Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (12 page)

FOREST LAW

One of William's first acts as conqueror of England was to create ‘The New Forest'. This didn't mean he planted a lot of nice trees so people could enjoy a picnic in the shade. What he was doing was ear-marking a vast tract of land as his own personal hunting-ground. This is what the Norman word ‘forest' meant. Whether there were trees or not wasn't really the point. The ‘forest' was wherever ‘Forest Law' applied, and ‘Forest Law' was not something anyone wanted to live under.

Towns and villages could be, and were, destroyed, and every animal and tree became royal property. The forest was administered by royal officials with draconian powers, who replaced the community as denouncers before the court.

The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
says of William:

He made many deer-parks, and he established laws therewith; so that whosoever slew a hart, or a hind, should be deprived of his eyesight. As he forbad men to kill the harts, so also the boars; and he loved the tall deer as if he were their father. Likewise he decreed respecting the hares that they should go free. His rich men bemoaned it, and the poor men shuddered at it.

The poor men shuddered at it because they were now under a set of laws that had nothing to do with common law, under which William destroyed their towns, villages and churches.

Hunting was an activity reserved by law for the nobility. It was, of course, their main occupation apart from warfare. Nevertheless, no king needed all the designated land for hunting; there was simply too much of it. It formed an alternative kingdom, from which he drew revenues and profits directly. Every monarch from William I to Edward I was denounced at one time or another for extending the royal forest and the abuse of the power associated with the law. This became a perpetual grievance, with kings forced to back off between bouts of afforestation of open country.

Forest law was deeply resented as a form of tyranny, and records show that entire peasant communities living in royal forests were often brought to trial for concealing offenders, protecting them, and refusing to help catch them or take part in investigations. The greenwood of the poems appears to represent a notional, pre-Norman land where officers of the Church and king were, in effect, foreigners at the mercy of the English, who lived by their own ancient codes. It is a nostalgic fiction, which serves as a standing reproach to those in power. The outlaw poet again:

You who are indicted, I advise you, come to me
,

to the green wood of Belregard, where there is no entanglement
,

just wild animals and pleasant shade;

for the common law is too unreliable.

This nostalgia did not mean that outlaws were non-violent. The earliest Robin Hood poetry is very comfortable with violence, and the outlaw poet is hardly a pacifist (he says, ‘I was never a killer, of my own will, at least'). But compared with the evil of the corrupt world of public administration, symbolized by the sheriff, the outlaw was a model of propriety.

SHERIFFS

The real sheriffs of Nottingham lived up to the one immortalized in the Robin Hood tales pretty well. Philip Mark, sheriff from 1209 to 1224, was celebrated for robbery, false arrest, unjustly throwing people off their property and persistent attacks on local landed interests, both secular and ecclesiastical. Henry de Faucemberg, sheriff from November 1318 to November 1319, and again between 1323 and 1325, was so in debt that he owed over £285 to the king and had to face charges of extortion. John de Oxenford, sheriff from 1334 to 1339, was accused in 1341 of ‘illegal purveyance, abusing his authority in regard to the county gaol and its prisoners, as well as various extortions'. He didn't show up in court and was himself outlawed.

Another sheriff, Sir Robert Ingram, was an ally of the Coterel gang, notorious fourteenth-century bandits who terrorized Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, including Sherwood Forest, from 1328 to 1332. These were no common criminals. They were ‘gentlemen' like the Folvilles, probably the younger sons of landed gentry, who, when they were not committing crimes such as robbery, extortion and murder, often for money, were serving in Edward III's wars in Scotland and France while holding public office as bailiffs and even Members of Parliament. The Coterels created their own framework of social roles, with lieutenants, recruits, organization, division of labour, maintainers and laws; one of their lieutenants, Roger de Sauvage, referred to the gang as
‘la compagnie sauvage'.
James Coterel was accused in one indictment of recruiting 20 members in the Peak District and Sherwood Forest.

NOBLE OUTLAWS

The Coterel gang indicates the existence of a different kind of outlaw. There were many robber gangs that consisted largely of men of good birth who had no way of making a living except during wars. This was, to some extent, the consequence of a system of inheritance that passed everything to the eldest son. Outlaws were therefore often linked directly into the governing class. One of the accomplices in the Folvilles' kidnapping of Richard de Willoughby was Sir Robert de Vere, constable of Rockingham Castle in Northamptonshire. The castle was a base for armed gangs who came and went after dark. No-one bringing provisions to it was allowed to enter, to prevent them knowing who was there.

Some of these outlaws threatened to use violence to right the evils of bad government, under the banner of some kind of alternative rule. A letter from one gang leader has survived from the time of Edward III. Addressed to Richard de Snaweshill, parson of the church at Huntington in Yorkshire, and written in French in 1336, it commands in the name of ‘Lionel, King of the Rout of Raveners' that he remove a priest from his office in the vicarage of Burton Agnes (evidently a relative of de Snaweshill) and then replace him with the man chosen for the job by the abbot of St Mary's:

There are plenty of examples of robbers coming from noble and semi-noble families. It appears that the career of outlaw was perhaps seen as a legitimate one for a well-born, high-spirited younger son – or a cast-off serving man of ambition. Ballads about outlaws imply it was not fair that death on the gallows should be the reward for intrepid and sometimes prankish feats – especially if the victims were mere usurers, monks or tax-gatherers.

