The Story of England, page 25
These are the deeper undercurrents of English medieval history, the long-term changes that underlie the spectacular ephemera of events – the Hundred Years War, the brief but savage flare-up of violence in the Peasants’ Revolt. Such events are often only symptoms of what is happening below the surface, and on the heels of the famines and plagues of the time now came profound social, economic and religious changes. As always, the villagers of Kibworth were involved in these transformations. Heretic preachers from the village wandered the roads of the Midlands preaching a revolutionary creed, and ultimately a dozen local men marched down to join a rebel army attempting to overthrow the king in London, where some of their number suffered a cruel death at the executioner’s hands.
A new vicar
The remarkable tale of Kibworth’s involvement in the spread of heresy and dissent begins, at least as far as it is discernible in the records, almost twenty-five years before, at the end of February 1380 on the eve of the Peasants’ Revolt, with the arrival of a new vicar in the village.
Riding up from Oxford to Kibworth that February, Thomas Hulman had much to reflect upon. The mood in the countryside was dangerous, and recent rumours warned of vagabond robbers on the roads and of armed gangs – lordless and landless men – preying on villages with frightening violence and random killings. The journey to Leicestershire was relatively short though, easily managed in two days, and the road was far less fraught with danger than the route to the college’s northern estates. In the fourteenth century it took seven or eight days to the Merton manor at Ponteland, north of the Tyne, and the traveller was advised to ride in a large party and take weapons with him. The Merton accounts show that when their fellows headed into Northumberland they stocked up on crossbow bolts. But even though it was only seventy miles to Leicestershire it was not entirely safe and Hulman probably thought it best to ensure he had some spare bowstrings before he left Oxford, with a bow and a short dagger in the hands of his ‘garcon’.
Thomas Hulman – MA and bachelor in theology to give him his full due – was a Merton man. Appointed vicar of Kibworth by his fellows, he was a West Midlander, and had already enjoyed a solid university career, matriculating fourteen years earlier in 1366, the year after another Merton man whom he knew, and who was later famously accused of heresy, John Aston. By now Hulman was probably in his mid-thirties and had been a fellow of Merton College for fourteen years, having been made a junior proctor of the university in 1370, the college bursar in 1373–4 and sub-warden in 1377. His career had gone well and he could look forward to a secure living as a bachelor of theology and a lawyer, perhaps even rising to enjoy royal favour.
Across the country the national mood was edgy, a sense that the pressure was growing, the political barometer rising. The old king, Edward III, the first English ruler to demonstrate real senility while in office, was dead and the young Richard II, a callow juvenile, had made a disastrous start. The government’s unpopularity was reflected in a flood of popular ballads, songs and pamphlets, and there were reports of widespread discontent among the peasantry, especially in the richest parts of the country, the south-east, Essex and the wool villages of East Anglia. The fourteenth century was the first golden age of English political poetry, especially in the vernacular. ‘In this wicked age England is perished …’ wrote one balladeer, ‘the world is turned upside down.’ There were songs lambasting the friars and their lives of ‘riote and ribaudry’, and the attitudes of ordinary people to the medieval Church and the papacy were shaded by talk of privilege and corruption: ‘covetousse bishops and proude prelates of the Churche’, as one said, ‘who only longed for possessions and temporal goods’. Such songs and conversations one might have heard in any of the coaching inns from Brackley to Daventry, complaints about the clergy and their expenses, their corruption and even (a peculiarly modern preoccupation) their sexual misconduct. ‘If I had a house and a faire daughter or a wife,’ it was joked, ‘I would never let a smooth-talking friar in to shrive them’ … ‘er he a childe put hir with-inne – and perchaunce two at ones!’
