History of England 1-6

The church was not always used for sacred purposes. The contemporary literature suggests that it might be used as a meetingplace, a covered market, or even as an alehouse. The parish priests themselves were often illiterate, and many complaints were made about their drunkenness and violence. They were often married. They might be slaves employed by the lord of the manor. They were in any case little better than the lord’s servants, who worked in the fields when they were not in their churches. They carried knives. They exercised control over the villagers in every sense. These ‘Mass priests’, as they were known, were supposed to catechize children, administer the sacraments and repeat the rudimentary truths of the Christian faith. But in many parishes they also were treated as ‘cunning men’ who practised rural magic. They were as experienced in pagan customs as in Christian practice. It is hard to realize the sheer earthiness of life in these centuries, where people and cattle slept beneath the same roof and where the priest might be an unshaven scoundrel.

The men of the ninth and tenth centuries wore their hair long. If you pulled it you merited a fine, and forcible cutting of the hair was considered to be as criminal as cutting off a nose or ear. The clothes were simple, consisting principally of cloaks and tunics made of woollen cloth; yet the wealthy were heavily adorned with rings and brooches. When some Englishmen were imprisoned in Syria, during the eighth century, the native inhabitants came to see them and to wonder at the beauty of their clothes. The arms and faces of both men and women were tattooed. The richer women wore long flowing tunics, ornamented with gold, and their heads were covered with silk or linen that was wrapped around the neck. Both sexes loved bright colours such as scarlet and green and pink. And both sexes delighted in perfume. Heavy drinking was commonplace, as it has been in all stages of English history. 50 per cent of the people died before the age of thirty, and 90 per cent before the age of fifty. Death was always close at hand.

6

The measure of the king

At the beginning of the twelfth century, in the reign of Henry I, it was declared that the measurement of the yard (0.9 metres) should be ‘the distance from the tip of the king’s nose to the end of his outstretched thumb’. Yet what gave the kings of England such significance and control? They represented the country in a physical, as well as a spiritual, manner. They embodied the country, in its coinage and in its judicial process, in its land tenure and in its religious life. The history of England cannot be written without a careful account of its sovereigns. For many centuries it was impossible to imagine a country without a king. It was believed that a king’s health would affect the health of the kingdom as a whole, and that the private vices of the king could provoke a public calamity. The image of England might be that of the king outstretched.

The origins of kingship cannot be found. We may deduce from the evidence of the Neolithic monuments that there was power in the land from the fourth millennium bc. Who once lay in the great works of Sutton Hoo or Avebury? The kings of the dead have also gone down into the earth.

And then we begin to see flashes of regal pre-eminence. The early Saxon kings claimed that they were descended from the gods, in particular from Woden, and it was believed that they possessed magical powers. Even the supposedly saintly Edward the Confessor traced his descent from pagan Woden. In some more remote age of the world the king might also have been the high priest of the tribe. It is likely that, his true wife being a goddess, he was allowed to have intercourse with whomever he chose. This may help to account for the excessive promiscuity of later English kings; even until recent times they were always permitted and even expected to keep mistresses.

The Saxon kings were violent men, warlords in all but name, but they clothed themselves in the panoply of divine power. Their banners were carried before them wherever they walked. From the tenth century the kings took on classical and imperial titles such as caesar, imperator, basileus and Augustus. In their magnificence we may see traces of ancient British kings, combining wrathfulness and vengeance with spells and rituals. In essence it was the same authority wielded by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.