The Story of England, page 18
Englishness rising
By the early 1200s the English people could reflect on the Norman Conquest with some measure of tranquillity. Even among writers of mixed descent those events had been ‘a terrible havoc of our most dear country’; for Henry of Huntingdon ‘the Normans were the last of five plagues sent to Britain, who still hold the English in subjection.’ But the feeling did not go away that the English ruling class was an alien and rapacious group still divided by language from their subjects. ‘The Normans could speak nothing but their own language,’ wrote one thirteenth-century observer:
and they spoke French as they did at home and also taught their children. So that the upper class of the country that is descended from them stick to the language they got from home: therefore unless a person knows French he is little thought of – but the lower class stick to English and their own language even now.
Others, with the passage of time, were able to take a historical perspective on what they saw as the enslavement of the people brought about by William and his followers ‘who have held the English in subjection ever since’. Among some of these writers the whole social structure of the feudal system with its gradations of freedom and unfreedom now came to be seen as a consequence of the Conquest: ‘For all this thralldom that now on England is through Normans it came, bondage and distress.’
In the thirteenth century the rise of this sensibility will become apparent even at the village level: proletarian, vernacular, nationalist, speaking up for England and the English language, and backed up by a historical view of the English past. All this will feed into the momentous events of the century, from Magna Carta to the rebellion of Simon de Montfort. For trickling down through the shire and hundred assemblies these political ideas will reach the peasantry, who even in a place like Kibworth will play their part in the making of English history.
8. The Community of the Realm
In the high summer of 1264, on the days leading up to the full moon on 9 August, pilgrims and merchants coming up from Dover towards Canterbury saw an astonishing sight. Spread over the countryside on the London road under the sails of the ‘Black Mill’ at Barham Down, just a few miles from the cliffs of Dover, was a vast encampment. There were knights from all over England, with their colourful tabards and flashing escutcheons, their banners streaming, squires exercising their warhorses, armourers busy at their forges. But the mass of those present were peasants, a people’s army of England numbering tens of thousands of men. Around the campfires were men of Essex led by their constables, freemen of Norfolk and the Marches under their sheriffs, Leicestershire peasants with their lords, the Bassets, and even a contingent from little Rutland. Looking down towards the sparkling summer horizon over Deal and Walmer, the sea breezes stirring banners and signal flags, the smoke of cooking fires swirling over Barham Hill, it was such an incredible sight that those who were there then were lost for words: ‘There was then such a multitude gathered together against the foreigners that you simply would not have believed that so many men armed for war could have existed in the whole of England.’
And there in the crowd, under Saer de Harcourt’s standard with its horizontal stripes of red and gold, is John Wodard, freeman of Kibworth. Narrowing his eyes he looks down to the sea (if we may imagine him so) with his horse, spear, helmet and knapsack; on his head below his cap a fresh scar from a recent blow. John came from a peasant family long rooted in Kibworth and Smeeton: his name in Old English means ‘wood ward’, the keeper of the lord’s wood; perhaps it had once been the Wodards’ hereditary job to handle infringements of the forest law. The Wodards were a big kin group with several households, one of the most prominent and influential in the village along with the Polles, Swans and Heyneses, some of whom perhaps are with him now among the freemen from Kibworth and Smeeton with their mounts and war gear. They had been summoned here by Simon de Montfort’s baronial government, who had overthrown King Henry III and were now ruling in his name. To repel a threatened invasion of ‘aliens’ from France, Montfort had called for a huge army of peasants from every village, to come with horse, spear and helmet. Around Wodard then were perhaps a dozen of his neighbours from Kibworth and Smeeton, others from Newton Harcourt, Carlton and other places in the hundred of Gartree. All were here for the cause of England.
The atmosphere in those early days was exultant. For the first time peasants from all over England had the opportunity – paid for forty days by their fellow villagers – to meet and talk about the tremendous events which had rocked the nation over the last few years culminating in the defeat of King Henry that May. The deeds of Simon and the barons were already the subject of popular song and poems; and the mood we may imagine was like that during the days of the Armada, or when Napoleon’s Grande Armée waited in its barges at Boulogne; or even 1940, with Simon playing the role of Churchill, urging his soldiers that they must ‘fight on the beaches and never surrender’. Simon himself was Earl of Leicester (and lord of Smeeton) and his supporters there had come down in force: the Bassets and the Burdetts, the lords of Sapcote, Branston, Huncote, little Galby and Frisby, and Saer de Harcourt, the lord of Kibworth Harcourt. That was perhaps what had led John Wodard here among the freemen from Kibworth when after Lammas he would normally have been about to start harvesting the winter-sown corn on his strips in the open fields.
Behind the peasant involvement in these events lay what might anachronistically be called a working-class view of history. What was in the mind of Wodard and the other Kibworth men in the great army of Kent we can only conjecture from hints in the sources and from popular songs and poetry. But John and his neighbours we must presume shared a vision of ‘the gode olde lawes’ which had once pertained in England before the Conquest. A common view among the freeborn English too was that the English people had been ‘in thrall’ since the days of William the Conqueror. As John would have put it, ‘sithen he and his have had the lond in heritage that the Inglis haf so laid … that thei lyve in servage. He sette the Inglis to be thralle, that or (once) was so free.’
