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LOCI IBRO VERIT

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LOCI E LIBRO VERITATUM

PASSAGES SELECTED FROM

GASCOIGNE'S THEOLOGICAL DICTIONARY

ILLUSTRATING THE CONDITION OF CHURCH AND STATE

I403 — 1458

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS, M.P.

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The Manuscript from which the following extracts are made belongs to Lincoln College, Oxford. It consists of two folio volumes, of 680 and 692 pages respectively, and is written in double columns on vellum. Some of the initial letters are illuminated with great care. A few pages are left blank. From eight to ten scribes, apparently French, were occupied in transcribing Gascoigne's papers, and an estimate, in the distribution of the vellum, was doubtlessly made as to the work which each scribe had to perform. The work was subsequently revised, though not completely, partly for the purpose of correcting errors, partly for that of noting such passages as appeared to be of immediate interest. But for some reason or the other, the corrections and marginal sigla are more frequent in the earlier than they are in the later pages of the Manuscript. The examination of the text appears to have satisfied the object of those who undertook it long before it was completed.

The transcript of Gascoignes papers was made in pursu- ance of the directions contained in his will. He orders that an exact copy of his papers should be made on vellum, at the expense of Sion Abbey, and that they and the copy should be deposited in the monastery. It is plain from this that his real estate having passed to his sister or sisters, and the

vi PREFACE.

legacies in his will being satisfied, he must have devised the residue of his personalty to the new foundation, which was dedicated among other saints to Bridget of Sweden, a per- sonage whom he seems to have devoutly revered, and the acts of whose life were written out at his expense for the use of Sion Abbey. The satisfaction of Gascoigne's directions must have involved very considerable charges, not less, I am per- suaded, than £50 in money of the time, and probably more. It was also in all likelihood a very lengthy as well as a costly undertaking. But the scribes fulfilled their orders exactly, sometimes even copying the same passage twice over, after a short interval, and certainly omitting nothing, for many entries occur in which the same subject is treated in nearly identical words. The work, in short, is a precise transcript of the papers and extracts which Gascoigne had been making between 1433, when, as he tells us (p. 129), he commenced his labours, and 1457, when, after Dec. 17, he writes that Pecok's books had been burnt at Carfax, Oxford, by Dr. Chandler, Warden of New College, and Chancellor of the University, this being the last entry which is dated.

The Manuscript is in excellent preservation, the ink having hardly faded in any place, and the vellum being as clean as when it left the scribes' hands. The present binding is appa- rently of the seventeenth century ; but that enemy of books, the binder, having shorn the edges in order to put his foolish paint on them, has in places mutilated certain additions and corrections of the margin. One or two of these, occurring in passages which I have selected, have been conjecturally filled up, but with no difficulty, e.g. p. 11.

The book to which Gascoigne gave the name ' Liber

PREFACE. vil

Veritatum' (pp. 12, 129), is a collection of passages illustrating or explaining a number of words, in a rude alphabetical order, from ' Absolucio ' to ' Virginitas.' Occasionally an article is inserted out of its place. Sometimes, as in the largest ex- tract which I have made, the position of the passage is due to the leading word in the heading, i.e. 'Flumina' (p. 53). In the vast majority of cases, the interpretation or comment which the author makes is founded on, or confirmed by, a quotation from some one of the Latin fathers, especially SS. Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory, and the English divine, Grosteste. But the author quotes a very large number of authorities, and must have been possessed, as we know to be the fact from other evidence, of a very considerable library for the times. During his lifetime he gave many books to Oriel, Balliol, Lincoln, and Durham Colleges.

I have read the Manuscript through ; but, except to one who might desire to know what were the studies of a fifteenth century divine, there is little to interest any reader in the merely theological part of the work. The authors with whom Gascoigne was familiar have not been lost. The books which he studied are, many of them, still in existence. The volume from which I have quoted the extract which comes last in the present work, and is represented in facsimile on the title-page, once belonged to Grosteste, and is full of that prelates marginal notes. It subsequently became Gascoigne's property, and was given by him, as an entry on the first page in his own hand informs us, to Durham College. After the Reformation and the suppression of Durham, now the site of Trinity College, it came into the possession of a member of Gloucester Hall, who gave it to the Bodleian Library.

viii PREFACE.

