Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (9 page)

‘Hold up thy tail thy Satanas' said he

‘Show forth thine arse and let the friar see

Where is the nest of friars in this place!'

And ere that half a furlong way of space

Right so as bees come swarming from the hive
,

Out of the devil's arse began to drive

Twenty thousand friars in a route.

And throughout hell they swarmed all about

And came again as fast as they may gone

And in his arse they crept in every John!

The Summoner's Prologue

To offer satire at court is a dangerous game, especially when one year's patron is the next year's outcast. Richard II was violently overthrown. His usurper, who became Henry IV, was helped to the throne by Thomas Arundel, an archbishop of Canterbury who had been exiled by Richard, and who was determined to stamp out any criticism of the Church, especially criticisms in English, which any Tom, Dick or Harriet could read and understand. Within a year, Arundel began burning ‘heretics' at the stake, and even banned the use of English to discuss religion. Chaucer's writing, filled as it is with criticism of the Church in the vernacular, was exactly the sort of thing that was being stamped out.

Which may be the explanation for one of the unnoticed mysteries of history. Chaucer, the father of English literature, disappeared without trace at about the same time that Arundel was trying to limit the use of English in literature.

Chaucer was probably the most famous commoner in the kingdom, yet there is no record of his death, he did not leave a will and we do not even know when he died. All we have is an illegible inscription on a tomb, erected a century and a half after he disappeared, which does not mark the site of his burial and as far as we know never even contained his remains. He undoubtedly vanished quite mysteriously. It may be that he was deliberately removed.

DECLINE OF THE MINSTREL

There was no possibility of undoing the changes that had begun. Traditional minstrels, the old jongleurs, were out of fashion. They went downmarket and became itinerant entertainers performing at fairs and on street corners. Unemployed, they were outside the control of rich patrons and could pretend to belong to whomever they wanted – even the king.

It got so bad that Henry VI instigated an investigation board to clamp down on them. Any minstrel convicted of falsely claiming to have royal patronage would be fined and forced to pray for the king's soul.

The luckier minstrels were hired as civil servants by towns, to bolster citizens' self-importance in civic ceremonies. In the fourteenth century towns had given short-term contracts to minstrels in the service of aristocrats when they needed a performance on a feast day or for an armed muster, but by the fifteenth it seemed the supply was drying up. For example, York Corporation had a trio – the ‘city waits' – on retainer from the time of Henry VI. They were provided with uniforms each Christmas and performed at Easter, Corpus Christi, Christmas and on a couple of saint's days.

There were still court musicians, but few of them were minstrels in the old sense of being general entertainers. And in courts where sovereigns increasingly wrote poetry and performed their own songs, musicians were accepted into very polite company. This was obviously the case with a young dancer and harpsichord player, Mark Smeaton, minstrel to Henry VIII and his queen, Anne Boleyn. One spring day in 1536 he was invited to the home of Thomas Cromwell, Henry's chief minister. There, almost certainly under torture and with a promise of immunity, he ‘made revelations' about the queen, confessing to being her lover. It can be deduced from the general incredulity at the confession (‘How could she stoop so low?') that Smeaton did not come from a noble family.

He named several other men, including Anne's brother George, Sir Henry Norris, Sir William Brereton, Sir Francis Weston and Sir Thomas Wyatt. Wyatt, a poet and songwriter whose work is as fresh today as it was 500 years ago, had told Henry before the marriage that he had been Anne's lover.

Blame not my Lute!

Farewell! unknown; for though thou break

My strings in spite with great disdain
,

Yet have I found out for thy sake
,

Strings for to string my Lute again
:

And if, perchance, this sely rhyme

Do make thee blush, at any time
,

Blame not my Lute!

The men named were arrested, providing the pretext that allowed Henry to dispose of Anne Boleyn and replace her with Jane Seymour. Wyatt was released; it may be that Henry had a soft spot for songwriters. He was one himself, and wrote a new arrangement and lyrics for an old tune, which he called ‘Greensleeves'.

Alas, my love, you do me wrong
,

To cast me off discourteously.

For I have loved you well and long
,

Delighting in your company.

Any affection Henry might have felt for fellow-performers did not extend to Smeaton, who was tried for treason on 12 May 1536. He was not allowed to defend himself. He was hanged, cut down while still alive, his stomach was cut open and his intestines were pulled out in front of his still-conscious eyes. Then his body was butchered.

The revels were ended, the Middle Ages had given way to the ruthless cruelty of Renaissance power.

And what was left of the minstrels? Quite a lot; they had vanished as a class, but mutated into something far broader. The literature, poetry and drama of England now embraced and entertained the whole nation; and could weave together the most sublime and powerful emotions and delicate language, with the lowest comedy, to create a single, extraordinary experience. This was made evident later in the century, when Shakespeare's work appeared. His colleagues in the high-minded enterprise of presenting high tragedy and sophisticated comedy included Will Kemp, a fellow-shareholder in the Globe Theatre – clown, dancer, singer, instrumentalist and a man who fully appreciated the audience appeal of a leap, a whistle and a fart.

And the queen under whose rule they flourished, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, was said (very quietly) to bear more than a passing resemblance to Mark Smeaton.

CHAPTER THREE

OUTLAW

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

T
HE OUTLAWS OF MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
are still the stuff of legend. Heroes who bestrode the greenwood, fearlessly wearing only tights and little short tunics that hardly covered their bottoms – the figure of the medieval outlaw has come to represent freedom and justice for the common man.

