Book Review

Chivalry, sheep and murdered kings

The Hollow Crown: a history of Britain in the late Middle Ages

It cannot be an easy task to write an account of two centuries of British history, trying to include every aspect of life, from the complexities of politics to the diversities of economic development, taking in everything from war, plague and religion to how much ale people drank each day (three pints, apparently). Miri Rubin’s latest work, volume four in the New Penguin History of Britain, makes a spirited attempt to convey the richness of Britain’s history in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The effect is that of a watercolour sketch of a great landscape: swathes of colour, places where the paint wears a little thin, but patches of fascinating detail.

The two centuries in question offer unlimited potential for the imagination. For most people, the brutal experience of the plague perhaps loomed largest after 1348. Between a third and a half of every community died. Villages were left empty, marshes that had previously been drained now began to take back the land since there was no one there to maintain the dykes and ditches. In 1349 we find the Bishop of Bath and Wells responding to the crisis by granting the laity permission to make their deathbed confessions to one another, even to a woman, since there were so few priests left. A manorial court trying to record legal guardians around the same time, found that only 28 per cent of children had parents. This devastation of society was matched by unprecedented political turbulence. The era saw a series of depositions: wayward Edward II, volatile Richard II, hapless Henry VI, the “Princes in the Tower” and their supposed slayer, the “servile boar” Richard III. The death of kings was accompanied by many other deaths: one author recorded sadly that the “English nation has now made many martyrs; they spare neither their own king, nor their bishops, no dignity, no order, no estate, no degree”.

Yet this was also an era of extraordinary cultural achievement, with the beginnings of English vernacular literature and the arrival of printing; an era of commercial expansion, with 40,000 sacks of wool a year being exported, and the 89 ports of the British Isles developing a diversity of trade; an era of growing legal and parliamentary sophistication, with a high incidence of political awareness among many layers of society. It was also a time of chivalric honour and legendary military achievement, with the great battles of the Hundred Years War, most especially Henry V’s victory at Agincourt, compared at the time to the achievements of Saul, David, Solomon and Alexander the Great.

This epoch also saw an extraordinary breadth of religious experience and expression, and the passages dealing with this are perhaps the best parts of the book. The intermingling of the sacred with what the modern world would consider secular is neatly conveyed: a royal grant to a hermit near Doncaster required him to fill in the potholes in a nearby road, and when the locals from the Isle of Wight “salvaged” 174 casks of wine from a sinking ship, they were enjoined to do penance (the wine had belonged to a monastery) by building a lighthouse. Well over 3,000 misericords survive from this period, as likely to depict legends and fables as biblical tales, or combining the two, as when Noah’s wife in Ely Cathedral beats her husband for causing such upheavals with his boat-building. The Church of the time had its fair share of problems, and Rubin does not evade them. We find ignorant and adulterous priests, such as William Hardyng of Wantage, who broke the parish silver and sometimes spent the night in the church with his family, bedded down on the vestments, or William Colet who was ordered to the grammar school for a year that he might understand Scripture and the offices before he returned. Yet we also find a wealth of vigorous clerical and lay piety, manifest in will bequests, church decorations, feasts and processions, religious houses and chantries. It was a religious world of enormous diversity, where Lollardy, the late-medieval English heresy, might be best understood as “radical orthodoxy”, an exaggeration of accepted religious ideas rather than their opposite.

During the late Middle Ages the language of symbolism was universally understood. We see the Christ of Sundays, bleeding from wounds inflicted by those who worked on the Sabbath. A boatload of 120 flagellants arrives in London in 1349 making dramatic demonstration of their piety. Edward II’s queen appears at tournaments with her lover, dressed as Arthur and Guinevere. An inscription below an image of St Christopher promises that those who see it will not die that day. This book offers an array of such vivid glimpses into the past.

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