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00:00.
00:13In the summer of 1348,
00:15the English could be forgiven for thinking themselves unconquerable.
00:21They had vanquished the old enemies, the Scots and the French.
00:28Their king, Edward III, seemed the most powerful ruler in Europe.
00:36But they would be conquered,
00:38and by a king against whom neither longbows nor warships offered any defence.
00:45King Death.
00:48His weapon was plague,
00:51and by the end of his terrible campaign,
00:53almost half the people of Britain would be dead.
00:59The country would survive the trauma,
01:02but first it had to undergo a purgatory of unimaginable misery,
01:07because hard on the heels of pestilence would come rebellion and civil war.
01:12The century of plague was a pilgrimage through pain,
01:15and this is the story of that journey.
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01:55Yersinia pestis, the germ of plague,
01:58came to Britain in the guts of infected fleas.
02:04They were hidden away in cargoes of grain, bales of cloth and in the fur of black rats.
02:12The most probable point of entry was Malcolm Regis near Weymouth.
02:18By the time it got to the great ports of Southampton and Bristol, there were already stories from
02:24traumatised cities of Italy as to how and where it had begun.
02:28In the east, on the plains of Central Asia, another of the horrors carried on the backs of the Mongol
02:35hordes.
02:38The plague cut a swathe of destruction eastwards to China and India and westwards into Crimea and Turkey.
02:46At the port of Cather, the Tartars had thrown infected bodies over the city walls to hasten the surrender at
02:54the defending Genoese,
02:56a first in the annals of biological warfare.
03:04Once it arrived by sea in Italy, it spread quickly into mainland Europe.
03:11There had been devastating calamities before visited on Britain.
03:17Countless numbers died in the apocalyptic famine of 1315.
03:24But it was the merciless, indiscriminate swiftness of the plague's progress which so unhinged the cities
03:31and villages caught in its onslaught.
03:34No-one, rich or poor, could escape.
03:40This is how the Welsh poet Ewan Gethin saw it, waiting for his own infection,
03:45which, sure enough, came in 1349.
03:50We see death coming into our midst like foul smoke.
03:55A plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy.
04:03Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit.
04:07It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion.
04:12Great is its seething like a burning cinder, a grievous thing of ashy colour.
04:19It is an ugly eruption that comes with unseemly haste.
04:24They are like a shower of peas, the early ornaments of black death.
04:36It would take about six days from the bite of an infected flea
04:40for the tell-tale swellings, the buboes,
04:43to appear on the victim's neck, groin or armpit,
04:47accompanied by violent fever and agonising pain.
04:52The immune system would be overwhelmed within a week.
04:57If the infection reached the lungs,
05:00death came after just a couple of days of bloody coughing.
05:04Anyone who inhaled even the tiniest droplets of mucus
05:08would be doomed to suffer in their turn.
05:17No-one would have known it at the time,
05:19but the tightly packed streets, alleys and houses of a place like Bristol
05:24made a perfect factory farm for the bacillus.
05:27Vermin, crawling with fleas,
05:30lived alongside the crowded population of people and animals.
05:38The nibble of a flea was a common irritation in this lousy, ant-heap world.
05:44And even when the buboes appeared,
05:47there was no reason to suppose that fleas or rats were responsible.
05:51But there was no doubt about what would happen next.
05:57The youngest and the oldest and the poorest,
06:00those with least resistance, would be taken first.
06:04But then everyone else, too.
06:07In a town this ripe for infection,
06:10almost half the population would have perished in the first year.
06:13Among them, 15 of Bristol's 52 city councillors.
06:18Their names struck through as they died.
06:26Terrified and bewildered,
06:28the healthy abandoned the sick to their fate.
06:35Whole towns, villages, even families,
06:38were cruelly divided into the living and the dying.
06:43Husbands would have shunned their wives.
06:46Fathers and mothers recoiled from contact with their children.
06:52It's almost impossible to imagine the utter desolation and terror.
06:58The complete collapse of everything you've taken for granted.
07:02How do you find bread now the bakers are all dead?
07:05How do you find a physic now that none of them work?
07:09And at last, how do you find someone to cut away the bodies
07:14that have to be disposed of somewhere?
07:30The bigger the city, the greater the shock.
07:35In 1348, London had a population of close to 100,000.
07:44In the first wave of the plague, 300 died every day.
07:57At Spitalfields, there had long been a medieval hospital
08:01with a cemetery attached.
08:03Within its walls, the dead were dutifully laid to rest
08:06in their individual graves, pointing east,
08:09so that, come the Day of Judgment,
08:11they would rise again, facing towards Jerusalem.
08:17But in the grip of the epidemic,
08:19there was no time for such careful pieties.
08:22Recent excavations have turned up mass pits,
08:25where the bodies were pitchforked into the dirt
08:27in obvious haste and desperation.
08:31Unearthed now, just the way they were dumped in,
08:34they look as if they're protesting at the indignity.
