- 2 days ago
Historian Michael Wood covers the catastrophic 14th century here, including the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt. Michael tracks the plague's spread across Britain and looks at how society changed in the aftermath, including the rise of a new class of workers and the battle for workers rights. Finally Michael crawls down a Tudor sewer for some really hands-on history.
本集概览：
• 核心主题：灾难深重的14世纪，重点聚焦“黑死病”与“农民起义”。
• 黑死病：迈克尔·伍德（Michael Wood）通过地方文献记录，追溯了这场瘟疫在不列颠各地的蔓延轨迹——从萨福克郡的小科纳德（Little Cornard）和威尔士边境的阿伯加文尼（Abergavenny），一直到苏格兰的圣安德鲁斯（St Andrews）和都柏林。
• 劳动模式的转变：由于半数以上人口丧生，瘟疫过后的经济状况迫使社会结构发生剧变。本集重点介绍了女性开始积极投身劳动力市场，担任酿酒师和店主；此外，在朗梅尔福德（Long Melford）的一次考古试掘中，还发现了一个新兴的纺织工人群体。
• 农民起义：本集回顾了底层民众为争取劳动者权益而进行的抗争。尽管起义最终遭到镇压，但它却是一个重要的转折点：在此后的一个世纪里，越来越多的农民跻身于新兴的中产阶级行列。
• 中世纪的日常生活：节目展示了来自诺福克郡（Norfolk）某村庄的一批独特的中世纪书信，呈现了当时女性对于爱情与婚姻的视角；同时，节目还探讨了15世纪拉文纳姆（Lavenham）所蕴含的早期现代贸易根源。
本集概览：
• 核心主题：灾难深重的14世纪，重点聚焦“黑死病”与“农民起义”。
• 黑死病：迈克尔·伍德（Michael Wood）通过地方文献记录，追溯了这场瘟疫在不列颠各地的蔓延轨迹——从萨福克郡的小科纳德（Little Cornard）和威尔士边境的阿伯加文尼（Abergavenny），一直到苏格兰的圣安德鲁斯（St Andrews）和都柏林。
• 劳动模式的转变：由于半数以上人口丧生，瘟疫过后的经济状况迫使社会结构发生剧变。本集重点介绍了女性开始积极投身劳动力市场，担任酿酒师和店主；此外，在朗梅尔福德（Long Melford）的一次考古试掘中，还发现了一个新兴的纺织工人群体。
• 农民起义：本集回顾了底层民众为争取劳动者权益而进行的抗争。尽管起义最终遭到镇压，但它却是一个重要的转折点：在此后的一个世纪里，越来越多的农民跻身于新兴的中产阶级行列。
• 中世纪的日常生活：节目展示了来自诺福克郡（Norfolk）某村庄的一批独特的中世纪书信，呈现了当时女性对于爱情与婚姻的视角；同时，节目还探讨了15世纪拉文纳姆（Lavenham）所蕴含的早期现代贸易根源。
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TVTranscript
00:08For the people of a small island, the story of the British is one of the most astonishing
00:14tales in history. But it's also a tale of constant struggle.
00:21Over the centuries, the British people have faced many tests, endured many hardships.
00:30And the rich pattern of our history was made by the people themselves.
00:35It was the people who built our society.
00:39They fought for and won our rights and freedoms.
00:47And on their road to the modern world, they faced triumph and disaster,
00:53with courage, tenacity and humour.
00:59And never more so than in the catastrophic 14th century.
01:03The next chapter of the great British story.
01:23Around Midsummer's Day in June 1348, a merchant ship from Gascony in France sailed into the little port of Malcolm
01:33Regis in Weymouth Bay in Dawson.
01:38On board, one sailor was desperately sick, spitting blood, with agonising swellings in his armpits and groin.
01:49And as they put him ashore and unloaded their cargo, rats scampered into the town, bearing a deadly pathogen.
02:00On board, one sailor was desperately sick.
02:01The Black Death.
02:05The story of the arrival of the Black Death is the stuff of dreams.
02:10A tranquil summer's day on the south coast initiates the greatest catastrophe in our history.
02:16The Black Death will change everything for the peoples of Britain, in society, in economies, in religion and mentalities.
02:25It will be the beginning of the end for the old feudal system, which had been clamped on the people
02:29since the Norman conquest of 1066.
02:32But at that moment, no-one could have foreseen how it would happen.
02:38The horror was just about to begin.
02:47That summer, the plague moved up the roads of southern England.
02:56Remorseless, yet unseen, carried by soldiers, peddlers and pilgrims, it travelled about a mile a day and by winter had
03:04infected the whole of the south.
03:07The village of Little Cornard in the Suffolk countryside is the first place for which we have a detailed record.
03:24A farming community, whose surnames still recall the medieval countrytasks.
03:31Smith, Moa, Haywood.
03:41Jonathan Belsey is a doctor and in a local solicitor,
03:45handed down in the papers of the Lord of the Manor he's traced the lost court roll of the village.
03:53Can you take us through what actually happened in 1349?
03:57Do the parish minutes give us a picture?
04:00March, March 31st, 1349, there are nine deaths recorded,
04:06which is our first inkling that there's a problem.
04:08Presumably this has come up the Stour and the traders have picked this up.
04:13Then there's another one, 1st of May, we have 14 people dying.
04:17And this is not population, this is householders.
04:21So we can assume that wives and children are dying as well.
04:24And after that there's a gap.
04:25And I think what happened there is everybody was running scared.
04:321st of November we have this appalling list of everybody that's died.
04:38And it brings the total up to 49 householders.
