In-depth history documentary exploring the social and economic conditions in Medieval Britain. This period of the Middle Ages saw regal splendor, agricultural change, and the signing of the Magna Carta—the great charter curbing King John's powers, including those of all future British monarchs thereafter.
This film also looks at the aftermath of the Black Death and the effects on the peasantry that saw a growing movement for emancipation, which would lead to anarchy with the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Medieval Britain also experienced almost continual warfare, such as the Hundred Years' War against France, most famous for the Battle of Agincourt led by King Henry V, and the Wars of the Roses, the bloodiest civil war and most turbulent period in England's history, with the most famous battle taking place at Bosworth Field, concluding with the death of King Richard III.
Filmed at a reconstructed medieval village, Dr. Martin Lowry, Dr. Robert Swanson, and Andrew Brown provide expert commentary and analysis on a time of great upheaval.
This film also looks at the aftermath of the Black Death and the effects on the peasantry that saw a growing movement for emancipation, which would lead to anarchy with the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Medieval Britain also experienced almost continual warfare, such as the Hundred Years' War against France, most famous for the Battle of Agincourt led by King Henry V, and the Wars of the Roses, the bloodiest civil war and most turbulent period in England's history, with the most famous battle taking place at Bosworth Field, concluding with the death of King Richard III.
Filmed at a reconstructed medieval village, Dr. Martin Lowry, Dr. Robert Swanson, and Andrew Brown provide expert commentary and analysis on a time of great upheaval.
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TVTranscript
00:00The
00:30In the Middle Ages, which cover approximately the period from the Norman invasion of Britain
00:48in 1066 to the end of the Wars of the Roses in 1485, England moved from being an almost
00:56exclusively agricultural, feudal society to a society on the threshold of creating an empire.
01:11Medieval society was based on the feudal system, which can be said to have come of age in England
01:17under William the Conqueror. He introduced the idea that all land was the property of the crown
01:24to dispose of as the king thought fit. Large tracts of countryside were granted to the king's
01:31supporters who, in return, were bound to pay rent and offer their services when required.
01:38This usually meant supplying a certain number of armed knights in time of war.
01:44The lords would then rent their land to tenant farmers under similar conditions.
01:48These farmers were known as serfs or villains, and their lives were overshadowed by extreme hardship.
01:58A serf was effectively the property of the lord for whom he worked.
02:03He was not permitted to leave the land and go where he wished.
02:07If he tried to, he would be brought back and punished.
02:10Neither could he marry without the permission of the lord, which was also required should the serf wished to allow his son or daughter to marry.
02:22On the death of the serf, an heir had to pay a tax to the lord before he could continue to farm,
02:29besides what was known as a heriot, often the best animal on the farm.
02:34On top of the burden of working his own land to feed his family, the serf had to spend about three days each week working on the land of his lord,
02:47a service rendered in lieu of rent.
02:50Ploughing, sowing, harvesting, of course, but also repairing the manor house, building barns, and running errands to the local villages.
02:59A very time-consuming and tiring business.
03:03Dues, in the form of produce, constantly flowed into the lord's stores.
03:09This system of bartering came about because of the lack of money in circulation.
03:15The tasks of the serf could be extremely burdensome, although they did vary from manor to manor.
03:22As a serf, you might be expected to work on the lord's land for just the harvest time.
03:27But you might also be expected to work perhaps three or four times a week,
03:33and then perform extra labour services on the lord's land, work which was called boon work.
03:40But as a serf, you were also required to perform other sorts of obligations.
03:45For instance, if you wanted to pasture your pigs in the lord's woods,
03:49well then you had to pay the lord a certain kind of rent, probably a hogshead of wine or something like that.
03:56For all he undertook, the serf required the lord's approval.
04:00However, as there were not enough people to work the land, the lord would be loath to turn anyone off his demean,
04:09and there were customs preventing a man's land from being taken from him,
04:14or his services and dues being too great a liability.
04:17In that sense at least, the serf had security of tenure.
04:22And while the lord was permitted to chastise, he was not permitted to mutilate or kill his tenant.
04:30Any disputes that arose amongst the serfs themselves, or any agricultural grievances were heard in the manor court.
04:38The manorial court essentially dealt with agricultural disputes, disputes over land.
04:47But it also dealt with the enforcement of the lord's rights.
04:52If, for instance, a serf had not paid his licence to get married, he would be punished by a fine in the manorial court.
05:00The court would be overseen by the lord's bailiff or steward, who would gather the court together.
05:10And the villagers themselves would also elect a reeve to speak for them.
05:15The defendant at the court would also be expected to gain or to gather oath helpers who would vouch for his honesty and his good name.
05:26But the court didn't often deal with major criminal cases.
05:32Those tended to be dealt with by the royal justices.
