After Richard’s death, when John became lawful king of England, he lost Normandy and other territories in the wars against the king of France. His vassals came over to England to receive lands and titles. John began to give the lands and castles of the first Norman barons, who had come with the Conqueror, to the newcomers. Hatred for King John united the old barons, bishops and the Anglo-Saxons in their almost open struggle against the king. In the civil war which broke out, the barons worked out a programme which King John was finally forced to sign and seal. Magna Carta, or the Great Charter, was signed on June 10, 1215. The document was a detailed statement of how the king’s government ought to work and what kind of relations there ought to be in a feudal state between the monarch and his vassals. Instead of paying their lords in services, some vassals paid them in money. Vassals were beginning to turn into tenants. Feudalism, the use of land in return for service, was weakening. But it took three hundred years more to get rid of feudalism.
Magna Carta was the first document to lay the basis for the British Constitution.
When the throne went to Henry III, he tried to centre all power in his hands. Several times he demanded money from the Great Council but the barons refused to grant money. The first attempt to curb the power of the king and his foreign advisers was made by Simon de Montfort, the leader of the lesser barons and the new merchant class and poorer clergy. In 1258 they took over the government and elected a council of nobles which de Montfort called parliament (from the French word “parler” - “to speak”). The nobles were supported by the towns, which wished to be free of Henry’s heavy taxes. In 1264 a civil war began and the incompetent king was defeated. In 1265 de Montfort became the virtual ruler of the country and called “two knights from every shire, two burgesses from every borough” to his parliament The first Parliament was quite a revolutionary body. It represented the interests of barons, the clergy and the new class of merchants.
During the reign of Henry III’s son, Edward I, it was granted by the king that no new taxes would be raised without the consent of Parliament. At the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th centuries, Parliament was divided into the Lords (the barons) and the Commons (the knights and the burgesses). The alliance between the merchants and the squires paved the way to the growth of parliamentary power. Edward I conquered Wales and made it a principality of England (1284), passed exclusively to the heir to the English throne (Prince of Wales; 1301).
The Norman period in the English language, which lasted from the 11th to the 15th century, is known as Middle English. The Conquest was not only a historical event, it was also the greatest single event in the history of the English language.
One of the most significant consequences of the Norman domination was the use of the French language in many spheres of English political, social and cultural life. But though the court and the barons spoke Norman-French and the clergy spoke and wrote Latin, the invasion of these two Romance languages could not subdue the popular tongue spoken by peasants and townsfolk all over England. The two main languages, French and English, intertwined and by the end of the 14th century made one language, which was used both in speech and in writing. English was bound to survive and win in this linguistic battle as it was the living language of the people in their native land, and part of their culture. At the same time, Norman-French was torn away from its roots and had to surrender, although it greatly influenced English.
Three hundred years after the Norman Conquest, in 1258, Henry III issued a “Proclamation” to the counsellors elected to sit in Parliament from all parts of England. It was written in three official languages: French, Latin and English. This was the first official document to be written in English. In 1349 it was ruled that schooling should be conducted in English and Latin. In 1362 Edward III gave his consent to an act of Parliament proclaiming that English should be used in the law courts because French had become “much unknown in the realm”. In the same year Parliament, for the first time, was opened with a speech in English.
But the three hundred years of French domination in many spheres of life affected the English language more than any other single foreign influence before or after. The impact of French upon the vocabulary can hardly be exaggerated: the numerous borrowings reflect the spheres of Norman influence on English life.
The phonetic structure of the language was, naturally, affected. It is, however, controversial whether it was only the French language that affected the grammatical structure of English. The need to bring together the language of the new lords of the land and the language of those who cultivated the land brought about considerable changes in the grammar of the Old English language. Endings began to give way to auxiliary verbs. Thus Middle English is known as the period of levelled endings, a transitional period from synthetic forms (with various endings) to analytical forms (the use of auxiliary verbs).
In its turn, the French language brought in a number of new suffixes and prefixes:
· -ance, -ence: ignorance, experience
· -ment: government, agreement
· -age: village, marriage
· -able: available, admirable
· dis-: disbelieve, disappear, distaste.
The suffixes gave an abstract meaning to the words and were also used to form new words from the English roots: unbearable, readable, etc.
It was during the Middle English period that the indefinite article a/an, stemming from the Old English numeral an (one), came into use. Spelling changed altogether. Instead of the Germanic runes Þ and T the Normans introduced the digraph th. The Old English u was changed into ou or ow as in h u s>h ou se, m u s>m ou se, c u >c ow. It should be noted that at the time ou/ow was pronounced as [u:] and the diphthongs [ou]/[au] appeared later.
The Norman period enriched the English language with synonyms. Linguistic practice shows that words denoting the same object or the same idea cannot coexist in the same language, that is why there practically can be no full synonyms in a language. With the inflow of French words into the language, English retained the Anglo-Saxon words denoting things or concepts that the language had had before, and borrowed the French words which gave a new idea or a new shade of meaning. Thus the words ‘to eat, land, house’ come from Old English, but ‘to devour, territory, building’ come from French. The words describing feudal relations or related to the law courts and governing were borrowed from French: to command, to obey, baron, council, to accuse, court, crime, arms, guard, battle, victory, etc.
