History of England 1-6

At a subsequent conference of the interested parties – Richard together with the king of England and the king of France – the matter of succession was explicitly raised. Richard demanded his father’s assurance that he would be named as his heir. Henry refused to comply. ‘Then,’ Richard said, ‘I can only take as true what previously seemed incredible.’ He unbuckled his sword and, kneeling before the king of France, did homage for Normandy and Aquitaine. He was, in other words, denying his father’s claims over a large part of the Angevin Empire. Father and son walked off in different directions.

It seems unlikely, in retrospect, that Henry would have disinherited the elder son; it would have struck at the very heart of the medieval principle of rightful inheritance. But of course Richard could not be sure. He pressed the matter into open warfare against his father, fought among the towns and castles of northern France. The summer of 1189 was hot, and the English king was ailing. The tide of war turned against him. Who would wish to defend the old king of England against a young prince and the king of France?

Henry was forced to come to terms with the enemy. He made a promise that Richard would succeed him. When he gave the ritual kiss of peace to his son, according to Richard himself, he whispered in his ear, ‘May the Lord spare me until I have taken vengeance on you.’ But he was already dying. He was carried in a litter to Chinon, in the valley of the Loire, where he asked for a list of those men who had already pledged allegiance to his son. The first name was that of John. He turned his face to the wall, and would listen no more. His last words, apparently, were ‘Shame, shame on a conquered king’. But last words are often invented by moralists. Henry II lies buried in the abbey church of Fontevrault.

Henry is remembered, if at all, because of his association with Thomas Becket. Yet he has a more significant claim to our attention in his imposition of a system of national justice and of common law. He may have engineered these changes for reasons of profit rather than policy, but the origin of the most worthy institutions can hardly bear examination. All is muddled and uncertain. The writing of history is often another way of defining chaos.

14

The lost village

The deserted village of Wharram Percy lies on the side of a valley, by the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds. Its church, of St Martin, lies in ruins; earthworks mark the lines of habitation, rectangular mounds where the small houses once stood and sunken hollows in the grass where lanes and roads once ran. Remains of the manor house, and of a longhouse, survive together with the outlines of smaller houses of chalk. Most of the stonework has gone under the earth, however, covered by grass and weed. The life of the village has departed, but it has left traces of its existence that have survived for hundreds of years.

There are more than 3,000 deserted villages in England, mute testimony of a communal past. An old market cross stands alone among the trees of Stapleford Park in Leicestershire; the market, and the village, are long gone. A line of buttercups, springing from the moist soil beside a wall, will outline a forgotten boundary. The inhabitants of these villages left for a variety of reasons. Fire, famine and disease did their work through the centuries; successive stages of depopulation also crept over the countryside. Some villages were razed to make way for sheep pasture, and the villagers forcibly evicted by the lord of the land. Thus in the village of Thorpe, Norfolk, 100 people ‘left their houses weeping and became unemployed and finally, as we suppose, died in poverty and so ended their days’. The Cistercian monks were known for their practice of eviction.

The excavation of Wharram Percy, over a period of fifty years, has discovered evidence of successive rebuilding of walls and parts of walls. The pattern of settlement seems to have been formalized in the tenth century, with the individual houses erected in rows along the two principal streets. A manor house was built at this time, with a second manor house following three centuries later. This second manor is known to have contained a hall-house, a dovecote and a barn. Throughout the entire period the surrounding land was being farmed for wheat and for barley; sheep and cattle were being raised; flax and hemp were grown.