Simon Schama journeys through 5,000 years of life in the British Isles.
Simon Schama continues his look at British history with the Black Death, the horror of medieval Britain. Those it did not kill were condemned to suffer decades of anarchy and unrest, not least King Richard II. But it created an unlikely breed of survivor - the country gent.
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Simon Schama continues his look at British history with the Black Death, the horror of medieval Britain. Those it did not kill were condemned to suffer decades of anarchy and unrest, not least King Richard II. But it created an unlikely breed of survivor - the country gent.
Watch Complete Series:
https://dailymotion.com/playlist/x8t1po
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TVTranscript
00:00In the summer of 1348, the English could be forgiven for thinking themselves unconquerable.
00:20They had vanquished the old enemies, the Scots and the French.
00:26Their king, Edward III, seemed the most powerful ruler in Europe.
00:34But they would be conquered,
00:37and by a king against whom neither longbows nor warships offered any defence.
00:44King Death.
00:47His weapon was plague, and by the end of his terrible campaign,
00:52almost half the people of Britain would be dead.
00:58The country would survive the trauma,
01:00but first it had to undergo a purgatory of unimaginable misery,
01:05because hard on the heels of pestilence would come rebellion and civil war.
01:10The century of plague was a pilgrimage through pain,
01:14and this is the story of that journey.
01:17MUSIC
01:48MUSIC FADES
01:55Yersinia pestis, the germ of plague,
01:59came to Britain in the guts of infected fleas.
02:05They were hidden away in cargos of grain,
02:08bales of cloth and in the fur of black rats.
02:13The most probable point of entry was Malcolm Regis, near Weymouth.
02:19By the time it got to the great ports of Southampton and Bristol,
02:23there were already stories from traumatised cities of Italy
02:26as to how and where it had begun.
02:29In the east, on the plains of Central Asia,
02:33another of the horrors carried on the backs of the Mongol hordes.
02:38The plague cut a swathe of destruction eastwards to China and India
02:43and westwards into Crimea and Turkey.
02:47At the port of Qatar, the Tatars had thrown infected bodies
02:51over the city walls to hasten the surrender of the defending Genoese,
02:56a first in the annals of biological warfare.
03:01Once it arrived by sea in Italy,
03:04it spread quickly into mainland Europe.
03:08There had been devastating calamities before visited on Britain.
03:13Countless numbers died in the apocalyptic famine of 1315.
03:20But it was the merciless, indiscriminate swiftness
03:24of the plague's progress
03:26which so unhinged the cities and villages caught in its onslaught.
03:31No-one, rich or poor, could escape.
03:37This is how the Welsh poet Ewan Gethin saw it,
03:40waiting for his own infection, which, sure enough, came in 1349.
03:47We see death coming into our midst like foul smoke.
03:51We see death coming into our midst like foul smoke.
03:55A plague which cuts off the young,
03:58a rootless phantom which has no mercy.
04:03Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit.
04:07It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion.
04:12Great is its seething like a burning cinder,
04:16a grievous thing of ashy colour.
04:19It is an ugly eruption that comes with unseemly haste.
04:24They are like a shower of peas, the early ornaments of black death.
04:36It would take about six days from the bite of an infected flea
04:40for the telltale swellings, the buboes,
04:43to appear on the victim's neck, groin or armpit.
04:47Accompanied by violent fever and agonising pain.
04:52The immune system would be overwhelmed within a week.
04:57If the infection reached the lungs,
05:00death came after just a couple of days of bloody coughing.
05:04Anyone who inhaled even the tiniest droplets of mucus
05:08would be doomed to suffer in their turn.
05:18No-one would have known it at the time,
05:20but the tightly packed streets, alleys and houses of a place like Bristol
05:25made a perfect factory farm for the bacillus.
05:28Vermin, crawling with fleas,
05:30lived alongside the crowded population of people and animals.
05:39The nibble of a flea was a common irritation
05:42in this lousy, ant-heap world.
05:45And even when the buboes appeared,
05:47there was no reason to suppose that fleas or rats were responsible.
05:51But there was no doubt about what would happen next.
05:57The youngest and the oldest and the poorest,
06:00those with least resistance, would be taken first.
06:04But then everyone else, too.
06:07In a town this ripe for infection,
06:10almost half the population would have perished in the first year.
06:15Among them, 15 of Bristol's 52 city councillors.
06:19Their names struck through as they died.
06:26Terrified and bewildered,
06:28the healthy abandoned the sick to their fate.
06:35Whole towns, villages, even families,
06:38were cruelly divided into the living and the dying.
06:44Husbands would have shunned their wives,
06:47fathers and mothers recoiled from contact with their children.
06:54It's almost impossible to imagine the utter desolation and terror,
07:00the complete collapse of everything you've taken for granted.
07:04How do you find bread now the bakers are all dead?
07:07How do you find a physic now that none of them work?
07:10And, at last, how do you find someone to cart away the bodies
07:15that have to be disposed of somewhere?
07:31The bigger the city, the greater the shock.
07:35In 1348, London had a population of close to 100,000.
07:44In the first wave of the plague, 300 died every day.
07:57At Spitalfields, there had long been a medieval hospital
08:01with a cemetery attached.