05:36And indeed, the royal courts were places you could apply to get justice done on major land disputes.
05:44The judgment, or doom, was pronounced by the peasants, taking account of local oral and written custom.
05:51Most people were serfs in the early Middle Ages, and although it was possible for a man to buy his freedom, the expense involved and the unwillingness of the lord to lose a labourer were often insurmountable barriers.
06:07If they were required under feudal custom to perform military service for the lord or for the king, and they found they didn't have the right military equipment, and they were not in any case trained for war, what they could do was pay a kind of tax called scootage, which released them from actually performing military service themselves.
06:31And scootage was also useful to the king, because quite often the king would prefer to actually have money in order to raise an army, pay mercenaries, and have a properly trained force, rather than people who perhaps were not really military men.
06:50Early medieval England was a country of village settlements scattered amongst the great swathes of forest that belonged to the king, and which, to quote Richard Fitz Nigel, are the secret places of the kings and their great delight.
07:10There, away from the continuous business and incessant turmoil of the court, they can, for a little time, breathe in the grace of natural liberty.
07:23The great difficulty in understanding medieval forest is that we simply don't mean the same thing by forest as any medieval thinker, or indeed any medieval person would.
07:37To us, the word forest automatically suggests a wild place, trees, lots of trees.
07:44In the Middle Ages, it simply meant an area which was surrounded by a legal cordon within which a particular law applied.
07:57There didn't have to be trees. It was perfectly possible to settle in that area, provided you paid the king for the privilege.
08:04Now, this difference between legal forest and physical forest makes it very difficult to understand, because the words just don't mean the same.
08:13There is no doubt that kings enjoyed their hunting.
08:17We're told that William I loved stags as if they were his children.
08:22And so, those stags were protected by a series of very, very savage laws.
08:28Within the designated legal forest, the forest law, which was the king's law, ran.
08:35Probably the most famous forest statute, infamous, I should say, is that of Richard I of 1198, which demanded castration and blinding for the illicit hunting of deer.
08:48And this has given forest law a very, very wicked reputation and generated a whole folklore on its own.
08:55The hero is always the Robin Hood figure who subverts the forest law and kills the king's deer.
09:03The villain is always the sheriff.
09:05And this reputation, I might say, didn't stop with the lower classes, this reputation for the king's foresters.
09:15At least 90% of the early medieval population were villagers.
09:20They farmed two, sometimes three, vast open fields, which could cover hundreds of acres.
09:28The land was divided into strips, each farmed by individual serfs.
09:34The strips tended by any one man were not necessarily side by side.
09:39But for convenience, all strips would be ploughed in blocks, sometimes called furlongs.
09:46The lord of the village, of course, had his strips alongside each other in blocks distributed amongst those of the villagers.
09:53These fields made up his demean.
09:57One of the great fields was left fallow each year, and the other planted with spring and autumn sown crops.
10:06All work on the land required common action, as few of the serfs earned enough money to be able to work alone.
10:15Everyone's crops had to mature and get the same attention at the same point as everyone else's.
10:22The oxen and ploughs might be supplied by different people, combining their resources.
10:29This was the only viable means of getting the work done.
10:32Haymaking and mowing likewise required the contribution of each member of the community.
10:38After the harvest, the cattle, geese and pigs of the whole community would be allowed to roam freely about on the fields.
10:49Nonetheless, there was little enough food to produce fat livestock before the animals needed to be killed and salted for the winter.
10:57But even the pigs were filled up with acorns and beech nuts.
11:02For most peasants, life was lived on a knife edge, and one bad harvest could plunge them into the most wretched poverty and even starvation.
11:14Famine was not unusual, and one chronicler said that the men ate all kinds of herbs, even the bark of trees, or devoured the meadow grass uncooked like oxen.
11:31Small wonder that poaching, despite the forest laws, was a widespread activity.
11:38The villages were small, perhaps 100 or less inhabitants, of which many lived and died without leaving the community.
11:46The lord owned the largest house, although he may hardly ever have stayed there.
11:52In his absence, his steward looked after his affairs.
11:55The story of medieval agriculture is one of very profound contrasts of boom and bust, and very painful readjustment to changed circumstances.
12:07We start with a period of boom, which extends certainly from 1100 and possibly before, right through to 1300.
12:18Over that time, the population of England probably doubles, may even have trebled.
12:24The figures, as far as we can calculate them, are somewhere near 2 million, up to 5.5 or 6 million.
12:30And we can see much of the evidence of this process today.
12:34The Yorkshire abbeys, the Welsh abbeys show settlement probing higher and higher up river valleys into areas which had been barren.
12:44People are even beginning to talk in kinds of a sort of agricultural revolution on the pattern of what happened in the 18th century.