04:42And in some cases there's single households where a succession of four different people have died.
04:49Someone's died, left it to their son, who's died, left it to their sister, who's died, left it to...
04:53This is a picture of devastation.
04:57If you look at serious infectious illness, if you get a death rate of 3 or 4%,
05:04which is about the death rate we had in the flu pandemic in 1919,
05:09you think, God, that was dreadful.
05:12Now, with the Great Pestilence, with Black Death,
05:16what happened was about three quarters of people caught it
05:20and about half of those died of it.
05:22This would have ripped the heart out of the community.
05:28Lately died Lettice Harvey, Felice Osborne, John LeFuller, Adam Dylstown.
05:38By then the plague was raging in the cities.
05:42In London people spoke of 50,000 deaths,
05:45of 10,000 buried here under Charterhouse Square.
05:52The recent excavation of plague pits on Tower Hill
05:55showed that those who buried the dead
05:57were too scared even to take the purses from the bodies.
06:06Across the wide lands of Openfield, England,
06:09villages like Coddicott on the Great North Road were almost wiped out.
06:151349.
06:16Meeting of the Court of Coddicott.
06:18Pages and pages of deaths.
06:2359 of them in one entry.
06:27Hugo Allen.
06:29John Atpirri.
06:31John White.
06:33John Thickney.
06:35Ralph Thickney.
06:37Simon Walter John Martin.
06:40Robert Ludd.
06:46Out on the Welsh borders, the plague made its way up lonely country lanes
06:50to the farms around Abergavenny.
06:53And now in the Lord's Rent books, we can see its effect on the feudal system itself,
06:58where the whole structure of labour dues, which bound the peasants' lives,
07:03was on the point of collapse.
07:06John White.
07:07John At Coyd Morgan we had a water mill worth 14 pounds.
07:11It's now worth only three because of the mortality.
07:14There is no income from rent as the tenants are dead.
07:21And with the tenants dead, who would plough the Lord's land?
07:26At Bryn Gwynn we have 196 acres of arable,
07:30which are now worth nothing on account of the weakness of the land and the plague.
07:37As incomes fell, who would give the Lord his dues?
07:44At Hensley's manor we have a house of no value,
07:48a fish pond without fish and 16 acres of large wood, now worthless.
07:58The rich fared better than the poor, as they always do.
08:02But in Scotland the monks of the royal monastery of St Andrews were decimated.
08:14So severe was the affliction, said the chronicler Henry Knighton,
08:19that a third of the whole human race was obliged to pay the debt of nature.
08:26The sea was no barrier.
08:29By 1350 the plague had reached the Orkneys and the Shetlands.
08:37Boats from Bristol brought the plague to Ireland.
08:40The first deaths in Dublin came even before the plague reached London.
08:52And here in Trinity College there's an extraordinary eyewitness account of the plague,
08:58by a friar called John Klynn.
09:02Well in Dublin he says 14,000 died.
09:05He tells us that it arrived in Dublin and it swept through the whole of the city.
09:12And then he tells us very specifically that 25 friars died, Franciscans, in Drogheda.
09:19Now that's a full house of friars, so I mean it is a devastation.
09:22And 23 Franciscans died in Dublin.
09:25And does he describe the symptoms, Bernadette?
09:27Yes, he does.
09:28He describes three distinct symptoms.
09:31For many died from carbuncles and from ulcers
09:34and postures that could be seen on the shins and under the armpits.
09:38And some died as if in a frenzy from the pain in the head.
09:41Others from spitting blood.
09:44In a Christian universe, the plague brought visions of the end of time.
09:50Despairing of the future,
09:51Klynn left a moving message for the generations to come.
09:57Now I, Friar John Klynn, have brought together in writing
10:00just as I have truthfully heard and examined.
10:03And least the writing should perish with the writer
10:06and the work fail together with the worker.
10:08I am leaving parchment for the work to continue.
10:11If by chance, in the future, a man should remain surviving
10:15and anyone of the race of Adam should be able to escape this plague
10:19and live to continue this work I commenced.
10:23He's left it in case anyone be left alive of the race of Adam
10:26that will read it and will be able to continue.
10:29For the people of the future, for us.
10:32Because he thinks that everybody's going to die.
10:50And with those millions of deaths, what did that terrible time actually feel like?
11:01In the church at Ashwell in Hertfordshire,
11:0414th century graffiti scratched on the walls by the vicar and still readable,
11:10give us a glimpse.
11:13And the year when the great plague first came
11:18was one thousand and three hundred and fifty minus one.
11:26Miseranda ferox et violenta.
11:31Pitiable, ferocious and violent.
11:35The plague departed and left only the dregs of the people to bear witness.
11:43And that year, a mighty wind blew across the world.
11:53And so, over 500 days, the Black Death ran its course.
11:58At least half the population of Britain died.
12:01And the first impact of the plague was on work.
12:12Most of the British people worked the fields,
12:15villains and serfs who owed labour to their lords.
12:25Before the plague, England was densely populated,
12:28maybe six million people.
12:30Labour was plentiful.
12:32Wages were low.
12:33But now, labour had a new worth.
12:40This gives you an idea of what you would have seen in the Middle Ages.
12:43You know, ploughing time in the 13th century,
12:46maybe 15 or 20 ploughing teams
12:49moving slowly across one of the great fields.
12:52Some of them would have been women.
12:56If you set your plough right, it'll follow.
12:59If you anchor it set right in the first place, you'll sweat all day.
13:07The Black Death, having killed off so large a portion of the population,
13:11it sort of makes things better for those who remain.