08:03Within its walls, the dead were dutifully laid to rest
08:07in their individual graves, pointing east,
08:10so that, come the Day of Judgement,
08:12they would rise again, facing towards Jerusalem.
08:17But in the grip of the epidemic,
08:19there was no time for such careful pieties.
08:22Recent excavations have turned up mass pits
08:25where the bodies were pitchforked into the dirt
08:28in obvious haste and desperation.
08:31Unearthed now, just the way they were dumped in,
08:34they look as if they're protesting at the indignity.
08:47By the summer of 1349, the plague had spread
08:50to the furthest corners of England, Wales and Scotland.
08:54Now it travelled across the sea to Ireland.
08:58According to John Clynne, a Franciscan friar writing at Kilkenny,
09:0214,000 had perished in Dublin alone.
09:13Since the beginning of the world, it has been unheard of
09:17for so many people to die in such a short time.
09:22This pestilence was so contagious
09:26that those who touched the dead or the sick
09:29were immediately infected themselves.
09:32I, seeing these many ills,
09:36and that the whole world is encompassed by evil,
09:40waiting among the dead for death to come,
09:43have committed to writing what I truly have heard and examined.
09:48And I leave parchment for continuing this work
09:52if perchance any man survive.
09:55And any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence
10:00and carry on the work which I have begun.
10:07At this point, another hand has written.
10:11Here, it seems, the author died.
10:16When the survivors recovered
10:18from the first brutal shock of the Black Death,
10:21inevitably, why us? Why now?
10:28The best guess was that the plague was caused
10:31by a corruption of the atmosphere, putrefaction,
10:35the mark of men and beasts rising from lakes, swamps and chasms.
10:41This dank smog even had a name, miasma.
10:46If sickness grew in stanch,
10:48then sweet smells were an obvious remedy.
10:51Physicians and herbalists lost no time
10:54in devising recipes for pomanders and potions
10:57to guard against infection
10:59or even to act as an antidote for the stricken.
11:06Five cups of rue, if it be a man,
11:09and if it be a woman, leave out the rue.
11:12Five little blades of columbine,
11:15a great quantity of marigold flowers.
11:19An egg that is newly laid,
11:22and make a hole in one end and blow out all that is within.
11:26And lay it to the fire,
11:28and roast it till ground to powder, but do not burn it.
11:33And brew all these herbs with good ale,
11:36but do not strain them,
11:38and make the sick drink it for three evenings and mornings.
11:44If they hold it in their stomach, they shall have life.
11:55But if God decided otherwise,
11:57all the potions in the world would be of no avail.
12:02The inescapable conclusion was that the potions
12:05The inescapable conclusion was that the pestilence
12:08had been laid on mankind
12:10as a chastisement for its manifold sins.
12:17Lewd necklines, lascivious dancing
12:20and shameless adultery had brought on the plague.
12:26It would end when the world was contrite,
12:29but it never seemed contrite enough.
12:33In the meantime, the country was laid waste.
12:38Farms were abandoned, whole villages deserted.
12:47The accounts for the Bishop of Winchester's lands
12:50at Farnham in Surrey
12:52tell the story of a rural society in shock.
12:55In the first year of the Black Death,
12:5752 households, a good third of the villagers,
13:00were wiped out, given the mark Defectus Per Pestilentem.
13:09The Farnham rolls put names to the numbers,
13:12names like Matilda Sticker.
13:14She died together with her entire family.
13:17Or a servant girl, Matilda Talvin,
13:20who saw her master and his entire household succumb to the plague.
13:25By the time it ebbed away in 1350,
13:281,300 had died in Farnham.
13:32While the plague took, it could also give.
13:35In the first year of the Black Death,
13:37John Crutchate, who was a miner, became an orphan,
13:40but an orphan with assets,
13:42because he could now inherit the lots left to him
13:45by his father and another relative.
13:48This must have been the making
13:50of a small but serious village fortune.
13:53In another place in the rolls,
13:55we learn that the harvest had become twice as expensive to gather in,
13:5912 pence, written in Roman numerals, per acre,
14:03because, the rolls say, of the plague and the scarcity of labour.
14:09Workers, it seems, were thin on the ground
14:12and were beginning to charge accordingly.
14:15Farnham's story could be repeated all through Britain.
14:20The countryside after the Black Death
14:23was an irreversibly altered world.
14:26For one thing, there were no more serfs.
14:29For centuries, being a serf meant being tied,
14:33by custom and by birth, to your local lord.
14:36He gave you a name.
14:38And in return, you put in hours of grinding toil,
14:42unpaid, on his very big farm.
14:45There were other ways, too, in which you were not at all free.
14:49You had to ask his permission to marry,
14:52and you were not, repeat not, ever to leave.
14:55Until, that is, the Black Death.
14:58Now, there was at least one other way of living,
15:01and that was to be a serf.
15:04Until, that is, the Black Death.
15:07Now, there was a desperate labour shortage,
15:10and the simple operation of the laws of supply and demand
15:14meant that, for the first time,
15:16you could actually set the terms of the deal.
15:19He wanted some labour out of you,
15:21well, then you could say,
15:23why not start by paying me something?
