THOSE IN AUTHORITY
It is a common delusion, or, not to beg the question before producing evidence, a common opinion, that England in olden times, by which I mean that vague period when all words were spelled with an ‘e’ at their end and most with a ‘y’ in the middle, was a ‘merrie’ place. This idea is held not only by the laudatores temporis acti, who find it safer to repine for a past which can never be recovered than to enthuse over a future which may arrive and prove disappointing, but also by those energetic persons who set out to make the world enjoy itself and imagine that their schemes for compulsory happiness will really only restore a lost gaiety to the nation. Life in the Middle Ages was undoubtedly more highly coloured, more varied, more picturesque, but that it was merrier is at least a doubtful assumption. As the life of a people is reflected in their arts, we may compare the life of the Middle Ages to the quaint, irregular lines of some unimproved village street, or to the older parts of such towns as Winchester and Guildford, and contrast it with the mid-Victorian era, the flattest and dullest of all periods, as typified by Brixton, or with the frivolity of the present day, portrayed in the outbreak of terra-cotta and white wood flimsinesses all over the country. But the picture is not complete. In the background, behind the straight sameness of ‘Alma Terrace,’ or the quirked and joggled sameness of ‘Mafeking Avenue,’ lies nothing more terrible than the ‘desirable residence’ or the ‘eligible mansion.’ Behind your picturesque old-world cottages frowns the shadow of the feudal fortress. And, as Huxley remarked to the young man who said that he did not see what difference it would have made to him if his great-grandfather had or had not been a monkey, ‘it must have made a lot of difference to your great-grandmother.’
It was not without reason that such names as Batvilayne, Scorchevilayne, and Maungevilayne are found amongst the landowning classes. There were men who would beat, scorch, or devour their villeins, and some six-and-a-half centuries ago an ancestor of the present Lord Ashburnham could oppress his tenants until they were reduced to literal beggary, and when they complained to the Justices could airily reply that they were his villeins and, short of injury to life and limb, he need not answer them. Such was the position of the bulk of the peasantry, but in practice they did not often suffer by it, for it was obviously to the advantage of the landlord to have prosperous tenants. It was at the hands of the officials, the swarm of stewards, bailiffs, catchpoles, and so forth, that the peasants, yeomen, and smaller gentry suffered. These men, secure in the protection of a chain of superiors reaching back to some great noble, lived on their neighbours, wringing money from them on every, or no, pretext. A favourite weapon was the jury list; the frequency with which juries were summoned and the resulting inconvenience to those called away from their work made the more wealthy willing to pay well for exemption; then money could be obtained by summoning four or five times as many jurors as were required and taking bribes from the superfluous to let them go home again. Another common object of the country-side was the ‘scotale,’ which was a kind of bean-feast. No doubt this lent an appearance of merriness to life in the country, just as the wriggling of the worm on the hook lent it a superficial air of gaiety which deceived old Isaak Walton, but it is questionable if the feasters really enjoyed themselves, as they knew that the ale which formed the main feature of the meal was brewed from malt which they had unwillingly contributed, and that they were paying for the (compulsory) privilege of consuming their own produce. Nor did the townsmen escape entirely; even five hundred years ago the Christmas box was an established extortion, and, in 1419, William Sevenok, Mayor of London, had to forbid the custom of the servants of the mayor, sheriffs, and corporation begging gifts from the tradesmen at Christmas, as it was found that they used threats towards those who would not give and accepted the gifts of others as bribes to overlook their offences against the trading laws. Not only at Christmas did the servants of the city and the court fleece the tradesmen; the doubtful privilege of supplying the royal court with provisions could be, and frequently was, avoided by a gift to the purveyors, and one result was that rogues from time to time went round the breweries pretending to be court purveyors and taking money to leave the ale alone. A rogue of a similar type, with a turn of humour, was William Pykemyle, who in 1379 went to the town house of the Countess of Norfolk, and, pretending to be a royal messenger, left word that she was to dine with the King at Leeds Castle, near Maidstone, next day; having received from her a reward of 3s. 4d. (royal messengers always expecting a substantial tip) he went on to the Countess of Bedford and gave a similar message, only making the place of dining Eltham. Whether the ladies kept their appointments is not recorded, but the gay deceiver was caught and committed to Newgate.