12:52The windmill affected things quite profoundly.
12:55Horse harness was changing, quicker markets, better communications, new crops.
13:01Many of the components are there.
13:03But, of course, there's a price to be paid.
13:06The price shows in too many mouths to feed.
13:10There may also have been change in weather patterns. We don't know.
13:15Interestingly enough, the 13th century is the last period before our own time
13:19when any significant quantity of wine has been produced in England.
13:24The English kings of the Middle Ages did not stay at one castle or manor house only.
13:30Even if he did not spend a great deal of time abroad, like Richard the Lionheart,
13:35he moved from one of his estates to another.
13:38There may have been fourteen or fifteen hundred of them living from the produce.
13:44Edward I was known to have stayed at seventy-five in one year.
13:51The royal household accompanied him on these journeys,
13:54and the entourage was vast, consisting not only of family, friends and their servants,
14:01but of all the high officials and their servants,
14:04grooms, huntsmen, chamberlains, cooks, laundresses,
14:08together with those servants belonging to the king.
14:11Edward III had five hundred knights with him,
14:16and his mother was said to have taken sixty ladies and damsels.
14:20But the king, apart from dictating the government of the country,
14:26was also the highest court of law.
14:29Sometimes alone, sometimes with his most important nobles,
14:33he dispensed justice.
14:36And justice depended on whether the king himself was just and skilled in the laws of the land.
14:42The assizes were essentially codifications of legal procedures.
14:49They were a laying down of what procedures you could go through
14:55in order to settle a certain dispute, if you had a claim over a plot of land.
15:02The assizes laid out the way you went about prosecuting your claim.
15:08And essentially they established that you applied for a certain kind of writ,
15:12one that suited your case.
15:14And then the writ would be returned to the sheriff,
15:18who would be required to gather together four law-worthy knights,
15:23who in turn would appear before the royal justices.
15:27And they would be required then to elect twelve other knights to act as jurors,
15:33and the jurors would settle the dispute.
15:37But they came about really in the twelfth century,
15:40because the king was in the process of establishing his royal court
15:45as the main court of justice to whom people should apply.
15:50And in essence, he was trying to compete with the manorial court
15:54and also the church courts.
15:57And by providing a more efficient kind of justice,
16:00he would be able to satisfy the demand for greater justice.
16:19Life was precarious, but not without its pleasures.
16:23Strolling minstrels could be found entertaining at castles or in the villages
16:27for all festivities from weddings to Christmas and celebrations,
16:31such as the Harvest Home Feast, given by the Lord to mark the end of the harvest,
16:36when everyone ate and drank as much and more than they should.
16:41Minstrels not only gave recitations of heroic epics,
16:45Beowulf or the legends of Arthur, for example.
16:49They also sang, juggled, tumbled and danced.
16:53In the towns, the guilds organised plays that showed scenes from the Bible,
16:59sometimes performed in churches, sometimes on large wagons.
17:04In the houses of the rich, jesters and musicians could often be found in permanent employment.
17:10The tournament was not only a sport, albeit a highly dangerous one,
17:15but also a means of making reputations and fortunes from the prizes offered.
17:21For the king, it provided an opportunity to train his knights for battle.
17:26Fatalities were frequent during these bouts,
17:29which, through lack of rules until 1267,
17:33developed into bloody melees as teams of knights swarmed over large areas armed with swords.
17:40Later, the joust, a combat between two knights only,
17:45charging at one another with levelled lances, became the norm.
17:51I think one has to talk always about the knight and the tournament and Arthurian legend
17:57coming into being more or less together, because as far as we can tell, indeed, they did.
18:01What's a bit more subtle to understand is that King Arthur, to a large extent,
18:06is called into existence to control the forces represented by the knights.
18:12Now, the development of the tournament seems to have started very soon after 1100.
18:17We don't hear of it as a serious force or a threat before that at all.
18:22And it's connected in some way that we can't quite understand with the spread in the use of the stirrup.
18:28This gave the horsemen a firmer seat and, of course, made young knights very, very anxious
18:35to try out their mounts against each other.
18:38And the tournament seems to begin a little bit like a sort of motorcyclist's convention today.
18:45It was very unpopular. The powers that be were very much against it, even kings,
18:49because it just licensed rowdyism.
18:52We have a very amusing anecdote of 24 young knights deciding to meet in Bury St Edmunds in 1193
19:00and hold a tournament against the abbot's ban.
19:04They did. They came and stayed in the abbey. They got drunk.
19:08And the next morning they had to face excommunication as well as their hangovers.
19:12The tournament, in other words, is a spontaneous bit of aggression by young males trying out their physical skills.
19:24The majority of people in the early Middle Ages had no education whatsoever,
19:38and working life gave them no time to acquire one even if they desired it.