There is no record as to how the ■ Liber Veritatum' came into the possession of Lincoln College. At the time of Gas- coigne's death, Lincoln must have been a very poor and obscure foundation. Gascoigne had indeed a great respect for Fleming, the Bishop of Lincoln, who designed, it appears, a considerable establishment of persons who should devote themselves to the refutation of Wiklif s heresies, opinions which Fleming had in his youth embraced and defended, but sub- sequently abandoned. But the Bishop of Lincoln died before the foundation was even settled, and left his scholars very poorly off. I have no doubt that, had his intended benefaction taken effect, Gascoigne could hardly have omitted to notice the creation of a college which was expressly founded in order to attack the teaching of a man, for whom my author over and over again expresses the greatest abhorrence.

I can only offer a conjecture as to the cause which led to the placing of Gascoigne's work in Lincoln College Library. The second founder of Lincoln College was Thorrias Rother- ham, successively Bishop of Lincoln and Archbishop of York. This Rotherham had been one of the first fellows of King's College, Cambridge, and before the downfall of the House of Lancaster had been constantly erriployed by the College on their business with the King. He does not appear, how ever, to have allowed his gratitude to Henry to interfere with his promotion, for, like the rest of the bishops, he de- serted to the rival House as soon as its fortunes were in the ascendant.

As Bishop of Lincoln, in which diocese Oxford was then situated, Rotherham had a considerable influence or authority in the University. It is true that the charters of the Uni-

PREFACE. ix

versity gave it great independence ; and, in particular, an Act of Parliament at the beginning of Edward the Fourth's reign confirms a charter which the Commons, sixty years before, compelled Henry the Fourth to rescind. But it is reasonable to conclude that the bishop might have been quite within his powers in inspecting a work on Theology. It is certain that Gascoigne's Manuscript was inspected, and that the sigla which are put against many political passages in the transcript are intended to invite attention. Mr. Coxe, of the Bodleian Library. informs me that they are of the same age with the Manuscript.

I can well imagine that the bishop argued as follows : ' Gascoigne was a man of undoubted piety, orthodoxy, and zeal, an ornament of the University, and a considerable bene- factor to various colleges within it. But he is also exceedingly outspoken. He comments on persons and events, persons still living, events still green, with a plainness of censure and comment which is dangerous. He aspires, as he tells us, to teach posterity what are the shortcomings, the vices, the errors, the crimes of considerable personages in Church and State. Let him teach posterity, and let the present age be spared the exposure of its misdeeds.' In this way, as I con- jecture, he thought that the most convenient means for avoid- ing publicity was to drop the volumes into the Library of Lincoln College.

The Manuscript has been consulted, but only cursorily. by Anthony Wood and Hearne. Neither appear to have used it for much more than to transcribe notices about the University of Oxford, and not for all these. Had Hearne known what was to be found in the volumes, I have little

b

x PREFACE.

doubt that the publisher of ' William of Wyrcestre ' would have searched in these volumes for a description of society in England during the first half of the fifteenth century, and would have made those extracts which I have col- lected.

I have appended to the passages taken from the Lincoln Manuscript certain excerpta from other Manuscripts, to one of which, that of St. Augustine's ' De Civitate Dei/ I have referred above. The other volume has a curious and suggestive history. It contained originally three different works, bound together. The first is a Latin Psalter, annotated by Gascoigne in his earliest hand. The second is an account of the execution of Scrope, written by Gascoigne himself, and is, I believe, the origin of the information we have as to the particulars of that event. On the loose leaves of this second treatise are some entries made by Gascoigne, which I have also transcribed. The third was a Hebrew Psalter, which has been taken out of the volume, probably a century ago, when the Library was putting all its Hebrew books together. It is to be regretted that a rage for uniformity has severed a volume from its place in the book where Gascoigne had originally placed it.