If the men of the Middle Ages had had nothing more to complain of than extortion by threats and trickery they might have been merry enough, but when the bailiffs exercised their powers of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment it was another matter. From the sheriffs downwards those ‘clothed with a little brief authority’ used it unscrupulously to fill their own pockets, dragging men off to prison on false accusations, or on none, and causing convicted felons to accuse the innocent of participation in their crimes. Release from prison depended solely upon the payment of a fine to the officer concerned, and was almost as easily available for the guilty as for the innocent. Upon occasion the powers of the law could be used to assist the criminal and punish his victim. During the misrule of the last years of Henry III., one, Wilkin of Gloseburne, accused Gilbert Wood of killing his son; Gilbert promptly turned the tables by bribing the gaoler of York, who arrested Wilkin on a charge of theft, bound him naked to a post in the prison, and kept him without food until he paid 40s. About the same time, in Suffolk, a man stole six geese belonging to Constance de Barnaucle; possibly he would have argued that they were ‘barnacle geese,’ and as this species notoriously grew on trees they were ferÆ naturÆ, in which there could be no property. If so, he must have felt that his case was weak, as he ran away, pursued by the lady’s servant. The thief was caught by the bailiffs of Thingoe Hundred, but either they were friends of his or they saw a chance of getting the geese themselves, for they let him go free, and when the pursuer came up they showed half-a-dozen other geese, which he naturally failed to identify; they then talked big about libel actions and false accusations and terrified 4s. out of the unlucky man’s pockets.
‘... failed to identify the geese.’
Besides accusations of actual misdeeds, charges of opposing a predominant or favouring a fallen faction could be used for purposes of extortion. Towards the end of the reign of Edward II., when the Despensers were in power, Alan of Teesdale, chamberlain to the younger Despenser, with the assistance of Geoffrey Eston, the villainous gaoler of York, started a report that Sir John de Barton had spoken ill of Hugh le Despenser, whereat Hugh was much moved and furiously threatened Sir John, who for fear of his power had to give them lands to appease their lord. The same two scoundrels burnt down part of one of Alan’s own mills and then laid the blame first on Sir John de Barton, then on Thomas Vipont, and finally on the Abbot of Byland, all of whom, for fear of the Despenser, paid heavy compensation. They further extorted lands from Master Thomas de Leuesham by threatening to accuse him of having been a partisan of Andrew de Harclay, who, after winning the earldom of Carlisle by his loyalty at Boroughbridge in 1322, had, the following year, been dramatically degraded and executed as a traitor. Nearly a century earlier, Robert Passelewe, Justice of the Jews, had extorted £60 from John le Prestre, a wealthy Jew, by threatening to commit him to Corfe Castle for having financed the Bishop of Carlisle and Hubert de Burgh, then in disgrace. From the same Jew Passelewe extorted, amongst other things, a cameo worth 40 marks; he seems to have had an appreciation for jewels, as he appropriated a ‘camehew’ and an emerald belonging to a Jew who was hanged, and made Benedict Crispin give him another cameo, which he afterwards gave to the Queen. Crispin was fleeced by several persons in high places and had to part with another of his cameos, ‘on which was engraved a chariot with two angels,’ to Peter de Rievaux, the Treasurer.
