campaign, was the only fight that ended in a general
massacre. There were, of course, many local feuds and riots
which led to the destruction of property; well-known instances
are the private war about Caister Castle between the duke of
Norfolk and the Pastons, and the “battle of Nibley Green,”
near Bristol, between the Berkeleys and the Talbots. But on
the whole there was no ruinous devastation of the land. Prosperity
seems to have revived early during the rule of York;
Warwick had cleared the seas of pirates, and both he and King
Edward were great patrons of commerce, though the earl’s
policy was to encourage trade with France, while his master
wished to knit up the old alliance with Flanders by adhering
Commercial development.
to the cause of Charles of Burgundy. Edward did
much in his later years to develop interchange of
commodities with the Baltic, making treaties with
the Hanseatic League which displeased the merchants
of London, because of the advantageous terms granted to the
foreigner. The east coast ports seem to have thriven under his
rule, but Bristol was not less prosperous. On the one side,
developing the great salt-fish trade, her vessels were encompassing
Iceland, and feeling their way towards the Banks of
the West; on the other they were beginning to feel their way
into the Mediterranean. The famous William Canynges, the
patriarch of Bristol merchants, possessed 2500 tons of shipping,
including some ships of 900 tons, and traded in every sea. Yet
we still find complaints that too much merchandize reached
and left England in foreign bottoms, and King Edward’s treaty
with the Hansa was censured mainly for this reason. Internal
commerce was evidently developing in a satisfactory style,
despite of the wars; in especial raw wool was going out of
England in less bulk than of old, because cloth woven at home
was becoming the staple export. The woollen manufactures
which had begun in the eastern counties in the 14th century
were now spreading all over the land, taking root especially in
Manufactures and wool trade.
Somersetshire, Yorkshire and some districts of the
Midlands. Coventry, the centre of a local woollen
and dyeing industry, was probably the inland town
which grew most rapidly during the 15th century.
Yet there was still a large export of wool to Flanders, and the
long pack-trains of the Cotswold flockmasters still wound
eastward to the sea for the benefit of the merchants of the staple
and the continental manufacturer.
As regards domestic agriculture, it has been often stated that the 15th century was the golden age of the English peasant, and that his prosperity was little affected either by the unhappy French wars of Henry VI. or by the Wars State of the rural population. of the Roses. There is certainly very little evidence of any general discontent among the rural population, such as had prevailed in the times of Edward III. or Richard II. Insurrections that passed as popular, like the risings of Jack Cade and Robin of Redesdale, produced manifestos that spoke of political grievances but hardly mentioned economic ones. There is a bare mention of the Statute of Labourers in Jack Cade’s ably drafted chapter of complaints. It would seem that the manorial grudges between landowner and peasant, which had been so fierce in the 14th century, had died down as the lords abandoned the old system of working their demesne by villein labour. They were now for the most part letting out the soil to tenant-farmers at a moderate rent, and the large class of yeomanry created by this movement seem to have been prosperous. The less popular device of turning old manorial arable land into sheep-runs was also known, but does not yet seem to have grown so common as to provoke the popular discontents which were to prevail under the Tudors. Probably such labour as was thrown out of work by this tendency was easily absorbed by the growing needs of the towns. Some murmurs are heard about “enclosures,” but they are incidental and not widely spread.
One of the best tests of the prosperity of England under the Yorkist rule seems to be the immense amount of building that was on hand. Despite the needs of civil war, it was not on castles that the builders’ energy was spent; the government Architecture. discouraged fortresses in private hands, and the dwellings of the new nobility of Edward IV. were rather splendid manor-houses, with some slight external protection of moat and gate-house, than old-fashioned castles. But the church-building of the time is enormous and magnificent. A very large proportion of the great Perpendicular churches of England date back to this age, and in the cathedrals also much work was going on.
Material prosperity does not imply spiritual development, and it must be confessed that from the intellectual and moral point of view 15th-century England presents an unpleasing picture. The Wycliffite movement, the one phenomenon which at the beginning of the century Religious condition of the country. seemed to give some promise of better things, had died down under persecution. It lingered on in a subterranean fashion among a small class in the universities and the minor clergy, and had some adherents among the townsfolk and even among the peasantry. But the Lollards were a feeble and helpless minority; they no longer produced writers, organizers or missionaries. They continued to be burnt, or more frequently to make forced recantations, under the Yorkist rule, though the list of trials is not a long one. Little can be gathered concerning them from chronicles or official records. We only know that they continued to exist, and occasionally produced a martyr. But the governing powers were not fanatics, bent on seeking out victims; the spirit of Henry V. and Archbishop Arundel was dead. The life of the church seems, indeed, to have been in a more stagnant and torpid condition in this age than at any other period of English history. The great prelates from Cardinal Beaufort down to Archbishops Bourchier and Rotherham, and Bishop John Russell—trusted supporters of the Yorkist dynasty—were mere politicians with nothing spiritual about them. Occasionally they appear in odious positions. Rotherham was the ready tool of Edward IV. in the judicial murder of Clarence. Russell became the obsequious chancellor of Richard III. Bourchier made himself responsible in 1483 for the taking of the little duke of York from his mother’s arms in order to place him in the power of his murderous uncle. It is difficult to find a single bishop in the whole period who was respected for his piety or virtue. The best of them were capable statesmen, the worst were mean time-servers. Few of the higher clergy were such patrons of learning as many prelates of earlier ages. William Grey of Ely and James Goldwell of Norwich did something for scholars, and there was one bishop in the period who came to sad grief through an intellectual activity which was rare among his contemporaries. This was the eccentric Reginald Pecock of Chichester, who, while setting himself to confute Lollard controversialists, lapsed into heresy by setting “reason” above “authority.” He taught that the organization and many of the dogmas of the medieval church should be justified by an appeal to private judgment and the moral law, rather than to the scriptures, the councils, or the fathers. For taking up this dangerous line of defence, and admitting his doubts about several received articles of faith, he was attacked by the Yorkist archbishop Bourchier in 1457, compelled to do penance, and shut up in a monastery for the rest of his life. He seems to have had no school of followers, and his doctrines died with him.
In nothing is the general stagnation of the church in the later 15th century shown better than by the gradual cessation of the monastic chronicles. The stream of narrative was still flowing strongly in 1400; by 1485 it has run dry, even St Albans, the mother of historians, produced The monasteries. no annalist after Whethamstede, whose story ceases early in the Wars of the Roses. The only monastic chronicler who went on writing for a few years after the extinction of the house of York was the “Croyland continuator.” For the last two-thirds of the century the various “London chronicles,” the work of laymen, are much more important than anything which was produced in the religious houses. The regular clergy indeed seem to have been sunk in intellectual torpor. Their numbers were falling off, their zeal was gone; there is little good to be said of them save that they were still in some cases endowing
