fighting was suspended by agreement during the harvest. Local
administration was paralyzed by party faction or lodged in some
great lord or some clique of courtiers. The elections of members
to Parliament was interfered with and Parliament was rarely held.
Barons and earls fought their disputes in the field rather than in
the royal courts. Litigation was expensive, so men relied
increasingly on the protection of the great men of their
neighborhood and less on the King's courts for the safety of their
lives and land. Local men involved in court functions usually owed
allegiance to a lord which compromised the exercise of justice.
Men serving in an assize often lied to please their lord instead
of telling the truth. Lords maintained, supported, or promoted
litigation with money or aid supplied to one party to the
detriment of justice. It was not unusual for lords to attend court
with a great force of retainers behind them. Many justices of the
peace wore liveries of magnates and accepted money from them.
Royal justices were flouted or bribed. The King's writ was denied
or perverted. For 6-8s., a lord could have the king instruct his
sheriff to impanel a jury which would find in his favor. A statute
against riots, forcible entries, and, excepting the King,
magnates' liveries of uniform, food, and badges to their
retainers, except in war outside the nation, was passed, but was
difficult to enforce because the offenders were lords, who
dominated the Parliament and the council.
With men so often gone to fight, their wives managed the household
alone. The typical wife had maidens of equal class to whom she
taught household management, spinning, weaving, carding wool with
iron wool-combs, heckling flax, embroidery, and making garments.
There were foot-treadles for spinning wheels. She taught the
children. Each day she scheduled the activities of the household
including music, conversation, dancing, chess, reading, playing
ball, and gathering flowers. She organized picnics, rode horseback
and went hunting, hawking to get birds, and hare-ferreting. She
was nurse to all around her. If her husband died, she usually
continued in this role because most men named their wife as
executor of their will with full power to act as she thought best.
The wives of barons shared their right of immunity from arrest by
the processes of common law and to be tried by their peers.
For ladies, close-fitting jackets came to be worn over close-
fitting long gowns with low, square-cut necklines and flowing
sleeves, under which was worn a girdle or corset of stout linen
reinforced by stiff leather or even iron. Her skirt was
provocatively slit from knee to ankle. All her hair was confined
by a hair net. Headdresses were very elaborate and heavy, trailing
streamers of linen. Some were in the shape of hearts, butterflies,
crescents, double horns, steeples, or long cones. Men also wore
hats rather than hoods. They wore huge hats of velvet, fur, or
leather. Their hair was cut into a cap-like shape on their heads,
and later was shoulder-length. They wore doublets with thick
padding over the shoulders or short tunics over the trucks of
their bodies and tightened at the waist to emphasize the
shoulders. Their collars were high. Their sleeves were long
concoctions of velvet, damask, and satin, sometimes worn wrapped
around their arms in layers. Their legs and hips were covered with
hosen, often in different colors. Codpieces worn between the legs
emphasized the sensuality of the age as did ladies' tight and low-
cut gowns. Men's shoes were pointed with upward pikes at the toes
that impeded walking. At another time, their shoes were broad with
blunt toes. Both men and women wore much jewelry and
ornamentation. But, despite the fancy dress, the overall mood was
a macabre preoccupation with mortality, despair, and a lack of
confidence in the future. Cannon and mercenaries had reduced the
military significance of knighthood, so its chivalric code
deteriorated into surface politeness, ostentation, and
extravagance.
Master and servants ceased to eat together in the same hall,
except for great occasions, on feast days, and for plays. The
lord, and his lady, family, and guests took their meals in a great
chamber, usually up beneath the roof next to the upper floor of
the great hall. The chimney-pieces and windows were often richly
decorated with paneled stonework, tracery and carving. There was
often a bay or oriel window with still expensive glass.
Tapestries, damask, and tablecloths covered the tables. There was
much formality and ceremonial ritual, more elaborate than before,
during dinners at manorial households, including processions
bringing and serving courses, and bowing, kneeling, and
curtseying. There were many courses of a variety of meats, fish,
stews, and soups, with a variety of spices and elaborately cooked.
