The appetite for education was in any case instinctive, the natural child of emulation and ambition in an expanding world. By the beginning of the thirteenth century every town had its own school.
I would my master were an hare,
And all his books were hounds,
And I myself a jolly hunter:
To blow my horn I would not spare!
If he were dead, I would not care.
So wrote the author of a fifteenthcentury poem, ‘The Birched Schoolboy’. The schoolmaster sat on a large chair, often with a book in his lap, while the boys were grouped on simple benches around him. He would dictate the rules of Latin grammar, for example, while the boys would scribble them on wax tablets or chant them in unison. Schooling began at six in the morning and, with appropriate breaks, concluded at six in the evening. Another verse describes the life of the boy out of the schoolroom. When he was young, John Lydgate
Ran into gardens, apples there I stole,
To gather fruits I spared not hedge nor wall,
To pluck grapes from other men’s vines
I was more ready than to say my matins,
My lust was to scorn folk and jape,
To scoff and mock like a wanton ape.
In a world of much casual and spontaneous violence the beating of children was customary and familiar. Agnes Paston beat her daughter, Elizabeth, ‘once in a week or twice, and sometimes twice in one day, and her head broken in two or three places’. Elizabeth herself was twenty years old at the time. Agnes Paston also ordered her son’s schoolmaster to ‘truly belash him’ if he was disobedient. The sentiment would be expected from a loving mother. It was advised that a child should be beaten until he or she admitted guilt and cried for mercy. But childhood was not simply a world of whips and blows. Many educational manuals espoused the cause of gentleness mixed with firmness; excessive punishment was generally denounced.
Thomas More, who was born in 1478, believed that three out of every five of the English people could read; that might be an overestimate, and he might only have been considering the men and women of London, but it is testimony to the growing literacy of the country. The development of the unfamiliar medium of printing, in the latter decades of the fifteenth century, created a new audience with new skills. This was the age in which the poster and the handbill came into use and in which some of the larger towns had libraries. The Guildhall Library, established in 1423, exists still. Four new grammar schools were established in London in the space of one year. In the last decades of the fifteenth century free schools were endowed at Hull, Rotherham, Stockport, Macclesfield and Manchester.
Schoolboys were not allowed to dice or to use bows and arrows on the premises; they were, however, given time and opportunity to engage in the more suitable sport of cock-fighting. ‘Wehee!’ was the cry of liberation from the schoolroom. It was an age of ‘leaping about’, of running and of wrestling. Birds were snared or brought down with sling and stone. Bede recalls that in his youth he had engaged in a primitive form of horse-racing.
The medieval schoolboy played croquet, football, skittles, marbles. Tennis was played against a wall rather than across a net, with the palm of the hand rather than a racket; rackets were not introduced until the end of the fifteenth century. ‘Cambuc’ was a form of golf, with a curved stick known as a ‘bandy’. Skating, with skates made out of bone, was popular. A game known as ‘tables’ resembled backgammon. Chess was common and there were circular chessboards; stray chess pieces have been excavated from medieval dwellings. Card games were not introduced until the middle of the fifteenth century. Bowmanship was important; in ‘penny-prick’ an arrow was fired at a hanging penny coin. Dice were very frequent. ‘You shall have a throw,’ one schoolboy tells another in a schoolbook of the 1420s, ‘for a button of your wristlet.’ Play is as old, and as ever renewed, as the world.
35
The lion and the lamb
The new king, Edward IV, was according to Thomas More ‘a goodly personage, and very princely to behold … of visage lovely, of body mighty, strong and cleanly made’. A contemporary chronicler, Dominic Mancini, writing just after Edward’s death, gave a more ambiguous account. ‘Edward was of a gentle nature and cheerful aspect; nevertheless should he assume an angry countenance he could appear very terrible to beholders.’ Of course it was one of the duties of a king to appear very terrible, especially one who had succeeded Henry VI; the previous king had been more lamb than lion. Mancini went on to report that ‘he was easy of access to his friends and to others, even the least notable. Frequently he called to his side complete strangers, when he thought that they had come with the intent of addressing or beholding him more closely.’ Come, he might have said. Look at me. Yes. I am your king. ‘He was wont to show himself to those who wished to watch him, and he seized any opportunity … of revealing his fine stature more protractedly and more evidently to onlookers.’ He had a voracious appetite and, like many gourmands, he often vomited in order that he might eat again. In time this affected his girth; More commented that in his later years he became ‘somewhat corpulent and boorly, and nevertheless not uncomely’.
In his youth his pride was touched with vanity, and like many previous monarchs he indulged in the theatrical and spectacular aspects of kingship. In the first year of his reign the keeper of the great wardrobe spent a little over £4,784 on clothes and furs for the king’s person, an extraordinary sum when the average annual wage of a labourer was approximately £6. He draped himself in cloth of gold and crimson velvet, in tawny silk and in green satin. He owned hundreds of pairs of shoes and slippers, hats and bonnets; he wore amethysts and sapphires and rubies in abundance. They were talismans as well as jewels. The amethyst gave hardiness and manhood; the sapphire kept the limbs of the body whole; if poison or venom were brought into the presence of the ruby it became moist and began to sweat. Edward possessed a toothpick made of gold, garnished with a diamond, a ruby and a pearl.
It was not just a matter of personal aggrandizement, although of course that played a large part in the acquisition of wealth. One of the purposes of becoming king was to become the richest person in the land. But it was also a way of asserting the wealth and status of the kingdom; it was a display of national power. So self-love, and self-aggrandizement, can be construed as devotion to duty.
Of course that kingdom was still divided or, at the least, unstable. The survival of Henry and his son was a serious embarrassment to the new monarchy, especially since the Lancastrian dynasty had many loyal followers in the west as well as the midlands of the country. Edward had no power at all in the far north, where the old king was just over the border in Scotland. The largest part of Wales supported Henry, who also commanded more supporters among the magnates of the country. Thirty-seven noble families had fought for him and with him; only three of those went over to Edward’s side.
So the new king had to shore up his defences, as far as that was possible, partly in order to prevent the French from taking advantage of any internal confusion. He brought many previous Lancastrian supporters under the cover of his good lordship, principally by granting them territory; he was forced to trust, and to favour, those who had offended against him. Where the Lancastrians could not be reconciled, they were arrested or eliminated. The earl of Oxford and his son, for example, were beheaded at Tower Hill on charges of treason.
A commission of judges proceeded through twentyfive shires and eight cities in order to pursue political malcontents. No great set-piece battles were being fought but, in the first two years of his reign, there was probably more fighting than in any other period of the war; in 1461 he took under his control the estates of 113 enemies. This was the territory granted to his supporters. In that year he also created seven new barons.