Anti-clerical grumblings could be heard in any town in England in 1380. What was even more prevalent and striking was the seething discontent among the workforce, expressed in the exponential rise in labour disputes and peasant agitation. This kind of class conflict had been common for the last century or so. But now it was becoming organized. In 1377 the courts were inundated with cases in which peasants were taking their landlords to court. Those hostile to the peasants’ movements grumbled that their actions were so widespread that they must have been centrally coordinated, specifically designed to clog up the system, making it impossible for the law courts to thwart individual actions and to contain the grievances. From that year cases contesting the rights of landlords became so widespread that talk now spread of far greater conflict, of massive social disruption and even of revolution. That year, the time of the first introduction of the hated poll tax, one Londoner who was no friend of the peasants was full of dark forebodings: ‘Slothfulness has put the lords to sleep so they are not on their guard against the madness of the commons: they will allow that nettle to grow which is too violent in its nature.’
To experienced observers the crisis was coming fast:
He who observes the present time will fear that soon this impatient nettle will very suddenly sting us before it can be contained by justice or the law. There are three things that will produce merciless destruction if they get out of control: one is a surging flood; another is a raging fire; but the third is the common multitude: for they will not be stopped by either reason or restraint.
Such were the views too at high table in Oxford, where the new colleges derived much of their income as landlords; in the ecclesiastical courts, for along with the king the Church was the greatest landlord in England; and in the law courts in London, where Hulman had travelled on business as Merton’s junior bursar. So there was much to chew over on the road as he travelled towards Kibworth. The journey was usually made by the college agents three or four times a year, when making the annual audit, so he was setting out on a familiar road – ‘going out of town’, as they said, rather as today’s students and dons might say ‘up’ to Oxford and ‘down’ to the country. The countryside he passed through was dotted with new spires, signs of the upsurge in popular religion after the Black Death. It was dotted too with gallows, for the lord of the manor in every place had the right to erect a gallows and try peasants, rebels, thieves and bandits. No one journeyed far in the fourteenth century without seeing a hanged man twisting in the wind, his eyes pecked by crows.
The journey involved one overnight stop, unless there was a reason to dawdle, and this stop was usually at Daventry, where the Merton accounts rolls note the customary expenses of a traveller on horseback: fodder for the horses, bed and candles, bread, beer, eggs, salted herring, codlings, nuts and salt; and if you were lucky, ‘little fish’ fresh from the local fishponds, served at the inns along the road.
The second day’s ride took Hulman and his servant across Watling Street into the old Danelaw country at Gibbet Hill above the River Swift, then north-east through rolling countryside that since the Black Death had become the backdrop to many deserted villages – Bittesby, Stormsworth, Westrill, Knaptoft Misterton and Pulteney (the last a pleasant watering place for the fellows earlier in the century, on their long northern journeys). With an early start, they could be in Lutterworth (a few miles south-east of Kibworth) by mid-morning, its popular market on the River Swift much frequented by Leicestershire folk, and where the timber yards were stocked with wood from the Warwickshire Arden. Riding into Church Gate he saw a well-built town with good timber houses, the homes of prosperous local merchants. In the centre stood the fine church of St Mary, and on that chill February morning had Hulman walked inside and gazed up above the chancel arch he would have seen a great painted ‘Doom’, a vision of the Last Judgement, small white figures rising out of their tombs against a deep crimson background the colour of the stomach lining of hell, the ghostlike figures of the damned falling screaming into the abyss. And then even higher, separated by a dark black-blue wavy strip, the figure of Christ sitting on his rainbow throne surrounded by angels. The whole represented a stark warning of the ever-present threat of damnation, the promise of bliss and the fruit of sin. As Hulman would have said: ‘Forgif us ure gyltas.’
The vicar here at St Mary’s in 1380 was one of the most remarkable and controversial figures in England, indeed a man known across Europe: John Wycliffe. A former fellow of Merton, and no doubt already well-known to Hulman, Wycliffe was then living under government supervision. Prematurely aged now, thin and frail, John Wycliffe was an unlikely figure to have convulsed the English state and Church, arousing such hatred that the Pope had recently been moved to condemn him (and eventually after his death, in posthumous revenge, would command that his remains be dug up and burned, and his ashes cast into the River Swift).