Barons, knights, and their ladies sat to the right of the lord
above the salt and were served by the lord's sewer and carver and
gentlemen waiters; their social inferiors such as "gentlemen of
worship" sat below the salt and were served by another sewer and
yeomen. The lord's cupbearer looked after the lord alone. A
knights table was waited on by yeomen. The gentlemen officers,
gentlemen servants and yeomen officers were waited on by their own
servants. The amount of food dished out to each person varied
according to his rank. The almoner said grace and distributed the
leftovers to the poor gathered at the gate. The superior people's
hands were washed by their inferiors. Lastly, the trestle tables
were removed while sweet wine and spices were consumed standing.
Then the musicians were called into the hall and dancing began.
The lord usually slept in a great bed in this room. The standard
number of meals was three: breakfast, dinner, and supper.
The diet of an ordinary family such as that of a small shopholder
or yeoman farmer included beef, mutton, pork, a variety of fish,
both fresh and salted, venison, nuts, peas, oatmeal, honey,
grapes, apples, pears, and fresh vegetables. Cattle and sheep were
driven from Wales to English markets. This droving lasted for five
centuries.
Many types of people besides the nobility and knights now had
property and thus were considered gentry: female lines of the
nobility, merchants and their sons, attorneys, auditors, squires,
and peasant-yeomen. The burgess grew rich as the knight dropped
lower. The great merchants lived in mansions which could occupy
whole blocks. Typically, there would be an oak-paneled great hall,
with adjoining kitchen, pantry, and buttery on one end and a great
parlor to receive guests, bedrooms, wardrobes, servants' rooms,
and a chapel on the other end or on a second floor. The beds were
surrounded by heavy draperies to keep out cold drafts. In towns
these mansions were entered through a gate through a row of shops
on the street. A lesser dwelling would have these rooms on three
floors over a shop on the first floor. An average Londoner would
have a shop, a storeroom, a hall, a kitchen, and a buttery on the
first floor, and three bedrooms on the second floor. Artisans and
shopkeepers of more modest means lived in rows of dwellings, each
with a shop and small storage room on the first floor, and a
combination parlor-bedroom on the second floor. The humblest
residents crowded their shop and family into one 6 by 10 foot room
for rent of a few shillings a year. All except the last would also
have a small garden. The best gardens had a fruit tree, herbs,
flowers, a well, and a latrine area. There were common and public
privies for those without their own. Kitchen slops and casual
refuse continued to be thrown into the street. Floors of stone or
planks were strewn with rushes. There was some tile flooring. Most
dwellings had glass windows. Candles were used for lighting at
night. Torches and oil-burning lanterns were portable lights.
Furnishings were still sparse. Men sat on benches or joint stools
and women sat on cushions on the floor. Hall and parlor had a
table and benches and perhaps one chair. Bedrooms had a curtained
feather bed with pillows, blankets, and sheets. Clothes were
stored in a chest, sometimes with sweet-smelling herbs such as
lavender, rosemary, and southernwood. Better homes had wall
hanging and cupboards displaying plate. Laundresses washed clothes
in the streams, rivers, and public conduits. Country peasants
still lived in wood, straw, and mud huts with earth floors and a
smoky hearth in the center or a kitchen area under the eaves of
the hut.
In 1442, bricks began to be manufactured in the nation and so
there was more use of bricks in buildings. Chimneys were
introduced into manor houses where stone had been too expensive.
This was necessary if a second floor was added, so the smoke would
not damage the floor above it and would eventually go out of the
house.
Nobles and their retinue moved from manor to manor, as they had
for centuries, to keep watch upon their lands and to consume the
produce thereof; it was easier to bring the household to the
estate than to transport the yield of the estate to the household.
Also, at regular intervals sewage had to be removed from the
cellar pits. Often a footman walked or ran on foot next to his
master or mistress when they rode out on horseback or in a
carriage. He was there primarily for prestige.
Jousting tournaments were held for entertainment purposes only and
were followed by banquets of several courses of food served on
dishes of gold, silver, pewter, or wood on a linen cloth covering
the table. Hands were washed before and after the meal. People
washed their faces every morning after getting up. Teeth were
cleaned with powders. Fragrant leaves were chewed for bad breath.