19:43But there were ways in which a son could attain an elementary education.
19:47With the permission of the Lord, even a serf's son could be taught by the parish priest to read and write a little,
19:55so that he could read in the church service and attend to minor church work,
20:00such as that of sexton or doorkeeper.
20:03It was then possible for him to rise to a better life as a priest.
20:08Monastery schools were exclusively intended for those wanting to become monks.
20:14Then there were grammar schools, which concentrated primarily on the teaching of Latin,
20:20the universal language of religion and learning all over Europe.
20:24Together with some mathematics, these two subjects originally made up the entire curriculum.
20:31The history of all medieval education, I think, is like the history of so much else in the Middle Ages.
20:37It starts with a bang.
20:41It's a spontaneous growth, in some ways remarkably like the growth of knighthood,
20:45and to some extent the enthusiasm for education in the 12th and early 13th century
20:51exactly parallels the enthusiasm for fighting in a slightly more intellectual sector of society.
20:58Oxford was certainly established as a studium generale, a place where you could study all the known sciences of the time, by about 1200.
21:09Cambridge followed by 129, a breakaway, in fact, from Oxford.
21:14Several other English cities, Northampton, Lincoln, Salisbury, all came fairly close to establishing seats of higher learning.
21:24By the end of the 13th century, figures like the great Franciscan scientist Roger Bacon
21:30have given English science and philosophy a reputation across the continent.
21:35Now, where I think the educational experience of the Middle Ages parts company with so much else in medieval history
21:42is in the reaction to the Black Death.
21:46There is no contraction.
21:48Rather, the survivors seem to have got the idea that they had a better chance of getting on if they were qualified.
21:57And education becomes less and less associated with promotion within the church
22:03and more and more associated with success in secular life.
22:08And the whole thing is summed up very nicely in a parent's report, one might say, of the 1470s,
22:17where Margaret Paston says of one of her sons that she would rather have him a good secular man than a lewd priest.
22:26It was becoming more and more common, too, for lay children to be attached, by the payment of a fee, onto an ecclesiastical school.
22:38And this, of course, creates the basic apparatus round which, in later centuries, the English boarding school would grow.
22:46So it's not too much to say that some of the groundwork of English education was established in the later 15th century.
22:55For most children, their education was more practical.
22:59The village child would be taught the crafts that their parents knew, besides helping with the farm work.
23:05The son would learn to thatch, hedge, smith or do carpentry, while the daughter, who also helped on the farm, would cook, spin, weave and learn how to preserve food by salting and drying.
23:21They would also learn about herbs for curing illnesses.
23:25But perhaps the best education for a boy was that given by a master to his apprentice.
23:32An apprenticeship of seven years to a stonemason or carpenter would open up a world of greater freedom for a boy than he would ever have found on his father's smallholding.
23:43In the later Middle Ages, from the 13th century on, he would perhaps join one of the craftsman's guilds.
23:53A guild essentially is a religious association and its object is to provide for the interests of its members in this world and ease their passage into the next.
24:08Now, one dimension of that function, of course, the protecting the interests of members in this world, is very similar to that of a modern trades union.
24:18And a great deal of the apparatus of the modern trades union, the procession, the manner, does indeed come from the guild.
24:27Particularly the sense of solidarity and the sense of obligation that animate trades unions.
24:33All that comes from the guild.
24:36On the other hand, the guild never loses its religious foundation.
24:41That's why we have, for example, the Coventry guilds participating in the mystery plays.
24:48The armourers always did the crucifixion, of course, because their trade equipped them to interpret that part of the gospel story.
24:57So, the great difference between a medieval guild and a modern trades union is that the medieval guild cuts up and down through society.
25:08And it has to be remembered that many top people belonged to trade guilds.
25:13The Trinity guild in Coventry, for example, counted among its members not only the Earl of Warwick, but the dukes of Northumberland and Lancaster as well.
25:23So, by no means is the guild always necessarily biased towards a particular class in society.
25:31Craft guilds were simply a subdivision which was associated with a particular trade, whether it was the grocery trade, whether it was the tiling trade, whether it was the masonry trade.
25:47For the son of a lord, the way was opened to become a knight.
25:54The best way, in fact, to become a knight was obviously to be born the son of a knight.
26:01And once one achieved adolescence and a little bit beyond, you could, as a son of a knight, go through various ceremonies,
26:11particularly which would end usually in a tournament where perhaps there would be a mass knighting when lots of young men would be knighted at the same time.
26:22There might also be a ritual going through a special bath.
26:26There might also be a kind of religious element attached to the knighting of the son of a knight.
26:34But, of course, if one wasn't the son of a knight, it was much more difficult to enter that exclusive status.
