told, exactly the contrary plan followed by our modern publicans. Now,
when a man gets into a warm corner at the pot-house, they tell me that
John Barleycorn is apt to serve out more drink than is good for him;
but six hundred years ago the beer-seller made his profit, or tried to
make it, by giving his customer less than he asked for. Tobacco was
quite unknown; it was first brought into England about three hundred
years after the days we are dealing with. When a man once sat himself
down with his pot he had nothing to do but drink. He had no pipe to
take off his attention from his liquor. If such a portentous sight
could have been seen in those days as that of a man vomiting forth
clouds of smoke from his mouth and nostrils, the beholders would have
undoubtedly taken to their heels and run for their lives, protesting
that the devil himself had appeared to them, breathing forth fire and
flames. Tea and coffee, too, were absolutely unknown, unheard of; and
wine was the rich man's beverage, as it is now. The fire-waters of our
own time--the gin and the rum, which have wrought us all such
incalculable mischief--were not discovered then. Some little ardent
spirits, known under the name of _cordials_, were to be found in the
better appointed establishments, and were kept by the lady of the house
among her simples, and on special occasions dealt out in thimblefuls;
but the vile grog, that maddens people now, our forefathers of six
hundred years ago had never even tasted.
The absence of vegetable food for the greater part of the year, the
personal dirt of the people, the sleeping at night in the clothes worn
in the day, and other causes, made skin diseases frightfully common. At
the outskirts of every town in England of any size there were crawling
about emaciated creatures covered with loathsome sores, living heaven
knows how. They were called by the common name of lepers, and probably
the leprosy strictly so called was awfully common. But the children
must have swarmed with vermin; and the itch, and the scurvy, and the
ringworm, with other hideous eruptions, must have played fearful havoc
with the weak and sickly.
As for the dress of the working classes, it was hardly dress at all. I
doubt whether the great mass of the labourers in Norfolk had more than
a single garment--a kind of tunic leaving the arms and legs bare, with
a girdle of rope or leather round the waist, in which a man's knife was
stuck, to use sometimes for hacking his bread, sometimes for stabbing
an enemy in a quarrel. As for any cotton goods, such as are familiar to
you all, they had never been dreamt of, and I suspect that no more
people in Norfolk wore linen habitually than now wear silk.
Money was almost inconceivably scarce. The labourer's wages were paid
partly in rations of food, partly in other allowances, and only partly
in money; he had to take what he could get. Even the quit-rent, or what
I have called the ground rent, was frequently compounded for by the
tenant being required to find a pair of gloves, or a pound of cummin,
or some other acknowledgment in lieu of a money payment; and one
instance occurs among the Rougham charters of a man buying as much as
11-1/2 acres, and paying for them partly in money and partly in barley.
[Footnote: In the year 1276 halfpence and farthings were coined for the
first time. This must have been a great boon to the poorer classes, and
it evidently was felt to be a matter of great importance, insomuch that
it was said to be the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy by the great
seer Merlin, who had once foretold in mysterious language, that "there
shall be half of the round." In the next century it appears that the
want of small change had again made itself felt: for in the 2nd Richard
II. we find the Commons setting forth in a petition to the King, that
"_...les ditz coes n'on petit monoye pur paier pur les petites_ mesures
a grant damage des dites coes," and they beg "Le plese a dit Sr. le Roi
et a son sage conseil de faire ordeiner Mayles et farthinges pur paier
pur les petites mesures... et en eovre de charitée...."--Rolls of
Parl., vol. iii. p. 65.] Nothing shows more plainly the scarcity of
money than the enormous interest that was paid for a loan. The only
bankers were the Jews; [Footnote: I am speaking of Norfolk and Suffolk,
where the Jews, as far as I have seen, had it all their own way.] and
when a man was once in their hands he was never likely to get out of
their clutches again. But six hundred years ago the Jews had almost
come to the end of their tether; and in the year 1290 they were driven
out of the country, men, women, and children, with unutterable
barbarity, only to be replaced by other bloodsuckers who were not a
whit less mercenary, perhaps, but only less pushing and successful in
their usury.
