Original subtitles

The English coast in the early Middle Ages.

Each summer, pirates descended here.

They were looking for children.

Boys were sold as slaves.

Girls, as maidservants or worse.

Often by their own families.

Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester,

was one of the few to speak out against this trade in human souls.

"You would have groaned to see the files of wretches being put up for sale.

"An accursed deed that men should condemn to slavery their own flesh and blood."

In the modern world we accept,

at least in principle, that we're all equal.

Some people may be richer or have better opportunities,

but nonetheless equality is our ideal.

In the medieval world, that wasn't the view at all.

You were born and lived and died in radical inequality.

Whatever position in life you were born to, baron or knight,

peasant or slave, that was where you belonged.

For centuries, this harsh system governed the medieval world.

But a long revolution would transform relations between those with power and those with none.

Life in the early 11th century was almost unimaginably different from our own.

Inequality and oppression were part of the natural order,

ordained by God.

This was a class system of staggering extremes.

And every class had an exact price.

Just like an animal, a human life could be measured in pounds, shillings and pence.

If a person was murdered, the victim's family could pursue

the killer for compensation, known as "wergild".

Literally, "man price".

That price depended on the victim's status.

It was paid in shillings.

Five shillings was the cost of a cow.

If you killed a mere peasant, you paid 200 shillings.

The price of around forty cows.

If you killed a nobleman, you paid a hefty 1,200 shillings.

A noble's life was worth six times a peasant's.

The value of your life was determined by the class into which you were born.

Medieval writers divided society into three fixed classes or orders.

There were those who pray.

The monks and priests, about 5% of the population.

Those who fight. Another 5%, the nobles and knights.

And then all the rest.

The third order. Those who work.

A huge majority of people at the beginning of the Middle Ages

toiled as serfs on the estates of the wealthy landowners.

This was a rigid world in which your class was as much a part of you

as the colour of your skin.

If you were born a peasant, you stayed a peasant.

And the legacy of this early apartheid survives even in the language we use today.

The word "gentleman" comes from the same Latin root as our modern word "gene".

It means, literally, "someone who is well born".

Your class was literally in your genes.

Those at the bottom of the scale were born to a life of hardship.

Serfs had to work on their lord's land.

They also scratched a living from the small plots he granted them.

The 14th century poet, William Langland, described the lot of peasant women.

"They suffer much hunger and wake at midnight to card and to comb,

"to rub and to reel.

"The woe of these women who dwell in hovels

"is too sad to speak of or to say in rhyme."

The peasant class were regarded as a sort of working breeding stock.

A serf couldn't get married without his lord's permission.

And nor could he leave. He belonged to the lord's estate.

In legal terms, he was tied to the soil.

The law even stated, "Earls and barons may sell their serfs, like oxen or cattle."

And if you tried to escape from your lord's estate, you were punished.

Medieval lords went to great lengths

to recapture their runaway serfs with the full backing of the king,

who ordered his officials to arrest them and return them.

And lords claimed the right to put their serfs in stocks.

Stocks have a rather comical reputation nowadays,

but the reality was very different.

They were a humiliating and painful punishment.

Imagine what it would be like to be in here for two hours.

The cramp and discomfort.

Where, for example, did you relieve yourself?

And what if you were in here not for two hours, but for two days?

One Northumbrian peasant decided he couldn't take any more.

"His lord had frequently burdened him with heavy and wrongful claims.

"Extorting many things

"above his yearly rent.

"He gathered together all he had and set out with his wife and sons,

"his oxen, sheep and lambs."

The runaway peasant was hotly pursued by the lord and his men,

anxious to recover what they saw as their property.

"The cart and the cries of the herdsmen struck the ear.

"Oxen mooed, sheep baaed, horses neighed

"and men shouted at the animals so that the air resounded with the din."

The fugitive finally found a safe haven on the remote island of Lindisfarne.

But his story is a rare exception.

For most serfs, there was no escape.

Even in the great wildernesses of medieval England,

inequality was enforced by law.

In the Middle Ages, around a third of the country was forest.

Huge swathes of land where deer and wild boar roamed.

Wherever you lived, it was likely to be within walking distance.

But the forest was a dangerous place.

These ancient trees were the site of medieval class war.

