All long-lived institutions have their antecedents, and the antecedents of Parliament (or, perhaps more accurately put, the origins of the House of Lords) are to be found in the Anglo-Saxon witan which brought the leading men of the realm periodically together with the King for ceremonial, legislative and deliberative purposes.  In its earliest history ‘Parliament’, first used as a technical term in 1236, was a gathering of the same type, an assembly of prominent men, summoned at the will of the King once or twice a year, to deal with matters of state and law. It remained largely in that form for much of the thirteenth century. Occasionally, however, these assemblies were afforced by the summons of a wider grouping.  At first these extended assemblies – the first known dates from 1212 – served as a means by which the King could communicate with men who, although below the ranks of his leading tenants, were of standing in their localities and well-informed about local grievances. 

Had the Crown been able to subsist financially upon its landed and feudal revenues alone, these representatives of the localities, the precursors of the Commons, might have remained, from its point of view, no more than conduits of information and recipients of instruction. The decline in the real value of its traditional revenues and the financial demands of war, however, transformed these local representatives from an occasional to a defining component of Parliament.  Above all else, this was because the levy of taxation came to be understood as depending on their consent. The theoretical principle of consent had been stated in Magna Carta, but that consent was conceived, on the feudal principle, as residing exclusively in the King’s leading subjects, his tenants-in-chief.  But as the thirteenth century progressed this principle gave way to another, namely that consent must also be sought from the lesser tenants as the representatives of the localities.  There was both a theoretical and practical reason for this: on the one hand, there was the influence of the Roman law doctrine, ‘what touches all shall be approved  by all’, cited in the writs that summoned the 1295 Parliament; and, on the other, there was the practical consideration that the efficient collection of a levy on moveable property, the form that tax assumed, depended on some mechanism of local consent.  Hence, from the 1260s, no general tax was levied without the consent of the representatives of local communities specifically summoned for the purpose of giving their consent, and only Parliaments in which the Crown sought no grant of taxation met without these representatives.  The Crown’s increasing need for money meant it was a short step to the Commons becoming an indispensable part of Parliament.  After 1325 no Parliament met without their presence.

None the less, although this right of consent gave the Commons their place in Parliament, it did not give them any meaningful part in the formulation of royal policy.  In so far as that policy was determined in Parliament, it was determined between the King and the Lords, who came to Parliament not through local election, as was the case with the Commons, but by personal writ of summons from the monarch.  Further, the Commons’ right of consent was as much an obligation as it was a privilege.  Since subjects had a duty to support the Crown in the defence of the realm, the Commons had few grounds, even had they sought them, on which to deny royal requests for taxation.  What did, however, remain to them was some scope for negotiation.  To make demands on his subjects’ goods, the Crown had to demonstrate an exceptional need, a need generally arising from the costs of war; and, in making a judgment on the level of taxation warranted by this need, the Commons were drawn into a dialogue with the Crown over matters of policy, at least in so far as those matters  concerned expenditure.  Hence the Crown had to measure its demands to avoid exciting criticism of its government.  The consequences of its failure to do so are exemplified most clearly by the ‘Good Parliament’ of 1376, when the Commons, in seeking to legitimate the extreme step of refusing to grant direct taxation, alleged misgovernance, accusing certain courtiers of misappropriating royal revenue.

Aside from the granting of taxation, the other principal function of the medieval Parliament was legislative.  Even before the early Parliaments lawmaking was theoretically established as consensual between King and subjects, yet, in the reign of Edward I, legislation arose solely out of royal initiative and was drafted by royal counsellors and judges.  As the medieval period progressed, however, the assent of Parliament, first of the Lords and then of the Commons, became an indispensable part of the legislative process.  Here, however, the question was not, as in the case of taxation, simply one of parliamentary assent, it was also one of initiative.  New law came to be initiated not only by the Crown but also by the Commons.  In the early fourteenth century, in what was a natural elaboration of Parliament’s role as the forum for the presentation of petitions of individuals and communities, the Commons began to present petitions in their own name, seeking remedies, not to individual wrongs, but to general administrative, economic and legal problems.  The King’s answers to these petitions became the basis of new law. Even so, it should not be concluded from this important procedural change that Crown conceded its legislative freedom.  Not only could it deny the Commons’ petitions, but, by the simple means of introducing its own bills among the common petitions, it could steer its own legislative program through the Commons.  

By the end of the medieval period, Parliament was, in both structure and function, the same assembly that opposed the Stuarts in the seventeenth century. It bargained with the Crown over taxation, formulated local grievances in such a way as to invite legislative remedy, and, on occasion, most notably in 1376, opposed the royal will. Yet this is not to say that Parliament had yet achieved, or even sought, an independent part in the polity.  The power of the Lords resided not in their place in Parliament, but in the landed wealth of the great nobility.  For the Commons, a favourable answer to their petitions remained a matter of royal grace, yet they were under an obligation to grant taxation as necessity demanded (a necessity largely interpreted by the Crown); and their right of assent to new law was a theoretical rather than a practical restraint on the King’s freedom of legislative action.  Indeed, Parliament amplified, rather than curtailed, royal power, at least when that power was exercised competently.  Not only were the Crown’s financial resources expanded by the system of parliamentary taxation, so too was its legislative force and reach extended by the Commons’ endorsement of the initiatives of a strong monarch, a fact strikingly demonstrated by the legislative break with Rome during the Reformation Parliament of 1529-36. 

S.J.P.

This is a revised version of the article ‘Parliament and politics before 1509’ by Dr Simon Payling, originally posted on historyofparliamentonline.org.

In 1760 Thomas Worsley of Hovingham, a close friend of George III’s favourite, the earl of Bute, penned a letter to his friend and patron insisting on his family’s antiquity. In their possession, he claimed, were ‘authentic documents of coming over with William the Conquerer’. Worsley’s concern to prove that he was no johnny-come-lately had originally been seen when he was appointed to the privy chamber back in the 1730s, but he was still clearly concerned to emphasise his suitability at the time of his appointment as surveyor general of the king’s works (thanks to Bute).

He had nothing to worry about. The Worsleys were an old family, who could trace their ownership of estates in Lancashire to at least the 14th century. Another branch of the family, ultimately settled in Hampshire (and on the Isle of Wight), produced a parliamentary dynasty of their own.

Supporting Thomas Worsley’s assertion of descent from a companion of William the Conqueror were accounts in ‘ancient chronicles’ recording the family’s progenitor as the giant Sir Elias de Workesley, who had followed Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, on ‘crusade’. The 1533 Visitation of Lancashire referred to this character as Elias, surnamed Gigas on account of his massive proportions, and suggested he was a contemporary of William I.

