E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten
Castor Blood and Roses
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28680-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-28680-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Helen Castor is a historian of medieval England, and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Her first book, Blood & Roses, a biography of the fifteenth-century Paston family, was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2005 and won the English Association's Beatrice White Prize in 2006. Her second book, She-Wolves, was made into a BBC2 tv series. She lives in London with her husband and son.
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In 1378, in a small village near the north-east Norfolk coast, there lived ‘a good plain husbandman’ named Clement, who took his surname, Paston, from the place where he lived. Clement was a peasant farmer who held some arable land and ‘a little poor watermill running by a little river’. That was the sum total of his estate; ‘other livelihood nor manors had he none, there nor in none other place’. He was a careful man who worked hard to make his living from the land. The single surviving document describing his life tells how he ‘went at one plough both winter and summer, and he rode to mill on the bare horseback with his corn under him, and brought home meal again under him’. After the harvest each year he drove his cart the fifteen miles or so down the coast to Winterton to sell his grain, ‘as a good husbandman ought to do’.1 Perhaps it was at Winterton market that he met a woman named Beatrice Goneld, whose family came from the neighbouring village of Somerton. Clement and Beatrice married, and in 1378 Beatrice gave birth to their only surviving child, a son named William. More than six hundred years later, there is little more that can be said about the lives of Clement and Beatrice Paston. Even the fact that these few details survive makes the couple unusual; most people of their time and class have left no trace in the written records which would allow even the sketchiest outline of their life stories to be drawn. One thing, however, can be concluded with some certainty: Clement and Beatrice were determined to do everything they could to give their son greater opportunities than they had ever had.
The figure of the self-made man from a poor background whose success founds a dynasty has become one of the iconic archetypes of modern fact and fiction, but the phenomenon is centuries old. Medieval English culture was deeply infused with the belief that the order of God’s creation manifested itself in a social and political hierarchy within which every man should know and keep his place, but behind this image of rigid social stratification lay a wealth of opportunities for those with ability and ambition, even if their origins were humble. This was true more than ever at the end of the fourteenth century. The Black Death, which struck England in 1348, killed nearly half the country’s population – perhaps three million people – in little more than eighteen months. Contemporary chroniclers, in shock, described how those left alive struggled to bury the corpses of the scores who died each day. The plague itself was no respecter of persons; it ‘seizes young and old alike, sparing no one, and reducing rich and poor to the same level’, King Edward III wrote after his fourteen-year-old daughter succumbed to the disease in the autumn of 1348.2 Even if their bodies remained unscathed, the aristocracy soon made the uncomfortable discovery that their purses might not escape the effects of mortality on such a horrifying scale. The sudden and overwhelming shortage of peasant labour gave those who survived an economic bargaining-power unimaginable in previous centuries. Only a year after the epidemic’s first outbreak, the government reacted by trying to fix the cost of labour at pre-plague levels – the imposition of a maximum rather than a minimum wage – but population loss was so immense that the economic tide could not be held back for long. Once the immediate crisis was over, those who were left in the towns and the countryside began to take advantage of the new opportunities for advancement which had opened up all around them. The futility of the government’s attempt to block social mobility altogether was already becoming apparent by 1363, when a statute was passed specifying detailed restrictions to the ‘outrageous and excessive apparel’ which many people were now affecting, ‘contrary to their estate and degree’.3
For those who were determined to improve their lot, there were few better places to be than Norfolk at the turn of the fifteenth century. It was one of the most prosperous counties in England, with rich soils to grow grain, and pastureland for the thousands of sheep on which the flourishing local wool and cloth industries depended. The flat East Anglian landscape offered easy transport by river and road, and ships laden with cloth and grain sailed from the ports of Yarmouth and Lynn to markets elsewhere in England, and to the continent via Calais, the Low Countries and the Baltic. The sea coast provided opportunities to make money in fishing as well as shipping, and sea water was used for the production of salt, a valuable commodity essential for preserving meat, fish, butter and cheese. The commercial centre of the shire was the city of Norwich, which suffered badly during the plague, but recovered so rapidly that during the fifteenth century it overtook York and Bristol to become the second-largest city in England after the capital, with more than 10,000 inhabitants. If there was plenty of money to be made, there was also enough flexibility in local society to accommodate those who made it. The Norfolk gentry were numerous, wealthy and independent-minded. While several great magnates had estates in the county, none had an interest large enough to guarantee a controlling stake in the social and political life of the region. As a result, successful merchants, tradesmen and professionals – clerics, lawyers or administrators – who aspired to convert their earnings into the status and influence conferred by landownership had a better chance of establishing themselves among the landed classes in Norfolk than in most other parts of the country.
If the young William Paston was to be one of them, he would first of all need an education. Clement scrimped, saved and borrowed to send his son to school, perhaps at Bromholm Priory, only a mile from Paston, or perhaps to a grammar school in Norwich. Such schools, often established on a very small scale, were springing up in increasing numbers in towns around the country; the boys who attended were taught to read and write and given instruction in Latin, the formal language of the Church and the law – two of the potential careers to which the acquisition of such skills gave an entrée. William chose the latter. In doing so, he was following in the footsteps of his maternal uncle Geoffrey Goneld, or Somerton as he now called himself, after his family’s home village. Geoffrey Somerton was a modestly successful attorney with no children of his own, and he helped his brother-in-law Clement with the cost of sending William to London to train as a lawyer.
The four great central law courts sat a mile and a half outside the City of London in the Great Hall of the royal palace of Westminster: the court of Common Pleas on the west side of the Hall, the Chancery and the court of King’s Bench on the dais at the south end, and the Exchequer in antechambers to the north. When all four were in session the vast space was filled with a hum of voices rising from the press of people to the magnificent hammer-beam roof forty feet above their heads. This was where William Paston came with his fellow students to sit in the ‘crib’, the place reserved for lawyers-in-training to observe the courts in action. Legal proceedings were conducted in English but recorded in Latin; until as recently as 1362 they had been conducted in French, the language of aristocratic society since the Conquest more than three hundred years earlier, although it was now being superseded by English in everyday use even among the highest social classes. William and the other students were expected to take notes on the cases they observed, and on the explanatory comments which the judges from time to time aimed in their direction. In the evenings, the students returned to their lodgings in one of the four Inns of Court – Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, and the Inner and Middle Temple – which lay between Westminster and the City. The Inns had first developed as a convenient form of accommodation in the capital for lawyers working away from home, but by the early fifteenth century they were also offering courses of instruction in the intervals between the legal terms, when the courts were not in session. Students attended ‘readings’ given by senior members of the Inn – seminars where statutes were discussed in detail, clause by clause – and took part in ‘moots’, mock-trials in which they themselves had the chance to argue cases before their peers and their teachers.
William was a clever young man who made the most of the opportunities which his parents and his uncle had worked so hard to give him. His choice of career was a shrewd one. The English legal system in the late Middle Ages was the most centralised and sophisticated in Europe, with a network of royal officials which reached into every corner of local society. However, while the power of the law was theoretically all-encompassing, the reality was somewhat different. The state had no police force or standing army at its disposal through which decisions taken in royal courts could be directly enforced. Even had such a force existed, its deployment would have presented insuperable problems: the difficulties of communication – at a time when it took three days by road for...