08:46By the summer of 1349,
08:49the plague had spread to the furthest corners
08:51of England, Wales and Scotland.
08:53Now, it travelled across the sea to Ireland.
08:57According to John Klynn, a Franciscan friar writing at Kilkenny,
09:0114,000 had perished in Dublin alone.
09:12Since the beginning of the world,
09:14it has been unheard of for so many people to die
09:18in such a short time.
09:22This pestilence was so contagious
09:25that those who touched the dead or the sick
09:28were immediately infected themselves.
09:32I, seeing these many ills,
09:36and that the whole world is encompassed by evil,
09:40waiting among the dead for death to come,
09:43have committed to writing what I truly have heard and examined.
09:48And I leave parchment for continuing this work
09:51if perchance any man survive,
09:53and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence
09:59and carry on the work which I have begun.
10:06At this point, another hand is written.
10:10Here, it seems, the author died.
10:14When the survivors recovered from the first brutal shock
10:18of the Black Death, they asked, inevitably,
10:22why us?
10:23Why now?
10:28The best guess was that the plague was caused
10:31by a corruption of the atmosphere, putrefaction,
10:34the mark of men and beasts rising from lakes, swamps and chasms.
10:41This dank smog even had a name,
10:44my asthma.
10:48If sickness grew in stench,
10:51then sweet smells were an obvious remedy.
10:54Physicians and herbalists lost no time
10:56in devising recipes for pomanders and potions
10:59to guard against infection,
11:02or even to act as an antidote for the stricken.
11:08Five cups of rue, if it be a man,
11:11and if it be a woman, leave out the rue.
11:15Five little blades of columbine,
11:18a great quantity of marigold flowers,
11:22an egg that is newly laid,
11:25and make a hole in one end and blow out all that is within,
11:29and lay it to the fire, and roast it till ground to powder,
11:34but do not burn it,
11:36and brew all these herbs with good ale,
11:39but do not strain them,
11:40and make the sick drink it for three evenings and mornings.
11:46If they hold it in their stomach,
11:49they shall have life.
11:58But if God decided otherwise,
12:00all the potions in the world would be of no avail.
12:04The inescapable conclusion was that the pestilence had been laid on mankind
12:09as a chastisement for its manifold sins.
12:17Lewd necklines, lascivious dancing,
12:20and shameless adultery had brought on the plague.
12:26It would end when the world was contrite,
12:29but it never seemed contrite enough.
12:33In the meantime, the country was laid waste.
12:39Farms were abandoned,
12:41whole villages deserted.
12:47The accounts for the Bishop of Winchester's lands at Farnham in Surrey
12:51tell the story of a rural society in shock.
12:55In the first year of the Black Death,
12:5752 households, a good third of the villagers, were wiped out,
13:02given the mark Defectus Per Pestilentem.
13:09The Farnham rolls put names to the numbers,
13:12names like Matilda Sticker.
13:14She died together with her entire family.
13:17Or a servant girl, Matilda Talvin,
13:20who saw her master and his entire household succumb to the plague.
13:25By the time it ebbed away in 1350,
13:281300 had died in Farnham.
13:32While the plague took, it could also give.
13:35In the first year of the Black Death,
13:37John Crudshate, who was a miner, became an orphan,
13:39but an orphan with assets,
13:41because he could now inherit the lots left to him by his father and another relative.
13:47This must have been the making of a small but serious village fortune.
13:53In another place in the rolls,
13:55we learned that the harvest had become twice as expensive to gather in,
13:5912 pence, written in Roman numerals, per acre,
14:04because, the rolls say, of the plague and the scarcity of labour.
14:09Workers, it seems, were thin on the ground and were beginning to charge accordingly.
14:22Farnham's story could be repeated all through Britain.
14:26The countryside after the Black Death was an irreversibly altered world.
14:32For one thing, there were no more serfs.
14:35For centuries, being a serf meant being tied by custom and by birth to your local lord.
14:42He gave you a tiny spot of land on which you could farm,
14:47and in return, you put in hours of grinding toil, unpaid, on his very big farm.
14:54There were other ways, too, in which you were not at all free.
14:58You had to ask his permission to marry, and you were not, repeat not, ever to leave.
15:03Until, that is, the Black Death.
15:06Now, there was a desperate labour shortage,
15:09and the simple operation of the laws of supply and demand
15:14meant that, for the first time, you could actually set the terms of the deal.
15:18He wanted some labour out of you.
15:20Well, then you could say, why not start by paying me something?
15:24He wants you to move into a piece of land which otherwise would go to rack and ruin.
15:29You respond by saying, okay, cut the rent.
15:33And if the lord then says, not a chance, you impertinent so-and-so,
15:37well, then you just up sticks and find someone else
15:40who's got a more secure grip on the new economic facts of life.
15:45Well, hundreds of thousands of peasants must have done just that,
15:49and there was nothing anybody could do about it.
15:57It was not just the social order that the plague shook loose.