It is often said that the monasteries were the great supporters of the
poor, and fed them in times of scarcity. It may be so, but I should
like to see the evidence for the statement. At present I doubt the
fact, at any rate as far as Norfolk goes. [Footnote: The returns of the
number of poor people supported by the monasteries, which are to be
found in the "Valor Ecclesiasticus," are somewhat startling. Certainly
the monasteries did not return _less_ than they expended in alms. Note,
too, the complaint of the St. Alban's men to Wat Tyler, who are said to
have slandered the abbey "de retentione stipendiorum pauperum."
Walsingham, i. 469.] On the contrary, I am strongly impressed with the
belief that six hundred years ago the poor had no friends. The parsons
were needy themselves. In too many cases one clergyman held two or
three livings, took his tithes and spent them in the town, and left a
chaplain with a bare subsistence to fill his place in the country.
There was no parson's wife to drop in and speak a kind word--no
clergyman's daughter to give a friendly nod, or teach the little ones
at Sunday school--no softening influences, no sympathy, no kindliness.
What could you expect of people with such dreary surroundings?--what
but that which we know actually was the condition of affairs? The
records of crime and outrage in Norfolk six hundred years ago are still
preserved, and may be read by any one who knows how to decipher them. I
had intended to examine carefully the entries of crime for this
neighbourhood for the year 1286, and to give you the result this
evening, but I have not had an opportunity of doing so. The work has
been done for the hundred of North Erpingham by my friend Mr. Rye, and
what is true for one part of Norfolk during any single year is not
likely to be very different from what was going on in another.
The picture we get of the utter lawlessness of the whole county,
however, at the beginning of King Edward's reign is quite dreadful
enough. Nobody seems to have resorted to the law to maintain a right or
redress a wrong, till every other method had been tried. Starting with
the squires, if I may use the term, and those well-to-do people who
ought to have been among the most law-abiding members of the
community--we find them setting an example of violence and rapacity,
bad to read of. One of the most common causes of offence was when the
lord of the manor attempted to invade the rights of the tenants of the
manor by setting up a fold on the heath, or _Bruary_ as it was called.
What the lord was inclined to do, that the tenants would try to do
also, as when in 1272 John de Swanton set up a fold in the common
fields at Billingford; whereupon the other tenants pulled it down, and
there was a serious disturbance, and the matter dragged on in the law
courts for four years and more. Or as when the Prior of Wymondham
impleads William de Calthorp for interfering with his foldage at
Burnham; Calthorp replying that the Prior had no right to foldage, and
that he (Calthorp) had the right to pull the fold down. In these cases,
of course, there would be a general gathering and a riot, for every
one's interest was at stake; but it was not only when some general
grievance was felt that people in those days were ready for a row.
It really looks as if nothing was more easy than to collect a band of
people who could be let loose anywhere to work any mischief. One man
had a claim upon another for a debt, or a piece of land, or a right
which was denied--had the claim, or fancied he had--and he seems to
have had no difficulty in getting together a score or two of roughs to
back him in taking the law into his own hands. As when John de la Wade
in 1270 persuaded a band of men to help him in invading the manor of
Hamon de Clere, in this very parish of Tittleshall, seizing the corn
and threshing it, and, more wonderful still, cutting down timber, and
_carrying it off_. There are actually two other cases of a precisely
similar kind recorded this same year, one where a gang of fellows in
broad day seems to have looted the manors of Dunton and Mileham; the
other case was where a mob, under the leadership of three men, who are
named, entered by force into the manor of Dunham, laid hands on a
quantity of timber fit for building purposes, and took it away bodily!
A much more serious case, however, occurred some years after this when
two gentlemen of position in Norfolk, with twenty-five followers, who
appear to have been their regular retainers, and a great multitude on
foot and horse, came to Little Barningham, where in the Hall there
lived an old lady, Petronilla de Gros; they set fire to the house in
five places, dragged out the old lady, treated her with the most brutal
violence, and so worked upon her fears that they compelled her to tell
them where her money and jewels were, and, having seized them, I
conclude that they left her to warm herself at the smouldering ruins of
her mansion.
