What Was Life As A Medieval Serf Really Like? | Life In Medieval Times | Chronicle

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] in the Middle Ages which cover approximately the period from the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066 to the end of the wars of the Roses in 1485 England moved from being an almost exclusively agricultural feudal society to a society on the threshold of creating an Empire [Music] medieval Society was based on the feudal system which can be said to have come of age in England under William the Conqueror he introduced the idea that all land was the property of the crown to dispose of as the king thought fit large tracts of Countryside were granted to the king's supporters who in return were bound to pay rent and offer their services when required this usually meant supplying a certain number of armed Knights In Time Of War the Lords would then rent their land to tenant Farmers under similar conditions these farmers were known as surfs or villains and their lives were overshadowed by extreme hardship a surf was effectively the property of the Lord for whom he worked he was not permitted to leave the land and go where he wished if he tried to he would be brought back and punished neither could he marry without the permission of the Lord which was also required should the surf wish to allow his son or daughter to marry on the death of this Earth an heir had to pay Attax to the Lord before he could continue to farm besides what was known as a Harriet often the best animal on the farm on top of the burden of working his own land to feed his family serve had to spend about three days each week working on the land of his Lord a service rendered in lieu of rent plowing sowing harvesting of course but also repairing the manor house building Barns and running errands to the local villages a very time-consuming and tiring business dues in the form of produce constantly flowed into the Lord's stores this system of bartering came about because of the lack of money in circulation the tasks of the surf could be extremely burdensome although they did vary from Mana to Mana as a surf you might be expected to to work on the Lord's land for just the Harvest time but you might also be expected to work perhaps three or four times a week and then perform extra labor services on the Lord's land work which was called Boon work but as a surf you were also required to perform other sorts of obligations for instance if you if you wanted to pasture your pigs on in the Lord's Woods well then you had to pay the law a certain kind of rent probably a Hog's head of wine or something like that for all he undertook the surf required the Lord's approval however as there were not enough people to work the land the Lord would be loathed to turn anyone off his demean and there were Customs preventing a man's land from being taken from him or his services and dues being too great a liability in that sense at least the serf had security of tenure and while the Lord was permitted to chastise he was not permitted to mutilate or kill his tenant any disputes that arose amongst the serfs themselves or any agricultural grievances were heard in the Manor Court the memorial Court essentially dealt with agricultural disputes disputes over land but it also dealt with the enforcement of the Lord's rights if for instance a surf had not paid his license to get married he would be punished by a fine in the memorial Court the court would be overseen by the Lord's bailiff or Steward who would gather the court together and the villagers themselves would also elect a Reeve to speak for them the defendant at the court would also be expected to to gain altogether oath helpers who would vouch for his for his honesty and his good name but the court didn't often deal with major criminal cases those tended tended to be dealt with by the Royal justices and indeed the Royal courts were places you could apply to get Justice done on major land disputes history hit is an award-winning streaming platform built by history fans for history fans enjoy our Rich library of documentaries covering key events and locations of the medieval period history hits medieval offering features leading historians such as Dan Jones Elena yanega and Cat German not only that but with a rich library of audio documentaries covering every period of History through our network of podcasts sign up now for a free trial and Chronicle fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code Chronicle at checkout the Judgment or Doom is pronounced by The Peasants taking account of local oral and written custom most people were serfs in the Early Middle Ages and although it was possible for a man to buy his freedom the expense involved and the unwillingness of the Lord to lose a laborer were often insurmountable barriers if they were required under a feudal custom to perform military service for the Lord or for the king and they found they didn't have the rights military equipment and they were not in any case trains for War what they could do was pay a a kind of tax called scootage which released them from actually performing military service themselves and scootage was also useful to the king because quite often the king would prefer to actually have money in order to raise an army pay mercenaries and have a properly trained Force rather than people who perhaps were not really military men early medieval England was a country of Village settlements scattered amongst the great swathes of forest that belonged to the king and which to quote Richard Fitz Nigel are the secret places of the Kings and their great Delight there away from the continuous business and incessant turmoil of the Court they can for a little time breathe in the grace of natural Liberty the great difficulty in understanding medieval Forest is that we simply don't mean the same thing by Forest as any medieval thinker