16:02It also ate away at the sense of security offered by the church,
16:08especially since the regular clergy seemed powerless to provide help for the afflicted
16:13or even for themselves.
16:19In 1349, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, seeing that there was a serious shortage of priests,
16:26authorised laymen to hear the confession of the dying.
16:30Or, he wrote, even a woman if no man is available.
16:36The most daring took matters into their own hands,
16:40seeking redemption directly from the scriptures.
16:45The Lollards, or mumblers, took their name from their mouthing out loud of the Bible,
16:50and encouraged others to do the same by translating it into English,
16:56liberating it from the obscurity of Latin.
17:02As few as they were, the Lollards were a dramatic threat to the authority of the church.
17:07They were only saved from persecution by the protection of their most powerful patron,
17:13King Edward's third son, John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster.
17:18Men like him were drawn to new forms of piety and penance,
17:22because the plague had made them acutely aware that King Death was no respecter of rank or wealth.
17:30And that should he strike without warning, they had better be ready for a reckoning.
17:35They all knew of the cautionary tale of the three living and the three dead.
17:45A trio of handsome young kings, out for a decent day's sport,
17:51suddenly find themselves confronted by three not-so-handsome cadavers.
17:56Each in a different state of decomposition.
17:59The Marx Brothers, from hell.
18:03The three living pipe up, I am afraid.
18:07Lo what I see, and, methinks these devils be.
18:12Back come the other three.
18:15Such shall you be.
18:17I was welfare, and, for God's love, beware.
18:23The furthest gone of the gruesome threesome then makes a little speech.
18:28Know that I was head of my tribe.
18:32Princes, kings and nobles, royal and rich, rejoicing in wealth.
18:37But now I am so hideous and bare that even the worms disdain me.
18:50This was an invasion that Plantagenet England had not prepared for.
18:55The invasion of the space of the living by the dead.
19:00The sense that the borders between backyards and boneyards had collapsed
19:04produced a sudden nervousness.
19:06In the face of King Death,
19:08neither riches nor earthly fame could buy salvation or guarantee immortality.
19:20This insecurity found expression in a very peculiar kind of tomb.
19:25The transi, which means, appropriately enough, gone off.
19:31In transi tombs like this one at Canterbury Cathedral,
19:34you got remembered twice over.
19:37They were double-decker affairs.
19:40In the top deck, you were seen very much in the guise the world expected,
19:44as a knight in armour or a bishop in full episcopal rig.
19:50In the lower deck, though, they were a naked skeleton.
19:56The flesh fallen away from the bone.
20:19Now, the mindset that produced the transi tomb is a kind of reverse envy,
20:23a determination to fall behind the Joneses, to bow to no one in your painful awareness.
20:31That however grand you were, pretty soon you were going to be reduced to a heap of dust and maggots.
20:39The idea was to contrast, as shockingly as possible, two sorts of self-consciousness.
20:45On the one hand, the way we should like to be remembered, dying in splendour and piety.
20:51And on the other hand, the way we really are, pathetic in our cadaverous mortality.
21:05I was pauper born, reads the inscription on Archbishop Cicili's tomb.
21:11Then to primate raised.
21:13Now, I am cut down and served up for worms.
21:18Behold my grave.
21:26Only the highest office in the land seemed to have survived unscathed.
21:31Edward III, once the glamorous, invincible warrior, was now an ageing father to a fragile nation.
21:40Still, the royal succession seemed secure.
21:44Edward's son, the Black Prince, the heir to the throne, was already a legendary hero.
21:49But then, against all expectation, the picture changed.
21:54The Black Prince succumbed to dysentery in 1376,
21:58and a year later, the old king himself finally expired.
22:05And so the crown passed to Edward's grandson, Richard of Bordeaux.
22:10A boy king called upon before his time, Richard was ruler in name only.
22:17Everyone knew that his uncle, John of Gaunt, worked the real levers of power.
22:28Richard's coronation was orchestrated by John of Gaunt as a festival of loyalty,
22:33a statement of faith in the undimmed future of England's glory.
22:41There had been no coronation for half a century,
22:44but the mix of solemnity and festivity never failed to work its spell.
22:50Knights of the Shire rode in from all over England to witness the spectacle.
22:59The next day in the Abbey, little Richard had his shirt taken off him behind a golden screen,
23:05and his face, hands and chest touched with the holy oil.
23:12As they listened to him in his little boy's voice,
23:14and his face, promised to protect the church, do justice,
23:18and respect the laws and customs of his ancestors,
23:22the assembly of nobles and priests must have imagined him growing
23:26to fit the huge throne of his ferocious great-great-grandfather, Edward I.
23:34Inevitably, as the long ceremony droned on in the darkness,
23:38Richard fell asleep.
23:42As he was carried from the Abbey, his legs dangling,
23:46one of his oversized slippers fell off.
23:48But who could think that an ill omen?
23:50He was, after all, only ten.
23:57How was the child marked by all this?
24:0122 years later, did he remember this moment of anointing
24:05as a kind of apotheosis, a magical transformation
24:09from a little man into a little god?
