Conclusion

Rosemary Horrox

All historical boundaries are problematic. The dates chosen as the limits for this volume, 1200-1500, are arbitrary - as the choice of round numbers was designed to signal and as was stressed in the Preface. None of the contributors would claim that these three centuries represent a self-contained period. The exploration of their themes has meant looking back to earlier developments that were still working themselves out when this period opens, but also glancing forward to suggest how changes continued to unfold in the next century. No-one is in the business of trying to identify some medieval/modern divide, and although, through convention and convenience, most of us continue to use the term ‘the late middle ages’ it is with no intention of implying that the period should be characterised as liminal, let alone autumnal.

One consequence of this perspective is that the Black Death, as in other recent work, is denied its traditional status as the earthquake that reduced medieval certainties to rubble and allowed the building of the modern world. This model was firmly established by Cardinal Gasquet in the first major English study of the plague, published in 1893. Gasquet was particularly interested in the possibility that the plague might explain the Protestant Reformation, but he was also convinced that it brought about a complete social revolution as well. Other historians have linked it more specifically with the rise of capitalism, individualism, the middle classes and the modern state. These ideas fell out of favour in the course of the twentieth century, partly because many of the arguments amounted to little more than post hoc, propter hoc, but also because it became fashionable in the mid twentieth century to insist that medieval chroniclers had exaggerated the scale of the mortality and that the death rate was far less than the one in two claimed by Gasquet. Since then estimates of plague mortality have been creeping back towards (and in some cases beyond) the one in two mark and some historians are evidently beginning to feel that it is unreasonable to claim that such massive mortality had no long-term consequences beyond the quantifiably economic (upon which most writers are now agreed). What is clear, at least, is that the unfolding of those consequences was far more complex than the old model would allow and that their fruitful exploration demands acknowledgement of the striking continuities rather than merely a determination to hunt out ‘change’.

The readiness to see the plague as the agent of modernity was driven by two largely unstated assumptions: that the middle ages were profoundly different from ‘modern’ society and that medieval ways of doing things were so entrenched that it would take a major catastrophe to bring about significant change. Attention focused, therefore, on trying to identify that upheaval. In the political sphere the same approach generated the belief, now also generally abandoned, that it was the bloodbath of the Wars of the Roses that destroyed the ‘feudal’ nobility and ushered in the new monarchy as well as an upwardly mobile middle class. The rejection of that approach thus has as a corollary not only the assertion of continuities, but also an acceptance of incremental, ongoing change: what the current jargon would define as endogenous rather than exogenous change. Many examples could be offered: among them, the shift from memory to written record, the growth of the common law and the new pastoral imperatives that grew out of contritionist theology. There is also now much greater recognition that such developments were not simply imposed on medieval society from above but were at least in part a response to demand from below.

The earlier tacit denial that change could be self-generated in the middle ages was founded in a sense that the past was primitive and progress is an attribute of modernity. But it also drew encouragement from the ways in which medieval writers sought to present their own world. The most admired attribute in the middle ages was order: the quality which brought fallen humanity closest to the perfection envisaged by its creator. Disorder, although the inevitable consequence of mankind’s fall from grace, was aberrant and to be corrected. Both qualities were seen in the widest terms. Order entailed a sense of what was right and fitting: the natural law of which all human laws were imperfect reflections but also the ‘reason’ to which contemporaries endlessly appealed in justification or explanation. Malory’s King Arthur, for instance, celebrating his marriage to Guinevere, promised to grant any man’s wish ‘except it were unreasonable’.562 No more definition was necessary, although Arthur subsequently offered one: he would grant any wish that did not impair his realm or his estate. The maintenance of order, in all its senses, was the prerequisite of harmony: the state of man living in peace with man, but also of man living in peace with God. Disorder was disharmony, and writers and preachers reached instinctively for images of the out-of-tune instrument centuries before Shakespeare’s Ulysses asserted, ‘Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark what discord follows’.563

