# Cassell's Illustrated History of England/Volume 2/Chapter 4

CHAPTER IV.
THE PROGRESS OF THE NATION.
IT might be very reasonably supposed that during a century spent almost entirely in war, and during the second half of it in the most rancorous intestine wars, there could not be really much national progress. There is no doubt but that the population was greatly decreased. It was calculated that at the beginning of the century the population of England and Wales amounted to about 2,700,000. At the end of it, it is supposed that there were not 2,500,000.
In these depopulating wars, there can be no doubt that, besides the actual destruction of so many men, there must have been great sufferings inflicted, and an immense interruption of all those peaceful transactions by which nations become wealthy and powerful. ​culture must have been grievously impeded by army after army sweeping over the fields, and treading down the crops; by deterring the farmer from sowing his lands, and by drawing away all kinds of handicrafts from their trades; indeed, towards the end of this century, we hear that the traces of the plough had been almost obliterated; in both Scotland and England the traveller beheld dismal scones of ruined villages, decaying towns, and uncultivated fields; and, from want of labourers, the proprietors of large estates enclosed them in vast pasturages, where the cattle might wander without need of much looking after.
Yet, spite of all these circumstances, and of the continual drains of the people's substance to maintain these great armies, such is the indomitable energy of the British race, that, even during this most distracted age, there appears no inconsiderable progress to have been made in various ways. It is certain that the common people came out of the depressing condition of serfdom to a great extent—a very important step or passage from the condition of slaves to that of free men. This was especially promoted by the constant demands of the contending parties for soldiers. They were obliged to hurry the hind from the plough, and the artisan from his trade, to fight for one side or the other. Whoever once took up arms, never consented to return to the condition of a villein. Had their ancient lords been disposed to compel them to renew their slavery, they were now too prodigiously decimated themselves to possess the power. Thousands of estates had lost their owners, many fell to the crown, and others passed over to their enemies. While one-half of the aristocracy had fallen, the power of the other half over their villeins must have been destroyed. That race of arrogant and turbulent barons and princes of the blood, which for a century or two back had overshadowed the throne, had shaken it by their ambition and their jealousies, was now entirely cut down. More than sixty princes of the blood were sleeping in the dust, and the country had to look to an individual of so remote a claim as Henry VII. to occupy the throne.
This, while during the succeeding dynasties of the Tudors it augmented extremely the power of the crown, also contributed, and that immediately, to the liberty of the people. The decrease in the numbers of the labouring classes, as a matter of course, raised their value. Accordingly we find that while the contending monarchs or princes found increasing difficulties in bringing large armies into the field—while, instead of their 50,000 and their 100,000 men, they could scarcely muster 10,000 for a field—in the last year of Henry V., 1421, an Act was passed to repeal one issued in 1340, prohibiting a sheriff or escheator remaining more than one year in his office, and permitting them to hold office for four consecutive years, on the ground that pestilences and foreign wars had reduced the number of gentlemen in every county of England, till there were not sufficient qualified to fill those offices. Such was the diminution of the gentry, but that of the common people must have been still greater; and this fact is revealed, by the wonderful rise of wages and the manifestations of prosperity in the bulk of the population, spite of the repeated hurricanes of war which had swept the land.
If we compare the various Acts for regulating the wages of both labourers and citizens which were passed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we shall become aware of a very striking rise in the value of labour. Betwixt 1388 and 1444, the annual salary of a bailiff had risen from 13s. 4d. to 23s. 4d.; the wages of a master hind, carter, and shepherd, from 10s. to 20s.; of a farm servant, from 7s. to 15s.; and of a female labourer, from 6s. to 10s. The value of labour had, in fact, doubled in half a century. The causes of this remarkable change are obvious. The number of hinds was diminished which had been accustomed to cultivate the ground. Lands had gone out of tillage, and must be re-ploughed. But meantime, the people, amid the strife of their lords, had become free, or the majority of them, and their services were to be purchased at a proportionate rate.
Monarchs who with difficulty can maintain their standing, must court the people. Thus it was during the contentions of this century. Each party was continually obliged to solicit the populace to take arms in its behalf, and the self-estimation of the people rose in proportion. When there was scarcely a prince left to govern, the people, though they had decreased in numbers, had risen in position. It has been well remarked that in Wat Tyler's insurrection there was a vehement outcry against villenage; but that seventy years afterwards, in the insurrection of Jack Cade, nothing was said on this subject—a certain sign that it had disappeared, or was fast disappearing, and had ceased to occupy a prominent place in the popular mind.
But still more was the improved condition of the people indicated by the laws passed to restrain undue luxury in clothing. In 1444 the cost of the whole annual clothing of an agricultural servant was only 3s. 4d. But in 1463 an Act was passed to check the general extravagance in clothing, on the ground that "the commons, as well men as women, have worn, and daily do wear, excessive and inordinate array and apparel, to the great displeasure of God, and impoverishing of this realm of England, and to the enriching of other strange realms and countries, to the final destruction of the husbandry of this said realm." In this Act, the clothing of the rural labourer was permitted to be of woollen cloth, of 2s. per yard, which must have been three times the cost of the raiment allowed not twenty years before.
In the statute of 1463, many of the regulations of earlier acts of the legislature were repealed regarding the clothing of all classes, for nothing was left untouched by the paternal hand of Government in those good old times, any more than they are by the paternal Governments of the Continent at the present day. It was forbidden to all who were not of noble rank to wear woollen cloth of foreign manufacture, or the fur of sables, martens, or minevers. They were to content themselves with fur of black or white lamb. They or their wives were not to wear silk of foreign fabric, or any kerchiefs of higher price than 3s. 4d.; nor any girdle garnished with gold and silver. Fustian of Naples, and scarlet cloth in grain, were prohibited to them.
In like manner the dress and its quality of every other rank were regulated. None but the royal family, nor under the rank of a duke, were to wear any cloth of gold, of tissue, or silk of purple; none but a lord plain ​cloth of gold; none but a knight any velvet, damask, or silk in their gowns and doublets; none beneath an esquire or gentleman, gowns of camlet. The dress of the citizens was regulated, by Act of Parliament, in the same manner. The lord mayor and his lady were permitted to wear the same degree of clothing as knights and their ladies; and the aldermen and recorder of London, and the mayors of other cities, ranked with the esquires and gentlemen.
All this marks the fact that the lower classes were gaining in substance and importance, and were pressing on the higher in their apparel and mode of living; and it required stringent repression on the part of the higher grades to maintain exclusive licence in these respects. The same regulations extended to diet as well as clothing. It was ordered that servants and grooms, whether of lords or gentlemen, should not have milk or fish more than once a day, but should content themselves at other meals with milk, bread, butter, cheese, &c.
If we are to believe Sir John Fortescue, the great lawyer and Chancellor of England, who lived so many years in France at the court of Margaret of Anjou, and who, therefore, had ample opportunity of comparing the style of living in the two countries, the food and clothing of the ordinary class of English were much better than amongst the same class of French. "The French," he says, "weryn no wollyn; but if it be a pore cote, under their uttermost garment, made of grete canvas, and call it a frok. Their hosyn be of like canvas, and passin not to their knee; wherefor they be gartered, and their thyghs bare, their wifs and children goine bare fote. But the English wear fine wollen cloth in all their apparell. They have also abundanco of bed-coverings in their houses, and of all other wollen stuffe."
He says the English people "drink no water, except when they abstain from other drinks, by way of penance, and from a principle of devotion. They eat plentifully of all kinds, fish and flesh, with which their country abounds; but the commons in France be so impoverished and destroyed, that they may unith lyve. They drynke water; they eate apples with bread right brown, made of rye; they eate no flesche, but if it be seldom, a litill larde, or of the intrails or heds of bests sclayne for the nobles and merchaunts of the land."
There is much in these statements characteristic of the two nations to the present day. It is quite certain that France at that period was reduced to a dreadful condition by our repeated invasions. At home, spite of the drain for those wars, and of the succeeding wars on our own soil, there seems to have been a wonderful amount of wealth and prosperity amongst the people. Yet at the same time there was much misery and a growing amount of mendicity. Æneas Silvius, afterwards Pope Pius II., assures us that none of the inhabitants of a populous village in Northumberland, in which he lodged in 1437, had ever seen wine or wheaten bread, and were greatly astonished when they saw them on his table.
It is from the century preceding the one now under review that the era of pauperism commences. In fact, the moment that villenage began to give way, pauperism and mendicity appeared. So long as the inhabitants of the large estates, whether of the church or the laity, were so much property, they must be maintained just as the cattle were; but so soon as they became free men, and received not food, clothing, and lodging, but wages for their work, they became liable to the destitution which times of scarcity, sickness, or old age naturally brought. If they could make no provision against these seasons, they were necessitated to beg or receive alms. So early, therefore, as 1349, the number of beggars, thieves, and vagabonds had so increased under the plea of destitution and want of employment, that legislative enactment became necessary, and Government resorted to that which continued to be attempted without effect till the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth, namely, to coerce these tribes into orderly and laborious habits. But this new liberty of roaming over the country, and of abstaining from labour, was too sweet to be readily resigned, and flocks of idle fellows roved about in idleness, insolence, and robbery.
In the year mentioned the statute issued stated, "That because many valiant beggars, as long as they may live of begging, do refuse to labour, giving themselves to idleness and vice, and sometimes to theft and other abominations, none, upon pain of imprisonment, shall, under the colour of pity and alms, give anything to such which may labour, or presume to favour them in their sloth, so that thereby they may be compelled to labour for their necessary living." But this was an evil only in its infancy, and destined to become one of the great difficulties of the land for a century yet. Staff-strikers, sturdy rogues, and vagabonds, became a terror and a nuisance, and Act after Act, ordering whipping, branding, imprisoning, and other punishments, were passed to put them down in vain. Besides these, there gradually accumulated large shoals of really infirm and destitute poor, whose employers were no longer forced to support them. These were thrown chiefly on the towns and on the church, which, with its wealthy endowments, was bound to devote one-fourth to the payments of the state, one-fourth to the repair and maintenance of the ecclesiastical buildings, one-fourth to their own support, and the remaining fourth to the relief of the poor. We shall see, that when the church became deprived of the estates of its monasteries, the poor were then thrown in such hosts on the public as to compel the introduction of the poor law. Meantime, pressed by this new social evil, the Government, in the fifteenth century, actually had recourse to tickets-of-leave. These tickets were not indeed given to convicted criminals, but to persons for whom there was no employment in their own hundred, rape, wapentake, city, or borough. They had then a letter-patent given them, authorising them to travel in quest of labour; and without such letter, or ticket-of-leave, they were liable to be seized and clapped in the stocks, and after due punishment sent away, liable to the same treatment in every place they came to. But we shall obtain further insight into the social condition of the nation at this period, under the different sections of our review of it, and not the least under that of
THE CONSTITUTION AND THE LAWS.
We have described in our last chapter on the Progress of the Nation, the steps by which the Parliament of England finally resolved itself into the three great branches of King, Lords, and Commons. During this century, amid all the troubles and strifes of the nation, these powers were further defined and consolidated. The ​House of Commons no longer presented their requests in the form of petitions praying for the removal of any grievances which affected them, but they drew up such laws and enactments as they desired, in the form of bills, which were presented to the king in the House of Lords, and which, after receiving the approbation of the Lords and the assent of the monarch, became law. They were entered on the statute-roll, and then transmitted to the sheriffs to be promulgated in their county courts. The archbishops and bishops took their places amongst the Lords, as well as twenty-five abbots and two priors, so that the spiritual peers generally doubled the number of the temporal ones, and gave enormous power to the church, which it did not fail to exert, and which was awfully exhibited against the Lollards.
The rest of the clergy were summoned regularly to meet in convocation at the same time as the lay Parliament, and all matters affecting them, such as the levying of taxes, were sent to them to receive their sanction.
In 1429 universal suffrage, which till then prevailed, was restrained, and confined to the forty-shilling freeholders in the counties, as remains to the present day. The electors were to be possessed of "free land as tenements to the value of forty shillings by the year at least, above all deductions." What was the limit in cities and boroughs does not appear. In some it is supposed that the burgesses at large elected the representatives; in others that the corporations only elected.
The qualification for a county member was the possession of a freehold of £40 a year, equivalent to £400 at the present time. There were to be two for each county. The sheriffs themselves could not be elected. Henry IV. prohibited all lawyers from being elected, but this was deemed an unconstitutional exception, and was abandoned. In the last century we showed that already very corrupt practices had crept into the elections for Parliament; and these, spite of the popular resistance, still prevailed. The sheriffs, probably bribed or acted upon by the aristocracy, were very arbitrary and remiss in issuing their writs to the different boroughs. They appear often to have sent to just such boroughs as they pleased, and passed over others without notice. The Parliament of 1444 passed an Act to put an end to this abuse. It states "that diverse sheriffs of the counties of the realm of England, for their singular avail and lucre, have not made due elections of the knights, nor in convenient time nor good men and true returned, and sometimes no return of the knights, citizens, and burgesses to come to the Parliament; but such knights, citizens, and burgesses have been returned as were never duly chosen, and other citizens and burgesses than those which, by the mayors and bailiffs, were to the said sheriffs returned. And sometimes the sheriffs have not returned the writs which they had to make of elections of knights to come to Parliament, but the said writs have embisiled, and, moreover, made no precept to the mayor and bailiff, or to the bailiff or bailiffs, where no mayor is, of cities and boroughs, for the election of citizens and burgesses to come to Parliament."
We see in this passage the shapes of various abuses which the nobility were already practising on the commons to serve their own purposes. To remedy some of these, the candidate, who was, to his astonishment, omitted after due election in the sheriff's return, and found another person occupying his place, was authorised, by an Act of King Henry IV., of 1409, to sue the sheriff before the judge of assize; and the sheriff, if convicted, was to pay a fine of £100 to the king—equal to £1,000 at this day—and the false member returned was to lose his wages. This not proving sufficient check to this abuse, the sheriff, by an Act of 1429, was, besides this fine, to be imprisoned for a year. This again was made still more severe in 1444: the sheriff, besides the regal fine and the year's imprisonment, was condemned to pay £100 to the unjust candidate, thus making his punishment equal to a year's imprisonment and £2,000 at the present period. The reason for this great severity was, that Parliaments, seldom enduring more than one or two sessions, the sheriff had a great chance of escaping the due penalty before the proper member recovered his seat. Yet, notwithstanding all these penalties and precautions, there existed many strange violations of all law in Parliamentary elections. In Yorkshire the great nobility, by the extent of their estates, set the lesser freeholders at defiance, and returned the county members, by their agents, at their pleasure, as many of them have continued to do even in our day. In 1447 this evil was wholly or partially remedied by express enactment. In 1460 the Parliament of Coventry was summoned by Henry VI., in utter violation of the constitution. There was no election at all, but the members were nominated by the king, and returned by the sheriffs, who were afterwards protected by a bill of indemnity.
