The literature of social unrest

When Lewis de Beaumont was consecrated Bishop of Durham it was reported that he was illiterate, meaning that he knew little or no Latin, and this was widely taken as a joke by contemporaries, because he was a miles illiteratus , a knight who could not read. As Denholm-Young commented, ‘even in Edward III’s reign most knights were expected to put up a better show than that’. 1 The Lanercost Chronicle describes Earl Guy of Warwick as bene literatus and this, according to McFarlane, meant more than that he was able to read and write. 2 When the nobility was charged with illiteracy, it meant rather that they lacked a university degree. Indeed, by the second half of the fourteenth century roughly one in twenty of the population comprised the class just below the knighthood, the ‘country gentry’. Such gentlemen, their numbers swelled by the recent rise of the squirearchy, were also expected to be literate because many of them were sent to the nearest school and then on to Oxford and Cambridge or London to read law or be apprenticed to a merchant. The law of primogeniture forced the less endowed younger sons of the gentry to become merchants or lawyers, or take holy orders. There is little doubt such men could read and write. Along with the gentry, the sons of franklins (what later would be called yeoman farmers) and esquires could be said to be the rulers of the nation, for to them was entrusted the daily administration of the realm. 3 It is not insignificant, therefore, to find that the ‘peasants’ revolt’ of 1381 attacked lawyers 4 and landlords rather than the knightly per se . It was not only the older landowning monasteries, but the newer country gentry serving as tax collectors and rent-collecting landlords, as well as the upper reaches of the moneyed urban ‘middle class’, who were hated by the rural and urban poor. Chaucer, when not living in London as a King’s squire, lived the life of just such a country gentleman in Somerset and Kent. 5 Gower was certainly one. Court squires, even from the reign of Edward I and more so thereafter, were administrative, unwarlike men, and there was an expanding group of professional civil servants who were not clerks. Denholm-Young lists them as feodaries, cooks, castelans, purveyors to the king’s household, masons, surveyors, whose pay was often equal to that of the knight bachelor. 6 Their work frequently demanded a relatively high level of literacy. Many of the country gentry, at least from the reign of Edward III, were experienced administrators, rising lawyers, prosperous businessmen, and some of these collected in the Commons as MPs. McFarlane noted that, at this level, they did not feel any great awe in the presence of the king and lords. ‘Though few, they preserved continuity in the frequent and short-lived parliaments of the fourteenth century.’ 7 Indeed, few such country gentry were not in some way employed in local government, and although not all of these knights of the shire were the rich, top few, there remained a nucleus of such men in every Parliament, ‘skilled in business and ripe in counsel’. ‘If these men were independent and outspoken in criticism, and swayed their fellow knights and burgesses, it is surely no matter for surprise. … Their existence forbids us to divide that society into powerful barons on the one hand and humble commons on the other, into leaders among the peers and led among the knights,’ observed McFarlane. 8 Although there is a lack of accord between the terminology that defined status at court and that which defined rank in provincial life, the country gentry who were not returned to Parliament, and the free tenant farmers – the franklins of the provinces – were also a literate group. Around the core of a gentleman’s household and estate officials accumulated his ‘affinity’, an indefinite mass of retainers, counsellors, the ‘bastard feudatories’ of which McFarlane wrote. 9 Such men were hired for their skills and were known to change familial allegiance when it suited their careers.