Wycliffe – his family originated in the north Yorkshire village of Wycliffe on Tees – had enjoyed a glittering academic career: master of Balliol, fellow of Merton. He was still perhaps only in his fifties (though in the Middle Ages fifty of course was old), but his health was now deteriorating and he was soon to be partially paralysed by a stroke. As if he knew he didn’t have long to live (for such strokes often announce themselves in minor attacks over the preceding months or even years) he was working ceaselessly, arguing against the main intellectual and theological currents of his time. A pool of pupils like John Aston in Leicester and the mysterious John Purvey, who lived with him in Lutterworth (‘the fourth hieresiarch’ as a hostile Leicester chronicler called him), were engaged alongside him in translating, copying and disseminating his works.
Among his pupils Wycliffe’s ‘unblemished walk in life’ aroused great loyalty and affection. ‘I indeed clove to no one closer than to him,’ said one, William Thorpe: ‘he was the wisest and most blessed of men whom I have ever met. From him I learned in truth what the Church of Christ is and how it should be ruled and led.’ For Hulman then, that February, it was an opportunity perhaps to pay his respects to a much-loved old teacher.
Like most Oxbridge dons, Wycliffe liked a good meal and a good conversation, and there was much to discuss. Over a long and eventful career based on acute analysis of the biblical texts, Wycliffe had grown increasingly disillusioned with the Roman Catholic Church of his day and the vast edifice of scholastic theology that sustained the medieval ideologies of power, both spiritual and temporal. All these he felt had become both real and invisible chains on the minds of the people. Wycliffe believed simply that the scriptures were the only source of belief and doctrine, that the claims of the papacy in Rome were unhistorical (‘there is no pope in the Bible,’ he would say) and that the monastic orders, with their vast wealth and property, had become huge centres of privilege which were now irredeemably corrupt. He asserted that at the local level the widespread corruption of the priesthood invalidated the office, their actions and even the sacrament itself. In short, he said the Church must return to its roots, and the institution and its priests should be as poor as they were in the days of the apostles. In his person then, what had started out as an academic controversy, adjudicated in scholar’s Latin, had become a national issue, whose implications for the ordinary people were very great indeed.
Wycliffe was not alone in his reflections, for there were parallel movements in Europe at this time, but in the Middle Ages these were dangerous paths to walk. Wycliffe himself was protected by wealthy and influential patrons like John of Gaunt, the Earl of Lancaster, but since 1374 a suspicious government had banished him to what amounted to a supervised internal exile in Lutterworth. There, convinced of his own rectitude, he had continued to preach against the whole religious establishment, his words imbued with the quality of his quietly spoken but scintillating lectures in Oxford and the sparkling sermons that had packed them into city churches in London, where people of all classes had gathered to hear ‘the wonderful things that streamed forth from his mouth’. Such eloquence and intellectual rigour had convinced a generation of educated scholars, learned ‘clerks’, to challenge the attitudes and behaviour of the Church. The new ideas had percolated into the consciousness of the mercantile and artisanal classes – goldsmiths, drapers, parchment makers, scriveners – who had every reason to resist seeing their wealth go into the hands of a bloated Church while taking instruction on personal morality from a venal priesthood. In 1377 Wycliffe had been condemned by the Pope himself for ‘ideas erroneous and dangerous to Church and state’, and at home the orthodox decried his ‘blasphemy, arrogance and heresy’. During this period Wycliffe’s Book on the End of Time contained some of his boldest flights of imagination, sacred predictions for the time after the flawed old order had passed, that even distantly seem to foreshadow a secular democracy as the predestined fruition of Christ’s mission on earth. What Wycliffe envisaged was a new kind of commonwealth, and in very different hands that idea was soon to be voiced too in violent revolution.