13:14Go on, go on.
13:17That's it. Keep a bit of pressure down on that hand.
13:19On the right hand?
13:20You want to be driving that wheel into the side there.
13:23Into the side, OK.
13:24Yeah, that's better.
13:26And that's how you'll keep it straight, keeping that furrow.
13:28So you've got to watch the edge.
13:30Yeah, and watch your horses are walking in the furrow as well.
13:33So it takes some physical strength to do it, doesn't it?
13:36A little bit, yeah.
13:37The peasants, who were so tied to their land,
13:40are now in great demand because there aren't enough of them.
13:44And they can go off in search of higher wages.
13:49Eventually, legislation is brought in to keep them from doing that.
13:53But it's indicative of the sort of new age of ambition.
14:03Though most British people were still unfree,
14:06there was a rising class of free men and women
14:09able to move about to seek better work, more money.
14:17And the boom industry was in cloth.
14:21The demand for cheap and cheerful clothing was on the rise
14:24as far away as Scotland, Edinburgh and Dundee,
14:27and in Wales, in Carmarthenshire.
14:35The key product was wool, though after the Black Death,
14:39the ancient craft of flax-making to make linen
14:42also starts to be more than a cottage industry.
14:49That is ready as after it came from the crimpers.
14:52Now it comes to the scutches here.
14:55So we have crimping, stricking, scutching,
15:00then it's put up in the box here,
15:03and then up to the flexed door and re-tied.
15:08But the centre of the cloth trade was England.
15:14Of course, Manchester's famous as a textile town
15:16in the Industrial Revolution,
15:18the centre of Lancashire cotton,
15:19but its roots as a textile town lie in the Middle Ages.
15:23And after the Black Death, from the 1360s,
15:26it grew with the migration of Flemish weavers
15:29from East Anglia, who settled here.
15:31And all along the banks of the River Erwell
15:34and the Urk were fulling mills.
15:36And the workers here were typical of the kind of people of that time,
15:41with a bit of freedom, a bit of ready cash,
15:44who were anxious to take advantage of the new job opportunities
15:47after the Great Plague.
15:53The people below the big landlords, like the monks and the barons
15:59and the other great aristocrats,
16:02the people below them have a good deal of freedom of activity, shall we say,
16:08that they can take initiatives.
16:10They are not cowed, dominated, lacking in skill or the ability to change their own lives.
16:23And the new entrepreneurs were not only men.
16:26Across Britain, women had always been a major part of the workforce,
16:30at home, in the field and in the marketplace.
16:33I think you get your own little systems, don't you?
16:37And one industry where women led and made money was brewing.
16:41I have a feeling this is going to be thirsty work.
16:45Ale was a key part of the British diet,
16:47and in every town and village, women did that job,
16:51only now being reclaimed by today's female brewsters.
16:56Probably averaging four-barrel brews at the moment.
16:59I've literally just taken on a graduate from Herriot Watt.
17:02This is a manorial court rule for Brickstock.
17:07A lot of women did help support their households by brewing for sale,
17:12by making ale and selling it to their neighbors.
17:15And then this is a list of the brewsters.
17:18All women in this case, most of them wives.
17:21So this is the wife of Richard Tubb and Matilda Tubb,
17:25and a woman who's only known by her first name, Mary Ant.
17:27The wife of Richard Aukie and Joan Kokus and so on.
17:33Isabella Kokus and Alice Halcock.
17:40Medieval court rules give us a huge amount of social detail on women's work.
17:45One woman entrepreneur called Cecilia Penifader stood up for herself in a male world,
17:51and earned a rude cartoon from the landlord's scribe.
17:56What kind of freedoms did a woman like Cecilia have?
17:59I mean, for example, she didn't marry, but how did she make her living?
18:03She was a land holder. She held about 70 acres.
18:08She would have worked the land. She might well have hired people.
18:11She would have bought a lot of things at market that she needed.
18:15These people are very embedded in commercial markets.
18:18They're not subsistence farmers. They're not producing everything they consume.
18:22It's terribly touching, isn't it, that you can resurrect the life of such an ordinary person from documents.
18:28Almost an act of piety by the scholar.
18:31It shouldn't be necessary to write the history of half of humanity, but it is necessary, isn't it?
18:36Well, yes. I wouldn't say it was an act of piety, but it comes from my belief that the history
18:43of ordinary people matter,
18:45and that women are among those ordinary people.
18:48And I think what surprises people about someone like Cecilia, which really is not surprising at all,
18:56is that she was much more active than I think a lot of people expect.
19:03She did hold land. She did go to court. She argued with her neighbors.
19:06She had a rich and full life. It was limited in certain ways, but she's not in an abyss,
19:11which is, I think, what my students think the lives of medieval women were.
19:14Just terrible. And in fact, it's not the case at all.
19:18She's not a passive observer of history.
19:21That's right. She makes history.
19:23And she makes it in modest ways.
19:38So Britain after the Black Death is beginning to look like a different place.
19:43And in our community dig in the town of Long Melford in Suffolk,
19:47the townspeople found archaeological evidence of these hidden changes in people's lives.
19:53That's good evidence of a very posh building.
19:57In our 50 test pits, an unexpected pattern started to emerge.
20:02Have you broken through the floor?
20:04Yeah, we've got burret. You can see the layers.
20:05Fantastic.
20:08Before the Black Death, Melford had been a largely rural place.
20:14Its 60 tax-paying families were mostly farmers, with one cloth dyer and a handful of artisans.
20:22Right.
20:23Right. That is proper medieval.
20:25This is a late medieval jug handle.