24:14Perhaps it was just as well that Richard mistook himself for a messiah,
24:19since only someone with that kind of innate self-confidence
24:22could have faced down, at the tender age of 14,
24:26the most violent upheaval in the history of medieval England.
24:32It happened with astounding, terrifying swiftness,
24:36and it started in the kind of place you'd least expect it,
24:39not some destitute mud hole in the back of beyond,
24:42but in the most economically developed region of rural England,
24:46the belt of rich, fertile country,
24:49stretching from Kent over the Medway and Thames
24:52to Essex and southern East Anglia.
24:55The thing about the peasants' revolt is that the people who started it
24:59weren't really peasants at all.
25:01At any rate, they certainly weren't the straw-chewing,
25:04pitchfork-waving yokels of legend.
25:07No, they were people with something to lose, the village elite,
25:11men who'd served as constables and stewards and jurors,
25:15men who'd moved into those vacant lots
25:18that had been left behind by victims of the plague.
25:22They'd made a little money,
25:23and they weren't about to see it go down the drain
25:26in order to line the pockets of some lawyer and pen pusher in Westminster.
25:36What's more, they knew how to make an army
25:38out of those one rung down on the social ladder.
25:43Families just above the poverty line
25:45who had to sell their labour to make ends meet.
25:50They were already angry at government attempts
25:53to peg back their steadily rising wages to pre-plague levels.
25:57The balance had tipped in favour of the survivors,
26:01and they were determined to keep it that way.
26:06In their different ways, all these people were,
26:09or thought they were, up-and-comers.
26:11And they would fight, if necessary,
26:13to prevent themselves from sinking into the down-and-outers.
26:17Was this a class war, then?
26:20A phrase we're not supposed to use since the official burial of Marxism.
26:25Yes, it was.
26:29The suspicion amongst the men of village England
26:31was that the real power behind the throne,
26:34John of Gauntz, the Queen Mother and the Chancellor,
26:37were gathering in fresh taxes,
26:39not to finance a patriotic war in France,
26:42but to lavish on their own palaces
26:44and private estates.
26:47So when, in November, 1380,
26:50Parliament approved a new poll tax,
26:53one which for the first time took no account of individual wealth,
26:56the yeoman farmers must have imagined the awful prospect
27:00of all their hard-won gains being snatched back by a greedy government.
27:06There was outrage, bloody-minded fury and mass evasion,
27:11which quickly escalated into outright rebellion.
27:16Tax collectors and sheriff's men were attacked, a few killed.
27:24In Maidstone, they elected Wat Tyler, a yeoman craftsman,
27:29as their general and captain,
27:30and freed a Lollard anti-cleric called John Ball,
27:33who'd been imprisoned in the bishop's palace.
27:38John Ball is a recognisable type,
27:41a preaching friar who pushes Black Death radicalism
27:44to its logical extreme.
27:46Get rid of the priesthood and the property owners, Ball argued,
27:50and Christ's embrace of the poor will once again be honoured.
27:56Are we not descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve?
28:01And what reason can they give why they should be more masters than ourselves?
28:07They are clothed in velvet and rich ermine,
28:09while we are forced to wear poor clothing.
28:12They have wines and fine spices and fine bread,
28:16while we have only rye and the refuse of the straw,
28:19and when we drink, it must be water.
28:23We are called slaves,
28:24and if we do not perform our services, we're beaten.
28:28Let us go to the king and remonstrate with him.
28:32We may obtain a favourable answer,
28:35and if not,
28:37we must seek to amend our conditions ourselves.
28:45And so they marched,
28:47the levelling fever of the Black Death buzzing in their brains.
28:51Slogans of equality and retribution in their mouths.
28:55After all, who were what Tyler, John Ball and Robert Kaye of the Dartford Baker,
29:01but the three dead confronting the spoiled, rich and mighty
29:06with their day of judgement.
29:11On the morning of the 12th of June, 1381,
29:15an enormous army, at least 5,000, perhaps as many as 10,000 strong,
29:20was camped here on the fields of Blackheath,
29:23right on the edge of London.
29:25Below them, they could see the city.
29:28Old St Paul's, the bridges, crowded with shops,
29:31and Westminster beyond, all seemingly at their mercy.
29:40This was not a rabble.
29:42From the outset of the revolt,
29:44its targets had been selected carefully to make a point.
29:47Rich abbeys, estates belonging to tax collectors.
29:51Any document bearing the seal of the Exchequer
29:54was marked out for destruction.
29:57Manorial accounts were thrown on the fire.
29:59They knew what they were doing.
30:03Paradoxically, the rebels remained fervently loyal to the crown.
30:08Though they had made themselves outlaws,
30:10they were fired by the certainty that their cause was just.
30:14Surely it would be seen that they were not mobilised to threaten the king,
30:18but to rescue him, and through him, themselves.
30:26The discipline of the march, however, did not survive contact with the big city.