Ulysses’ target, with which his predecessors would have sympathised, was those who showed a lack of deference towards their betters, and it is easy to see how the commitment to order could be deployed as an argument against change in general and social change in particular. There were plenty of medieval writers who were prepared to argue that order required acceptance of the status quo. As the first prayer book of Edward VI (1549) phrased it, as part of the response to the question ‘What is my duty towards my neighbours?’: ‘To submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters. To order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters’. This assumed that one could identify one’s betters, and the medieval emphasis on hierarchy seems to play into the same set of values. The formulation and articulation of hierarchies was just one example of the love of patterning in which the intellectual commitment to order could manifest itself. The courtesy books cited by several of the contributors to this volume recognised the problems inherent in establishing precedence, but took it as axiomatic that the exercise should be undertaken.

This equation of order with stasis is, however, misleading. As several contributors to this volume have pointed out, individuals could change their social standing or their role. They could also be markedly undeferential, as indeed the contemporary emphasis on the importance of deference itself betrays. A more fruitful way into the question is the equation of order with a sense of what was appropriate. Men and women were indeed expected to behave in conformity with their status, recognising where they were placed in the scheme of things. The tag nosce teipsum (know thyself), rendered by Chaucer with rather more cynicism as ‘Full wise is he that can know himself, was an injunction to look outwards as well as inwards.564 Improving one’s placing was not, except by some moralists, frowned on. The growing demand for education across this period demonstrates as much. Although medieval education was generally directed at fitting its recipients for the niche they were expected to fill, there was always an underlying sense that it was a route to betterment. Even the sons and daughters of the gentry, sent to other households to learn the behaviour and skills requisite for their social position, would be sent where possible to the households of their parents’ social superiors, rather than their equals. The fact that this is relatively rarely articulated is evidence of the extent to which it was taken for granted rather than of its novelty. Thus a contemporary account of the rise of the Pastons could comment baldly that Clement Paston, characterised as a good husbandman who followed the plough and whose wife was unfree, sent his son William to school ‘and often he borrowed money to find him to school’.565 William ended up as a royal justice and although, as Philippa Maddern reminds us above, the speed and permanence of his elevation is atypical, the hope of similar advancement fuelled the demand for schooling. When in 1439 William Bingham petitioned for licence to found God’s House in Cambridge to address ‘the great scarcity of masters of grammar’ this was less an expression of the parlous state of education than a reflection of consumer demand.566

Viewed in this context, the late medieval sumptuary laws were not evidence of hostility to social mobility per se, but of discomfort when people could not be ‘placed’ securely. By attempting to regulate appearance they reveal a world in which social standing was in practice what one could support, not just financially but behaviourally. It is significant that William of Wykeham, the founder of Winchester and New College, Oxford took as his motto the proverb ‘Manners maketh man’, with the clear implication that not only can behaviour be learned but that this is a desirable state of affairs. Writers hostile to the whole notion of social mobility predictably took issue with this view, insisting that behaviour was, on the contrary, innate, but their vehemence suggests that they were fighting a losing battle. There was indeed in medieval England a continuing sense that status derived from birth was the best sort of status - it could hardly be otherwise when the defining attributes of the elite, land and title, were largely hereditary. But widespread acceptance of the doctrine of primogeniture, leaving younger sons with ‘that which the cat left on the malt heap’ demanded a pragmatic recognition of the

Very different lifestyle and social standing that might be experienced by siblings.6