15:25He wants you to move into a piece of land
15:28which otherwise would go to rack and ruin.
15:31You could go on by saying, OK, cut the rent.
15:34And if the Lord then says,
15:36not a chance, you impertinent so-and-so,
15:39well, then you just up sticks and find someone else
15:42who's got a more secure grip on the new economic facts of life.
15:46Well, hundreds of thousands of peasants must have done just that,
15:51and there was nothing anybody could do about it.
15:55It was not just the social order that the plague shook loose.
16:00It also ate away at the sense of security offered by the church.
16:07Especially since the regular clergy
16:09seemed powerless to provide help for the afflicted,
16:13or even for themselves.
16:18In 1349, the Bishop of Bath and Wells
16:21seeing that there was a serious shortage of priests
16:24authorised laymen to hear the Confession of the Dying.
16:28Or, he wrote, even a woman if no man is available.
16:35The most daring took matters into their own hands,
16:38seeking redemption directly from the scriptures.
16:43The Lollards, or Mumblers,
16:45took their name from their mouthing out loud of the Bible.
16:49And encouraged others to do the same by translating it into English.
16:54Liberating it from the obscurity of Latin.
17:00As few as they were,
17:02the Lollards were a dramatic threat to the authority of the church.
17:06They were only saved from persecution
17:08by the protection of their most powerful patron,
17:11King Edward's third son, John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster.
17:16Men like him were drawn to new forms of piety and penance,
17:20because the plague had made them acutely aware
17:23that King Death was no respecter of rank or wealth.
17:28And that should he strike without warning,
17:31they had better be ready for a reckoning.
17:34They all knew the cautionary tale of the three living and the three dead.
17:40A trio of handsome young kings, out for a decent day's sport,
17:45suddenly find themselves confronted by three not-so-handsome cadavers.
17:51Each in a different state of decomposition.
17:54The Marx Brothers, from hell.
17:59The three living pipe up, I am afraid.
18:02Lo, what I see!
18:04The three living pipe up, I am afraid.
18:07Lo, what I see!
18:09And, methinks, these devils be.
18:12Back come the other three.
18:15Such shall you be.
18:18I was welfare.
18:20And, for God's love, beware.
18:24The furthest-gone of the gruesome threesome then makes a little speech.
18:29Know that I was head of my tribe.
18:32Princes, kings and nobles, royal and rich, rejoicing in wealth.
18:37But now I am so hideous and bare that even the worms disdain me.
18:51This was an invasion that Plantagenet England had not prepared for.
18:56The invasion of the space of the living by the dead.
19:00The sense that the borders between backyards and boneyards had collapsed
19:05produced a sudden nervousness.
19:07In the face of king death,
19:09neither riches nor earthly fame could buy salvation.
19:13Or guarantee immortality.
19:20This insecurity found expression in a very peculiar kind of tomb.
19:26The transe, which means, appropriately enough, gone off.
19:32In transe tombs like this one at Canterbury Cathedral,
19:35you got remembered twice over.
19:38They were double-decker affairs.
19:40In the top deck, you were seen very much in the guise the world expected
19:44as a knight in armour or a bishop in full Episcopal rig.
19:50In the lower deck, though, they were a naked skeleton.
19:56The flesh fallen away from the bone.
20:20Now, the mindset that produced the transe tomb was a kind of reverse envy.
20:25A determination to fall behind the Joneses,
20:28to bow to no-one in your painful awareness
20:32that however grand you were, pretty soon,
20:34you were going to be reduced to a heap of dust and maggots.
20:40The idea was to contrast, as shockingly as possible,
20:43two sorts of self-consciousness.
20:46On the one hand, the way we should like to be remembered,
20:49dying in splendour and piety.
20:53And on the other hand, the way we really are.
20:57Pathetic in our cadaverous mortality.
21:06I was pauper-born, reads the inscription on Archbishop Chichelly's tomb.
21:11Then to primate raised.
21:14Now I'm cut down and served up for worms.
21:19Behold my grave.
21:26Only the highest office in the land seemed to have survived unscathed.
21:32Edward III, once the glamorous, invincible warrior,
21:35was now an ageing father to a fragile nation.
21:40Still, the royal succession seemed secure.
21:43Edward's son, the Black Prince, the heir to the throne,
21:47was already a legendary hero.
21:50But then, against all expectation, the picture changed.
21:55The Black Prince succumbed to dysentery in 1376,
21:58and a year later, the old king himself finally expired.
22:05And so the crown passed to Edward's grandson, Richard of Bordeaux.
22:10A boy king, called upon before his time,
22:13Richard was ruler in name only.
22:17Everyone knew that his uncle, John of Gaunt,
22:20worked the real levers of power.
22:27Richard's coronation was orchestrated by John of Gaunt
22:31as a festival of loyalty,
22:33a statement of faith in the undimmed future of England's glory.
22:41There had been no coronation for half a century,
22:44but the mix of solemnity and festivity never failed to work its spell.
22:50Knights of the Shire rode in from all over England
22:53to witness the spectacle.
22:59The next day in the abbey,
23:01little Richard had his shirt taken off him behind a golden screen
23:05and his face, hands and chest touched with the holy oil.