It took some time for the northern Worsleys to establish themselves but by the 15th century a number of distinguished figures had already emerged. The marriage of Seth Worsley to Margaret Booth linked the family to two archbishops of York, Margaret’s uncles, William Booth (archbishop 1452-64) and Lawrence Booth (1476-80). Their son, William, later became dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and towards the end of his life became caught up in the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy, for which he was sent to the Tower.

William Worsley may have conspired against Henry VII, but by the 16th century other members of the family had managed to establish themselves on the fringes of the Tudor court in the retinue of the earl of Derby and it seems to have been thanks to the 3rd earl (Edward Stanley) that Sir Robert Worsley was returned to Parliament in 1553 as knight of the shire for Lancashire. Nine years earlier, he had been knighted at Leith in recognition of his services in the English army. Worsley’s return in 1553 seems to have been somewhat accidental, only occurring as a result of a by-election after one of the other recently elected members had declared himself too ill to serve. By becoming one of the Lancashire knights of the shire, Worsley was following in the footsteps of his father-in-law, Thurstan Tyldesley, who had been elected to the same seat in 1547.

Sir Robert’s son, another Robert, continued the family tradition of following the Derbys by attaching himself to the retinue of the 4th earl (Henry Stanley). A passionate Protestant, as keeper of the gaol at Salford he had numerous recusant (Catholic) prisoners in his care, whom he tried to persuade away from their faith by organising time dedicated to reading from the Bible. How successful that policy was is uncertain, but he found the burden of his role intolerable and by the end of his life he had lost all of his principal estates in Lancashire. Like his father, he seems to have owed his election to Parliament to his patron, Derby, though in his case he was returned for the Cornish borough of Callington.

The best part of a century passed before another Worsley was returned to the Commons. In the interim, having lost their original estates, the family had relocated to Hovingham, near Malton in North Yorkshire. The manor had been acquired by Sir Robert Worsley in 1563 from Sir Thomas Gerard, and the connection was reinforced by the subsequent marriage of the younger Robert to Gerard’s daughter, Elizabeth. In 1685, it was one of the Hovingham Worsleys, Thomas (great-great-grandson of Robert and Elizabeth), who succeeded in being returned for Parliament, where he proved to be ‘totally inactive’.

Inactive he may have been, but this did not prevent him from making his views clear to the lord lieutenant when he was faced with the ‘Three Questions’, framed to tease out opposition to James II’s policies. In response to them he insisted that he would ‘go free into the House, and give my vote as my judgment and reason shall direct when I hear the debates’. This was not at all the response required by the king’s officials, and he was removed from his local offices. He regained them shortly after at the Revolution but it was not until 1698 that he was re-elected to Parliament, again for Malton. In 1712 he was removed from local office again, this time probably on account of his Whiggery.

The older Thomas lived to see the Hanoverian accession, which he doubtless welcomed. Three years before that his son (another Thomas) had been returned to Parliament as one of the Members for Thirsk, after failed attempts in 1708 and 1710. This Thomas Worsley also seems to have played little or no role in the Commons. This was perhaps ironic, given that his marriage to Mary Frankland linked him directly to Oliver Cromwell. Efforts by his father to secure him a government post through the patronage of the earl of Carlisle came to nothing.

The trio of Thomas Worsleys in Parliament was completed by the election for Orford of the second Thomas’s son in 1761. It was this Thomas Worsley, the friend of Bute, who had been so concerned to prove his family’s antiquity. Although he was to sit first for Orford and then (like his forebear, Robert) for Callington, Parliament was not Thomas’s passion. Rather, his interests lay in equestrianism, collecting and architecture. His true claim to fame was rebuilding the family seat at Hovingham, creating the elegant Georgian house that endures to this day, but his dedication to horseflesh was equally strong and he seems to have looked out for suitable mounts for his contacts, the king among them. Writing to Sir James Lowther, 5th bt. (future earl of Lonsdale) in 1763, he mentioned trying out one of Lowther’s horses in front of the king and queen. They liked the animal, but concluded it was not ‘strong enough to carry [the king’s] weight’. [HMC Lonsdale, 132]

Thomas Worsley died in December 1778 at his London residence in Scotland Yard. [Morning Chronicle, 15 Dec. 1778] Just a few months before, he had been contacted by the duke of Ancaster, the lord great chamberlain, requiring him to see to the repair of the House of Lords, which was reported to be ‘in bad condition’. [PA, LGC/5/1, f. 279] By then, he was probably in no fit state to oversee the work.

This Thomas seems to have been the last member of his family to show much interest in national politics until the 20th century. His eldest son, another Thomas, had died four years before him, leaving the inheritance to a younger son, Edward. In 1838 Edward’s nephew, Sir William Worsley, was created a baronet but his interests appear to have been largely confined to his immediate surroundings in North Yorkshire. The 4th baronet was a talented cricketer, serving as captain of Yorkshire, as well as president of the MCC. It was his son, Sir Marcus Worsley, 5th bt., who finally broke the family duck and returned to Parliament, first as MP for Keighley and latterly for Chelsea. In November 1969 he presented a bill to encourage the preservation of collections of manuscripts by controlling and regulating their export. His other chief preoccupation was as one of the church commissioners.

The late duchess of Kent was Sir Marcus’s younger sister. She continued the family’s long tradition of interest in sport (in her case tennis) and quiet dedication to their locality.

RDEE

Further reading
Estate and Household Accounts of William Worsley, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral 1479-1497 (Richard III & Yorkist Trust and London Record Society, 2004), ed. H. Kleineke and S. Hovland
VCH Yorkshire North Riding, volume one
Visitation of Lancashire and a part of Cheshire, 1533, ed. William Langton (Chetham Soc. 1876)

It is a familiar theme in medieval chronicles, whether monkish or secular, that extreme weather, natural disaster or even just unusual events were, or, at least, could be interpreted as, manifestations of divine interaction with the temporal world. At the most extreme, they were seen as expressions of God’s displeasure, as punishment for some recent transgression. The chronicle of Henry Knighton (d.c.1396), a monk in Augustinian abbey of St. Mary, Leicester, provides a diverting and unsubtle example. He writes, with strong disapproval, of a recent and remarkable development. In the late 1340s troops of women, sometimes as many as 50, had taken to travelling to tournaments, riding on fine horses and ‘dressed in men’s clothes of striking richness and variety’. These women, disparagingly described as, ‘hardly of the kingdom’s better sort’, ‘wantonly with disgraceful lubricity displayed their bodies’.  From Knighton’s point of view, however, the story had a happy ending: God ‘had a marvellous remedy to dispel their wantonness’, visiting great storms upon them (Knighton’s Chronicle, ed. G.H. Martin, p. 93).  Such specific connexions were, however, rarely drawn. Much more commonly, extreme events were seen as portent rather than punishment, as predictors of some upcoming misfortune in human affairs. Curiously, one of these concerns Parliament. The Monk of Westminster relates that, on 1 February 1388 near Abingdon, the bed of the Thames was empty of water for the length of a bowshot and remained so for an hour, ‘conveying a striking omen of events that were to follow’.  He then, although without making the connexion explicit, describes in detail the violent and disturbing events of the ‘Merciless Parliament’ that began two days later (Westminster Chronicle, ed. L.C. Hector and B.F. Harvey, p.234). 

