The view of the ‘long’ fifteenth century which held the field until the middle of the twentieth century, and was most famously embodied in Shakespeare’s two tetralogies, was of a century of dynastic struggle and civil war. The deposition of Richard II in 1399 by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke gravely wounded the body politic, and the wounds remained open until the defeat and deposition of Richard III at Bosworth in 1485 by Henry Tudor. It was the children and grandchildren of Tudor’s marriage to Elizabeth of York who ended civil dissension and ushered in a new era of harmony at home and success in the wider world. It was a short step from this to see the century as the ‘waning’ or ‘autumn’ of the middle ages: the death throes of an outmoded political culture before the arrival of the modern era.
Implicit in this view was the belief that the middle ages as a whole were profoundly different from the period that followed. This reading was already apparent in the work of late sixteenth - and seventeenth-century antiquaries, whose elaboration (one might almost say creation) of the concept of ‘feudalism’ served to emphasize that difference. And it was around feudalism that many of the later negative stereotypes of the middle ages came to cluster. The word is now notorious for meaning whatever its user wishes it to mean, but it has always carried the sense of not-modern. For many late nineteenth - and twentieth-century writers the feudal world was one where the possession of land gave the nobility independent power sufficient to pose a threat to the monarchy. Such power was seen as centrifugal, pulling away from the centre, and, given that such writers generally regarded centralization as an essential element of modern government, noble power was by definition regressive: something which had to be tamed before a modern state could form. Wise kings clipped the wings of their ‘overmighty subjects’, or, like the early Tudors, emasculated the nobility by bringing them to court and rewarding them with ceremonial duties there rather than granting them local responsibilities.
But the fifteenth century was even worse than feudal. It was ‘bastard feudal’ - a term coined in the nineteenth century by Charles Plummer.1 Feudalism, on this reading, did at least give a sort of political stability because political relationships were based on land tenure. Plummer argued that what characterized the late middle ages was an erosion of the significance of the lord-tenant relationship and its replacement by a contract based on a money fee. Lords now bought (retained) the service of their inferiors. The resulting relationships, it was assumed, were far more volatile - and, in Plummer’s view, less respectable. It is not hard to see a nineteenth-century privileging of land over lucre at work here. In political terms, retaining made it easier for nobles to build up private armies which they could turn against each other and against the king, and so contributed directly to the outbreak of civil war - the so-called Wars of the Roses - in the mid-fifteenth century.
It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that these views came under sustained criticism in the seminal work of K. B. McFarlane. Bastard feudalism, which Plummer and his followers had seen as divisive and corrupt, was now rehabilitated. It was seen as politically neutral, mirroring the existing power structure rather than shaping it. It was not possible just to go out and buy a retinue. To achieve a following, a man had to show himself a ‘good lord’: someone who could advance the interests of his supporters. Some writers went further and argued that bastard feudalism was a positively stabilizing force, creating a network of relationships which could minimize the consequences of conflict at both a local and national level. Both views, it may be noted, tacitly accepted Plummer’s terms of reference. The question of bastard feudalism’s morality continued to hold centre stage, with service now defended as honourable, not merely mercenary. The enduring nature of such relationships was stressed, and was accompanied by an attempt to write land back into the picture by emphasizing that lords generally retained men within the area where their estates lay.
The debate about bastard feudalism concentrated historians’ attention on the localities, encouraging the painstaking exploration of social and political networks. But the centre did not entirely drop out of view. Royal favour allowed a ‘good lord’ to advance his men more effectively and the crown was thus inevitably part of the nexus of service and reward. On the whole this was seen positively, with bastard feudalism no longer a weapon to be turned against the crown but a ready-made set of connections that the crown could utilize in ruling the counties, assuming that the king had the ability and the will to do so. The king, on this reading, was the good lord of all good lords. But there has been a growing insistence by Castor and others that this belittles the king, and that as king he was (or ought to be) more than another lord. This is one facet of recent attempts to reassert the place of ideology in the political scene. Even the most positive readings of bastard feudalism had the effect of presenting political life as the mere pursuit of self-interest, as historians totted up the rewards earned by individuals and patronage became seen as the main determinant of political action. A backlash became apparent in the late 1980s, with several historians, including Hicks and Carpenter, urging the importance of contemporary ideals as a motivation for political involvement.
The historiographical developments of the last sixty years can thus be seen as a sustained attempt to rehabilitate the fifteenth century. At times this has been slightly defensive or over-drawn, but the period has been effectively rescued from the claim that it constituted the sort of cataclysm out of which radical political change might be expected to come. Historians working on both sides of the old divide of 1485 now reject the assumption that the period saw the collapse of the medieval polity and its replacement by something not only profoundly different but (implicit in the traditional reading) better. Some literary critics do still take it as axiomatic that the sixteenth century is inherently different from what went before (so that late medieval culture can be confidently defined as other than whatever is seen as characteristic of the later period). But among historians the current emphasis is much more on continuity and on the enduring vitality of medieval political structures into the sixteenth century and perhaps beyond. The dynastic conflicts of the fifteenth century might mean that there was at times potential uncertainty about who should be king, but there was general agreement on the crown’s role and importance within the realm.
World History