23:11As they listened to him in his little boy's voice,
23:14promised to protect the church, do justice
23:18and respect the laws and customs of his ancestors,
23:21the assembly of nobles and priests must have imagined him growing
23:26to fit the huge throne of his ferocious great-great-grandfather,
23:30Edward I.
23:33Inevitably, as the long ceremony droned on in the darkness,
23:37Richard fell asleep.
23:41As he was carried from the abbey, his legs dangling,
23:44one of his oversized slippers fell off.
23:47But who could think that an ill omen?
23:49He was, after all, only ten.
23:56How was the child marked by all this?
23:5922 years later, did he remember this moment of anointing
24:03as a kind of apotheosis, a magical transformation
24:07from a little man into a little god?
24:13Perhaps it was just as well that Richard mistook himself for a messiah,
24:17since only someone with that kind of innate self-confidence
24:21could have faced down, at the tender age of 14,
24:24the most violent upheaval in the history of medieval England.
24:28It happened with astounding, terrifying swiftness,
24:31and it started in the kind of place you'd least expect it,
24:35not some destitute mudhole in the back of beyond,
24:38but in the most economically developed region of rural England,
24:42the belt of rich, fertile country,
24:44stretching from Kent over the Medway and Thames
24:47to Essex and southern East Anglia.
24:50The thing about the Peasants' Revolt is that,
24:54the people who started it weren't really peasants at all.
24:57At any rate, they certainly weren't the straw-chewing,
25:01pitchfork-waving yokels of legend.
25:04No, they were people with something to lose, the village elite,
25:08men who'd served as constables and stewards and jurors,
25:12men who'd moved into those vacant lots
25:15that had been left behind by victims of the plague.
25:19They'd made little money and they weren't about to see it
25:22go down the drain in order to line the pockets
25:25of some lawyer and pen-pusher in Westminster.
25:33What's more, they knew how to make an army
25:36out of those one rung down on the social ladder.
25:40Families just above the poverty line
25:43who had to sell their labour to make ends meet.
25:46They were already angry at government attempts
25:49to peg back their steadily rising wages to pre-plague levels.
25:54The balance had tipped in favour of the survivors
25:57and they were determined to keep it that way.
26:03In their different ways, all these people were,
26:06or thought they were, up-and-comers.
26:08And they would fight, if necessary,
26:10to prevent themselves from sinking into the abyss of poverty.
26:14And they would fight, if necessary,
26:16to prevent themselves from sinking into the down-and-outers.
26:20Was this a class war, then?
26:22A phrase we're not supposed to use
26:24since the official burial of Marxism.
26:27Yes, it was.
26:31The suspicion amongst the men of Village England
26:34was that the real power behind the throne,
26:36John of Gaunt, the Queen Mother and the Chancellor,
26:39were gathering in fresh taxes,
26:41not to wage a patriotic war in France,
26:44but to lavish on their own palaces and private estates.
26:49So when, in November 1380, Parliament approved a new poll tax,
26:54one which for the first time took no account of individual wealth,
26:58the Yeoman farmers must have imagined the awful prospect
27:02of all their hard-won gains being snatched back by a greedy government.
27:07There was outrage, bloody-minded fury and mass evasion,
27:11which quickly escalated into outright rebellion.
27:16Tax collectors and sheriff's men were attacked, a few killed.
27:25In Maidstone, they elected Watt Tyler, a Yeoman craftsman,
27:29as their general and captain,
27:31and freed a Lollard anti-cleric called John Ball,
27:34who'd been imprisoned in the Bishop's Palace.
27:38John Ball is a recognisable type,
27:41a preaching friar who pushes Black Death radicalism
27:44to its logical extreme.
27:46Get rid of the priesthood and the property owners, Ball argued,
27:50and Christ's embrace of the poor will once again be honoured.
27:56Are we not descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve?
28:01And what reason can they give why they should be more masters than ourselves?
28:07They are clothed in velvet and rich ermine,
28:09while we are forced to wear poor clothing.
28:12They have wines and fine spices and fine bread,
28:16while we have only rye and the refuse of the straw,
28:19and when we drink, it must be water.
28:23We are called slaves, and if we do not perform our services, we're beaten.
28:28Let us go to the king and remonstrate with him.
28:32We may obtain a favourable answer,
28:35and if not, we must seek to amend our conditions ourselves.
28:44And so they marched,
28:46the levelling fever of the Black Death buzzing in their brains,
28:50slogans of equality and retribution in their mouths.
28:55After all, who were what Tyler, John Ball and Robert K of the Dartford Baker
29:01but the three dead, confronting the spoiled, rich and mighty
29:06with their day of judgement?
29:11On the morning of the 12th of June, 1381, an enormous army,
29:16at least 5,000, perhaps as many as 10,000 strong,
29:20was camped here on the fields of Blackheath,
29:23right on the edge of London.
29:25Below them, they could see the city.
29:28Old St Paul's, the bridges,
29:30crowded with shops and Westminster beyond,
29:33all seemingly at their mercy.
29:40This was not a rabble.