Forest didn't mean just woodland,

but any land under the law of the forest.

Only the king, or those he favoured, had the right to hunt here.

If a piece of land that wasn't

already forest caught the king's fancy, he could turn it into one.

When William the Conqueror came across this heathland

twenty miles from his royal City of Winchester, he was enchanted.

Wouldn't it be a wonderful place to thunder across on horseback,

the hounds baying, to hunt boar and chase deer?

He turned it into his own personal pleasure ground.

Nova Foresta.

The New Forest.

To create this royal playground, between thirty and forty villages

had to be brought under the forest law.

Inhabitants were evicted and strict laws enforced.

The rich could buy hunting rights from the king.

The poor couldn't even carry hunting weapons.

The forests were policed by the king's spies - the hated Foresters.

The Foresters had a reputation for cruel tyranny.

"To them," wrote the monk Adam of Aylesham, "violence is law.

"Pillage is praiseworthy.

"Justice is hateful.

"Innocence is guilt.

"From their evil ferocity no rank or condition of man, save the king himself, can escape unharmed."

The Foresters hunted down anyone who broke the law

and brought them to trial.

The Queen's house in the New Forest

has been the site of a forest court for nearly 800 years.

One surprising remnant

from the savage forest laws of the medieval period is this stirrup.

Its purpose was to measure the size of dogs.

Every dog in the royal forest would have to pass through this stirrup.

Its head and its whole body would have to get through.

Yoyo is obviously not going to make it.

If the dog was too big,

its toes would be cut off to prevent it hunting the royal deer.

For humans, it was even crueller.

For killing a hart or a hind,

the punishment was blinding, castration or death.

The writer John of Salisbury

voiced the hatred of ordinary people for the forest laws.

"Although man is created in the image of Him,

"kings regard the beasts of the earth more highly than man.

"How many wretches have they hanged on the gallows

"for taking the flesh of wild animals?

"They do not fear to ruin a man on account of a beast."

The brutality of these laws caused great bitterness

amongst the thousands excluded from the forest.

Human beings might be unequal,

but it was still thought there was something cruelly unjust

in this shutting out of the natural world to all except the very rich.

In 1209, one man who had killed a deer, Hugh the Scot,

was pursued by Foresters.

He fled to the sanctuary of the local church.

The Foresters wanted him to stand trial.

If they'd succeeded, it would have meant the gallows.

He hid there for a month.

Then he disappeared in disguise.

He was never seen again.

Running away from the courts took a man into dangerous territory.

From that moment on, he was an outlaw.

Someone literally outside the law, a non-person.

He was known as "wolvesheved", wolf's head.

Because like the wolves of the forest,

there was no punishment for taking his life.

Outlaws turned to robbery to survive.

Some became heroes, glorified in stories and songs.

"Come all you outlaws,

"come off with me to the green wood of Belregard

"where men can live free.

"Trees and wild animals and the cool of the shade,

"far from the courts where the laws are made."

The reality for an outlaw was very different.

Trial and certain death were never far away.

It was a severe and rigid system.

Everyone had their place.

The law dictated how you lived and even where you could go.

The lives of those who worked

had little in common with the lives of the ruling classes.

Serfs bound to their lord's estates.

Outlaws treated like wolves.

Forest-dwellers killed for hunting.

And yet there is no record of major popular insurrections or revolts at this time.

There was a very good reason why.

Wherever you looked, the landscape was being transformed.

The country was a building site.

Forbidding structures were taking shape all over Europe.

The peasant class was being drafted to construct buildings designed to oppress them.

From 1066, England belonged to one man, the invading Norman king,

William the Conqueror.

He parcelled out the country

to the leading families who had fought for him.

To control their enormous estates,

they built the first stone castles in England.

They were the power bases

of the second order of society, the military aristocracy.

The medieval world was studded with castles, hundreds of them.

"The bones of the kingdom,"

as one contemporary called them.

They were built to be high,

to act as giant watchtowers over the surrounding countryside.

To see, and to be seen.

A stone castle like this would be the biggest, most expensive

and most threatening building you'd be likely to see in your life.

It was a symbol of the power of the aristocracy,

the centre of their great estates and the foundation of their military might.

