Richard The Chird (38 page)

London was, however, more than a city of merchants. No less than ninety-seven parish churches thrust their steeples into the air, dominated by the spire of St. Paul's rising five hundred feet from the cathedral on Ludgate Hill, and a score of great religious houses sheltered within their walls cloisters, gardens, hospitals, chapels, shrines, and chantries. The city resounded with the clangor of bells and the voices of singing clergy; the city shimmered in the colors of church pageantry. On feast days processions of choristers wound through the streets bearing banners, lighted candles, and crosses. Funerals were almost as grand, with more singers, heralds, torchbearers, and poor men bearing white staves. Bishops and mitred abbots, often in London on business, rode as stately as peers at the head of trains of liveried servants, clerics, and men-at-arrns. In parish churches and monastic houses glowed many a silver or jewel-crusted reliquary. The Bohemian visitors of 1466 were dazzled upon viewing, in London alone, "twenty golden sepulchres adorned with precious stones." They were no less moved by the beauty of English singing. After hearing the chorus of sixty voices in the King's Chapel, they decided that "there are no better singers in the world."

London was also the city of the King and his court; besides the palace at Westminster, there were three royal residences within the walls, the Tower and Baynard's Castle and the Wardrobe. It was the court which provided the most thrilling pageantry of London: scarcely less spectacular than coronations were the tournaments, royal weddings and christenings, victorious entries into the city, the reception of foreign potentates, the welcoming home of the King. On these occasions the Mayor and Aldermen donned scarlet gowns trimmed with fur; the chief citizens rode

in violet or green. Tapestries fluttered from windows; trumpets and clarions sounded above the shouting of the crowd; tableaux were staged in the principal places of the city.

As colorful as any spectacle were the costumes of the age. During the reign of Edward the Fourth the attire of courtiers had grown ever more gorgeous, and the rest of the world followed the lead of court. Lords emulated the King; squires and gentlemen, the lords; citizens, even priests, could not resist the quickening impulse to go as richly clad as their means allowed— this despite Edward's sumptuary laws, which sought to confine men to costumes appropriate to their several stations in life. What the present age vaguely pictures as medieval dress was the court costume of Richard's day: men wore robes of velvet or brocade and black velvet caps with turned-up edges, or doublets (tunics) of green or scarlet with padded shoulders and slashed sleeves, and long hose ending in shoes with pointed "pikes"; women wore the steeple headdress, or "hennin," which trailed a mist of fine linen, and low-necked gowns with full trains. These garments were enriched by a profusion of rings, bracelets, necklaces, and for the men, honorific collars of suns and roses.

This medley of color and life which was London had long ago begun to push beyond the walls. Along the chief roads it reached thin tentacles toward the neighboring villages of Islington, Clerkenwell, Hoxton, Kennington. Southwark, Mancini noted, "is a suburb remarkable for its streets and buildings, which, if it were surrounded by walls, might be called a second city." So populous had the district from Ludgate to Westminster now become that to Mancini's eye it was a "suburb continuing uninterruptedly from the metropolis and differing in appearance very slightly from it." This was really only a ribbon of buildings along Fleet Street and the Strand—lined with the palaces of bishops— which at Charing Cross turned south to follow the river to Westminster.

A metropolis it was, and yet redolent of the countryside— girdled by farms, by fields where youths practiced archery, and harboring many a green garden. On May Day the Maypole was still set up in Cornhill. Maidens danced in the streets for garlands

on summer evenings while boys armed with makeshift shields and staves hacked at each other in mimic warfare. And on the bosom of the river, green-banked, floated the white swans. "London," sang the Scot William Dunbar, enchanted by what he saw, "thou art of Townes A per set"

Strong be thy wallis that about thee standis;

Wise be the people that within thee dwellis; Fresh be thy ryver with his lusty strandis;

Blithe be thy churches, wele sownynge be thy bellis; Riche be thy merchauntis in substaunce that excellis;

Fair be their wives, right lovesom, white and small; Qere be thy virgyns, lusty under kellis:

London, thou art the flour of Cities all.