26:41And one had to perhaps perform great deeds of arms and be noticed by an aristocrat and therefore be knighted.
26:49Or one could serve in a noble household and gradually build up influence, gain a bit more land through the land market,
26:58become a sheriff, a justice of the peace, and finally get knighted in that way.
27:03The church was the main purveyor of education in the Middle Ages, and it is the monks who we have to thank for some of the finest medieval manuscripts.
27:13Time nor money were of consequence to them as they recorded their world on parchment or vellum.
27:20But letters from kings, bishops and barons, the law courts and tax rolls all tell us of the affairs of the Middle Ages.
27:31Because of the austere conditions in which lord and peasant lived, glass for windows was a luxury rarely seen except in churches,
27:53everyone wore garments that would keep out the wind and the cold.
27:58Men of authority, from the king downwards, wore cloaks, long and full, reaching to the feet,
28:05occasionally with short sleeves and under sleeves to the wrist.
28:10If they were working or went hunting, they wore a short cloak stretching to the knee and a gown beneath of the same length.
28:19The gown, which in its varying materials of silk, linen or wool, was universally worn by monks, royalty or clerks, was generally made in one piece.
28:31Belts, girdles and shoes or boots were plain, with the shoes and boots made of leather, pointed at the toe and without heels.
28:39The peasants wore shorter clothes, tied around the waist, maybe with a woolen cord and of roughly knee length.
28:48This enabled them greater freedom of movement in their labours.
28:52Over their heads, they often wore a hood.
28:56By the 14th century, dress became more elaborate, closer fitting and with a greater variety of colours and fabrics in use.
29:08The medieval towns would often be protected by earthen ramparts, ditches and gates, outside of which spread the fields and common pastures that belonged to the townspeople, the burgesses.
29:21The streets were dirty, as people simply dumped their rubbish outside the houses.
29:27I think one has to imagine great extremes, great poverty and also great wealth.
29:34You have to imagine the streets squalid, perhaps with pigs, dogs roaming.
29:42The smell of dunghills, cesspits, the stench of the slaughterhouses, the stink of rotting meat, putrid fish and very poor housing conditions.
29:57As the population increased, so it became more usual for those men who were also craftsmen to devote more and more time to their weaving, baking or carpentry and pay for their farm work to be carried out by others.
30:11Gradually, more and more people were loath to work as serfs and desired more freedoms.
30:18The great lords, who often found themselves in dire need of funds to support their war efforts, for example, became happy to grant charters of freedom to the serfs in all aspects of life in return for money.
30:33Thus, as the Middle Ages progressed, many people and their towns began to prosper and grow.
30:40The Middle Ages gave birth to two famous written works, documents that fascinate us still.
30:48The first was Doomsday Book, written in 1086 at the instigation of William I.
30:55It's a great deal easier to say what the Doomsday Book was not than to say what it was.
31:03The difficulty is, of course, that it's not a survey and it's not a census.
31:10And historians often treat it as both. This makes it difficult.
31:15I think the best way I can put it is to say it's something between a white paper on an international crisis and a tax return.
31:23It has to be put in its circumstances. In 1085, William the Conqueror was facing a very nasty international crisis with a threatened Danish invasion backed by one of his sons.
31:36He needed to know fast what sort of backup and support he could get.
31:41So he sent his commissioners through the counties which he controlled, asking them who the tenants were, what service they could expect,
31:50and what the value of the lands they held was.
31:54And more important, perhaps, what it had been twenty years earlier in the time of King Edward.
32:01Now, the resulting document, of course, gives us a very impressive picture of English society.
32:06Above all, a moving picture of English society.
32:10We see English society not just in 1086, but in 1066 as well, and we see what has changed between.
32:18It's a tremendously useful document.
32:21There is nothing else like it anywhere in Western Europe.
32:25No other document so complete.
32:27The second was Magna Carta.
32:31King John, who reigned from 1199 until 1216, following the death of his brother Richard the Lionheart, was tyrannical and weak.
32:42The Pope excommunicated him, and the barons united and decided to curb the King's powers.
32:50They marched on London, forcing the King to flee to Windsor.
32:54The rebellious nobles confronted him at last in a field known as Runnymede between Staines and Windsor.
33:01There, he was forced to affix his seal to the Great Charter.
33:08In Latin, the language in which it was written, it was called Magna Carta.
33:14It's, to some extent, an attempt at crisis limitation.
33:18John is forced to accept concessions or rather to grant concessions.
33:23They're extracted from him.
33:24They're not an act of will.
33:25They're not a voluntary act.
33:27And say the Magna Carta is an attempt to get back to the good old days.
33:31It's an attempt to limit the exploitation.
33:34To establish an organised system of justice.
33:38To establish a new organised system of feudal arrangements.
