Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (2 page)

Sir Walter Ralegh, one of the heroes of this volume —
and one of mine — is said to have given up writing his
History of the World
when he looked out of his cell in the Tower of London one day and saw two men arguing in the courtyard. Try as he might, he
could not work out what they were quarrelling about: he could not hear them; could only see their angry gestures. So there
and then he abandoned his ambitious historical enterprise, concluding that you can never establish the full truth about anything.

In this sobering realisation, Sir Walter was displaying unusual humility — both in himself and as a member of the historical
fraternity: the things we do not know about history far outnumber those that we do. But the fragments that survive are precious
and bright. They offer us glimpses of drama, humour, frustration, humanity, the banal and the extraordinary — the stuff of
life. There are still a good few tales to tell…

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
…

G
EOFFREY CHAUCER
’
S
CANTERBURY TALES
opens on a green spring morning beside the River Thames, towards the end of the fourteenth century. Birds are singing, the
sap is rising, and a group of travellers gathers in the Tabard Inn — one of the rambling wooden hostelries with stables and
dormitory-like bedrooms round a courtyard, that clustered around the southern end of London Bridge. At first hearing, Chaucer’s‘English’
sounds foreign, but in its phrasing we can detect the rhythms and
wording of our own speech, especially if we read it aloud, as people usually did six hundred years ago:‘Thanne longen folk
to goon on pilgrimages…’

The pilgrimage was the package holiday of the Middle Ages, and Chaucer imagines a group of holidaymakers in search of country
air, leisurely exercise and spiritual refreshment at England’s premier tourist attraction, the tomb of St Thomas Becket at
Canterbury: a brawny miller tootling on his bagpipes; a grey-eyed prioress daintily feeding titbits to her lapdogs; a poor
knight whose chain mail has left smudgings of rust on his tunic. To read Geoffrey Chaucer is to be transported back in time,
to feel the skin and clothes — and sometimes, even, to smell the leek- or onion-laden breath — of people as they went about
their daily business in what we call the Middle Ages. For them, of course, it was‘now’, one of the oldest words in the English
language.

The host of the Tabard, the innkeeper Harry Bailey, suggests a story-telling competition to enliven the journey — free supper
to the winner — and so we meet the poor knight, the dainty prioress and the miller, along with a merchant, a sea captain,
a cook, and twenty other deeply believable characters plucked from the three or four million or so inhabitants of King Richard
II’s England. Chaucer includes himself as one of the pilgrims, offering to entertain the company with a rhyming tale of his
own. But scarcely has he started when he is cut short by Harry the host:

’By God! quod he, for pleynly, at a word,

Thy drasty ryming is nat worth a toord!’

It is lines like these that have won Chaucer his fondly rude niche in the English folk memory. People’s eyes light up at the
mention of
The Canterbury Tales,
as they recall embarrassed schoolteachers struggling to explain words like‘turd’ and to bypass tales of backsides being stuck
out of windows.‘Please, sir, what is this “something” that is “rough and hairy”?’

In one passage Chaucer describes a friar (or religious brother, from the French word
frère)
who, while visiting hell in the course of a dream, is pleased to detect no trace of other friars, and complacently concludes
that all friars must go to heaven.

’Oh
no,
we’ve got millions of them here!’ an angel corrects him, pointing to the Devil’s massively broad tail:

’Hold up thy tayl, thou Satanas!’ quod he,

’Shewe forth thyn ers, and lat the frere se
…’

Whereupon twenty thousand friars swarm out of the Devil’s
ers
and fly around hell like angry bees, before creeping back inside their warm and cosy home for eternity.

In gathering for a pilgrimage, Chaucer’s travellers were taking part in a Church-inspired ritual. But the poet’s message was
that the Church — the massive nationalised industry that ran the schools and hospitals of medieval England as well as its
worship — was in serious trouble. While his imaginary company of pilgrims included a pious Oxford cleric and a parish priest
who was a genuinely good shepherd to his flock, it also included men who were only too
happy to make a corrupt living out of God’s service on earth: a worldly monk who liked to feast on roast swan; a pimpled‘Summoner’
who took bribes from sinners
not
to summon them to the church courts; and a‘Pardoner’ who sold bogus relics like the veil of the Virgin Mary (actually an old
pillowcase) and a rubble of pig’s bones that he labelled as belonging to various saints. Buy one of these, was the message
of this medieval insurance salesman, and you would go straight to heaven.

Chaucer humorously but unsparingly describes a country where almost everything is for sale. Four decades earlier England’s
population had been halved by the onslaught of the‘Black Death’ — the bubonic plague that would return several more times
before the end of the century — and the consequence of this appalling tragedy had been a sharp-elbowed economic scramble among
the survivors. Wages had risen, plague-cleared land was going cheap. For a dozen years before he wrote
The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer had lived over the Aldgate, or‘Old Gate’, the most easterly of the six gates in London’s fortified wall, and from
his windows in the arch he had been able to look down on the changing scene. In 1381 the angry men of Essex had come and gone
through the Aldgate, waving their billhooks — the‘mad multitude’ known to history as the ill-fated Peasants’ Revolt. During
the plague years the city’s iron-wheeled refuse carts had rumbled beneath the poet’s floorboards with their bouncing heaps
of corpses, heading for the limepits.