Garlic was used for indigestion and other ailments. Feet were
rubbed with salt and vinegar to remove calluses. Good manners
included not slumping against a post, fidgeting, sticking one's
finger into one's nose, putting one's hands into one's hose to
scratch the privy parts, spitting over the table or too far,
licking one's plate, picking one's teeth, breathing stinking
breath into the face of the lord, blowing on one's food, stuffing
masses of bread into one's mouth, scratching one's head, loosening
one's girdle to belch, and probing one's teeth with a knife.
Fishing and hunting were reserved for the nobility rather than
just the King.
As many lords became less wealthy because of the cost of war, some
peasants, villein and free, became prosperous, especially those
who also worked at a craft, e.g. butchers, bakers, smiths,
shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, and cloth workers.
An agricultural slump caused poorer soils to fall back into waste.
The better soils were leased by peasants, who, with their
families, were in a better position to farm it than a great lord,
who found it hard to hire laborers at a reasonable cost. Further,
peasants' sheep, hens, pigs, ducks, goats, cattle, bees, and crop
made them almost self-sufficient in foodstuffs. They lived in a
huddle of cottages, pastured their animals on common land, and
used common meadows for haymaking. They subsisted mainly on
boiled bacon, an occasional chicken, worts and beans grown in the
cottage garden, and cereals. They wore fine wool cloth in all
their apparel. Brimless hats were replacing hoods. They had an
abundance of bed coverings in their houses. And they had more free
time. Village entertainment included traveling jesters, acrobats,
musicians, and bear-baiters. Playing games and gambling were
popular pastimes.
Most villeins were now being called "customary tenants" or "copy-
holders" of land because they held their acres by a copy of the
court-roll of the manor, which listed the number of teams, the
fines, the reliefs, and the services due to the lord for each
landholder. The Chancery court interpreted many of these documents
to include rights of inheritance. The common law courts followed
the lead of the Chancery and held that copyhold land could be
inherited as was land at common law. Evictions by lords decreased.
The difference between villein and freeman lessened but landlords
usually still had profits of villein bondage, such as heriot,
merchet, and chevage.
A class of laborers was arising who depended entirely on the wages
of industry for their subsistence. The cloth workers in rural
areas were isolated and weak and often at the mercy of middlemen
for employment and the amount of their wages. When rural laborers
went to towns to seek employment in the new industries, they would
work at first for any rate. This deepened the cleavage of the
classes in the towns. The artificers in the town and the cottagers
and laborers in the country lived from hand to mouth, on the edge
of survival, but better off than the old, the diseased, the
widows, and the orphans. However, the 1400s were the most
prosperous time for laborers considering their wages and the
prices of food. Meat and poultry were plentiful and grain prices
low.
Social mobility was most possible in the towns, where distinctions
were usually only of wealth. So a poor apprentice could aspire to
become a master, a member of the livery of his company, a member
of the council, an alderman, a mayor, and then an esquire for
life. The distance between baron and a country knight and between
a yeoman and knight was wider. Manor custom was strong. But a
yeoman could give his sons a chance to become gentlemen by
entering them in a trade in a town, sending them to university, or
to war. Every freeman was to some extent a soldier, and to some
extent a lawyer, serving in the county or borough courts. A
burgess, with his workshop or warehouse, was trained in warlike
exercises, and he could keep his own accounts, and make his own
will and other legal documents, with the aid of a scrivener or a
chaplain, who could supply an outline of form. But law was growing
as a profession. Old-established London families began to choose
the law as a profession for their sons, in preference to an
apprenticeship in trade. Many borough burgesses in Parliament were
attorneys.