30:31Prisons were broken open, churches looted, palaces put to the torch.
30:38Thirty-five Flemish merchants were decapitated on the same block,
30:43one after the other.
30:48Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury, was captured
30:51while at his prayers in the Chapel of St John.
30:54The rampaging rebels hacked his head off,
30:57stuck it on a spike and paraded it triumphantly through the streets.
31:07On the evening of Thursday, 30th of June,
31:10the teenage king climbed one of the turrets in the tower,
31:14and what he saw ought to have broken him in terror.
31:20The sky red with flames,
31:23London crumbling into smoking ruins.
31:31But, hostage to a nightmare, Richard doesn't seem to have panicked.
31:36When the councillors asked him to negotiate with the rebels,
31:39he evidently showed no hesitation.
31:41It was the boy who was the man of the hour.
31:48It was a brave front,
31:50for Richard must have thought there was a good chance he might not survive.
31:54Before his meeting with the rebels,
31:56he prayed at the shrine of Edward the Confessor,
31:58the patron saint of all the Plantagenet kings.
32:03Then, he rode through the jostling crowds to meet Wat Tyler
32:07and the rest of the leaders at Smithfield.
32:16When he got to Smithfield, the king could see the rebels
32:19camped on the west side of the field
32:21and the royal party on the east.
32:23What Tyler rode over to Richard,
32:26got off his little horse,
32:28knelt very briefly, not very convincingly,
32:31but then shakes his hand and calls him brother.
32:35Why will you not go home?
32:37asked the king rather plaintively,
32:38to which Tyler responded with a loud curse
32:41and a set of demands.
32:44The most important was for our new Magna Carta,
32:47this time for the ordinary people.
32:49It would abolish serfdom,
32:51it would liquidate the property of the church,
32:53it would offer a general pardon to all outlaws,
32:56and if all this wasn't radical enough,
32:59it would make every man equal below the level of the king.
33:05Now, to all this,
33:07Richard answered yes,
33:09perhaps crossing his fingers behind his back,
33:11and maybe what Tyler was so amazed by the concession,
33:14he didn't quite know what to do next.
33:16So an eerie silence settles over everybody on the field,
33:22broken only by Tyler asking for a flagon of ale.
33:26He gets it, he downs it,
33:28he gets back onto his mount,
33:30a big man on a little horse.
33:33And at that moment, history changed.
33:40There was someone on the king's side who had not been reading the script,
33:45or perhaps was just unable to take the humiliation any longer.
33:51It was a young esquire, someone Richard's own age,
33:54who shouted at Tyler that he was a thief.
33:58It broke the strange spell.
34:02Walworth, the mayor, who had always taken a hard line,
34:06tried to arrest Tyler.
34:11There was horseback fighting,
34:13Walworth getting in the decisive blow,
34:17cutting Tyler through the shoulder and neck.
34:22As soon as he was down,
34:24the king's men surrounded him,
34:26finishing him off,
34:27but making sure the rebel camp could not see what was going on.
34:36One way or another, this was the moment of truth.
34:40It was also the moment when Richard himself acted,
34:43decisively and with amazing courage.
34:46He rode straight at the rebels, shouting famously,
34:51you shall have no captain but me.
34:56The words were brilliantly chosen,
34:58and were, of course, deliberately ambiguous.
35:02To the rebels, it seemed that Richard himself was now their leader,
35:06just as they'd always wanted.
35:08But the words could just as easily have been meant
35:10as the first reassertion of royal authority.
35:15Either way, it diffused the immediate crisis
35:18and gave Mayor Walworth the opportunity to get back to London
35:23and mobilise armed men.
35:26Now the process of breaking up the leaderless rebellion could begin,
35:31cautiously at first with offers of pardons and mercy,
35:34but then with implacable resolution.
35:37Just a week after the apparent concessions at Smithfield,
35:41another group of rebels met with Richard at Waltham in Essex.
35:45But they found a very different king.
35:52You wretches, detestable on land and sea.
35:56You who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live.
36:00Give this message to your colleagues.
36:03Rustics you were, and rustics you are still.
36:07You will remain in bondage not as before, but incomparably harsher.
36:11For as long as we live, we will strive to suppress you,
36:15and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity.
36:20However, we will spare your lives if you remain faithful.
36:25Choose now which course you want to follow.
36:30The rebels took the only option that was realistically open to them.
36:34They fell to their knees.
36:36It was all over.
36:38The king was literally the only one left standing.
36:42But what was the effect of all this on Richard?
36:47What did he now think he was capable of?
36:50My master, God Omnipotent, is mustering in his clouds on our behalf armies of pestilence.
36:59And they shall strike your children, yet unborn and unbegot,
37:03that lift your vassal hands against my head and threat the glory of my precious crown.
37:12Though Shakespeare starts his tragedy many years after the Peasants' Revolt,
37:17it's hard not to believe that in his portrait of a petulant, self-admiring Richard II,
37:23there is the sense of someone trapped in an adolescent fantasy of indestructibility.