The Great Hall was the centre of aristocratic life,

where nobles would sit in the midst of family,

servants, entertainers and dogs,

in surroundings of luxury unimaginable to the peasantry.

What they were used to were houses made of mud and timber.

Castles like Hedingham

were visible symbols of the knight's right to rule.

This international class of fighting men,

the aristocracy, regarded themselves as a different breed from the peasants who served them.

The word aristocracy means, as medieval scholars knew, "rule by the best people."

Quite simply,

the nobles saw themselves as a better class of being.

If land gave them their power,

it was their blue blood that entitled them to it.

Binding the aristocratic fighting class was a code of honour.

The code of chivalry.

The origins of chivalry had little to do with gallantry and romance.

It was a code of conduct that protected the aristocratic families

at the expense of everyone beneath them.

Above all, chivalry was a form of caste solidarity,

the glue that held the warring class together.

This is how the Catalan knight, Ramon Lull,

describes the Chivalric Code.

According to him, after protecting God and the king,

the knight's next duties are to go hunting, give lavish feasts

and fight in tournaments.

After that, he must ensure that he terrorises the peasantry.

"For because of the dread that the common people have of the knights,

"they labour and cultivate the earth,

"for fear lest they be destroyed."

But the central duty of the knight was to go to war.

In exchange for their castles, lands and peasants,

this class not only controlled the population,

but would be expected to fight for the king.

For them, war was the natural state of life, and warfare was ennobling.

It was in war that they could win honour, riches and even more land.

Medieval knights lived for the glory of the battlefield.

"I love the gay Eastertide

"which brings forth leaves and flowers,

"and I love the joyous songs of the birds echoing through the copse.

"But I also love to see,

"amidst the meadows, knights and horses in battle array.

"And my heart is filled with gladness when I see many vassals struck

"down together, and the horses of the dead and wounded roving at random."

Chivalry found its ideal in Edward the Black Prince.

The Black Prince was the quintessential aristocratic knight.

Deeply religious, a superb warrior and with, above everything, an unshakeable sense of honour

and duty, at least to members of his own class.

He could be merciless to anybody else.

Some people say he got his name from his distinctive armour.

burnished and darkened for battle.

But according to others, it's a memory of his ruthless campaigns in France.

There, they say, he showed that it was not his armour that was black,

but his heart.

The French city of Limoges had sworn allegiance to the Black Prince.

But in 1370, the citizens went over to the king of France.

The Black Prince was furious that they had broken their oath,

in his eyes, a treasonable act.

He set out with his army to exact revenge.

The chronicler Jean Froissart described the horrific scene.

"Pillagers ran through the town, slaying men, women and children.

"They cast themselves on their knees before the prince, begging for mercy.

"But he was so inflamed with passion and revenge that he listened to none,

"but all were put to the sword.

"Upwards of 3,000 men, women and children were put to death that day."

What happened next highlights the startling inequalities

that lay at the heart of the Code of Chivalry.

While the ordinary French townspeople were butchered,

the enemy French knights met a very different fate.

When it was clear that they'd lost, they appealed to the Black Prince.

"My lords, we are yours.

"You have vanquished us.

"Act therefore according to the laws of war."

"By God," replied the Prince's knights,

"We would do no otherwise, and accept you as our prisoners."

According to the Code of Chivalry, on the medieval battlefield

fellow knights, even on opposing sides, looked after their own class.

It was the lower orders, the commoners, who paid the price with their lives.

With their wealth and castles, their passion for war

and their martial bond of chivalry,

the medieval fighting class was a formidable force.

Aggression and bloodlust ran in the veins of the warrior caste,

and just as they themselves held down the peasantry, so too

this aggressive and competitive class had to be held in check.

The man to do this had to be unique.

Set apart from the rest of humanity.

Chosen, in fact, by God.

First, he had to be transformed, elevated above ordinary people.

It is here, at Westminster Abbey,

that this extraordinary transformation has taken place

ever since the time of William the Conqueror.

The coronation ceremony evokes the mystical names of Jesus and Solomon.

It turns a man into a leader touched by divinity.

For nearly 1,000 years, every English monarch has walked down

this aisle to be transformed by an ancient ceremony - the Coronation.

With its roots going back to the Old Testament, this was far more

than some elaborate ritual designed to impress the population.