Through the gates of the city ran roads to all the quarters of the kingdom. In wet weather patches of mire made for slow going; some of the lesser roads were \vell-nigh impassable in winter, but they were on the whole not nearly so bad as they are usually thought to have been. Causeways carried them above marshy riverbanks or across swamps; bridges were often built solidly of stone. It was not uncommon now for men to leave bequests of money to keep the local stretch of highway in repair. The arrow-straight stone roads of the Romans, Watling Street running northwest and Ermine Street running northeast, still bore their burden of carts and horsemen. It is doubtful if the highways of the eighteenth century were much better.

Like London, the countryside looked other than it does today. To the Bohemian visitors, who saw only the southern counties, the population seemed remarkably thick; but French and Italian travelers, perhaps venturing farther, thought the land sparsely inhabited. They were struck by the great forests, like those of Dean and Rockingham and Nottingham which spread, each of them, across almost a thousand square miles. Swamps there were in plenty too, and lonely expanses of heath and moor and waste, and abundant streams. In the valleys and by the rivers nestled towns and villages, still surrounded by the open fields and common pastures of an earlier day. By modern standards the lot of the peasant was hard, narrow, often brutish. But to foreigners

the prosperity of the country was no less remarkable than that of London. Not only did the nobles surround their manor houses with splendid parks and well-kept enclosures. Everywhere one met thriving franklins; the tenant farmers, who held by copyhold or leasehold from an abbey or manor, seemed to live well; and the peasants had plenty to eat, stout clothing, and a few acres of their own. Serfdom lingered, especially in the remoter parts, but it was already an exception and an anachronism. Sir John Fortescue complacently contrasted the misery of the French peasant with the independence and well-being of his English counterpart.

"The riches of England/* affirmed the Italian observer who followed Mancini, "are greater than those of any other country in Europe. . , . There is no small innkeeper, however poor and humble he may be, who does not serve his table with silver dishes and drinking cups and no one who has not in his house silver plate to the amount of at least £100 ... is considered by the English to be a person of any consequence." Under King Richard, England owned a balanced prosperity she would not see again for a long time. In just a few years a hard and unhappy era would commence for the lower classes, enforced by rising prices and widespread enclosure of lands and eviction of tenants, the Tudors' tendency to ignore the suffering of the politically impotent levels of society, and Henry the Eighth's wanton debasement of the coinage. In alliance with the House of Tudor the ambitious burgesses and gentry would claw their way to wealth across the face of the poor. "Sheep ate the men," said Thomas More, referring to the conversion of arable land to pasture. "These decaying times of charity," Stow called the sixteenth century.

The prosperity of Yorkist England had wrought few changes upon the face of the countryside. Dominant upon the skyline stood yet the castle or the abbey, built three centuries before by the magnificent energies of the Normans. Castles no longer had much utility as fortresses. When the Lancastrians tried to defend Bamburgh against King Edward in 1464, the royal artillery so battered the walls that great blocks of masonry went flying into the sea and Sir Ralph Grey's chamber toppled down

on his head. Though Edward and Richard had kept the strongholds in the Welsh and Scottish Marches up to the mark and accomplished notable repairs at Windsor, Warwick, Nottingham, Middleham, Barnard Castle, and a few other places, a number of castles, it appears, would soon be abandoned or were already being allowed to fall into ruin. No new ones were being built. Noblemen deserted their dark keeps to dwell in more comfortable apartments erected within their courtyards, and cut windows in forbidding walls, as Richard had done at Middleham; but manor houses, galleried and oriel-windowed, were still almost a generation distant. The increased ease of living which marked the Yorkist period is mainly to be found in a greater profusion and richness of carpets, cushions, tapestries, chests, and beds; and in the growing desire for privacy, which the lord and his family found in privy chambers and solars, retreating from the hurly-burly of communal life in the great hall.

The religious houses, too, stood outwardly unchanged from Angevin days, except for their accumulation of precious adornments. An impression of their size, their opulence, and their state-liness still lingers in the mighty ruins of Glastonbury, Tintern, Fountains. "The abbeys," poor, betrayed Robert Aske said in the hard days of their dissolution, "was one of the beauties of this realm to all men passing through the same." The Italian visitor thought that "the great monasteries are more like baronial palaces than religious houses. Many of these monasteries possess unicorns* horns of an extraordinary size." Not even St. Martin of Tours could compare with the richness of Edward the Confessor's tomb; but the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury "surpassed all belief," plated as it was with pure gold; and yet the gold was "scarcely visible for the variety of precious stones with which it is studded, such as sapphires, diamonds, rubies . and emeralds . . . but everything is left far behind by a ruby, not larger than a man's thumb, which is set to the right of the altar." This was the famous "Regal of France" given by Louis VII.