Outlaws inhabit a kind of border territory in our medieval myth, crossing back and forth between the pantomime vision of a jolly and well-ordered medieval kingdom and the dark image of horribly violent and barbaric lawlessness. Taking a cool look at reality not only reveals the truth and falsehood in both these images, but also clarifies what has emerged as a central theme of this whole book; the way in which medieval lives in England became different from those in the rest of Europe, as a distinct national society emerged.

Perhaps the most surprising example of that distinctiveness is that in England, uniquely in Europe, bold robber outlaws were necessary for the effective functioning of the kingdom.

This will all be explained as we investigate whether bandits like Robin Hood really existed, whether the forest was truly a place of freedom and escape, and, of course, the key question, did outlaws never wear trousers?

There certainly were plenty of outlaws in the Middle Ages, in fact, more than one might imagine. By the end of the period, historians tell us, practically everyone got outlawed at some stage of their lives. It had become a minor inconvenience – a bit like having your credit card stopped.

It is true that there were some other outlaws whose violence blighted society, but even there things are often not quite what one might expect.

Take the drama that engulfed the little village of Teigh, in Rutland, one afternoon in 1340.

A REAL-LIFE OUTLAW GANG

A gang of armed men broke into the church, and the rector, whose place of worship it had been for twenty years, was dragged outside into the street and beheaded. The twist, however, is that the gang of armed men who slew the man of God weren't the outlaws. It was the rector who was the outlaw. His name was Richard Folville and he was one of six brothers who made up the notorious Folville Gang.

A generation after their deaths, the Folvilles were celebrated as the kind of outlaws who righted wrongs. One chronicle tells how they: ‘took the law in to their own hands' and rode out to right injustice with the force of arms. ‘Folville's Laws' became a synonym for ‘justified robbery'. They killed a widely-hated judge in the court of the Exchequer, and kidnapped a justice of the King's Bench whom a contemporary poem indicted as corrupt.

So were the Folvilles the real-life Robin Hoods? It would be exciting to report that they were, but they weren't.

The Folvilles were the younger sons of minor aristocracy, who drifted into a life of crime to support themselves in the style to which they were accustomed. They weren't robbing from the rich to give to the poor, they were simply robbing, raping, beating, kidnapping and killing as a livelihood.

And yet they were still held in some esteem in later years. They were acquitted on charges of murder when brought to trial and the justice of the peace who rid the world of Richard Folville, the rector, was forced to do penance – touring the local parishes and being beaten at each church.

It seems that people in the Middle Ages may have had an ambivalent attitude not simply to the Folvilles but to outlaws in general and to the very question of bold robbers. Maybe that's how one of our most popular legends came about.

THE REAL ROBIN HOOD?

If there ever was a real Robin Hood, he's surprisingly hard to pin down. There is confusion over where he lived (Nottinghamshire? Yorkshire?), when he lived (the twelfth century, in the age of Bad King John and Good King Richard? The fourteenth century?) and even
whether
he lived (the occasional record referring to a criminal called Robin Hode or Hood may be the origin of the story or the perpetuation of a legend).

But the medieval landscape would clearly be incomplete without him. Robin Hood somehow represents a fundamental image of English identity. Partly, of course, this is the bizarre English pantomime-identity of innocent transvestite jollity, but he also carries a message of political morality. A victim of injustice and of a corrupt, self-seeking sheriff, hiding out in the forest with his company of rogues, he is a symbol of natural justice, admired by the poor and hated by the fat cats of medieval England.

PRIDE IN ROBBERS

The strange fact is that the English always have been, and still are, proud of their outlaw robbers – not just fictional ones, but real robbers like the Folvilles. They regarded them as unique. Outlaws in other countries may have had codes of honour among themselves, but they were not regarded as stout bold fellows as they clearly were in England. There was felt to be the world of difference between an honourable robber and the mugger who makes a sneak attack. In much medieval writing about outlaws there is a presumption that their activities are honourable if robbery is performed boldly, face to face. In fact, it seems to be treated much like trial by ordeal: if God were not on the robber's side he would be defeated by his victim.

This admiration for outlaws could be found in the Middle Ages even among those whose job it was to hang them. In 1470 Sir John Fortescue, who had been chief justice of the King's Bench from 1442 to 1461, was educating the Lancastrian Prince Edward, son of Henry VI, who he expected would replace the Yorkist Edward IV as king. The prince, his mother Queen Margaret and Fortescue were in exile in Flanders at the time, and Fortescue wanted the prince to understand that the English were a more courageous people than the French. He knew this, he explained, because they made such bold outlaws:

. . . Frenchmen are seldom hanged for robbery, for they have no heart to do such a terrible act. There are therefore more men hanged for robbery and manslaughter in England in a year than are hanged in France in seven years for such crimes
 . . .
If [an Englishman] is poor and sees another man having riches which may be taken from him by might, he will not spare to do so, unless that poor man should be very law-abiding.

Could it be true that the medieval outlaw was fundamental to the development of a unique English identity? If so, the story is very different from that of the Robin Hood of pantomime. We imagine the outlaw as essentially non-violent and honourable; this is what makes him deserve our sympathy and affection. But just take a closer look at the actual medieval Robin Hood.

ROBIN HOOD'S BRUTALITY