ was a prescription sub specie aeternitatis and applied to the heavenly world not the vale of tears, where serfdom was a consequence of original sin.27 Neither Langland nor his mentors in the hierarchy seemed able to see the glaring holes in this argument. Not only was the Crucifixion in direct contradiction to any such casuistry, as it was meant to guarantee the brotherhood of Man, but on the ‘original sin’ scenario no explanation was offered for the privileged position of the lords. Were they somehow exempt from the consequences of the fall of Adam? One of the reasons Piers Plowman is so obviously a poem of crisis is that it shows, albeit unwittingly, the Church floundering in its own recondite theology, unable to give a clear lead to the peasantry.28 It was not surprising that a contempt for clergy, churches and sanctuary was such a marked feature of the Peasants’ Revolt.

  The economic crisis in the fourteenth century was manifold but, simplifying, we can reduce it to three main headings. The central fact was the Black Death and its catastrophic impact on population levels. Since the plague caused an obvious labour shortage, those who survived should, by the normal laws of supply and demand, have seen a significant rise in real wages and living standards. But the feudal lords were determined to hang on to their privileges and struggled frantically to escape the implications of the Black Death through measures like the Statute of Labourers.29 By enforcing to the letter feudal privileges and using royal officialdom as their executives, the great magnates tried to stem the tide of inevitability. Labour legislation to curb rising wages, the attempt to retain servile villeinage, and the attempt by landowners to recoup rent income in a period when the overall trend of rents was downwards were all efforts to swim against the flow of history. Yet none of this made armed insurrection inevitable. It was only the government’s attempted introduction of discriminatory taxation to finance a futile and unpopular war that did that.30 At the same time the feudal lords could, in the main, enjoy the support of organised religion, since the medieval mind saw any form of ‘levelling’ as the road to a world without order, a chaos world or, in theological terms, Hell itself. The Church faced the difficulty that its doctrines required it to regard poverty as a supreme evil; in this sense it was grateful for the (unwitting) support of St Francis and his followers, who stressed poverty as the greatest Christian virtue.31 Unfortunately the seigneurial backlash was unleashed at the very time the peasants’ aspirations were rising, as their favourable position in the labour market became clear. They perceived the vast Pacific Ocean of inequality that separated them from their ‘betters’ and were not prepared to tolerate it. Inequality and the seigneurial system were, then, two main pieces in the complicated mosaic of class conflict. A third was the fact that urbanisation and the market economy obviously collided with the requirements of the seigneurial system. This was clearly a factor in the greater militancy of Kent and Essex in the Peasants’ Revolt, for there the market economy was more important. Beyond that, there was an obvious ‘contradiction’ between the need to expand production – implying greater freedom both for trades and the peasants – and the requirements of traditional aristocratic power. In this sense it is quite correct for Marxists to emphasise the fourteenth century as a key moment in the transition from feudalism to capitalism.32

  A few more words about the three main factors in the economic crisis are appropriate. At the time of the Peasants’ Revolt about 80 per cent of England’s population still lived in the countryside and three-fifths of the peasantry were unfree, i.e. serfs. Their life was, in Hobbes’s classic formulation, ‘nasty, brutish and short’. A typical peasant eked out a living on a ‘messuage’ – a rectangle of land about thirty acres in extent surrounded by dwelling houses and outhouses for animals and tools. The peasant’s one-storey house would contain two or at most three rooms, and was no larger than forty-five feet in length and fifteen feet wide. Additionally he would have access to strips of arable land within common fields and grazing rights on common pasture.33 All the time the feudal lords were pressing for maximum profits, with rising rents and fines the norm. When an unfree tenant died, the serf who took over his plot had to pay a ‘fine’ in the manorial court to continue the tenancy. Fines, to obtain the lord’s formal pe
rmission, were also payable if you wished to move from your village or give your daughter in marriage. Additionally, the lord levied forced labour or corvée, typically four days’ work every two weeks. If any peasant dared to show entrepreneurial ability, for example by selling ale, he would have to pay a tax to the lord on any profits he made. Moreover, when a peasant died, the lord could take the family’s best beast as a ‘heriot’; the second-best animal was then taken by the parson as a ‘mortuary’ fee.34 From 1250 to 1350 the lot of the peasantry was especially dire. Wages fell sharply relative to prices, increasing only by 5 per cent while prices rose by 25 per cent. Price inflation was so marked because of a booming export trade and the consequent import of bullion. Because of the basic overpopulation before the Black Death, opportunities for freelance labour outside one’s own holding were rare.