Even if both Anglo-Saxon and French words remained in the language, they were at least slightly different in meaning. This was illustrated by Walter Scott in Ivanhoe: a domestic animal in the charge of a Saxon serf was called by its Anglo-Saxon name, but when it was sent to the table of a Norman baron it changed it name into French. Thus the English language still has such pairs of words as ‘ox – beef’, ‘calf – veal’, ‘sheep – mutton’, ‘swine – pork’.
Some synonymous words are used in different styles. The English words usually give a homelier idea, while the French ones are mostly used in formal speech: ‘to give up – to abandon’, ‘to give in – to surrender’, ‘to come in – to enter’, ‘to begin – to commence’, ‘to go on – to continue’.
As a result, the stock of synonyms in English is larger than in any other European language, and the English word-stock is the largest in Europe.
The 11th-12th centuries was a period of significant changes in English culture due to the Norman Conquest and the influence of Norman culture on the English court and the nobility. It was a transitional period from Old English and Anglo-Saxon literature of the conquered on the one hand, and the Norman French and continental French literature and the conquerors, on the other hand, to a new language and a new people, with their specific culture.
The 13th century in Britain witnessed an intellectual development which established Britain’s reputation as equal to the continental centres of learning. Central to this was the founding of the two great universities at Cambridge and Oxford.
First universities
Originally, the first universities in Europe appeared in Italy and France. A fully developed university comprised four faculties: three superior faculties – Theology, Canon law, Medicine – and one inferior (primary) faculty of Art where music, grammar, geometry and logic were taught. University graduates were awarded with 3 degrees: Bachelor of Science, Master of Arts and Doctor. Towards the end of the 13th century there appeared colleges where other subjects were taught. It became a custom with students to go about from one great university to another, learning what they could from the most famous professors of the time.
Already at the end of the 11th century Oxford was a centre of learning. In the middle of the 12th century, after controversial debates at Paris University, a group of professors were expelled. They went over to England and in 1168 founded schools in Oxford which formed the first university. Students and scholars were attracted to to Oxford where they tried to recreate the style of learning they had experienced in Europe. However, the plague, which devastated whole towns, led to a temporary dispersion of the schools. In 1214 the university received a charter from the Pope, and by the end of the 13th century four colleges had been founded: University, Balliol, Merton and St. Edmund Hall. There were already 1500 students and the university was famous all over Europe.
Another university was founded in Cambridge. It is generally considered to date from 1209, when a group of students who had been driven out of Oxford by serious rioting came to Cambridge to continue their studies. Following a Papal Bull of 1318, Cambridge was declared a ‘studium generale’ or place of general education, which meant that degree holders could teach in any Christian country.
Unless a university student was a member of a religious house, it was necessary for him to provide for his own board and lodgings, and usually he would reside with a family in town. This caused certain problems: the young students, who were usually 14 or 15 years old, were often ill-disciplined and needed supervision and financial aid as the landlords often charged them more than other tenants. That led to the opening of colleges, with their hostels and the first student grants which were paid by benefactors and charity funds.
The nobles generally had no use for university education in the Middle Ages. It was the sons of the lower middle-class families who hoped to better their stations in life by getting an education. Most of the English writers and poets of the time had university education.
· Literature of the 11th-13th centuries
The Norman barons were followed to England by the churchmen, scribes, minstrels, merchants and artisans. Each rank of society had its own literature. Monkswrote historical chronicles in Latin. Scholars in universities wrote about their experiments - also in Latin. Even religious satires were written in Latin. The aristocracy wrote their poetry in Norman-French. But the peasants and townspeople made up their songs and ballads in Anglo-Saxon.
The literature of the 11-12th centuries was represented by the romance, the ballad, the fable and the fabliau. The fable and the fabliau were typical literary forms of the townsfolk. Animal characters in fables mocked out human evils and conveyed a moral. Fabliaux were short funny stories about cunning crooks and unfaithful wives written as metrical tales.
The influence of continental literature was marked by the increasing popularity of French chivalric romances – a form already popular in France and Germany, which revolved around the love of a knight for a lady, with definite religious undertones. In southern France the lyric poets of the Middle Ages called ‘troubadours’ wrote dancing-songs called ‘ballads’ (stemming from the same root as ‘ballet’).
The most famous poet in the reign of Henry II was the Norman poet Wace. An educated person who had studied theology at Paris University, he was a clergyman, a secretary, a teacher, a writer and a poet. His chief works were two rhyming chronicles written in form of romance: Brut, or the Acts of the Britts and Rollo, or the Acts of the Normans.
Of great importance was the introduction into English of the Arthurian legend, first in 1140 by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Britons) and then by Wace who translated History of the Britons into French. Geoffrey of Monmouth had been brought up in Wales and lived close to the myth of King Arthur, the legendary Celtic chief.
Later, in the 13th -15th centuries there appeared a series of legends about King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The best-known legends are “Arthur and Merlin”, “Lancelot of the Lake”, “Percival of Wales”, “Sir Tristram” and others. In the 15th century Thomas Malory collected Arthurian stories and arranged them in twenty books.
Soon another powerful myth gained popularity, that of Robin Hood and his merry men, the outlaws who would not accept Norman rule but lived free in Sherwood Forest.