On another occasion there was a fierce riot at Rainham. There the manor
had become divided into three portions, as we have seen was the case at
Rougham. One Thomas de Hauville had one portion, and Thomas de
Ingoldesthorp and Robert de Scales held the other two portions. Thomas
de Hauville, peradventure, felt aggrieved because some rogue had not
been whipped or tortured cruelly enough to suit his notions of salutary
justice, whereupon he went to the expense of erecting a brand new
pillory, and apparently a gallows too, to strike terror into the minds
of the disorderly. The other parceners of the manor were indignant at
the act, and collecting nearly sixty of the people of Rainham, they
pulled down the new pillory and utterly destroyed the same. When the
case came before the judges, the defendants pleaded in effect that if
Thomas de Hauville had put up his pillory on his own domain they would
have had no objection, but that he had invaded their rights in setting
up his gallows without their permission.
If the gentry, and they who ought to have known better, set such an
example, and gave their sanction to outrage and savagery, it was only
natural that the lower orders should be quick to take their pattern by
their superiors, and should be only too ready to break and defy the
law. And so it is clear enough that they were. In a single year, the
year 1285, in the hundred of North Erpingham, containing thirty-two
parishes, the catalogue of crime is so ghastly as positively to stagger
one. Without taking any account of what in those days must have been
looked upon as quite minor offences--such as simple theft,
sheep-stealing, fraud, extortion, or harbouring felons--there were
eleven men and five women put upon their trial for burglary, eight men
and four women were murdered; there were five fatal fights, three men
and two women being killed in the frays; and, saddest of all, there
were five cases of suicide, among them two women, one of whom hanged
herself, the other cut her throat with a razor. We have in the roll
recording these horrors very minute particulars of the several cases,
and we know too that, not many months before the roll was drawn up, at
least eleven desperate wretches had been hanged for various offences,
and one had been torn to pieces by horses for the crime of debasing the
king's coin. It is impossible for us to realize the hideous ferocity of
such a state of society as this; the women were as bad as the men,
furious beldames, dangerous as wild beasts, without pity, without
shame, without remorse; and finding life so cheerless, so hopeless, so
very very dark and miserable, that when there was nothing to be gained
by killing any one else they killed themselves.
Anywhere, anywhere out of the world!
Sentimental people who plaintively sigh for the good old times will do
well to ponder upon these facts. Think, twelve poor creatures butchered
in cold blood in a single year within a circuit of ten miles from your
own door! Two of these unhappy victims were a couple of lonely women,
apparently living together in their poverty, gashed and battered in the
dead of the night, and left in their blood, stripped of their little
all. The motive, too, for all this horrible housebreaking and
bloodshed, being a lump of cheese or a side of bacon, and the
shuddering creatures cowering in the corner of a hovel, being too
paralyzed with terror to utter a cry, and never dreaming of making
resistance to the wild-eyed assassins, who came to slay rather than to
steal.
Let us turn from these scenes, which are too painful to dwell on; and,
before I close, let me try and point to some bright spots in the
village life of six hundred years ago. If the hovels of the labourer
were squalid, and dirty, and dark, yet there was not--no, there was
not--as much difference between them and the dwelling of the former
class, the employers of labour. Every man who had any house at all had
some direct interest in the land; he always had some rood or two that
he could call his own; his allotment was not large, but then there were
no large farmers. I cannot make out that there was any one in Rougham
who farmed as much as two hundred acres all told. What we now
understand by tenant farmers were a class that had not yet come into
existence. Where a landlord was non-resident he farmed his estate by a
bailiff, and if any one wanted to give up an occupation for a time he
let it with all that it contained. Thus, when Alice the divorced made
up her mind in 1318 to go away from Rougham--perhaps on a
pilgrimage--perhaps to Rome--who knows?--she let her house and land,
and all that was upon it, live and dead stock, to her sister Juliana
for three years. The inventory included not only the sheep and cattle,
but the very hoes and pitchforks, and sacks; and everything, to the
minutest particular, was to be returned without damage at the end of
the term, or replaced by an equivalent. But this lady, a lady of birth
and some position, certainly did not have two hundred acres under her
hands, and would have been a very small personage indeed, side by side
with a dozen of our West Norfolk farmers today. The difference between
the labourer and the farmer was, I think, less six hundred years ago
than it is now. Men climbed up the ladder by steps that were more
gently graduated; there was no great gulf fixed between the employer
and the employed.
