The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (46 page)

Somewhere in the 1370s, a beautiful young noblewoman is looking at Geoffrey Chaucer. She is teasing him, looking him in the eye, smiling, and laughing. She will remain there like that, forever, just like the Canterbury pilgrims will forever be riding along together on their way to Canterbury, never to return. Men are gathered around the poet, listening as he describes the woman, her smiling laughter, so fresh and fair and free. They can tell he still feels the sadness of her death. What they hear is what we hear. We might interpret the lines differently, and we might misunderstand a few words (we are, after all, strangers in this century), but some inkling of Chaucer’s affection for this woman comes across to his audience—to them, to us, and everyone in between. Whole centuries of us are there in the echoing hall of time, listening to Chaucer’s poem. If Gower takes the storyteller’s place, we may hear about the terror of the Peasants’ Revolt; if Froissart, the chi-valric gloss of knightly warfare in France; if Langland, the injustice of the clergy; if the
Gawain
poet, his grief for his little girl, his pearl. And in listening we may offer all these men, women, and children a degree of recognition: the sort of dignified memory and sympathy which today we offer to those who gave their lives in war.

You may not agree. You may think that living for the here and now is all that matters. Or you may think that judging the past as dirty and cruel in some way establishes our superiority over our ancestors. But if you believe that we are the inheritors of a living, vibrant past, and that an understanding of what we have been is vital to an understanding of what we are today, and what we will be in the future, then you may find yourself becoming a thoughtful time traveler, setting out on the highway of human history, guided by Chaucer down all the alleys of fourteenth-century life. You might even consider joining him and his companions in that tavern, the Tabard, in Southwark, and yourself becoming a pilgrim. At the very least you will hear some good stories.

Notes

1.
These cries are from the early fifteenth-century poem “London Lick-penny” once attributed to John Lydgate. A similar series of fourteenth-century cries appears at the end of the prologue of Langland’s
Piers Plowman.

2.
The figures in this table come from the poll tax returns of 1377 as tabulated in Hoskins,
Local History,
pp. 277-78. The population estimates are drawn from the fact that in sixteenth-century England about 32 percent of the population was aged below fourteen, and that this figure is a reasonable estimate for the late fourteenth century. In addition it allows for two other facts: (1) that clergy and beggars were exempt from paying, and (2) some of those who ought to have paid did not. As a result, the approximate population figures are based on the estimate of 6 percent of the total civic population being taxpayers, the remainder being children under fourteen (32 percent), clergy (2 percent), beggars and evaders (6 percent collectively). The areas of doubt are the proportions of beggars and evaders. If 10 percent of the population evaded, and another 10 percent were beggars, then taxpayers amount to only about 46 percent of the population, and the estimates given here should be increased accordingly. Some cities have been ascribed much larger populations than these tax-based figures indicate. Winchester has been calculated to have had a population of about 7,000 to 8,000 in 1400, three times this estimate for 1377. See Dyer,
Standards,
p. 189. The figure for Plymouth is no longer extant; 1,700 is Professor Hoskins’s estimate. Note: Gloucester and Oxford did not become cities until the sixteenth century

3.
If the population of England was 2.5 million, and at least 170,000 lived in these thirty cities, and the two hundred other towns and cities have
an average population of 650, the proportion is 12 percent. Other writers have suggested that as little as 5 percent of the population were urban dwellers in the fourteenth century (e.g., Platt,
Medieval Town,
p. 15, drawing on the work of Lawrence Stone) but these figures are based on the assumption that only 150,000 people lived in towns. About 190,000 people lived in just the largest forty (as listed by Hoskins). So the figure is much more likely to be nearer the one in seven (14.3 percent) in Dyer,
Standards,
p. 23, or even the one in five (20 percent) suggested in Dyer,
Everyday Life,
xv

4.
Riley (ed.),
Memorials,
p. 279.

5.
Riley (ed.),
Memorials,
p.
67.
The other details in this paragraph are from the same source.

6.
Brown, Colvin and Taylor,
History of the King’s Works,
I, p. 534.

7.
Second only to Edward Ill’s work at Windsor Castle. See Brown, Colvin, and Taylor,
History of the King’s Works,
I, p. 157.