Norman kings, who were fond of hunting, turned vast territories into King’s Forest. (The word ‘forest’ comes from the Latin word ‘fores’ which means ‘out of doors’.) It was not a wood, though some parts of King’s Forest were wooded. King’s Forest was carefully guarded: peasants could neither make their living by hunting nor cut trees or shrubs nor pick firewood. Sheep and cattle that had the right to feed in the forest were branded with a special mark and their owners paid taxes. Unbranded animals, if caught, were made royal property. No goats were allowed in the forest as deer hated their smell and would not feed in the place where goats had walked. A man who killed a deer in the forest was either blinded, or had his fingers or arm cut off, or even put to death.
No wonder rebellious peasants, serfs and people who were driven to despair by hunger and need hunted in the forest, thus becoming outlaws.
Ballads describe Robin Hood, the famous legendary outlaw of the period as a strong, brave and skilful archer. Robin Hood was presumably a Saxon nobleman who had been ruined by the Normans. Together with his merry men (Little John – a gigantic manly fellow, brother Tuck – a stray friar and the others) they fought against Norman nobles and clergy and would appear wherever the poor were in need of help. Ballads about Robin Hood were composed and sung throughout the 12th and the 13th centuries. Robin is supposed to have lived in the reign of King Henry II and his son Richard the Lion Heart. All through the ballads goes the idea of Robin waiting for Richard the Lion Heart to return. Then he would lay his bow at the king’s feet and subdue to the lawful king, whose wicked brother John had taken his place while Richard went crusading.
· Art and architecture in Norman England
Art and architecture in the 12th century were especially influenced by continental developments. In addition, crusaders returning from the Holy Lands brought back Byzantine influences. One of the four most unusual churches, the Round Church in Cambridge, is the oldest of the four surviving Norman churches built in 1130. The style was introduced by the returning crusaders in remembrance of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
The production of illuminated manuscripts increased as new religious orders and monasteries were founded. The use of elaborate initials of these manuscripts was accompanied by a variety of depictions of events, monsters and people which became increasingly sophisticated as the century progressed, until this Romanesque illumination became Gothic. In architecture, the 12th and 13th centuries also experienced this transition, with the development of the early Gothic style. It was in this style that the original Westminster Abbey was constructed from 1245.
DO YOU KNOW THAT
· King Harold Godwin’s elder daughter Gytha married Prince Waldemar of Novgorod, later King Waldemar of Kiev, and became Queen.
· William the Conqueror, the illegitimate son of the Norman duke Robert the Devil, was also known as William the Bastard.
· The Bayeux Tapestry (1067-1077), an embroided wall-hanging in coloured wool on linen, narrating the events leading up to the invasion of England by William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings in 1066, is believed to have been made by William’s wife Matilda and her ladies in waiting.
· In 1940, when Britain was desperately fighting against fascist Germany, there circulated a rumour that King Arthur, who would never die, had come again to drive out the expected invader.
?
In England the period of the 14th and 15th centuries is known as the period of war, plague and disorder. The country waged long and costly wars with France and the Low Countries on the Continent as well as with Scotland and Wales within the British Isles. The period also saw the longest civil war in English history, the Wars of the Roses. Like nowhere else in Western Europe, the English regularly murdered their kings and the children of their kings. Famine, disease and plague dramatically reduced the population of the country by the beginning of the 15th century. Spiritual uncertainty led to the spread of heresy which swept the country. The oppression of peasants led to numerous revolts.
At the same time, the Continental wars gave Englishmen a sharper sense of national identity and the civil wars finally resulted in the establishment of an absolute monarchy. The peasants’ revolts led to the abolition of serfdom. Some heretical priests turned into famous poets.
The growing economic development of England turned it into one of the strongest European powers.
· Population
English society was headed by the king and based upon ownership of land. The richest landowner was the king who was followed by the landed nobility: dukes, earls and knights who were no longer heavily armed horsemen but had turned into ‘gentlemen farmers’ or ‘landed gentry’.
King
i
Landowners
Lords
dukes earls knights
Clergy
monasteries bishops
Freemen
Town
Countryside
merchants lawyers
artisans workers
peasants
farmworkers
Serfs
By the order of king Edward I all those with an income of 20 a year were made knights, even some of the yeomen farmers and formers esquires became part of the ‘landed gentry’. The word esquire was commonly used in written addresses. Vast lands belonged to the clergy – monasteries and bishops.
Freemen from towns could make a fortune through trade. A serf could become a freeman if he worked for seven years in a town craft guild. Merchants, lawyers and artisans were forming a new middle class. It was knights from the country and merchants from towns that formed the House of Commons in Parliament. The alliance between the landed gentry and merchants made Parliament more powerful.
Judicial power was exercised by the king’s courts as well as justices of the peace who were first appointed by King Edward III to deal with smaller crimes and offences. The JPs were usually less important lords of representatives of the landed gentry. Through the system of JPs, the landed gentry took the place of the nobility as the local authority. The JPs remained the only form of local government in rural areas until 1888. They still exist within the British judicial system.
By the end of the 13th century, England’s population reached its peak of about four million. As there was not enough cultivated land to ensure all peasant families with an adequate livelihood, low living standards and poor harvests led to poverty, disease and famine.
