On the next day the parliament assembled at Westminster, and a roll of parchment announcing Richard’s title to the throne was presented to the Lords and Commons. It was given unanimous consent by these various worthies from towns and shires, and on 26 June a large concourse proceeded with Buckingham to Gloucester’s mansion in London, Baynard’s Castle, where the roll was read out to him; he was then exhorted to take up the crown and, after a period of modest reflection, he decided so to do. He was therefore proclaimed as Richard III.
King Richard rode in state to Westminster Hall where he was seated in majesty upon the marble chair of King’s Bench; this was the seat in which the monarch reposed when he was dispensing justice. Richard had immediately taken on the role of the wise and just king. He delivered a speech to the Lords and Commons, in which he pleaded for fairness and equity in the proceedings of justice. No man was outside the law. All parties should be treated equally. This may be considered a reproof to Edward IV, whose family interests often led him to break or bend the law for immediate profit.
Some in fact welcomed the advent of Richard’s reign. He was known to be a good administrator, and a fine soldier. Surely his reign would prove superior to that of a fourteen-year-old boy under the thrall of his mother and his remaining Woodville relations? Edward V was king for eighty-eight days, a king for spring and early summer; he thus earns the unhappy distinction of enjoying the shortest reign of any English sovereign but in death his influence, as we shall see, was profound.
38
Come to town
In the fifteenth century England was still predominantly a rural society, with only a fifth of the population living in approximately 800 towns. Only one city, London, could be compared with the cities of the European continent; the other urban centres were essentially large towns, with populations well under 10,000. York and Norwich were the exceptions, with populations of 30,000 and 25,000 respectively. The more important of them, such as York and Chester, were walled; so were the port towns such as Southampton. At the other end of this demographic range, the majority of towns contained populations of hundreds rather than thousands. Many of these smaller towns were simply ringed with a ditch.
A Venetian traveller, at the end of the fifteenth century, noted that the country was ‘very thinly inhabited’ with ‘scarcely any towns of importance’. We may imagine a land with an uneven distribution of relatively small settlements, in utter contrast to the territories of the city-states in northern Italy. The small towns had not yet reached maturity; they were part of the great unconscious of England.
The most significant public buildings were constructed of stone; the churches were of stone, as were the bridges. But only the richest merchants built their houses of that material. The rest were constructed as before with timber or wattle-and-daub; the streets between them were narrow, dirty and malodorous, combining the less desirable aspects of the farm with the detritus of town life. Pigs and chickens roamed the streets and houses; there is a case from Girton in Cambridgeshire where, in 1353, a hen caused a fatal fire by scratching glowing ashes onto a child’s bed of straw. Cattle were kept in the gardens of some town houses, and the back gardens resembled the ‘strips’ of the common farmland producing fruit and vegetables. Orchards and streams lent for a moment the illusion of open country. In many towns you would never be very far from the sound of running water.
The clamour was great, rising in a crescendo on market day, but a few minutes’ walk would take the visitor into the relative silence of the fields or woods. The town gradually faded into the country, with dwellings and yards becoming fewer and fewer until pasture or field or wood became the landscape. The wind was fresher here, less contaminated by foul smells and the fear of infection, and the earth softer beneath the feet. Yet it would be ill-advised to create a picture of pastoral bliss; many trades were pursued in the cottages and hamlets of the countryside, among them clothmaking and leatherworking. Fewer clothmakers resided in the town than in the country, where labour was cheaper and less regulated.