37:30There's no denying that, especially at times of crisis, he was subject to unpredictable mood swings,
37:37between adrenaline rush feelings of omnipotence and abject fatalism.
37:43But it is easy to exaggerate his unfitness to rule, as though he was somehow suspiciously unsound.
37:55He was built the usual Plantagenet way, six foot tall, with long flowing blonde hair.
38:01But unlike his grandfather, he failed to keep mistresses,
38:05and seemed, oddly enough, to want to be faithful to his wife, Anne.
38:11Real Plantagenets tore at their meat and slurped the drippings.
38:15Richard not only insisted on using a spoon, but inflicted it on the rest of the court.
38:20Real Plantagenets brought you blood-soaked victories over the ancestral enemies in France and Scotland.
38:27Richard brought England the pocket handkerchief.
38:32Real Plantagenets built fortresses.
38:35Richard, instead, wanted a great ceremonial space in Westminster Hall,
38:40with a spectacular hammer-beam roof.
38:45The rows of angels symbolised the king's divine right to rule.
38:57The angels, in turn, are supported by carved stone plinths bearing Richard's own emblem,
39:04the White Heart.
39:06But the alien strangeness attributed to Richard seems a lot less strange,
39:12if you think of him as a Renaissance prince,
39:15for whom the idea of a civilised life was not necessarily a mark of being un-English.
39:22The Wilton Diptych is the clearest illustration of his exalted vision of kingship.
39:30Richard instinctively felt he belonged in the company of saints.
39:35So here he is with three of them.
39:39John the Baptist, Ebba the Confessor, and the Saxon Martyr King, Edmund.
39:50The other panel reveals him to be in the even more exalted company of angels,
39:55the Christ child, and the Virgin.
40:00He is her appointed lieutenant.
40:03She is receiving his kingdom as her dowry,
40:07and in return will bestow on it her special protection and favour.
40:15Ceremonial style was not, the king decided, just an affectation,
40:19of the kingdom, the window dressing of power.
40:21It was at the heart of its mystery, its capacity to make men obey.
40:29This is what Richard had in mind when, for the first time in the history
40:32of the British monarchies, the king let it be known
40:35he should like to be addressed as majesty and highness,
40:40a kind of mystical elevation.
40:46But what seemed like refinement to Richard, to the barons,
40:50was evidence that the king had lost touch with their common interests.
41:00Richard's refusal to continue the war with France
41:03was an obvious source of irritation for the nobility.
41:06They had positively prospered from foreign campaigns
41:10and built spectacular castles, like this one at Bodium,
41:13to guard against a French invasion.
41:17But it was the king's high-handedness
41:19that finally stung them into action.
41:23By issuing royal decrees, Richard could bypass Parliament,
41:27and he went out of his way to lavish favours
41:29on his closest friends and advisers,
41:32men like Sir Simon Burley and Robert de Vere,
41:35who was absurdly promoted to be Duke of Ireland.
41:39The lords retaliated with their only available weapon, Parliament.
41:44In February 1388, five of the king's favourites
41:48were charged with abusing his youth and innocence
41:51to promote their own ambitions.
41:54All were found guilty of treason
41:56by what became known as the Merciless Parliament.
42:00Robert de Vere, the most hated of the king's confidence,
42:04escaped before sentence of execution could be carried out,
42:07but Simon Burley was not so lucky.
42:12Richard's queen pleaded on her knees for Burley's life,
42:16but to no avail.
42:21Richard may have crushed the Peasants' Revolt,
42:23but peers of the realm were another matter.
42:27Chastened by the humiliation,
42:29the king withdrew into autocratic solitude.
42:32And yet, he had enough of the Plantagenet about him
42:36to harbour desires for retribution.
42:39He held his peace for nearly ten years,
42:42but when his beloved Queen Anne died of plague,
42:45Richard lost his only restraining influence,
42:47and he reasserted himself in an extraordinary storm of revenge.
42:56Using the pretext of an aristocratic plot,
42:59he brutally disposed of the ringleaders of the Merciless Parliament
43:03a decade earlier.
43:06The Earl of Arundel was executed,
43:10the Earl of Warwick was exiled,
43:12and the Duke of Gloucester, Richard's own uncle,
43:15was murdered, smothered in his bed on the king's orders.
43:21The old scores had been settled at last.
43:26Well, you would think, wouldn't you,
43:28that Richard could manage to contain his sense of triumph,
43:32if only in the interest of self-preservation.
43:35But now that Richard II discovered
43:37that people were, for the first time, frightened of him,
43:41he also discovered he rather liked it.
43:43He drank it in and lashed out at anybody he thought was disloyal to him,
43:50replacing them with yes-men and toadies,
43:53eating, sleeping and travelling surrounded by a private army
43:57as if he was some sort of Roman emperor.
44:01Beneath these delusions of omnipotence, though,
44:04Richard remained neurotically insecure.
