Religion

Across England, meanwhile, in thousands of parish churches the gentry advertised their own status and privilege through the building of elaborate tombs for their ancestors, and the establishment of chantry chapels to pray without cease that the souls of such ancestors might be released from purgatory into the eternal rejoicing of heaven. At least 900 such chantries were established in the fifty years to 1350, and a further 660 in the fifty years afterwards. Cheaper than the foundation of a monastery, chantries both emphasized the Church’s monopoly over the rituals and industry of death and helped to establish private spaces within what in theory was the most ‘public’ building of each village community, creating walled-off and physically segregated symbols of gentry or aristocratic privilege. Like today’s stretch limo or heavily built bodyguards, they served as very public advertisements of the desire and ability of the rich to use privacy as a means of achieving exclusivity.

Added to the sense that society was controlled by powerful interests not necessarily devoted to the common good, warfare itself had begun to warp the social fabric. New defences, thicker and more effective town walls, the rash of castles scattered across the landscape, the fact that from the 1280s the kings of England were no longer merely at war within or on the fringes of their own realm but carrying a campaign of outright conquest, first to Wales, then to Scotland and ultimately to France, all of this ensured that war became prolonged and a great deal costlier.

The effect here, above all after Edward I’s failure to subdue the Scots, was to instil viciousness and a mentality of revenge amongst the English political elite, whilst at the same time levelling the playing field between King and aristocracy. Where Henry II took a mere eighteen months to suppress rebellion in the 1170s, Edward II struggled for most of his twenty-year reign to establish his own authority over that of his earls. Where William the Conqueror had the resources to engage in near-permanent probing of the Norman frontier with Maine or Brittany, Edward III had to resort to extraordinary measures, and in particular to prolonged negotiations with Parliament and the wool merchants to finance his own far more extensive military operations in France. As a result of their obeisance to the cult of chivalry, itself an organized hypocrisy in which outward splendour and civility masked a reality that was violent and squalid, after 1340, like two rams in the same field, the kings of England and France were obliged, in the name of honour, to pursue aggression to the point of mutual exhaustion or death. At the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, according to the chronicler Geoffrey Baker, men

Chivalry itself was called into question, not merely because of the increasing costs or futility of war, but because new technology threatened to render knighthood itself an obsolete phenomenon.