29:42From the outset of the revolt,
29:44its targets had been selected carefully to make a point.
29:47Rich abbeys, estates belonging to tax collectors,
29:51any document bearing the seal of the Exchequer
29:54was marked out for destruction.
29:57Manorial accounts were thrown on the fire.
30:00They knew what they were doing.
30:03Paradoxically, the rebels remained fervently loyal to the crown.
30:08Though they had made themselves outlaws,
30:10they were fired by the certainty that their cause was just.
30:14Surely it would be seen that they were not mobilised to threaten the king
30:19but to rescue him and through him themselves.
30:27The discipline of the march, however,
30:29did not survive contact with the big city.
30:32Prisons were broken open, churches looted,
30:36palaces put to the torch.
30:3935 Flemish merchants were decapitated on the same block,
30:43one after the other.
30:46Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sadbury, was captured
30:50while at his prayers in the Chapel of St John.
30:53The rampaging rebels hacked his head off,
30:56stuck it on a spike and paraded it triumphantly through the streets.
31:06On the evening of Thursday, 13th June,
31:09the teenage king climbed one of the turrets in the tower.
31:14And what he saw ought to have broken him in terror.
31:20The sky red with flames, London crumbling into smoking ruins.
31:31But hostage to a nightmare, Richard doesn't seem to have panicked.
31:36When the councillors asked him to negotiate with the rebels,
31:39he evidently showed no hesitation.
31:42It was the boy who was the man of the hour.
31:49It was a brave front, for Richard must have thought
31:52there was a good chance he might not survive.
31:54Before his meeting with the rebels,
31:56he prayed at the shrine of Edward the Confessor,
31:59the patron saint of all the Plantagenet kings.
32:04Then he rode through the jostling crowds to meet Watt Tyler
32:08and the rest of the leaders at Smithfield.
32:13When he got to Smithfield, the king could see the rebels
32:17camped on the west side of the field and the royal party on the east.
32:22Watt Tyler rode over to Richard, got off his little horse,
32:26knelt very briefly, not very convincingly,
32:29but then shakes his hand and calls him brother.
32:33Why will you not go home, asked the king rather plaintively,
32:37to which Tyler responded with a loud curse,
32:41and a set of demands.
32:43The most important was for a new Magna Carta,
32:46this time for the ordinary people.
32:48It would abolish serfdom,
32:50it would liquidate the property of the church,
32:53it would offer a general pardon to all outlaws,
32:56and if all this wasn't radical enough,
32:59it would make every man equal below the level of the king.
33:04Now, to all this, Richard answered yes,
33:09perhaps crossing his fingers behind his back,
33:11and maybe Watt Tyler was so amazed by the concession,
33:14he didn't quite know what to do next.
33:17So an eerie silence settles over everybody on the field,
33:22broken only by Tyler asking for a flagon of ale.
33:26He gets it, he downs it, he gets back onto his mount,
33:30a big man on a little horse.
33:33And at that moment, history changed.
33:39There was someone on the king's side
33:42who had not been reading the script,
33:45or perhaps was just unable to take the humiliation any longer.
33:51It was a young esquire, someone Richard's own age,
33:54who shouted at Tyler that he was a thief.
33:59It broke the strange spell.
34:02Walworth, the mayor, who had always taken a hard line,
34:06tried to arrest Tyler.
34:12There was horseback fighting,
34:14Walworth getting in the decisive blow,
34:17cutting Tyler through the shoulder and neck.
34:22As soon as he was down, the king's men surrounded him,
34:25finishing him off,
34:27but making sure the rebel camp could not see what was going on.
34:37One way or another, this was the moment of truth.
34:41It was also the moment when Richard himself acted,
34:44decisively and with amazing courage.
34:48He rode straight at the rebels, shouting famously,
34:52you shall have no captain but me.
34:58The words were brilliantly chosen
35:00and were, of course, deliberately ambiguous.
35:03To the rebels, it seemed that Richard himself was now their leader,
35:07just as they'd always wanted.
35:09But the words could just as easily have been meant
35:12as the first reassertion of royal authority.
35:16Either way, it diffused the immediate crisis
35:20and gave Mayor Walworth the opportunity to get back to London
35:24and mobilise armed men.
35:28Now the process of breaking up the leaderless rebellion could begin,
35:32cautiously at first with offers of pardons and mercy,
35:35but then with implacable resolution.
35:38Just a week after the apparent concessions at Smithfield,
35:42another group of rebels met with Richard at Waltham in Essex,
35:46but they found a very different king.
35:53You wretches, detestable on land and sea,
35:57you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live.
36:01Give this message to your colleagues.
36:03Rustics you were and rustics you are still.
36:07You will remain in bondage not as before but incomparably harsher.
36:12For as long as we live, we will strive to suppress you
36:16and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity.
36:20However, we will spare your lives if you remain faithful.
36:25Choose now which course you want to follow.
36:31The rebels took the only option that was realistically open to them.
36:35They fell to their knees.
36:37It was all over.
36:39The king was literally the only one left standing.
36:43But what was the effect of all this on Richard?
36:47What did he now think he was capable of?
