0306B

It was usual for these men to merge, or 'engross', the former demesne lands with their own, creating new estates. The new landholding units differed sharply from the old in the manner of their specialisation. They were often used for pastoral husbandry in other words, arable cultivation was abandoned and the land primarily given over to grazing. The shift to animal husbandry is to be numbered among the most striking phenomena of the period. The background to it lay in a general improvement in diet. Whereas in earlier times the peasantry had eaten a mainly bread-based diet, in the 15th century they were consuming more meat: higher incomes led to a diversity of consumption patterns. Rural landowners responded to the change with alacrity. They chose to specialise in whatever was most profitable. Some went in for cattle grazing, others for sheep rearing, others again for the breeding of rabbits. But all were watchful of costs. Late medieval agriculture was run much more efficiently than its predecessor.
Alongside this agrarian revolution there occurred a minor industrial revolution. The late Middle Ages witnessed a spectacular revival of the cloth industry. Before the Black Death cloth-making had been based mainly in the towns of southern and eastern England - Winchester, Beverley, Lincoln, Northampton. Under pressure of foreign competition, the industry had gone into decline. However, in the late 14th century, aided by the high export tax on English wool which added to foreign competitors' costs, the industry recovered. But its geographical basis was very different. No longer was it based principally, in the old established towns; it flourished in the countryside. The main cloth-producing areas were to be found in the West Country - notably the Cotswolds and north Wiltshire, East Anglia and Yorkshire. The attractions of these areas were several: there was plenty of wool to be obtained locally; there were ports nearby for exporting the end-product; and labour was cheap because women and casual workers could be used. No similar industrial recovery occurred north of the Border. Wool was just as plentiful in Scotland as in England, but the domestic market was smaller and so there was less incentive to industrialise. The patterns of the English and Scottish economics were beginning to diverge.
In this story of change the year 1400 is of no particular significance: it represents merely a moment in an evolutionary process which began in the wake of the Black Death. But in terms of political and cultural history its significance is greater. 1400 represents something of a turning point. Only months beforehand, in 1399, a political revolution had taken place in England, with Richard II (r 1377-99) overthrown by his cousin Henry of Lancaster (r.1399-1413). The year also witnessed the deaths of some of the leading creative figures of the age: in August the distinguished architect Henry Yevele died, and in October the most celebrated poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. At the same time, events in the non-English parts of the British Isles were reaching crisis point. In Wales the escalating feud between Owain Glyndwr and Lord Grey of Ruthin culminated in a national uprising, while in Ireland the collapse of Richard ll's settlement fatally undermined English lordship.
Some of these events were of chiefly symbolic importance. Yevele's death admittedly removed from the scene one of the giants of English architecture: Yevele had been the designer of such supreme works as Westminster Hall and the nave of Canterbury Cathedral. But his death did not precipitate any change of style. The lean, economical style which he had popularised was to dominate English architecture for the next half century, and he left behind him some notable successors - men like Stephen Lote. In the early 15th century there was a shift in building activity from so-called 'great' churches - cathedrals and abbeys - to parish churches and colleges, but there was no revolution in architectural vocabulary.
The death of Chaucer was of greater significance. Even in his lifetime Chaucer had been recognised as a writer without peer, and both contemporaries and successors honoured him. His achievement was substantial: he gave the English vernacular new status. Hitherto courtly writing in England had chiefly been in French or, where appropriate, Latin. Chaucer brought English into the mainstream of contemporary French and Italian poetry. He 'Europeanised' English poetry by accommodating it to the broader Latin and vernacular traditions, and he fashioned the metrical form that was long to dominate English verse - the pentameter, which he used in both couplet and stanza. His two visits to Italy had introduced him to the work of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and he translated such key works as the Roman de la Rose and Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. Chaucer had a higher sense of the importance of poetry than any English poet before Spenser.
But the creative impulse in poetry which he had unleashed slowed after his death. The 15th century produced no Brahms to follow his Beethoven. The poets of the new age were a fairly lacklustre bunch. Thomas Hoccleve, author of The Regement of Princes (1411-12), was the most accomplished of them, and John Lydgate, a monk of Bury St Edmunds, the most prolific; in Scotland James I (r 1406-37), author of The Kingis Quair, stands out. But not until the time of Malory in the second half of the century was there again a writer of the first rank. In the 15th century writing in England became more inward-looking.
The introspection which the English showed was reinforced by the challenges to their ascendancy in Wales and Ireland. In English-ruled Ireland the position of the Dublin government had been precarious for almost a century. Richard ll's two expeditions in 1394 and 1399 had sought to arrest the decline, but in the wake of the King's fall the Dublin administration was left largely to fend for itself, and assistance from Westminster was slight. In Wales at the beginning of the century English authority was virtually eliminated. Glyndwr's rebellion which had begun as a local rising in Merioneth, swelled into a mighty bid for national independence. For many decades there had been growing resentment at the weight of seignorial burdens, but around 1400 this sentiment swelled into a more general hatred of England and the English. The rebellion coincided with the series of risings against Henry IV in England, and Glyndwr was able to capitalise on the latter's misfortunes to establish a broad ascendancy in Wales. In the end, his rebellion was crushed and English authority reimposed. In the new century, however, the political mood in Wales was healthier. The English learned to treat the Welsh with greater sensitivity, while the Welsh appreciated that they would have to cultivate their identity within the experience of conquest, not against it.
The final upheaval of these years - Richard ll's overthrow by Henry of Lancaster - is one that is more difficult to assess. For Shakespeare, writing in the 1590s, the usurpation was to be the cause of all England's later misfortunes. Shakespeare's history cycle tells the story of a realm afflicted. Henry's action in seizing the crown, according to Shakespeare, brought a fatal curse on his dynasty. In the short term, Henry's own reign was to be blighted, while fifty years later, in his grandson's time, the dynasty itself was toppled amid bloodshed and civil war.

Today, we tend to a less fatalistic interpretation of events. For a modern historian, the Lancastrians' downfall was caused not so much by dynastic curse as by Henry Vl's personal inadequacy. Nonetheless, political life in the 15th century was certainly bloody: Shakespeare was right there. In strife-ridden England no fewer than three kings met violent deaths, while in Scotland two did: one assassinated and the other killed in a rebellion. Yet, at least in the case of Scotland, appearances can deceive. Scottish political life had the advantage of an underlying stability which was lacking in England. In Scotland there was no prolonged civil war and no dynastic rivalry. Scottish kingship was successful because it was informal - much more informal than in England. Kings still itinerated round the realm, allowing their subjects to meet them. And government remained relatively decentralised: so communities could regulate themselves. These conditions made for a less competitive political society than in England. Small wonder that in 1603 James VI was to encounter such problems of adjustment when he succeeded to the throne of England. In political terms England, like the past, was a foreign country; they did things differently there. ENDS