These were heavy debates that wore heavily on him now. Sitting across the dining table in the old medieval rectory at Lutterworth towards the end he was ‘emaciated in body, and well-nigh devoid of bodily strength’, but still ‘in temper quick, in mind clear, and in moral character unblemished’. Unremittingly sharp towards his enemies, like many a brilliant don he was cuttingly sure of his own views, but never offensive: ‘in demeanour and conduct he was very innocent,’ said one who knew him. Such qualities had inspired wide devotion. ‘Many important people conferred with him’, it was said. ‘They loved him dearly, wrote down his sayings, and followed his way of life.’
That February in Lutterworth, Wycliffe was still writing and preaching. In fact he had never been on such a creative roll. His current project, tilting at the Pope’s ban on vernacular translations of the sacred books, was his English translation of the Bible, which would be revised by his loyal pupil John Purvey. Thinking and writing ceaselessly, he had produced an incredible amount of material (thirty volumes so far in the modern printed edition of his collected works). And although he himself could not easily travel, his ideas were spread (as he had envisaged) by a network of loyal friends and pupils, and once out there in the world, of course, his ideas were beyond his control.
Wycliffism was not just a dry scholastic argument. It was about the Christian way of life, and that is why his teachings appealed not only to intellectuals who followed the bold and challenging flights of his logic, but also to the artisanal and commercial classes in the cities, and the better-off free peasants in the Midlands who were moved by a vision of the Church purified and simplified, in which there was room for individual thought and expression – in effect, freedom of conscience. In his last years Wycliffe attacked the whole Church and the social hierarchy of the land, while growing more and more sure that the Pope and the Antichrist were virtually one and the same. ‘The Church’, he said, ‘with Christ at its head offers one path to salvation. The Pope cannot say that he is its head, he cannot even say he is a member unless he follows the life of Jesus and the apostles.’
Although Wycliffe himself was not a social revolutionary, others at the time were in no doubt about the radical potential of his teaching. John Ball, the voice of the Peasants’ Revolt (who made the famous sermon ‘When Adam delved and Eve span who was then the gentleman?’), was said by the Leicester historian Henry Knighton to have been a disciple of Wycliffe. Directly or indirectly Ball took the social implications of Wycliffe’s theories to their natural conclusion, a link that was understood in some quarters, where Wycliffe was virulently hated. The chronicler Thomas Walsingham unleashed a tirade of anger against the old man, calling him ‘an instrument of the devil, an enemy of the Church, a sower of confusion in the common people, the very image of a hypocrite, the idol of heretics, author of schism, spreader of lies … a malicious spirit destined for the abode of darkness’.
So these were dangerous times for the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God. Men like Thomas Hulman shared a sense of impending crisis. Perhaps he felt uneasy as he said his goodbyes and set out from Lutterworth on the two-hour ride on a cross-country track through Peatling Parva and Bruntingthorpe, then through open fields across to Kibworth past the great post mill at Arnesby. From Smeeton Hill he got his first sight of the new spire of Kibworth, a great landmark for any traveller, soaring 160 feet above the peasants’ houses, one of the finest smaller parish churches in England and long a source of pride to Kibworth people, the familiar landmark during their travels to the markets in the south of the shire, and a proud symbol of recovery by villagers who had poured their own resources into the rebuilding of their church – Christ’s one true Catholic Church.
Kibworth in 1380
The village where Thomas Hulman arrived at the end of February 1380 had seen many changes since the first great outbreak of the Black Death in 1349–50. The catastrophic fall in population had been arrested, despite further heavy losses from the plague in 1361, and again only the previous year in 1379. The village birth rate had shot up in the last few years, and the streets were full of children as he rode through Smeeton. The open fields were coming out of winter now, their furlongs still dusted with snow, the ploughmen preparing their gear as the first ploughing of spring corn was about to begin. The other side of Smeeton, Hulman passed through the village of dependent serfs and villeins owned by the Beauchamp family, their huge demesne yards on the right-hand side of the track, where the noise of a hundred plough oxen echoed in the barns; then down a little valley, across the stream and up to Kibworth church.