20:27I mean, that's very sort of typical of the stuff they were making in Essex from about 1400 onwards or
20:33thereabouts.
20:34But the quantity of finds suggested life in the town was beginning to change.
20:41The dig turned up startling evidence for the time after the plague.
20:45Previous results from 40 rural village digs showed massive contraction, but Long Melford had now become a magnet.
20:53Nearly all of the other villages we've looked at across the region show a dramatic, catastrophic in most cases, drop
21:02in the amount of activity, the size of the population post-Black Death.
21:06Not Long Melford.
21:07You can see that in the maps here. Here's high medieval Long Melford.
21:10Remember this sort of scatter of sort of separate nodes of activity with perhaps fields in between.
21:16When we take that forward to the late medieval period, when nearly all of our other villages, there's a massive
21:22contraction in what's going on, we see growth.
21:25Look at that. And I think for the first time, we've got something that really looks like a town there.
21:32Nearly all of these test pits producing pottery of late medieval date.
21:37People in a period when the population has declined, many settlements are decimated.
21:42Long Melford was probably hit as bad as everyone else, but people are moving into it.
21:46People are picking up those empty places, those empty households.
21:50They're moving into them and the village is just steaming ahead.
21:57Sharing in that boom was Hadley, a prosperous wool town.
22:02And it's here that, for the first time, a document has turned up with one of the most famous names
22:08in British history.
22:11Watt Tyler.
22:15His name tells you his profession.
22:18He came from a Hadley family of tile and brick makers.
22:21A perfect example of the trades that were doing well after the Black Death.
22:29Tyler and his wife Imogen lived on the outskirts of town here in Coram Street.
22:36And he would have worked in a place like this.
22:41There have been kilns on this site since the 14th century.
22:48Here we have Hadley, an ideal situation for brick and tile making.
22:51They have all that's necessary.
22:53You have a river valley, you have all the ingredients here.
22:55You will have clay, you will have sand and water.
22:57All the things that a tile or brick maker would want.
23:00If Tyler and his wife Imogen were living on Coram Road, they're quite close to the source of the materials,
23:07the raw materials that are right on their doorstep.
23:13You would have probably had a family group because the children were occupied and they were cheap labour.
23:20So the tendency was for the man or the woman, because women made tiles as well and bricks, would be
23:25actually making the product and the family would be moving it away.
23:30The method of making bricks by hand hasn't changed since Tyler's day.
23:35We're using a system very, very similar to those that would have been used in the 13th and 14th century.
23:41Very little has really changed.
23:43The principle is identical to that, which would have been used by what Tyler and his wife.
23:51The tiles were in demand, not just for domestic housing, but we're now going into a period where grain barns
23:56were being built.
23:57Huge barns which needed roofs to keep the grain dry.
24:03In the late 14th century, tilers and plasterers were apprenticed to a master to learn their trade, a bit like
24:10today.
24:11How did you get into this job and what training did you have to do?
24:14I got a job doing the kiln stacking.
24:17Then I slowly worked my way up here and just got on the bench and started learning.
24:23That's pretty much it.
24:26But what turned a skilled craftsman like him into the most famous rebel in British history?
24:33Do you know what the job is, Matt?
24:36Not topping me out.
24:40Here there's a group, very independent, self-sufficient in every way and proud of what they did because they were
24:48proud people.
24:50I'm sure they'd be very bitter about any controls brought in on them because they were used to working at
24:55their own speed and making their own progress.
24:58But as East Anglians, they were also very jealous of their independence.
25:02And they weren't the only ones.
25:04In every English community, there were peasants who were literate, who knew the law and were politically aware.
25:13In medieval court rolls, an incredible range of material is now coming to light, recording a century of almost constant
25:21conflict between the peasants and their feudal lords.
25:24These sorts of things are the training ground for the later Peasants' Revolt.
25:30So a long history of, dare we call it, class struggle?
25:33Class struggle, absolutely.
25:35Certainly you can, certainly you can.
25:37If you actually took a sort of map of England and mapped out all the villages where there was violent
25:44protest, litigation against their lord, it would be a checkerboard of lots of parts of England.
25:49What's true is that it never was coordinated. It was just there wasn't the spark.
25:54And the spark came in the late 1370s with a series of national poll taxes which hit everyone, rich and
26:03poor, men and women.
26:04So this is one of the great documents of English history. This is the poll tax of 1381.
26:11The tax that caused the Peasants' Revolt. An unheard of tax, it was said at the time, imposed by a
26:21corrupt, incompetent, insolvent government who were fighting a very costly foreign war.
26:30We've heard that before, haven't we?
26:43The revolt began in Essex, in a village on the Thames estuary, where the king's poll tax gatherers were driven
26:50out by force.
26:54The place was fobbing, and the date, 13th of May, 1381.
27:02In the next few days, resistance spread like wildfire.
27:08East Anglia, the richest part of England, was a centre of the revolt.
27:14You're suggesting that a lot more planning lay behind these events.
27:17It's not just a kind of spontaneous combustion like the English riots in 2011.
27:23I think it's totally unlike that, Michael. I'd rather choose the Arab Spring.
27:27The communication is the thing. What was the equivalent in 1381 of the Blackberry?
27:34Answer is a string of good fast horses.
27:37They got the information out and the signal to start the revolt.
27:43As far as we know, the Peasants' Revolt was an English phenomenon.
27:47It didn't spread into Wales or into the Kingdom of Scotland.
27:51Beginning in the south-east, it spread as far north as Yorkshire and as far west as Somerset.