The peers attended Parliament at their own proper cost, for this was a service contingent on the holding their baronies. But all the members of the Commons received regular wages. These were fixed, in the reign of Edward III., at 4s. a day for a knight of the shire, and 2s. a day for a citizen or burgess; and this rate of payment continued so long as the payment of members continued at all. This was an admirable means for ensuring a full attendance during the whole session; and as it would amount at this day, at the same rate, to £2 per day for the county members, and £1 per day for borough members, would probably, even now, throw a telling weight in the scale opposite to grouse, pheasants, and legislative indifference.
The protection of the persons of the representatives was also in full existence at this time, and both their wages, their privileges, and their attendance commenced and terminated at the same time. They commenced as many days prior to the meeting of Parliament as were requisite to travel to the place of meeting, and so for returning, and not a day longer. That the Commons were already alive to the maintenance of their privileges, is demonstrated by the petitions to the Lords or to the crown, which are yet extant on the rolls of Parliament. These wages had no slight influence on the duration of the parliamentary sessions, for the constituents became very restive when they continued long, on account of the amount of payment to the members. In the Parliament of the twenty-third of Henry VI., which lasted four sessions—a total of 178 days—the payment by each county for its two members amounted to £142 8s.—equal to £1,424 of to-day. These expenses were a sharp spur to the dispatch of business, and under such a system the ​constituents would never have tolerated the enormous speeches of modern Members of Parliament. The numbers of representatives constituting the Commons of England about this period would seem to be about 254, being 180 from 90 boroughs, and 74 knights of shires.
There were other stimulants to hasten the Parliaments of those times. The country was generally so unsettled that numbers, both of the Peers and Commons, were naturally anxious not to be absent from their own neighbourhoods and their estates longer than was absolutely needful. The peers and gentry were, moreover, still passionately attached to their field sports. Yet, notwithstanding all this, the legislators of this century made about fifty systems, or bodies, of laws, some of them containing only a few, and others as many as twenty or thirty statutes, on a great variety of subjects. Amongst the most important of these statutes, were the confirmation of the great charter and the charter of the forests, by Henry IV. and Henry V.; the enactments of the same monarchs against the Wycliffites, condemning them, at the demand of the clergy, to the flames. The powers of justices of peace were augmented, and their qualifications and duties better defined. The laws relating to commerce and foreign merchants were still very impolitic and harsh towards strangers who settled in England, especially to the Welsh and Irish, till the reign of Edward IV., who himself being addicted to commerce, soon perceived the folly and injustice of many of the old regulations, and abolished them.
Tournament. Harl. MS., 4,379.
One of the most influential legal measures during this century was that which confirmed, in the reign of Edward IV., the practice of cutting off entails by the process of a "common recovery." The better to enable the estates of the party which happened to be foiled at arms to pass under forfeiture to the crown, this legal fiction of "recovery" was adopted. The person to whom the crown granted such entailed estates by private agreement brought an action against the grantor for unjustly claiming such hereditary right, which was permitted to go by default, and then the entail was declared lost. The fee simple of the property thus recurring to the possessor, the property could be divided and disposed of at option. And this practice still continues, by which the possessor and the next heir can, in conjunction, destroy entails at pleasure.
Criminals conducted to Execution. Fifteenth century. Harl. MS., 4,374.
became general in such cases, but during the wars of the Roses was applied to all descriptions of property. When attempts were made to confiscate the estates of different nobles and gentlemen, they were found to be held by them only for the uses of different parties, and were thus beyond the power of the crown to confiscate. By this means men provided against the accidents of war and party, and in favour of their families in those times of perpetual change.
The statutes of Richard III. were the first that were written in English, and the first which were printed—two most important improvements. The courts of law continued much the same as in the former century. The judges varied in number. Sometimes there were five, and sometimes as many as eight, in the Court of Common Pleas. The chief-justice of the King's Bench had £160 a-year, or £1,600 of our money value; the chief-justice of the Common Pleas £130, or £1,300 of present value. The other judges had £100, or £1,000 of our money. They had also their robes allowed them. Every judge, on entering on his office, swore "That he would not receive any fee, pension, gift, reward, or bribe, of any man having suit or plea before him, saving meat and drink, which should be of no great value."
Execution of a Criminal. From a MS. of Froissart's Chronicles. Fifteenth century
Yet the administration of justice appears to have been very corrupt. The judges complained that their salaries were too small for their station, and as they held their appointments at the option of the crown, they were easily influenced. The clergy, by their exemptions, were almost beyond the power of the law, and the laity could with difficulty obtain any justice from their spiritual guides. Perjury was a great vice of the age, and the Convocation of Canterbury of 1439, declared that numbers of people had no other trade than that of hiring themselves as witnesses, and taking bribes when they were or juries. But, more than all, the violent factions of the times enabled those who were in the ascendant to set law totally at defiance. The great number of sanctuaries in all parts of the kingdom made it the easiest thing in the world to escape from creditors, as well as enemies. The high constable in those times exercised a kind of arbitrary power. He could, and frequently did, from the authority of his commission, put great political offenders, or those deemed such, to death without any ​form of law. Torture was also applied by him when he wished to have some evidence according to his own purpose. The famous rack in the Tower was invented by the Duke of Exeter when he was high constable, and thence was called "the Duke of Exeter's daughter."
But the "Paston Letters," which have let a flood of light in upon the social condition of the fifteenth century, show us that where great men desired to have their own will, they still occasionally passed entirely by all the forms and courts of law, and endeavoured to seize with the strong hand the property of their neighbours. These letters range over sixty years of the century, proceeding to its close. They reveal to us various modes by which the strong man was enabled to turn the scale against the weak one at law; but the most extraordinary relation concerning the family itself is one which occupies more than a volume, and details the actual war made upon them by the Duke of Norfolk. The celebrated general Sir John Fastolf left Sir John Paston the estate of Caistor, in 1459; but the Duke of Norfolk came forward and declared that Sir John Fastolf had given him the estate in his lifetime. Had he had a proper deed of gift, no doubt he would have produced it, and soon settled the matter in a court of law; but, instead of this, he marched out and laid regular siege to the place. For ten years this contest was carried on—each brought forward his tenants, and attacked and defended the place by cannon and hand-guns, and by every art and stratagem of war. By this time the duke had exhausted all the resources of his enemy. The gunpowder and the provisions for the garrison failed, and the place was surrendered. It was only recovered, after the death of the duke, by an appeal to the king in council.
The royal prerogative, especially as it regarded the raising of money, was much more limited in this century than it was in the former one. We hear no more of arbitrary subsidies imposed by the king's council. No legitimate tax could be imposed without the consent of Parliament. The king, indeed, could impress soldiers and sailors for his service, and even musicians, goldsmiths, embroiderers, and artificers of all kinds, but he could not touch their money, except by legislative means. We hear, moreover, far less of the nuisance of purveyance. That had been retained solely to supply the royal household, and the officers were bound to make prompt payment for whatever was taken. Hence the kings of this period were often reduced to great straits. We shall find them, when we come to speak of the coinage, debasing that, being slow to learn that a coin of less value can only purchase less goods.
The total revenue of Henry V. appears to have been only £55,754. After paying his civil and military expenses, his salaries to the collectors of taxes and customs, and his pensions to dukes, earls, knights, &c., the sole remainder was only £3,507. Out of this he had to defray the charges of his household, his wardrobe, his embassies, and various other matters, while his household alone required £20,000, or more than six times the amount. We cease, therefore, to wonder at the debts which he left to his son, after all his wars, which amounted to £372,000, or nearly £4,000,000 of our money.
Parliament having well secured the power of granting or withholding supplies, the monarchs were compelled to resort to what they call benefices, or free gifts. They saw that the merchants had become very wealthy, and they took this means of easing them of a part of their substance. It argues a strange state of affairs, however, when a monarch could intimidate wealthy men into ruining themselves; for, according to the Act of Richard III. for abolishing this system, this was the effect. "Many worshipful men of this realm," says the preamble to that Act, "were compelled, by occasion of that benevolence, to break up their households, and live in great penury and wretchedness, their debts unpaid, their children unpreferred, and such memorials as they had ordained to be done for the wealth of their souls, were neutralized and annulled," &c. There must have been great compulsion of some kind, in extracting these free gifts, for men do not ruin themselves voluntarily, and the injustice of it must have been crying; for Edward IV., on his deathbed, was woefully troubled by the memory of it, and wished restitution to be made.
The power of the crown at this period was widely diffused by the number of valuable offices in its gift, which, Sir John Fortescue says, were more than a thousand, besides those in the gift of the Prince of Wales. Yet, notwithstanding this power, and the sanguinary scenes we have had to describe, compared with all other countries at that time, the Government in this appeared to be conducted on very liberal principles. Philip de Comines, the minister and historian of France, after enumerating the miseries and the exactions of the people of that country, of Italy, and Germany, Says, "In my opinion, of all the states of the world that I know, England is the country where the commonwealth is best governed, and the people least oppressed."
The Government of Scotland received some marked improvements during this century. When James I. returned from his long captivity in England, he found his kingdom overrun with abuses, and the common people in particular groaning under the oppressions of the nobles. He set about the work of reformation with a vigour which ended in his own death, after thirteen years of assiduous labour for the benefit of his subjects. One of the first mischiefs which he attacked was that of crowds of "thiggers and sorners," as they were called, spreading themselves over the country. These were the same class as the "sturdy rogues" of England—vagabonds who, capable of work, preferred to beg, and, what was worse, to menace and intimidate the country people into compliance with their demands. James ordered all such fellows between the ages of fourteen and seventy, who were abroad without badges, which were granted by the sheriffs to infirm or superannuated people, and who were called gaberlunzies, to be compelled to work, or to be branded on the cheek and driven from the country. The evil was too deeply rooted, however, to be eradicated in James's time, though he greatly diminished it.
The three estates of Parliament in Scotland had always met in one house. The first estate consisted of the archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, and a few other dignitaries of the church; the second of the dukes, earls, barons, and presbytery; the third of the commissioners of the boroughs. Of these, the borough commissioners were so few in comparison with the others—being only fourteen or fifteen—that they had a mere nominal influence. ​James I. endeavoured to remedy this by erecting a separate House of Commons, like that with whose working he was so familiar in England. This would have completely curbed the power of the aristocracy, but they took care to murder James before the scheme could be carried out. He ordered every sheriffdom, except Clackmannan and Kinross, to send "twa or maa wyse men;" the two just mentioned to send "ane of thamo" each. Unfortunately, the order, through the king's death, remained a dead letter, and the Scottish Parliament continued to the end one house.
The powers of the Scottish Parliament were, by a peculiar institution, thrown almost wholly into the hands of the crown and aristocracy. The first thing which Parliament did, on assembling, was to appoint three committees. The first was called the committee "pro articulis advisandi;" the second "ad judicia;" and the third "ad caitsas." The business of the members of the third was to sit as judges of all civil causes brought before Parliament; of the second, of all criminal prosecutions; and the first—far the most important, as it regarded the constitution—was to sit as a Parliamentary grand jury upon all petitions, proposals, and overtures, and to form such of them as they thought fit into bills to be laid before the house. It is clear that the whole legislative power of the realm was vested in this committee, for it determined entirely what should and what should not come before Parliament. It is true that all the committees were composed of members of the three estates, which gave them an air of great fairness; but this apparent equilibrium was totally destroyed by another law, which gave seat and vote in each of these committees to all the lords of Parliament which chose to claim them, by which the whole power was vested in the hands of the aristocracy. Hence the members of this particular committee became called the "Lords of the Articles."
Friar preaching from a Movable Pulpit. Royal MS., 14 E. 3.
Isabel Hervey, Abbess of Elstow. From a Brass.
Another great foundation of James I. was the Court of Session, which has become in Scotland the great central and supreme tribunal of justice. But on its establishment the justiciar-general—an office long abolished in England, as giving too much power to any subject—was the officer of the law, and dispenser of justice in Scotland, and he held courts of justice, called justice-airs, twice a year in every county in the kingdom. The chamberlain, another great officer, held also his chamberlain-airs in the royal boroughs of the kingdom, from which there lay appeal to another court, called the Court of the Four-Boroughs, these being Edinburgh, Stirhug, Eoxburgh, and Berwick; and after these fell into the hands of the English, Lanark and Linlithgow, which sent commissioners to this court. James I. also at this period abolished various hereditary offices and grants, which gave too much power to particular nobles over the subject; but many of these after his death were revived, and the hereditary powers and jurisdictions of the barons continued for three centuries longer to be a cause of oppression to the people.
STATE OF THE CHURCH AND OF RELIGION.
In our narrative of the different reigns of this period we have noticed the spread of Wycliffism, and the persecuting resistance of the church. Henry V., and after him every monarch of the century, supported the pretensions of the clergy, and let loose the horrors of persecution upon their subjects. The civil wars for a time checked these persecutions, the very storm, as Fuller observed, being the shelter of the persecuted; but they afterwards revived in all their virulence. Though the schism in the papacy which agitated all Europe from the death of Gregory XI. in 1378 to the election of Nicholas V. in 1447, and the resignation of Felix V. in 1449, had greatly undermined ​the foundations of the Romish Church, yet, supported by the royal power, the hierarchy in England persecuted with a high hand. "We will trace with a rapid pen the great facts of this most important contest betwixt the church—which asserted that its laws and doctrines were the truth and could not change, therefore announcing that there could be no progress—and the people, who were changing from day to day, because they were getting more light, and advancing in it.
Thomas Fitzalan, or Arundel, as he was more commonly called, being the brother of the Earl of Arundel, had been banished by Richard II., and came back with Henry IV., as it would seem, determined to deal sternly will all who thenceforth dared to trouble the church with fear of change. But the Lollards, as they were called, most probably after the German reformer, Walter Lolhard, who was burnt at Cologne in 1322, were now become a numerous and resolute body, not likely to be put down without a sturdy struggle; and, as it proved, not at all. These people had boldly announced their doctrines in their petition to the House of Commons in 1395. In that they declared that the Church of Rome was not the church of Christ, and ought to be removed. They maintained that the possession of temporalities by the clergy was totally opposed to the law of Christianity; that outward rites and ceremonies have no warrant in Scripture; that the celibacy of the clergy was the manifest work of anti-Christ, and the root of all the immoralities of the church; that transubstantiation was a gross imposition; the blessing of bread, wine, salt, oil, &c., was not religion, but necromancy; that the clergy filling offices of state were hermaphrodites, endeavouring to serve God and mammon. They attacked in the same sweeping manner pilgrimages, auricular confession, worshipping of images, absolution of sins by the priests, war, and luxury, as all equally un-Christian. They went, therefore, far beyond the after reformation of the time of Henry VIII., and resembled in many of their doctrines George Fox.