33:43To limit taxation.
33:46And a number of very specific points which relate precisely to what John has been doing.
33:52The clique of foreign mercenaries is built up around him.
33:55So the foreigners are not to have particular offices.
33:58They're to be kicked out of England.
34:01In the end, at the end of the charter, an attempt to ensure that those concessions will be enforced.
34:08A committee of 25 barons who, if the King steps out of line, they will act and make sure he gets back into line.
34:14They will do to John, in some ways, what he has been doing to his subjects.
34:19The church was omnipresent in the lives of the medieval citizens.
34:34The priest, a very important person in the village.
34:38He was a free man, but also a farmer.
34:42Tending strips of land given in return for his church duties.
34:46He also had the right to take one tenth of each man's produce each year.
34:51Besides fees for special services such as marriages and burials.
34:56The superstition still existed, however, alongside Christian religion.
35:01And witchcraft, the superstition of the evil eye, was a potent force.
35:06People began to worry more and more about the devil and eternal damnation.
35:12On the social side of things, the church clearly, I think, saw the serfs as just part of the normal run of the peasantry.
35:20In that three-fold structure where the peasants are there to support the knights and support the church on top of them.
35:25They're the ones who simply foot the bills, provide the labour and the cash in the long term.
35:32As far as serfdom itself goes, there doesn't seem to be any worry about it as an element of human rights or beneath human dignity or anything like that.
35:41And in some respects, the church exploited serfs just as much as anybody else did as the secular lords did.
35:47I mean, the monks, the bishops, the great religious houses would all have serfs on their estates to start off with.
35:53And following the normal pattern of the lords, they would gradually release a few at a time, sometimes held villages, as economic pressures dictated.
36:03Where there does seem to be a slight difference is that the church, if anything, was perhaps more reluctant than the secular lords to liberate the serfs as time passed,
36:12particularly in the later Middle Ages, although you get regular dribbles and drabbles of records where serfs are being liberated, manumitted, their freedom being sold to them.
36:24And it's quite a nice case, actually, in the early 16th century, where the Abbot of Shrewsbury had sold somebody's freedom to them
36:33and then seized the document back and claimed they were again a serf, just to get them back under the thumb.
36:41So they were trying to play it always, exploiting as much as they could.
36:50Art was not neglected in medieval life, and here, too, the church was important, being rich enough to employ artists or use the talents of the clergy themselves.
37:02Apart from the glorious stone and wood carving of the Gothic style, there were the illuminated books which were famous throughout Europe.
37:10Increasingly, professional illuminators were employed to supplement the output from the monasteries.
37:17Wall paintings could be found in local churches and great houses, either depicting biblical scenes or the portraits of nobility.
37:27In the 14th century, the stained glass windows also portrayed the likenesses of benefactors.
37:34These windows developed into works of rich, sumptuous colouring.
37:39Sculpture was also well represented, not least in the shapes of the effigies of the nobility.
37:46Chaucer was the first great literary artist to raise the English language to the level already attained by contemporary French and Italian.
37:58Praised as the father of English poetry, his works are rich, marvellous tapestries of words,
38:05his storytelling powers unequalled except by Shakespeare and Dickens.
38:12From 1338, the Hundred Years' War with France began over French resentment at England's rule in land in southwest France,
38:33and Edward III's claim to the French throne.
38:38These wars brought the great victory at Agincourt and the emergence of the Maid of Orléans, Joan of Arc.
38:47In the 12th and 13th centuries, the feudal horsemen were the military elite.
38:54Knights wore more chain mail, and their armour became more elaborate and expensive,
39:00with the result that many men decided to forego the honour of being a knight and paid scootage,
39:07rather than be burdened with the cost of armour of the heavy horses required.
39:11Freemen, too, were required to render military service and maintain equipment according to their status.
39:19Of course, those fighting at the bottom of the scale were very lucky to have any equipment at all.
39:25The army that got to Agincourt was practically fighting in bare feet and shirts,
39:31and right the night before the battle, King Henry was negotiating to get his troops out in what they were wearing.
39:37Properly equipped, of course, the archer would be expected to have a padded jacket,
39:43which would give him some protection, but essentially he was expected to keep out of danger.
39:49Your man-at-arms, going beyond that, would have a male shirt,
39:53and possibly some protection, some plate protection on the upper part of his body.
39:58Once you get to the heavy horsemen, of course, by 1400 you've got very, very sophisticated armament indeed,
40:07covering the man cap à pied, head to foot.
40:11It's, I think, a misconception to say that this was necessarily heavy.
40:16A heavy cavalryman was actually carrying rather less in weight than a modern marine.
40:21It's also not true to say that it made him immobile.
40:26He was expected to be able to fight on foot.