If the Jews were plundered we may at least put it to the credit of our ancestors that they showed a fine impartiality in according similar treatment to Christian clergy. The sheriff of Yorkshire, in 1315, wishing to persuade Master Henry de Percy, rector of Wharrom, to surrender his church, handed him over to Geoffrey Eston,[2] the gaoler of York, of whom we have already said something, who bound him to a convicted criminal and kept him five days without food or drink; at the end of that time he paid £20 to be released, but he kept his church. Encouraged by this, the sub-sheriff followed his superior’s example and brought the rector of Whixley to Geoffrey, who confined him ‘in a horrible place in the prison’ until he produced 20 marks. Most prisons, probably, had a ‘horrible place,’ usually an underground dungeon, such as ‘the pit of the gaol’ at Exeter, or the ‘fosse’ at Newgate, or the place in the King’s Bench prison called by the grim humour of the fifteenth century ‘Paradise,’ from which Alexander Lokke, who had been detained there ‘alle this holy tyme of Cristemasse,’ begged to be removed to some other prison. Apart from these dungeons the comfort of the prisoners depended largely on their possession of money; they were not ‘lodged at his majesty’s expense,’ but were dependent upon money supplied by friends or on the alms of the charitable, and their position when the gaoler was a tyrant was unenviable. In the reign of Henry VIII. the keeper of Norwich gaol, Andrew Asketell, ‘of his uncharitabill and covetous mind’ oppressed the poor prisoners, charging them twice as much for ale as it cost outside—and ale, it must be remembered, was in those days really ‘the people’s food in liquid form’—and when kind people sent ‘a potte ale’ to the prisoners he made his servants pour the drink in the streets and break the vessels. But he did this once too often, when ‘a litill boy haveng a veray power woman to his moder in prison brought to her to ye prison wyndow a crok with ale.’ Edward Rede, alderman and J.P., seeing her drink thus snatched from her, kindly sent her ‘a cruse with drynk.’ The arrival of this widow’s cruse so annoyed the keeper that he came up to the alderman and insulted him, calling him ‘a Bedlam man,’ and as a result he saw prison life from a fresh point of view. Some two centuries earlier Newgate was controlled by Edmund le Lorimer, who ill-treated his prisoners shockingly, keeping them short of food, depriving them of their share in the common alms, and preventing them communicating with their friends. He robbed them, taking from Roger Martel a gold cross with four garnets and a ‘pere crapaudyn’ or toad-stone, the precious jewel which a toad bears in its head and which is an invaluable antidote to poison, and he inflicted such severe ‘penaunce’ to extort money that many died, including a knight, Sir John de Horn, and that Roger de Colney, being loaded with irons and deprived of food, snatched a knife from a companion and cut his throat.
All those in authority were not brutes; it is even recorded of a Suffolk bailiff that finding on his recovery from illness that his deputy had been guilty of extortion, he returned the money and dismissed the deputy. But the reports from Yorkshire in 1275 were fairly typical; the bailiff of the Earl of Lincoln had done ‘many acts of oppression, rapine, and injuries beyond belief’; ‘many other things, beyond number and astonishing,’ were related of the sub-sheriff, and ‘innumerable devilish acts of oppression’ were accredited to the steward of Earl Warenne. The earl himself was a man of violence, who had turned about a fifth part of the county of Sussex into a game preserve, and maintained armed keepers to prevent the peasants from driving the deer out of their corn. The story is well known how, when King Edward’s commissioners demanded by what title he held his lands, he produced a rusty sword and said ‘by this my ancestors won their lands and by this I will defend them.’ Like most well-known stories this is apocryphal, and in any case a distaff would have been more appropriate, as his lands had descended through an heiress, but that he would have been willing to protect his lands with the sword is likely enough. One of his descendants, the Earl of Surrey of the time of Henry VIII. seems to have inherited some of his lawlessness, as he was charged with ‘a lewde and unsemely manner of walking in the night abowght the stretes and breaking wyth stonebowes (i.e. catapults) of certeyne wyndowes.’ It does not appear that he wanted ‘Votes for Peers’ and, in fact, he admitted that he ‘hadde verye evyll done therein,’ and was sent to the Fleet prison.