It was clear that either the Lollards or the church could not stand, and the tug of internecine war commenced at once. The public was, during this century, divided into three religious parties: the church, which was for standing as it was, unmoved and unmoving for ever; the Lollards, who were for pulling it down stick and stone; and another large section of the public which saw the corruption of the church, and demanded its reform, but did not accord with the Lollards in the cry for its destruction. The Commons, and especially the famous Lack-learning Parliament in 1404, and the Parliament of 1409, strongly recommended the king to seize the revenues of the church, as inconsistent with its spiritual office, and filling it with arrogance and sensuality, and to apply these riches to the exigencies of the state. The church, during this century, was saved from this spoliation by the contending monarchs having too much need of its support; but that process was in operation which, by destroying the old nobility, and increasing the power of the crown, should, ere long, at the cry of a new and indigent noblesse, effect this in a more wholesale manner. Safe for the time, the hierarchy let loose its fury on the Lollards.
In 1401 they burnt in Smithfield, William Sawtre, the incumbent of St. Osith's, London, for this heresy. In 1407, William Thorpe, a clergyman celebrated for his learning and eloquence, was arraigned before Arundel and others at St. Paul's for like heresy. There Thorpe made a terrible onslaught on images and pilgrimages—the image of "Our Lady of Walsingham," especially, which was at that time, and long after, the most famous in all England. Thither flocked princes, nobles, and people of all degrees to pay their vows and make their offerings; and the most extraordinary miracles were attributed to this popular virgin. Camden says: "In the last age, whoever had not made a visit and an offering to the blessed virgin of this place, was looked upon as impious." Judges from the bench ascribed all their good fortune in the world to the good offices of Our Lady of Walsingham. Ladies of all ranks were enthusiastic votaries of Our Lady. The whole place was a-blaze with gold, silver, and precious stones. Henry VIII., as a boy, walked bare-footed to the shrine from Barham, and presented a necklace of great value. It seems he never forgot the riches of the place, for it was one of the first monasteries that he afterwards ransacked.
From Thorpe's account of the pilgrimages, they appear to have been precisely what they have continued to the present day on the Continent, the licentiousness of which has compelled some of the most Catholic governments in Germany to put them down. Men and women, of all ages and characters, went whole weeks, and even months, journeys on these pilgrimages, camping out in woods and fields, with pipers and singing men and women, "jangling of their Canterbury bells," and troops of barking dogs, and enacting scandals which spread demoralisation like a pestilence. It may be imagined with what indignation so daring an attack on these things, in the height of their popularity, would be received. Thorpe, however, was not consigned to the flames, but is supposed to have lain in the archbishop's dungeon at Saltwood Castle, in Kent, till he perished, for he never was heard of again.
Thomas Badby, a tailor, of Worcester, was the next victim. He was burnt in Smithfield in 1410. In 1444, Arundel died, and was succeeded by Archbishop Chicheley, who was a still more relentless persecutor of the new faith. He it was who built the Lollards' Tower attached to the palace at Lambeth, in which he confined his heretical prisoners, chaining them to iron rings, which are still in the walls, and upon the wainscot of which remains scratched some of their names. In 1415, John Claydon, a London furrier, and a relapsed heretic, having been confined two years in Conway Castle, and three years in the Fleet, was burned for having in his possession heretical books, especially one called "The Lanterne of Light." In the same year, Richard Turmin, a baker, of London, was sent to the stake. Lord Cobham, whose bold and unbending advocacy of the reformed religion we have related, as well as his escape from the clutches of Arundel, was again captured by Chicheley, hanged and then burnt at Tyburn, December, 1418. In 1423 William Taylor, Father Abraham, of Colchester, John White, and John Wadham, priests, were burnt for the same crime of daring to think for themselves on the subject of religion.
In 1443 Chicheley died, having burnt, imprisoned, and persecuted many, yet being as far as ever from extinguishing Lollardism. In 1457, Thomas Bouchier the foundations of the Romish Church, yet, supported by ​being archbishop, Reginald Pococke, Bishop of Chichester, was brought to trial for heresy. It is curious that Pococke differed greatly in opinion from the Lollards, but he reasoned with them instead of persecuting and burning them; and this was such a reproof to the persecuting section of the clergy, that he was brought to the bar of the church. The bishop did not believe that the church was infallible, or that it was necessary even to salvation to believe in the Catholic Church; broad and unpardonable heresies! These, however, he renounced, and yet was deprived of his bishopric, and shut up in a cell in Thorney Abbey, in the Isle of Ely, without pen, ink, or paper, but was permitted to have a Bible, a mass-book, a psalter, and the legends of the saints. He died after a confinement of three years.
Spite of the danger with which the church was menaced, and the growth of knowledge amongst the people, as is the case with all old and corrupt institutions, it made no efforts to reform itself and thus to avoid its fate. On the contrary, Archbishop Bouchier, while putting the reformers to the most horrible of deaths, complained that members of "the clergy, both regular and secular, were ignorant and illiterate blockheads, or rather idiots; and that they were as profligate as they were ignorant, neglecting their cures, strolling about the country with bad women, and spending the revenues of their benefices in feasting, drinking, and adultery."
Pilgrim buying a Glass Mirror. From a MS. of Lydgate's Poem of "The Pilgrim."
Whilst the clergy were exhibiting this disgusting character, in the very spirit of obstinate dogmatism, all the outward rites and ceremonies of the church were more than ever insisted upon. The cup in the sacrament was taken from the laity. They were told that the wine in the cup was not the sacrament, but only given to enable them to swallow the bread more easily. The clergy were ordered to begin in small, obscure churches, to withdraw the cup, and to tell the people to swallow the bread whole, that it might not stick in their teeth. Several new saints were introduced—St. Osimund and the two virgins, St. Fridiswida and St. Ethelrida. The churches were crowded with images of the Virgin and other saints. The festivals of St. George, St. Edmund, and the Virgin, were made double festivals. Pilgrimages, processions, indulgences, and confessions to the priests, were more zealously enjoined than ever. Every effort was in the wrong direction, showing that the days of the Catholic Church in this country were numbered as the state church. Instead of endeavouring to infuse new intellectual life, the clergy were trying to make a dead body stand erect, and when they could not succeed, they as vainly endeavoured to prop it up with gorgeous habiliments and empty forms.
To make the matter worse, there arose a terrible dispute betwixt the secular clergy and the begging friars, in which they said many plain truths of each other, which were remembered to their common detriment. The begging friars claimed Christ as belonging to their class while on earth, which the seculars rejected as a horrible and blasphemous doctrine. The Pope was obliged to publish a bull denouncing the doctrine of the friars.
Of the amount of instruction by preaching given to the people, a convocation, held at York in 1466, gives us a striking idea. By its first canon, every parish priest is commanded to preach four times in the year! either personally or by another. The convocation omitted the second commandment of the Decalogue, and made the number up by dividing the tenth into two. The learning of the higher clergy is curiously shown in a little bit of attempted reform of Sunday trading, which was directed against the barbers, who are said, by Archbishop Chicheley, to keep open their shops on the Lord's-day, "namely," he says, "the seventh day of the week, which the Lord blessed and made holy, and on which he rested after his six days' work"—a singular confirmation of the Jewish Sabbath. In a word, it would be difficult to say whether ignorance or vice was more prevalent at this period; it was the dark hour before the dawn.
Parish Priest in Ordinary Costume, and Attired for the Altar. Fifteenth century.
In the church of Scotland during this century, the chief events were the breaking out of the persecution against the Lollards and the erection of St. Andrew into an archbishopric. John Resby, an English priest, who had fled from persecution at home, was arrested and burnt at Perth, in 1408. In 1433 was also burnt, at St. Andrew's, Paul Crawar, a Bohemian physician, who had ​been sent by the Reformers from Prague to communicate with the Wycliffites here. Pilgrimages were in high estimation in Scotland as well as in England, and Whithern, in Galloway, was a place of immense resort, to the shrine of St. Ninian.
The archbishopric of St. Andrew's was erected by Pope Sixtus IV., in 1471, but the act having been done without the consent of the crown and Parliament, brought down destruction upon its first occupant, Patrick Grahame, who was deposed, and, after being confined in several successive dungeons, perished in that of the castle of Lochleven.
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.
During this century, two events of the highest importance to art and learning took place—the introduction of the knowledge of Greek, and the invention of printing.
If the knowledge of Greek had not entirely died out in western Europe, it had nearly so till this century. The crusades, leading the Christians of western Europe to the east, had opened up an acquaintance betwixt the people of the Greek empire and those of the west. The destruction of that empire in this century drove a number of learned men into Italy, where they taught their language and literature. Amongst these were Theodore Gaza, Cardinal Bessarion, George of Trebizond, Demetrius Chalcondyles, John Argyropulus, and Janus Lascaris. Before that time some knowledge of the Greek philosophy had reached us through the Arabians, but till the fourteenth century very little of the literature of Greece was known in the western nations, not even the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" of Homer. In Italy Petrarch and Boccaccio learned the language and studied the writings of Greece, and an enthusiasm for Greek literature spread over all Europe. Grocyne studied it in Italy in 1488, under Chalcondyles, and came and taught it in England. But there were no more munificent promoters of this new knowledge than Pope Nicholas V. and Cosmo de' Medici. Gibbon says, "To the munificence of Nicholas, the Latin world was indebted for the versions of Xenophon, Diodorus, Polybius, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Appian, of Strabo's 'Geography,' of the 'Iliad,' of the most valuable works of Plato and Aristotle, of Ptolemy and Theophrastus, and of the fathers of the Greek church. The example of the Roman pontiff was preceded or imitated by a Florentine merchant, who governed the republic without arms and without a title. Cosmo of Medicis was the father of a line of princes whose name and age are almost synonymous with the restoration of learning. He corresponded at once with Cairo and London, and a cargo of Indian spices and Greek books was often imported in the same vessel. He encouraged the emulation of Demetrius Chalcondyles and Angelo Politian, and his active missionary, Janus Lascaris, returned from the East with a treasure of 200 manuscripts, fourscore of which were, as yet, unknown to the libraries of Europe."
At the same moment that Greek began to be studied, Latin in Europe was in the lowest and most degraded state. Though it still continued the language of divines, lawyers, philosophers, historians, and even poets, it had lost almost every trace of its original idiom and elegance. Latin words were used, but in the English order, and where words were wanting, they Anglicised them. William of Worcester, speaking of the arrival of the Duke of York from Ireland, says—"Et arrivavit apud Redbanke prope Cestriam;" that is, And arrived at Redbanke, near Chester. But the style of most writers at this period was equally barbarous; that of Thomas of Walsingham and a few others was better, but far from classical.
So low, indeed, was learning and the respect for it fallen in this age of continual distractions, fighting and revolutions, that Anthony à Wood says that there were frequent complaints from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge to Parliament, that all the most valuable livings were bestowed on illiterate men, or on foreigners, by the Pope. The son of a mad knight was made Archdeacon of Oxford before he was eighteen years of age; and soon after obtained two rich rectories and twelve prebends. The Chancellor of Oxford asked him one day what he thought of learning. "As for learning," said he, "I despise it. I have better livings than any of you great doctors, and I believe as much as any of you!" "What do you believe?" "I believe that there are three Gods in one person: I believe all that God believes!" "The best scholars in the kingdom were," adds Wood, "often driven to the necessity of begging their bread from door to door, with recommendations of the Chancellor of their university to public charity."
He says that "two of these learned mendicants came to the castle of a certain nobleman, who, understanding from their credentials that they had a taste for poetry, commanded his servants to take them to a well; to put one into the one bucket, and the other into the other bucket, and let them down alternately into the water, and to continue that exercise till each of them had made a couplet on his bucket. After they had endured this discipline for a considerable time, to the great entertainment of the baron and his company, they made their verses and obtained their liberty."
If such were the rewards of learning in the fifteenth century amongst the aristocracy, and in the persons of its most distinguished professors, we may conceive what must have been the dense darkness of the illiterate mass. Till the reign of Henry IV. no villein, farmer, or manufacturer was allowed to put his children to school, nor long afterwards dared they educate a son for the church without a licence from their lord. At no period had the condition of England been more benighted.
Earl Rivers presenting William Caxton to Edward IV. (From a MS. in the Library of Lambeth Palace.)
That is the Dutch story, but the Germans insist on Gutenberg being the originator of printing. They contend that Coster's were only the wooden blocks which had long been in use for the printing of playing-cards, and manuals of devotion. They even insinuate that all that the Dutch claim, had probably been brought from China by Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, who had seen the paper-money thus printed there in letters of vermilion, and that Holland had no share in the invention at all. But we know that the Germans have a vast capacity for claiming; they are on the point of claiming Shakespeare, and they claim England as really German, calling it Die Deutsche Insel. It is notorious that all the earliest block-printing, the Bibliæ Pauperum, the Bibles of the Poor, the Speculum Humanæ Salvationis with its fifty pictures, and other block-works, were all done in the Low Countries in the century we are reviewing.
Enough, then, for the Germans, that Gutenberg, Fust, and Schoeffer, were the men, let them come at their types as they might, who first printed any known works in movable types, and from Mayence, in 1445, diffused very soon the knowledge of the present art of printing over the whole world. The first work which they are supposed to have printed was the Bible, an edition of the Latin Vulgate, known by the name of the Mazarin Bible, of which various copies remain, though without date or printer's name.
Fac-simile of the Bible printed at Mayence in 1450, by Gutenberg. Commencement of the 19th Chapter of the First Book of Samuel.
Printing was introduced into England in 1472, according to all the chief authorities of or near that time, by William Caxton, though there have not been wanting attempts since to attribute this to one Corsellis. The story of Corsellis, however, is by no means well authenticated: it wants both proof and probability. Caxton was a native of the Weald of Kent. He served his apprenticeship to a mercer of London, became a member of the Mercer's Company, and was so much esteemed for his business talents, that in 1464 he was sent with others by Edward IV. into the Low Countries, to negotiate a commercial treaty with the Duke of Burgundy. There he was greatly regarded by Margaret, the Duchess of Burgundy, Edward IV.'s sister, who retained him as long as she could at her court. Caxton was now upwards of fifty years of age, but his inquisitive and active temperament led him to learn, amongst other things, the whole art of printing. He saw its immense importance, and he translated Raoul le Feure's "Recueil des Histoires de Troyes," and printed it in folio. This great work he says himself that he began in Bruges, and finished in Cologne in 1471. The first work which he printed in England was "The Game and Playe of Chesse," which was published in 1474. From this time till 1490, or till nearly the date of his death in 1491 or 1492, a period of sixteen years, the list of the works which Caxton passed through his press is quite wonderful. Thomas Milling, the Abbot of Westminster, was his most zealous patron; and at Westminster, in the Almonry, he commenced his business. The Earl Rivers, brother to the queen of Edward IV., ​was another of his friends and patrons, translating the "Diets and Sayings of the Philosophers" for his nephew, the Prince of Wales, and introducing Caxton, when it wasprinted, to present it to the king and royal family.
