Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (5 page)

By 1364 William had been made keeper of the privy seal and was so powerful that, according to Froissart, he ‘reigned in England, and without him they did nothing'. He was the ultimate self-made man, and fully understood the significance of education. He founded a free school, to offer 70 boys from poorer, rural backgrounds – peasants – a proper education, and also a university college to which they could go when they were ready. Both have survived to this day: Winchester College and New College, Oxford. William's own motto, ‘manners mayketh man', became the motto of both institutions; ‘manners' means not simply politeness, but being a capable and reliable member of society. This was a peasant attitude rather than an aristocratic one.

William of Wykeham would have been unique in any age. However, by the mid-fourteenth century most peasants knew their ABC, could sound out, and therefore recognize, their names and were familiar with the English equivalents of perhaps 10 or 20 Latin words. This allowed them to locate and recognize references to their land in court rolls, and to be aware of and talk about the contents of charters.

THE FOURTEENTH-CENTURY CATASTROPHE

The busy, prosperous and successful rural society of the start of the fourteenth century did not last. Within 15 years nature had dealt it a crushing blow:

In the year of our Lord 1315, apart from the other hardships with which England was afflicted, hunger grew in the land
 . . .
Meat and eggs began to run out, capons and fowl could hardly be found, animals died of pest, swine could not be fed because of the excessive price of fodder. A quarter of wheat or beans or peas sold for twenty shillings [in 1313 a quarter of wheat sold for five shillings], barley for a mark, oats for ten shillings. A quarter of salt was commonly sold for thirty-five shillings, which informer times was quite unheard of. The land was so oppressed with want that when the king came to St. Albans on the feast of St. Laurence [10 August] it was hardly possible to find bread on sale to supply his immediate household
 . . .

JOHANNES DE TROKELOWE
,
Annales

This dearth had begun in May. Then came heavy summer rains and the corn did not ripen – the start of a series of agricultural disasters. Villages built on dried-out marshlands sank back into the mud and there was not enough food for the greatly swollen populace. The annals are full of misery. Then, when the famines had run their course, the Black Death came.

Having spread across Europe from the east, it arrived at Weymouth in June 1348. In less than a year the whole country was stricken. No-one could have understood what was happening. Once a person was infected large, foul-smelling swellings developed in their groin, neck and armpits. Death followed within two or three days. The disease killed more than a third of the people and by 1350 the population of England was half what it had been in 1315. Villages shrank in size or were simply abandoned. The land was covered in images of death. Church walls were painted with depictions of the ‘Three Living and the Three Dead' and scenes of the ‘Dance of Death'.

The effect of the Black Death was immediately catastrophic for everyone; curiously, those peasants who survived it found their lives immeasurably improved. Labour became scarce and more valuable than abundant land. Landless people were able to take over abandoned holdings, and those who could handle more land simply took it. Wages roughly doubled, while the fall in the population led to something like a halving of the price of wheat.

Villeinage seemed seriously out of date. The whole basis of economic power in England had shifted. The Statute of Labourers in 1351 complained that existing laws were ineffective:

. . . servants having no regard to the said ordinance, but to their ease and singular covetise, do withdraw themselves to serve great men and other, unless they have livery and wages to the double or treble of that they were wont to take . . . to the great damage of the great men, and impoverishing of all the said commonalty.

As the country recovered in the decades following the Black Death landowners tried to restore the old systems, rediscovering old laws of compulsory service that had been forgotten in the good times when England was increasingly moving to a money economy.

It was this growing pressure to turn back the clock that eventually produced the so-called ‘Peasants' Revolt' – an uprising of people who were well used to running their own affairs, in manorial courts and militias and in minor public office, and who had stopped believing in the entire structure of feudal authority.

‘When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the Gentleman?' demanded John Ball, one of the leaders of the rebellion. A question to which, after the insurrection had been put down, there came the firm reply: ‘Villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain.'

But, of course, they did not.

Although Wharram Percy, like many deserted medieval villages, was believed to have lost its population at the time of the Black Death, excavations have shown this was not the case. It remained inhabited until the fifteenth century, and it was human beings, not bacteria, that determined its fate.

The old feudal consensus had broken down, and the lords realized that if the peasants were now free from any obligation to them, they were equally free from any obligations to care for the peasants. Thus it was that the peasants came face to face with their greatest natural enemy – sheep.

Labour had become expensive and your average lord could now make more money out of sheep than he could out of his peasants. There was more wool on sheep, for a start, and you could also eat them – which is possible with peasants but socially taboo – so the lords started to throw the expensive, troublesome and uneatable peasants off their land and replace them with sheep.

The few remaining villeins, at Wharram Percy and in much of the rest of the country, were made redundant. They were doubtless given encouraging talks about the fact that it was time to move on, that they should view this challenge as an exciting opportunity, and that a gentleman from the Cistercians would be coming round to see them individually to discuss openings in the lead mines.

Being a peasant in the middle ages wasn't necessarily a terrible life, but it deteriorated when the lords fenced the land off for sheep. It got even worse in the Industrial Revolution, and nowadays small farmers are still going to the wall.

The life of the peasant depends on the sort of society he lives in – and compared with a lot of people's lives today, there were times when the medieval peasant had it pretty good.