44:08On the merest suspicion of treason,
44:11he rashly condemned John of Gaunt's son, Henry Bolingbroke,
44:14to ten years in exile,
44:16without even the pretense of a show trial.
44:20If such summary justice made the English nobility uneasy,
44:24what happened next left them stunned.
44:28When John of Gaunt finally died,
44:31Richard decided to increase Bolingbroke's sentence
44:33to banishment for life
44:35and seized the young duke's inheritance,
44:38the valuable Lancastrian estates,
44:40in the name of the crown.
44:44The magnates of England must have looked at this and said,
44:49he's got to be stopped or it's my turn next.
44:55Richard was one blunder away from disaster.
44:58The final, fatal distraction was Ireland.
45:04He'd decided to bring the Irish princes to heel,
45:07but he took with him just enough soldiers
45:10to leave himself defenceless at home
45:12and not enough to cow the Irish nobles.
45:17And before he could finish his business there,
45:20he heard news that Henry Bolingbroke
45:22had landed with an army on the Yorkshire coast
45:25and the alienated English lords had flocked to Hispana.
45:31By the time Richard returned,
45:33Bolingbroke was already in command of the southern and eastern heartland of England.
45:40The odd thing is that Richard actually seemed to be one step ahead of his enemies
45:44in fatalistic pessimism.
45:47So that when he got the bad news that many of his most trusted supporters and allies
45:53had switched to the other side,
45:55his reaction was not to dig in his heels, make a stand, make a fight of it,
46:00but rather to flee at night across the country disguised as a priest,
46:05bewailing his misfortunes and, as usual, blaming them on everybody else.
46:10At some point in his uncontested march towards Richard,
46:15Bolingbroke's aims changed from simply getting his lands back to overthrowing the king.
46:21Now I can see my end, Shakespeare has Richard say,
46:26a neat little piece of Lancastrian propaganda
46:29which solved the embarrassing problem of a deposition
46:33by making Richard seem as though he had resigned the crown
46:37rather than having it snatched from his desperate grip.
46:45In fact, it took a month of painful negotiations
46:49to get Richard, now a prisoner in the tower, to give up the throne.
46:53Three times they asked him to surrender, three times he refused,
46:58before finally bowing to the inevitable.
47:03On the 30th of September,
47:05a report of the king's renunciation was read to Parliament,
47:09gathered under the angels of Richard's magnificent roof.
47:13The lords were asked to acclaim Henry Bolingbroke,
47:16Earl of Hereford, Duke of Lancaster, as King Henry IV,
47:19which they did to cries of yes, yes, yes.
47:35Richard, the divine prince no longer,
47:39was spirited away and imprisoned in Pontefract Castle.
47:43Most likely he was starved to death, a horrible way to end,
47:47but one which ensured there'd be no compromising marks
47:50of assault on his body when it was given a public burial.
47:55Now, oddly enough, it was Henry who orchestrated this big funeral,
47:59a pre-emptive strike against any conspirators out there
48:03who might imagine that Richard could be rescued
48:06and restored to the throne.
48:10It was Bolingbroke's son, Henry V,
48:13who had the body of King Richard buried in Westminster Abbey.
48:18Perhaps Henry wanted to put the charge of murder,
48:21as well as its victim, to rest.
48:24He must have hoped somehow that in his reign
48:26the wounds of the contending parties might be healed.
48:31But it was not to be.
48:35Despite his famous victory at Agincourt,
48:38Henry V remains a might-have-been,
48:40dead at 35 from dysentery.
48:43So neither he nor his son, Henry VI,
48:46could prevent what the stealing of Richard's crown
48:49had made inevitable, a long and bloody war
48:52between the competing wings of the Plantagenet family.
48:57For 30 years, the houses of York and Lancaster
49:01slogged it out in a roll call of battles
49:03we know as the Wars of the Roses.
49:11There are only two ways to feel about the Wars of the Roses.
49:15Either the endless chronicle of violent seizures of the crown
49:18makes you thrilled to one of the great English epics,
49:21or else it leaves you feeling slightly numbed.
49:27If you're in the dazed and confused camp,
49:29the temptation, of course, is to write off the whole sorry mess
49:33as the bloody bickering of overgrown schoolboys
49:36whacking each other senseless
49:37on the fields of Towton, Barnet and Bosworth.
49:44But there was something at stake in all the mayhem,
49:47and that was the sense of needing to make the English monarchy credible again,
49:52to re-solder the chains of allegiance
49:54which had once stretched all the way from Westminster
49:57out to the constables and justices in the shires,
50:01and which had been so badly broken by the fate of Richard II.
50:09To understand the way in which lawlessness, violence and chaos
50:13did make an impact on the not-so-rosy world of 15th century England,
50:17we have something incomparably richer
50:20than a list of battlefields and barons, kings and kingmakers.
50:26We have in the letters of the Paston family of Norfolk
50:29the very first private correspondence in English,
50:32the authentic voice of middling folk,
50:35farmers, lawyers, would-be gentry, social climbers.