Fragment Fac-simile of the 98th page of the Psalter printed at Mayence in 1457, by Fust and Schoeffer.
We should, however, afford no idea of the amount of service rendered by Caxton in his own lifetime if we did not give a catalogue of the works he printed. They are:—The Recule of the Histories of Troye; the Game of Chess; the Pilgrimage of the Soul; Liber Festivalis, or Directions for keeping Feasts all the Year; Quatuor Sermones, or Four Sermons, in English; the Golden Legend, three editions; the Art and Craft to know well to Die, from the French; Infanta Salvatoris, the Childhood of our Saviour; the Life of St. Catherine of Siena; Speculum Vitæ Christi, or Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ; Directorium Sacerdotum, a Directory of Church Services; a Book of Divers Ghostly Matters; the Life of St. Winifred; the Provincial Constitutions of Bishop Lyndwood of St. Asaph, in Latin; the Profitable Book of Man's Love, called the Chastening of God's Children; the Book of the Life of Jason; Godfrey of Bologn; the Knight of the Tower, from the French; the Book of the Order of Chivalry or Knighthood, from the French; the Book Royal, or the Book for a King; a Book of the Noble Histories of King Arthur and certain of his knights; the History of the Noble, Right Valiant, and Right Worthy Knight, Paris, and of the fair Vienne; the Book of Feats of Arms and of Chivalry, from the French of Christine of Pisa; the History of King Blanchardine and Queen Eglantine, his Wife; Renard the Fox, from the German, translated also by Caxton; the Subtle Histories and Fables of Æsop; the works of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, &c.
Fac-simile of Caxton's Printing in the "Dictes and Sayings of Philosophers," printed in 1477.
That is a noble monument of labour in the very outset of printing in this country, and at the latter end only of a busy life. But while Caxton was thus busy he saw others around him also as hard at work with their presses: Theodor Rood, John Lettow, William Machelina, and Wynkyn de Worde, foreigners, and Thomas Hunt, an Englishman. A schoolmaster of St. Albans set up a press there, and several books were printed at Oxford in 1478, and to the end of the century. There is no direct evidence of any work being printed in Scotland during this century, though such may have been the case, and all traces of the fact obliterated in the almost universal destruction of the cathedral and conventual libraries at the Reformation. James III. was known to collect the most superb specimens of typography, and Dr. Henry mentions seeing a magnificent edition of "Speculum Moralitatis" which had been in that king's possession and contained his autograph.
Not less meritorious benefactors of their country, next to the writers and printers of books, are those who collected them into libraries, and the most munificent patron and encourager of learning in this manner was the unfortunate Duke Humphrey of Gloucester. He gave to the University of Oxford a library of 600 volumes in 1440, valued at £1,000. Some of these very volumes yet remain in different collections. Duke Humphrey not only bought books, but he employed men of science and learning to translate and transcribe. He kept celebrated writers from France and Italy, as well as Englishmen, to translate from the Greek and other languages; and is said to have written himself on astronomy, a scheme of astronomical calculations under his name still remaining in the library of Gresham College. The great Duke of Bedford, likewise, when master of Paris, purchased and sent to this country the royal library, containing 853 volumes, valued at 2,223 livres.
​The schools and colleges founded during this century were the following:—Lincoln College, Oxford; founded in 1430, by Richard Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, and completed by Thomas Scott, of Rotherham, Bishop of Lincoln, in 1475. All Souls' College, Oxford; founded by Chicheley, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1437. He expended upon its erection £4,545, and procured considerable revenues for it out of the lands of the alien priories, dissolved just before that time. Magdalene College, Oxford; founded by William Patten, Bishop of Winchester, in 1456, which soon became one of the richest colleges in Europe. King's College, Cambridge; founded by Henry VI., in 1443. Queen's College, Cambridge; founded by Margaret of Anjou, in 1448; and Catherine Hall, Cambridge, founded by Robert Woodlark, third provost of King's College, in 1475.
Copyist at work.
Besides these, Henry VI. founded Eton College, and Thomas Hokenorton, Abbot of Osney, founded in Oxford, in 1439, the public schools, called the New Schools. Before that time the professors of several sciences in both universities read their lectures in private houses, at very inconvenient distances from each other. To remedy this inconvenience, public schools were erected in both universities at this period. Hokenorton's schools comprehended the teaching of divinity, metaphysics, natural and moral philosophy, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, music, logic, rhetoric, and grammar. They required liberal aid from other benefactors, and they found these in the noble Humphrey of Gloucester, and the two brothers Kemp, the one Archbishop of York and the other Bishop of London. They were completed in 1480, including Duke Humphrey's noble library. The quadrangle, containing the public schools of Cambridge, was completed in 1475.
Up to this period Scotland had possessed no university whatever, and its youth had been obliged to travel to foreign universities for their education. But now the University of St. Andrews was founded in 1410, and obtained a charter in 1411 from Archbishop Wardlaw, which was confirmed by the Pope in 1412, and by James L in 1431. The great need of such an institution was soon evidenced by the university becoming famous. In 1444 Kennedy, the successor of Wardlaw, founded the College of St. Salvator in that city; and in 1451 James II., at the instance of William Turnbull, the Bishop of Glasgow, founded the university of that city; and in the same year was founded the college or faculty of arts in Glasgow, the king taking both college and university under his especial patronage and protection. This college received a handsome endowment from James, Lord Hamilton, and his lady, Euphemia, Countess of Douglas, in 1459. These were great measures in a very dark age, preparing light for those which came after.
Physician Bleeding a Patient. Harl. MS., 4,425.
Of the sciences taught in these institutions little can be said. There were few masters of such eminence in them as to give a high tone to them. Medicine, which was now taught in them all, had rather fallen off than advanced. Dr. Friend, in his History of Physic, could find not one physician of those times whose works deserve mention. Yet Dr. Gilbert Kymer, Duke Humphrey's physician, wrote a Dietary for the Preservation of Health—Dietarium de Sanitatis Custodia; and Dr. Fauceby, physician to Henry VI., was commissioned by Henry to discover the long sought-for Elixir of Life, and the Philosopher's Stone. But the sweating sickness, one of the most terrible distempers which ever visited this kingdom, and which raged from 1485 to 1551, completely set at defiance all the medical science of the times. It carried off its victims in seven or eight hours, and amongst them two lord mayors, five aldermen, and a prodigious number of people of all ranks. What is most extraordinary is that it is asserted to have attacked Englishmen residing in foreign countries at the same time, though foreigners living in England escaped.
​Most amazing, however, are the facts regarding surgery at that period. At a time when foreign or domestic war was raging through nearly the whole country, anatomy, so far from being studied, was abominated as a barbarous violation of the remains of the dead. Henry V. when invading France took only one surgeon with him! This surgeon, Thomas Morstede; however, engaged to bring fifteen assistants, twelve students of surgery, and three archers. Morstede was to have the pay of a man-at-arms, and his assistants that of common archers. What an idea does this give us of the agonies suffered, and of the wholesale waste of human life in those wars! Henry himself seems to have been impressed with this fact, for in his second expedition he was anxious to procure a competent supply of surgeons, but not being able, he granted to Morstede a warrant empowering him to press the requisite number, or what Morstede thought a requieite number, of surgeons for the army.
Abbot Whethamstele of St. Albans. From the Register Book of the Abbey.
There is little doubt that Henry himself fell a victim, in his prime, to the medical ignorance of the age, for his complaint was a fistula, which none of his professional attendants knew how to cure. Yet the surgeons of Paris, at this time, 1474, achieved a chef d'œuvre in their art, performing successfully on an archer, under sentence of death, an operation for the stone.
Mathematics were in this age confounded with astrology; the mathematician and astrologer were synonymous terms. A book by Arnold do Marests, an astronomer in France, was declared by the University of Paris to "contain many superstitions, many conjurations, many manifest and horrible invocations of the devil, and several latent heresies and idolatries." In England there was a board of commissioners for discovering and apprehending magicians, enchanters, and sorcerers—and by it Thomas Northfield, professor of divinity and sorcerer, was apprehended at "Worcester in 1432, with all his books and instruments. Alchemy, as we have shown, was not only in high vogue, but especially patronised by Henry VI.
HISTORY AND HISTORIANS, WITH MEN OF LEARNING AND TASTE.
The scale of literary merit in this century, as may be inferred from what has gone before, is, for the most part, extremely low. You look in vain for one divine, physician, or philosopher, who cast a glory on the age. The names of the chroniclers are little more distinguished; their language is anything but elegant or classical, and the facts they record alone give them value. We have awarded Caxton his fame as a printer; as an author, and the continuator of Higdon's Polycronicon, he is less estimable. Next to him comes Thomas Walsingham, a monk of St. Albans, and unquestionably the best historian of the period. He wrote two works: a history of England from the first year of Edward I. to the death of Henry v., and a history of Normandy from the beginning of the tenth century to 1418, under the absurd title of Ypodigma Neustriæ—Neustria being the ancient name of Normandy.
Thomas Otterbourne, a Franciscan friar, compiled a history of England from the chroniclers of an earlier period down to 1420. John Whethamstele, Abbot of St. Whethamstele
Richard III. and his Queen. Engraved from the Warwick Roll.
Albans, wrote a chronicle of twenty years, from 1441 to 1461, in which there is a very full account of the two battles of St. Albans, and of the affairs of his abbey. He lived to be a hundred years old. Thomas de Elmham, Prior of Linton, wrote the life and reign of Henry V. in a very inflated style. The history of Henry V. was also written by an Italian who called himself Titus Livius, probably imagining himself on a par with the Roman historian in literary genius. He was a protége of the great Humphrey of Gloucester, and re-wrote Elmham's history in a more tolerable style. John Rous, the antiquary of Warwick, was an industrious collector of materials for a history of the kings of England, and a work still more valuable, called the Warwick Roll, containing portraits of the most celebrated persons of the time. Robert Fabyan, a merchant and alderman of London, wrote "The Concordance of Stories," a history ​of England and France, ending at the twentieth of Henry VII., 1504. It is one of the most valuable works of the time, written in English, and with a great air of truth. Besides these, John Harding also wrote a chronicle. But the chief writers of this age are not our own, but three Frenchmen—Froissart, Comines, and Monstrellet—who wrote with great life and spirit, and give us a better account of our own affairs than all our own writers put together.
Amongst the professors of law, by far the two most distinguished were Sir Thomas Littelton and Sir John Fortescue. Sir Thomas Littelton, one of the judges of the Court of Common Pleas, is remembered for his work on the land tenures of England, which for ages remained an authority on that subject. We particularly mentioned Sir John Fortescue, lord high chancellor, for his faithful attachment to Margaret of Anjou in her exile, and for his famous work, "De Laudibus Legum Anglicæ," on which a writer in the "Biographia Britannica" has pronounced this eulogium:—"Take it altogether, and it will appear to be a work which affords as full evidence of the learning, wisdom, uprightness, public spirit, and loyal gratitude of its author, as in our own or any modern language."
James I. of Scotland was, perhaps, the most accomplished scholar and real genius of his age; but we shall speak of him when we notice the poetry of this century. Nor must we omit two other men, though they have already figured in the general history of the times—Tiptoft, the Earl of Worcester, and the Earl of Rivers. John Tiptoft was a fellow-student of John Rous of Warwick, at Oxford. He became lord high treasurer of England under Henry VI. During the troubles of the kingdom, and the depression of tho Lancastrian party, he went to Italy, and studied at Padua, under the most famous masters there—Carbo, Guarini, and Phrea. Previous to this he had visited the Holy Land. On the elevation of Edward IV. he returned home, submitted to him, and was made successively treasurer, Lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and Constable of England. In 1470, when Edward IV. was again obliged to abandon the kingdom, Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, was seized in the top of a tree at Weybridge, brought to London, and executed. He had acquired the reputation, whether justly or not, for great severity and even cruelty in the wars; but he was a great collector of books, which, to the value of 500 marks, he gave to the University library at Oxford. He made an oration before the Pope and cardinals, which was very famous in his time, and translated the orations of Publius Cornelius and Caius Flaminius, as well as the De Amicitia and De Senectute of Cicero.
Anthony Wydville, Earl of Rivers, the great patron of Caxton, and the mirror of chivalry of his time, wrote Ballads on the Seven Deadly Sins, and translated the Wise Sayings or Dictes of the Philosophers, the Proverbs of Christine of Pisa, and a work called Cordyale. He was beheaded at Pontefract by Richard III., and Rous of Warwick has preserved some verses which he is said to have composed in that prison a little before his death, which breathe a noble spirit of resignation to his fate. It has been thought a singular fact that the most illustrious characters of the age, the authors or the patrons of its literature, should all have suffered a violent death: Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, James I. of Scotland, the Earls of Worcester and Rivers. But where is the wonder when almost every prince and noble of those times fell amid the ever-fluctuating billows of civil carnage?
ARTS BEARING IMMEDIATELY ON THE NEEDS OF SOCIAL LIFE.
Mason and Carpenter of the 15th Century. MS. Reg. E11.
On everything which related to agriculture, gardening, and rural economy in general, the perpetual wars had a most depressing and deteriorating effect. The labourers were continually summoned from the fields to supply the waste of war, either by the king or by their own lords; and such was the destruction of this useful class of men, that labour grew deficient, and proportionately high in price. To remedy this, the rulers had recourse to their usual methods—of which no experience seems to have taught them the futility—that of issuing enactments to keep down labour to a certain price. When this did not avail they passed a law that no one who had been employed at the plough or other husbandry work till he was twelve years of age, should be allowed to follow any other calling; and that no man who had less than twenty shillings a year, equal to £10 at present, should put his sons apprentice to any other trade, but should bring them all up to husbandry.
