Richard The Chird (20 page)

When his duties permitted him to be at Middleham, Richard lived with his wife and son the life of a country lord. In his great hall minstrels and players performed for his guests; there were mummings to delight little Edward; he looked to the management of his estates; he encouraged the trade of Middleham by securing a license from the King for the village to hold two fairs a year. 4

Most of the judicial work of his two greatest offices, the con-stableship and the admiralty of England, he delegated to experienced jurists. Dr. William Godyer heard admiralty cases at Hor-ton Quay in Southwark or "in the principal court of Admiralty of England," probably in the White Hall. Godyer also heard cases in the Court of the Constable in the White Hall, as did Master John Aleyn, Doctor of Laws, described, like Godyer, as "lieutenant or commissary" of the Duke of Gloucester. 5

Even so, Richard was often called from home by his manifold affairs. As steward of the Duchy of Lancaster north of Trent, he held official residence at Pontefract Castle; and a variety of business brought him frequently to his estate of Sheriff Hutton, which was conveniently close to the city of York and the principal manors of the Earl of Northumberland. His most demanding office, however, was the wardenship of the West Marches, with its supervisory authority over Northumberland's warden-ship of the East and Middle Marches. Though there was a truce with the Scots throughout the 1470*5, the borders were often troubled by armed forays and casual hostilities. Richard spent much of his time seeing that the frontier fortresses were properly garrisoned and victualed; he was responsible for the repair of fortifications; he conducted conferences with the Scots regarding breaches of the truce; he arranged for the exchange of prisoners and the reception of envoys. 6 Two generations after his death, his accomplishments on the border were still used as a standard of excellence by which to measure the work of a Warden of the Marches. 7 *

Yet Richard's greatest service and the principal source of the devotion which he inspired lay not in his official achievements but in the pervasive influence he won by his labors as friend and justicer to the people of Yorkshire. His brother the King had given him, through the bestowal of powers and estates, preeminence beyond Trent. It was by his own efforts, however, that he became Lord of the North. As the years passed, men of all classes came increasingly to avail themselves of his justice and to seek his aid. Richard's council, whose primary function was to help him govern, developed into a great judicial body, a court of requests to hear poor men's petitions, a court of equity and arbitration.

Among these councilors were Richard's neighbor Lord Scrope of Bolton, who had fought for Warwick against Edward but was now Richard's devoted adherent; Baron Greystoke, who like Scrope was related by marriage to the Nevilles; Sir Francis Lovell, Richard's boyhood friend; Sir James Harrington and Sir William Parre; Sir Richard Nele, Richard Pygott, and Miles Metcalfe, who were lawyers; and probably some of the Justices for the Assize of the northern circuit. For his military affairs and other services demanding bold action, Richard called upon men like Sir James Tyrell, Sir Ralph Assheton, and probably Richard Rat-cliffe. His secretary was a man of vigorous talents named John Kendall, the son of a John Kendall who had spent his life in the service of the House of York. 8

In these times the lesser gentry and yeomen and peasants who held manor land by lease or custom were often at the mercy of the baronage, of neighbors enjoying the protection of a magnate, or of greedy landlords who found ways to get around the law. The practice of evicting tenants was beginning its ruthless course; the common law had grown too rigid, or royal officers were too intimidated, to offer relief in many cases. Richard's council appears to have acted as a court of appeal, in which these oppressed classes were able to obtain some relief of their grievances. Poor tenants, whose only claim to the land they worked was the immemorial custom of the manor, were upheld against landlords

THE NORTHERNER

seeking to dispossess them in order to convert their farms into pasture land. But the work of the council was not confined to rectifying ^economic hardship. Richard "offered good and indifferent justice to all who sought it, were they rich or poor, gentle or simple." He served as arbiter of disputes between individuals, between towns, between factions within a town. His decisions were obeyed because he held the chief authority north of Trent; but his verdict was sought because he offered a sympathetic hearing and fair dealing. He was a bestower of aid as well as judgment, aid to all manner of men and causes. In even so relatively minor a matter as the decay of Holy Trinity Priory at York, he was confidently appealed to, since the priory "without your abundant grace and due reformation will be utterly extinct and expired for ever." * r

