The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (14 page)

Paintings of
The Dance of the Dead
, like those at Hexham Abbey or on the north wall of the cloisters of St Paul’s, showed the ghastly figure of Death leading the ranks of humanity, grand and lowly, in a grotesque round. Sermons and plays taught that with death comes judgement, and that Christians would be judged not according to who they were, but how they had lived their lives. Yet nothing distinguished the life of a prince from that of a pauper more than the ceremonies at the leaving of it. Magnificent in death as in life, the lord processed for the last time at his funeral, attended still by his household and retinue who wore his
badge, and with a brilliant display of heraldic banners. Priests, his poor neighbours and tenants, russet-liveried beggars who had never known him, followed his hearse, bearing lighted candles and praying for his soul. The lord’s funeral demonstrated the honour and continuity of his family, surviving the death of its head, but it also celebrated the spiritual affinity between dead and living, rich and poor, the aspiration of the whole community to collective salvation as it prayed for the lord’s soul and all Christian souls.

The magnate, for all his great wealth and power, depended upon the goodwill and intercession of his fellow parishioners, just as they depended upon his charity and protection. But perhaps his spiritual need was greater, for had not Christ pointed out the special difficulties for the rich in entering the kingdom of heaven? Any contradiction between the pursuit of wealth and honour in this world, and hopes for salvation in the next, might be reconciled by making restitution and by works of charity. Alms-giving could aid the soul of the donor in the afterlife as it relieved the plight of the poor in this. Doles to the poor were called ‘devotions’, crumbs from the rich man’s table ‘Our Lady’s bread’, for such gifts were believed to lay up treasure in heaven. Doles were given at funerals in exchange for the grateful prayers of the poor, which were believed to impart a special blessing. A bequest of £20 for a penny dole for the poor provided no fewer than 4,800 mourners for the needy soul. In their last wills and testaments the lifelong devout and the belatedly repentant made the same testimonies of devotion.

In every church, every day, masses were sung for the souls of the dead. The requiem mass was first sung at the funeral, but masses continued long after death; for the wealthy sometimes for ever, or so they intended. Perpetual chantries were founded in the late middle ages to provide for a priest and his successors to celebrate requiem mass daily for the repose of the founder’s soul, and for the well-being of the living. The multitude of masses celebrated in a parish church – even hourly in some – brought not only intercessory prayers for the souls of the departed but intercession for the salvation of many. The rich endowed prayers for ever; the poor, too, needed and asked for prayers, as many as they could afford. Sharing the same spiritual aspirations and hopes for intercession as their lords, poor craftsmen left a few pence to the high altar in restitution for forgotten tithes or to the fabric of their church; they hoped to share in the benefit of perpetual chantries by joining guilds which would bury them and pray for them; they bade their kin, friends
and neighbours to funeral feasts as lavish as they could offer. Feasting was important in binding the community fractured by the death of a member and as a way of keeping the friend in memory. But some had no memorial, and a pauper’s grave.

Peasants and great nobles alike were born into a family; the tiny society of the nuclear family – a husband, a wife and their children. No bonds in society were stronger than these; no love greater, but no quarrels more bitter, than among those tied by blood. On earth, as in heaven, the society of the family was patriarchal, headed by the father, who was to be feared as well as loved; who ruled and judged his family, as well as caring for it. The figure of the father was central to all authority: monarchical, papal, clerical. Society was strongly patrilineal, defined by the father. When a woman married she took her husband’s surname. She left her own patrilineage, her father’s family, and entered another family, another patrilineage. The children of the marriage were, in most essential matters – before the law and to her friends and family – his children rather than hers. In the family, founded upon the monogamous marriage, the wife was the necessary, cherished, but subordinate partner. A woman, even a wife, was always inferior, second best. As a sister she was inferior to her brothers, as a wife inferior to her husband. Only as a widow could she, sometimes, escape this depressed condition.

Rich or poor, the legal definition of the family was the same. Then as now, English kinship was bilateral: that is, individuals traced their descent from both father and mother and were equally related to female as to male cousins, to nieces as to nephews. There was kinship by blood (consanguinity) and kinship created by marriage (affinity), for marriage made the in-law’s family kin also. When a family chose godparents, spiritual affinity was established, for through baptism not only the child but the child’s family became related to the godparents. Children were usually named after their principal godparent, and this – not parental carelessness – was why two children in a family might share the same Christian name. The Church had introduced elaborate canonical prohibitions on marriage by degree of kinship. Those whom one could not marry were one’s kin, and vice-versa. Marriage was forbidden between men and women related in the fourth degree of kinship – that is, descended from the same great-great-grandfather – nor could a widow marry the brother of her former husband. Affinity was a bar to marriage.
Adulterous alliance created kinship also, as Henry VIII would forget, when it suited him to forget, and remember when it suited him to remember. Yet the Church rarely intervened to annul the marriages of those married within the forbidden degrees. In small and insular societies the rules had to be suspended or ignored if women were to find husbands and men wives. It was said that ‘all Cornish gentlemen are cousins’. The citizens of Cork, according to the chronicler Richard Stanihurst, ‘trust not the country adjoining but match in wedlock among themselves only’. In 1537 complaints came from Dublin that no jury could be empanelled because of ‘challenging of consanguinity and affinity within the ninth degree’. At that degree, all of Anglo-Irish society was related.