These laws were enforced by severe penalties; but they could not all at once restore the slaughtered population, and the great landed proprietors, whether barons, prelates, abbots, knights, or gentlemen, were obliged to enclose large tracts of land round their castles, and allow them ​to lie in pasturage, where a few people could oversee their cattle and flocks. This was probably the origin of that general enclosure of lands into fields which prevails more in England than in any other country. There were not wanting people at the time who cried out mightily against these enclosures as an evidence that the aristocracy were determined to drive out the people and live in a stately solitude. John Rous, the Warwick chronicler, was one of the most vehement of these declaimers. The greater part of his history abounds with the fiercest denunciations of them, as depopulators, destroyers, pillagers, robbers, tyrants, basilisks, enemies to God and man; and he assures them that they will all go to the devil when they die. But the original cause was, no doubt, the want of a population, not a desire to drive one away; yet, when the fashion set in, it was carried to such a pitch that Henry VII. was obliged, in the fourth year of his reign, to interfere by statute to put some restraint upon it. The price of wheat was, in consequence of this decrease of tillage, often enormous, seldom under 4s. or 4s. 6d. a quarter, equal to 40s. or 45s. of our money; and in 1437 and 1438 it rose to £1 6s. 8d., equal to £13 6s. 8d. at present. This, again, produced such an importation from the Continent, that corn laws were adopted in 1463, and all importation was prohibited when wheat was below 6s. 8d. a quarter, rye 4s., and barley 3s., bearing a curious relation to the scale of the modern corn laws: the original corn law of our time prohibiting importation when wheat was under 80s., and Sir Robert Peel's sliding scale commencing at 62s., and running up to 73s.—the 6s. Sd. of Edward IV.'s time being equal to nearly 70s. of ours. In Scotland, agriculture, from the same causes, was equally low in condition, and all landowners were by law compelled to sow a certain quantity of grain of different kinds, under a penalty of 10s., equal to £5 now; and every labourer was expected to dig a square of seven feet every day, or contribute half an ox to drawing the plough.
Gatehouse of the Priory at Montacute, Somersetshire.
As pastures were enclosed, greater attention was paid to the breeding of cattle and sheep, but the sowing of grasses and the manuring of the land were yet unknown. Henry VI. brought over John de Scheidame and sixty men from Holland, to instruct his subjects in the manufacture of salt, and having failed to procure supplies of the precious metal by alchemy, the same monarch brought over from Bohemia, Austria, and Hungary, upwards of thirty skilful miners to work the royal mines, and to instruct his subjects in this art.
ARCHITECTURE—MILITARY, ECCLESIASTICAL, AND DOMESTIC.
The castles erected during this period are few. The wars of the Roses brought the force of cannon and gun-powder against the massive old erections of the barons of past ages, and many a terrible stronghold was demolished. But there was, from the commencement of these wars, little leisure for rebuilding, or for building new ones. The proprietors, for the most part, were killed or reduced to ruin, and the workmen shared the same fate, so that labour became too scarce and dear for such great undertakings. Scotland was affected by similar circumstances.
Gatehouse at Helmingham, Suffolk.
Red Mount Chapel at Lynn, Norfolk. (See page 58.)
in 1448 on the plan of Porchester Castle. It was a stupendous building, of which the ruins now remain, forming a regular parallelogram of 180 feet square, flanked by seventeen octagon towers, and with a fine machicolated gateway forming the keep. Tattershall, in Lincolnshire, built in 1455, is erected in the style of the ancient keep, a huge square tower with polygonal turrets at the angles. Caistor, in Norfolk, erected about 1450, was remarkable for two very large circular brick towers at the northern angle, one of which remains.
But the castles and the mansions of this period possessed frequently so many features and qualities in common, that some of them are actual hybrids, the uniting links of the two kinds of houses. They had alike towers, ​battlements, and moats, and the chief apartments looked into the interior quadrangle as the safest. Oxburgh Hall, in Norfolk, is one of this mixed class. Though called a hall, it is moated, and has a massive gateway of a remarkable altitude. Raglan Castle, built in the reign of Edward IV., has more of the true castellated style; Warwick and Windsor, more of the union of the two styles. At the same time, such castles as had their gateways battered down and rebuilt at this period, present in them all the older characteristics of castellated buildings. Such is the gateway of Carisbrook Castle, built in the reign of Edward IV., and the west gate of Canterbury, built towards the close of the fourteenth century, which retain the stern old circular towers, lighted only by mere loopholes and œillets.
ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHITECTURE.
The style of ecclesiastical architecture prevailing through this century, and to the middle of the next, is that called the Perpendicular. It appears to have commenced about 1377, or at the commencement of the reign of Richard II., just twenty years prior to this century; and it terminated at the Reformation, in the reign of Henry VIII. The Reformation was anything but a reformation in architecture. That great convulsion broke up the period of a thousand years, during which, from the first introduction of Christianity into this island, this peculiar character of architecture, often called Gothic, but more properly Christian, had been progressing and perfecting itself. The Saxon princes and prelates, evidently copying the Grecian in their columns, but adding curves and ornaments unknown to the Greeks, and introducing principles of pliancy, and of long and lofty aisles, from the suggestions of the forests, in which they were accustomed to wander, and the linden groves which they planted, originated a new school of architecture, in many particulars far exceeding that of the classic nations. No church took up and perpetuated this noble Christian architecture more cordially and more inspiredly than the Catholic. Over the whole of Europe, wherever the Roman Church prevailed, it erected its churches and monasteries in a spirit of unrivalled grandeur and beauty. In architecture, in music, and in painting, it acquitted itself royally towards the public, however it might fail in spirit, in doctrine, or in discipline. The remains of painted windows, to say nothing of the productions of such men as Raphael, Michael Angelo, Guido, and a host of others, who drew their inspiration from the devotions of that church, are sufficient to excite our highest admiration; and the sublime anthems which resounded through their august and poetical temples, through what are called the dark ages, were well calculated to enchain the imagination of minds not deeply reflective or profoundly informed.
In every country we find, moreover, a different style in all these arts—music, painting, and architecture; demonstrating the exuberance of genius turned into these channels during long centuries, when all others, except warfare, seemed closed. Our own country had its distinctive style in these matters, and in architecture this Perpendicular style was the last. During its later period it considerably deteriorated, and with the Reformation it went out. In England sufficient power and property were left to the Anglican Church to enable it to preserve the majority of its churches, and many of its conventual buildings: in Scotland the destruction was more terrible. There public opinion took a great leap from Catholicism to the simplicity and sternness of the school of John Knox; and in consequence of his celebrated sermon at Perth, in which he told his congregation that to effectually drive away the rooks they must pull out their nests, almost every convent and cathedral, except that of Glasgow, was reduced to a ruin.
Window of Crosby Hall, London
Of the Perpendicular style we have many churches throughout the country, and still more into which it has been more or less introduced into those of earlier date in repairs and restorations. Every county, and almost every parish, can show us specimens of this style, if it be only in a window, a porch, or a buttress. Rickman is of opinion that full half the windows in English edifices over the kingdom are of this style. Whilst our neighbours on the Continent were indulging themselves in the flamboyant style, and loading their churches with the most exuberant ornament, as in the splendid cathedrals of Normandy and Brittany, our ancestors were enamoured of this now and more chaste style. There are writers who regard the perpendicular lines of this style as an evidence of a decline in the art. We cannot agree with that opinion. The straight, continuous mullions of the Perpendicular are—combined with the rich and abundant ornaments of other portions of the buildings, as the spandrils enriched with shields, the finely-wrought and soaring canopies, and crocketed finials, the canopied buttresses, the groined roofs ​and fan-tracery of ceilings—a pleasure to the eye, when chastely and richly designed.
They are the windows of this style which at once catch the observation of the spectator. The mullions, running through from bottom to top, give you, instead of the flowing tracery of the Decorated style, a simple and somewhat stiff heading; but the stiffness is in most windows relieved by the heading of each individual section being cuspated, and the upper portions of the window presenting frequent variations, as in the grand western window of Winchester Cathedral. Some of these windows, with their cinquefoils and quatrefoils, approach oven to the Decorative. Amongst the finest windows of this kind are those of St. George's, Windsor, of four lights; the clerestory windows of Henry the Seventh's Chapel, of five. The east window of York Cathedral is of superb proportions. The window of the Beauchamp Chapel, Warwick, is extremely rich and peculiar in its character. Those of the Abbey Church of Bath have the mullions alternating, by the perpendicular line being continued from the centre of each arch beneath it.
Buttress of Beauchamp Chapel.
The mullions in this style are crossed at right angles by transoms, converting the whole window into a series of panels; for paneling in the Perpendicular style is one of its chief characteristics, being carried out on walls, doors, and, in many cases, even roofs and ceilings. Take away the arched head of a window, and you convert it at once into an Elizabethan one.
Every portion of a Perpendicular building has its essential characteristics: its piers, its buttresses, its niches, its roofs, porches, battlements, and ornaments, which we cannot enumerate here. They must be studied for themselves. We can only point out one or two prominent examples.
Many of the buildings of this style are adorned with flying buttresses, which are often pierced, and rich in tracery, as those of Henry VII.'s Chapel. The projection of the buttresses in King's Collage Chapel, Cambridge, is so great that chapels are built between them. Many of these buttresses are very rich with statuary niches and wrought canopies. Pinnacles are used profusely in this style; but in St. George's, Windsor, and the Beauchamp Chapel, Warwick, the buttresses run up, and finish square.
Panelling, as we have said, is one of the most striking features of the Perpendicular style. This is carried to such an extent in most of the richly-ornamented buildings, that it covers walls, windows, roofs; for the doors and windows are only pierced panels. St. George's, Windsor, is a fine example of this; but still finer is Henry VII.'s Chapel, which, within and without, is almost covered with panelling. King's College Chapel, Cambridge, is another remarkable example, which is all panelled, except the floor. The roof of this chapel is one of the richest specimens of the fan-tracery in the kingdom. Amongst the most graceful ornaments of this style are the angels introduced into cornices, and as supporters of shields, and corbels for roof-beams, rich foliated crockets, and flowers exquisitely worked, conspicuous amongst them being the Tudor flower.
Some of the finest steeples in the country belong to this style. First and foremost stands the unrivaled open-work tower of St. Nicholas, Newcastle-on-Tyne. This forms a splendid crown in the air, composed of four flying buttresses, springing from the base of octagonal turrets, and bearing at their intersection an elegant lantern, crowned with a spire. From this have been copied that of St. Giles's, Edinburgh, that of the church of Linlithgow, and the college tower of Aberdeen. Boston, Derby, Taunton, Doncaster, Coventry, York, and Canterbury boast noble steeples of this style.
The arches of the Perpendicular are various; but none are so common as the flat, four-centred arch. This in doors, and in windows also, is generally enclosed by a square plane of decoration, appearing as a frame, and this mostly surmounted by a dripstone; the spandrels formed betwixt the arch and frame being generally filled by armorial shields, or ornamental tracery. In some doorways there is an excess of ornament. The Decorative style in this country, or the florid abroad, has nothing richer. Every part is covered with canopy-work, flowers, heraldic emblems, and emblazoned shields. Such is the doorway of King's College Chapel, Cambridge; and such are the chapels of Henry V. and Henry VII. at Westminster.
The groined roofs of the Perpendicular style are noble, and often profusely ornamented. The intersections of the ribs of these groined roofs are often shields richly emblazoned in their proper colours. The vaulted roof of the cloisters of Canterbury Cathedral is studded with ​above 800 shields, of kings and other benefactors; and the whole presents a perfect blaze of splendour. Some of these groined roofs are adorned with a ramification of ribs, running out in a fan-shape, circumscribed by a quarter or half-circle rib, the intervals filled up with ornament. The cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral present, perhaps, the first specimen of the fan-tracery roof; and after that King's College Chapel, Cambridge, Henry VII.'s Chapel, and the Abbey Church at Bath. The Red Mount Chapel at Lynn, in Norfolk, is a unique and very beautiful specimen of the Perpendicular, not only having a richly ornamental roof of this kind, but, though much injured by time, displaying in every part of it design and workmanship equally exquisite. Henry VII.'s Chapel and the Divinity School at Oxford have pendents which come down as low as the springing-line of the fans.
Staircase at Charlton House, Kent.
A simpler roof, but quaint and impressive in its appearance, is the open one—that is, open to the roof framing. Here, as all is bare to the eye, the whole framework of beams and rafters has been constructed for effect. The wood-work forms arches, pendents, and pierced panels of various form and ornament. Such are the roofs of Westminster Hall, Crosby Hall in Bishopsgate, Eltham Palace, the College of Christ Church, Oxford, and many an old baronial hall and church throughout the country.
Fireplace at Charlton House, Kent.
Specimens of this style of architecture in whole or in part will meet the reader in every part of England, Wales, and Scotland; and it should be remembered that it is an especial and exclusively English style, no other country possessing it. In Scotland Melrose Abbey and Roslyn Chapel present fine specimens of the Perpendicular, the latter one displaying some singular variations, the work of foreign artists.
The Bay Window at Speke Hall.
When we descend from the military castle to more domestic architecture, we find the large houses of the gentry or nobility, though totally incapable of resisting cannon, yet frequently battlemented, flanked with turrets, and surrounded by the flooded moat. The large houses of this period were generally built round one or two quadrangles. These buildings often possessed a great variety of exterior detail: a great arched gateway with the ​armorial escutcheon above it; projections, recessses, tall chimneys, flanking buttresses, handsome oriel windows, and pointed gables, terminated by some animal belonging to the emblazonry of the family. They were commonly adorned with fanes, in the form of the military banner of the chief, duly emblazoned in proper colours. Within, the great hall, with its open groined roof, the kitchen, and the buttery, cut the principal figure. At the upper end of the hall was the dais or raised part, on which stood the table of the lord and his immediate family or particular guests; and below the great salt-cellar sat the remainder of the establishment. At the lower end was commonly a music gallery. The fire was still frequently in the centre of the hall, and a hole in the roof to permit the smoke to escape, as at Penshurst, where the front of the music gallery is true perpendicular. In other houses there were large open fireplaces, the mantlepieces of which were frequently richly carved with the armorial shields of the family.
Smithell's Hall, Lancashire.
The floors were still strewn with fresh rushes instead of a carpet, and the walls were hung with arras, which clothed them and at the same time kept out cold draughts. Plaster ceilings were yet unknown. The greater portion of these houses, however, was required for the sleeping apartments of the numerous retainers.
In the humbler halls, granges, and farmhouses, the same plan of building round a quadrangle was mostly adhered to, and a great number of such houses were of framed timber, with ornamental gables and porches, and displaying much carving. Great Chatfield manor-house in Wiltshire, Harlaxton in Licolnshire, Helmingham Hall, Norfolk, Moreton Hall in Cheshire, and probably some of the framed timber houses of Lancashire, as the Hall-in-the-Wood. Smithell's, Speke Hall, &c., in whole or in part, date from this period. Ockwells, in Berkshire, is another of the fine old timber houses of this period.
