Social change

Nostalgia, a desire to return to a vanished Eden, a collapse in aristocratic self-confidence masked by ever greater demands for deference and ever greater emphasis upon aristocratic privilege, these are significant features of late medieval society to set against the impression that social change must always be equated with progress. The aristocrats of the fifteenth century no doubt seemed on occasion almost as futile to their contemporaries and dependents as they have tended to appear to modern historians. Nostalgia is perhaps the key emotion of the period. It can be found at all levels and in all social classes. In law, the Statute of Labourers or the Sumptuary laws of 1363 were attempts by the elite to legislate a return to former wages and to former modes of dress, allowing some but not all social classes to use family coats of arms, limiting the use of fur (itself one of the great industries of the forest) or silk to those who had traditionally been able to afford the cost of such materials.

Not since the early thirteenth century, when the regulation of clerical costume, the ban on priests wearing scarlet or excessively luxurious cloth, was a leading feature of episcopal legislation, had the fear been so clearly articulated that the lower orders were getting above themselves and that society was collapsing for lack of proper respect for rank: wastrels were rising whilst merchants were living like pedlars and lords as mere ‘lads’, as the English poem Winner and Waster chose to put it. The Scrope-Grosvenor case of 1380s, in which two leading families contended before the court of the King’s constable for the right to bear the same coat of arms, and in which evidence was given by such celebrities as John of Gaunt, Geoffrey Chaucer and Owen Glyn Dwr, is itself an indication of the degree to which badges and outward symbols of rank were now being policed, to prevent the contamination of aristocracy by the lower orders, or the blurring of social distinction.

The livery badges of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – Richard II’s white hart, a symbol apparently first adopted by his mother, the Lancastrian collar of ‘S’s, apparently adopted as early as the 1340s by Queen Philippa, John of Gaunt’s mother, and representing the forget-me-not or ‘souveyne vous de moi’, ‘remember me’ (an early and comparatively innocent use of the SS symbol) – can be interpreted as calls to obedience and order rather than as radical new departures. Nor was nostalgia confined to the political elite. In 1377, the peasants of southern England looked to Domesday Book and the eleventh-century customs of their manors as the origin of the ‘Great Rumour’ that villeinage was about to be abolished. The ‘Law of Winchester’ which Watt Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 sought to reinstitute was probably this same Domesday law, since Domesday was known alternatively as the ‘Book of Winchester’. Even the Lollards, for all their supposed radicalism, can be seen as deeply conservative, attempting to cut through the elaborations of late medieval religion towards a rediscovery of primitive, Biblical truths. Those who persecuted Lollardy via trial and inquisition themselves drew on memories of the twelfth-century Cathars and upon fears that England, in ancient times the home of the early-Christian heretic Pelagius, was about to return to its ancient British and heretical roots.