· The Black Death
Longer lasting and more profound were the consequences of a terrible disease called the ‘pestilence’. It was bubonic plague commonly known as the Black Death. The first attack occurred in southern England in 1348 and by the end of 1349 it had spread north to central Scotland. Two more outbreaks of plague fell on 1361 and 1369.
The disease was brought over to England from France in rat-infected ships. There was no escape from it: those affected died within 24 hours. By 1350, the Black Death reduced England’s population by about a third. About 1,000 villages were destroyed or depopulated.
With the reduction of labour available to cultivate the land, land owners were forced to offer wages instead of the old feudal traditions to keep their tenants. The remaining craftsmen and traders charged higher rates. All that brought the possibility of social change in the former strictly stratified society.
In 1351 Parliament passed a law called ‘The Labourers’ Statute’ which obliged any man or woman from 16 to 60 to work on the land if they had no income of their own. Those who disobeyed were executed. The law was the first attempt to control wages and prices by freezing wages and the prices of manufactured goods and by restricting the movement of labour. The peasants who survived the Black Death were forced by drastic measures to till the land of their lords for the same pay that had existed before the epidemic.
In 1377, 1378 and 1360 Parliament voted for the Poll Tax: it was a fixed four-penny tax paid for every member of the population (‘poll’ meant ‘head’). Both ‘The Labourers’ Statute’ and the Poll Tax were significant factors leading to the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.
Peasants’ Revolt
In 1381 the impoverished peasants and townsmen revolted. Sixty thousand people led by Wat Tyler and Jack Straw marched from Essex and Kent to London. They besieged the Tower of London where King Richard II and his court had found refuge. Central power was paralyzed. The rebels destroyed the Royal Courts, several prisons, killed the king’s men, beheaded the archbishop of Canterbury and nailed his head to the gates of the Tower. On June 14 the rebels met the king at Mile End, in the suburbs of London. Wat Tyler handed Richard their demands which later became known as the ‘Mile End Programme’. Richard, who was only 14 years of age at the time, met all their demands. He abolished the ‘Labourers’ Statute’ and serfdom. Part of the rebels left the place, bearing the king’s charters which granted them freedom. But the more radical part remained and continued the talks on the following day, in Smithfield. It was there, in Smithfield, that the leader of the revolt, Wat Tyler, was treacherously killed. The rebels were dispersed and punished. Over 100 of them were hanged. But as a result, serfdom was practically done away with by the end of the 14th century. It paved the way to a new social system.
Already between the 12th and the 14th centuries, new economic relations began to take shape within the feudal system. The peasants were superseded by the copy-holders, and ultimately, by the rent-paying tenants. The crafts became separated from agriculture, and new social groups came into being: the poor townsmen (artisans and apprentices), the town middle class and the rich merchants, owners of workshops and money-lenders. The peasants who wished to get free from their masters migrated to towns. The village craftsmen travelled about the country looking for a greater market for their produce. They settled in the old towns and founded new ones near big monasteries, on the rivers and at cross-roads.
Agriculture and industry
In the late Middle Ages, England’s wealth was its land. Farming and cattle breeding were the main rural occupations. Corn and dairy goods were the main articles of agricultural produce.
England’s most important industry, textiles, was also based on the land, producing the finest wool in Europe. By 1300 the total number of sheep in England is thought to have been between 15 to 18 million.
As the demand for wool and cloth rose, Britain began to export woollen cloth produced by the first big enterprises – the manufactures. Landowners evicted peasants and enclosed their lands with ditches and fences, turning them into vast pastures. Later, Thomas More wrote about the sheep on pastures: ‘They become so great devourers and so wylde that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves’. (The phrase is often quoted in Russian as “овцы съели людей”.) In English history this policy is known as the policy of enclosures.
Other industries were less significant in creating wealth and employing labour, although tin-mining in Cornwall was internationally famous.
The new nobility, who traded in wool, merged with the rich burgesses to form a new class, the bourgeoisie, while the evicted landless farmers, poor artisans and monastic servants turned into farm laborers and wage workers or remained unemployed and joined the ranks of paupers, vagrants and highway robbers.
· Wool trade
Trade extended beyond the local boundaries. The burgesses (the future bourgeoisie) became rich through trading with Flanders, the present-day Belgium. The English shipped wool to Flanders where it was sold as raw material. Flanders had the busiest towns and ports in Europe and Flemish weavers produced the finest cloth. Flemish weavers were often invited to England to teach the English their trade. However, it was raw wool rather than finished cloth that remained the main article of export. All through the period Flanders remained England’s commercial rival.
As the European demand for wool stood high, and since no other country could match the high quality of English wool, English merchants could charge a price twice as high as in the home market. In his turn, the king taxed the export of wool as a means of increasing his own income. Wool trade was England’s most profitable business. A wool sack has remained in the House of Lords ever since that time as a symbol of England’s source of wealth.
· European contacts
London merchants derived great incomes from trade with European countries, as London was one of the most important trading centres in Europe. It had commercial ties with the Mediterranean countries as well as the countries of Northern Europe. (See Map 8.) With the beginning of crusades the demand for oriental goods increased. Every year Venetian ships loaded with spices and silks sailed through the Straight of Gibraltar and up to the English Channel on their way to Flanders. But before they reached Flanders, they always called at ports on the southern coast of England. English merchants bought luxurious oriental goods and sold them again at a high profit. Particularly profitable was the trade in spices, which often cost their weight in gold.