I can tell you nothing of the amusements of the people in those days. I
doubt whether they had any more amusement than the swine or the cows
had. Looking after the fowls or the geese, hunting for the hen's nest
in the furze brake, and digging out a fox or a badger, gave them an
hour's excitement or interest now and again. Now and then a wandering
minstrel came by, playing upon his rude instrument, and now and then
somebody would come out from Lynn, or Yarmouth, or Norwich, with some
new batch of songs for the most part scurrilous and coarse, and
listened to much less for the sake of the music than for the words. Nor
were books so rare as has been asserted. There were even story-books in
some houses, as where John Senekworth, bailiff for Merton College, at
Gamlingay in Cambridgeshire, possessed, when he died in 1314, three
books of romance; but then he was a thriving yeoman with carpets in his
house, or hangings for the walls. [Footnote: Rogers' "Hist, of Prices"
vol. i. p. 124.]
There was a great deal more coming and going in the country villages
than there is now, a great deal more to talk about, a great deal more
doing. The courts of the manor were held periodically, and the free
tenants were bound to attend and carry on a large amount of petty
business. Then there were the periodical visitations by the Archdeacon
and the Rural Dean, and now and then more august personages might be
seen with a host of mounted followers riding along the roads. The
Bishop of Norwich was always on the move when he was in his diocese;
his most favourite places of residence were North Elmham and Gaywood;
at both of these places he had a palace and a park; that meant that
there were deer there and hunting, and all the good and evil that seems
to be inseparable from haunches of vension. Nay, at intervals, even the
Archbishop of Canterbury himself, the second man in the kingdom, came
down to hold a visitation in Norfolk, and, exactly 602 years ago the
great Archbishop Peckham spent some time in the county, and though I do
not think he came near Rougham or Tittleshall, I think it not
improbable that his coming may have had some influence in bringing
about the separation between Peter Romayn and Matilda de Cringleford,
and the divorce of poor Alice from John of Thyrsford.
That year, 1280, or just 602 years ago, when Archbishop Peckham paid
his visit to Norfolk, was a very disastrous year for the farmers. It
was the beginning of a succession of bad seasons and floods even worse
than any that we have known. The rain began on the 1st of August, and
we are told that it continued to fall for twenty-four hours, and then
came a mighty wind such as men had never known the like of; the waters
were out, and there was a great flood, and houses and windmills and
bridges were swept away. Nay, we hear of a sad loss of life, and many
poor people were drowned, and many lost their all; flocks, and herds,
and corn and hay being whelmed in the deluge. In November there was a
frightful tempest, the lightning doing extensive damage; and just at
Christmas-time the frost set in with such severity as no man had known
before. The river Thames was frozen over above London Bridge, so that
men crossed it with horses and carts, and when the frost broke up on
the 2nd of February there was such an enormous accumulation of ice and
snow that five of the arches of London Bridge blew up, and all over the
country the same destruction of bridges was heard of.
Next year and the year after that, things went very badly with your
forefathers, and one of the saddest stories that we get from a Norfolk
chronicler who was alive at the time is one in which he tells us that,
owing to the continuous rain during these three years, there was an
utter failure in garden produce, as well as of the people's hope of
harvest. The bad seasons seem to have gone on for six or seven years;
but by far the worst calamity which Norfolk ever knew was the awful
flood of 1287, when by an incursion of the sea a large district was
laid under water, and hundreds of unfortunate creatures were drowned in
the dead of the night, without warning. Here, on the higher level,
people were comparatively out of harm's way, but it is impossible to
imagine the distress and agony that there must have been in other parts
of the county not twenty miles from where we are this evening.