This Hebrew Psalter is, I am informed, a Manuscript of the fifteenth century, and was probably written in England. The margin is written all over by Gascoigne, who was plainly endeavouring to make himself master of the language : indeed the MS. informs us that he began his Hebrew studies in 1431. He might have found a teacher on the spot, if the tradition which I have often heard is correct, that when the Jews had no legal settlement in England from the reign of Edward the First to the Protectorate, a little Hebrew colony

PREFACE. xi

continued to exist in Oxford under the protection of those great academical privileges which the University possessed, privileges which were never in peril, except for a short time, when Oxford was too eager in the defence of Wiklif, which were even re- spected and confirmed by so absolute a sovereign as Henry the Eighth.

Gascoignes handwriting is not good, if one can infer from his later notes. Hence the scribes had some difficulty, to judge from the errors and misspellings of names which they commit, in reading and transcribing his papers. These misspellings are often, we may expect, the shifting use of a period, in which names were written phonetically at one time and traditionally at another. I do not know whether I am right in guessing that my author's indignation against the unlucky Bishop of Chichester led him at last to almost uniformly write his name Pacok instead of Pecok, and thus to compare him with the noisy bird in fine feathers, whom our forefathers took as the type of unwarrantable conceit. But in any case, the confusion in spelling is probably to be explained by the uncertainty of orthography, and the blunders of a foreign scribe.

Gascoigne's work has a further interest in being nearly the last book written in the familiar Latin of the Middle Aees,

o

and before the revival of classical correctness. Judged by the standard even of the latinity of St. Augustine or St. Jerome, with whose writings the author is so familiar, it is amazingly barbarous. ' Utor' is often used as a passive ; 'odio' is a common use of ' odi,' and English phrases are literally rendered in Latin words. The student of English may discover the in- fluence of local as well as general idioms in my author's latinity. And yet, in the learning of his time, Gascoigne was thought

b 2

xii PREFACE.

to be very eminent by his contemporaries. I ought, however, to infer that many of the obscurities are solecisms of the text and due to the copyists.

My reader will find the same story told over and over again, but almost always with some additions. I have some- times thought that Gascoigne did not like to tell all the facts at once, but preferred to say what he wished piecemeal, from caution, or because the circumstances did not occur to him simultaneously. Thus he speaks of the patronage which was heaped on Fulk de Birmingham over and over again, but generally with some fresh characteristic. The variations in the narrative are not contradictory, but correlate. When he dwells on the scandals of Pecok's teaching, especially on the laxity with which this divine interpreted episcopal duty, he almost always adds something new to the story. Most of what he says of this bishop was written when Pecok was in the height of his reputation and influence, for the indignation which arraigned and condemned him was, as we shall see, immediately connected with Pecok's letter to the Lord Mayor of London, Cannyng.

The longest extract which I have printed, the commentary on the seven streams of Babylon, and therein the denunciation of the vices of his age, is probably a sermon. In the course of it Gascoigne even rises to eloquence. It is by far the best specimen of his style, and for its bold denunciation, from an orthodox point of view, of the abuses in the practice of the Church, from the action of the Papal Court to the slovenly conduct of English ecclesiastics, is an exceedingly instructive picture, drawn by a pious and zealous man, of the faults of his time, and the dangers which he saw to be imminent.

In printing these extracts, I have regularly and carefully

PREFACE. xiii

compared the copy with the original Manuscript. That some errors of transcription have crept in is possible, though I have taken all pains to avoid this inconvenience. Greater difficulties arise from the errors of the scribes who had been selected to write out Gascoigne's notes, but whose labours were only par- tially revised. There remain other difficulties in Gascoigne's own style, which is generally involved, and frequently ungram- matical. I have only in rare cases altered a word, and then only because the error was manifest.

It seemed desirable to retain the original spelling through- out, for historical reasons. To this rule I have made only one exception. There are no diphthongs used in the original, and perhaps it would have been better if I had, in my copy, followed the author in this particular. But in commencing the work it struck me that if I did so, I should import needless ambiguities in the transcript, and consequently, I continued the practice with which I have commenced my copy. The same exact system of transcription has been employed with the Arabic and Roman numerals, which are used indifferently, and are sometimes treated as adjectives, sometimes written as in our own day. Arabic numerals, which appear, as far as my researches inform me, to have been introduced in accounts as early as the latter end of the thirteenth century, do not prevail over Roman numerals till the beginning of the seventeenth. The use of Roman figures necessitated a clumsy system of calculation, which is wrell known to those who are familiar with old accounts, but must have been sufficiently convenient for the audit of receipt and expenditure. But it is singular that so obvious a convenience as decimal notation made such very slow progress.

xiv PREFACE.