Such examples could be multiplied, but it is worth asking whether the chroniclers were as credulous and unthinking as they appear to the modern observer.  One may doubt whether the Monk of Westminster really believed that a lack of water in the Thames was a predictor of grave parliamentary events, the juxtaposition looks more like a literary device to relate human to natural events.  He was usually content simply to describe the most extreme natural phenomena free of the overt implication that they were omens. He was not moved to speculate even on the meaning of the ‘amazing marvels’ seen in Cheshire on 1 August 1388 when ‘the heavens were seen to open and angels carrying lights to flit about in the air’. This far-from sinister apparition encapsulates a difficulty chroniclers had in interpreting omens.  Imaginatively, within the thought processes of the time, it was just about coherent to see some grave natural disasters as a harbinger of some more general crisis in human affairs; it was less easy (or at least chroniclers were less ready) to see some positive natural event, like the apparent appearance of angels, as portending some happy one. Thomas Walsingham, the most sophisticated of the monastic chroniclers of the late-medieval period, overcame this difficulty by offering both positive and negative interpretations.  His account of two major political events shows his interpretative ingenuity. He reports that, as Anne of Bohemia arrived at Dover in December 1381 (for her marriage to Richard II), a sudden ‘disturbance of the sea’ caused the ship she had come in to be dashed to pieces, just after its passengers had safely alighted. Not surprisingly, perhaps, some thought this a forecast of future misfortune; others, however, took the view that it ‘showed the favour of God and presaged future happiness for the land’. Walsingham concluded that, ‘Subsequent events will show why it was a dark, perplexing omen of doubtful meaning’ (Chronica Maiora, ed. D. Preest, pp. 170-1). The same duality is apparent in his account of another event.  Although Henry V’s coronation took place in the spring, Walsingham reports that, to everyone’s surprise, there was a great fall of show.  Some feared that this harsh weather presaged an unhappy fate, for the new King ‘would be a man of cold deeds and severe in his management of the kingdom’; but others believed it to be the ‘best of omens’, predicting that the new King ‘would cause to fall upon the land snowstorms which would freeze vice and allow the fair fruits of virtue to spring up’ (p.389).

On this evidence, one must wonder whether these monastic chroniclers believed that portents, as manifestations of divine intervention in the real world, could be meaningfully discerned. Although Knighton seems to have thought that God was ready to punish female jousters by visiting storms upon them, this was an isolated expression of a belief in God’s active intervention.  Like the Monk of Westminster, he was generally content to report extreme natural events, like a fatal heatwave in Calais in August 1347, without seeking to draw any lessons from them. Walsingham, although clearly ready to believe in portents, was so playful in his interpretation of them as to reduce them almost to meaninglessness. Characteristically, he could also employ them as expressions of his own prejudices. He was hostile to the Welsh rebel leader, Owain Glyndwr, and was thus happy to report the ‘dreadful omens’ that were said to have attended his birth, namely that his father’s stables became flooded with blood. Prejudice of a different sort probably informed Knighton’s story of the female jousters.  He did not really believe that they were punished by God; he was rather claiming divine endorsement for the sexual and social prejudices of the cloister.

S.J.P.

Ordained in 1364, Thomas Walsingham, the last of the great medieval monastic chroniclers, spent nearly his entire adult life as a monk in the great Benedictine abbey of St. Albans. His writings, the most important of which was his Chronica Maiora (now existing in a confusion of texts prepared at different times), show a man of forthright opinions who was readier to condemn than to praise. He lived through a dramatic and formative period in parliamentary history, and parliamentary affairs formed a recurring theme in his narrative. What he has to say is worthy of close notice, and, although he viewed all with a prejudiced eye, he was very well-informed. On one occasion, in respect of the Parliament of October 1385, he appears to have been a direct witness to parliamentary events, and on others he benefited from the testimony of both his abbot, who had a seat in the House of Lords, and the constant stream of important visitors a great abbey attracted.

Walsingham’s best-known and most vivid reference to Parliament concerns that of 1376, perhaps the most important assembly of the medieval period. His detailed account is notable in two respects: it bestowed the title of ‘good’ on the assembly, a description still used today, and, uniquely in respect of any account of a medieval Parliament, it provides a description of an MP’s dream. His informant was Sir Thomas Hoo, MP for Bedfordshire, who told the chronicler that, at the beginning of the assembly, he had dreamt that he saw seven gold florins on the floor of Westminster abbey’s chapter-house (which served as the Commons’ chamber). Anxious to find the owner of the seemingly-mislaid coins, he enquired among his fellow MPs and then ‘respectfully’ approached the monks. The most ‘eminent’ of the latter explained that they were not lost coins, rather they represented gifts bestowed on the Commons by the Holy Ghost, the gold signifying wisdom. Walsingham uses this story to show that the knights of the shire, in their opposition to the failing and corrupt regime of Edward III’s last years, ‘were prompted by the loving counsel of the Holy Spirit’.

It is this account, strong in its praise of the Commons, that is generally cited when the Chronica Maiora is mentioned in a parliamentary context. Yet it is entirely unrepresentative of the chronicler’s attitude to Parliament as a whole. This was almost unremittingly negative. In some cases, his disapproval was specific to an individual assembly: he deprecated the Parliament of 1377, in which the court-party, headed by John of Gaunt, undid the work of its much-admired predecessor. This, it could be argued, reflected his disapproval of the sudden change in the political climate rather than a negative view of the institution of Parliament itself. That unfavourable attitude was, however, to become apparent in his relentlessly critical commentary on the Parliaments from 1378 to 1410, culminating in his ringing condemnation of the Commons in this last assembly. Indeed, it is not going too far to say that he came to view the institution, and particularly the Commons, as an enemy of both the people and the Church.

Walsingham’s critique was a comprehensive one. In his view, the Crown had sufficient resources not only to maintain the royal household and other ordinary charges, but also to wage war, if the ‘kingdom was governed sensibly and honestly’. Parliamentary taxation had no easy place in such a view, and he generally condemned its granting. He argued that the Commons, conspicuously not following the admirable precedent of 1376, failed in their duty by not effectively resisting what he saw the Crown’s needless and burdensome impositions. He was characteristically trenchant in his expression of these views. Of the Parliament of November 1384, he wrote that, ‘as had now been the case for many a year, nothing worth recording took place except that a document was produced for the extortion of taxes from the clergy and the common people for the financing of the useless wars of the king’. He was equally unimpressed by Parliament’s other main function, the making of legislation. Of the Cambridge Parliament of 1388, he wrote slightingly, ‘many … statutes were enacted there, details of which I omit here, mainly because these same statutes were often enacted in the past but completely disregarded’.