  Until about 1350 the climatic change damaged arable crops and further increased the pressure of a rising population on food supplies. The Black Death thus appeared initially to be a godsend to the survivors, as it gave them leverage. One of the first aspirations of the peasantry flexing their muscles in the changed labour market was an improved diet. Until about 1350 there was a de facto dietary law every bit as restrictive as the sumptuary laws. The rich dined on beef, lamb, pork, geese, sucking pig, cod, hake, whiting, haddock, herring and oysters, and also had access to fresh fruit and vegetables. A notorious feast held to celebrate the installation of George Neville as archbishop of York involved 3,000 people, not just the diners (clerics, knights, gentry, franklins, yeomen), but those who served them (servants, cooks, waiters, ushers, etc). In a dazzling display of conspicuous consumption the organisers of the feast provided 300 quarters of wheat, 104 oxen, 1,000 sheep, 304 boars and 2,000 pigs, plus thousands of geese, capons, mallards, cranes, chickens and other birds, to say nothing of pasties, tarts and custards.35 The poorest peasants by contrast lived mainly on onions, leeks and cabbages. Hunting and trapping were scarcely possible in a culture where most game was considered a royal preserve and where poaching – of deer, boar, swans and even rabbits – attracted the most draconian penalties.36 Yet after 1350 employers often evaded the letter of the Statute of Labourers by topping up the legal wage with free meals, some of them quite lavish. Gradually the peasants came to demand a better diet and for this ‘wickedness’ were excoriated by William Langland as follows:

  The labourers that have no land and work with their hands deign no longer to dine on the stale vegetables of yesteryear; penny-ale will not suit them, nor bacon, but they must have fresh meat or fish, fried or baked, and that hotter and hotter for the chill of their maw. Unless he be highly paid he will chide, and bewail the time he was made a workman … Then he curses the king and all the king’s justices, for making such laws that grieve the labourer.37

  The resentment towards the king and his officials was not surprising in a context where the only ‘interface’ between the monarch and the peasantry was in the form of taxation and judicial control. The previously mentioned grievances over trailbaston were compounded by the medieval system of ‘purveyance’ used to finance royal visits and tours through the countryside. Meant to allow royal households to obtain victuals at low prices (below their market value), the system was little more than legalised theft. Sometimes those subjected to purveyance were not paid but given chits which later proved almost worthless, redeemable for only a fraction of the value of the victuals provided.38 The king and the great lords were less than happy when free labourers and even bonded serfs (in defiance of the law) took to the roads after the Black Death, taking advantage of the labour shortage and wandering around the country in search of higher wages. By the time of the Peasants’ Revolt two different economic impulses were seriously weakening the fabric of the seigneurial system. The bullion-import-led inflation made it advantageous for the lords to pay for services in cash rather than kind, so that both the commutation of feudal services to money or rents produced what has been called ‘bastard feudalism’ at the very time the demands of the market were exposing the contradictions in the system.39 The other impulse was the break-up of the tight village community as wage labourers and even ex-bond labourers cut loose in search of lucrative opportunities elsewhere. Beggars became a common sight on the highways of England, making vagrancy for the first time in English history a matter of acute concern. Langland, in his discussion of the proper Christian stance vis-à-vis poverty, liked to distinguish the ‘deserving poor’ from the undeserving, principally beggars. This was part of a general syndrome whereby he evinced almost pathological dislike of ‘marginal’ types who did not work for a living in a traditional, recognisable way. Langland’s three bêtes noires (apart from friars) were beggars, hermits and minstrels, all of whom he identified as ‘getting away with it’.40 The phenomenon of beggary was at an all time high because of four main factors: the consequences of the Great Famine of 1315–16; the population implosion in towns following the Black Death; the consequent breakdown of village traditions of communal charity; and the ‘bad example’ of the mendicant friars.41