In almost all his labors, whether on the Marches or in Yorkshire, Richard found it necessary to pay careful heed to Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, whose family had once been lords of the North and who was the dominant magnate of the region. The official form of their relationship had been developed by the supreme authority Richard held over all the Marches; by the compact to which Richard and Northumberland had sworn before the King's council in 1473; and by a personal indenture Richard negotiated with the Earl a year later, whereby in return for Northumberland's promise of faithful service, he undertook to be his "good lord." Royal commissions indicated a rough division of authority: Richard's special domain was Cumberland and Westmorland; the Earl's, the county of Northumberland; both were appointed to commissions for Yorkshire, in which, sometimes, Richard appears only for the West Riding and Northumberland for the East Riding. 10

Such a parchment partitioning scarcely represented the realities of power, especially since Richard's council had become, by its sheer effectiveness, the first judicial authority of Yorkshire. Richard, therefore, sought to maintain harmony, to associate the Earl with him in judicial cases, to favor his interests and be his friend. In disputes among the gentry he made Northumberland

joint arbiter with himself; he saw to it that the city of York consulted him in its affairs; and in the wars against the Scots, Northumberland was always his second-in-command. 11 *

Yet Richard never touched Henry Percy's heart, which was apparently impervious to the sentiment of gratitude. Though the Earl did good service of war on the borders and avoided any overt indication of dissatisfaction or jealousy, he could not forget that the writs of the House of Percy had once run supreme in Yorkshire. It is in his dealings with the city of York that his discontent most clearly appears. His repeated failures to assert the dominance his family had once held over the town he charged to the account of the Duke of Gloucester. Yet for his own sake as well as the King's, Richard could not afford to let Northumberland treat the metropolis of the North as his private preserve; Edward pointedly bade the citizens to do Richard's bidding; 12 and the citizens, in any case, were so wholeheartedly won to Richard by his benevolent dealing that they had no wish to be at the command of the Earl of Northumberland.

It is this intimate association with the city of York which, preserved in the municipal archives, most vividly reveals Richard's life and work in the North.

York, second only to London in dignity and population, was then and for some years to come at the zenith of its medieval greatness. Built upon the ruins of the Roman Eboracum and enjoying its profitable outlet to the sea by the river Ouse, the capital of the North was a thriving city of some thirteen thousand inhabitants, enclosed in a wall of white stone which was broken by four battlemented and barbicaned gates. Outside the walls nine churches, and three score within, thrust their towers into the air, dominated by the magnificent Minster, which had just been brought to completion in 1472. The castle, crowned by a mighty citadel, was beginning to fall into ruin; but numbers of great buildings proclaimed the city's importance: the Abbey of St. Mary's, Holy Trinity Priory, friaries of the four orders, St. Leonard's Hospital and fifteen smaller hospitals, twelve chantry chapels, Guildhall and the spacious halls of the Merchant Adventurers and Merchant Taylors, and Ouse Bridge, with its

great arch, its chapel, and its council chamber. Proud of its charter of liberties, the city was governed by a Mayor, a Board of Aldermen and a Council of the Twenty-four. Men like Richard York, who had served as adviser to the King, and Miles Metcalfe, a councilor of the Duke of Gloucester's, were happy to be elected officers of the municipality. Well-nigh a hundred different trades offered their wares and services; the Merchant Adventurers of York, founded more than a century before, carried on a lively trade with the Baltic and the Continent, sending their goods down the Ouse for transshipment at Kingston-on-HuIl, and still other merchants belonged to the powerful fellowship of the Wool Staplers. Traders from the Hanse towns, whose noses were proverbially unrivaled at smelling out profits, were now flocking to the city in order to hawk their Teutonic wares, to the great bitterness of the local merchants. The Easterlings were not quite so unpopular, however, as the Scots. Not infrequently the Mayor was called upon to certify that a citizen "defamed of the children of iniquity" by being called a Scot was indeed a proper Englishman. John Harrington, clerk of the city, was so exercised by this ghastly slander murmured against him by Thomas Wharfe that he hastened to solicit testimonials from Sir John Ashe, Lady Fitzhugh, Sir John Conyers, and Sir Robert Harrington that he was no "false Scot" "If this slanderous report," Ashe wrote fiercely, "come to the ears of some young men of the blood that he [Harrington] is of, it will grieve them, I doubt not, which I pray you desire the said Thomas Wharfe to remember."