Life must certainly have been more exciting, if not merrier, in now peaceful Sussex when Earl John de Warenne was alive. He was carrying on a sort of private war with his neighbour, Robert Aguillon, who was also on bad terms with his other neighbour, William de Braose, while further west, at Midhurst, was John de Bohun, who displayed his contempt for the law by attacking Luke de Vienne on the high road and ducking him in a horse-pond when he was on his way to hold a court. The son and namesake of this William de Braose showed his temper by insulting one of the Justices of the King’s Court who had given judgment against him. Edward I. was not the man to excuse such conduct; he had, indeed, banished the Prince of Wales from court for insolence towards a judge, and Braose had to walk in penitential garb through Westminster Hall when the court was sitting and apologise to the justice. With such examples set by their lords it is not surprising that the smaller men adopted an attitude of swagger and arrogance, riding with armed followers through markets and fairs for the mere pleasure of frightening the people. As an example of apparently pointless insolence, the constable of Shrewsbury gave his groom 4d. to go through the village of Cressage calling out ‘Wekare, Wekare,’ to insult both men and women. The character of the insult is not obvious, but it was evidently clear to those concerned, as a woman dared to remonstrate; the groom struck at her and wounded a man who came to her assistance, but then had to fly and was shot—for which his lord obtained full compensation.
‘... ducking him in a horse-pond.’
Whatever the meaning of ‘Wekare,’ there can be no doubt of the insult conveyed by Robert Sutton to Roger of Portland, clerk of the Sheriff of London, when he exclaimed in full court, ‘Tprhurt, tprhurt!’ This monosyllable is a very trumpet blast of contempt and its significance surely did not require to be emphasised by Robert’s ‘raising his thumb’—whether to his nose or not it is not stated, which is a pity, as it would have been interesting to find the ‘long nose’ flourishing in 1290. City Officers, and more particularly mayors and aldermen, were very touchy, seeing and punishing ‘vile and abominable abuse’ in the most harmless retort, and my sympathy is certainly with Collard, the cobbler, who was sent to prison at Norwich because, when the mayor ordered him to take off his beard he refused to do so and said, ‘Noo, I was ones shaven and I made an othe I wolde never have off my berde again, I was so evell shaven.’ Still there is no doubt that however arbitrary the authorities may have been they also had their trials, and, if officials often abused their powers, their was another side to the question. Smaller men than William de Braose could, upon occasion, tell the judges what they thought of them. In 1300 one Henry de Biskele came into the Sussex county court and asked leave to say certain matters ‘on the king’s behalf,’ and having thus obtained silence and the attention of the whole court, he broke out into violent abuse of one of the justices, calling him a liar and using other opprobrious terms, for which he was lucky to escape with a fine of 20s. Some fifty years later a more violent act of contempt of court occurred at Pevensey. John de Molyns, the Queen’s steward, came to hold a court there, but being busy appointed a deputy to take his place in the morning; this official seems to have irritated the townsmen, and when he ordered them to withdraw outside the bar, contrary to their local custom, Roger Porter replied by challenging him to come outside and fight. During the luncheon interval the deputy reported the state of affairs, and in the afternoon the steward himself came to the court, preceded by the portreeve carrying his white wand of office, but the townsmen refused to come when summoned, Roger and Simon Porter in particular declaring that they were not bound to attend. At last the steward rose in wrath and started to seize the two Porters, who fled to their house and with drawn swords stood in the doorway. A pitched battle ensued between them and the steward’s men, in which several were injured, but in the end victory rested with the law.
‘... with drawn swords stood in the doorway.’