To what extent did people recognize their wider kin, and did kinship create bonds of alliance, loyalty, friendship, duty? In Gaelic Ireland kinship lay at the heart of society, of politics, of justice; it was the primary social bond. There, ancestral piety and a preoccupation with the cult of the dead were even more deeply entrenched than elsewhere in Europe. People were defined by membership of their clan – literally, ‘offspring’, a corporate family claiming descent from a common male ancestor – and of their sept, a branch of the clan. Still in 1589, as centuries earlier, annalists recorded the death of a lord thus: ‘Turlough, the son of Teige, son of Conor, son of Turlough, son of Teige O’Brien of Bel-atha-an chomraic, died; and his death was the cause of great lamentation.’ The obligations and loyalty due to kin, this natural affinity, were fundamental. This was a world which knew the extent of kinship, even to the most distant cousins, because there were advantages to knowing it. Knowledge of kin was no mere genealogical curiosity: power and inheritance depended upon it, and kin made real claims on each other, on their possessions, even on their lives. Succession to lordships was elective. It passed, in theory, to the eldest and worthiest among the descendants of former lords within four generations – the
derbfine
group of early Irish law. The whole system of justice in Gaelic Ireland was predicated upon the principle of ‘kincogish’, the responsibility of the clan for the actions of its members.

Kinship was a powerful force in the extreme instability of late medieval and early modern Ireland. So it was also on the borders with Scotland, in Cumberland, and in Redesdale and North Tynedale in Northumberland, where the ‘surnames’ – kin groups organized for the mutual protection and security of near neighbours related by blood – had formed, perhaps in the fourteenth century, perhaps earlier, to contain the effects of
constant warfare between England and Scotland. In Weardale the unity and strength of the family groupings of the upland kin gave the communities power to mobilize against external aggression. In all these regions, where pastoral farming was practised, the custom of partible inheritance was widespread. Here this pattern of inheritance – gavelkind – promised sons a share in family lands, and encouraged them to stay at home. Nowhere else in England were the ties of kinship so binding; certainly not among the lower orders.

In the restricted society of the nobility and gentry of England, the sense of lineage was vital to its members’ self-conception. Seeing themselves as part of a line, with a future and a past, they recognized a compelling duty to the family that came before and would come after, and to the land which was the source of the family’s wealth and power. The present head of the family was steward of the patrimony, and it was his responsibility to pass this inheritance to his descendants. Laws of property and laws of entail ensured that estates were not lost to the male family line in the event of a failure to produce children. When William, Lord (later Marquess of) Berkeley (d. 1492) sacrificed the interests of his brother and heir to his own, his seventeenth-century biographer condemned his unnatural behaviour: ‘This man was born for himself and intended his house and family should end in himself.’ A noble needed to assert the family ‘honour’ and ‘worship’, and to maintain the wealth and authority of the family commensurate with its inherited status and right. To exercise ‘lordship’ was the natural prerogative of the leading lineages and to the lord was owed the service and fidelity of servants and tenants who held the family’s lands, and of the dependent gentry who made up his affinity. In uncertain times, the affinity might rise in arms for the lord and the kin be called upon. Yet by the end of the sixteenth century kinsmen were no longer bound in loyalty to name and blood to act; especially not to act against the Crown. For the nobility and gentry, as the century wore on, the sense of family became less a practical, political consideration than a genealogical obsession, as those of ‘ancient blood’ sought to prove their descent through many generations, and arrivistes invented theirs. Heraldry was studied as the source of memory for a lineage and as a flamboyant declaration of descent.

The world of kin was open and flexible. Recognition of kin depended upon affection, neighbourhood, cupidity and politics, beyond the simple ties of blood. People could behave as kinsmen should to those who in genealogical terms had little claim upon them, and indigent cousins
would look, hopefully, to grand and distant relations for favour. Even for the nobility and gentry, loyalty and pride in name and blood did not transcend the interests of the head of the family and his heir, and the stern recognition of the paramount duty of defending the estate. For upper and lower orders alike, the sense of family that mattered and where the ties of obligation and affection were strongest, ran up, and down, through three generations, from parents to children and grandchildren, and across to nephews, nieces and cousins. The family was defined very narrowly indeed when it came to the transmission of property. Through most of England, except, unusually, in the Weald of Kent, and in the remote uplands and the Scottish Marches, among almost all those with something to pass on, the principle of primogeniture prevailed. Lands and wealth passed to the eldest son, whose right was accepted without question, if not always without resentment. For the landed society of England, wealth was something to be inherited, not created; passed on, not passed around. Generation by generation, the gap between the prosperity of the head of the family and his descendants, and the younger brothers and theirs widened, as the families of younger sons made their gradual social descent. Yet in noble and gentry families younger brothers were usually left some modest annuity and daughters were given a marriage portion; not only through affection, but because it did not accord with the ‘worship’ of a house for sons to live in penury or daughters to marry beneath them.

The family represented an ideal of permanence which was spiritual as well as secular. Lords were buried in churches near their family seats. Entombed in chantries resplendent with the family arms, with prayers for souls endowed in perpetuity, lords asserted their authority even in death, and the immortality of their family. Heraldic emblems were displayed on tombs, in windows, on vestments, in pavements, as symbols of the undying family, in despite of death and infertility. The emblems of the northern nobility – the saltire of the Nevilles of Raby, the bend azure of the Scropes of Bolton – were emblazoned in local churches. In the late fifteenth century some nobles and gentlemen still chose to lie under effigies of recumbent knights in armour, with a faithful dog at their feet, for they continued to see themselves as a martial order. In Ireland that memorial tradition continued longer, and there, where mourning was so extravagant that there was a proverb ‘to weep Irish’, lords like Tibbot
na Long
of Mayo in the early seventeenth century had ‘weepers’ sculpted on their tombs.