50:40Like many an anxious wife and mother,
50:43the Wars of the Roses worried Margaret Paston
50:45because they were making England a bad place to make and keep a little fortune.
50:52God for his mercy give grace,
50:55for I never heard say of so much robbery and manslaughter in this country as is now.
51:00And as for gathering of money, I never saw a worse season.
51:07Seen through Margaret's eyes,
51:09the Kingdom of England might be up for grabs,
51:11but the real disaster was shopping.
51:15As for cloth for my gown,
51:17I pray you that ye will vouchsafe to do by for me
51:20three yards and a quarter of such as it pleaseth you that I should have.
51:24For in good faith I have done all the draper shops in this town
51:27and here is right fable choice.
51:30The founder of the Pastum dynasty was Clement.
51:35Clement's described as a plain husbandman,
51:38which is to say a peasant,
51:40but a peasant who took advantage of the Black Death
51:43to scramble right up the social ladder of the village.
51:47Clement Pastum was shrewd enough to send his son William to law school,
51:53clever enough, that is, to understand that it was going to be through learning,
51:58as much as through land,
52:00that the fortunes of the Pastums would be utterly transformed.
52:06Clement's son did indeed become a lawyer and married into money.
52:10So did his grandson John, who acquired Cayster Castle,
52:15completing the meteoric rise of the Pastums,
52:18from peasantry to landed gentry in just two generations.
52:25John Janney informed me, and I verily learned since,
52:29you're to be made a knight of this carnation,
52:32considering the comfortable tidings aforesaid,
52:35to attain the necessary gear be perveyed for.
52:39But nothing's ever this easy, is it?
52:42As the Pastums became influential and rich,
52:46so they also were bound to attract enemies.
52:49As long as they were obscure nobodies,
52:52the great bloody tides of the Wars of the Roses
52:55were going to happen somewhere else.
52:57But now that they became owners of lands and manors and castles,
53:01they also became prime targets for the heavies,
53:04and no-one was heavier than the Duke of Norfolk.
53:08He'd always coveted Cayster Castle,
53:10and now in September 1469 he came to get it.
53:15Margaret wrote in some anguish to her son,
53:19I greet you well, letting you know that your brother
53:22and his fellowship stand in great jeopardy at Cayster.
53:27Which was clearly desperate, but she was also extremely angry,
53:31and a few lines later she lets her son, John,
53:36feel the rough edge of her tongue, which is extremely rough indeed.
53:41Every man in this country marvels that you suffer them to be for so long in great jeopardy.
53:47They be like to lose both their lives and the place.
53:51The greatest rebuke to you that ever came to any gentleman.
53:57John immediately writes back.
54:00Mother, if I had need to be woken up by a letter at this time,
54:04I would indeed be a sluggish fellow.
54:06I have heard ten times worse tidings since the siege began
54:10than any letter that ye wrote me.
54:13But I assure you that those within have no worse rest than I have,
54:18nor fear more danger.
54:25Faced with the might of the Duke of Norfolk's army,
54:28the Pastons had no choice but to surrender their castle.
54:33But once again they would have the law to thank
54:35for the transformation of their fortunes.
54:39It took a seven-year legal battle and an appeal to the king,
54:43but they were eventually rightfully reinstated at Cayster,
54:47although for the eldest of Margaret's brood the triumph was short-lived.
54:53Three years later, John Paston died of the plague.
55:00The Pastons had got over all these bumps in the road
55:04to become a settled presence in their county.
55:07And that would be true for countless other Englishmen and women just like them.
55:12Essentially, they were survivors.
55:14They'd survived the plague, they'd survived dethronement,
55:18they'd survived civil war.
55:20Kings came and went, but the men of the village,
55:23the same sort of men who'd marched on London in 1381,
55:26who'd been revolutionaries and desperados,
55:30were now on their way to becoming squires of the village.
55:33People like this knew what the worst could be.
55:36They knew that the plague could come and carry off babies and children.
55:40They knew that the knights from over the hill might go on a rampage,
55:43but they also knew that with an equal measure of prudence and prayer,
55:48they would get through it.
55:56So come to an English village like this,
55:59far from the mayhem, say around 1480,
56:02and you'd see what you'd expect.
56:04A church built in the economic elegance of the perpendicular style.
56:10For the first time, a village ale house with a name like the swan or the frog.
56:16And at the heart, a grand and handsome dwelling for the biggest tenant farmer in the area.
56:22No longer just a wattle and daubed, single-room glorified hut,
56:26but a miniature manor with its own hall and servants to wait on the master and mistress.
56:33A buttery, a cellar and private retiring chambers.
56:42One shouldn't be too complacent about the condition of Britain at the end of its first century of plague.
56:49The end of the road through trauma was not all buttercups and beer.
56:54There was still grinding poverty alongside plenty.
56:58But all the same, the improbable had happened.
57:01Out of the fires of pestilence and bloodshed had emerged that most unlikely example of survivor,
57:10the English country gent.
57:12.
57:14.
57:28.