or indeed any medieval person would to us the word Forest automatically suggests a wild Place trees lots of trees in the Middle Ages it simply meant an area which was surrounded by illegal Cordon within which a particular law applied there didn't have to be trees it was perfectly possible to settle in that area provided you paid the king for the privilege now this difference between legal forest and physical forest makes it very difficult to understand because the words just don't mean the same there is no doubt that Kings enjoyed their hunting we're told that William the first loved Stags as if they were his children and so those Stags were protected by a series of very very Savage laws within the designated legal Forest the Forest Law which was the king's law ran probably the most famous for his statute Infamous I should say is that of Richard the first of 1198 which demanded castration and blinding for the illicit hunting of deer and this has given for his law a very very Wicked reputation and generated a whole folklore on its own the hero is always the Robin Hood figure who subverts the Forest Law and kills the king's dear the villain is always the sheriff and this reputation I might say didn't stop with the lower classes this reputation for the king's Foresters at least 90 percent of the early medieval population were villages they farmed two sometimes three vast Open Fields which could cover hundreds of Acres the land was divided into strips each farmed by individual Serfs the strips tended by any one man were not necessarily side by side but for convenience all strips would be plowed in blocks sometimes called furlongs the lord of the village of course had his strips alongside each other in blocks distributed amongst those of the villagers these fields made up his demean one of the great Fields was left fallow each year the other planted with spring and Autumn sewn crops all work on the land required common action as few of the serfs earned enough money to be able to work alone everyone's crops had to mature and get the same attention at the same point as everyone else's The Oxen and plows might be supplied by different people combining their resources this was the only vile means of getting the work done haymaking and mowing likewise required the contribution of each member of the community after the Harvest the cattle geese and pigs of the whole Community would be allowed to roam freely about on the fields nonetheless there was little enough food to produce fat livestock before the animals needed to be killed and salted for the winter but even the pigs were filled up with acorns and beech nuts for most peasants life was lived on a knife edge and one bad Harvest could plunge them into the most wretched poverty and even starvation famine was not unusual and one chronicler said that the men ate all kinds of herbs even the bark of trees or devoured the meadow grass uncooked like oxen Small Wonder that poaching despite the forest laws was a widespread activity The Villages were small perhaps 100 or less inhabitants of which many lived and died without leaving the community the Lord owned the largest house although he may hardly ever have stayed there in his absence his Steward looked after his affairs the story of medieval agriculture is one of very profound contrasts of boom and bust and very painful Readjustment to changed circumstances we start with a period of Boom which extends certainly from 1100 and possibly before right through to 1300 over that time the population of England probably doubles may even have traveled the figures as far as we can calculate them are somewhere near 2 million up to five and a half or six million and we can see much of the evidence of this process today the Yorkshire Abbeys the Welsh Abbas show settlement probing higher and higher up river valleys into areas which had been Barren people are even beginning to talk in kinds of A Sort Of Agricultural Revolution on the pattern of what happened in the 18th century the windmill affected things quite profoundly horse harness was changing quicker markets better Communications new crops many of the components are there but of course there's a price to be paid the price shows in too many mouths to feed the may also have been changing weather patterns we don't know interestingly enough the 13th century is the last period before our own time when any significant quantity of wine has been produced in England the English kings of the Middle Ages did not stay at one Castle or Manor House only [Music] even if he did not spend a great deal of time abroad Like Richard the lionheart he moved from one of his Estates to another there may have been 14 or 1500 of them living from the produce Edward the first was known to have stayed at 75 in one year the Royal household accompanied him on these Journeys and the Entourage was vast consisting not only of family friends and their servants but of all the high officials and their servants Grooms Huntsman chamberlains Cooks launderers together with those servants belonging to the king Edward III had 500 nights with him his mother was said to have taken 60 ladies and damsels but the king apart from dictating the government of the country was also the highest court of law sometimes alone sometimes with his most important Nobles he dispensed Justice and Justice depended on whether the king himself was just and skilled in the laws of the land the sizes were essentially codifications of legal procedures they were laying down of what procedures you could go through in order to settle a certain dispute if you had a claim over over a plot of land their size is laid out the way you went about Prosecuting your claim and essentially they established that you applied for a certain kind of writ one that suited your case and then the rich would be returned to the sheriff who would be required to to gather together for law worthy nights who in