To the medieval mind, this was the precise moment

when God singles out one person, his chosen representative on Earth.

Sheltered beneath a canopy of silk borne on four lances,

the new king made his way

towards God's intermediary, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The king knelt before this altar and swore a solemn oath.

He promised to protect the church, to repress wrongdoing and to administer justice.

As he rose, the choir began to sing.

MUSIC: "Zadok The Priest" by GF Handel

The Archbishop anointed his body with holy oil,

signifying the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the new king.

He is given the golden orb and sceptre, symbols of God's power on earth and of royal authority.

Then the crown is placed upon his head.

The transformation was now complete.

He who had been a mere mortal emerged as the lord's anointed.

An early medieval king started his reign with some considerable advantages.

He had God on his side,

he was lord of the whole country.

He could give or take away vast tracts of land, castles and property.

His subjects were at the mercy of his will.

There's no doubt that for aristocrats, staying close to the king was crucial.

But not too close.

As a contemporary wisely observed, "A king is like a fire.

"If you're too far away, you freeze.

"If you're too close, you burn."

Controlling the aristocracy

was the king's most important duty,

as the knight, Hubert de Burgh, discovered to his cost.

His vast estates, stretching from Norfolk to Somerset,

made him one of the wealthiest men in 13th-century England.

But the king blamed Hubert for the failure of his military campaigns.

He was stripped of his possessions and threatened with the tower.

A king might be lord of the whole country, but how could he exercise

real power over an entire kingdom at a time when nothing moved faster than a horse?

The average rate of travel, with good weather,

healthy mounts and luck, was no more than 35 miles a day.

To get a letter from one end of the kingdom to the other and a reply

might take three weeks, by which time an ambitious aristocrat could have seized an entire region.

For a king like Henry II, the challenge was immense.

In the 12th century, his vast empire stretched

from the highlands of Cumbria to the shores of the Mediterranean.

Like many medieval kings, he travelled.

The famously energetic Henry was always on the move.

This was a government of the roadside.

This travelling court rode from city to palace to castle, sometimes camping out in the fields.

Its purpose was not only to exercise the king's authority, but also to feed his large and hungry retinue.

Everywhere the king's court went,

it sucked up the food and supplies of the king's subjects.

According to the courtier Peter of Blois, travelling with the king could be a grim business.

"The life of the court is death to the soul.

"Every day is unpredictable.

"There may be a last minute change of plan, taking the court to some

"desolate spot where there is a roof and dinner only for the king.

"So, after wandering three or four miles through unfamiliar woodland,

"often in darkness, the courtiers

"fight with their swords for lodgings unworthy for pigs to quarrel over."

As they travelled around their kingdom, medieval monarchs were like the owners of a big family business,

keeping an eye on all the branches of the firm.

But members of a family business have a habit of falling out.

A domestic dispute in the royal household

could bring the country to its knees.

Few quarrels were more destructive

than the one between Queen Isabella and her husband, Edward II.

Born in 1295, Isabella was the sister of the King of France,

and said to be "more beautiful than the rose."

But her looks were wasted on her husband Edward.

His tastes were unconventional.

He preferred fishing to hunting,

banquets to battles,

and beautiful young men to Isabella.

His contemporaries were scandalised.

"Oh, insane foolishness of the king, to be reproved by God and men.

"He loved unlawful sex and removed from his side sweet conjugal embraces, in contempt of his nature."

The relationship between Isabella and Edward deteriorated.

He set spies in her household, and reduced her income.

When she was sent as an ambassador to France she refused to return. "A marriage,"

she wrote, "is a joining together of man and woman, maintaining the undivided habit of life.

"Now someone has come between my husband and me, trying to break that bond.

"I protest that I will not return until the intruder is removed."

A medieval queen, with her wealth and connections, was a dangerous enemy.

In 1326, Isabella returned to England with a private army.

This time, her eyes were on the throne.

The population divided between supporters of the queen

and supporters of the king, rather fewer of those.

The Church became involved.

"When the head of the kingdom becomes sick and diseased,"

preached the Bishop of Hereford, "it must of necessity be taken off

"without useless attempts to administer further remedies."

The marital conflict had become a national crisis.

Edward fled to Wales.

Isabella's vengeance was ruthless.