After that dreadful year I think there was a change for the better, but
it must have been a long time before the county recovered from the
"agricultural distress;" and I strongly suspect that the cruel and
wicked persecution of the Jews, and the cancelling of all debts due to
them by the landlords and the farmers, was in some measure owing to the
general bankruptcy which the succession of bad seasons had brought
about. Men found themselves hopelessly insolvent, and there was no
other way of cancelling their obligations than by getting rid of their
creditors. So when the king announced that all the Jews should be
transported out of the realm, you may be sure that there were very few
Christians who were sorry for them. There had been a time when the
children of Israel had spoiled the Egyptians--was it not fitting that
another time should have come when the children of Israel should
themselves be spoiled?
The year of the great flood was the frequent talk, of course, of all
your forefathers who overlived it, and here in this neighbourhood it
must have acquired an additional interest from the fact that Bishop
Middleton died the year after it, and his brothers then parted with
their Rougham property.
Nor was this all, for Bishop Middleton's successor in the see of
Norwich came from this immediate neighbourhood also. This was Ralph
Walpole, son of the lord of the manor of Houghton, in which parish the
bishop himself had inherited a few acres of land. In less than forty
years no less than three bishops had been born within five miles of
where we are this evening: Roger de Wesenham, [Footnote: The names of
several members of the bishop's family occur in the Rougham Charters as
attesting witnesses, and a Roger de Wesenham is found among them more
than once.] who became Bishop of Lichfield in 1245; William Middleton,
who had just died; and Ralph Walpole, who succeeded him. There must
have been much stir in these parts when the news was known. The old
people would tell how they had seen "young master Ralph" many a time
when he was a boy scampering over Massingham Heath, or coming to pay
his respects to the Archdeacon at the Lyng House, or talking of foreign
parts with old James de Ferentino or Peter Romayn. Now he had grown to
be a very big man indeed, and there were many eyes watching him on both
sides of the water. He had a very difficult game to play during the
eleven years he was Bishop of Norwich, for the king was dreadfully in
need of money, and, being desperate, he resorted to outrageous methods
of squeezing it from those whom he could frighten and force, and the
time came at last when the bishops and the clergy had to put a bold
face on and to resist the tyranny and lawless rapacity of the sovereign.
And this reminds me that though archdeacons, and bishops, and even an
archbishop, in those days might be and were very important and very
powerful personages, they were all very small and insignificant in
comparison with the great King Edward, the king who at this time was
looked upon as one of the most mighty and magnificent kings in all the
world. He, too, paid many a visit to Norfolk six hundred years ago. He
kept his Christmas at Burgh in 1280, and in 1284 he came down with the
good Queen Eleanor and spent the whole of Lent in the county; and next
year, again, they were in your immediate neighbourhood, making a
pilgrimage to Walsingham. A few years after this he seems to have spent
a week or two within five miles of where we are; he came to Castle
Acre, and there he stayed at the great priory whose ruins you all know
well. There a very stirring interview took place between the king and
Bishop Walpole, and a number of other bishops, and great persons who
had come down as a deputation to expostulate with the king, and
respectfully to protest against the way in which he was robbing his
subjects, and especially the clergy, whom he had been for years
plundering in the most outrageous manner. The king gave the deputation
no smooth words to carry away, but he sent them off with threatening
frowns and insults and in hot anger. Some days after this he was at
Massingham, and one of his letters has been preserved, dated from
Massingham, 30th of January, 1296, so that it is almost certain the
great king passed one night there at least. It is a little difficult to
understand what the king was doing at Massingham, for there was no
great man living there, and no great mansion. Sometimes I have thought
that the king rode out from Castle Acre to see what state the Walpoles
of those times were keeping up at Houghton. Had not that audacious
Bishop Walpole dared to speak plainly to his Grace the week before? But
the more probable explanation is that the king went to Massingham to
visit a small religious house or monastery which had been recently
founded there. I suspect it had already got into debt and was in
difficulties, and it is possible that the king's visit was made in the
interest of the foundation. At any rate, there the king stayed; but
though he was in Norfolk more than once after this, he never was so
near you again, and that visit was one which your forefathers were sure
to talk about to the end of their lives.
* * * * * * *