Even the King’s Court at Westminster was not safe from disturbance. In 1332 John Parles, acting as attorney for Adam Basset in a plea of debt against Florence de Aldham, was waiting in the great hall at Westminster, where the court was in session. He was sitting on a table ‘close to the sellers of jewels,’ from which it would seem that the lower end of the hall was used for stalls, or at any rate for peddling jewellery, even while cases were proceeding. Presently Florence came up with two men and abused John Parles, threatening to kill him if he did not abandon the suit; Richard Calware dragged him off the table and struck him a blow which drew blood and Thomas Newark whipped out a knife and would have killed him if he had not been restrained. John at once made his way to the bar and complained to the judges, who ordered the arrest of his assailants, but they struggled towards the door and were joined by Thomas of Thornhamton with his sword drawn. But the clerks of the court, apprentices, and attorneys barred the doors and disarmed them, and they were all handed over to the warden of the Tower.
In all these cases the disturbers of the peace met with prompt defeat, but sometimes they were more successful, though their success was usually temporary and vengeance overtook them sooner or later. No courts seem to have been so unpopular as those of the Church; dealing with moral offences, they touched the lives of the people in a way which must have led to constant irritation, even if the archdeacons and their summoners had not been unfair and extortionate. That they were so was the pretty general opinion of mediÆval Englishmen, from Chaucer to his contemporary John Belgrave, who, when the archdeacon of Leicester was going to hold a court, set up in his church a clearly written bill setting forth that the archdeacon and his officials might well rank with the judges who condemned Susannah, giving unrighteous judgment, oppressing the innocent, and suffering evildoers. This so terrified the archdeacon and his officials, possibly made cowards by their consciences, that they dared not hold their courts. Civil courts were also liable to be broken up, especially the open-air courts held by sheriffs. On one occasion, in the fourteenth century, when the sheriff of Sussex[Pg 148 & 149] was holding such a court, John Ashburnham rode up, with a small boy bearing his tabard, and so threatened the sheriff that he incontinently fled. To hasten his going Ashburnham whistled on his fingers—a street-boy’s accomplishment to which I must admit I have never managed to attain in spite of repeated efforts—at which whistle his esquire and other men in ambush suddenly rose up. Even the assize courts were liable to be interfered with, especially in the north, and at the end of the reign of Edward II. there were in Lancashire several men of position who rode about with armed bands and turned up at the courts with fifty or sixty ruffians to persuade their adversaries not to proceed with their suits, or, if such peaceful picketing proved unavailing, to terrorise the justices. Chief of these was Sir Walter Bradshaw. He had been one of the sworn adherents of Sir Adam Banaster in his rebellion, and having assisted in the attack on Liverpool Castle and the capture of Halton, had fled the country after the defeat of his friends at Preston. Returning later, he carried on a private war with Sir Richard de Holand, another ruffian of the same kidney, each of them riding about with small armies, oppressing each other’s tenants and openly defying the courts. These quarrels between county families were undoubtedly more exciting when the process of cutting one another was conducted with swords instead of with averted eyes and upturned noses, but whether they were more conducive to the merriness of their rival retainers may be doubted. These retainers, if we may trust Sir Ralph Evers, did not always play their parts with the politeness and courtesy which their masters displayed, and, in fact, on one occasion he remonstrated with Sir Roger Hastings’ servant, saying, ‘Ye false hurson kaytyffes, I shall lerne you curtesy and to knowe a gentilman.’ It is possible that he was feeling irritated at the time, as he had been lying in wait to ambush Sir Roger, and it must have been annoying to find that he had only caught his servants. Sir Roger himself seems to have been rather quick-tempered; he had a grudge against one Ralph Jenner, and on his way to church on Christmas Day discovered that Ralph was in the church; he at once decided that the season of peace and goodwill was a suitable occasion to make an end of his quarrel (and of his adversary), but the vicar flung himself on his knees before him, while Lady Hastings ran up to Ralph Jenner exclaiming, ‘Woo worthe man this day! The chirche wolbe suspended and thou slayn withoute thou flee away and gette thee oute of his sighte.’ Whereupon Ralph, either out of consideration for the parishioners or himself, prudently fled.
‘He incontinently fled.’