She started with the king's favourite, Hugh de Spencer.

The chronicler Jean Froissart described his execution.

"His member and his testicles were first cut off, because

"he was a heretic and a sodomite, even, it was said, with the king."

And the king's fate was not much better.

Edward was imprisoned at Berkeley Castle, and in September 1327 he was attacked by Isabella's men.

A contemporary described what happened next.

"He was ignominiously slain, with a red hot spit thrust into the anus."

A king's divine authority counted for little within his own home.

What started as a dispute between man and wife ended

in a royal murder, and took the country to the brink of civil war.

A violent aristocracy, endless travelling, conflict within his own family.

How was a king to keep on top of all this?

Machiavelli gave the ruler some famous advice.

"It is best to be both feared and loved.

"But if you can't be both, it's better to be feared."

In the 13th century, King John might have taken these words as his personal motto.

He was brutal and mistrustful.

But to be feared was not enough.

His disastrous reign exposed the perils of unchecked royal power

and transformed our ideas of kingship.

Every medieval king had to live, however uncomfortably, with the power of the Church.

It had wealth, land and huge influence.

This so called "first order"

of medieval society was like a state within a state.

With its own hierarchy, it was a powerful force in this world.

So the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury,

the head of the English church, was a matter of enormous political importance.

When the Pope overruled John's choice of Archbishop,

it led immediately to confrontation and crisis.

One chronicler described his reaction.

"He became nearly mad with rage

"and broke forth in words of blasphemy,

"and swore by God's teeth to send all the Church clerks to Rome

"with their eyes plucked out and their noses slit."

John was so furious at being overruled that he banished all the monks at Canterbury.

The Pope was ready to strike back.

For the first and only time in English history,

the entire apparatus of the Christian Church came to a halt.

The pulpits fell silent.

The parish priest sent home.

Church services were forbidden.

There were no marriages, and no burials in consecrated ground.

For six years, the churches of England were empty.

John fared no better with the other axis of medieval power, the aristocracy.

"He disinherited some without judgement,

"and condemned others to a dire death.

"He violated their wives and daughters.

"His only law was his despotic will."

In 1208, Matilda de Braose, the wife of a favoured courtier,

let slip in company that King John had murdered his own nephew.

John was enraged.

He seized her property, and sent an army to pursue her.

Matilda and her son were taken to Corfe Castle in Dorset.

They were locked up...

and simply left to die.

John's brutality was matched by his incompetence in war.

By 1213, he'd lost almost all his territories in France.

The French king was threatening to invade.

John came up with a desperate solution.

Hoping to get the Church back on his side, he recognised the Pope

as his feudal overlord, in effect granting him power over the kingdom.

By now, King John was facing opposition from all sides, not only from the King of France,

but also from the Church and his own aristocracy.

He had managed to alienate everyone in medieval society who mattered.

It was a textbook lesson in how NOT to exercise power in the medieval world.

The aristocracy decided it was time to rebel.

The king's power had to be curtailed.

On the 17th May 1215, the rebel barons seized London.

They accused John of acting above the law,

seizing land and killing his subjects at will.

They demanded something quite new, a contract making the king answerable to the law.

Magna Carta.

For many people, this is the source and fountain of Western liberty.

Magna Carta is one of the most famous documents in English history.

But when you actually read it, it can be rather disappointing.

It has no stirring statements about the rights of man or all men being created equal.

In fact, it has rather more to say about fish weirs on the Thames and inheritance tax.

But in the midst of all this detail, a few clauses still ring out a clear message.

"No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way,

"nor shall we attack him except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land."

Or this.

"To no-one will we sell, deny or delay, right or justice."

The reverberations of this crucial clause are with us to this day.

When we debate whether we can justify imprisoning terrorist suspects for 28 days or 56 days

or 90 days, we're referring back to the principles in this document, sealed by John in 1215.

It was a revolutionary moment.

Royal whim would no longer decide the fate of a subject.

Magna Carta was the beginning of an irreversible process,

the shifting of power away from the king towards his subjects.

Inside this building is an enormous chamber, known at the time as "the most capacious room in Christendom."

It was here that the king gathered his most powerful men when he needed to discuss matters of importance -

war, inheritance, relations with the Church.

