His hopes were misjudged, however. On 17 February 1461, the Yorkists and Lancastrians met once more at St Albans, but on this occasion the Lancastrians were successful. The king was rescued; he had been placed for safekeeping a mile away, where it was said that he laughed and sang beneath a tree. Many of the leading Yorkist nobles were slaughtered. Warwick fled the scene with a handful of companions.
It is reported that Henry was overjoyed to see his immediate family once more and, in his excitement, he knighted his young son. The seven-year-old boy in turn knighted some thirty of his followers. Margaret, with the king in her possession, now stood close to the gates of London. It was reported in the chronicles that ‘the shops keep closed, and nothing is done either by the tradesmen or by the merchants. Men do not stand in the streets or venture far from home’. They had heard the news of the devastation wreaked by Margaret’s troops in the north of England. John Paston wrote to his father that they ‘are appointed to pillage all this country, and give away men’s goods and livelihoods in the south country, and that will ask a mischief’.
On hearing the news of Margaret’s advance, Edward of March – who was now after his father’s death the duke of York – left the site of his victory by the Welsh border and took his forces east to intercept her; he met Warwick in Oxfordshire, close to the Cotswolds, and together they moved towards London. Their purpose now was to occupy the city and to declare Edward to be the lawful king. The citizens were disposed to accept them, and the gates were shut against Margaret of Anjou.
When Edward arrived, he was greeted by the Londoners; the streets were crowded with his supporters and he took the crown almost by acclamation. His right to the title was proclaimed, at St Paul’s Cross and elsewhere, while Henry VI was declared to have forfeited the throne by reneging on his agreement to make York his heir. On 4 March Edward entered St Paul’s Cathedral, and then proceeded in state towards Westminster where he was crowned as Edward IV. All those present did homage to him, as he held the sceptre of Edward the Confessor. They chanted the refrain:
Verus Vox, Rex Edwardus
Rectus Rex, Rex Edwardus.
He was the true voice and the rightful king. He was nineteen years old and, at a height of 6 feet and 4 inches (1.9 metres), a commanding figure. He was every inch a proper king. The ambassador from Burgundy said that ‘I cannot remember ever having seen a finer looking man’.
Yet Henry VI could still be construed to be the anointed sovereign; he was not dead, and he had not abdicated. So effectively two kings of England reigned. Two suns were visible in the sky. A seventeenth-century historian, Thomas Fuller, put it perhaps more vividly in The Holy State and The Profane State where he remarked that ‘they lived in a troublesome world, wherein the cards were so shuffled that two kings were turned up trumps at once, which amazed men how to play their games’.
Edward took steps to resolve this unsatisfactory situation by going in pursuit of Margaret and of Henry. On 29 March the two armies met at Towton in Yorkshire, the royal family having taken the precaution of returning to York to await developments. They were right to do so. Edward won a signal victory on the battlefield; the conflict, held in a snowstorm, is thought to have involved some 50,000 soldiers of whom approximately a quarter perished. Much of the Lancastrian nobility were destroyed. Henry and Margaret, together with their son, escaped into Scotland. The old king, if we may call him that, was to remain at liberty for another four years as an emblem of the surviving Lancastrian claim to the throne. Only the first part of the Wars of the Roses was over.
34
The world at play
Many miniature jugs have been found in the soil of medieval dwellings; they have been interpreted as toys for children. The son of Edward I was given a miniature cart as well as the little model of a plough. From an excavation in London was removed a toy bird, made out of lead and tin; in its original state it would have rocked on a horizontal rod, at the same time as its tongue would appear and reappear from an open beak. Miniature faces were made out of tin, with large ears and eyes and spiked hair. For the very young, rattles were made. Glove puppets were common. Dolls of wood or of cloth were known as ‘poppets’. Tops were called ‘scopperils’ or things that jump about. Hobby-horses were small wooden horses. So the children played as they have always done. But the call of the world was not far distant. The boys were trained in wrestling and in shooting with bow and arrow. They were taught how to imitate the calls of birds, and how to tell the time from the shadows cast by the sun. The girls were trained in weaving, in sewing and in laundering.
Childhood did not last for very long. In the time of the Saxons the age of adult responsibility was twelve at which point the boy or girl could be set to proper full-time work, in the fields of the country or in the streets and markets of the town. In later centuries a boy was criminally liable from the age of seven and could make his will at the age of fourteen.
The more fortunate were granted an education. Some children were given to the monks at a very young age, and were never seen again in secular clothing. The child’s hair was shaved from the round area of the scalp, so that he already resembled a monk. His cloak was taken from him at a special Mass as the abbot declared ‘May the Lord strip you of the old man.’ The boy was then given a monk’s cowl with the words ‘May the Lord clothe you with the new man.’ One elderly monk recalled how in 1080, at the age of five, he began school in the town of Shrewsbury where ‘Siward, an illustrious priest, taught me my letters for five years, and instructed me in psalms and hymns and other necessary knowledge’. A long tradition of clerkly learning already existed.
From the seventh to the eleventh centuries, in fact, the cloister schools of the monasteries provided the principal means of education; the lessons included those of grammar, rhetoric and natural science. The art of singing was also taught. They are not dead institutions. The school of St Albans, established in the tenth century, is still in existence at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The grammar school of Ely, now known as the King’s School, also has an Anglo-Saxon origin; one of its boarding houses is reputed to be the oldest residential building in Europe. The present grammar school of Norwich was instituted in the eleventh century. Many other examples can be found.
It was widely believed that priests should also be schoolmasters, and a church decree of 1200 declared that ‘priests shall keep schools in the towns and teach the little boys free of charge. Priests ought to hold schools in their houses … They ought not to expect anything from the relatives of the boys except what they are willing to give’. Such schools remained in use throughout the period of this book.
In the twelfth century a number of larger schools also emerged, as part of what has been called the ‘renaissance’ of that century in humane learning; they grew up beside the cathedrals, or beside the houses of canons, or in the towns reliant upon great monasteries. Their influence and reputation spread, and between 1363 and 1400 twenty-four new schools were founded. They became known as the grammar schools, despite the fact that grammar was not the only subject; the art of letter-writing was the subject of study, as well as the disciplines of record-keeping and commercial accounting. ‘Business studies’ began in the medieval period.
A fortunate male child received his education at the court of the king or the nobles. If a superior spoke to him, he was trained to take off his hat and to look steadfastly in that person’s face without moving his hands or feet. He was taught to put his hand in front of his mouth before spitting. He was not to scratch his head and was to ensure that his hands and nails were always clean.