Another respect in which the middle ages created its own reputation for stasis was the insistence that what was done in the present was legitimated by what had been done in the past; indeed that what had been done in the past should be what was done in the present. Generations of later authors have mocked medieval scholars for their reliance on ‘authorities’, especially when, as in the medieval Bestiary, received wisdom seemed to fly in the face of common observation. That misses the point of the Bestiaries, which were allegories rather than scientific treatises: the medieval equivalent, one could say, of the C. S. Lewis Narnia stories rather than of David Attenborough’s Life on Earth. More generally, the criticism overlooks the fact that the deployment of authorities entailed authorial choice. Similarly, custom and precedent were immensely powerful forces but they were inevitably selective, constituting (although not generally admitting) a choice about what aspects of the past should be upheld. Such choices were fluid, although the increasing reliance on written records did something to limit that fluidity. Even so, self-conscious change remained possible, albeit often signalled by the very urgency with which its proponents insisted that it represented a return to the good old days. The radicalism of the mendicant orders, or of the most vociferous sixteenth-century critics of the Church, was presented as a stripping away of new and unjustified accretions to the body instituted by Christ and his apostles. If all else failed, change could be justified, especially in the political arena, by presenting it as the fulfilment of prophecy.

‘Novelty’ or ‘new fangledness’ retained negative connotations, and the latter in particular did so well beyond the middle ages. But advance did not always have to be camouflaged as return and some writers were prepared to use ‘novelty’ in a positive sense. The medieval cliche that men were ‘dwarves on the shoulders of giants’ is also testimony to acceptance of progress. Writers of plague treatises insisted that they were better able than their authorities to discuss the terrifying new disease because they were experienced in it and their predecessors were not. Among the various innovations mentioned in earlier chapters and recognised at the time as improvements were developments in agricultural technology,

The quotation is from Thomas Wilson, describing the state of England in 1600, cited by D. A. L. Morgan, ‘The individual style of the English gentleman’, in M. Jones, ed., Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Medieval Europe (Gloucester, 1986), p. 21.

Ship-building and mapping. One could probably add improvements in building - fewer high-status buildings seem to have fallen down in the late middle ages, although builders were prepared to cut corners in their cheaper developments. And the public response to ‘novelty’ was not always negative. The commercialisation of the medieval economy brought more choice for those consumers who could afford it. The disapprobation of moralists makes it clear that there was a sense of what was fashionable and that this was spreading beyond the elite. For its critics ‘fashionable’ seems often to have been identified with ‘foreign’: another reason for damning it in their eyes, but offering more evidence of the openness of medieval men and women to the possibility of new ways of doing things.

Of course change could be a source of conflict. The notorious breakdown of lord/peasant relations in Halesowen (Worcs.) had its roots in a new lord’s attempt to subvert custom. The post-plague world saw wider conflict as lords and employers struggled to block the economic changes consequent upon demographic collapse: reduced competition for land and higher wages. Some writers inveighed against a ‘world turned upside down’ in which, in John Gower’s Orwellian image of the 1381 rising, farm animals became ravening beasts. The rising was undoubtedly profoundly shocking — the chronicler Thomas Walsingham evoked apocalyptic imagery to convey his outrage - and, could we see the views of the rebels rather than their critics, we might see a burning optimism on their side that the world could be renewed. But in the event that did not happen. The social order was reasserted and tensions seem gradually to have subsided. In the course of the fifteenth century the rhetoric of common petitions in parliament moved away from blaming the idle and feckless English workman for the economic malaise and towards accusations that foreign competition was taking work away from honest English tradesmen. By the mid century the royal government was even emboldened to resume experiments in widening the tax base although there was no move to reinstitute the poll tax, the immediate trigger of the 1381 rising.

Change might be uncomfortable at times, it might even generate overt hostility in some quarters, but it was incremental and could generally be absorbed. It is striking in this context that the most recent work on the Reformation of the sixteenth century — another traditional ‘turning point’ — is inclined to emphasise that this too was a gradual process: gradual, that is, in the sense that it was a long way down the line before contemporaries fully realised how far they had come, but also in the sense that underlying assumptions changed more slowly than public observance. Although reliance on public pronouncements can obscure the fact, change is never definitive; it always has to be negotiated (in both senses) by individuals and communities. How medieval men and women negotiated the world in which they lived has been the theme of this book.