In London, shopkeepers appealed to passersby to buy their goods,
sometimes even seizing people by the sleeve. The drapers had
several roomy shops containing shelves piled with cloths of all
colors and grades, tapestries, pillows, blankets, bed draperies,
and 'bankers and dorsers' to soften hard wooden benches. A rear
storeroom held more cloth for import or export. Many shops of
skinners were on Fur Row. There were shops of leather sellers,
hosiers, gold and silver cups, and silks. At the Stocks Market
were fishmongers, butchers, and poulterers. London grocers
imported spices, canvas, ropery, potions, unguents, soap,
confections, garlic, cabbages, onions, apples, oranges, almonds,
figs, dates, raisins, dyestuffs, woad, madder (plant for medicine
and dye), scarlet grains, saffron, iron, and steel. They were
retailers as well as wholesalers and had shops selling honey,
licorice, salt, vinegar, rice, sugar loaves, syrups, spices,
garden seeds, dyes, alum, soap, brimstone, paper, varnish, canvas,
rope, musk, incense, treacle of Genoa, and mercury. The Grocers
did some money lending, usually at 12% interest. The guilds did
not restrict themselves to dealing in the goods for which they had
a right of inspection, and so many dealt in wine that it was a
medium of exchange. There was no sharp distinction between retail
and wholesale trading.
In London, grocers sold herbs for medicinal as well as eating
purposes. Breadcarts sold penny wheat loaves. Foreigners set up
stalls on certain days of the week to sell meat, canvas, linen,
cloth, ironmongery, and lead. There were great houses, churches,
monasteries, inns, guildhalls, warehouses, and the King's Beam for
weighing wool to be exported. In 1410, the Guildhall of London was
built through contributions, proceeds of fines, and lastly, to
finish it, special fees imposed on apprenticeships, deeds, wills,
and letters-patent. The Mercers and Goldsmiths were in the
prosperous part of town. The Goldsmiths' shops sold gold and
silver plate, jewels, rings, water pitchers, drinking goblets,
basins to hold water for the hands, and covered saltcellars. The
grain market was on Cornhill. Halfway up the street, there was a
supply of water which had been brought up in pipes. On the top of
the hill was a cage where riotous folk had been incarcerated by
the night watch and the stocks and pillory, where fraudulent
schemers were exposed to ridicule. No work was to be done on
Sundays, but some did work surreptitiously. The barbers kept their
shops open in defiance of the church. Outside the London city
walls were tenements, the Smithfield cattle market, Westminster
Hall, green fields of crops, and some marsh land.
On the Thames River to London were large ships with cargoes; small
boats rowed by tough boatmen offering passage for a penny; small
private barges of great men with carved wood, gay banners, and
oarsmen with velvet gowns; the banks covered with masts and
tackle; the nineteen arch London Bridge supporting a street of
shops and houses and a drawbridge in the middle; quays;
warehouses, and great cranes lifting bales from ship to wharf.
Merchant guilds which imported or exported each had their own
wharves and warehouses. Downstream, pirates hung on gallows at the
low-water mark to remain until three tides had overflowed their
bodies. A climate change of about 1 1/2 degree Celcius lower
caused the Thames to regularly freeze over in winter.
The large scale of London trade promoted the specialization of the
manufacturer versus the merchant versus the shipper. Merchants had
enough wealth to make loans to the government or for new
commercial enterprises. Local reputation on general, depended upon
a combination of wealth, trustworthiness of character, and public
spirit; it rose and fell with business success. Some London
merchants were knighted by the King. Many bought country estates
and turned themselves into gentry.
The king granted London all common soils, improvements, wastes,
streets, and ways in London and in the adjacent waters of the
Thames River and all the profits and rents to be derived
therefrom. Later the king granted London the liberty to purchase
lands and tenements worth up to 2,667s. yearly. With this power,
London had obtained all the essential features of a corporation: a
seal, the right to make by-laws, the power to purchase lands and
hold them "to them and their successors" (not simply their heirs,
which is an individual and hereditary succession only), the power
to sue and be sued in its own name, and the perpetual succession
implied in the power of filling up vacancies by election. Since
these powers were not granted by charters, London is a corporation
by prescription. In 1446, the liverymen obtained the right with
the council to elect the mayor, the sheriff, and certain other
corporate officers.