36:51My master, God omnipotent,
36:55is mustering in his clouds on our behalf armies of pestilence
37:00and they shall strike your children yet unborn and unbegot
37:04that lift your vassal hands against my head
37:07and threat the glory of my precious crown.
37:13Though Shakespeare starts his tragedy many years after the Peasants' Revolt,
37:17it's hard not to believe that in his portrait of a petulant,
37:21self-admiring Richard II,
37:23there is the sense of someone trapped
37:26in an adolescent fantasy of indestructibility.
37:31There's no denying that, especially at times of crisis,
37:34he was subject to unpredictable mood swings
37:38between adrenaline-rush feelings of omnipotence and abject fatalism.
37:44But it is easy to exaggerate his unfitness to rule,
37:49as though he were somehow suspiciously unsound.
37:53He was built the usual Plantagenet way,
37:56six foot tall with long, flowing blonde hair.
38:00But unlike his grandfather, he failed to keep mistresses
38:04and seemed oddly enough to want to be faithful to his wife Anne.
38:09Real Plantagenets tore at their meat and slurped the drippings.
38:13Richard not only insisted on using a spoon,
38:16but inflicted it on the rest of the court.
38:19Real Plantagenets brought you blood-soaked victories
38:22over the ancestral enemies in France and Scotland.
38:25Richard brought England the pocket handkerchief.
38:30Real Plantagenets built fortresses.
38:33Richard instead wanted a great ceremonial space in Westminster Hall
38:38with a spectacular hammer-beam roof.
38:43The Rose of Angels symbolised the King's divine right
38:47to rule.
38:56The angels, in turn, are supported by carved stone plinths
39:00bearing Richard's own emblem, the White Heart.
39:06But the alien strangeness attributed to Richard
39:09seems a lot less strange if you think of him as a Renaissance prince
39:15for whom the idea of a civilised life
39:17was not necessarily a mark of being un-English.
39:23The Wilton diptych is the clearest illustration
39:26of his exalted vision of kingship.
39:30Richard instinctively felt he belonged in the company of saints.
39:35So here he is with three of them.
39:39John the Baptist, Ebba the Confessor
39:42and the Saxon Martyr King Edmund.
39:50The other panel reveals him to be in the even more exalted company
39:54of angels, the Christ Child and the Virgin.
40:01He is her appointed lieutenant.
40:04She is receiving his kingdom as her dowry
40:07and, in return, will bestow on it her special protection and favour.
40:15Ceremonial style was not, the King decided, just an affectation,
40:19the window-dressing of power.
40:21It was at the heart of its mystery, its capacity to make men obey.
40:29This is what Richard had in mind
40:31when, for the first time in the history of the British monarchies,
40:34the King let it be known he should like to be addressed
40:37as Majesty and Highness, a kind of mystical elevation.
40:47But what seemed like refinement to Richard, to the barons,
40:50was evidence that the King had lost touch with their common interests.
41:00Richard's refusal to continue the war with France
41:03was an obvious source of irritation for the nobility.
41:06They had positively prospered from foreign campaigns
41:10and built spectacular castles, like this one at Bodium,
41:13to guard against a French invasion.
41:17But it was the King's high-handedness that finally stung them into action.
41:22By issuing royal decrees, Richard could bypass Parliament
41:27and he went out of his way to lavish favours
41:30on his closest friends and advisers,
41:32men like Sir Simon Burley and Robert de Vere,
41:35who was absurdly promoted to be Duke of Ireland.
41:40The Lords retaliated with their only available weapon, Parliament.
41:44In February 1388, five of the King's favourites were charged
41:49with abusing his youth and innocence to promote their own ambitions.
41:55All were found guilty of treason
41:57by what became known as the Merciless Parliament.
42:01Robert de Vere, the most hated of the King's confidants,
42:04escaped before sentence of execution could be carried out,
42:08but Simon Burley was not so lucky.
42:12Richard's Queen pleaded on her knees for Burley's life,
42:17but to no avail.
42:21Richard may have crushed the peasants' revolt,
42:24but peers of the realm were another matter.
42:27Chastened by the humiliation, the King withdrew into autocratic solitude.
42:33And yet he had enough of the Plantagenet about him
42:36to harbour desires for retribution.
42:40He held his peace for nearly ten years,
42:42but when his beloved Queen Anne died of plague,
42:45Richard lost his only restraining influence
42:48and he reasserted himself in an extraordinary storm of revenge.
42:54Using the pretext of an aristocratic plot,
42:57he brutally disposed of the ringleaders of the Merciless Parliament
43:01a decade earlier.
43:05The Earl of Arundel was executed,
43:08the Earl of Warwick was exiled,
43:11and the Duke of Gloucester, Richard's own uncle, was murdered,
43:15smothered in his bed on the King's orders.
43:18The old scores had been settled at last.
43:23Well, you would think, wouldn't you,
43:25that Richard could manage to contain his sense of triumph,
43:29if only in the interest of self-preservation.
43:32But now that Richard II discovered
43:35that people were, for the first time, frightened of him,
43:38he also discovered he rather liked it.
43:41He drank it in and lashed out
43:44at anybody who came in his way.