40:29One of the great difficulties that the French army had at Agincourt, of course,
40:33was precisely that it tried to fight on foot,
40:36and found that after advancing a mile and a half across a ploughed field in an October downpour,
40:42it was a little bit difficult to do any fighting because they had no energy left.
40:45But there's one last point that I think needs to be made,
40:49and that is that the extremely beautiful and sophisticated armour that we see in museums to this day
40:55tends to be tournament armour.
40:58Very, very expensive, specially produced generally to order in the workshops of Milan,
41:04and probably not to be risked on the battlefield.
41:08Among the footmen, the bow and the spear remained the principal weapons.
41:13Prior to 1300, the bow had been short and light.
41:20At about that time, the famous longbow made its appearance with a greater range and striking power.
41:28The warfare along the borders with Scotland necessitated the horsing of archers,
41:34so that they could pursue the enemy and dismount to engage in battle.
41:37During the Hundred Years' War with France, English armies consisted of archers and men-at-arms in equal numbers.
41:46The effectiveness of the archers in breaking up defensive formations prior to cavalry action
41:52was soon learned by English commanders and ignored at great cost,
42:00as in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.
42:03From 1348, England was struck with a natural disaster, the Black Death.
42:15This was the bubonic plague from Asia, which swept away at least one quarter of the population of Europe on its way to England,
42:25and claimed the lives of half of the English population, which, at that time, was about four or five million.
42:32In 1477, the population was still only 2,200,000.
42:42Some areas of the country had been completely wiped out.
42:46From 1348 until 1350, the plague ravaged the country.
42:51Once infected, the victim began to shiver, his temperature rose,
42:58and swellings appeared in the neck, armpits and groin.
43:02Death often came to the afflicted mercifully quickly, and they would be dead within 12 hours.
43:09The disease spread rapidly from Dorset, and was soon over the border in Scotland.
43:14When it finally died down, towns and villages were almost deserted, with grass growing in the streets.
43:24In the field, crops rotted.
43:28The first and most important consequence of the plague was that it kept on coming back.
43:34This is perhaps the most serious matter.
43:371348 and 1449 is just the start.
43:40It comes back again, 1369, 1375, on and on and on.
43:47It's probable that the immediate loss of population amounted to about 40%.
43:53We can control this to some degree from the records of closed institutions like monasteries,
43:59presentations to religious benefices, but that wasn't the end of it.
44:03Probably the trough in the loss of population wasn't reached until 1430 or 1440.
44:10So, the loss goes on for two or three generations after the plague, before there's any turn-up at all.
44:18Now, the immediate consequence of this, of course, is to create a labour shortage.
44:23And people were aware of this from the very, very earliest moment.
44:26The most famous move against it, of course, is the Statute of Labourers, which was passed in 1351,
44:32and was a conscious attempt by the government, in Parliament, to peg wages of labourers and artisans at the level of 1346.
44:42Gradually, men began to question the status quo.
44:47Men such as John Ball, nicknamed the Mad Priest of Kent, or John Wycliffe, born about 1330, who taught at Oxford University and influenced the translation of the Bible into English.
45:01He spoke about the evils he saw in the church.
45:06His followers went out to preach throughout the country, the Lollards, as they became known by their detractors.
45:13The churches and monasteries, they claimed, were too wealthy, and the clergy should spend their riches in better ways than on luxurious living.
45:23In 1381, when the wars in France were not going well and emptying the treasury, Richard II's ministers decided to impose a poll, or head tax, on every citizen rich and poor over the age of 15.
45:43Already burdened with heavy taxation and insufficient wages, which had caused riots, strikes and other disturbances for years,
45:51the people could stand no more, and a revolt broke out.
45:56In Essex, the tax commissioner, who had come to ask for more contributions, was set upon by the peasants who stoned him out of town.
46:06The rebellion spread all over Essex and Kent, with murder and beheadings written on the account of the rioters.
46:14A man named Wat Tyler was appointed as their spokesman, and gathering support along the way, and leaving a trail of violence behind them, the insurgents marched off to seek redress for their grievances from the king in London.
46:33The first meetings with the king are relatively decorous and show considerable respect for the king's person, and this is most important of all.
46:42They demand royal charters, therefore admitting the government in its present form.
46:49What happens after this meeting, I think, is that a number of the moderates, a very large number of the moderates, chiefly from Essex, are satisfied with what they've got and go home.
47:02The hard men at the hard core are left to cut loose in the city, and boy do they cut loose.
47:09Now, sacking John of Gaunt's palace, that was just a little rowdy, perhaps.
47:16There were plenty of other members of the nobility who would have been happy to sack John of Gaunt's palace at any time.
47:21Lynching the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chancellor, well, this is a bit more dodgy.
47:30This is bad manners.