28:02Leaders immediately emerged at a local level, many using pseudonyms, Jack Straw, Jack Truman, even Piers Plowman.
28:12They communicated by letters in English. The texts of seven of these have survived.
28:20Jack Carter prays you all, make a good end of what you have begun.
28:25And doeth well.
28:28For if the end be well, then all is well.
28:35In the rich county of Kent, the rebels took over market towns like Faversham, supported by the better-off peasant
28:42landowners.
28:43Crippled by levies and taxes and tithes. The crying of children and the sorrow of wives.
28:52A lot of people were very disgruntled because this tax of one to three groats went across everybody.
28:59Everyone thinks it's just the peasants, but no, everyone was there.
29:02People of England. People of England, but that's it, yeah.
29:05Harkin!
29:06It was here in Kent that the radical priest John Ball spoke his famous sermon that all human beings are
29:13born equal.
29:13When Adam delved and Eve Spann, who was then the gentlemen?
29:21One of the most interesting new discoveries about the revolt is the role of women in the leadership.
29:28There were women leaders as well, weren't there Michelle?
29:30Certainly, Marjory Starr for one.
29:3363 women rebels were indicted in Suffolk alone.
29:36Women were sometimes going against the men.
29:39I'm sorry, I'm a free woman.
29:42That old English idea of it's not fair.
29:45Yeah, you've got to be fair play and all that as injustice.
29:47People take so much and then after a while they say, no, we've had enough of this and just rise
29:53up.
29:56The government now faced a mass uprising.
30:00Among the peasants' first targets was the ancient Abbey of St Albans,
30:04which owned estates with thousands of tied peasants and also controlled the market.
30:11This is where the mob attacked St Albans Abbey that summer of 1381, the Great North Gate.
30:17It's like a fortress, isn't it? A visible symbol of their subjection.
30:23There were 2,000 rebels, all of them trying to fight their way inside where there were 100 monks and
30:28the abbot and their few hundred staff.
30:31They must have been terrified by the turn of events, by the fury that was unleashed.
30:36And the peasants out there not only wanted to get the monks inside, but they wanted to destroy the Abbey
30:42archives, the court books, the record of their subjection.
30:47Their leader, William Grindcobb, said, all we want is a little liberty after so many centuries of oppression.
30:57By now, and we don't know how, what Tyler was acknowledged as the chief leader?
31:03From south and east, the rebels converged on London.
31:07Crippled by levies and taxes and tithes, the crying of children and the sorrow of wives, smouldering anger in Essex
31:20and Kent, has burst into flame now on London we're bent.
31:25The city's gates were opened and the people poured in.
31:30In the garden of England we'll delve and we'll spin
31:34Till the fruits of our labours in Eden we'll win
31:40They celebrated with bonfires of feudal documents in the streets.
31:46As the Savoy Palace went up in flames, the whole order of things were shaking.
31:54Among the chief targets of the people's anger was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury.
32:01Sudbury was Lord Chancellor too, and the rebel leader, Jack Straw, said he was public enemy number one.
32:09As Chancellor, he was responsible for bringing in the poll tax at three groats ahead.
32:14Rich pay the same as poor.
32:17But most of all I think it's said to be that he is one of a coterie who influenced Richard
32:22against doing a deal with Wat Tyler.
32:25Tyler is reported as saying that if he could have done a deal with the king, we can all go
32:30home.
32:31And the person who stopped it was Simon of Sudbury, and that was probably the real reason, as well as
32:39the poll tax, why they finished him off.
32:44To the rebels, Sudbury was an enemy of the people, but back in his home town where he founded a
32:49college, he's still a bit of a local hero.
32:52And they pulled him out together with some others, and they made him kneel down.
32:58On June 14th, Sudbury was beheaded on Tower Hill by rebels led by a woman, Joanna Ferroor.
33:07And Simon's head was gone.
33:11Recovered from its spike on London Bridge, his head was later returned to Sudbury.
33:16And it's still here.
33:18Draw around so that you can all see.
33:21And I will introduce you to Simon.
33:26Ew!
33:29Say hello, everybody.
33:31Hello.
33:32What do you think of that?
33:34Gross.
33:35Gross!
33:37The peasants had now killed the Lord Chief Justice and the Chancellor.
33:42They were on the verge of full-scale revolution.
33:47As Sudbury was executed, eyewitnesses remembered the sound of the crowd rising over the city, a visceral roar like a
33:58monstrous beast.
34:03Within a few days, the rebels had taken over the capital.
34:08But what would they do now?
34:11At this point, the letters of the peasant leaders betray a growing anxiety.
34:17Lady Mary, help us.
34:20Know your friend from your foe.
34:23Beware of treachery in the city.
34:29Early next day came the reckoning.
34:32The peasants believed that the king would listen if only they could speak to him directly.
34:42Their key demand was the abolition of serfdom, and the next morning they met the 14-year-old Richard II
34:48face-to-face here at Smithfield.
34:53Saturday, June 15th, 1381.
34:56It's a turning point in British history.
34:59A crystalline blue day, just like today, and the city crackling with tension.
35:07During the night, the peasant army has moved round from the East End and is pouring into Smithfield.
35:13And the king and his henchmen, with his armed guards, have come out of the city and are down there
35:18below us, facing the peasant army.
35:22And at this point, with incredible bravado, the peasant leader, Wat Tyler, rides out to meet the king.
35:30Now, remember, our sources for what happened next only come from the king's side.
35:36But according to them, Tyler was insulting in his manner towards the king, called him my brother.
35:42At one point, reined his horse in, so its bottom thrust into the very nostrils of the king's horse.