turn would appear before the Royal justices and they would be required then to elect 12 other Knights to act as jurors and the jurors would settle the dispute but they came about really in the 12th century because the King was in the process of establishing his Royal Court as the main course of Justice to whom people should apply uh and innocent in in essence he was trying to compete with the memorial court and also the church courts and by providing a more efficient kind of Justice he would be able to satisfy the demand for for greater Justice [Music] life was precarious but not without its pleasures strolling minstrels could be found entertaining at castles or in The Villages for all festivities from weddings to Christmas and celebrations such as the Harvest Home Feast given by the Lord to Mark the end of the Harvest when everyone ate and drank as much and more than they should minstrels not only gave recitations of heroic epics Beowulf or the legends of Arthur for example they also sang juggled tumbled and danced in the towns the guilds organized plays that showed scenes from The Bible sometimes performed in churches sometimes on large wagons in the houses of the rich jesters and musicians could often be found in permanent employment the tournament was not only a sport albeit a highly dangerous one but also a means of making reputations and fortunes from the prizes offered King it provided an opportunity to train his Knights for battle the fatalities were frequent during these bouts which through lack of rules until 1267 developed into bloody melees as teams of nights swarmed over large areas armed with swords later the joust a combat between two knights only charging at one another with leveled glances became the norm [Music] I think one has to talk always about the night and the tournament and Arthurian Legend coming into being more or less together because as far as we can tell indeed they did what's a bit more subtle to understand is that King Arthur to a large extent is called into existence to control the forces represented by the knights now the development of the tournament seems to have started very soon after 1100 we don't hear of it as a serious force or a threat before that at all and it's connected in some way that we can't quite understand with the spread in the use of the Stirrup this gave the horsemen a firmer seat and of course made young Knights very very anxious to try out their mounts against each other and the tournament seems to begin a little bit like a sort of motorcyclist's convention today it was very unpopular the powers that be were very much against it even Kings because it just lies licensed rowdism we have a very amusing anecdote of 24 young Knights deciding to meet in various and Edmonds in 1193 and hold a tournament against the abbots ban they did they came and stayed in the Abbey they got drunk and the next morning they had to face excommunication as well as their hangovers the tournament in other words is a spontaneous bit of aggression by young males trying out their physical skills [Music] the majority of people in the Early Middle Ages had no education whatsoever and working life gave them no time to acquire one even if they desired it but there were ways in which a son could attain an elementary education with the permission of the Lord even a surf's son could be taught by the parish priest to read and write a little so that he could read in the church service and attend to minor Church work such as that of Sexton or doorkeeper it was then possible for him to rise to a better life as a priest Monastery schools were exclusively intended for those wanting to become monks then there were grammar schools which concentrated primarily on the teaching of Latin the universal language of religion and learning all over Europe together with some mathematics these two subjects originally made up the entire curriculum the history of Walnut Hill education I think is like the history of so much else in the Middle Ages it starts with a bang it's a spontaneous growth in some ways remarkably like the growth of Knighthood and to some extent the enthusiasm for education in the 12th and early 13th century exactly parallels the enthusiasm for fighting in a slightly more intellectual sector of society Oxford was certainly established as a studio generali a place where you could study All the known Sciences of the time by about 1200 Cambridge followed by 1209 a breakaway in fact from Oxford several other English cities Northampton Lincoln Salisbury all came fairly close to establishing seats of Higher Learning by the end of the 13th century figures like the great Franciscan scientist Roger Bacon have given English science and philosophy a reputation across the continent now where I think the educational experience of the middle age is parts company with so much else in medieval history is in the reaction to the Black Death there is no contraction rather the survivors seem to have got the idea that they had a better chance of getting on if they were qualified and education becomes less and less associated with promotion within the church and more and more associated with success in secular life and the whole thing is summed up very nicely in a parent's report one might say of the 1470s where Margaret paston says of one of her sons that she would rather have him a good secular man than a lewd priest it was becoming more and more common too for Lay children to be attached by the payment of the fee onto an ecclesiastical school and this of course creates the basic apparatus around which in later centuries the English boarding school would grow so it's not too much to say that some of the ground work of English education was established in the later 15th century for most children their education was more practical The Village child would be taught the crafts that their parents knew besides helping with the farmwork the sun would