This may be linked to another unique feature of England in the Middle Ages: the fact that knighthood was not hereditary. Primogeniture had become established over much of western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and from the thirteenth century knights had to offer ‘proofs of nobility' – show they were the elder sons of knights. This meant there was a universal younger son problem, but only in England could those younger sons earn a knighthood.

Moreover, only in England was knighthood a potential career for all comers – only there could a servant or the son of a tradesman win the spurs of military command.

This was possible because the feudal levy only produced a militia who served for a limited number of days a year and did not have to travel overseas. But England was an island kingdom fighting long campaigns overseas. This is why landowners were allowed to pay a tax rather than serve. Their service was not very useful. It made more sense to create knights from the ranks of landless men who needed pay. So England, more than anywhere else, offered wartime careers of status to landless men.

But what was to happen to these knights, esquires and hopefuls between wars? They had no land to go to. A life of bold robbery became, in practice, a necessity for men who had no living of their own, and who had failed to make much out of the last war but were hopeful of doing so from the next.

At least until the mid-fifteenth century (and the end of the Hundred Years War), outlaw robbers were, in fact, a national resource and kings depended on them. This explains some of the ideas behind the outlaw ballads, including the fact that Robin Hood stories often end ‘happily' with him being released from outlawry by the king. This is not particularly fanciful. Many outlaws were pardoned, usually in return for fighting in the army or helping the king in some other way. These acts of amnesty were necessary to stop the number of outlaws increasing endlessly. And the men involved were important recruits to the army and administration. England needed its bold outlaws. It needed them so much that they could buy their pardons, and be recruited into respectability.

Not all of them remained respectable. In 1335, the outlaw gangster Nicholas Coterel was made the queen's bailiff for the High Peak District of Derbyshire. Within two years he was accused of interfering with tax collection and ‘having been guilty of many other oppressions by the pretext of his office', but that is hardly surprising. Similarly, when two outlawed associates of the Coterels, Sir William de Chetulton and Sir John de Legh, were pardoned and then commissioned, together with James Stafford, a well-known gang leader, to capture two other robbers it was only a matter of months before they were in a Nottingham gaol accused of attempted rape. Both of them subsequently served their king in his Scottish wars: in 1336 they were instructed to recruit archers in Cheshire and lead them north into Berwickshire.

It was the same story with the surviving Folville brothers. After 16 years of criminal activity they were all pardoned. One of them, Eustace, was even knighted for his ‘good services' to the king. But in the course of only six years he received no less than three more pardons – two of them because he had fought against the king's enemies – for crimes that included murder, rape and armed robbery.

England depended on its bold outlaws. And its admiration of these men would echo throughout its history, with the forest ultimately transferred to colonial frontiers where Billy the Kid, Ned Kelly and a hundred other lawless men would inherit this strange tradition.

MONK

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

T
HE MEDIEVAL MONK
is an emblem of unworldiness. Shut away in his cloister, he dedicated himself to a life of prayer, hard work, poverty, self-denial and silence. He cut himself off from the temptations of the ordinary world in order to give himself to God. The life of a medieval monk was literally ‘out of this world'. The story of the monastic life should be uneventful from beginning to end. But of course it isn't. Monks couldn't totally cut themselves off from the material world, even when they wanted to.

And there were times when they didn't want to. On the morning of Sunday 18 October 1327, for example, the monks in the abbey of Bury St Edmunds ended their prayers, filed out through the abbey's crenellated gate and proceeded to the parish church. This was full of men, women and children. The monks threw off their habits – revealing that some of them wore armour under their robes – and burst into the church. They seized a number of citizens by force and dragged them back to the abbey as prisoners.

Sometime later the townsfolk assembled at the abbey to demand the prisoners' release. The monks replied with a hail of missiles, killing a large number of people. Later in the day the town bells summoned a larger party of armed men including aldermen, burgesses, a parson and 28 chaplains, who all took a solemn oath to live or die together. They then set fire to the gates and stormed the abbey.

Obviously no-one in Bury St Edmunds associated these monks with the contemplative life. Monks were the constant target of satire and lampoon in fourteenth-century England. To appreciate what had gone so badly wrong at Bury, we must understand what had happened to the monastic ideal.

THE START OF MONASTICISM

The idea of living in a community cut off from your fellow men in order to worship God didn't really get going in the West until around AD 500, when a Roman nobleman by the name of Benedict got fed up with life in the big city. Rome was far too full of people enjoying good food, drink and sex for his taste. So he took a servant and settled in the countryside where, unfortunately, his reputation for being able miraculously to mend broken pottery started to attract the crowds.

So he sought out a reasonably inaccessible cave halfway up a cliff face, with no modern conveniences and no plumbing. A monk from one of the nearby religious establishments came every day to lower a basket of food down to him. And Benedict made sure there was no oyster sauce or deep-fried wontons in his daily picnic – indeed, he didn't want anything he could actually enjoy. As far as Benedict was concerned, God placed us in this world to give us the opportunity to refrain from enjoying our brief time here, in order to concentrate on thanking him for placing us in this world.