And it was these conversations that gave this new institution its name,

from the French word "parlez", to talk.

This is Westminster Hall, the heart of the Palace of Westminster,

the birthplace of the English parliament.

Westminster Hall has been in continuous use for 900 years.

Medieval kings took advice here from favoured lords and clergy.

What we think of today as Parliament, a place where laws are made, evolved here.

Not because medieval monarchs wanted democracy,

but because they needed cash.

In the 13th century, a series of expensive wars meant the king had to increase taxes - everybody's taxes.

To avoid open revolt, he had to open up these assemblies to others beyond earls and barons,

to those a little bit further down the social scale,

eventually including members of the emerging merchant class.

From such prosaic necessity was democracy born.

But it was still only the words of the wealthy that reached up into these great rafters.

The poor remained unheard.

Despite the advances in common law, Magna Carta, the growth of parliament,

in the middle of the 14th century, one third of the population

was still living in bondage, tied to the estates of the rich.

Life had changed very little for them.

It would take an act of God to set them free.

The seeds of this dramatic change

were sown in the southern port of Melcombe Regis in July 1348.

They were planted silently, and at first went almost unnoticed,

but within a few days the impact was irreversible.

The Black Death had arrived in Britain.

A Welsh poet observing a later outbreak of the plague described its symptoms.

"We see death coming into our midst like black smoke,

"a rootless phantom that has no mercy nor fair countenance.

"Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit.

"It is terrible, seething, a painful, angry knob,

"a white lump, a small boil that spares no-one."

The disease scythed through the population.

"It made its way along the coast by Southampton,

"where almost the whole strength of the town perished.

"Few kept their beds more than two or three days, or even half a day."

Within six months, the disease had decimated cities across the country.

A chancellor of the university reported from Oxford.

"The university is ruined and enfeebled by pestilence.

"30,000 scholars,

"and now only 6,000 remain".

Within 12 months, half the population of England was dead.

The world after the plague looked dramatically different.

Entire villages lay deserted.

There was no-one to work the land.

With fewer people available, the demand for labour went up, and so did the price.

Labourers would no longer be at the beck and call of their lords.

Take the response of William of Cayburn, a Lincolnshire ploughman.

William, we are told, did not want to work, except at a daily rate.

And he did not want to eat salt meat, but fresh meat.

And on account of that, he left the village.

Such men sensed the way the wind was blowing.

The third order of medieval society, those who worked, was beginning to taste a new freedom.

The authorities panicked.

Just a year after the plague, in 1349,

they rushed through a law to freeze the wages of labourers.

They passed another stopping them from travelling to look for work.

They even brought in a law aimed at branding every person according to their status.

This new law was designed to make the class system visible.

It dictated, in very precise terms, what you could wear.

A peasant must look like a peasant, or face the consequences.

"Peasants to wear clothes made from cloth worth less than two marks,

"and not to wear anything of gold, silver or silk.

"Squires and gentlemen with land worth less than £100 a year

"to wear cloth worth less than four and a half marks.

"Knights with land worth up to £200

"to wear clothes made from cloth worth six marks."

Such desperate attempts to bind the peasants to their old way of life

only fuelled centuries of frustration.

So when the government of the new king, Richard II,

tried to raise taxes on this diminished population,

class tension reached breaking point.

Rebellion broke out.

The rebels attacked hated symbols of power.

They burned piles of legal documents,

to destroy any record of their subjection.

In Cambridge, the university archives were thrown onto a bonfire,

while the rebels cried, "Away with the learning of the clerks! Away with it!"

Then violence came to the capital.

Word of the rebellion spread fast, and on 12th June 1381,

50,000 peasants, according to one chronicler,

descended on the fields of Blackheath,

waiting for the order to attack the city which lay below.

The restless crowd were roused into a murderous mood by the radical priest John Ball.

"Good people, things cannot go right in England

"and never will until goods are held in common and there are

"no more serfs and gentlefolk, but we are all one and the same.

"They are clad in velvet while we go dressed in coarse cloth.

"They have wines, spices and good bread.

"We have straw and we drink water.

"They have shelter and ease, we have hardship and toil, the wind and the rain.

"Let us go to the king and show him how we are oppressed, and tell him

"that we want things to be changed, or else we will change them ourselves."

