The Good Parliament, as it became known, wished ‘to make correction of the errors and faults of the realm if such are found to exist’. It proclaimed itself to be assembled ‘on behalf of the community of the realm’, and then moved against corrupt courtiers and merchants who had conspired to defraud the country. They were impeached, and sent to trial before the Lords. One or two of them fled the country; others were dismissed, imprisoned, or forfeited their property. It was an early test for the efficacy of the Commons, which had shown itself to be capable of determined action. It was not representative of some supposed popular freedom, however, since it proved to be equally capable of rebuffing the demands of the peasants and labourers. In the following year it introduced the ‘poll tax’ which was feared and hated in equal measure. The members of the parliament house were concerned only with the interests of their own particular ‘community’ of the realm.
The Black Prince died during the sessions of the Good Parliament, and his father followed a year later in 1377. It is said that Alice Perrers took the rings from his fingers as he lay upon his deathbed in the palace of Sheen, but this may be no more than a morality tale. The baubles of glory had already been stripped from him in France. He had achieved nothing much of his own volition, but during his reign of fifty years England itself had acquired a more coherent or at least more organized national life.
Another consequence of his reign is of equal importance. Edward III’s early victories at Sluys and Crécy, and his capture of Calais, had augmented the sense of national identity. The people may not have cared a whit about Edward’s claim to the throne of France but they understood the force of arms against ‘strangers’. The news of battles was issued from market crosses and church pulpits, spreading quickly throughout the entire country. English merchants, rather than Italian or German traders, were now in charge of the country’s business. In the port of Hull, for example, English exporters of wool had made up only 4 per cent of the total in 1275. By 1330, it was almost 90 per cent.
‘I kan noght construe all this,’ a character remarks in Piers Plowman, ‘ye most kenne me this on Englissh.’ It is worth remarking that Chaucer began his poetic career at the court of Edward III. His first verses were written in courtly French but the power of the vernacular overcame his literary conventionality; it is a measure of the strength of spoken and written English that Chaucer now celebrated it as worthy of comparison with the classical tongues. In Troilus and Criseyde, and more especially in Canterbury Tales, he created or adapted a language that was capable of the highest lyric flights and the most vulgar comic effects. It is already the language of Shakespeare. Within Chaucer’s lifetime English replaced French as the language of schoolteaching, and in the reign of the next sovereign it became the language of the court.
Human ingenuity is unceasing. The first mechanical clock was introduced to England in the reign of Edward III. It marks the demise of the feudal and seasonal world no less plainly than the advent of the longbow and the decline of the serf. The first reference to a crane, working in a harbour, comes from 1347.
24
The night schools
In the reign of Edward III there arose the greatest disturbance within the Church since the time that Augustine imposed the primacy of Rome upon the English at the end of the sixth century. In the succeeding 800 years the Church had become part of the governance of England, with all the obligations and dangers that implies. It had become rich. It had remained powerful, with its principal servants becoming the chief administrators of the king. The bishops were effectively the king’s clerks, chosen and promoted in a complex hierarchy of service; they had their own small armies of knights and retainers, sometimes leading them into battle.
The Church was by far the greatest landowner in the country, and therefore the largest employer. Many saintly and devout clerics could still be found, but the majority of the clergy had gone the way of the world. The bishops and abbots, for the most part, lived in great state and luxury. The lowlier monks also lived in conditions of comfort, with the obligations of prayer and study offset by the more familiar pursuits of hunting or hawking. They gambled and they drank; they often pursued women where they did not lust after boys.
The secular clergy, better known as the parish priests, were often unlearned. They may have had to till the land and gather the harvest together with their parishioners. They were of the earth. Many no doubt offered spiritual consolation, and administered the sacraments with due care, but others set no such good example. They lived openly with their mistresses, and neglected their duties. They were in the marketplace and the alehouse more often than they were in the church. The people of Saltash in Cornwall, for example, complained about their priest to the dean of Windsor. ‘He is deaf,’ they wrote, ‘and cannot hear confessions except to the scandal of those confessing; he is a discloser of confessions, because he gets drunk and reveals the confessions of parishioners … he sells the sacramentals to his parishioners, and refused to minister the last rites to those labouring in the final stages when he was asked.’
In times of famine and plague, of course, the piety of the people in such matters as individual prayer and mortification was all the more plaintive and fervent. At a slightly later date, manuals of devotion became more popular among the literate. This did not amount to a rejection of the authority of the Church. The institution was taken for granted, but fresh avenues of access to the divine were required by the pious. Some, however, questioned the wealth of the Church; some knights and London merchants, in particular, were opposed to clerical pretensions in every sphere of social and economic life. In the parliament of 1371 they argued that the lands of the clergy should be taken over for the sake of the public purse.
The life and career of John Wycliffe must be placed in this context. He was himself in holy orders, a Fellow of Merton College in Oxford before becoming Master of Balliol College at the same university. He was a doctor of divinity, and in that profession he had acquired a great reputation both as a teacher and a writer. He became known as ‘the flower of Oxford’, and was held by many contemporaries to be ‘the greatest clerk that they knew then living’. He held two ‘benefices’, two rural parishes that he did not visit but from which he collected the revenue. He had also come to the attention of the king’s court, and was granted a retainer for his services to the Crown.
He was useful to certain members of that court, among them John of Gaunt, because of his avowed disdain for clerical wealth and privilege. He represented a genuine distaste, shared by some of the nobility and many of the gentry, for the temporal possessions of the Church. But he was a scholar who pressed ahead his arguments with a blithe disregard for the consequences in the world around him; he followed the light, or will-o’-the-wisp, of reason wherever it led him. He wrote in university Latin, and in books whose titles may be translated as On the Eucharist and On the Power of the Pope he denounced the claims and corruptions of the Church. No printing presses were of course then available to disseminate his message, so it was laboriously copied by hand.
In these manuscripts he espoused the power of scripture, and suggested that the holy word of God was more important than the sacramental hierarchy of the Church. He believed in a version of predestinarianism, by which the elect were already known to God. There was no need for an elaborate machinery of Church power, which simply interfered between the individual soul and its maker. He taught that the king, rather than the pope or the bishops, was the fountain of grace in the land. He denounced the pope as the Antichrist. Friars and monks were repellent and superfluous. Wycliffe also condemned the worship of the saints as idolatry.