Social and cultural development of England in Late Middle Ages
Society in England was still based upon rank. At the top were dukes, earls and other lords, although there were far fewer as a result of war. Below these great lords were knights. Edward I had ordered that those with an income of 20 a year must be made knights. Next to the gentlemen were the ordinary freemen of the towns. By the end of the Middle Ages, it was possible for a serf from the countryside to work for seven years in a town craft guild, and to become a “freemen” of the town where they lived. The freemen controlled the life of a town.
Meanwhile, in the towns, a new middle class was developing. By the fifteenth century most merchants were well educated, and considered themselves to be the equals of the gentlemen of the countryside. The lawyers were another class of city people. In London they were considered equal in importance to the big merchants and cloth manufacturers.
The development of Parliament at this time showed the beginnings of a new relationship between the middle class and the king. Edward I had invited knights from the country and merchants from the towns to his parliament because he wanted money and they, more than any other group, could provide it during the time of Edward III’s reign Parliament became organized in two parts: the Lords, and the Commons, which represented the middle class. Only those commoners with an income of forty shillings or more a year could qualify to be members of Parliament. This meant that the poor had no way of being heard except by rebellion. The poor had no voice of their own in Parliament until the middle of the 19th century.
The king’s courts could not deal with all the work. In 1363 Edward III appointed “justices of the peace” to deal with smaller crimes and offences, and to hold court four times a year.
Little is known about the life of women in the Middle Ages, but without doubt it was hard. The Church taught that women should obey their husbands. It also spread two very different ideas about women: that they should be pure and holy like the Virgin Mary; and that, like Eve, they could not be trusted and were a moral danger to men. Once married, a woman had to accept her husband as her master. A disobedient wife was usually beaten. The first duty of every wife was to give her husband children, preferably sons. The wife of a noble had other responsibilities. When her lord was away, she was in charge of the manor and the village lands, all the servants and villagers, the harvest and the animals. She also had to defend the manor if it was attacked. She had to run the household, welcome visitors, and store enough food, including salted meat, for winter. She was expected to have enough knowledge of herbs and plants to make suitable medicines for those in the village who were sick. She had little time for her own children, who in any case were often sent away at the age of eight to another manor, the boys to “be made into man”.
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Most women, of course, were peasants, busy making food, making cloth and making clothes from the cloth. They worked in the fields, looked after the children, the geese, the pigs and the sheep, made the cheese and grew the vegetables.
With the spread of literacy, cultural life in Britain naturally developed also. In the cities, plays were performed at important religious festivals. They were called “mystery plays” because of the mysterious nature of events in the Bible, and they were a popular form of culture.
The language itself was changing. French had been used less and less by the Norman rulers during the 13th century. In the 14th century Edward III had actually forbidden the speaking of French in his army. By the end of the 14th century, however, English was once again a written language, because it was being used instead of French by the ruling, literate class. But “Middle English”, the language of the 14th and 15th centuries, was very different from Anglo-Saxon. This was partly because it had not been written for three hundred years, and partly because it had borrowed so much from Norman French.
Bу the end of the Middle Ages, English as well as Latin was being used in legal writing, and also in elementary schools. Education developed enormously during the fifteenth century, and many schools were founded by powerful men. There was a growing need for educated people who could administer the government, the Church, the law and trade. Clerks started grammar schools where students could learn the skills of reading and writing. These schools offered their pupils a future in the Church or the civil service, or at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
The Middle Ages ended with a major technical development: William Caxton’s first English printing press, set up in 1476. Caxton’s printing press was as dramatic for his age as radio, television and the technological revolution are for our own.
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QUESTIONS FOR CONTROL
1. What changes did William the Conqueror make in England during his reign?
2. Who inherited England after William the Conqueror?
3. How did Stephen become the king of England?
4. Who is the beginner of the Plantagenet dynasty?
5. What is Henry II famous for?
6. Why was Richard the Lion Hearted called a disaster for England?
7. What problems was John, Richard’s successors, faced with?
8. What is Magna Carta? When and what for was it written?
9. When was the first Parliament summoned?
10. How did Edward I change the Parliament?
11. What was done by Edward I for unification of the country?
12. Describe the process of unification of England and Scotland.
13. Where was the government situated?
14. How did the system of justice change in the 11-12th centuries?
15. Why did the number of religious houses grow in the early Middle Ages?
16. What universities were formed in the middle of 13th century?
17. How can you characterize the 14th century?
18. What was the reason for the war between England and France? How long did it last?
19. What were the results of Hundred’s Years War with France?
20. Tell about the plague of 1348.
21. Did ordinary people agree with their position? What rebellion took place in 1381? How did it end?
22. What changes took place in religion of England? What was heresy?
23. What was the reason for the Wars of the Roses and was it a romantic event?
24. What was the structure of society in the Middle Ages?
25. Which two parts was the Parliament divided to? When? What for?
26. How can you explain the meaning “justices of the peace”?
27. What was the position of women in late Middle Ages?
28. What were the great cultural achievements of that age?
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