It sometimes happened that these imperious gentry reaped the reward of their own lawlessness and goaded their oppressed tenants to active rebellion. As early as the twelfth century the sheriff of Hants is found grimly entering in his accounts money spent on doing justice on the peasants who burned their lord. At Faccombe in the same county, in 1426, John Punchardon, lord of the manor, was dragged from his bed one Sunday night, carried out into the fields, and there done to death. In this case there was probably some personal feeling in the matter, as the murderers included five members of the family of Cosyn, whose ancestors had formerly held the manor, but who had now come down to the position of labourers. A case in which the motive of rebellion was more clearly resentment to oppression occurred at Preston in Sussex, in 1280, when the villeins of Simon de Pierpoint set fire to his manor-house, and with drawn knives and flourished axes compelled him to swear upon the Gospels that he would demand no services from them without their consent, and would take no action against them for their violence. At the same time they destroyed their lord’s tabard, so beat his charger that it could never be used again and slew his ‘gentle falcon,’ thus wreaking their wrath on the outward signs of his nobility. Such revolts were much more common in towns; for instance, at Lynne, in 1313, when Robert Muhaut tried to exercise his authority in a new direction, a crowd of tradesmen, under the leadership of the prior, assaulted his house, dragged him out and made him stand on a stall in the market-place and swear on the Host that he would not interfere with the town officers. At Bristol, also about the same time, the burgesses quarrelled with the castellan, barricaded the streets and erected an embattled wall from behind which they shot into the castle, and at Oxford the watchmen were on several occasions shot at with arrows:—I have known, in more recent times, a casual shot at a proctor with a lump of sugar have more disastrous effects—to the shooter.
‘... compellyd them for to devour the same writte.’
But if the lords of manors, town officials, and judges occasionally found their authority slighted and their persons endangered by the disrespect of those who should have been subservient to them, their trials were not to be compared with those of the inferior officers such as bailiffs. In the fourteenth century, when Philip of Berwick was elected as bailiff of Hailsham, he had to fly for his life to escape from a certain John of Buckholt, who terrorised the whole neighbourhood, chasing the vicar into his church, killing several persons, and so frightening the coroner that he dared not hold any inquests. With such men about as this John of Buckholt, who was known as king among his people, the life of a bailiff was not a happy one, and in particular, the life of the process-server was exciting, but not necessarily merry. It can hardly have been cheering to the man who had to serve a writ in Drayton Basset to know that the offenders were boasting that ‘whoo so ever wold be so bolde to serve any warrant there shuld runne upon a pycheforke.’ It was also not an uncommon experience that Thomas Talbot and Thomas Gaiford had when they served a writ on Agnes Motte, who ‘reysyd upp her neghburs with wepyns drawen for to slee and mordre the said bryngers of the writte and compellyd them for to devour the same writte and ther, sitting upon ther knees, in saving of ther lyves, eete the writte bothe wex and parchement,’ in fact, from the number of similar instances recorded it would almost seem that writ-servers must have been accustomed to a diet of wax and parchment. There seems also to have been a custom of serving writs in church, not unattended with risk, as the sacredness of the place does not seem always to have subdued the temper of the recipient. When William Nash served a writ on John Archer in Ilmingdon churchyard he retorted by threatening to make him eat it, and afterwards, as Nash was kneeling in the church, he came up to him and said, ‘Pray, longenekked horesson, by Goddes armes, thou shalt be hanged ere I ete holy bred.’ John Cheyney, also, when he was served with a writ in church, took the server by the shoulders and thrust him out of the church, saying that he would slit his nose, stove his eyes, crop his ears, and ‘make hym a curtall.’
‘... thrust him out of the church.’
No, taking into consideration the injuries inflicted by the more powerful men in authority upon those subject to them and the pains suffered by those having the responsibilities of office without its powers, I do not think the mediÆval populace was always merry and bright, and if any one, after reading this article, still thinks that England in the Middle Ages was a ‘merrie’ place, I can only say with Robert Sutton, ‘Tprhurt, tprhurt!’