Alongside this negative commentary on parliamentary taxation and legislation ran a yet more outraged one on what he took to be the anticlericalism of a Commons too easily influenced by the religious ideas of John Wycliffe (for whom Walsingham had nothing but hatred and contempt). Two assemblies attracted his particularly robust denunciation. The first of these was that of October 1385, which he appears to have attended as his abbot’s proxy and in which the Commons sought to make their own grant of the taxation dependent upon a grant by the clergy. When, on Walsingham’s testimony, William Courtenay, archbishop of Canterbury, vigorously opposed this assault on the independence of the Church, the knights of the shire ‘furiously pleaded’ that churchmen should be punished for their arrogance by being deprived of their temporalities. Indeed, the ‘madness of the knights on this issue was so great that they actually believed that what they were asking for could be put into effect’ and ‘you could have seen them preening themselves, with one of them promising himself a certain sum from this monastery, and another a sum from another monastery’. He himself heard one of the knights swear that he would have 1,000 marks p.a. from the temporalities of St. Albans. The young Richard II attracted the chronicler’s praise for his decisive rejection of these ’unruly ravings’.

These ‘ravings’ were to raise their head again in the Parliament of 1410, and in a more considered and comprehensive form. That assembly heard the most radical proposal ever made by the medieval Commons, namely the confiscation of the temporalities of the Church to relieve the need for direct taxation and endow what amounted to a new landed class of 15 earls, 1,500 knights, 6,200 esquires and a hundred new almshouses. The figures were as risible as the proposal itself was in practical and political terms. Walsingham was characteristically forthright: ‘the parliamentary knights, or, to name them more truly, the ‘minions of Pilate’’ (‘milites parliamentales vel ut dicamus verius satellites Pilatales’) made the proposal ‘with no thought for the good of the kingdom but with malice in their hearts and no time for anything but this one crime’.

One must doubt how much support there was in the Commons for any scheme of clerical disendowment. Walsingham may have deliberately magnified the threat to emphasise the danger of the Lollard ideas that underpinned such proposals and so repelled him. None the less, his negative view of the Commons, leaving aside his account of the 1376 Parliament, is a consistent theme. In 1376 the Commons had been ‘prompted by the loving counsel of the Holy Spirit’; by 1410 they had become ‘minions of Pilate’.

S.P

Further Reading

A. Goodman, ‘Sir Thomas Hoo and the Parliament of 1376’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Reasearch, xli (1968), pp. 139-49.

The Chronica Maoira of Thomas Walsingham, 1376-1422, trans. D. Preest (Woodbridge, 2005)

It is surprising to find the sister of a King buried in a remote Shropshire church.  Henry IV’s sister, Elizabeth, in marked contrast to her elder sister, Philippa (d.1415), wife of King John I of Portugal, grandly entombed in Batalha Monastery, found her final resting in the modest country church of Burford.  The two sisters were also markedly contrasted in life.

Philippa’s sole marriage was made in 1387 to advance, unsuccessfully as it transpired, the claims of her step-mother, Constance of Castile, to the throne of Castile. Elizabeth had a rather more colourful marital history.  In 1380, when she was about 17, her father, John of Gaunt, contracted a conventional marriage for her: John Hastings, earl of Pembroke, was his ward, and by birth and wealth a suitable spouse. There was, however, a problem, that Gaunt chose to ignore. The groom was some ten years younger than his bride, and it would be some years before they could live together as a married couple. In the interim, the young earl grew up in Gaunt’s household, while Elizabeth was sent to the royal court to, in the words of the Westminster chronicler, ‘study the behaviour and customs of courtly society’. That study took a predictable and active form. She formed a romantic attachment with Richard II’s half-brother, Sir John Holland, some ten years her senior, who had, rather ironically, been present at her marriage to Pembroke.

Whatever her precise marital status, this attachment was less than ideal.  Holland, despite his grand birth, was a younger son with no great financial prospects, and he had shown himself to have tendencies violent beyond even the generous limits of his times. None the less, in its most notorious manifestation, that violence had been exercised in defence of Elizabeth’s father.  In 1384, when a Carmelite friar denounced Gaunt to the King’s face as a traitor, Holland took a leading part in the torture and murder of the either deranged or unwisely forthright friar (‘Am I not your uncle?’: John of Gaunt, the murder of Friar Latimer and the Salisbury Parliament of 1384, 8 March 2022).  It was perhaps Holland’s apparent devotion to him that led Gaunt to abandon the objections raised by prudence to his daughter’s liaison; or else, perhaps more probably, he found himself faced with a fait accompli when she fell pregnant.  What is not clear is whether the Pembroke marriage had already been set aside before this happy event.  Since the marriage had been contracted when the groom was under the canonical age of consent, its dissolution was a matter of no great difficulty, and it is probable that it had already been dissolved as unsuitable before her affair with Holland.  However, it makes a better story to assume a causal link, and contemporary chroniclers were not slow in proposing one.  In any event, the new marriage was made before the child was born.  The young couple were married at Plymouth on 24 June 1386 as her father made ready for a campaign in Spain.  Holland had a leading position of command in that campaign, and his new wife accompanied him, perhaps not the ideal start to married life.

A less than ideal start was followed by a calamitous end.  In the late 1390s the marriage was compromised by mounting political crises.  As Richard II’s autocracy created unbridgeable divides among the leading aristocracy, Elizabeth faced a terrible dilemma. Her husband had never enjoyed the same close relationship with her brother, the future Henry IV, as he did with her father, and, given his own kinship with Richard II, it is not surprising that he should have sided with the King.  His reward was promotion to the dukedom of Exeter.  By contrast, her brother found himself banished and excluded from inheriting the great Lancastrian inheritance on his father’s death in February 1399.  Even, however, against this background, all would have been well if Holland had been able to reconcile himself to the new political disposition after Henry returned triumphantly from exile to depose Richard II.   Given his marriage to Elizabeth, such a reconciliation would, no doubt, have been expected (although it must be said that Henry did not exert himself to bring it about), and it must have been to her dismay that her husband chose to rise in a futile conspiracy to depose her brother.  Taking flight, his reward was execution in January 1400 at the hands of a group of Essex peasants.

Elizabeth, not seemingly one to dwell on life’s setbacks, lost little time in making a new marriage.  1400 was a momentous year for her, beginning with her husband’s death and ending with the death of her eldest son, Richard Holland.  In the interval, however, there was a much happier moment.  At a tournament held at York in July, her attention was caught by the skill of one of its participants, Sir John Cornwall, a few years her junior.  As the son of a younger son of a Shropshire knightly family, and notwithstanding the fact that his mother was, reputedly at least, a niece of John de Montfort (d.1399), duke of Brittany, he hardly had the social qualifications as a husband for a King’s sister, yet the couple were married by the end of the year. If Henry IV originally viewed this with disapproval, he quickly came to a brighter view, making lavish grants in favour of the couple and, in February 1405, standing godfather to their son. The couple went on to prosper.  The profits of Cornwall’s military career compensated him for his lack of hereditary expectations. Through their only son, John, the couple could look forward to establishing a dynasty.