learn to thatch hedge Smith or do carpentry while the daughter who also helped on the farm would cook spin weave and learn how to preserve food by salting and drying they would also learn about herbs for curing illnesses but perhaps the best education for a boy was that given by a master to his Apprentice an apprenticeship of seven years to a stone Mason or Carpenter would open up a world of Greater freedom for a boy than he would ever have found on his father smallholding in the later Middle Ages from the 13th century on he would perhaps Join one of the craftsmen's guilds build essentially is a religious Association and its object is to provide for the interests of its members in this world and ease their passage into the next now one dimension of that function of course the protecting the interests of members in this world is very similar to that of a modern Trace Union and a great deal of the apparatus of the modern trades Union the procession the manner does indeed come from The Guild particularly the sense of solidarity and the sense of obligation that animate trades unions all that comes from the Guild on the other hand the guild never loses its religious Foundation that's why we have for example the Coventry guilds participating in the mystery plays the armorers always did the crucifixion of course because their trade equipped them to interpret that part of the gospel story so the great difference between a medieval Guild and a modern trades Union is that the medieval Guild Cuts up and down through society and it has to be remembered that many top people belonged to trade guilds the Trinity Guild in Coventry for example counted among its members not only the Earl of Warwick but the Dukes of Northumberland and Lancaster as well so by no means is the guild always necessarily biased towards a particular class in society craft guilds was simply a subdivision which was associated with a particular trade whether it was the grocery trade whether it was the tiling trade whether it was the masonry trade for the son of a lord the way was opened to become a knight the best way in fact to become a knight was obviously to be born the son of a night and once one achieved adolescence and a little bit beyond you could as a son of a knight go through various ceremonies particularly which would end usually in a tournament where perhaps there would be a mass nighting when lots of young men would be United at the same time there might also be a ritual going through a special bath there might also be a kind of religious element attached to the nighting of of the son of a knight but of course if one wasn't the son of a knight it was much more difficult to enter that exclusive status and one had to perhaps perform great Deeds of arms and be noticed by an aristocrat and therefore be knighted or one could serve in a noble household and gradually build up influence gain a bit more land through the land market become a sheriff justice of the peace and finally get knighted in that way the church was the main purveyor of Education in the Middle Ages and it is the monks who we have to thank for some of the finest medieval manuscripts time nor money or of consequence to them as they recorded their world on parchment or vellum but letters from Kings Bishops and Barons the Law Courts and tax rolls all tell us of the Affairs of the Middle Ages [Music] because of the austere conditions in which Lord and peasant lived glass for Windows was a luxury rarely seen except in churches everyone wore garments that would keep out the wind and the cold men of authority from the King downwards wore cloaks long and full reaching to the feet occasionally with short sleeves and under sleeves to the wrist if they were working or went hunting it wore a short cloak stretching to the knee and a gown beneath of the same length the Gown which in its varying materials of silk linen or wool was universally worn by monks royalty or Clarks was generally made in one piece belts girdles and shoes or boots were plain with the shoes and boots made of leather pointed at the toe and without heels [Music] peasants wore shorter clothes tied around the waist maybe with a Woolen cord but of roughly knee length this enabled them greater freedom of movement in their labors over their heads they often wore a hood by the 14th century dress became more elaborate closer fitting and with a greater variety of colors and fabrics in use the medieval towns would often be protected by Earth and ramparts ditches and Gates outside of which spread the fields and common pastures that belonged to the town's people the Burgesses the streets were dirty as people simply dumped their rubbish outside the houses I think what has to imagine great extremes great poverty and also great wealth you have to imagine the streets squalid perhaps with pigs dogs roaming the smell of dunghills cesspits the stench of the slaughterhouses the stink of rotting meat a putrid fish and very poor housing conditions the population increased so it became more usual for those men who were also Craftsmen to devote more and more time to their weaving baking or carpentry and pay for their farm work to be carried out by others gradually more and more people were loath to work as serfs and desired more freedoms the great Lords who often found themselves in dire need of funds to support their War efforts for example became happy to Grant charters of freedom for the Surfs in all aspects of life in return for money thus as the Middle Ages progressed many people in their towns began to prosper and grow the Middle Ages gave birth to two famous written works documents that Fascinate us still the first was Doomsday Book written in 1086 at the instigation of William the first it's a great deal easier to say what the Doomsday Book was not than to say what it was the difficulty is of course that it's not a survey and it's not a census and historians often treat it