43:48He would kill anybody he thought was disloyal to him,
43:51replacing them with yes-men and toadies,
43:55eating, sleeping and travelling,
43:57surrounded by a private army,
43:59as if he were some sort of Roman emperor.
44:03Beneath these delusions of omnipotence, though,
44:06Richard remained neurotically insecure.
44:10On the merest suspicion of treason,
44:12he rashly condemned John of Gauld's son, Henry Bolingbroke,
44:16to life in exile, without even the pretense of a show trial.
44:21If such summary justice made the English nobility uneasy,
44:25what happened next left them stunned.
44:30When John of Gauld finally died,
44:32Richard decided to increase Bolingbroke's sentence
44:35to banishment for life
44:37and seize the young duke's inheritance,
44:39the valuable Lancastrian estates, in the name of the crown.
44:46The magnates of England must have looked at this and said,
44:50he's got to be stopped or it's my turn next.
44:56Richard was one blunder away from disaster.
45:00The final, fatal distraction was Ireland.
45:06He'd decided to bring the Irish princes to heel,
45:09but he took with him just enough soldiers
45:11to leave himself defenceless at home
45:14and not to cow the Irish nobles.
45:18And before he could finish his business there,
45:21he heard news that Henry Bolingbroke
45:23had landed with an army on the Yorkshire coast
45:26and the alienated English lords had flocked to his banner.
45:32By the time Richard returned,
45:34Bolingbroke was already in command
45:36of the southern and eastern heartland of England.
45:40The odd thing is that Richard actually seemed to be
45:43one step ahead of his enemies in fatalistic pessimism,
45:47so that when he got the bad news
45:50that many of his most trusted supporters and allies
45:53had switched to the other side,
45:55his reaction was not to dig in his heels,
45:58make a stand, make a fight of it,
46:00but rather to flee at night across the country,
46:03disguised as a priest, bewailing his misfortunes
46:07and, as usual, blaming them on everybody else.
46:11At some point in his uncontested march towards Richard,
46:15Bolingbroke's aims changed
46:17from simply getting his lands back to overthrowing the king.
46:22Now I can see my end, Shakespeare has Richard say.
46:26A neat little piece of Lancastrian propaganda
46:29which solved the embarrassing problem of a deposition
46:34by making Richard seem as though he had resigned the crown
46:38rather than having it snatched from his desperate grip.
46:46In fact, it took a month of painful negotiations
46:49to get Richard, now a prisoner in the tower, to give up the throne.
46:54Three times they asked him to surrender, three times he refused,
46:59before finally bowing to the inevitable.
47:04On 30th September, a report of the king's renunciation
47:08was read to Parliament,
47:10gathered under the angels of Richard's magnificent roof.
47:14The lords were asked to acclaim Henry Bolingbroke,
47:17Earl of Hereford, Duke of Lancaster, as King Henry IV,
47:21which they did to cries of yes, yes, yes.
47:34Richard, the divine prince no longer,
47:38was spirited away and imprisoned in Pontefract Castle.
47:42Most likely, he was starved to death, a horrible way to end,
47:46but one which ensured there'd be no compromising marks
47:50of assault on his body when it was given a public burial.
47:54Now, oddly enough, it was Henry who orchestrated this big funeral,
48:00a pre-emptive strike against any conspirators out there
48:04who might imagine that Richard could be rescued
48:07and restored to the throne.
48:11It was Bolingbroke's son, Henry V,
48:13who had the body of King Richard buried in Westminster Abbey.
48:18Perhaps Henry wanted to put the charge of murder,
48:21as well as its victim, to rest.
48:24He must have hoped somehow that in his reign,
48:27the wounds of the contending parties might be healed.
48:31But it was not to be.
48:36Despite his famous victory at Agincourt,
48:39Henry V remains a might-have-been, dead at 35 from dysentery.
48:44So neither he nor his son, Henry VI,
48:47could prevent what the stealing of Richard's crown
48:50had made inevitable, a long and bloody war
48:53between the competing wings of the Plantagenet family.
48:58For 30 years, the houses of York and Lancaster
49:01slogged it out in a roll call of battles
49:04we know as the Wars of the Roses.
49:12There are only two ways to feel about the Wars of the Roses.
49:15Either the endless chronicle of violent seizures of the crown
49:18makes you thrilled to one of the great English epics,
49:21or else it leaves you feeling slightly numbed.
49:27If you're in the dazed and confused camp,
49:29the temptation, of course, is to write off the whole sorry mess
49:33as the bloody bickering of overgrown schoolboys
49:36whacking each other senseless
49:38on the fields of Towton, Barnet and Bosworth.
49:45But there was something at stake in all the mayhem,
49:48and that was the sense of needing to make the English monarchy
49:51credible again, to resolder the chains of allegiance
49:54which had once stretched all the way from Westminster
49:57out to the constables and justices in the shires,
50:01and which had been so badly broken by the fate of Richard II.
50:09To understand the way in which lawlessness, violence and chaos
50:13did make an impact on the not-so-rosy world
50:16of 15th-century England,
50:18we have something incomparably richer
50:20than a list of battlefields and barons, kings and kingmakers.
50:26We have in the letters of the Paston family of Norfolk
50:29the very first private correspondence in English,
50:32the authentic voice of middling folk,
50:35farmers, lawyers, would-be gentry, social climbers.