35:48Then, the mayor of London, William Woolworth, seized Tyler's reins and called him a scurvy villain and a traitor, and
35:56stabbed him.
36:02The rebels were stunned and enraged, but the king himself pacified them and agreed to meet their demands.
36:17That day, the king and his counsellors signed charters promising to abolish serfdom.
36:24But once the rebel army had dispersed, the government reneged on the deal, saying they'd only signed it under duress.
36:34The ringleaders were hunted down, tried and executed.
36:39Whether Imogen Tyler carried on her husband's business, history does not say.
36:55So brief and savage, the summer of blood was over by late June 1381.
37:03Sporadic rioting, looting and housebreaking still flickered across the country, but serious organised disorder was over.
37:12Here in Sudbury, the Earl of Suffolk was brought in on a mandate from the government to mop up the
37:18resistance and to punish insurgents.
37:21And in the 14th century, that was a very unpleasant business.
37:28So the great rising had failed, but the forces that had propelled it, which after all were the forces of
37:36history, couldn't be stopped.
37:39Over the next few decades, a million mutinies are recorded in the court rolls, legal cases in which the people
37:46themselves slowly, patiently negotiated away the bonds of the old order.
37:55One story from Suffolk is typical of the changing times.
37:59It's the tale of a man who was born a bonded surfer, 20 years after the revolt, but gained his
38:05freedom and rose in the world to become a member of a new group in English society.
38:13I was interested in finding out more about farmers because they're a mystery.
38:17I mean, often all you know about them is their name, the amount of rent they paid.
38:22We're using this word farmer.
38:24Yes, I mean, for them, it was quite a technical term.
38:26It meant someone who paid a particular type of rent the farm.
38:31So they're renting rather than paying labour dues as their ancestors.
38:36Yes, they're not paying labour dues.
38:37The usual arrangement was they paid a sum in cash.
38:40And that's typical of the records contained in a roll like this, which is a financial account.
38:47This is the account of Robert Parman, farmer.
38:51It says that he pays £11 for the farm of the agricultural production of the abbot's demean.
38:58And it says here, thus let to the said Robert.
39:04Is he a free man?
39:05No, no, he's a serf. His father was a serf, so he was born into serfdom.
39:10But being a serf didn't prevent you making your way in the world.
39:14Sounds like the rise of a new class in English society.
39:18Yes, yes, there were no farmers in, you know, 20 years earlier.
39:23It's a new group of people, a very significant group of people,
39:26who were making waves in the 15th century and, of course, continue to make waves until the present day.
39:33So in the 1450s, Robert was a man of some standing in the village.
39:39Do you get a sense of a personality coming out of the documents, Chris?
39:42I don't think he's a very attractive man myself.
39:45You know, he's a dominant, bullying sort of figure, I suspect.
39:48Clever, manipulative, he's a successful businessman.
39:53Can I just point out how he bossed the village about?
39:57You find that his sons are not just landholders in the village,
40:01they also occupy official positions in the government.
40:05The abbot's bailiff chooses the people who are going to occupy office
40:11because, for a long time, the abbot's bailiff was one Robert Parman.
40:17And then you look down the list and who do you see?
40:21Simon Poorman.
40:23Sometimes you get three or four of his sons
40:25are also in this group of influential pledges, chosen by himself.
40:32Wonderful tale of advancement, isn't it?
40:41Unlikable and grasping as he may have been,
40:44Robert had set out to better himself and his children.
40:53Oh, that's very pretty, isn't it?
40:54The ex-surf had become a pillar of the local community.
40:58He even beautified his parish church.
41:01Robert Parman's window from the inside.
41:04That's right, yes.
41:04This is his great contribution to the whole communal effort, really,
41:11in building the church.
41:18So, Robert dies 1475, commemorated in the church.
41:24Yes.
41:25What happens to the family story in the village after that?
41:28Quite extraordinary.
41:29His son, Robert Junior, had actually become a rector of the parish.
41:35So, as well as his father ruling the secular side of parish life,
41:41his son was the leader of the religion of the parish as well.
41:47So, his son had got a much better education then than his father.
41:51Oh, indeed, yes.
41:51Do we know?
41:52Yes, well, we know the father had had a basic education of some kind
41:56which made him able to keep his accounts and so on.
41:58But the son, presumably, again, went to Bury School,
42:02the Monk School at Bury, then went on to Cambridge.
42:05To Cambridge?
42:06Got an MA at Cambridge,
42:08and then was promoted to become a rector of Chevington.
42:12An everyday story of medieval country folk, isn't it?
42:15But what a journey in a few decades,
42:17from a serf to a Cambridge MA.
42:21Yes.
42:22Now you've made you famous.
42:32So the aspirations of the Peasants' Revolt would eventually be achieved by new economic freedoms.
42:41And also, crucially, by education,
42:44which provided opportunities across the barriers of medieval class and gender.
42:50I think you're a friend of Jesus.
42:54You're a friend of mine.
42:57And don't think that our rural ancestors were strangers to education.
43:01By the 14th century, schools had sprung up all over the medieval countryside.
43:08Uelm School was founded in the 1430s, before the Wars of the Roses.
43:14We're at Uelm Primary School in South Oxfordshire, the oldest primary school in the country.
43:19Founded in 1437 by Alice Chaucer, who was granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer, the poet.
43:28The children would have been taught to read and write, very unusual in those days.
43:33So this was, in effect, a grammar school.
43:36And the children would have learnt Latin.
43:38Can you see whether you can work out what any of these words might mean?
43:43Feminum might be feminine.