as both this makes it difficult I think the best way I can put it is to say it's something between a white paper on an international crisis and a tax return it has to be put in its circumstances in 1085 William the Conqueror was facing a very nasty International crisis with a threatened Danish Invasion backed by one of his sons he needed to know fast what sort of backup and support he could get so he sent his Commissioners through the counties which he controlled asking them who the tenants were what service they could expect and what the value of the lands they held was and more important perhaps what it had been 20 years earlier in the time of king Edward now the resulting document of course gives us a very impressive picture of English society above all a moving picture of English society we see English society not just in 1086 but in 1066 as well and we see what has changed between it's a tremendously useful document there is nothing else like it anywhere in Western Europe no other document so complete second was Magna Carta [Music] King John who reigned from 1199 until 1216. following the death of his brother Richard the lionheart was tyrannical and weak poop excommunicated him and the Barons United and decided to curb the king's powers they marched on London forcing the king to flee to Windsor the rebellious Nobles confronted him at last in a field known as Runnymede between stains and Windsor there he was forced to affix his seal to the great Charter in Latin the language in which it was written it was called Magna Carta some extent an attempt at crisis limitation John is forced to accept concessions throughout to Grant concessions they're extracted from his react with will not a voluntary Act and say the Magna Carta is an attempt to get back to the good old days attempt to limit the exploitation to establish a re an organized system Justice to establish the on a new organized system of feudal Arrangements to limit taxation and a number of very specific uh points which relate precisely to what John has been doing to the group The Clique of foreign mercenaries is built up around him so the foreigners are not to have particular offices they're to be kicked out of England in the end at the end of the charter an attempt to ensure that those concessions will be enforced the committee of 25 parents who is the king steps of out of line they will act and make sure he gets back into line they will do to John in some ways what he has been doing uh to his subjects [Music] the church was omnipresent in the lives of the medieval citizens the priest a very important person in the village he was a free man but also a farmer tending strips of land given in return for his church duties he also had the right to take one tenth of each man's produce each year besides fees for special services such as marriages and burials superstitions still existed however alongside Christian religion and witchcraft Superstition of the evil eye was a potent Force people began to worry more and more about the devil and eternal damnation on the social side of things the church clearly I think saw the research as just part of normal ran at the peasantry in that three-fold structure where the peasants are there to support the knights and support the church on top of them they're the ones who sent they simply foot the bills provide the uh labor and and and the cash in the long term um as far as serfdom itself goes uh there doesn't seem to be any worry about it's a element of Human Rights or beneath human dignity or anything like that and in some respects the church exploits itself just as much as anybody else did as much as the secular Lords did I mean the monks the Bishops the great religious houses all have cerse on their Estates to start off with and following the normal pattern of the laws they will gradually release a few at a time sometimes Hill Villages as economic pressures dictated where there does seem to be a slight difference is that the church if anything was perhaps more reluctant than the secular Lords to liberate the services time passed particularly in the late Middle Ages although you get regular dribbles and dribbles and Records where serves are being liberated manumated uh their freedom being sold to them and it's quite a nice case actually in the early 16th century where the ABS are Shrewsbury had sold somebody's freedom to them and then seized the document back and claimed they were again a surf just to get them back under the thumb so they were they were playing trying to play it always exploiting as much as they could art was not neglected in medieval life and here too the church was important being rich enough to employ artists or use the talents of the clergy themselves apart from the Glorious Stone and wood carving of the gothic style there were the illuminated books which were famous throughout Europe increasingly professional illuminators were employed to supplement the output from the monasteries wall paintings could be found in local churches and great houses either depicting biblical scenes or the portraits of nobility in the 14th century the stained glass windows also portrayed the likenesses of benefactors these windows developed into works of Rich Sumptuous coloring sculpture was also well represented not least in the shapes of the Effigies of the nobility Chaucer was the first great literary artist to raise the English language to the level already attained by contemporary French and Italian praised as the father of English poetry his works are rich marvelous tapestries of words storytelling Powers unequaled except by Shakespeare and Dickens [Music] from 1338 a hundred years war with France began over French resentment at England's rule in land in Southwest France and Edward III's claim to the French throne these wars brought the great Victory the emergence of the maid of Orleans Joan of Arc in the 12th and 13th centuries feudal horseman