The incredible was happening.

The fundamental principle of inequality was being challenged.

The natural order was under threat.

Nothing like this had ever been seen in England before.

The next day 100,000 people marched on London.

They burned down the Savoy Palace, on the site of today's Savoy Hotel.

Then they headed for the Tower of London, led by Wat Tyler.

They were after one of the chief architects of the hated Poll Tax, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Archbishop had passed the previous night in confession

here in St John's Chapel,

anxiously awaiting the arrival of the rebels, constantly asking, "When will they come?"

He spent the time deep in prayer, chanting psalms and the holy litany.

And as he said the words, "Omnes sancti, orate pro nobis" -

"Pray for us, all the saints,"

the rebels burst in and seized him from his prayers.

They dragged the Archbishop through the passages

by his arms and his hood to Tower Hill,

where, along with the Treasurer of England, he was beheaded.

The heads, placed on stakes, were paraded through the city.

By the end of the day,

160 people had been beheaded, and London was in chaos.

The rebels, following their leader, Wat Tyler,

met with the young King Richard, only 14 at this time.

In an outrageous breach of protocol, Wat Tyler offered the king his hand,

saying "Brother, be of good comfort."

You can imagine the waves of hatred emanating from the nobility.

No peasant had ever spoken to a king like that.

This was a critical moment in which the power structures of the medieval world seemed about to shift.

The king was so outnumbered by the rebels

that he was forced to listen to Tyler's extraordinary demands.

An end to serfdom.

No lords except the king.

The property of the Church to be divided amongst the people.

Even more extraordinary, the king agreed.

Fighting broke out.

Tyler was killed by the king's soldiers.

The terrified rebels fled.

The leaders were beheaded, their heads placed on stakes on London Bridge.

The young king told his discontented subjects just what he thought of them.

"Serfs you were, and serfs you are still.

"You will remain in bondage as long as we live,

"and by God's grace, rule over the realm.

"We will strive to suppress you

"so your servitude will be an example to posterity.

"People like you will always have your misery as an example

"before their eyes, and will fear to do the things you have done."

His words sound like the echo of a vanishing world.

Social change was unstoppable.

The forces that had held all the classes in check for so long were weakening.

The Black Death had cracked the foundations of the hierarchy.

Within the 15th century, serfdom disappeared from England.

And as new cities grew, a class made rich on business,

law and trade, began to flex its muscles.

This new merchant class was hungry for influence.

Ewelme, in Oxfordshire, was the home of Alice Chaucer,

the granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer, the writer.

Through clever marriages and contacts at court,

this merchant family began to rise in the world.

Alice could afford to build a manor house, a church, a school, even an almshouse for the poor.

Great charitable institutions like this

were not uncommon in the Middle Ages,

but they were usually the preserve of the very, very rich.

It's a sign of how far the Chaucer family had come in just two generations.

Just what Alice's family achieved

can be found in the church at Ewelme.

This wonderful alabaster tomb

is more than a memorial to Alice and her religious devotion.

It's a statement that the Chaucer family had arrived

at the very top of English society.

When Alice died in 1475,

she had married off her son to the king's sister.

Her once modest family had been catapulted into royal circles.

Her tomb proudly displays this dazzling ascent.

Crests of all the powerful families who, through marriage,

carried the Chaucers up the social scale, are on show.

Including the royal crest of Alice's daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Plantagenet.

The inscription on her tomb reads,

"Orate pro anima Serenissimae Principessae Aliciae."

"Pray for the soul of the most serene princess Alice".

An outrageous piece of self-promotion.

She was the granddaughter of a wine merchant's son.

Her grandson was in line to the throne of England.

THAT is social climbing.

By the late Middle Ages,

your place in society was no longer dictated entirely by your birth.

Families like the Chaucers

were moving into places once reserved for the aristocracy.

Blood and land were no longer the sole path to power.

Skill and ambition could take you to the top.

By the end of the Middle Ages,

England was a very different country from what it had been 500 years before.

Slavery had disappeared. "Wergild", man price, was a distant memory.

The serfs were now free men,

and the power of the king was checked by law and parliament.

A free and equal society?

Certainly not. But one that a knight from five centuries earlier,

or even a serf on that knight's estates,

would scarcely have recognised.

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