But within their walls, the great abbeys and nunneries showed a sad decline from the ages when they had stood as fortresses

of Christian devotion and of civilization as well. There were now only about seven thousand monks and two thousand nuns, scarcely enough in many establishments to maintain the offices of the Church. The world outside the cloister had grown brighter, more hopeful, safer. These survivors of another time were more lazy than evil, leading humdrum lives, clinging to their privileges, and out of habit, continuing their rites and their charitable works. Their worldliness sprang partly from an invasion of the world which they had encouraged. In return for a lump sum of money, called a "corrody," a man or woman might pass the rest of his days in a religious house, bringing with him his secular way of life and, often, his dogs and servants as well These speculative annuities not only lamed the spirit but, in the case of long-lived folk, lightened the purse of the abbey.

The monks had long ago resigned spiritual leadership to the friars; but the friars, despite their reputation for learning and preaching, had now grown lethargic and fond of worldly possessions. The secular clergy were no better. Many churches were served by ignorant and ill-paid vicars who could hardly mumble a paternoster; priests sought the well-paid, easy posts of officiating in a chantry or of being "retained" by a guild or of serving as secretary and adviser to a lord or gentleman. While bishops accumulated benefices, they stayed far from their sees, serving as the royal officers of state.

Monks, friars, bishops, deans—such as they were—were symbols of the time. The vast, rich, complex, massive institution of the Church lay upon the land rather like a fat whale stranded in a lagoon abounding in its food—not uncomfortable enough and too well fed, too inert, to try to move in any direction at all. Though pricked by the Lollards and stung by hostile criticism from the laity into holding tight to its privileges, the Church was not sufficiently challenged to attempt or even imagine reform. It held a third of the land, exacted a tenth of men's income, and charged exorbitant fees for burials, christenings, the proving of wills. Yet the powerful demands of a century before that it be made to disgorge its wealth were now seldom heard. This ac-

quiescence probably reflects the growth of prosperity in Yorkist days; men had discovered that they and the kingdom could thrive without looting the ecclesiastical establishment,

The slide from ardent faith characterized laymen as well as clergy—it was a mutual movement. If ecclesiastics no longer waged flaming battle for souls, numbers of souls had been distracted by new interests from the fear of eternity and the hunger

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for grace and an unthinking dependence upon Holy Church. Our Italian visitor was puzzled by a seeming paradox: though the English faithfully attend Mass, say many paternosters in public, and do not "omit any forms incumbent upon good Christians; there are, however, many who have various opinions concerning religion." The bite of the comment lies equally in the phrase "omit any forms." Observance was often habitual rather than urgent; it also offered the means for a conspicuous consumption of goods. The lovely parish churches built, re-edified, or adorned in this period—the "wool" churches of East Anglia, the towered churches of Somerset, that jewel of stone built by William Canynges at Bristol, St. Mary Redcliffe—represent, in part, ways of spending money, in an age which did not possess many such ways, in order to display power and command esteem. Now was occurring the last great surge in ecclesiastical building and with it the one artistic glory of Edward's and Richard's time: perpendicular architecture. This cannot match the spiritual aspiration, the daring, the haunting wonder of earlier Gothic; but in sheer power of loveliness is it not pre-eminent? It is, in any case, the end of something. After, long after, comes Wren, and stone grows monumental and mute. Though perpendicular architecture has not forgotten the spirit, it revels in the physical beauty of shapes and colors. The gorgeousness of its fan vaulting, the dazzling ostentation of its glass, the proud assertion of its straight ines, sing man's exnltatioa in his power to create a thing goodly to look opon. There are four supreme examples: Eton College chapel, King's College chapel at Cambridge, the chapel of St. George, and Henry VTTs chapel at Westminster Abbey. The first three were founded between 1450 and 1485; the last is their child and closes the story,