Again, however, tragedy intervened.  Just as war had made Cornwall rich, it also ended his male line.  Late in 1421, at the siege of Meaux, the young John was killed by a cannonball in the presence of his father (H.W.Kleineke, ‘1421: a troubled royal Christmas’, 11 Jan. 2022).  Elizabeth did not long survive this loss, dying in November 1425.  Cornwall, for reasons one can only speculate, did not remarry.

It is not known why Elizabeth should have been buried in the church of Burford.  Her husband was not the lord of the manor, only the representative of a junior branch of the knightly family long established there.  Further, he had, before her death, purchased the extensive lordship of Ampthill in Bedfordshire and began the building of a great castle there.  That castle, not yet complete on Elizabeth’s death, had no doubt been intended as the grand residence of a new dynasty, and the church of Ampthill might have become its mausoleum.   The only plausible explanation for her burial at Burford is her personal affection for the place, perhaps because she had spent time there during Cornwall’s absences fighting in France.

Elizabeth’s career was a remarkable one. She demonstrated a degree of independence unusual for an aristocratic woman. She repudiated the marriage made for her by her powerful father when she was in her late teens; she then chose her own husband in what appears to have been scandalous circumstances; and, as a widow in her thirties, she followed her own inclinations in marrying below her rank to one of the foremost soldiers of the day. No doubt part of the reason for this seeming freedom was the indulgence of a father and brother to a favoured daughter and sister. Yet that indulgence was only necessary because of Elizabeth’s spirited independence.  

SP

On 9 July 1377, a week before the day scheduled for the coronation of the ten-year-old Richard II, his uncle, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, discharged a task that had not been undertaken for a little over 50 years. In his capacity as hereditary of steward of England, he convened a hearing in the White Hall of Westminster Palace to assign to the great men of the realm, or at least mostly to those who met that description, the ceremonial functions they were to perform at the coronation ceremony.  In doing so, he had no free hand, for these functions were hereditary. His role was the more limited one of ruling on the validity of claims brought before him. But that task was not quite as simple as it sounds. The hereditary system largely removed the contention and jealousies that might have arisen had the steward had the freedom to choose whom he would, but it threw up problems of a different sort. Gaunt’s position itself illustrated one of them: the accidents of inheritance could bring one man more than one function. As steward, an office appurtenant to the earldom of Leicester, part of the great inheritance of his late wife, Blanche of Lancaster, it was his task, the most honourable of all, to carry ‘Curtana’ the principal royal sword, at the coronation, but his great accumulation of estates included the earldom of Lincoln, also his late wife’s inheritance, to which pertained the right of carving the meat before the King at the coronation feast. Perhaps sensitive to taking too prominent a part in the proceedings, he assigned the task of carving to Hugh, earl of Stafford, whose late elder brother, Ralph (d.1362), had been his brother-in-law.

Another difficulty arose when a task was inherited by one who might be deemed incapable of its discharge. Here Gaunt called upon to make a judgement. Although only 15 years old, Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, claimed, as his hereditary right, the tasks of acting as chamberlain and of serving the King with water during the coronation banquet. Gaunt conceded the claims, perhaps because the King himself was only a boy and there was a curious appropriateness to him being served by another. Another boy, however, was too young for any such concession. John Hastings, earl of Pembroke, as lord of the castle and town of Pembroke, had a strong claim to carry the second sword and the great gilt spurs at the coronation, but, as he was only four years old, Gaunt wisely ruled that, to avoid any unfortunate accident, the task should be entrusted to an earl of more mature years, Edmund Mortimer, earl of March. A further difficulty arose when the hereditary task fell to an heiress, prohibited by her sex from undertaking it in person. The office of naperer, responsible for the table linen at the coronation feast, for example, had, since the coronation of Henry I in 1100, been attached to the Norfolk manor of Ashill, and, in 1377, this was part of the dower of the earl of Pembroke’s mother, Anne. Gaunt allowed her to appoint a knight as her deputy.

Gaunt deemed others disqualified from acting in person not by minority or sex but by rank. Some appear to have been considered not grand enough to discharge personally the function that fell to them. John Wiltshire, a London grocer, claimed, by virtue of his tenure of the manor of Heydon in Essex, the right of holding a towel for the King to dry his hands before the coronation feast. Although the claim was admitted, it was Gaunt’s brother, Edmund, earl of Cambridge, who, ostensibly as the grocer’s deputy, performed the task. In respect of a man of greater rank than Wiltshire, Gaunt made another judgment that emphasised the importance of rank. William, Lord Furnival, petitioned that, by virtue of his manor of Farnham Royal in Buckinghamshire, he had the important, if rather esoteric, function at the coronation ceremony of providing a glove for the King’s right hand and then supporting that gloved hand and arm for as long as the King should hold the royal sceptre. His claim was conceded but only on condition that he took up the rank of knighthood. Although he was over 50 years old and of some military experience, he had so far failed to do what was almost de rigeur for men of his standing, but, with his coronation claim, he could resist no more, and, on 14 July, two days before the coronation, he was duly knighted.

Not all the hereditary rôles were obviously prestigious, but they were claimed nevertheless. The most curious was that which pertained to the manor of Addington in Surrey, once held by William the Conqueror’s cook, Tezelin. In 1377 this manor was held by William, Lord Bardolf, and he duly asserted his right to the function that went with it, namely providing a cook for the royal kitchen to provide a pottage (composed of almond milk, chopped chicken, sugar and spices) for the coronation banquet. Clearly any part in the coronation, however seemingly minor, was worth having, and Gaunt had a problem not in any failure to claim but in competition between claimants. Of all the coronation functions the most dramatic was that of King’s champion, deputed to ride on one of the King’s warhorses and challenge to mortal combat anyone who should dare deny the King’s right to the Crown. This was disputed between two knights, Sir John Dymmok and Sir Baldwin Freville. Gaunt ruled in the former’s favour, deeming the right as appurtenant to the Lincolnshire manor of Scrivelsby, the property of Dymmock’s wife, but reserved to Freville the right to make a new claim at the next coronation.