8.
This example dates from the thirteenth century. See Scott (ed.),
Every One a Witness,
p. 42.

9.
Henry III was importing fir boards from Norway in the previous century. See Wood,
Medieval House,
pp. 395-96.

10.
Details on the trees have been taken from Salzman,
Building
(mainly from chapter 16), Esmond and Jeanette Harris,
Guinness Book of Trees,
and Cantor,
Medieval Landscape,
p. 63. The reference to elm (which is otherwise not noted in these books) is due to the reference in Riley (ed.),
Memorials
to an elm too near the walls of London being cut down in the year 1314. Elms also apparently grew in the twelfth century at Smithfield (Morley
Bartholomew Fair,
p. 9) and, most famously, at Tyburn.

11.
Quoted in Coulton (ed.),
Social Life,
p. 2.

12.
Dyer,
Standards,
pp. 258-60.

13.
Hoskins,
English Landscape,
p. 118.

14.
Barnwell and Adams,
House Within,
p. 4.

15.
This figure has been extrapolated from (a) the area of the county as described in Lewis,
Topographical Dictionary,
and (b) a population figure derived from the poll tax returns of 1377 on the same basis as the figures for the towns. It presumes that 40 percent of the population was thirteen years of age or less, or clergy, or avoided the tax illegally or were destitute. It is not possible directly to compare these figures with modern ones, as the definition of a town is differently composed in the modern world (motor transport and the railways having changed the relationships of towns and rural areas). Surrey—which had a rural density of about 40 people per square mile in 1377—now has in excess of 2,000 for those areas that have
not
been swallowed by Greater London.

It may be of interest that Norfolk, Suffolk, and Huntingdonshire (all of which remain largely rural) have between 381 and 442 people per square mile (according to the 2001 census); Rutland has 243 people per square mile, Dorset 389, Devon 273, and Cornwall 378. Cumberland and Westmorland, combined as Cumbria, have 218. The population density of modern counties is determined to a far greater extent by the towns and industries within them, rather than the nature and landscape of the county itself.

1.
See Hatcher,
Plague, Population,
pp. 13-14, 71. The poll tax of 1377, supposedly leveled on all the population over fourteen, with only the clergy and the naked poor excepted, shows 1,386,196 taxpayers. If one uses the same estimate used above—that this represents about 60 percent of the total population—then the total would be about 2.31 million. Earlier estimates are normally extrapolated from this, taking into consideration the level of plague-related mortality in 1348-49, 1361, and 1368. The population was continuously falling for a whole century, to the 1440s. See Hatcher,
Plague, Population,
p. 27.

2.
Dyer,
Standards,
p. 182.

3.
Hatcher,
Plague, Population,
especially p. 71. The age-related statistics here are estimates based on the sixteenth-century figures in Wrigley and Schofield,
Population History,
especially table A3.1 on p. 528. These statistics relate to a life expectancy at age twenty-five of about thirty-two more years, which is in excess of the estimates of between twenty and thirty years at age twenty in both Dyer,
Standards,
p. 182 and Harvey
Living and Dying,
p. 128 (both based on fifteenth-century data). Hence the slight revision downwards in average age from the figures in Wrigley and Schofield’s table A3.1. Modern figures have been taken from the website of the Office of National Statistics.

4.
Dyer,
Standards,
pp. 316-17. See also Roberts and Manchester,
Archaeology of Disease,
p. 57, which gives 171.8 cm (5 ft. 7 in.) for men.

5.
Greene,
Medieval Monasteries,
p. 161.

6.
Roberts and Manchester,
Archaeology of Disease,
p. 75.

7.
Coulton,
Chaucer,
p. 13.

8.
Cokayne,
Complete Peerage,
V p. 629.

9.
Very briefly there is also the rank of marquis. Robert de Vere was created marquis of Dublin in 1385, a title that he technically still held after being created duke of Ireland the following year and did not become extinct until his death in 1392. In addition, John Beaufort was created
marquis of Dorset by Richard II in 1397; his brother Henry IV stripped him of the title on his return to England in 1399. It was then declared “un-English.”

