In a suitably elaborate ceremony the other rioters, with halters around their necks, were brought to Westminster Hall in the presence of the king. He was sitting on a lofty dais, from which eminence he condemned them all to death. Then Wolsey fell on his knees and begged the king to show compassion while the prisoners themselves called out ‘Mercy, Mercy!’ Eventually the king relented and granted them pardon. At which point they cast off their halters and, as a London chronicler put it, ‘jumped for joy’.
It had been a close-run thing, but there is no disguising the real scorn and even hatred between the court and the citizens. The nobility distrusted and despised the commonalty, a feeling returned in equal measure. It was believed, with some reason, that the bishops and the clergy took the nobles’ part; the city’s animus against them would play some role in the religious changes of later years. London itself had the capacity to stir riot and breed dissension, and was a constant source of disquiet to the king and his council.
Two or three weeks after the riots, a distemper fell upon the city and the country. In the early summer of 1517 a fever, accompanied by a profuse and foul-smelling sweat, began its progress. It was accompanied by sharp pains in the back and shoulders before moving to the liver; lethargy and drowsiness ensued, with a sleep that often led to death. Swift and merciless, it became known as the sweat or the sweating sickness; because it seems only to have attacked the English, in cities such as Calais and Antwerp, it was called ‘sudor Anglicus’ or ‘the English sweat’. It was also called ‘Know Thy Master’ or ‘The Lord’s Visitation’. Tens of thousands died. A physician of the time, Dr Caius, described how it ‘immediately killed some in opening their windows, some in playing with children in their street doors; some in one hour, many in two, it destroyed; and at the longest to them that merrily dined, it gave a sorrowful supper’. A chance encounter in the street, a beggar knocking at the door, a kiss upon the cheek, could spell death.
The houses themselves might harbour the pestilence. Erasmus complained that the floors of English dwellings were covered with rushes that harboured ‘expectorations, vomitings, the leakage of dogs and men, ale-droppings, scraps of fish and other abominations not to be mentioned’. Whenever there was a change in the weather, vapours of foul air were exhaled. In the streets the open sewers rolled their stagnant and turbid discharge down to the Thames.
In the summer of that year Thomas Wolsey himself fell sick of the sweat, with many of his household dying. Yet he was robust and determined. He could shake off any sickness without permanent injury to his strong constitution. On his recovery he made a pilgrimage to Walsingham; when he had faced death, he had made a vow to pray at the shrine of Our Lady there, a replica of the house in Nazareth where Gabriel had appeared to Mary. After he had meditated and fasted, he continued with the business of the realm.
In the spring of the previous year he had spoken at length, to Henry and to the council, of the inefficiencies and enormities in the administration of justice. He was not a lawyer and had no training in the law, but his intelligence and self-reliance easily surmounted any doubts about his ability. He had decided, with the king, to reinforce the procedures of the law by means of a body known as the Star Chamber; in its judicial capacity, the king’s council met in a chamber the roof of which was studded with stars.
Under the stars the lord chancellor could question and punish, in particular, the great ones of the realm. ‘I trust,’ he wrote, ‘to learn them next term the law of the Star Chamber.’ He punished lords for maintaining too many retainers, and knights for ‘bearing’ (bearing down on) their poorer tenants; he investigated cases of perjury and forgery; he regulated prices and food supplies, on the understandable assumption that scarcity might provoke riot. One of the principal functions of the chamber was to suppress or punish public disorder. He investigated the behaviour of the sheriffs. In the previous reign the Star Chamber had heard approximately twelve cases a year; under the direction of Wolsey it heard 120 in the same period.
Wolsey had his own court, too, known as the court of Chancery. This was a civil rather than a criminal court, where disputes over such matters as inheritance and contract were resolved. The plaintiffs could state their case in the vernacular, and defendants were obliged to appear by means of a ‘subpoena writ’. It was an efficient way of hearing appeals against judgments in common law. It also provided a method by which the cardinal could keep a tight grip upon the business of the land. Wolsey went in procession to Westminster Hall each day, with two great crosses of silver carried before him together with his Great Seal and cardinal’s hat; he dressed in crimson silk with a tippet or shoulder cape of sable. In his hand he carried an orange, hollowed out and filled with vinegar, pressed to his nose when he walked through the crowd of suitors awaiting him. ‘On [sic] my lords and masters,’ his attendants called out, ‘make way for my Lord’s Grace!’ John Skelton described his behaviour in the court of Chancery itself:
And openly in that place
He rages and he raves
And calls them cankered knaves …
In the Star Chamber he nods and becks …
Duke, earl, baron or lord
To his sentence must accord.
He was resented by those whom he punished, but his ministrations seem to have been effective. In the late summer of 1517 he wrote to Henry with a certain amount of self-congratulation on the blessed state of the realm. ‘Our Lord be thanked,’ he said, ‘it was never in such peace nor tranquillity.’
In this year, too, Wolsey established an inquiry into the causes of depopulation in the counties of England. The countryside had been changing for many generations, so slowly that the alteration had not been discernible until it was too late to do anything about it. By the time that the enclosure of land by the richer or more efficient farmers was recognized as a manifest injustice, it had become a simple fact that could not be reversed. A society of smallholders gave way to one of large tenant farmers with a class of landless labourers. So it is with all historical change. It proceeds over many decades, and many centuries, before becoming irrevocable.
Many tracts and pamphlets were written in the sixteenth century concerning the evils of enclosure. Thomas More’s Utopia is in part directed against it. The enclosed land was used for the rearing of sheep rather than for the production of crops. More wrote that the sheep were now eating the people rather than the reverse. One shepherd took the place of a score of agricultural workers in the process, thus leading to the depopulation of large parts of the countryside. A bishop wrote to Wolsey that ‘your heart would mourn to see the towns, villages, hamlets, manor places in ruin and decay, the people gone, the ploughs laid down’. When labourers were not needed, they moved on. The simple houses of the rural tenantry, once abandoned, were dissolved by wind and rain; the walls crumbled, and the roofs fell, leaving only hillocks of earth to show where they had once stood. The village church might become a shelter for cattle. Yet it was hard, then and now, to identify the causes of this decay. The distress of the early sixteenth century may have been caused by a series of bad harvests and a steadily growing population, for example, rather than a suddenly accelerated rate of enclosure. A population of approximately three million was below the peak of the early fourteenth century, but it was increasing all the time.
Enclosure itself had been a fact of farming ever since the fourteenth century, when the ‘pestilence’ or ‘black death’ took a large toll upon the population. With the lowered demand for corn, the land had to be put to different uses. Fields lying idle were cheap, also, and a steady process of purchase began that continued well into the eighteenth century. There were barters and exchanges between farmers, with the wealthiest or the most resourceful getting the best of the bargain. Many of the once open fields were enclosed with hedges of hawthorn. It was estimated that the value of enclosed land was one and a half times that of the rest. The process could not be prevented or halted. It came to a crisis, as we shall see, a generation later.