43:45So it's reading and writing and being able to use Latin and to compute figures,
43:51so that they were equipped to go and help on the estates and keep records, possibly even to go into
43:58the church.
43:59So I'm going to show you some of the equipment that they would have been using in this school back
44:06in the 15th century.
44:07They would have been using things like wax tablets.
44:11OK.
44:12Can anyone say anything around this classroom that you don't think they would have had in 1437?
44:18Rhodes.
44:19Well, they wouldn't have had whiteboard pens.
44:22Well, I don't know, maybe they just didn't know how to make a whiteboard pen work.
44:27Back in the 15th century, the spread of education was helped by a very simple and practical innovation.
44:33Paper.
44:35When you get to about 1400, paper is becoming common and cheap in England.
44:43And it's always seemed to me that the paper revolution is even more important than the printing revolution,
44:49because in fact you cannot have a printing revolution until you've got paper.
44:54And once you've got cheap paper, it's much easier for schools to function,
44:58because you don't merely keep temporary exercises, which you have to then get rid of.
45:05You can actually keep permanent notes.
45:07So by 1400, you're already in the world of school exercise books.
45:15And we've been talking about boys. What about girls and women?
45:20Most female education is done in the households, but it won't involve Latin.
45:26They don't go to grammar schools, but they may well be taught by a parent or a literate person,
45:35a cleric or somebody like that.
45:36They may be taught their alphabet and be able to read.
45:40And we certainly know at gentry level that women were reading romances,
45:45that they were reading religious books, because these works get mentioned in wills.
45:50Right, we're going to be singing the Tudor song,
45:53Hey ho, nobody's at home.
45:55Okay, so one, two, three, four.
45:58Hey ho, nobody at home
46:02Needs no drink, no money I have known
46:06So in the 15th century, hundreds of villages up and down the land
46:12had their own tiny schools and schoolmasters.
46:15It was the beginning of a social revolution percolating silently from below.
46:23By the time we reach the Tudors, England will be the most literate society that had yet existed in history.
46:36So the people rose through education.
46:39Take the Paston family from the tiny Norfolk village which still bears their name today.
46:47Back in the 1400s, the Pastons were just 100 acre farmers, but they rose in the world.
46:54And we know about them through letters they wrote to each other during the Wars of the Roses.
47:04The Pastons' letters are so vividly expressed that they can almost seem people like us.
47:11And it's the letters written by the women that are most revealing.
47:17That's not bad actually, that's not a bad thing.
47:20Oh yeah, not too, you can't see now.
47:22For the first time in our history we can eavesdrop on the thoughts of ordinary women.
47:30They tell of blackmail and bullying by the local lords and their cronies,
47:34but they also speak of women's hopes and dreams, and even their love lives.
47:41I'm sorry that you shall not be home for Christmas.
47:44I pray that you'll come as soon as you may.
47:46I shall think myself half a widow because you shall not be home.
47:51God have you in his keeping.
47:53Written on Christmas Eve by your Margaret.
48:00They read so immediate. I mean, they just are real people.
48:05And that's very uncommon in 15th century letters.
48:10So as the news filtered back to this corner of Norfolk,
48:13of battles in France in the Hundred Years' War, the Wars of the Roses, life went on.
48:20To my right worshipful husband, John Paston,
48:24I pray you heartily that you will send me a pot of treacle.
48:28In haste, Margaret.
48:33In one of the Paston letters is what might just be our earliest valentine.
48:38It has sealed it. You've got your pattern.
48:41Just skidded a little bit.
48:44Cousin, Friday is Valentine's Day
48:47and every bird choose himself a mate.
48:51If you'd like to come on Thursday night and stay till Monday,
48:55I trust to God that you may speak to my husband
48:58and that we may bring the matter to a conclusion.
49:06I pray you that you will wear the ring with the image of St Margaret.
49:11That I sent you for remembrance till you come home.
49:13You have left me such a remembrance
49:15that makes me think upon you both night and day when I would sleep.
49:20Yours, Marjorie.
49:24We've talked about the quill that was taken from goose feathers.
49:28You just like take all the feathers off
49:31and then you just like make a slit in the bottom
49:34and then you just dip it in the ink.
49:37The younger John Paston, he's begging for a new hawk from his brother.
49:42There's this plea, could I have a new hawk please?
49:45My last hawk was useless and all the other knights have got better hawks than me.
49:50And then he gets one and he says, but she is but a hedge sparrow
49:55because she arrived with broken wings.
49:57So it's so sad, this younger brother.
50:00But I mean, he triumphed in the end
50:02because he's the one that all the rest of the Pastons have descended from.
50:14If you were an ordinary person, the 15th century wasn't a great time to live.
50:19But out of catastrophe had come the beginnings of real changes in our ancestors' lives.
50:24By the 1470s and 80s Britain was slowly rising out of its long depression.
50:31And the wool men now did what the British have always been good at.
50:36They reinvented their business model.
50:42And it was the wool towns of Suffolk which scored the most spectacular successes.
50:47They tapped into the export market with Germany, France and the Baltic.
50:51And you can still see their new money.
50:54In Lavenham.
51:02Wonderful spectacle of medieval wealth as you come up the street, isn't it?
51:06It's an incredible place.
51:07In 1524, we were recorded as the 14th richest town in England.
51:11We pay more tax in that year than York, Lincoln, Norwich, many of the big cities.
51:16Oh, God.
51:17It's quite incredible to think of a population not much bigger than it is today.
51:20Amazing.
51:21About 1800.
51:22I love the way you refer to, you're talking we, Jane.
51:25We, we.