Of more interest, or at least more diverting, is a dispute over a role claimed not by an individual but by a corporation. According to the formal record of the hearings before Gaunt, the city of London successfully claimed that its mayor should serve the King with a gold cup and ewer at dinner in the hall after the coronation and then when he took spices in his private chamber; and that the city’s nominees should serve the lords as assistants to the chief butler at both dinner and afterwards. The contention, as far as the official record goes, was a minor one: whether the gold cup and ewer should go, as a fee, to the chief butler, Richard, earl of Arundel, or to the Londoners.  Gaunt referred the matter, or so the record goes, to the adjudication of the young King, who ruled that the latter should have the cup and ewer. The St. Albans chronicler, Thomas Walsingham, however, tells a much more interesting story. He claims that it was the judges who ruled on the city’s ‘butler’ claim. When the citizens put that claim before the chief justice of the common pleas, Sir Robert Belknap, they received an answer they did not like. With a lawyer’s precision, the chief justice condescendingly told them that, given the range of functions taken by butlers from pouring wine to washing up dishes, ‘there is no point in you asking to be assigned the office of butler, unless you specify which duty it is you want’. Not surprisingly the citizens did not take kindly to this, remarking that ‘it was not their duty to wash the dishes’ and adding, irrelevantly and gratuitously, ‘that they had better dishes …  than he did, which they wanted to test out on his head’. Later, according to Walsingham, they adapted their threat, making an effigy of Belknap’s head and placing it above the aqueduct in Cheapside, ‘so that it would be pouring out wine from its mouth on the arrival of the King and the people’. 

This controversy aside, and even it may owe more to a chronicler’s affection for a good story than to reality, Gaunt’s efforts ensured that, in Walsingham’s words, the day of the coronation a week later was one ‘of light-hearted gladness’.

S.P.

Read more blogs from our coronation series here.

Thomas, earl of Lancaster (b. c.1278), cousin of Edward II and for much of that King’s reign the leader of opposition to him, has proved a divisive figure in death as well as life. The near-contemporary monastic chronicler Ranulf Higden (d.1364) cited his virtues – his generous alms-giving, his respect for churchmen and his consistency of political action – but balanced them against his more lurid demerits. Not only did he mistreat his wife, the great heiress Alice de Lacy, but he ‘defouled a greet multitude of women and of gentil wenches’; he was murderously vindictive to his enemies; and he supported ‘apostates and evel doers’. The ‘Oh! Earl of Lancaster’ lament of the Vita Edwardi Secundi cited above hints at his pride and overweening ambition. Modern judgments tend to emphasise these negatives. To his modern biographer, John Maddicott, he was, ‘unscrupulous, violent and avaricious’ and ‘not a man likely to convince others that he could either lead or govern’; and, to May McKisack, more neutrally, he was ‘the supreme example of the over-mighty subject whose end must be either to destroy or be destroyed’. Here he appears as, in part at least, a victim of circumstance, with his great wealth and Edward II’s misrule forcing him into the role of leader of opposition, one to which he was ill-suited by temperament and ability. Nowhere are his weaknesses as a leader more clearly illustrated than in the campaign that ended in his execution after the battle of Boroughbridge.

The prelude to that campaign was the rise of a new royal favourite, Hugh Despenser the younger. His ruthless-acquisitiveness in the marches of Wales, as he sought to add to the lordship of Glamorgan, the inheritance of his wife, united against him most of the Marcher lords, headed by Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford. In May 1321 they drove him out of Glamorgan and systematically ravaged his estates, and, in the Parliament of the following July, with Lancaster’s active support, they used the threat of deposition to force the King to exile him. The striking thing about the eight months that followed is the ease with which Edward II turned the tables on opponents who had appeared so strong. Now deprived of the focus their hatred of Despenser had given them, an infirmity of purpose seems to have overtaken them. This, in part, explains their failure to co-ordinate their opposition. But Lancaster’s fatal weakness for placing his own personal enmities before a common purpose was a more important factor. His personal hatred for Bartholomew, Lord Badlesmere, once steward of Edward II’s household but now allied with the Marchers, ensured that the King began his campaign of recovery with a bloodless victory. The Marcher lords had moved to lift the royal siege of Badlesmere’s castle at Leeds in Kent in October 1321, advancing as far as Kingston-on-Thames, only some 50 miles away, but Lancaster ordered them to desist.

The King now turned his attention to the Marcher lords, winning victory against them without the need to give battle. Here Edward was able to exploit the hostility of the native Welsh for the Marchers, but the principal reason for his facile victory was Lancaster’s failure to come to their aid. This, in turn, reflects the earl’s political and military weakness. His efforts to raise a coalition of northern lords against the King had failed, and, more alarmingly still, there were signs that his own great affinity was disintegrating. The most notable desertions were those of the northern lord, William, Lord Latimer, who went on to be one of the royalist commanders at Boroughbridge, and Sir Robert Holland, the earl’s most intimate friend and one who owed his wealth and position entirely to his patronage. So weak was his position that, as the royal army advanced north-east from the Marches, Lancaster, who had advanced south to Burton-on-Trent, withdrew north. His intention was probably to retreat to his cliff-top castle of Dunstanborough in Northumberland, where he might receive help from the Scots. But, on 16 March 1322, he found his way barred at the crossing of the River Ure at Boroughbridge by levies raised in Cumberland by a veteran of the Scottish wars, Sir Andrew Harclay. Battle was joined around the narrow wooden bridge over the River Ure, and Lancaster’s principal ally, the earl of Hereford, was killed early in the engagement as Lancaster’s army failed to force a passage of the river. A truce was then concluded until the following day. The two near-contemporary accounts of the battle differ as to what happened next. According to the Lanercost chronicle, desertions from his ranks caused Lancaster to surrender to Harclay when the truce expired.  The Vita Edwardi Secundi, however, indirectly accuses Harclay of duplicity. Afforced by the arrival of the Yorkshire lives during the night, he entered the town before morning and seized the unsuspecting Lancaster when technically the truce was still in force. 

Here a parallel is to be drawn with the battle of Ludford Bridge fought, or rather not fought, some 137 years later.  Then the duke of York withdrew from the field under cover of darkness and, sensibly, fled without giving battle to a superior force. Lancaster had the opportunity to do the same but either turned it down or delayed and was overtaken by events. Thus, while York survived to fight another day (not that it did him personally much good but his cause survived), Lancaster fell into the merciless hands of Edward II and Despenser. He was executed, after the most summary and questionable legal process, at his own castle at Pontefract on 22 March.

The manner of his death gave the earl an afterlife hardly justified by his personal qualities. It raised him to the status of a popular hero with stories of miracles at his tomb current within a short time of his death. The unpopularity of Edward II and Despenser, which intensified in their period of misrule after Boroughbridge, ensured that the cult took root, and, in the Parliament of 1327, after Edward’s deposition, the Commons went so far as to petition the new King, Edward III, to seek the earl’s canonization. That did not come, but his cult survived, albeit in attenuated form, until the Reformation.       

S.P.