10.
For Isabella, see Mortimer,
Greatest Traitor,
p. 171. For Gaunt, see Dyer,
Standards,
p. 36, where his income is given as £12,474; Goodman,
John of Gaunt,
p. 341 gives his income for the years ending at Michaelmas 1394 and 1395 as “about £10,000 net (£11,750 gross).”

11.
See Dyer,
Standards,
pp. 30-31 for incomes of the knightage and lesser gentry

12.
The number of parliamentary prelates varied greatly In 1307 fifty-four were summoned. In 1399 just twenty-six: the abbots of Peterborough, Glastonbury St. John’s Colchester, Bury St. Edmunds, Abingdon, St. Mary’s York, Waltham Holy Cross, Crowland, Bardney St. Benet Hulme, Malmesbury Reading, St. Albans, Selby Thorney Battle, Westminster, St. Augustine’s Canterbury, Cirencester, Evesham, St. Peter’s Gloucester, Ramsey, Hyde by Winchester, Winchcombe, and Shrewsbury. In addition, the prior of Coventry was regularly summoned. Note that all the prelates in Parliament are given precedence over the earls, even though dukes are given precedence over archbishops. See
PROME,
1399 September, introduction.

13.
The medieval English dioceses are Bath and Wells, Canterbury, Chich-ester, Coventry and Lichfield, Ely, Exeter, Hereford, Lincoln, London, Norwich, Rochester, Salisbury, Winchester, and Worcester. The Welsh ones are Bangor, Llandaff, St. Asaph’s and St. David’s.

14.
Dyer,
Standards, p. 36.

15.
This estimate is based on the large proportion with £50-£500 in
Valor Ec-clesiasticus
as noted in Knowles and Hadcock,
Medieval Religious Houses.

16.
Dyer,
Standards,
p. 119, quoting E. A. Kosminsky
Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century
(Oxford: 1956), pp. 216-23.

17.
Coulton,
Medieval Panorama,
p.
76.

18.
Finberg,
Tavistock Abbey,
p.
77.

19.
A 1279 lease of a whole manor to its chief tenants is printed in Fisher andjurica (eds.),
Documents,
pp. 102-103.

20.
Dyer,
Standards,
pp. 193-94.

21.
Quoted in Coulton (ed.),
Social Life,
p. 433.

22.
Quoted in Leyser,
Medieval Women,
p.
97.

23.
Leyser,
Medieval Women,
p. 114.

24.
There are a few exceptions to this. Edward I campaigning against the Scots in his sixties is perhaps the most obvious. Roger, Lord Mortimer of Chirk, took arms against Edward II in 1322, at the age of sixty-six. Sir Thomas Erpingham took part in the battle of Agincourt (1415) at the age of sixty Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, rebelled several
times against Henry IV in his sixties, dying in battle at the age of sixty-six.

1.
The story appears in Riley (ed.),
Historia Anglicana,
I, pp. 418-23. It is probably propaganda, as the outrage is terrible and yet the nunnery not mentioned. No nunnery of this size in the vicinity can be identified. Richard Barber in his
ODNB
article on Sir John Arundel points to some corroborating details though. Either way, Walsingham believed that these outrages took place. They are therefore indicative of the violence people believed was inherent in society

2.
Furnivall (ed.),
Babees Book,
p. 46.

3.
Bradley (ed.),
Dialogues,
p. 9.

4.
Coulton (ed.),
Social Life,
pp. 519-20.

5.
Hamilton, “Character of Edward II,” p. 8.

6.
Mortimer,
Greatest Traitor,
p. 214.

7.
Coulton (ed.),
Social Life,
p. 470.

8.
Woolgar,
Great Household,
p. 1.

9.
Few fourteenth-century churchwardens’ accounts survive. According to the list in the appendix to Hutton,
Rise and Fall,
pp. 263-93, the earliest are Bridgwater (1318), St. Michael, Bath (1349), St. James, Hedon (1350), Ripon (1354), St. John, Glastonbury (1366), St. Augustine, Hedon (1371), St. Nicholas, Hedon (1379), and Tavistock (1392). That these cover both the north of the country and the southwest (from Yorkshire to West Devon) is a good indication that the format was more widely known in the fourteenth century than the few extant accounts suggest.