51:25Well, you know, I'm not exactly a local, but, um, Suffolk corn and bread.
51:29Yeah.
51:30And how did they make their money, Jane?
51:32We, we're called the wool towns, but in actual fact we made our money from cloth.
51:36Our cloth in Lavenham, which was a, a very thick, coarse, broad cloth, known as Lavenham blues, dyed with woad,
51:43which was a pretty horrible substance anyway.
51:46But it was being exported as far away as Northern Russia.
51:49Wow.
51:50Yeah.
51:50What in the 15th century?
51:52Yeah.
51:52All before that, yeah.
51:53And the, these people who started life as little artisans, spinning, weaving and dyeing, gradually became sort of, um, under
52:01the umbrella, if you like, of a cloth merchant or clothier who took control of the, the whole process and
52:06made a great deal of money in the process.
52:08But, of course, all those wealthy cloth merchants are trying to show off their wealth through their buildings.
52:12And so Lavenham is comprehensively rebuilt during that period with all these close-studded buildings, jetty buildings, to show off
52:20the amount of timber they could afford.
52:27Lavenham is an extraordinarily well-preserved medieval townscope.
52:30You really can get a sense of what it must have been like to walk down a medieval street here.
52:36And here we're stepping onto Water Street in Lavenham.
52:39Yeah.
52:39Which was originally, as the name suggests, a wet, wide street that flooded regularly.
52:46Yeah.
52:46Today, the water flows underneath the, the front rooms, the sitting rooms of the people living on one side of
52:53this street.
52:53And, Michael, you're wearing your Wellington boots because you're about to go and explore it.
52:58Here in Lavenham, the early Tudor middle class built grand townhouses showing off all the arts of the plasterers and
53:05the tilers.
53:06But they also put their money into infrastructure, even a common sewerage system for the town.
53:13And the manhole cover that is looming open in front of us, Michael, would have been the middle of our
53:19medieval street.
53:20Oh, gosh!
53:25It's quite narrow, isn't it?
53:27Yes.
53:28Whoa!
53:29Look at this!
53:33So...
53:38So, can you hear me, Lee?
53:40Yep, I can hear you.
53:42What can you see, Michael?
53:44I've got a fantastic sweep of brick vaults down here, Lee.
53:50I don't think anything lives down there, Michael, but I can't guarantee it.
53:55There might be a few escaped pets...
53:58...of the reptilian variety.
54:03Oh, gosh, spiders around here. Look at this.
54:15Great, look at this.
54:17Sewage outlet there, running underneath the street.
54:23It's a wonderful insight, isn't it, to the way things worked in the medieval world.
54:27The community was the driving force behind all the things that make society work.
54:37Charity, law and order, education, entertainment, and even sanitation.
54:43In a medieval microcosm.
54:47It's the big society.
54:51Right!
54:58Oh, gosh!
55:00Blimey!
55:04Hamish!
55:08Gosh!
55:09Well, hello.
55:11It's very nice to see you.
55:14I was expecting to come out in the loo.
55:20Back in Long Melford, in our big communal dig, we found more evidence of this early Tudor boom time.
55:27That's going back kind of quite a long way, the sort of Tudor period, Queen Elizabeth onwards really.
55:32A medieval guild hall was rebuilt as an inn for commercial travellers.
55:36I don't know what that is. It's certainly not a typical modern tile.
55:39And just behind the Swan Inn, the test pit revealed the modern spirit of those Tudor developers.
55:45Well, you have your grey-brown layer at the bottom, which presumably was the soil behind the original building here,
55:51which is producing the sort of the 14th, 15th century pottery.
55:55Then someone's dug a trench through that to put a brick wall in, presumably as part of a nice Tudor
56:00brick building.
56:01The building goes up, the building's knocked down, the whole thing's levelled, the builders tarmac over it, and at some
56:06point someone's put a sewer pipe in as well.
56:08I love it, I love it.
56:10Historians talk about the great rebuilding of the 16th century, don't they?
56:13And we think of all these lovely half-timbered houses, and actually that's kind of builders going at it as,
56:19and developers going at it as hard as they are today.
56:22Yeah. Great.
56:23Terrific.
56:25Well, it's a real insight, isn't it, to the changing world of Tudor England.
56:29I mean, you have to remember that at that time, 15th, 16th century, this part of East Anglia is a
56:36mainstay of the wealth of England, with the wool trade, these towns like Lavenham and Kersey and Long Melford here.
56:42So in 1522, around the time that the Swan Inn was built, there were 160 taxable households here in Long
56:50Melford, and a third of them worked in the cloth industry.
56:53There were ten great rich clothiers.
56:56There were weavers and dyers and fullers and tailors.
57:01And an inn like this, built to service their industry, with people coming in from as far away as London.
57:08And it's a story that you could repeat right across Britain, from Totnes in Devon to the towns of North
57:15East Scotland.
57:15For the people of Britain, the world of work was changing.
57:27So through work, education and ambition, the British people came through the horrors of the Black Death and its violent
57:35fallout.
57:36For the ordinary person, it must have been a terrible time to live.
57:40But out of it, they forged new ways of working and living that still shape us today.
57:50At this point, the lives of the people of Britain were still ruled by the twin pillars of medieval power.
57:58Monarchy and the Catholic Church.
58:01And the next challenge the British people will face will come from their own rulers.
58:06A chain of events that will change them forever in their religious beliefs and customs.
58:12In their attitudes to life and death.
58:15Events that in the end will overthrow the power of both God and King.
58:27And how that happened, we'll see in the next chapter of the Great British Story.