50:40Like many an anxious wife and mother,
50:43the Wars of the Roses worried Margaret Paston
50:46because they were making England a bad place to make and keep
50:50a little fortune.
51:07Seen through Margaret's eyes,
51:09the Kingdom of England might be up for grabs,
51:11but the real disaster was shopping.
51:15As for cloth for my gown,
51:17I pray you that you will vote safe to do buy for me
51:20three yards and a quarter of such as it please you that I should have.
51:24For in good faith I have done all the drapery shops in this town
51:27and here is ripe fable choice.
51:31The founder of the Pastum dynasty was Clement.
51:35Clement's described as a plain husbandman,
51:38which is to say a peasant,
51:40but a peasant who took advantage of the Black Death
51:43to scramble right up the social ladder of the village.
51:47Clement Paston was shrewd enough
51:50to send his son William to law school,
51:53clever enough, that is, to understand
51:56that it was going to be through learning,
51:58as much as through land,
52:00that the fortunes of the Pastons would be utterly transformed.
52:06Clement's son did indeed become a lawyer
52:09and married into money.
52:11So did his grandson John, who acquired Cayster Castle,
52:15completing the meteoric rise of the Pastons
52:18from peasantry to landed gentry in just two generations.
52:25John Janney informed me, and I verily learned since,
52:29yet to be made a knight of this coronation,
52:32considering the comfortable tidings aforesaid,
52:35to a time the necessary gear be purveyed for.
52:40But nothing's ever this easy, is it?
52:43As the Pastons became influential and rich,
52:46so they also were bound to attract enemies.
52:49As long as they were obscure nobodies,
52:52the great bloody tides of the Wars of the Roses
52:55were going to happen somewhere else.
52:57But now that they became owners of lands and manors and castles,
53:01they also became prime targets for the heavies,
53:04and no-one was heavier than the Duke of Norfolk.
53:08He'd always coveted Cayster Castle,
53:10and now, in September 1469, he came to get it.
53:15Margaret wrote, in some anguish, to her son,
53:18I greet you well, letting you know that your brother
53:22and his fellowship stand in great jeopardy at Cayster.
53:27She was clearly desperate, but she was also extremely angry.
53:32And a few lines later, she lets her son, John,
53:36feel the rough edge of her tongue, which was extremely rough indeed.
53:40Every man in this country marvels that you suffer them
53:44to be for so long in great jeopardy.
53:47They be like to lose both their lives and the place.
53:50The greatest rebuke to you that ever came to any gentleman.
53:56John immediately writes back...
53:59Mother, if I had need to be woken up by a letter at this time,
54:03I would indeed be a sluggish fellow.
54:06I have heard ten times worse tidings since the siege began
54:10than any letter that ye wrote me.
54:12But I assure you that those within have no worse rest than I have,
54:17nor fear more danger.
54:20Faced with the might of the Duke of Norfolk's army,
54:23the Pastons had no choice but to surrender their castle.
54:28But once again, they would have the law to thank
54:31for the transformation of their fortunes.
54:33It took a seven-year legal battle and an appeal to the king,
54:38but they were eventually rightfully reinstated at Cayster,
54:42although, like many of the others,
54:44but they were eventually rightfully reinstated at Cayster,
54:48although, for the eldest of Margaret's brood,
54:51the triumph was short-lived.
54:53Three years later, John Paston died of the plague.
55:01The Pastons had got over all these bumps in the road
55:04to become a settled presence in their county,
55:07and that would be true for countless other Englishmen and women
55:11just like them.
55:12Essentially, they were survivors.
55:14They'd survived the plague, they'd survived dethronement,
55:17they'd survived civil war.
55:19Kings came and went, but the men of the village,
55:23the same sort of men who'd marched on London in 1381,
55:27who'd been revolutionaries and desperados,
55:30were now on their way to becoming squires of the village.
55:33People like this knew what the worst could be.
55:36They knew that the plague could come
55:38and carry off babies and children.
55:40They knew that the knights from over the hill might go on a rampage.
55:44But they also knew that, with an equal measure of prudence and prayer,
55:49they would get through it.
55:56So come to an English village like this, far from the mayhem,
56:01say, around 1480, and you'd see what you'd expect,
56:05a church built in the economic elegance of the perpendicular style.
56:11For the first time, a village alehouse,
56:13with a name like the Swan or the Frog.
56:16And at the heart, a grand and handsome dwelling
56:19for the biggest tenant farmer in the area.
56:23No longer just a wattle and daub single-room glorified hut,
56:27but a miniature manor with its own hall
56:30and servants to wait on the master and mistress.
56:33A buttery, a cellar and private retiring chambers.
56:41One shouldn't be too complacent about the condition of Britain
56:46at the end of its first century of plague.
56:49The end of the road through trauma was not all buttercups and beer,
56:54there was still grinding poverty alongside plenty.
56:58But all the same, the improbable had happened.
57:01Out of the fires of pestilence and bloodshed
57:06had emerged that most unlikely example of survivor,
57:10the English country gent.
57:35MUSIC PLAYS
58:05.