The special value of these extracts from Gascoigne's Manu- script resides in the fact, that they are singularly illustrative of the darkest period in the social and political history of England. Other contemporary materials are, first, the Rolls of Parliament, which have never been sufficiently examined ; next, the dry Chronicle of Wyrcestre ; next, the pedantic dissertations of Whetehamstede ; and lastly, the Paston Letters. For the rest, the student of history must rely on the narratives of the Tudor annalists. In Gascoigne we have an estimate of English society, made by a contemporary who had considerable op- portunities for forming a judgment, and possessed sufficient fearlessness in dealing with men and facts. His words may sometimes seem to be those of a disappointed man, often of an angry man ; but of his genuine piety, and sincere desire for the reformation of society, there can be no doubt.

Other manuscripts of Gascoigne, and probably the original of these volumes, were in the Cotton Library (Otho), and perished when the house in Little Dean's Yard, where the library was placed, was consumed.

JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS.

HOUSE OF COMMONS,

Jan. 31, 1881.

C O N T E N T S.

PAGE

PREFACE V

INTRODUCTION xvii

LOCI E LIBRO VERITATUM I

EXCERPTA MSS. GASCOIGNII . . - . . . . 225

NOTES 233

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE / 2$$

INDEX 241

INTRODUCTION.

Thomas Gascoigne, from whose 'Liber Veritatum/ or 'Dictio- narium Theologicum/ the extracts contained in the following pages have been collected, was the eldest or only son of Richard and Beatrice Gascoigne (p. 31), and was born at their manor of Hunslet in 1403 (p. 192). Hunslet was a hamlet then near, and now part of, the town of Leeds. It appears that Gascoigne had two sisters, one who became Lady Ros (p. 229), another who was married to a cadet of the house of Nevile, Lord Westmoreland (p. 202). and carried the estate into that family. The manor of Hunslet remained in this branch of the Xeviles till the head of the family joined the insurrection of the Northern Earls in 1569, when the estate was forfeited to the crown.

There is a constant tradition that Richard Gascoigne was brother of the famous chief justice who refused to try Archbishop Scrope on a charge of treason ; and, according to a less credible story, having been insulted on the bench by Henry of Monmouth, committed the wild Prince of Wales to prison. My author makes no allusion to such a relationship, though it seems as if the passage in the account of Scrope's execution, in which the answer of the chief justice to the king's request that he should try Scrope for treason is given, must have been supplied by the speaker to the writer. The name Gascoigne is frequent among the Yorkshire families of the fifteenth century.

Gascoigne's father must have died when he was young, as he says that he lived on his patrimony from his youth (p. 196). He does not tell us in what year he came to Oxford ; but as he graduated doctor of divinity in 1434, and the statutes of the University prescribed that eleven years should intervene between the status of the regent master and admission to the doctors degree, he must have taken the earlier degree in 1423, and as the master's degree was reached seven years after matriculation. he must have commenced his residence in

c

xvni INTRODUCTION.

Oxford not later than 1416, when he was thirteen years of age. So early an age was in accordance with academical custom in the fifteenth century, and indeed for long after. It is probable that he prosecuted his studies as a commoner of Oriel College. He resided in that College in later life, in a set of rooms which he hired of the Society ; for in the register of the College, under the date Feb. 8, 1449, we read that in consideration of a gift of money towards building, and books towards furnishing their library, the Provost and Scholars of Oriel College grant Dr. Gascoigne the use of his rooms rent free for the time of his natural life, but without the power of subletting them. The extent of Gascoigne's private resources excluded him from the benefit of a fel- lowship. It was at Oriel that Gascoigne became acquainted with Praty, bishop of Chichester, whom he mentions with praise, with Ly Hert, or Lye Hart, Provost of Oriel in 1443-5, and afterwards Bishop of Norwich, whom he condemns, and Pecok, Fellow of Oriel, and succes- sively Bishop of St. Asaph and Chichester, whom he cordially detests.