In the towns the houses were also chiefly of wood. The streets were extremely narrow, and the upper stories of the houses projected over the lower ones, so that you might almost shake hands out of the third or fourth story windows. This was the cause of such frequent fires as occurred in London. Many of the small houses in these narrow streets were adorned with abundance of carving. The houses or inns of the great barons, prelates, and abbots were extensive, and surrounded inner courts. Here, during Parliament, and on other great occasions, the owners came with their vast retinues. We are told that the Duke of York lodged with 400 men in Baynard's Castle, in 1457. The Earl of Warwick had his house in Warwick Lane, still called after it, where he could lodge 800 men. At another house of his called the Herber, meaning an inn, the Earl of Salisbury, his father, lodged with 500 men. Still more extensive must have been the abodes of the Earls of Exeter and Northumberland, who occasionally brought retinues of from 800 to 1,500 men. The sites of these great houses are yet known, and bear the names of their ancient owners, but the buildings themselves have long vanished. The great houses of Scotland still kept up the show of feudal strength and capability of defence. The Peels, or Border towers, yet bear evidence of the necessity of stout fortification in those times. We may form some idea of the devastation made amongst private dwellings in the Wars of the Roses, from the statement of John Rous, the Warwick antiquary, who says that no fewer than sixty villages, some of them large and populous, with churches and manor-houses, had been destroyed within twelve miles of that city. From all that we can learn, the common people of this age were but indifferently lodged, and the mansions of the great were more stately than comfortable.
Staircase leading to the Chapel, Smithell's Hall.
SCULPTURE, PAINTING, GILDING, AND ILLUMINATION.
Though such extensive destruction of the statuary which adorned both the exterior and interior of our churches took place at the Reformation, sufficient yet remains to warrant us in the belief that the fifteenth surpassed every prior century in its sculpture. The very opposition which the Wycliffites had raised to the worship and even existence of images, seems to have stimulated ​the Church, only the more to put forth its strength in this direction. Sculptors, both foreign and English, therefore received the highest encouragement, and were in the fullest employ. The few statues which yet remain in niches, on the outside of our cathedrals, especially those on the west end of the Cathedral of Wells, though probably not the best work of the artists, are decided proofs of their ability. The effigies of knights and ladies extended on their altar tombs received great damage, with the rest of the ecclesiastical art, from the misguided zeal of the reformers, yet many such remain of great beauty, and the chantries, which were in this century erected over the tombs of great prelates, are of the most exquisite design and workmanship. Such are those in Winchester Cathedral of Bishops Wykeham, Beaufort, and Waynflete. That of Bishop Beaufort, in particular, is a mass of Portland stone, carved like the finest ivory, and is a most gorgeous specimen of a tomb of the Perpendicular period. Henry V.'s chantry, in Westminster Abbey, is the only one erected in this period to royalty, and it is a monument of high honour to the age.
The names of some of the artists of this era are preserved. Thomas Colyn, Thomas Holewell, and Thomas Poppehowe, executed, carried over, and erected in Nantes, in 1408, the alabaster tomb of the Duke of Brittany. Of the five artists who executed the celebrated tomb of Richard, Earl of Warwick, in the Beauchamp Chapel, four were English, and the fifth was a Dutch goldsmith. Besides the great image of the earl, there were thirty-two images on this monument. These were all cast by William Austin, a founder of London, clearly a great genius, on the finest latten (brass), and gilded by Bartholomew Lambespring, the Dutch goldsmith. The monument and the superb chapel in which it stands cost £2,481 4s. 7d., equivalent to £24,800 now.
Most of the monumental brasses which abound in our churches were the work of this period. There are some of much older date, but during this century they were multiplied everywhere, and afforded great scope for the talents of founders, engravers, and enamellers.
In painting, the age does not appear to have equally excelled. There were, unquestionably, abundance of religious pictures on the walls of our churches, and the images themselves were painted and gilt; but there does not seem to have existed artists who had a true conception of the sublimity of their pursuit. The painting of such works was undertaken by the job, by painters and stainers. John Prudde, glazier in Westminster, undertook to "import from beyond seas glass of the finest colours, blue, yellow, red, purple, sanguine, and violet," and with it glaze the windows of the Beauchamp Chapel. Brentwood, a stainer of London, was to paint the west wall of the chapel "with all manner of devices and imagery;" and Christian Coliburne, painter of London, was to "paint the images in the finest oil colours." The great Earl of Warwick bargained with his tailor to paint the scenes of his embassy to France, for which he was to receive £1 8s. 6d. The "Dance of Death," so common on the Continent in churches and churchyards, made also so famous by Holbein, was copied from the cloister of the Innocents in Paris, and painted on the walls of the cloister of St. Paul's. It was a specimen of the portrait painting of the age, for it contained the portraits of actual persons, in different ranks of life, in their proper dresses. The portraits of our kings, queens, and celebrated characters, done at this time, are of inferior merit.
Gilding was in great request, not only for ornamenting churches and their monuments, but for domestic use, the precious metals being very scarce, and therefore copper and brass articles were very commonly silvered or gilt. But it was in the illumination of manuscripts that the artistic genius of the time was, more than almost in any other department, displayed. The colours used are deemed inferior in splendour to those of the fourteenth century, but they are superior in drawing and power of expression. The terror depicted in the faces of the Earl of Warwick's sailors in expectation of shipwreck, and the grief in those who witnessed his death, are evidences of the hand of a master. Many of the portraits of the leading characters of the age are to be found in these illuminations; and they afford us the most lively views of the persons and dresses of our ancestors of that day—their arms, ships, houses, furniture, manners, and employments. But the art of printing was already in existence, and before it the beautiful art of illumination fell and died out.
POETRY.
If all the authors of this century who wrote in verse had been poets, no age could have been more brilliantly poetical, but in truth its genuine poets were very few. Of the seventy poets enumerated by Ritson, we can only select three who deserve a mention. These are James I. of Scotland, Oocleve, and Lydgate. James I. was a man of remarkably earnest and independent mind. He seems to have overflowed with genius on all sides. The writers of his time celebrate his skill in architecture, gardening, and painting. Of these we have no remains, but we know that in government he was a great reformer; and in poetry, his "King's Quair," or Book, is a poem which is still read with equal admiration and pleasure. It consists of six cantos, containing 197 stanzas of seven lines each. It was written as the story of his courtship of Jane Beaufort, who was afterwards his queen. He describes his first seeing her from his window at Windsor, as she tended a little garden there. A single stanza relating this first glimpse of the beautiful Lady Beaufort, will give an idea of the poetic language of the times:—
   "And therewith kest I doun myn eye ageyne, Quare as I saw walkynge under the toure, Full secretely, new cumyn her to pleyne, The fairest or the freschest young floure That ever I saw, methought, before that houre, For qwhich sodayne abate, anon astert The blude of all my body to my hert."
Two other poems have been attributed to James I., "Christ's Kirk on the Green," and "Peebles to the Play;" but there is reason to think that they should be assigned to James V., who wrote "The Gaberlunzie Man," and the "Jolly Beggar," poems of the same humorous and popular character. If the "King's Quair" alone, however, can be authentically assigned to James I., it stamps him as the great poet of that age, and as the greatest from Chaucer to Spenser, that is, from the time of Henry V. to the reign of Elizabeth.
The merit of Occleve is not of that quality that it need detain the reader. He wrote much, but without much ​power or originality. Lydgate was a monk of Bury, and wrote upon a great variety of subjects, but his four chief poems are, "The Lyfe of our Lady," "The Fall of Princes," "The Siege of Thebes," and "The Destruction of Troy."
Amusements of People of Rank. 15th Century. Harl MS. 4,125,
Lydgate is most at home in description, and most deficient in invention.
Organ of the 14th Century. MS. 175, Imp. Lib. of Paris.
He is rather a learned man than a poet, and many of those which he calls his poems are scarcely more than translations from Latin authors. Wethamstede, the learned Abbot of St. Albans, employed him to translate into English the legend of the patron saint of his abbey, and paid him for the translating, writing, and illumination, 100 shillings. Lydgate died in his monastery at an advanced age, never having obtained any preferment through his learning or productions. In all those early ages there was a class of writers, called the ballad poets, who seem never to have had the power, or perhaps the ambition, to attach their names to their effusions, which were sung by the people, and were only collected and made known to us by Bishop Percy and Sir Walter Scott, in the "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," and in the "Border Minstrelsy."
Cannon of the 15th Century. MS. Reg. 14 E. IV.
Yet many of these are lyrics of the highest vigour and genius, such as "Chevy Chase," "Sir Andrew Barton," "The Nutbrown Maid," and the "Babes in the Wood"—the latter written ​in this century, and by the "Cruel Uncle" meaning Richard III. Most of these nameless ballads were probably the productions of that class of professed minstrels who attended the courts and houses of the great, who had bands of them regularly retained, or who wandered from town to town and sang to amuse the people. They were at the same time musicians on various musical instruments.
Hand-Gun. Reign of Edward IV. MS. Reg. 15 E. iv.
Music made considerable progress in this age. Henry V. was an ardent admirer of it, and not only played well himself on the harp, but had a regular military band attending him in France, consisting of ten clarions and other instruments, which played an hour every morning and evening at his head-quarters. Church music was carefully taught at the universities. It was one of the four sciences of the quadrium, and was a means of promotion in the church and colleges. Thomas Saintwix, doctor of music, was made the provost of King's College, Cambridge, by its founder Henry VI. Counterpoint, an English discovery, was now added to the melody or plain chant of the early Church; and the example of Henry V. of England, and of the first and third James of Scotland, promoted the study of the art amongst the laity. James I. is said to have been as exquisite a musician as he was a poet, and to have introduced a plaintive but touching style of modulation, which was imitated by Carlo Gesnaldo, Prince of Venosa, who diffused it amongst his countryman. Perhaps the plaintive character of Scottish ballad music may be partly derived from James.
Soldier in a Floating Battery, with Hand-Gun fitted on Stock. From a treatise De Re Militari, printed at Verona in 1472.
ART OF WAR.
The deadly arts of destruction were more practised during this century than all others. First the English turned their arms against the French, and then against each other, and though many of their armies were hastily raised, and therefore ill-disciplined, they not only showed their accustomed bravery, but many advances were made in the manner of raising, forming, paying, and disciplining troops, as well as in the modes of attacking fortifications and towns. Henry V. was a consummate master in this, his favourite art, and was, perhaps, the first of our kings who introduced a scheme of superior discipline, teaching his troops to march in straight lines at proper distances, with a steady, measured pace; to advance, attack, halt, or fall back without breaking, or getting into confusion. This, combined with his mode of employing his archers, which we have described in the account of his battles, gave him an invincible superiority over his enemies.
Cannon. End of 15th Century. From an Engraving by I. van Mechlin.
As the feudal system decayed, the kings of England no longer depended on their barons appearing in the field with their vassals, but they bargained with different leaders to furnish men at stated prices, which, as we have shown, were high. It was only in cases of rebellion and intestine struggle that they summoned all their military tenants to raise the people in mass, and the same summonses were issued to the archbishops, bishops, and all the principal clergy, to arm all their followers, lay and clerical, and march to the royal standard. We have shown that they were the archers, however, who were the masters of the field, and who won all the great battles. At Homildon they alone fought, and at Beaujé the English were utterly routed, through leaving them behind. This notorious fact induced James I. of Scotland to introduce and cultivate archery in his army, but he was cut off too soon to give it permanent effect.
The pictures of battles and sieges at this period give us an odd medley of bows and arrows, crossbows, spears, cannon, and hand-guns. The old weapons were not left off because the new ones were too imperfect, and too difficult of locomotion to supersede them. The cannons, though often of immense bore and weight, throwing balls of from one to five hundred weight, were, for the most part, without carriages, and therefore difficult and tardy in their operations. The Scotch were the first to anticipate the modern gun-carriage, by what they called their "carts of war," which carried two guns each, while many of the guns of the English required fifty horses to drag them. They had, however, smaller guns; as culverines, serpentines, basilisks, fowlers, scorpions, &c. The culverines were a species of hand-gun in general, fired from a rest, or from the shoulder. The Swiss had 10,000 culverines at the famous battle of Morat. These ​hand-guns are said to have been first brought into England by Edward IV., on his return from Flanders in 1471. Ships were also supplied with small guns.
COMMERCE AND SHIPPING.
The commerce of England continued to flourish and extend itself through this century, in spite of the obstacles and ruinous effects of almost perpetual war. Our kings, however warlike they might be, were yet very sensible of the advantages of commerce, and during this century made numerous treaties in its favour. Henry, the historian, says:—"It would be tedious to enumerate all the commercial treaties that were made by the kings of England, with almost all the princes and states of Europe, in this period. These treaties were very necessary to restrain the piratical spirit that reigned in the mariners of all nations in those times; but they were very ill observed, and few seamen of any country could resist the temptation of seizing on weaker vessels, when they fell in their way, though belonging to a friendly power. This occasioned continual complaints of the breach of treaties. No fewer than four commercial treaties, for example, were concluded between France and the Hanse Towns in the space of three years, from 1472 to 1474, and all to little purpose; and we have copies of eighteen such agreements between England and Flanders in this period, which is a sufficient evidence that none of them were well observed."
Ship of War and Galley of the 15th Century. Harl. MSS. 4,374–9.
At the same time, it is curious, that, even when two countries were at war, such was the spirit of trade, that the merchants went on trading whenever they could, just as if there was no war at all. This was the case especially between England and Flanders. Our monarchs were already ambitious of reigning supreme masters of the seas, and this doctrine was as jealously urged upon them by the nation. In a rhyming pamphlet, written about 1433, and to be found in Hakluyt, vol. i., p. 167, the writer says, "that if the English keep the seas, especially the main seas, they will compel all the world to be at peace with them, and to court their friendship."
Henry IV., though harassed by the difficulties of a usurped crown, strenuously set himself to promote commerce, and to put an end to the continual depredations committed upon each other by the English and the merchants of the Hanse Towns, as well as those of Prussia and Livonia, subject to the grand master of the Teutonic order of knights.
Henry V. was as victorious at sea as at land; and by his fleet, under his brother, the great Duke of Bedford, in 1416, and again in 1417, the Earl of Huntingdon being his admiral, swept the seas of the united fleets of France and Genoa, and made himself complete master of the ocean during his time. This ascendancy was lost under the disastrous reign of Henry VI., but was re-gained by Edward IV., a monarch who, notwithstanding his voluptuous character, was fully alive to the vast benefits accruing to a nation from foreign trade, and thought it no dishonour to be, if not a merchant-prince, a prince-merchant. He had ships of his own, and when they were not otherwise employed in peace, he did not suffer them, as in our day, to rot in harbour, but freighted ​them with goods on his own account, and grew rich by traffic.