with a military Elite Knights wore more chain mail their armor became more elaborate and expensive with the result but many men decided to forego the honor of being a knight and paid scootic rather than be burdened with the cost of armor and the heavy horses required Freeman II were required to render military service and maintain equipment according to their status of course those fighting at the bottom of the scale were very lucky to have any equipment at all the army that got to Asian core was practically fighting in bare feet and shirts and right to the night before the battle King Henry was negotiating to get his troops out in what they were wearing properly equipped of course the Archer would be expected to have a padded jacket which will give him some protection but essentially he was expected to keep out of danger your man at Arms going beyond that would have a male shirt and possibly some protection some plate protection on the upper part of his body once you get to the heavy Horsemen of course by 1400 you've got very very sophisticated Armament indeed covering the man cap PA head to foot it's I think a misconception to say that this was necessarily heavy a heavy cavalryman was actually carrying rather Less in weight than a modern Marine it's also not true to say that it made him immobile he was expected to be able to fight on foot one of the great difficulties that the French army had at Agincourt of course was precisely that it tried to fight on foot and found that after advancing a mile and a half across a plowed field in an October downpour it was a little bit difficult to do any fighting because they had no energy left but there's one last point that I think needs to be made and that is that the extremely beautiful and sophisticated armor that we see in museums to this day tends to be tournament armor very very expensive specially produced generally to order in the workshops of Milan and probably not to be risked on the battlefield among the footmen the bow and the spear remained the principal weapons [Applause] prior to 1300 the bow had been short and Light at about that time the famous Longbow made its appearance with a great arranged and striking power the Warfare along the borders with Scotland necessitated the horsing of archers so that they could pursue the enemy and Dismount to engage in battle during the Hundred Years War with France English armies consisted of archers and men at Arms in equal numbers the effectiveness of the archers in breaking up defensive formations prior to Cavalry action was soon learned by English Commanders and ignored at Great cost as in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 from 1348 England was struck with a natural disaster the Black Death this was the Bubonic plague from Asia which swept away at least one quarter of the population of Europe on its way to England and claimed the lives of half of the English population which at that time was about four or five million in 1477 the population was still only 2 million two hundred thousand some areas of the country had been completely wiped out from 1348 until 1350 a plague ravaged the country once infected the victim began to shiver his temperature Rose and swellings appeared in the neck armpits and groin death often came to The Afflicted mercifully quickly they would be dead within 12 hours the disease spread rapidly from Dorset and was soon over the Border in Scotland when it finally died down towns and Villages were almost deserted with grass growing in the streets in the field crops rotted the first and most important consequence of the plague was that it kept on coming back this is perhaps the most serious matter 1348 and 49 is just the start it comes back again 1369 1375 on and on and on it's probable that the immediate loss of population amounted to about 40 percent we can control this to some degree from the records of closed institutions like monasteries presentations to religious benefices but that wasn't the end of it probably the trough in the loss of population wasn't reached until 1430 or 1440. so the loss goes on for two or three generations after the plague before there's any turn up at all now the immediate consequence of this of course is to create a labor shortage and people were aware of this from the very very earliest moment the most famous move against it of course is the statute of laborers which was passed in 1351 and was a conscious attempt by the government in Parliament to Peg wages of laborers and Artisans at the level of 1346. gradually men began to question the status quo men such as John Ball nicknamed The Mad priest of Kent or John Wycliffe born about 1330 who taught at Oxford University and influenced the translation of the Bible into English he spoke about the evil he saw in the church his followers went out to preach throughout the country the lollards as they became known by their detractors the churches and monasteries they claimed were too wealthy and the clergy should spend their riches in better ways than on luxurious living in 1381 when the wars in France were not going well and emptying the treasury Richard II's ministers decided to impose a poll or head tax on every citizen rich and poor over the age of 15. already burdened with heavy Taxation and insufficient wages which had caused riots strikes and other disturbances for years the people could stand no more and a Revolt broke out in Essex the tax commissioner who had come to ask for more contributions was set upon by The Peasants who stoned him out of town [Music] the Rebellion spread all over Essex and Kent with murder and beheadings written on the account of the rioters a man named what Tyler was appointed as their spokesman and Gathering support along the way and leaving a trail of violence behind them the insurgents marched off to seek redress for their grievances from the king in London the first meetings with the King are relatively