  Further evidence of a late-fourteenth-century general crisis, in the form of a conflict between the forces of production and the political organisation of the state, comes from the French jacquerie of 1358 and the Ciompi revolt in Florence in 1378. Devotees of historical uniqueness like to say that these two and the Peasants’ Revolt in England in 1381 were utterly different in character,42 and it is true that if one concentrates solely on the content of the rebellions rather than their form this case can easily be made out. Yet all three were triggered by consequences of the Black Death, all three saw forces of production outrunning the capacities of the state, and all three featured an absence of increasing immiseration, famine or rising food prices.43 In Florence the revolt of the Ciompi did not involve the peasantry and did not have the urban/rural mix of 1381 or the French jacquerie. Since the price of food was not an issue, there was no significant participation by women. Thus far one could assert a significant difference from 1381. Yet the features of general crisis were as observable on the banks of the Arno as in France or England. Florence was highly unstable in the period 1342–85, reeling as it did under the successive blows of the Bardi fiasco and the Black Death.44 In the case of the French jacquerie we see a particularly close convergence with the Peasants’ Revolt, with rural artisans spearheading the rising, an insurrection breaking out in early summer (May) in the French case and lasting about two weeks. As in England, the rebels claimed that their target was corrupt royal officials and advisers, not the king himself. The rebel profile – artisans, petty officials, well-to-do proprietors and some country clergy were ranged against the great nobility – uncannily pre-echoes 1381 in England.45 And the Hundred Years War, again as in England, played a significant part, with the peasantry contemptuous of the nobility, who had failed so signally in the Battle of Poitiers. Once again new taxes and corvées designed to pay for unpopular war were the trigger; for the French peasants, having to defend the chateaux that were the very symbol of their misery, was simply the last straw.46 As in the Peasants’ Revolt one can see the rising as a reaction to both short-term and long-term causes, some going back to the grain crisis and famine of 1315. Where the jacquerie was different was in the bitterness of class hatred, the level of violence engendered, and the sheer loss of life. What is remarkable about England in 1381 is the relative lack of bitterness towards the great feudal lords as a whole, as opposed to particularly identified exploiters. Moreover, the revolt in France precipitated an epidemic of unrelated banditry, where English mercenaries, Gascon adventurers and Spanish and German routiers plundered and ravished at will throughout northern France; in contrast to England, levels of rape were significantly high.47 Guillaume Cale, the French peasant leader, was something of a Wat Tyler equivalent, since he too was invited to talks and then treacherously seized before being tortured and beheaded. The architect of this atrocity, Charles the Bad, dared to put into words what Richard II had presumably only thought: that safe
conducts and all the other aspects of the code of chivalry did not apply to low-lives of the base born.48

  The Jack Cade revolt of 1450 is sometimes viewed as a rerun of 1381, but an awareness of chronology is important. Significant changes took place over those seventy years. These were years of violence – Henry IV’s overthrow of Richard II and the wars of succession that followed, Henry V’s famous campaigns in France, especially Agincourt, the drama of Joan of Arc in 1429–31 and the many domestic risings, most notably those of Archbishop Richard Scrope in 1405 and Sir John Oldcastle in 1415–17.49 Yet the only real stirring of radical revolt in this period was the Lollard-inspired rising in southern England in 1431. As previously mentioned, the Lollards wanted a simpler Christianity, purged of all accretions. The Bible was regarded as the be-all and end-all, priestcraft was held to be nonsense and flummery, as were the cult of the saints and all images and statues, to say nothing of the sacramental nature of the eucharist. Anticlericalism and hatred of the Church were the hallmarks of a creed popular with literate craftsmen and artisans, which is conveniently summed up as an early version of Protestantism.50 Centred mainly on Abingdon and Oxford, the 1431 outbreaks failed lamentably and were followed by bloody retribution and cynical vindictiveness by the authorities, especially Henry VI’s acolyte Duke Humphrey of Gloucester. On pain of death Lollards were forced to recant their beliefs and perform heavy penances for their heresy. This concession was not even allowed to the ringleaders, who were summarily beheaded or hanged; Tyburn became known as ‘the Lollard gallows’.51 Lollardism seemed broken and the cause of reformist Christianity everywhere in retreat across Europe, perhaps most graphically illustrated by the burning at the stake of Jan Hus in Constanz in 1415. Yet severe repression often merely drives the opposition underground, ready to resurface at the first favourable moment. Such was the experience of the vanquished Lollards who, nineteen years after their great revolt, found a new saviour in Jack Cade. It is significant that prominent among those documented as Cade supporters in 1450 were the very people who had to make public recantation of their ‘errors’ in the 1430s.52