In the folk memory of the later thirteenth century King John in particular had been a monster of venality and partiality (that image goes back far beyond Walter Scott or modern Hollywood epics). Back in their grandfathers’ day Magna Carta had largely been concerned with upper-class rights and privileges, but it was nevertheless understood as a stand against autocratic royal rule. But it was felt that the kings since had repeatedly abandoned the charter and that constant struggle and vigilance would be needed to maintain English freedoms. English people too knew that the great charter had been only grudgingly given and confirmed, and that John’s successors only half-heartedly observed it: ‘feebly kept it was after his day, of King John and the others …’ who ‘granted and confirmed it unwillingly, thinking it to be worth nothing’.
Such ideas lay behind the great cause, the ‘community of the realm’, which in the thirteenth century swept up even the peasantry of Kibworth and their neighbours. The nub was the law, and the freeborn English peasant’s right to use it in court to defend his rights. ‘Every king is ruled by the laws that he enacts,’ wrote an Angevin lawyer. ‘We give first place to the community and we say too that the law takes precedence over the king’s dignity.’ The rulers were well aware of the feelings of the shire about the common law. In 1219 the justices of the king declared to the king’s council that ‘we who ought to be judges would become contemptible in the sight of those to whom we have been sent to enact justice … we assert most firmly that we have done nothing contrary to the approved custom of the land.’ Jurists also acknowledged that ‘the custom of the nation is better known to the people of the nation than any foreigner’ (England’s rulers of course were French-speaking). Asked about the way the system worked, one thirteenth-century legal expert answered: ‘Ask the country people, they know best!’ South-east Leicestershire’s freemen had become a radicalized hotbed in the decades since Magna Carta. The freemen of places like Kibworth and Peatling Magna, even the villeins of Stoughton, used the courts to defend their status, and when we hear them speak they are not discussing the price of corn but the ‘welfare of the community of the realm’ on which they believed they could speak in the king’s court to the king’s justices.
So by the thirteenth century both lawgivers and peasants believed that the law should work for them. During the course of the half-century from Magna Carta to the Barons’ Revolt, they found their voice. And that is what had brought John Wodard and his neighbours to Barham Down that summer in 1264 on behalf of ‘the community of the realm’.
Magna Carta
Time heals wounds. Richard FitzNeal, whom we have already met in this story as a member of the government of Henry II in the 1180s writing about Domesday and its aftermath, recounts a casual conversation he had ‘in the twenty-third year of the reign of King Henry II, while I was sitting at the window of a tower next to the River Thames’, and in doing so lets slip a rare insight into how social change was perceived in England. As he saw it, change in some respects was for the better. Violence, racial hatred and secret killings were on the wane; the reach of justice had improved in most places though the killing of serfs still went unpunished. But ‘in most places’ the powers that be couldn’t get away with killing a villein with impunity, that is, without the murdered man’s family having recourse to the law. It is a startling admission of how bad things had been.
FitzNeal was a sophisticated observer and his book is a mine of sharp realistic observations. As he admits, his remarks were not true everywhere, but from the documentary evidence he was broadly right that by 1200 the rapid growth of peasant literacy and access to local courts meant that the issue of rights was perceived as central by both high and low. In the Magna Carta in 1215 King John had acceded to the barons’ demands made in response to his wholesale abuses of power. In essence it was a charter for the ruling class but it embodied the crucial principle that the king was bound by the law, that kingship indeed is the creation of the law. Immediately after John’s death Magna Carta was reissued in the name of his successor, and there were several versions up to 1225. Since then it has come to be regarded by English people, and by all who have adopted English law, as the chief constitutional defence against arbitrary or unjust rule. Its most famous clauses express some of the English people’s most deeply held political beliefs, and pertained to both rich and poor:
No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals, or by the law of the land … To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.
Later lawyers found here the basis for some fundamental English rights: equality before the law and freedom from arbitrary arrest. To the king, of course, 1215 was a treaty of peace forced on him under duress by barons who had rebelled against the royal authority. But the wheels of change were in motion, and no longer only in the hands of the upper class. The story reached its climax in the Barons’ Revolt of 1264–5, under Simon de Montfort, the French-born Earl of Leicester who was married to the king’s sister. Simon was a French-speaking aristocrat who despised the ordinary English peasant, but he became a figure of adulation, a hero around whom popular tales, songs and even miracle stories gathered. He was a secular martyr who like Thomas Becket had stood against royal power.