Notwithstanding all this, the nation was not yet much more enlightened as to the real principles of trade than it was in the previous century. The same absurd restrictions were in force against foreign merchants. Such foreign merchants were required to lay out all the money received for goods imported in English merchandise. No gold or silver coin, plate or bullion, was, on any recount, to be carried out of the kingdom. Banks were now established in most countries, and bills of exchange had been in use since the thirteenth century—so that these remedied, to a great extent, this evil; but it is clear that where he exports of a country exceeded its imports, the balance must be remitted in cash; and the commercial men were clever enough to evade all the laws of this kind. No fact was so notorious as that the coinage of England abounded in all the countries to which she traded.
Besides the prohibition of carrying out any English coin or even bullion, foreign merchants were to sell all the goods they brought within three months, but they were not to sell any of them to other merchant strangers, and when they arrived in any English town they were assigned to particular hosts, and were to lodge nowhere else. Yet, under all these obstacles, our commerce grew, and our merchants extended their voyages to ports and countries which they had not hitherto frequented. In 1413 they fitted out ships in the port of London for Morocco, having a cargo of wool and other merchandise valued at £24,000, or £240,000 of our money. This raised the ire of the Genoese, who seized these precious ships; but Henry IV. soon made ample reprisals by granting to his subjects letters of marque to seize the ships and goods of the Genoese wherever they could be found; and so well did the English kings follow this up, that we find them in Richard III.'s reign not only successfully competing with their great rivals, the Genoese, but having obtained a footing in Italy itself, and established a consul at Pisa. Consuls, or, as they were then called, governors, of the English traders abroad, were also established during this period in Germany, Prussia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Flanders.
Wool, woollens, tin, hides, and corn, were still our chief exports. Slaves, says the historian, were no longer an article of commerce; but the conveyance of pilgrims to foreign shrines was a source of great emolument to merchants. A curious pamphlet of the middle of this century, called "The Prologue of English Policy," gives us a complete view of our imports:—The commodities of Spain were figs, raisins, wines, oils, soap, dates, liquorice, wax, iron, wool, wadmote, goatfell, redfell, saffron, and quicksilver—a valuable importation. That of Portugal was very much the same. Brittany sent wine, salt, crest-cloth, or linen, and canvas. Germany, Scandinavia, and Flanders, iron, steel, copper, osmond, bowstaves, boards, wax, corn, pitch, tar, flax, hemp, felting, thread, fustian, buckram, canvas, and wool-cards. Genoa, gold, cloth of gold, silk, cotton, oil, black pepper, rock-alum, and wood. Venice, Florence, and other Italian states, all kinds of spices and grocery wares, sweet wines, sugar, dates, with what the author considered great trumpery:
   "Apes and japes, and marmusets tayled. And niflis and triflis that little have avayled."
Towards the end of the century, 1483, we have an Act passed, at the instigation of the manufacturers of London and other towns, to prohibit the following long list of articles—a proof that they were busy making all these things for themselves:—Girdles, harness wrought for girdles, points, leather-laces, purses, pouches, pins, gloves, knives, hangers, tailors' shears, scissors, and irons, cupboards, tongs, fire-forks, gridirons, stock-locks, keys, hinges, garnets, spurs, painted glasses, painted papers, painted forcers, painted images, painted cloths, beaten gold and beaten silver wrought in papers for painters, saddles, saddle-trees, horse-harness, boots, bits, stirrups, buckler-chains, latten-nails with iron shanks, turners, hanging candlesticks, holy water stops (stoops), chafing-dishes, hanging leavers, curtain-rings, wool-cards, roan-cards, buckles for shoes, shears, broaches for spits, bells, hawk's-bells, tin and leaden spoons, wire of latten and iron, iron candlesticks, grates, and horns for lan-thorns, with other things made by the petitioners, prohibited on pain of forfeiture. This list is, as it were, evidence of the numerous civilised requirements of the age, and of the rapid growth of our manufactures.
The age abounded with great merchants. The Medici of Florence; Jacques le Cœur, the greatest merchant that France over produced, who had more wealth and trade than all the other merchants of that country together, and who supplied Charles VII. with money by which he recovered his country from the English. In our own country John Norbury, John Hende, and Richard Whittington, were the leading merchants of London, the last of whom was so far from a poor boy making his fortune by a cat that he was the son of Sir William Whittington, knight. In Bristol also flourished at this time William Cannynge, who was five times mayor of that city, and who had, for some cause not explained, 2,470 tons of shipping taken from him at once by Edward IV., including one ship of 400 tons, one of 500, and one of 900. Cannynge, in the last generation, was immortalised by Chatterton in his wonderful poems of Rowley.
Of the ships and shipping of the age we need not say more than that, with all the characteristics of the past age, there was an attempt to build larger vessels in rivalry of the Genoese. John Taverner, of Hull, had a royal licence granted him in 1449, conferring on him great privileges and exemptions as a merchant, for building one as large as a Venetian carrack, one of their first-class ships, or even larger. And Bishop Kennedy, of St. Andrews, was as much celebrated for building a ship of unusual size, called the Bishop's Berge, as for building and endowing a college.
In Scotland the state of the shipping interest was much the same as in England. James I. displayed the same enlightened views of trade as of government in general. He made various laws to ascertain the rate of duty on all exports and imports, to secure the effects of any traders dying abroad, and permitted his subjects to trade in foreign ships when they had no vessels of their own. In both countries great care was taken to protect and promote their fisheries.
COINS AND COINAGE.
The coin of these times in England was chiefly of gold and silver. The gold coin consisted of nobles, half-nobles, ​and quarter-nobles, originally equivalent to guineas (the exact value of a noble in Henry IV.'s reign was 21s. 1$^1$⁄$_2$d.), half-guineas, and quarter-guineas, or dollars of 5s. 3d. The silver coins were groats, half-groats, and pennies. But it must be remembered that all these coins were of ten times the intrinsic value of our present money; so that the labourer who in the fifteenth century received 1$^1$⁄$_2$d. per day, received as much as fifteen pence of the present money.
Groat of Richard III.
Penny of Richard III.
But the great historical fact regarding the money of this age was its continual adulteration, and consequent depreciation. Our monarchs, involved in great wars, while their crown lands had melted away into the hands of their barons, and these barons had ceased to yield their proper feudal services, were reduced to the greatest extremities for money, and fell, one after another, into the hopeless practice of endeavouring to make more money out of the little they had. They vainly expected that if the name and dimensions of a coin remained the same, the public would permit it to be treated as of the same value. But they soon found that if a gold coin was so alloyed that it only contained ten shillings' worth of real gold in it instead of twenty, it would only fetch ten shillings' worth of goods; in other words, all articles to be purchased rose to double the old price.
Half-Groat of Henry V.
The original English pound contained a real Tower pound of silver, weighing 5,400 grains troy. Of this pound of silver were coined 240 pennies, then the largest coins in use. That was the money of England from the Conquest to Edward III.'s time. He coined 270 pennies out of a pound, weighing twenty instead of twenty-two and a-half grains each; and he coined groats weighing, instead of ninety grains, only seventy grains. Henry V. again reduced the value of the coin, and to such a degree that out of the pound, instead of 21s. 1$^1$⁄$_2$d. he made 30s. His money was, therefore, of one-third less value than that of Edward III., and was found to purchase one-third less commodities. Notwithstanding this, Edward IV. again reduced the value of the currency by coining 37s. 6d. out of the pound. Besides the nobles, half and quarter nobles of his predecessors, Edward coined angels and half-angels, or angelets, the angel being 6s. 8d. of the silver money of that time.
Angel of Edward IV.
Half-Groat of Edward IV.
The kings of Scotland pursued the same useless course of depreciating their currency, by which, instead of benefiting themselves, they extremely diminished the real revenues of the crown. Both they and the chief barons, as they were the chief promoters of the diminution of the weight and value of the coin, so they were by far the greatest sufferers by the measure. They received the same number of pounds from their subjects and vassals in all the fixed annual payments due to them, but the pounds did not contain the same quantity of silver, and would not purchase the same quantity of goods with those in the original stipulation. The king and nobilty discovered their error, and time after time issued orders and Acts of Parliament to compel the people to estimate their spurious coins at the same value as the unadulterated ones, but in vain. Nature and the eternal proportions of things are above all kings and all human laws. James III. of Scotland coined copper money, and one of the reasons assigned in the Act ordaining this coinage, is that it is "for almons' deid to be done to pure folk," that is, people thought the smallest coin in use was too much to give in alms—they must have something of less value for that purpose. He also coined a still inferior money called black money, the small tinge of silver mixed with the copper giving it that colour. The price of all articles at that time of day, and sums paid for salaries, show that everything then was far cheaper than at present, in proportion to the nominal value of money. A cow was 7s., but ten times that value, or £3 10s., would not buy half a cow now. A goose was 3d., equal to 2s. 6d. of our money, but 2s. 6d. would not buy a goose now-a-days. Neither could a clergyman and his family live very well on £46 a year, though £4 13s. 4d. was then thought a fair income for one. A yeoman of our time would not be very jolly on £50 a-year, though Sir John Fortescue in his day said "that £5 a-year was a fair living for a yeoman."
MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.
Bed-stead of the 15th Century. From a MS. Romance of the Comte d'Artois.
An excellent historian of the last generation has said, "When a country continues to be inhabited by the same people, living under the same Government, professing the same religion, and speaking the same language, as the people of Britain did at this period, the changes in their manners, customs, virtues, vices, language, dress, diet, and diversions, are slow and almost imperceptible. These changes are, however, like the motion of the shadow on the sun-dial, real, and in process of time become conspicuous. If the heroic Henry V. were now to rise from the dead, and appear in the streets of London mounted on his war horse, and clothed in complete armour, what astonishment would he excite in the admiring multitude! How much would he be surprised at every object around him! If he were conducted to St. Paul's, he would neither know the church nor understand the service. In a word, he would believe himself to be in a city and amongst a people that he had never seen."
Bed-room Furniture, time of Henry VI. Harl. MS. 2,278.
Betwixt the people of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, we should not therefore suppose there could be a very marked difference. Yet change, and the seeds of immense change, were actively at work. The revival of Greek literature, the invention of printing, and the progress of new ideas in church government and religious doctrines, were preparing the most complete revolution of mind, of state maxims, and of manners, which the world had never seen. The combined influence of the high-toned republican spirit of Greece, and of the cosmopolitan principles of the Gospel, the nobler tastes and more graceful imaginations infused by the Hellenic poets and philosophers, the profoundly just, generous, and popular sentiments of the Bible, were destined inevitably to produce a more enlarged and exalted standard of feeling and opinion, and to revolutionise all the ideas and practices of the country.
Kitchen of the 15th Century. Harl. MS. 4,375.
On morals and on manners these causes were yet too recent to have produced much effect. On the contrary, the wars, the strifes, the vile passions generated in the courts of both this country and France, and spreading with the desolating rapidity of the plague, had sunk the nation lower than ever. All principle and virtue appeared extinct. The change began in the outward husk of society. Already it was seen that the old feudal system was tumbling piecemeal. The barons had broken loose from their engagements, and civil war had decimated them. Even in the social pomp and circumstance of the system, vicissitude was making itself visible. Caxton cried out even ​more vehemently than Burke in our times: "The days of chivalry are gone." "Oh, ye knyghtes of Englande!" he exclaimed, "where is the custome and usage of noble chivalry that was used in those days? What do ye now but go to the baynes and play at dyse? How many knyghtes bea ther now in England, that have thuse and thexercise of a knyghte? That is to wite, that he knoweth his horse and his horse him."
And honest William Caxton hoped to re-inspire them with the dying fires of chivalry by reading the romances which he printed. "Love this, leve it, and rede the noble volumes of St. Graal, of Lancelot, of Galaad, of Trystram, of Perse Forest, of Percyval, of Gawayn, and many mor: ther shall ye see manhode, curtosye, and gentylness."
The Knight's Return from the War. From the Histoire de Petit Jehan de Saintré. MS. in the British Museum.—"How Saintré on his return receives honour from the king, and brings joy to the heart of his grieving and sorrowing lady." [It will be observed that the figure of the knight appears four times in this illumination.]
But though the spirit of chivalry was gone, the forms of it still lived, and tournaments were still celebrated when actual war did not present more serious exercise of arms. Henry V. of England and James I. of Scotland were renowned for their skill in tilting, and in all knightly arts. The great Earl of Warwick was not less so. The kings still granted royal protections to foreign princes and nobles to come hither and joust with our knights. Thus, the Bastard of Burgundy came over and tilted with Anthony Wydville, Earl Rivers, in Smithfield, before the court and public. Sometimes there was a general tournament, in which as many as thirty or forty knights of a side attacked each other with spears and battleaxes, and it became a real battle.
Our great barons still kept up their huge retinues and huge houses, as we have stated. There they kept up a rude state, like kings. They had their privy councillors, marshals, treasurers, stewards, secretaries, heralds, seneschals; their pursuivants, pages, guards, trumpeters; their bands of minstrels, their jesters, buffoons, tumblers, and all sorts of ministers to their amusement. In their style of living there was a rude abundance, a prodigality far from refined. They had four meals in the day: breakfast at seven, dinner at ten, supper at four in the afternoon, and a meal called the "livery," which was taken just before going to bed. The common people were much later in their hours of eating. They breakfasted at eight, dined at twelve, and supped at six. The fashionable hours of the present day are almost precisely those of the common people then, if we call the twelve o'clock dinner a luncheon, and the supper at six dinner. So does one age reverse the habits of another.
The account which we have of supplies of the table of the nobility of this century as presented in the Household Book of the Percys, is something startling. The breakfast of the Earl and Countess of Northumberland was "first a loaf of bread in trenchers, two manchetts, a quart of beer, a quart of wine, half a chyne of mutton, or a chyne of beef boiled." The livery, or evening collation for the lord and ​lady, was equally abundant, having dined and supped, be it remembered, "first two manchetts, a loaf of household bread, a gallon of beer, and a quart of wine," which was warmed and spiced. Though we cannot suppose them to have got through half this provision, the whole account of the age shows that it was addicted to profusely good living. The tables at dinner were loaded with huge pewter dishes filled with salted beef, mutton, and butcher's meat of all kinds; venison, poultry, sea-fowls, wild boar, wild fowls, game, fish, &c., and they were luxurious in pies and baked meats of many sorts. The side-boards were plentifully furnished with ale, beer, and wines of Spain and France, which were handed to the guests as called for, in silver, pewter, or wooden cups, by the marshals, grooms, yeomen, and waiters of the chamber, ranged in regular order. Yet amid all this state the guests used their fingers instead of forks, which were not yet invented. Though they sat down to dinner at ten in the forenoon, they did not rise till one, thus spending three of the best hours of the day in gormandising. Meantime they were entertained by the songs and harps of the minstrels, the jests of the fool, the tricks of jugglers, and the tumbling and capering of dancers. After each course came in what they called suttleties—figures in pastry of men, women, beasts, birds, &c., set on the table to be admired, but not touched, and each had a label attached, containing some witty or wise saying; whence their name.