When Richard of Gloucester paid one of his frequent visits to the city, he usually stayed at the house of the Augustinian friars in Lendal. He could always count on a warm welcome from the Mayor and Aldermen, expressed in gifts of tench and pike, wine by the gallon, and "demain" bread (dominus, or lord's bread), a fine milk loaf. Richard and Anne sometimes visited York to enjoy the pageantry of Christmas and Easter; but as friends of the city they were particularly interested in its famous celebration of the festival of Corpus Christi, which, falling on the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday, came in the fine season of late spring. On this day the great cycle of mystery plays was staged by the

guilds of the city—some fifty sacred scenes acted by five or six hundred performers. Beginning at dawn, the wagons, marshaled on Toft Green, wound slowly through the streets, pausing to exhibit their biblical stories before the principal public places from Holy Trinity Priory to the towering Minster and before the homes of those who were rich, or pious, enough to pay a fee for the privilege. The dramas were distributed among the guilds by a certain logic: the shipwrights, fishmongers, and mariners drew on their experience to play the tale of Noah; the goldsmiths made splendid the Three Kings coming from the East; while the vintners handled the miracle at Cana.

The day after Corpus Christi was reserved for the more solemn and stately ceremonial of the Corpus Christi Guild, which had been founded almost three quarters of a century before. During the festival of 1477 Richard and Anne became members of the Guild—twenty-one years after the induction of Richard's mother Cicely. They walked in the procession of ecclesiastics, Guild members, officers of the city and the companies, which, in a dazzle of torches and tapers and crosses and banners, moved from the Holy Trinity Priory to the Minster. Glittering in their midst was borne the shrine of silver gilt crusted with gerns which housed a beryl vase containing the sacred elements. Along the route the fronts of the houses were hung with arras and the doorways strewn with rushes and flowers.

That the Lord of the North and his wife were happy to become members of this Guild of citizens illustrates the intimate relation which Richard had established with the men of York. If they found themselves in trouble or in need, they inevitably turned to the Duke of Gloucester; and the blaze of his great affairs did not blind him to their hopes and anxieties.

When, in 1476, the city fathers desired to sack their clerk, Thomas Yotten, for various peculations, they ran into serious difficulties. Yotten promptly appealed to the Earl of Northumberland for protection, and the Earl showed himself very willing to interfere in the case. The city ,now turned to Richard, explained the matter to him, and begged him to use his good offices to secure the King's permission for them to discharge their clerk.

Richard wrote to Lord Hastings and to Lord Stanley, recounting the dispute at length and asking them to do him the favor to "move the King's good grace on my behalf." When the King's sergeants of the law had investigated the case, Edward approved the dismissal of Yotten and gave the city liberty to chose whom they would for the office.

Even in so seemingly trivial a matter as fishgarths, Richard was indefatigable in his service to the magistrates of York; for he recognized that in their eyes the matter was not trivial. Fishgarths were weirs or systems of nets and wicker "rooms'' erected in rivers to trap fish, especially salmon. They were hated by the people because they impeded navigation of the rivers and because they diminished the number of fish a poor man might catch by hook and line. Though for centuries Parliament had sought to limit their size and numbers, powerful elements had always been able to circumvent the law, particularly abbots and bishops who needed plentiful supplies of fish for their clergy. In January of 1463 the corporation of York had been granted the power to supervise fishgarths and remove illegal ones from the rivers Ouse and Humber and their navigable tributaries. But this authority could not cope with vested interests. When, however, in 1475 Parliament strengthened the magistrates' hand, they began to take vigorous measures. They started by showing their commission to Richard of Gloucester. He demonstrated liis respect for their authority by dispatching letters to his bailiffs and tenants commanding them instantly to remove all fishgarths that they might have erected. With this powerful support the magistrates proceeded to approach one of the most highly placed offenders, the Bishop of Durham; and they did not fail to point out to the bishop that the Duke of Gloucester had granted to them "his gracious aid and assistance, and over that" had sent "his full honourable letters unto his bailees and tenants." How the Bishop of Durham responded is not on record.