Simon and the barons were determined to maintain the limitations on royal power granted by Magna Carta and to force the king to rule within a framework of custom and common law. Their movement was particularly attentive to the opinions of the shire and of the hundreds, the fundamental units of local rule. In 1258 in the Provisions of Oxford the barons had attempted to reduce Henry III to the status of a constitutional monarch. It has been said that ‘no other kingdom in Europe had gone so far towards a republican Constitution.’ The name of the movement is most revealing: the barons (who were French-speaking) called themselves the ‘community of the realm’, le commun de Engleterre, translated in the vigorous English version of the Provisions as ‘this landes folc’. Claiming to represent the interests of the country as a whole, the barons demanded that elected councillors were to hold a parliament three times a year ‘to review the state of the realm and to deal with the common business of the realm and of the king together’. It was bound to end in war. And now not only the barons but the peasants too believed they had a stake in the outcome.
The people’s voice: ‘England is free’
Medieval chroniclers were of course interested in personalities, kings and nobles. They themselves tended to be clerics from the upper or middle classes, and the thought of the masses taking political action caused them a shudder of horror. It was of no concern to them whether peasants died, or who they were. But in the revolution of the 1260s the free peasantry of south Leicestershire, Simon’s earldom, were widely politicized; they were involved in these events and unnamed freemen must have given their lives for the cause. Some no doubt followed their feudal lord as they were told to do; many though were elected by fellow villagers and supplied with money for subsistence. And some, like Wodard, must have been well-acquainted with events and supported Montfort because they understood the issues having heard them discussed in the manor and at the hundred courts at the Gartree. In the collective memory over the last century or two the rapacious rule of foreigners had left its mark. Now the peasants wanted more say.
In May 1264, though outnumbered heavily in mounted knights, Simon defeated the royal army at Lewes in Sussex. In a brief burst of extreme violence on the downs above the town 3,000 royalists were killed; 1,500 knights and squires were heaped into death pits stripped of their expensive gear, having been slaughtered by exultant peasants. For a moment England stood on the verge of ‘Europe’s first constitutional revolution’ and in the euphoria after Lewes popular songs trumpeted the idea that ‘England is now free’ and that freeborn Englishmen were ‘no longer treated like dogs in their own land’. Big ideas with startling suddenness could now be spoken out loud. ‘Every king is ruled by the laws which he enacts. We give first place to the community, we also say that the law rules, and takes precedence over the king’s dignity.’
In the aftermath of the battle the king and his son, Prince Edward, were captured and England entered the strange phoney war of Montfort’s regency. A brief explosion of anti-royalist violence across the home counties was followed by an uneasy peace as Montfort and his allies attempted to rule through the king. It is in this period that the involvement of John Wodard and the peasants of Kibworth and neighbouring villages began, in that uncertain time when no one knew where the revolution would lead.
The crime of John Wodard
Back home in Kibworth, four weeks after Lewes, it was the old custom to go on pilgrimage at Pentecost to their mother church of St Mary Arden next to Market Harborough, an ancient Anglo-Saxon minster from where every year their vicar collected the chrism oil. We may imagine the Kibworth people walking from their village in the open air along village tracks in lovely June weather through ripening cornfields. The vicar, Oliver of Sutton, and his chaplains were carrying religious banners, followed by the pilgrims with their emblems and badges. The most important pilgrimages in the village were also Marian, to Walsingham and Lincoln, and pewter pilgrim badges from both shrines have turned up in the village recently, on one of which the Virgin’s lilies can still be seen. This Pentecost’s journey took them five miles to the River Welland at Harborough, the new trading town founded some eighty years before and already a thriving market with traders, merchants and craftsmen. Today the church of St Mary Arden is a small roofless chapel hidden behind trees on a rounded hill just above the railway station; ignored by almost all visitors to that charming town of coaching inns with its Stuart schoolroom and its magnificent church of St Dionysus. Once much bigger, the church was largely demolished in the seventeenth century, and only the Norman porch survives from that day in 1264.
Below the church the graveyard stretched down the hillside to the Welland, where there was an ancient sacred well known as Lady Well. The pilgrimage probably required prayers at the shrine before its image of Mary, and then bathing and drinking at the sacred well, especially for the sick and infirm, who were borne along by the villagers. The mood we may conjecture was celebratory. Kibworth was a Montfortian village and we might imagine a little touch of victorious football fans arriving in hostile territory with the Montfortian villagers arriving on the royal estate of Great Bowden and insisting on the performance of their ancient customary celebration. But the Bowden people blocked their way, some of them apparently armed. Things grew tense. There was a stand-off at the church door and hotheads began to jostle. What followed was over in a moment, but by one of those miracles of medieval record-taking, the account survives in the National Archives:
When the men of Kybbeworth came to the church of Harborough to make their procession there on Monday in the week of Pentecost in year 48 [9 June 1264], according to what is the custom of the country [patria], the foresaid William Kyng came and wished to prevent them from proceeding into the foresaid church, and struck the foresaid Wodard, who came with the foresaid men of Kybbeworth, in the head with an axe, and pursued him, wishing to strike him again and kill him if he could, and the foresaid Wodard, perceiving this, turned round and struck the foresaid William in the head with an axe so that he afterwards died of that blow.