Many boroughs sought and obtained formal incorporation with the
same essential features as London. This tied up the loose language
of their early charters of liberties. Often, a borough would have
its own resident Justice of the Peace. Each incorporation involved
a review by a Justice of the Peace to make sure the charter of
incorporation rule didn't conflict with the law of the nation. A
borough typically had a mayor accompanied by his personal sword-
bearer and serjeants-at-mace bearing the borough regalia,
bailiffs, a sheriff, and chamberlains or a steward for financial
assistance. At many boroughs, aldermen, assisted by their
constables, kept the peace in their separate wards. There might be
coroners, a recorder, and a town clerk, with a host of lesser
officials including beadles, aletasters, sealers, searchers
[inspectors], weighers and keepers of the market, ferrymen and
porters, clock-keepers and criers, paviors [maintained the roads],
scavengers and other street cleaners, gatekeepers and watchmen of
several ranks and kinds. A wealthy borough would have a chaplain
and two or three minstrels. The mayor replaced the bailiffs as the
chief magistracy.
In all towns, the wealthiest and most influential guilds were the
merchant traders of mercers, drapers, grocers, and goldsmiths.
>From their ranks came most of the mayors, and many began to
intermarry with the country knights and gentry. Next came the
shopholders of skinners, tailors, ironmongers, and corvisors
[shoemakers]. Thirdly came the humbler artisans, the sellers of
victuals, small shopkeepers, apprentices, and journeymen on the
rise. Lastly came unskilled laborers, who lived in crowded
tenements and hired themselves out. The first three groups were
the free men who voted, paid scot and bore lot, and belonged to
guilds. Scot was a ratable proportion in the payments levied from
the town for local or national purposes. Merchant guilds in some
towns merged their existence into the town corporation, and their
guild halls became the common halls of the town, and their
property became town property.
In London, the Cutlers' Company was chartered in 1415, the
Haberdashers' Company in 1417, the Grocers' Company in 1428, the
Drapers' and Cordwainers' companies in 1429, the Vintners' and
Brewers' companies in 1437, the Leathersellers' Company in 1444,
the Girdlers' Company in 1448, the Armourers' and Brassiers'
companies in 1453, the Barbers' Company in 1461, the Tallow
Chandlers' Company in 1462, the Ironmongers' Company in 1464, the
Dyers' Company in 1471, the Musicians' Company in 1472, the
Carpenters' Company in 1477, the Cooks' Company in 1481, and the
Waxchandlers' Company in 1483. The Fishmongers, which had been
chartered in 1399, were incorporated in 1433, the Cordwainers in
1439, and the Pewterers in 1468.
There were craft guilds in the towns, at least 65 in London. In
fact, every London trade of twenty men had its own guild. The
guild secured good work for its members and the members maintained
the reputation of the work standards of the guild. Bad work was
punished and night work prohibited as leading to bad work. The
guild exercised moral control over its members and provided
sickness and death benefits for them. There was much overlapping
in the two forms of association: the craft guild and the religious
fraternity. Apprentices were taken in to assure an adequate supply
of competent workers for the future. The standard indenture of an
apprentice bound him to live in his master's house, to serve him
diligently, obey reasonable commands, keep his master's secrets,
protect him from injury, abstain from dice, cards and haunting of
taverns, not marry, commit no fornication, nor absent himself
without permission. In return the master undertook to provide the
boy or girl with bed, board, and lodging and to instruct him or
her in the trade, craft, or mystery. When these apprentices had
enough training they were made journeymen with a higher rate of
pay. Journeymen traveled to see the work of their craft in other
towns. Those journeymen rising to master had the highest pay rate.
Occupations free of guild restrictions included horse dealers,
marbelers, bookbinders, jewelers, organ makers, feathermongers,
pie makers, basket makers, mirrorers, quilters, and parchment
makers. Non-citizens of London could not be prevented from selling
leather, metalwares, hay, meat, fruit, vegetables, butter, cheese,
poultry, and fish from their boats, though they had to sell in the
morning and sell all their goods before the market closed.
In the towns, many married women had independent businesses and
wives also played an active part in the businesses of their
husbands. Wives of well-to-do London merchants embroidered, sewed
jewelry onto clothes, and made silk garments. Widows often
continued in their husband's businesses, such as managing a large
import-export trade, tailoring, brewing, and metal shop. Socially
lower women often ran their own breweries, bakeries, and taverns.
It was possible for wives to be free burgesses in their own right
in some towns.