CHAPTER TWO

MINSTREL

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

T
HE STORY OF NORMAN ENGLAND
began with a song. At about nine o'clock on the morning of Saturday 14 October 1066, the minstrel Taillefer rode out on his horse and began to juggle with his sword. As he juggled, he sang the
Song of Roland
.

He was at the foot of Senlac ridge, a few miles from Hastings. Above him on the ridge, stretching for nearly three-quarters of a mile and seven lines deep, was the entire army of Harold, King of England, in battle order. A solid wall of shields was punctuated only by bristling spears and great double-headed battleaxes.

Taillefer was the enemy. This was a gig to be remembered.

The minstrel was a Norman, part of Duke William of Normandy's invading force. The rest of that force was behind him, a little over 100 yards from the Anglo-Saxons. The archers were in front, then the infantry, and at the back were the knights on their small stallions.

All through the summer Harold had been expecting the Normans to invade but by mid-September he had figured it was too late in the season and stood down his coastal defences. Then his kingdom was attacked in Yorkshire by Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, and he had marched north to deal with the threat.

That was when the Normans made their crossing. They had landed at Pevensey on 28 September and since then they had been consolidating their hold on the area around Hastings. They had not expected to be challenged for quite a while yet, and were busy foraging and looting. When the Anglo-Saxon army arrived late the previous afternoon William was taken by surprise. Harold was supposed to be fully tied up in the North and perhaps even defeated. Instead, he had crushed Hardrada a full three days before William invaded, and he then made an astonishingly swift march south, first to London and then onwards to the Norman invasion site.

Harold's arrival was most alarming for the Normans. They were not going to have as easy a time as they had supposed. William decided he had better not leave his troops with any time to think about what was happening, and spent the night gathering up his foraging parties and preparing them for battle. In the early dawn they began the six-mile march to meet the Anglo-Saxons.

When the Normans arrived at Senlac they were presented with a discouraging sight. They were geared up to face an army like their own, with archers in front, then the infantry, and perhaps cavalry behind. Instead they saw a long wall of wooden shields that would be impervious to their arrows. Even worse, there were no Anglo-Saxon archers to shoot back at them – Normans did not carry many arrows and relied on picking up their enemy's spent ones after the first barrage.

Their infantry would have to attack with the undamaged enemy raining down deadly missiles from above them as they struggled up the slope. Then the knights would also have to launch themselves uphill, having to push their horses' flesh against a solid and heavily spiked wall of shields.

It would be a suicide assault.

It appears that the Norman resolve to fight was somewhat uncertain. The Anglo-Saxons would not have helped matters by chanting their prebattle war cry: ‘
Ut! Ut!
' (Out! Out!). Simple, and intimidating when shouted by 7000 or 8000 men armed with spears and axes.

It was at this uncertain point that William's minstrel Taillefer asked for permission to give a little performance.
*1

According to one account, he rode forward and juggled with his sword. A minstrel was a ‘jongleur', a jester, a general entertainer, but if juggling was all Taillefer did it would have been very odd. Another chronicle, presumably based on an account by someone nearer the performance, describes him singing the
Song of Roland.

The version we have runs to 291 verses, which is a little long for the event. Since it is clear from internal references that it dates from somewhat later than 1066, we can assume that Taillefer was working from an earlier and probably shorter version; and that even then, under the circumstances, he probably went for the edited highlights. The song he sang told a famous story, of battle against impossible odds and heroic death that would never be forgotten.

And then he attacked the Anglo-Saxon line, all by himself. And he was killed.

There have been other battles, even in recent years, when soldiers who were required to attack but were frightened to advance have watched a volunteer from their own ranks go forward to certain death. The result always seems to be the same. The death creates a moral certainty; the survival of the men watching seems not to matter to them any more. Now they will advance with absolute resolution, irrespective of the odds. They do this not to exact revenge or even because they feel hatred for the enemy – they advance because they are totally bonded to the man they saw die. In this moment they do not have homes or even lives to return to. This moment is all there is, and the spinning world revolves around what they must do.

This is why the battlefield can be a place of music, of song, of poetry. Taillefer's death-song shaped the history of England, Europe and the whole world.

The Normans charged. The initial attack was indeed suicidal, but their determination to succeed was now unbreakable. The first assault was followed by another, and then another. The battle continued all day long until eventually, as it began to grow dark, the English defence crumbled, dissolved and disappeared. A new history of England had begun.

The Norman survivors did not see this wonderful tale as being all that heroic. The Bayeux tapestry, a strip-cartoon account of the high points of the conquest of England, leaves Taillefer out. The hint of cowardice, the leadership of a low-born entertainer – these do not seem to have been themes that attracted Odo, bishop of Bayeux, the man who commissioned the tapestry.

THE PUBLIC RELATIONS MINSTREL

An eleventh-century jongleur was pretty low down in the social order. Taillefer was a ‘jongleur des gestes', a man who entertained the mighty with the heroic epics that fired their blood. The emphasis was entirely on military virtues; women barely figure in the epics of the period. These poems were a validation of the military ethos, placing the listeners inside the world of heroic action and, in effect, inviting them to see their own warfare as participation in a cosmic drama of masculine sacrifice and loyalty.