47:31Actually, going off into the financial quarter and killing a lot of foreign visitors, no, no, that's not acceptable at all.
47:40That's downright bad for business.
47:43Those loyal to the king were summarily executed at the block.
47:48Arson, plunder and blackmail were rife.
47:52The next day, a meeting was arranged at Smithfield, a square where cattle markets were held.
47:59Tyler was demanding not only the abandonment of feudal ties.
48:05He wanted the estates of the church confiscated and equal status for all men besides many other reforms.
48:14When a disparaging remark was made about him, Tyler drew his sword,
48:20whereupon Mayor Woolworth struck him in the neck with his cutlass.
48:24Moments later, one of the king's squires ran him through twice with a sword.
48:31Tyler managed to utter the word treason before he fell dead.
48:38Whether the murder of Tyler, the lynching, the destruction of Tyler, however you call it, whether that was planned and a put-up job, we don't know.
48:49I strongly suspect it was.
48:51Either way, there is no doubt at all that young Richard, aged barely 13 at the time, comes very, very creditably out of the episode indeed.
49:01Even if he was primed to do so, he kept his head and exploited his position by riding towards the peasants and saying,
49:09I am your king, in truly splendid style.
49:13Once the peasants' revolt was over, only the progress of time would free the serf from his yoke of feudal labour.
49:21A series of famous medieval conflicts began in 1455.
49:39They found their way into the history books as the Wars of the Roses and raged on and off for 30 years, changing England forever.
49:52There were three separate phases in these wars, with a hiatus between each.
49:57The House of Lancaster, its symbol a red rose, and the House of York, with its white rose, engaged in battles for the sovereignty of England, with savagery that even the Middle Ages had not seen.
50:13In the 1440s and 1450s, where you see the beginnings of the disputes, it wasn't really a dynastic dispute, as much as one about patronage and power.
50:24Richard the Duke of York was a frustrated courtier, an aristocrat who failed to get the influence he really wanted at court, and ran a series of campaigns against the established courtiers who were the favourites of Henry VI.
50:41And indeed the first battle of the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of St Albans, in 1455, ended as soon as the Duke of Somerset, who was one of the King's favourites, was killed by the Yorkist force.
50:55And at the bottom, I suppose, it was about the failure of Henry VI to rule as a king properly, that led to disputes between his courtiers, and finally led to this dynastic dispute.
51:10The victories went from one army to the other, from one end of the country to the other.
51:17At the First Battle of St Albans, the Yorkists won, as they did in Stafford, Northampton and Herefordshire.
51:25In Shropshire and Wakefield, where a trick led to the slaughter of many Yorkists,
51:31and in the Second Battle of St Albans, the Lancastrians had the upper hand.
51:36During the 1450s, the main protagonist is Richard Duke of York, who is constantly trying to assert his position at court, gain influence over the king,
51:51and finding himself totally thwarted in his ambitions.
51:55He is faced with a group of courtiers, particularly Duke of Somerset, who is determined to keep Richard Duke of York out of his position at court.
52:06And although the Duke of Somerset is killed in 1455, Richard of York is still unable to gain position at court, because Henry VI's queen, Margaret of Anjou, is determined that York should not have any kind of influence.
52:23One of the most vicious battles resulted in the biggest bloodbath seen in England until the 17th century.
52:30This was the engagement at Towton in Yorkshire.
52:35At first, it seemed the Lancastrians had won the day. A massed charge had driven the Yorkists from the field.
52:44But with the chaotic climax, the melee of dismounted men-at-arms, wielding swords, axes and maces, the Yorkists were at last victorious.
52:54Edward of York became King Edward IV.
53:01But once Richard III had seized the throne, the wars flared up again.
53:07Henry Tudor, a Welsh prince, last survivor of the House of Lancaster, landed at Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire, engaged Richard in battle at Bosworth Field and slew him.
53:22With the death of the usurper, Henry assumed the kingship as Henry VII.
53:27And in marrying Elizabeth, the daughter of the Duke of York, blended the two houses into one powerful new monarchy.
53:38But the wars had brought about the end of the great English longbowmen, no match for the new discovery, gunpowder.
53:47The great feudal barons and lords were now all but extinct, leaving the king far more powerful than any of his subjects.
53:59With the end of the Civil War, the Middle Ages were also drawing to a close.
54:06Feudalism died out as more and more men gained their freedom.
54:11Trade abroad made men wealthy.
54:13And as the population increased, the English landscape was changed forever.
54:20We may be forgiven for eulogising on the Middle Ages, imagining a merry England that didn't exist.
54:28Even Chaucer fell into the trap of nostalgia.
54:31We must declare a best way of nostalgia.
54:40We must declare the new completion of nostalgia, as the H Kriss, a