The appropriately and contemporaneously named ‘Merciless’ Parliament of 1388 was among the most dramatic of medieval Parliaments, and the capture and execution of Sir Robert Tresilian, chief justice of the King’s bench, on 19 February was, arguably, its most dramatic event. He, like others, was a victim of the orgy of political violence unleashed by the breakdown of relations between the young King and a powerful group of leading nobles, headed by his uncle, Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, and Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel. That violence claimed more distinguished and worthy victims than Tresilian, but his execution claims a special interest not only as the first in the series but also for its unusual circumstances.

What is known of Tresilian does not paint him as a sympathetic figure. A Cornishman who had begun his legal career in the mid 1350s, he was promoted to the chief justiceship of the King’s bench in June 1381 after the brutal murder of his predecessor, Sir John Cavendish, during the Peasants’ Revolt. No doubt that murder justified to him harsh measures against the rebels, but he won an evil name for himself by going too far. Two chroniclers remark on the unrestrained severity with which he treated those suspected of involvement in the revolt, sending many to the gallows unjustly after intimidating juries into indicting and convicting. Further, he seems to have acquired, in a way that few late-medieval judges did, a reputation for corruption. The comprehensive pardon granted to him in July 1384 implies that he had been guilty of exploiting his great office for private gain, and, after his death, victims of that exploitation were quick to petition for redress. A fellow Cornishman, Ralph Trenewith, for example, claimed that, when he brought an assize of novel disseisin before Tresilian as justice of assize in Cornwall, the judge had purchased the disputed lands from the defendant and ordered the plaintiff to abandon his suit.    

Yet it was not a reputation for harshness and corruption that led to his fall. He attracted the ire of the ‘Lords Appellant’, led by Gloucester, for the part he had taken in the notorious episode of the ‘questions to the judges’. In the Parliament of 1386, a commission had been imposed on the young King, effectively removing government from his hands for a year. His response was to have the commission ruled illegal, and to that end he posed a series of questions to his judges in the autumn of 1387. Tresilian was held by the Appellants as principally responsible for both the questions and the contentious answers, notably the ruling that not only was the commission illegal but its architects deserved to be punished as traitors. It was for this that they included him among the five men whom they appealed of treason in November 1387.

Under pressure from the Appellants, the King reluctantly agreed to the trial of the five appellees in a Parliament scheduled to open at Westminster on the following 3 February. When, however, that Parliament assembled, the three most important of them – the earls of Suffolk and Oxford and the archbishop of York – had wisely fled, and only the former mayor of London, Sir Nicholas Brembre, was in custody. Tresilian’s whereabouts remained unknown until it was dramatically revealed 16 days into the Parliament. There are rival accounts of what precisely happened. The most vivid is provided by Thomas Fovent, an obscure Wiltshire cleric, who wrote a seemingly well-informed account in the Appellant interest. He claims that Tresilian’s arrest was the fortuitous result of the judge’s own foolhardiness: he was spotted, ‘above the gutters of a house next to the palace, hiding among the rooftops and watching the lords coming and going from Parliament’. Other evidence, however, suggests that the judge had concealed himself in the precinct of the abbey of Westminster’s sanctuary, that his hiding place was betrayed, and that he was illegally taken from there. Given Fovent’s evident support for the Appellants, his account was probably a fabrication designed to conceal the controversial nature of the judge’s arrest. 

Once he had fallen into his enemy’s hands, Tresilian’s fate was quickly sealed. The parliamentary process against him was summary. His earlier failures to appear to answer the appeal amounted to conviction under its terms. When he questioned the legality of this process, he was met, in the words of the Westminster chronicler, with ‘the swift retort that the action or judgement of the parliament was irrevocable’. Conviction was immediately followed by execution. The fullest account of his death is Fovent’s harshly unsympathetic one. He claims that the unfortunate judge had to be whipped to force him into climbing the ladder to the gallows at Tyburn. Then, after he had claimed to be wearing charms that would protect him from death, he was stripped naked and found to be adorned with ‘amulets and signs painted with celestial characters, the head of a devil and the names of demons’. Although the claim that Tresilian had an annulet with mystical powers also appears in a contemporary devotional text complied at Bordesley Abbey in Worcestershire, the polemical nature of Fovent’s tract does not invite belief in this improbable story. If Tresilian really placed his belief in these charms, why did he reveal their existence to his executioners? The Westminster chronicler gives a more sympathetic account, implying that Tresilian died with courage for ‘no fear or shame or dread altered his refusal to admit that he had ever been a traitor’.

Tresilian’s execution was followed by those of others, on equally slender legal grounds. The extremity of the measures eventually threatened the unity of the King’s opponents. The beheading of Sir Simon Burley, a knight of the Garter and once the King’s tutor, on 5 May was forced through by Gloucester and Arundel against opposition that included their fellow Appellants, the earls of Derby and Nottingham. It is worth emphasising quite how extreme were the tactics employed by the Appellants. Parliament was used, not as it had been in 1376 and, only two years before, in 1386, to remove royal ministers from office and influence, but to end their lives; the novel process of appeal was described by judges, appointed by the Appellants themselves, as inconsistent with common law; and, in the taking of Tresilian, the privileges of sanctuary were disregarded. One contemporary chronicle was emphatic in its criticism: the Appellants ‘most cruelly put to death certain knights and justices … contrary to the King’s will and the equity of the law… and did many other things which it is better to pass over in silence than to relate’. If Tresilian himself was not a figure worthy of much sympathy, other of the Appellant victims were, notably Burley and the courageous Brembre. If these extreme tactics do not excuse the revenge Richard II exacted in 1397, it is easy to argue that his principal victims, Gloucester and Arundel, then reaped the harvest they had sown.

S.J.P

Death was a crucial moment of transition in the passage of property. At the deathbed of a medieval landowner, particularly a substantial one, there was a pressing question; what lands were to be diverted from the heir? Primogeniture was too harshly restrictive a system to be allowed to operate unmodified. Provision needed to be made for other members of the family and, more contentiously, for the health of the landowner’s soul. The story of the death of Sir Henry Vavasour provides an illustration, albeit an extreme one, of the problems that might ensue when the landowner was inclined to put too great an emphasis in investing in the latter.

The records of medieval government, formal and bureaucratic by their nature, rarely contain vivid stories of the eternal realities of human life. When they do the story is generally worth relating, and such is the case with the moving narrative of Vavasour’s deathbed. The narrative begins with a remarkable act of either generosity or recklessness by Sir Henry in favour of a neighbour, the Cistercian abbey of Louth Park. In late November 1342 he summoned the abbot to meet him at his manor of Cockerington, a few miles from the abbey, and told him that, moved by both his love for the abbey and concern for his soul, he intended to give that manor to the abbey to support as many as ten new monks. Since the manor was one of his principal estates, the proposed alienation promised to compromise the wealth and standing of his family. He was, in short, giving priory to his own concern for his soul over the future interests of his family. If, however, this gave the abbot pause about the wisdom of accepting a gift that contravened social norms, the financial difficulties under which his house was labouring must have stilled them. In any event, the precarious state of Sir Henry’s health meant there was little time for reflection.  If the gift was to be carried through, there was to be no time to lose in drawing up the necessary legal instruments. These were to be made in the abbey itself, and it was there that Sir Henry took up residence for the last days of his life. Annoyed on his arrival to find that the abbot was not there to greet him, he sent his wife to summon him with the admonition that ‘never would he take such a fish in his net’. Duly warned that the ailing Sir Henry might yet change his mind, the abbot came to his bedside to discuss arrangements for the conveyance of the manor to feoffees who were then to settle the manor on the abbey. 

