1. General characteristic of the period

In England the period of the 14^th and 15^th centuries is known as the period of war, plague and disorder. The country waged long and costly wars with France and the Low Countries on the Continent as well as with Scotland and Wales within the British Isles. The period also saw the longest civil war in English history, the Wars of the Roses. Like nowhere else in Western Europe, the English regularly murdered their kings and the children of their kings. Famine, disease and plague dramatically reduced the population of the country by the beginning of the 15^th century. Spiritual uncertainty led to the spread of heresy which swept the country. The oppression of peasants led to numerous revolts.

At the same time, the Continental wars gave Englishmen a sharper sense of national identity and the civil wars finally resulted in the establishment of an absolute monarchy. The peasants’ revolts led to the abolition of serfdom. Some heretical priests turned into famous poets.

The growing economic development of England turned it into one of the strongest European powers.

• P

  2. Society

  opulation

English society was headed by the king and based upon ownership of land. The richest landowner was the king who was followed by the landed nobility: dukes, earls and knights who were no longer heavily armed horsemen but had turned into ‘gentlemen farmers’ or ‘landed gentry’.

		King 
Landowners
Lords dukes earls knights			Clergy monasteries bishops
Freemen
Town				Countryside
merchants lawyers artisans workers				peasants farmworkers
	Serfs

By the order of king Edward I all those with an income of 20 a year were made knights, even some of the yeomen farmers and formers esquires became part of the ‘landed gentry’. The word esquire was commonly used in written addresses. Vast lands belonged to the clergy – monasteries and bishops.

Freemen from towns could make a fortune through trade. A serf could become a freeman if he worked for seven years in a town craft guild. Merchants, lawyers and artisans were forming a new middle class. It was knights from the country and merchants from towns that formed the House of Commons in Parliament. The alliance between the landed gentry and merchants made Parliament more powerful.

Judicial power was exercised by the king’s courts as well as justices of the peace who were first appointed by King Edward III to deal with smaller crimes and offences. The JPs were usually less important lords of representatives of the landed gentry. Through the system of JPs, the landed gentry took the place of the nobility as the local authority. The JPs remained the only form of local government in rural areas until 1888. They still exist within the British judicial system.

By the end of the 13^th century, England’s population reached its peak of about four million. As there was not enough cultivated land to ensure all peasant families with an adequate livelihood, low living standards and poor harvests led to poverty, disease and famine.

• The Black Death

Longer lasting and more profound were the consequences of a terrible disease called the ‘pestilence’. It was bubonic plague commonly known as the Black Death. The first attack occurred in southern England in 1348 and by the end of 1349 it had spread north to central Scotland. Two more outbreaks of plague fell on 1361 and 1369.

The disease was brought over to England from France in rat-infected ships. There was no escape from it: those affected died within 24 hours. By 1350, the Black Death reduced England’s population by about a third. About 1,000 villages were destroyed or depopulated.

With the reduction of labour available to cultivate the land, land owners were forced to offer wages instead of the old feudal traditions to keep their tenants. The remaining craftsmen and traders charged higher rates. All that brought the possibility of social change in the former strictly stratified society.

In 1351 Parliament passed a law called ‘The Labourers’ Statute’ which obliged any man or woman from 16 to 60 to work on the land if they had no income of their own. Those who disobeyed were executed. The law was the first attempt to control wages and prices by freezing wages and the prices of manufactured goods and by restricting the movement of labour. The peasants who survived the Black Death were forced by drastic measures to till the land of their lords for the same pay that had existed before the epidemic.

In 1377, 1378 and 1360 Parliament voted for the Poll Tax: it was a fixed four-penny tax paid for every member of the population (‘poll’ meant ‘head’). Both ‘The Labourers’ Statute’ and the Poll Tax were significant factors leading to the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.