Costume of the Middle Classes in the 15th Century. Cotton MSS., Nero, D.7.
The monks and secular clergy are reported to have been especial lovers of the table. The monks in rich monasteries lived even more fully and richly than any order of men in the kingdom. The cook was one of the brethren who was elevated to that office for his genius in that department, and was held in high honour. The historian of Croyland speaks in raptures of brother Lawrence Chateres, the cook of that monastery, who, "prompted by the love of God, and zeal for religion, had given £40 (£400 of our money) for the recreation of the convent with the milk of almonds on fish days." Almonds, milk of almonds, sugar, honey, and spices, appear to have been plentiful in these sacred styes, and these dainties were much adorned with gold-leaf, powder of gold, and brilliant pigments.
The secular clergy celebrated in the churches five times in the year what they plainly called glutton-masses. Early in the morning the people flocked in, bringing all sorts of roast and boiled meats and substantial viands, and strong drinks; and, as soon as the mass was ended, they all fell to in right earnest, and finished the day in unbounded riot and intemperance. The clergy and people of different parishes vied in the endeavour to have the greatest glutton-mass, and to devour the greatest quantity of meat and drink in honour of the Holy Virgin!
Costume of Gentlemen, A.D. 1460. From a MS. History of Thebes.
The sports and pastimes of this age were very much the same as those of the preceding one. Besides jousts and tournaments, they were keen pursuers of the sports of the field. They were accustomed to sit hours, and even successive days, over what appear to us very dull plays, both sacred and profane, called mysteries, moralities, and miracle-plays. They had also all sorts of public pageants, attended by every species of minstrels, jugglers, mummers, rope-dancers, and mountebanks. Their more simple and healthy sports were foot-ball, trap-ball, and hand-ball, at which the aristocracy played on horseback, as well as on foot, for large sums. They had a large kind of leather ball, probably filled with air, which they propelled sometimes by bats and sometimes merely with the hand. In Scotland, when James I. was anxious to introduce archery, he forbade foot-ball, quoits, and similar popular games, as well as a game which was called "cloish, kayles, half-bowl, handin-handout, and quickeaborde." Card-playing was still checked by the high price of a pack of cards, which was 18s. 8d. at Paris, or upwards of £9 of our present money. In 1463 the English card-makers obtained an Act of Parliament to exclude foreign cards. The cause of their high price lay in their richly-gilded and painted figures.
Male Costume of Henry IV.'s Reign. Harl. MS. 2,332.
COSTUME.
The age was extravagant in dress. The long-toed shoos gave way a good deal from the reigns of Henry IV. to Henry VI. In 1463, two years after the accession of ​Edward IV., an Act was passed prohibiting anyone making or wearing shoes or boots with pikes exceeding two inches. But in that reign, as if in disdain of the law, they burst forth more ridiculously than over, and the power of the Church was called in to excommunicate the wearers, with as little effect. Towards the end of Edward IV.'s reign, shoes and boots began to spread as wide as they before had been elongated, and another Act was passed, forbidding them being more than six inches broad at the toe. The long-toes, however, did not go quite out till the reign of Henry VII.
1, Lady Bardolf. 2, Catherine, Countess of Suffolk. 3, Beatrice, Countess of Arundel.
Costume of the Reign of Henry V. Royal MSS., 15 D. 3.
The lower garment of gentlemen during this period was all of one piece from the foot to the waist. There were no separate stockings and pantaloons. This dress fitted as tight to their limbs as possible. Their upper garments were of various kinds and shapes. In Henry IV.'s reign the caps were generally turned up at the sides, some larger, some less, a good deal resembling turbans. The elder gentlemen much affected a close-fitting gown, or coat, with skirts reaching to the feet. It was buttoned down the front, and had a row of similar buttons under each sleeve from the elbow. His broad hat was turned up behind, and under it he wore a hood which clothed both head, neck, and shoulders, like a cape. The younger wore tunics, fitting the body, belted at the waist, and with skirts terminating at the knee. The sleeves were wide, but not so long as in the preceding or succeeding reign.
Lady Margaret Pennebrygg.
Robert Skerne and Joan his Wife. From a Brass in the Church of Kingston-on-Thames. 1, Caul of the Lady's Head-dress. 2, Brooch confining her Mantle. 3, Girdle of the Gentleman.
Female Costume. Royal MS. 16 G. 5.
The dress of the ladies of Henry IV.'s time was remarkable for the very singular gown, open at the sides, and showing the dross beneath, called the sideless gown. This dress is conspicuous in the effigies of the Countess of Arundel, Lady de Thorpe, the Countess of Westmoreland, and others in Stothard's Effigies. They are striking from the width with which their hair is extended under a caul of jewelled network, over which frequently falls a veil, as if borne on a frame. Of this kind is the Countess of Arundel's, in Arundel Church. To such a preposterous extent was this head-dress carried in France, that it is said—we suppose in jest—that the doors of the palace of Vincennes were obliged to be both heightened and widened to admit Isabella of Bavaria, queen of Charles VI., and the ladies of her suite. The ladies also wore exceedingly rich and beautiful girdles, which depended to a great length in front, as may be seen in all those effigies. That of Lady ​Margaret Pennebrygg, in Shottesbrooko Church, Berkshire, has the hair dressed in more elaborate dimensions.
Male costume. From various MSS.
The collar of SS, or Esses, made its appearance in this reign as a badge of honour; but, like the order of the Garter, and the feathers of the Prince of Wales, the origin is uncertain. Amongst the various conjectures of heralds and antiquaries, that of Sir Samuel Meyrick that it was the motto of Henry IV., while Earl of Derby. "Souveraine," is, perhaps, the most probable one.
Male Costume. Reign of Edward IV.
In the reign of Henry V. the tunic became shorter and the sleeves immensely loager: they actually swept the ground. Occleve ridiculed these sleeves:—
   "Now hath thia land little nede of broomes. To sweep away the filth out of the streetes. Sin side sleeves of penniless groomea Will it uplicke, be it dry or weete."
Hats and Caps. Harl. MSS. 4,379-80.
Sometimes those sleeves were fancifully indented on the edges, or cut in the form of leaves. In all this century beards were close shaven, except by men of mature age.
The ladies of this reign continued and even exaggerated the stupendous head-dresses, like that of the Countess of Arundel. They actually wore horns, on which they hung their veils and ribbons. From the horn on the right side a streamer of silk or other light fabric was hung, which was sometimes allowed to fly loose, and sometimes brought over the bosom and wrapped over the left arm. The head-dress of some ladies was more graceful, presenting the appearance of a square flat hat of embroidered silk, resembling that of the gown. This gown, or robe, with a long train and hanging sleeves, and the coathardie, appear as in the last reign. Where the rich girdles remain the waist is shorter. We have as yet no trace of gloves.
Ladies' Head-dresses. Harl. MS. 2,278.
The reign of Henry VI. presented dresses bearing a considerable likeness to those gone before, but now much trimmed with fur, long tippets frequently depending from the hat to the ground. The hair cut short, the caps or hats of fantastic shapes, worn sometimes with a single feather. The long-toed shoes re-appeared.
Ladies' Head-dresses. From a MS. of Froissart's Chronicles.
State dresses were also much trimmed with fur. The ladies indulged in fanciful variations of the previous fashions. Their head-dresses had decreased in width, but had many of them risen in height. They were horned, or heart-shaped, and there were turbans of the genuine Turkish fashion. Tippets, or veils, were attached to the horned head-dresses. Their gowns had enormous trains; waists extremely short, and tightly girded. Their collars were ​often furred, and of the turn-over sort, coming to a point in front, and disclosing a vest, or stomacher, of a different colour to the robe. Women of the lowest estate, serving women, says one writer, put fur not only on their collars, but on the bottom of their dress, which fell about their heels, and was dragged in the mire.
In Edward IV.'s reign the toes of shoes were longer than ever, and the doublets, or tunics, shorter than ever. Only lords were allowed by law to wear these "indecently short dresses;" but the law was ignored freely, and even boys wore short, rich doublets of silk, velvet, or satin, and tremendously long toes, now called poulaines. The caps of cloth assumed very much the shape of hats; and the hair was not only worn long, but brought down upon the forehead into the eyes. All gentlemen wore chains of gold of the most sumptuous kind. Large jack or top boots began to be worn; occasionally robes bound at the waist, and sweeping the ground, in strong contrast to the short doublets.
Female Costume. From a MS, History of Thebes.
But of all the head-dresses ever introduced in the wildest vagaries of fashion, those of the ladies of this reign were the most preposterous. The horns now rose up from the cap or bonnet, enclosing it from behind, and roaring their lofty points into the air, like those of some wild bison.
Couvrechef, or Kerchief.
These were covered with some richly-patterned silk or velvet. Others had round tower-like bonnets, with battlemented tops, and huge transparent shades enclosing the face, and running to a point half a yard before and behind them. Others had conical frames half a yard high set upon their heads, covered with lace or velvet. These had frequently a large wing on each side, like those of butterflies; and from the top fell a piece of fine lawn, often quite to the ground. These preposterous caps became so much the rage, that the peasant women of Normandy, especially in the Boccage, still wear them, where they tower aloft in the markets, white as snow, and with their butterfly wings generally tied over the front.
1, 2, Seals. 3, 4, 5, Rings. 6, 7, Portions of Chains.
"Thus," says Planché, "the evanescent caprice of some high-born fair has given a national costume to the paysannes of Normandy, who have reverently copied, for nearly four centuries, the head-dress worn by their mothers before them." Paradin says that the ladies would probably have built their bonnets still higher, but that a famous monk, Thomas Conecte, came to Paris, and preaching in the Church of St. Geneviève for nine successive days against them, produced such effect that the ladies threw off their steeple caps, and many of them not only their horns but their tails and other vanities, and made a bonfire of them. But he adds, "The women that, like snails in affright, had drawn in their horns, shot them out again as soon as the danger was over." Some had this steeple frame set on the back of their heads in such a way that it is difficult to imagine how it was supported there.
From the Brass of Sir John Drayton. Died A.D. 1411.
In the costumes of the short reign of Richard III. the gentlemen appear again in top-boots, with spurs, and enormous long toes. They have the long tight hose, which are fastened to the doublet with laces or points, as they were called; and we are told that the poor boy, Edward V., when in the Tower, convinced that his ​uncle meant to murder him, neglected fastening his points, or otherwise attending to his dress. The doublet was open in front, showing a stomacher, and over this was worn a short loose gown, plaited before and behind, with full slashed sleeves. These gowns and doublets were of the richest and most brilliant velvets and satins. On the head was a small cap, generally round and closely fitting, with a roll of fur round it, or turned up at the side with a feather, jewelled up the stem. The hair was worn thick and bushy behind.
Knight in complete Armour, A.D. 1461–80.
The ladies had now, in a great measure, discarded the steeple caps, and wore the hair thrown backwards, in a caul of gold, and over it a kerchief of the finest texture, stiffened out and descending to the back. Some of these kerchiefs were very large. Their gowns were as before, with turn-over collars and cuffs of fur or velvet. On state occasions, the hair was suffered to fall in natural ringlets, and the ermined jacket was worn with a kirtle and mantle. These dresses were very rich with crimson or other bright velvet, cloth of gold, chains and jewels; the shoes being of tissue cloth of gold. They wore also a singular plaited neck covering called a barbe.
1, Mace, time of Henry V. 2, Hand-Cannon. 3, Hand-Gun and Battle-Axe. 4. Guisarme. 5, Bill, time of Henry VI. 6, Ditto, time of Edward IV. 7, Ditto, Richard III.
The armour through this period was of solid plate, varied in every reign by too many small particulars to be enumerated here. In Henry IV.'s reign, increase of splendour in arms and armour was visible. The basnet was ornamented by a rich wreath, and the jupon, or surcoat, had its border cut into rich foliage, spite of the prohibition. In Henry V.'s reign was introduced the panache, or crest of feathers, stuck into a small pipe on the top of the basnet. The petticoat or apron of chain was replaced by horizontal plates of steel, called tashes or tassets, forming a sort of skirt, and extending from the waist to about the middle of the thigh. In this reign the two-handed waving or flaming sword was introduced. In Henry VI.'s reign the sallet or German steel cap superseded the basnet. In Edward IV.'s the armour was distinguished by its very globular breastplates, and immense elbow and knee plates. Every joint was double covered, and in Richard's reign, the pauldrons, or shoulder plates, and the knee and elbow plates, generally large, fan-shaped, and of most elaborate workmanship, were still more striking. Such it is seen in the effigy of Sir Thomas Peyton, in Isleham Church, Cambridgeshire. Over this armour was worn, not the jupon, but a tabard of arms, loose like a herald's, as in Edward IV.'s reign.
Effigy of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. A.D. 1442—65.
CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE.
The Standard taken at Bosworth laid on the Altar of St. Paul's Cathedral.(See page 75.)
​consequence. The destruction of high principle and kindly affection amongst the higher classes spread to the lower. We have seen that voluptuousness, epicurism, and perjury were every-day sins. The people were superstitious; running after pilgrimages, saints, fastings, and flagellations; whilst they had so abandoned the very heart of Christianity—love of God and love of neighbour, that they began to burn God's children and their own brothers for opinion.
Swearing was become so English a characteristic that Englishmen had already acquired the epithet of "God-dammees;" and Joan of Arc told the Earls of Warwick and Stafford that they would never conquer France, though they had 100,000 more God-dammees with them. There was a spirit of ferocity awoke in the people by their long familiarity with blood and violence which even infected the women, who, many of them, took up arms, and were as fierce as the men. The women of Wales acquired an infamous celebrity for their horrid mutilations of the soldiers of Lord Mortimer; and Rymer says that, at the siege of Sens, there were many gentlewomen, both French and English, who had long fought in the field, but now also lying in arms at sieges. Sir John Fortescue, chief justice of the King's Bench, writes that there were more men hanged for robbery in England in one year than in France or Scotland in seven; and the ignorance and luxurious effeminacy of the clergy deprived the people of much chance of improvement from that quarter. Perhaps no period of our history, with much military fame and general vigour of character, presents us with so little that is elevated in moral character, or attractive in its social features.