As England traded with the Baltic and Scandinavian countries, an important sea route ran across the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. Hull, Boston, Dover, Newcastle, Ipswich had long been important trade centres.
The merchants of the Hanseatic League as well as traders from the Baltic states and Flanders settled in London, Hull and other English ports. Closer contacts with the Continent meant more goods available for exchange. In the 14th century, the list of imports was considerably increased. From France England imported wines, salt and building stone for castles and churches; a greater quantity and variety
Map 8
(From S.D. Zaitseva. Early Britain. Moscow, 1975.)
of cloths and spices was brought from the East. In its turn, England exported wool, tin, cattle and lead. At first, the bulk of the export trade was in the hands of the Venetian and Flemish merchants, but with the growth of trade at the beginning of the 14th century, more than half the trade fell into the hands of English merchants.
During the 14th century English merchants began to establish trading stations called ‘factories’ in different places in Europe. Often they replaced the old town guilds as powerful trading institutions. In 1363 a group of 26 English merchants who called themselves the Merchant Staplers, were granted the royal authority to export wool to the Continent through the French port of Calais. In return, they promised to lend money to English monarchs. The word ‘staple’ became an international term used by merchants to denote that certain goods could be sold only in particular places. Calais became the staple for English wool and defeated rival English factories in other foreign cities. The staple was a convenient arrangement for the established merchants, as it prevented competition and was a safe source of income for the Crown, which could tax exports more easily.
· Free towns
The changes in the economic and social conditions were accompanied by the intermixture of people coming from different regions, the growth of towns with a mixed population, and the strengthening of social ties between the various regions.
The growth of trade promoted the growth of towns. (See Map 9) London, the residence of the Norman kings, became the most populous town of England. Two centuries before, kings had realised that towns could become effective centres of royal authority and balance the power of the local nobility. As a result, many towns got ‘charters of freedom’ which freed them from feudal duties to the local lord. These charters, however, had to be paid for, but they were worth the money. Towns could then raise their own taxes on coming goods. They could also have their own courts, controlled by the town merchants, on condition that they paid an annual tax to the king. People who lived inside the town walls were practically free from feudal rule. It was the beginning of a middle class and a capitalist economy.
Map 9
(From S.D. Zaitseva, Early Britain, Moscow, 1975.)
· Guilds
In towns, the central role was played by guilds. These were brotherhoods of merchants or artisans. The word ‘guild’ came from the Saxon word ‘gildan’ which meant ‘to pay’, as members of guilds had to pay towards the cost of the brotherhood. The right to form a guild was sometimes included in a town’s charter of freedom. It was from the members of the guild that the town’s leaders were usually chosen. The guilds defended the rights of their members and saw to the high standards of the trade.
During the 14th century, as larger towns continued to grow, there appeared craft guilds: all members of each of the guilds belonged to the same trade or craft. The earliest craft guilds were those of weavers in London and Oxford. Each guild tried to protect its own trade interests. Members of the guilds had the right to produce, buy or sell their particular goods without paying special town taxes. But they also had to make sure their goods were of a certain quality, and had to keep to agreed prices so as not to undermine the trade of other members of the guild.
In London the development of craft guilds went further than elsewhere. The rich upper part of the craft community, the so-called livery companies, developed into large financial institutions. Today they pay an important role in the government of the City of London, and the yearly choice of the Lord Mayor of London.
· Causes of the war
The 14th and 15th centuries were also marked by the Hundred Years War which lasted from 1337 to 1453. The causes of the war were both political and economic. Politically, King Edward III of England claimed the French throne and wanted to get back the English possessions in France which had already been lost. It was a good enough reason for starting a war. But there were far more important reasons. The king of France, who ceased Gascony and Burgundy, and the French feudal lords who wanted to better themselves by seizing the free towns of Flanders, deprived England of its traditional wool market. England could not afford the destruction of overseas trade. The threat to their trade with Flanders persuaded the English merchants that war against France was inevitable. In 1337 Edward III declared war on France.
The beginning of the campaign was rather successful for England because of its military supremacy. Due to the newly invented cannons the English defeated the French army in several battles, the most important of which were the battles at Crecy in 1346 and at Poitiers in 1356. By 1360, the English had regained their lands on the Continent. But then the tide of war turned and the territories gained at the beginning of the war were lost in the next fifteen years. At the beginning of the 15th century, Henry V, who is remembered as the most heroic of English kings, undertook successful military campaigns in France. In 1415 he won the battle of Agincourt, in which the French outnumbered the English by more than three to one. In accordance with the Treaty of Troyes (1420), Henry V of England was recognized as heir to the French king. Moreover, Henry married the French king’s daughter Katherine of Valois. But Henry V never took the French throne as he died a few months before the French monarch. His nine-month-old son inherited the crowns of England and France.
· Joan of Arc
After Henry V’s death in 1422, Joan of Arc rallied the French and had Charles II of France crowned as the lawful King of France. The English were gradually expelled from France, until only Calais remained in their possession.