Sir Henry’s servants were then despatched back to Cockerington to put these arrangements into execution. Soon after midnight on the following day, one of the dying man’s female servants, Alice, who had been left as his sole attendant, came and knocked on the abbot’s window and asked him to come and give her master extreme unction, for he was on the point of death. At this stage Sir Henry was still compos mentis, aware enough to gift the loyal Alice a horse as he received that sacrament from one of the monks. As this moving scene was being enacted, the feoffees were at Cockerington, where, soon after first light, they took the attornment of the manor’s free tenants, a necessary formality to establish their seisin of the manor and thus to give legal validity to their later conveyance to the abbey. When they returned to the abbey a few hours later, they found that Sir Henry had died, leaving open the question of whether he had survived until after the feoffees had established their seisin by receiving the attornments. Indeed, it was later to be alleged, quite falsely, that the abbot had forged the deed of feoffment and set Sir Henry’s seal to it after his death.

Given these difficulties, it is not surprising that things did not go smoothly for the abbey and that Sir Henry’s generosity did not bring the much-needed addition to its resources. Instead, it provoked a crisis in the abbey’s affairs. Sir Henry’s widow and his sons sought to overturn his reckless generosity, by both legal and illegal means, and the abbot was obliged to seek royal protection. The matter was discussed in the Parliament of June 1344 and, as a result of these deliberations, the abbey was committed to royal commissioners, ‘in consideration of its impoverished state’. An inquiry was then instigated into the validity of the grant, before which the story of Sir Henry’s deathbed was related. Although, however, the validity of the grant was established, the abbot, perhaps wisely, did not press the matter. In June 1347 he accepted from Sir Henry’s heir a part of the manor in exchange for relinquishing his abbey’s claim to the rest. Two years later the abbot died of the plague, having, in the words of the terse contemporary chronicle of the abbey, suffered ‘a very great persecution’ on account of the grant of the manor. Appropriately, perhaps, he was buried before the great altar close to Sir Henry Vavasour.

S.P.

This year’s annual lecture was given by Professor Chris Given-Wilson, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of St Andrews and former member of the History of Parliament’s editorial board. Professor Given-Wilson presented Parliament, Politics and Pandemics in Later Medieval England to a capacity audience.

To begin the 2022 lecture, Professor Given-Wilson reassured the audience that his talk was ‘not actually about a pandemic’, instead it was ‘about the medium and long-term consequences of a pandemic’. Something I am sure a lot of us are currently contemplating in our own lives. In fact, the key focus of the lecture was on legislation: the statutes and laws passed as a direct result of pandemics throughout later medieval England.

Throughout the many pandemics and health crises during the Middle Ages, the purpose of parliament and the laws it passed changed significantly. The framework and regulation of labour shifted from private, local authority to national and public authority, and the health of the nation became the subject of parliamentary decision-making. As Professor Given-Wilson explained, this was a significant development in English society, and signified a major extension of parliament’s attempts to control the labouring classes.

When the Black Death arrived in England in June 1349, the English government passed the ‘First Ordinance of Labourers’, which attempted to protect livelihoods and incomes – the livelihoods of the rich, that is. The Black Death brought issues for landowners: high death rates created a ‘great scarcity of labourers’, and those still alive were now demanding higher wages. Therefore, the First Ordinance of Labourers was issued to make sure that ‘every able-bodied adult’ under 60 had to work, or they would be imprisoned, and it forbade increases in wages. This ordinance was reinforced in 1351 with the Statute of Labourers. Throughout the many waves of plagues, more and more laws were passed to control the labouring classes.

These laws went from shocking to downright bizarre. In 1388, the Cambridge Statute of Labourers decreed that no agricultural labourer could send their child to school to prepare them for a career in church. Instead, children had to work at the same occupations as their parents, and if they had worked on the land up to the age of twelve, they could not be admitted to a trade apprenticeship. Not only were these laws introduced to control working conditions and career choices, but leisure activities, too. They started to control more and more aspects of the labouring classes’ lives.

Football was banned in 1314 for being ‘too noisy’, and in the fifteenth century indoor games such as dicing and cards were banned, too. Parliament appeared to be worried about these games; Professor Given-Wilson explained that they believed these indoor games might lead to violence and poverty. Throughout the plagues, statutes and laws appeared to become more concerned with the possibility of violence from the ‘lower orders’. As Professor Given-Wilson had mentioned, the ‘scarcity of labourers’ meant that some workers began to demand higher wages and would refuse to work until they received a pay rise. Therefore, statutes began to be passed to prevent ‘insurrection’ from the lower orders. This included the Statute of 1390 which banned the labouring classes from participating in hunting as Parliament worried that these activities would foment rebellion.

Many of the more bizarre laws created incredulous murmurs throughout the audience, but these were most audible when Professor Given-Wilson outlined a statue entitled ‘The Pestilence’ passed by the Parliament of 1439 during yet another plague year. The statute, passed as King Henry VI turned eighteen, forbade those paying homage to the King to partake in the act of kissing him. As Professor Given-Wilson surmised, and the audience appeared to agree, ‘Poor Henry VI – eighteen years old, and couldn’t be kissed’.

The audience remained captivated throughout the lecture and Professor Given-Wilson was met with a flurry of hands when History of Parliament Chair of Trustees Lord Norton of Louth opened the floor to questions. Professor Given-Wilson was able to respond to a wide range of questions, from domestic and international comparisons to the impact of plagues and the discussed legislation on women’s social standing. Throughout his answers, Professor Given-Wilson paid notice to the many other academics in the audience who would be able to add to the discussion, encouraging the conversation to continue after the lecture.

As Professor Given-Wilson concluded, we should not ‘underestimate the consequences of a pandemic’. The Ordinance of Labourers in 1349 was the first of multiple laws that came in to control the everyday life of the individual, extending greatly the jurisdictional scope of the English Parliament. From wage freezes and work becoming compulsory, to the regulation of dress and leisure activities, the English government began to claim a right to intervene. However, as Professor Given-Wilson noted, while we know these laws were passed, how effectively they were enforced is more difficult to know. So, while these plagues may have changed the purpose of Parliament and the laws it passed, how effective these statutes were is a different matter.

A special thank you to Professor Chris Given-Wilson for a fantastic lecture.

KOR