Chaucer paints the keen detail of this reviving community in a newly revived language — the spoken English that the Norman
Conquest had threatened to suppress. Written
between 1387 and 1400, the year of Chaucer’s death,
The Canterbury Tales
is one of the earliest pieces of English that is intelligible to a modern ear. For three hundred years English had endured
among the ordinary people, and particularly among the gentry. Even in French-speaking noble households Anglo-Saxon wives and
local nursemaids had chattered to children in the native language. English had survived because it was literally the mother
tongue, and it was in these post-plague years that it reasserted itself. In 1356 the Mayor of London decreed that English
should be the language of council meetings, and in 1363 the Lord Chancellor made a point of opening Parliament in English
— not, as had previously been the case, in the language of the enemy across the Channel.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s cheery and companionable writing sets out the ideas that are the themes of this volume. In the pages that
follow we shall trace the unstoppable spread of the English language — carried from England in the course of the next few
centuries to the far side of the world. We shall see men and women reject the commerce of the old religion, while making fortunes
from the new. And as they change their views about God, they will also change their views profoundly about the authority of
kings and earthly power. They will sharpen their words and start freeing their minds — and in embarking upon that, they will
also begin the uncertain process of freeing themselves.

T
HE LAST TIME WE MET RICHARD II HE WAS
a boy of fourteen, facing down Wat Tyler and his rebels at the climax of the Peasants’ Revolt.‘Sirs, will you shoot your
king? I will be your captain!’ the young man had cried in June 1381 as the‘mad multitude’ massed angrily on the grass at Smithfield
outside the city walls. His domineering uncle John of Gaunt was away from London, negotiating a truce in Scotland, and Richard’s
advisers had shown themselves wavering. But the boy king had said his prayers and ridden out to face the brandished billhooks.

An uncomplicated faith brought Richard II a brave and famous triumph, and it was small wonder that he should
grow up with an exalted idea of himself and his powers. While waiting for vespers, the evening prayer, the young man who had
been treated as a king from the age of ten liked to sit enthroned for hours, doing nothing much more than wearing his crown
and‘speaking to no man’. People who entered his presence were expected to bow the knee and lower the eyes. While previous
English kings had been content to be addressed as‘My Lord’, now the titles of‘Highness’ and‘Majesty’ were demanded.

Richard came to believe that he was ordained of God. He had himself painted like Christ in Majesty, a golden icon glowing
on his throne — the earliest surviving portrait that we have of any English king. When the King of Armenia came to the capital,
Richard ordered that Westminster Abbey be opened in the middle of the night and proudly showed his visitor his crown, his
sceptre and the other symbols of regality by the flicker of candlelight.

But Richard’s public grandeur was a mask for insecurity. The King suffered from a stammer, and by the time he was fully grown,
at nearly six feet tall, his fits of anger could be terrifying. Cheeks flushed, and shaking his yellow Plantagenet hair, on
one occasion Richard drew his sword on a noble who dared to cross him, and struck another across the cheek. When Parliament
was critical of his advisers, he declared that he‘would not even dismiss a scullion’ from his kitchens at their request. When
Parliament was compliant, he proclaimed proudly that he had no need of Lords or Commons, since the laws of England were‘in
his mouth or his breast’.

Richard’s dream was to rule without having to answer to
anyone, and to that end he made peace with France, calling a truce in the series of draining conflicts that we know as the
Hundred Years War. No fighting meant no extra taxes, calculated Richard — and that meant he might never have to call Parliament
again.

Some modern historians have frowned on Richard II’s ambition to rule without Parliament. They condemn his attempts to interrupt
the traditional story of England’s march towards democracy — only six Parliaments met during his reign of twenty-two years.
But it is by no means certain that Richard’s subjects saw this as regrettable. On the contrary. The summoning of Parliament
was invariably followed by the appearance of tax assessors in the towns and villages. So there was much to be said for a king
who left his people in peace and who managed to‘live of his own’ — without levying taxes.

Richard’s gilded, image-dazzled style, however, won him few friends. He made no pretence to love the common man, and it was
his attempt to live of his own’ that brought about his downfall. When John of Gaunt died in 1399, aged fifty-eight, Richard
could not resist the temptation to seize his uncle’s lands. Gaunt’s Duchy of Lancaster estates were the largest single landholding
in England, and his son Henry Bolingbroke had recently been sent into exile, banished for ten years following a dispute with
another nobleman.

Bolingbroke, named after the Lincolnshire castle where he was born in 1366, was the same age as Richard. The two cousins had
grown up at court together, sharing the frightening experience of being inside the Tower of London at one stage of the Peasants’
Revolt as the angry rebels had
flocked outside the walls, yelling and hurling abuse. Some rioters who broke through managed to capture Henry, and he had
been lucky to escape the fate of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was dragged outside to be beaten, then beheaded.