Joan of Arc, or the Maid of Orleans, is the French national heroine. She claimed to hear voices urging her to help the dauphin, Charles II, to regain the French crown from the English. Joan convinced Charles of her mission, and led a large army to raise the siege of Orleans in 1429. Charles was crowned in Reims the same year. In 1430 Joan was captured by the Burgundians who sold her to the English. Joan was tried for heresy and sorcery by an ecclesiastical court at Rouen. She was condemned and burned at stake. King Charles II of France, who could have saved her, turned a blind eye on the trial and the execution. He was evidently frightened that he had been assisted by a witch. Joan’s condemnation was annulled in 1456 and she was canonized in the 20th century, in 1920. The feast is celebrated on May 30.
After the end of the Hundred Years War, the feudal lords and their hired armies came home from France, and life in England became more turbulent than ever. The baronial families at the king’s court, the House of York and the House of Lancaster started a series of wars fighting for possession of the throne. In the 19th century the novelist Walter Scott named them the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) after their emblems – the white rose, which was the emblem of the House of York, and the red rose, which symbolized the House of Lancaster. During the wars, more than sixty aristocratic families controlling England divided into the Yorkists and the Lancastrians. Many of them were related by marriage. Most noblemen still kept their private armies after returning from the war in France and subdued the local population into obeying them. Thus the struggle for the throne turned into a civil war.
King Henry VI, who was the founder of Eaton college (1440) and King’s College at Cambridge, was a scholarly man but suffered from insanity. Thus true power was in the hands of rival ministers of the Houses of York and Lancaster, notably Richard, Duke of York, and Edmund Beaufort, the Second Duke of Somerset, both descendants of Edward III.
The war began when Richard, Duke of York, claimed the protectorship of the crown after the mental breakdown of King Henry in 1454. In 1455 Richard defeated the King’s army at St. Albans, the first battle in the Wars of the Roses, and in 1460 claimed the throne to himself. As for Henry VI, he was murdered in the Tower in 1471.
After Richard’s death in battle, the throne went to his son Edward IV. When Edward IV died, his two young sons were put in the Tower by their uncle Richard who took the crown as Richard III. The two princes were never heard of again. Richard III was unpopular both with the Yorkists and the Lancastrians that is why when in 1485 Henry Tudor, a challenger with a very distant claim to royal blood landed in England with Breton soldiers to claim the throne, he was joined by many Lancastrians and Yorkists. Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at Bosworth and was crowned king in the battlefield.
The Wars of the Roses lasted thirty years and ended with the establishment of a stronger royal power under Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty. In 1486 Henry VII married the daughter of Edward IV of the York house, thus uniting the rival houses. The wars demonstrated the danger of allowing powerful nobles to build up private armies. As a reminder of the war, today the floral symbol of England is the red Tudor rose.
· Church and religion
A popular discontent with the Catholic church went side by side with the Lollard movement which opposed the traditional doctrine of the English clergy. The word ‘lollard’ was probably derived from lollaer, ‘a mumbler of prayers’. It was a nickname given to the poorer priests who travelled from place to place propagating the ideas of John Wycliff, the only university intellectual in the history of medieval heresy and a forerunner of the English Reformation. Wycliff gained reputation and support among noblemen, courtiers and scholars for his criticism of the Church’s wealth and the unworthiness of too many of its clergy. His increasingly radical ideas led to his condemnation and withdrawal from Oxford. Wycliff was the first priest to deny the basic principle of the Roman Catholic Church – the miraculous change of things from one substance into another, particularly the conversion of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. After Wycliff’s death, the Pope ordered his works to be destroyed, his body to be dug out and burnt, and the ashes to be thrown into the river.
· Rebirth of English literature
One of the most famous Lollard priests was William Langland (1334-1400) who is remembered for his poem The Visions of William Concerning Piers the Ploughman (now known as Piers Plowman), a dream allegory popular in the Middle Ages. The poem deals with the vision of a peasant, Piers Ploughman, who describes the hard life of the common people. He explains that it is the peasant who works to keep the lord and the monks in comfort. The author stresses the idea that every person is obliged to work – be it a peasant, a lord or a priest. Every now and then the author suddenly darts from allegory to real history. The main characters of the poem are human qualities, such as Virtue, Truth and Greed. The written text of the poem is dated 1362. Before and during the revolt of 1381 the text of the poem was used in proclamations which easily spread among the peasants and townspeople.
Another follower of Wycliff was John Ball, one of the leaders of the peasants’ revolt. He is best remembered for his proclamations in which he used quotations from ‘Piers Ploughman’ and Wycliff’s works. He often ended his speeches with Wycliff’s famous words which then turned into a saying:
When Adam delved and Eve span
who was then the Gentleman?
Geoffrey Chaucer
The greatest writer of the 14th century was Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400). Whereas his predecessor, Langland, expressed the thoughts of the peasants and Wycliff – the protest against the church, Chaucer was the writer of the new class, the bourgeoisie. He was not, however, the preacher of bourgeois ideology but just a writer of the world: he wrote about the things he saw, and described the people he met. Chaucer was the first to break away from medieval forms and paved the way to realism in literature.
Geoffrey Chaucer was supposedly born in 1340 in London, shortly after the Hundred Years War broke out. John Chaucer, his father, was a London vintner (a wine merchant). Very little is known about Chaucer’s early years. We do know, however, that his parents always lived in rented houses and gave their son some education. He is said to have gone to St. Paul’s school. Although some researchers claim that he must have been educated at Oxford or Cambridge, no data can prove that. Most probably he had no university education.