decorous and show considerable respect for the king's person and this is most important of all they demand Royal Charters therefore admitting the government in its present form what happens after this meeting I think is that a number of the moderates a very large number of the moderates chiefly from Essex are satisfied with what they've got and go home the hard man at the hardcore are left to cut loose in the city and boy do they cut loose now sacking John of God's palace was just a little Rowdy perhaps there were plenty of other members of the nobility who'd have been happy to sack John of gaunt's Palace at any time lynching the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chancellor well this is a bit more dodgy this this is Bad Manners actually going off into the financial quarter and killing a lot of foreign visitors no no that's not acceptable at all that's downright bad for business those loyal to the king were summarily executed at the Block arson plunder and blackmail were Rife the next day a meeting was arranged at Smithfield Square where cattle markets were held Tyler was demanding not only the abandonment of feudal ties he wanted the Estates of the church confiscated and equal status for all men besides many other reforms when a disparaging remark was made about him Tyler drew his sword whereupon mayor Woolworth struck him in the neck with his Cutlass moments later one of the king's Squires ran him through twice with a sword Tyler managed to utter the word treason before he fell dead whether the murder of Tyler the lynching the destruction of Tyler however you call it whether that was plan and a put up job we don't know I strongly suspect it was either way there is no doubt at all that young Richard aged barely 13 at the time comes very very creditably out of the episode indeed even if he was primed to do so he kept his head and exploited his position by riding towards the peasants and saying I am your king in truly Splendid Style once the peasant's Revolt was over only the progress of time would free the surf from his yoke of feudal labor [Music] a series of famous medieval conflicts began in 1455. they found their way into the history books as the walls of the Roses and raged on and off for 30 years changing England forever there were three separate phases in these wars with a Hiatus between each the House of Lancaster its symbol a red rose in the house of York with its white rose engaged in battles for the sovereignty of England with savagery that even the Middle Ages had not seen in the 1440s and 1450s where you see the beginnings of the disputes it wasn't really a dynastic dispute as much as one about patronage and Power Richard the Duke of York was a frustrated courtier an aristocrat who failed to get the influence he really wanted at court and ran a series of campaigns against the established courtiers who were the favorites of Henry VI and indeed the first battle of the wars of the Roses the Battle of Saint Albans in 1455 Ended as soon as the Duke of Somerset who was one of the king's favorites was killed by the yorkist force and at the bottom I suppose it was about the failure of Henry VI to rule as a king properly that led to disputes between his courtiers and finally led to this dynastic dispute the victories went from one Army to the other from one end of the country to the other at the first battle of Saint Albans the yorkists won as they did in Stafford Northampton and herefordshire in Shropshire and Wakefield where a trick led to the slaughter of many yorkists and in the Second Battle of Saint Albans the lancastrians had the upper hand during the 1450s the main protagonist is Richard Duke of York who is constantly trying to assert his position at court gain influence over the king and finding himself totally thought it in his ambitions he is faced with a group of courtiers particularly Duke of Somerset who is determined to keep Richard Duke of York out of his position at court and although the Duke of Somerset is killed in 1455 Richard of York is still unable to gain position at court because Henry VI Queen Margaret bonshu is determined that that York should not have any kind of influence one of the most vicious battles resulted in the biggest bloodbath seen in England until the 17th century this was the engagement of Talton in Yorkshire at first it seemed the lancastrians had won the day a massed charge had driven the yorkists from the field but with the chaotic climax the melee of dismounted men at Arms wielding swords axes and maces the yorkists were at last Victorious Edward of York became King Edward IV but once Richard III had seized the throne the wars flared up again Henry Tudor a Welsh Prince last survivor of the House of Lancaster landed at Milford Haven in pembrokeshire engaged Richard in battle at Bosworth field and slew him with the death of the usurper Henry assumed the kingship as Henry VII and in marrying Elizabeth the daughter of the Duke of York Blended the two houses into one powerful new monarchy but the wars had brought about the end of the great English longbowmen no match for the new discovery gunpowder the great feudal Barons and Lords were now all but extinct leaving the king far more powerful than any of his subjects with the end of the Civil War the Middle Ages were also drawing to a close feudalism died out as more and more men gained their freedom trade abroad made men wealthy and as the population increased the English landscape was changed forever we may be forgiven for eulogizing on the Middle Ages imagining a merry England that didn't exist even Chaucer fell into the Trap of nostalgia [Music] [Music]

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 313,417

Keywords: history documentary, medieval history documentary, middle ages, medieval history, the middle ages

Id: xA6oJACrVpc

Length: 55min 25sec (3325 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 10 2023