Iron from the Weald in Kent and the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire was much in demand; other wooded areas, where timber was available to create the charcoal for smelting the ore, were fully exploited. In the Forest of Dean alone there were seventy-two forges. All Saints Church in the village of Newland, on the western edge of the forest, has a brass engraving of a miner. His leather breeches are tied below his knee, and he sports a wooden mine-hod over his shoulder in which to carry the iron ore; he holds a mattock or small pickaxe in his right hand, and between his teeth he carries a candle-holder or ‘Nellie’. He would, of course, work and dress as a small farmer when he was not mining. The silver mines of Cornwall and Devon, Dorset and Somerset, were expanded. It was said at the time that ‘the kingdom is of greater value under the land than it is above’. Productivity increased in the shipyards, the gunsmitheries and the bell foundries.
The reign of wool reached new heights during the rule of Henry VI and of his successor. The annual export of raw wool had declined a little from its peak in the fourteenth century but this was offset by a proportionate increase in the export of woollen cloth. Together they accounted for approximately 80 per cent of the country’s exports. English cloths were taken to the shores of the Black Sea, and were traded at the fair of Novgorod as well as the Rialto in Venice; they went to Denmark and to Prussia. The merchant adventurers, in control of the cloth trade, were exporting approximately 60,000 rolls of cloth each year by the end of the century.
It was a business that engaged a significant part of the nation; the wool was given to village women to comb and to spin before being sent to the weaver; to this day, an unmarried woman is known as a spinster. Once the wool had been woven into cloth it was given to the fuller for dyeing and then passed on to the shearman for finishing. The dominance of wool is the reason why the Lord Chancellor of England, until 2005, always sat upon a woolsack in the House of Lords. The towns that were involved in the cloth trade – notably Colchester – became larger and stronger. The fulling mills of the West Riding and the west of England turned ever faster. Broadcloth came from the Cotswolds and the Stroud Valley. As York and Coventry decayed, so villages like Lavenham in Suffolk with its famous ‘wool church’ thrived.
Wool raw and finished was indeed the motor of the fifteenthcentury English economy, and as a result more and more land was preserved for the breeding of sheep. This in turn led to the enclosing of land for that purpose. Villages were moved or even destroyed to make way for the sheep-runs; the cultivation of grain gave way to rearing. The shepherds lived in wheeled huts that followed the flocks. In the late fifteenth century one Warwickshire antiquary, John Rous, complained in his Historia Regum Angliae of ‘the modern destruction of villages which brings dearth to the commonwealth. The root of this evil is greed … As Christ wept over Jerusalem so do we weep over the destruction of our own times.’ In his own county there are more than a hundred deserted villages, the vast majority of them cleared in the fifteenth century. The rights of freeholders and copyholders were in principle protected, but those who had dwelled on the land by custom could be evicted with impunity. Much of the population moved a few miles, perhaps, and continued working the land. A few were not so fortunate. That rootless phenomenon known then as ‘the sturdy beggar’ is first mentioned in the 1470s.
All things move in restless combination. There is a law of contrast at work in human history, whereby one development provokes a counter-development. Many people suffered from the pace of economic change, but others benefited from it. The successful small farmer was now paying rent for his land as a tenant, rather than performing labour duties; the small freeholder, known as the yeoman, is also more in evidence. The class of villein or serf gave way to the labourer working for a wage. The feudal economy had to a large extent been succeeded by a money economy.
Yet the prosperity of England was by no means evenly shared, and it is important to bear in mind the unimaginable extremes of poverty beside the perceived affluence of certain county towns and regions. The fact that the contrasts of life were more violent, and the insecurity of existence more palpable, rendered the people more passionate and more excitable. Theirs was a life more intense, more sensitive, more arduous and more irritable than our own.
33
The divided realm