His father, who had some connections with the court, hoped for a courtier’s career for his son. At the age of 16 or 17 Geoffrey was page to a lady at the court of Edward III. From an old account book we learn that Geoffrey Chaucer received several articles of clothing ‘of his lady’s gift’ and that now and then he was paid small sums of money ‘for necessaries’. Those facts indicate that he was a favourite with the royal family.
During the Hundred Years War, when he was about 20, Chaucer was in France serving as an esquire (an arms-bearer) to a knight. He was then taken prisoner by the French. When his friends raised money to ransom him, even Edward III contributed 16 pounds towards his ransom.
On his return to England, Chaucer passed into attendance on John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the fourth son of the king. It was there that he met a young lady named Phillipa who became his wife in 1366. At about the same time Chaucer started writing his first poems. It is peculiar that he never wrote a single line of poetry to his young wife: probably, the marriage was not a romantic one.
At different periods of his life Chaucer was a student, a courtier, a soldier, a diplomat, a customs official and a Member of Parliament for Kent. He mixed freely with all sorts of people and in his works gave a true and vivid picture of contemporary England.
Chaucer’s earliest poems were written in imitation of French romances. He translated from French the famous allegorical poem of the 13th century, “The Romance of the Rose”. These years are usually described as the first, or the French period of Chaucer’s writings.
The second period is known as Italian. In the early 1370s Chaucer travelled much and lived a busy life. He made three trips to Italy where he acquainted himself with Italian literature. Italy made a deep impression on him. Italian literature opened to Chaucer a new world of art and taught him to appreciate the value of national literature. It was then that he wrote The Parliament of Birds, an allegorical poem satirizing Parliament, Troilus and Cressid, the first psychological novel in English, and The Legend of Good Women, a dream poem which describes nine famous women of twenty. The poem forms a bridge between the Italian period and the next, English period.
When Chaucer came back to England, he received the post of the Controller of the Customs for wool and hides in the port of London. He held this position for ten years and apparently had little time to write. Much of his work remained unfinished. But Chaucer’s fame as a poet was spreading although his writings were copied by hand and were very expensive. The court admired his graceful way of writing and his ability of being satirical without being unkind.
In the late 1370s Chaucer was appointed Knight for the shire of Kent, that is became a Member of Parliament representing Kent. Chaucer often had to travel from London to Kent and back and could observe the pilgrimage to the tomb of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. Travelling was dangerous at the time, and several times Chaucer was robbed of all the money that was in his possession. Later he described his experiences in The Canterbury Tales, the greatest work that brought him world fame.
However, his duties grew very tedious to the poet and several times he petitioned the king for permission to give up his post. Finally, the king granted him a pension. But when his patron John of Gaunt went to Spain, Chaucer lost his pension and became so poor that he even had to borrow money for food. When the new king, Henry IV, came to the throne in 1399, the poet addressed him with the poem The Complaints of Chaucer to His Empty Purse. As a result, his old pension was given back to him and a new one granted. Chaucer died in 1400 and was buried in Westminster Abbey in London.
Chaucer’s greatest work, The Canterbury Tales, is a series of stories told by a number of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. In the Prologue Chaucer makes a rapid portrait of 30 men and women from all walks of life. Nearly all of them are described with such particularity that suggests the idea that Chaucer was drawing his portraits from individuals in real life.
In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer sums up all types of stories that existed at the time: the Knight tells a romance, the Nun – a story of a saint, the Miller – a fabliau, the Priest tells a fable and so on. The Canterbury Tales is as popular in England as Decameron is on the Continent.
Chaucer did not only overshadow all his contemporary writers. He is rightly considered to be the greatest English writer before the age of Shakespeare.
In many modern manuals on the history of the English language and English literature, Chaucer is described as the founder of the English literary language. He wrote in a dialect which in the main coincided with that used in documents produced in London shortly before his time and for a long time after. Although he did not actually ‘create’ the literary language, as a poet of outstanding talent, he made better use of it than his contemporaries. He set up a pattern of literary language to be followed in the 14th and 15th centuries. Chaucer’s literary language based on the mixed dialect of London is known as classical Middle English. Chaucer’s poems were copied so many times that over 60 manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales have survived up to this day. His books were among the first to be printed in England, a hundred years after their composition. A hundred years later, William Caxton, the first English printer, called him ‘The wonderful father of our language.’
William Caxton
The 15th century saw an event of outstanding cultural significance in Europe. In 1438 Johannes Gutenberg printed in Germany the first European book known as The Gutenberg Bible. The idea of printing quickly spread all over Europe. The first English printer was William Caxton.
Caxton was a farmer’s son born in Kent in 1422. At the age of 16 he went to London where he became an apprentice to a company of London merchants who traded in silk and woollen cloth. When his master left for Flanders, William followed him and spent over three decades of his life in Bruges. The boy quickly learned several European languages: French, Italian and German. He read a lot for pleasure and translated books from French into English. When his master died, he left most of his money to Caxton, who had become his partner by the time.
During a visit to Cologne, William saw a printing press and learned the method of printing. In 1473 he bought a printing press of his own and in 1476 printed the first English book. It was Caxton’s own translation of the ancient story of Troy. A few years later Caxton moved to London and set his printing press at Westminster. Later, he bought another printing press which was set up at Oxford. During the next 15 years Caxton printed 65 books, both in the original and in translation. One of the first books to be printed was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In 1484 William Caxton printed Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Athur, the fullest record of the adventures of the knights of the Round Table.
Caxton made a great contribution to standardizing the English language. The concept of the norm had not existed before, it only appeared and was accepted as printed books spread all over England. The development of the printing technique promoted the spread of literacy and the literary norm.
· The development of literacy and the English language
Late medieval literacy was not confined to the noble, clerical or government classes. Some artisans, merchants, tailors, mariners could also read and write. Already in the 1470s, the rules and regulations of some craft guilds insisted on a recognized standard of literacy for their apprentices. The fact that wealthy laymen owned small libraries of poems, prophecies, chronicles and even recipes reflects their reading habits. Books were carefully listed in their wills.
The spread of literacy and the increased use of the English language were twin developments of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They reflected the feelings of patriotism and nationhood. The causes of this quiet linguistic revolution were complex, but among them was patriotism generated by the long French war, the popularity of Lollardy, the lead given by the Crown and the nobility and the greater participation of the English speaking men in the affairs of Parliament. A further factor was the emergence in the 14th century of London as the settled capital of the kingdom, with York as another important administrative centre and Bristol as the second commercial centre. The regional dialect that was spoken in each of the three centres inevitably had to become comprehensible to the others. The dialect of London prevailed although it was greatly influenced by the Midlands dialect.
Music, theatre and art
The 15th century witnessed a new wave of Robin Hood ballads. It was also the time of minstrels as English poetry was meant to be chanted and sung. The nobles were taught to play musical instruments, sing and dance. Even at a barber’s, an English lord or a knight might see a lute and take a few cords. Sometimes barbers invited musicians to attract more clients. Folk songs took the form of carols, or polyphonic songs. Polyphony greatly influenced the prominent English composer of the 15th century John Dunstable. The popularity and importance of music was so great that in the 16th century Oxford and Cambridge universities introduced the degrees of Doctor and Bachelor of Music.
Huge audiences were attracted by plays and performances of different kinds: mysteries and miracles, or plays about the miraculous things performed by saints. Another type of play was moralite where the characters were abstract ideas, such as Friendship, Death, Power, Kindness, Virtue, etc. These plays were performed in market squares and during town fairs. The performances were arranged and paid for by merchants and artisans. Already in the 15th century actors were professional.
In the 14th and 15th centuries the English art of portrait painting made a leap forward. The portraits acquired individual characters and features. The most famous work of art of the period is the portrait of Richard II painted in the 1390s. It shows a young man in royal attire whose face is not yet spoiled by power and passion. The portrait of Margaret Beaufort belonging to the second half of the 15th century, depicts a grieving young woman concentrated on her prayer.
The 14th and 15th centuries are known as the period of Pre-Renaissance in England.
DO YOU KNOW THAT
· When Richard I was taken prisoner, over half the price of his ransom was paid in wool.
· Any book printed before 1501 is called an incunabula.
· The first English book was printed in Bruges, Flanders.
· Caxton was the first to introduce the use of the apostrophe as a norm.
The 11th-12th centuries was a period of significant changes in English culture due to the Norman Conquest and the influence of Norman culture on the English court and the nobility. It was a transitional period from Old English and Anglo-Saxon literature of the conquered on the one hand, and the Norman French and continental French literature and the conquerors, on the other hand, to a new language and a new people, with their specific culture.
Population
Already between the 12th and the 14th centuries, new economic relations began to take shape within the feudal system. The peasants were superseded by the copy-holders, and ultimately, by the rent-paying tenants. The crafts became separated from agriculture, and new social groups came into being: the poor townsmen (artisans and apprentices), the town middle class and the rich merchants, owners of workshops and money-lenders. The peasants who wished to get free from their masters migrated to towns. The village craftsmen travelled about the country looking for a greater market for their produce. They settled in the old towns and founded new ones near big monasteries, on the rivers and at cross-roads.
Causes of the war
Church and religion
Geoffrey Chaucer was supposedly born in 1340 in London, shortly after the Hundred Years War broke out. John Chaucer, his father, was a London vintner (a wine merchant). Very little is known about Chaucer’s early years. We do know, however, that his parents always lived in rented houses and gave their son some education. He is said to have gone to St. Paul’s school. Although some researchers claim that he must have been educated at Oxford or Cambridge, no data can prove that. Most probably he had no university education.
in Europe. In 1438 Johannes Gutenberg printed in Germany the first European book known as The Gutenberg Bible. The idea of printing quickly spread all over Europe. The first English printer was William Caxton.
During a visit to Cologne, William saw a printing press and learned the method of printing. In 1473 he bought a printing press of his own and in 1476 printed the first English book. It was Caxton’s own translation of the ancient story of Troy. A few years later Caxton moved to London and set his printing press at Westminster. Later, he bought another printing press which was set up at Oxford. During the next 15 years Caxton printed 65 books, both in the original and in translation. One of the first books to be printed was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In 1484 William Caxton printed Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Athur, the fullest record of the adventures of the knights of the Round Table.