Gascoigne was ordained priest by Bishop Fleming in 1427 (p. 179) in the prebendal church of Thame. His earliest, and for a long time his only preferment was the rectory of Dighton (p. 175), a parish which I cannot identify, beyond the fact stated by Gascoigne, that it was in the diocese of York. In 1432 he was offered the chancellorship of York Cathedral (pp. 51, 194), on the death of John Kexby, by Kemp, then Archbishop, but declined it on the ground that the in- come of the office was derived from the impropriation of two benefices, and therefore was enriched at the expense of the parishioners and parochial clergy of those two livings. In 1445, again, he was offered the rectory of S. Peter's, Cornhill, (on the election of four doctors in theology, and the nomination of the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and citizens of London,) at that time probably one of the most valuable pieces of preferment in the kingdom. He accepted the presentation (p. 232) ; but within the year, on St. Matthias' day (Feb. 24), he resigned it absolutely, feeling that his health was too infirm for the duties of the office, and being firmly resolved, as he tells us, to undertake the re- sponsibility of no church whose services he was not able to satisfy personally. In 1448 he was made prebend of Combe Decima, in the Cathedral of Wells, by Beckyngton, bishop of that see, and previously

IXTRODUCTIOX. xix

a fellow of New College. This prebend was worth (p. 194) only eight marks yearly.

It appears that from his matriculation to his death, Gascoigne re- sided almost constantly in Oxford. He was Chancellor for the first time in 1434 (p. 116). In 1436 the University bestowed on him the special title of ' Doctor Catholicus/ and thanked him for his sermons on Easter day, and the Wednesday in Easter week. He was Chancellor again in 1442, in 1443, when he is styled ' Cancellarius natus,' and in 1445. It appears that (p. 201) he was elected even more frequently, but that he declined to hold the offke, if, as seems, he is referring to himself in the passage. In 1443 ne procured from the king a charter, or letters patent, to the effect that the Chancellor of Oxford should always be ex officio a justice of the peace, and in the same year carried a statute by which compurgation should be disallowed in the University court, except at the Chancellor's discretion.

Gascoigne died on some day between March 12, 1458, the date of his will, and March 22, on which the will was proved. The in- scription on his Brass in the chapel at New College, where he was buried, stated that he died on the morrow of S. Gregory, i.e. March 13. The inscription was copied by Anthony Wood, but has disappeared. The burial of Gascoigne in the antechapel of New College was probably a high compliment to his reputation. It was rare, perhaps unprece- dented, that any one who was not of the Society was honoured by sepulture within its church. The arms of his family, Gascoigne of Hunslet, were engraved on his Brass.

The crooked ways, and the gross breach of faith by which Henry the Fourth deposed the unlucky and unpopular Richard, and set aside the issue of Philippa, disturbed the reign of that king. He succeeded in putting down the formidable insurrection of the Percies, who had been his accomplices, and yet was unable to vanquish Owen Glendower in Wales. He had to conciliate the clergy by the appearance at least of being the patron of orthodoxy; and inserted chapters in the statutes of the year, in answer to their petitions, under which the preachers were silenced, by limiting the right of preaching to those who were licensed by the bishop ; and heretics were condemned to the flames, by compelling the secular officer, the sheriff in the counties, and the

c 2

xx INTRODUCTION.

rnayor or bailiffs of the cities and towns, to put into execution the decrees of the bishop's court. Universal suffrage was granted in the counties, and the language of the Commons was bold and even minatory. No English sovereign, perhaps, whose life ended naturally, had a more troubled and unhappy reign. He was born in the same year as the cousin whom he deposed, and died before he reached the 47th of his age. The attitude taken towards him, in what Gas- coigne calls the letters patent of Northumberland, Edmund Mortimer, and Bardolf, is that of charging him with perjuries, calling on him to resign his kingdom to the right line, claiming that the Iords of the kingdom should be judged by their peers, that the king's council should be reformed, that the sheriffs should be freely elected, and that the privileges of Parliament should be respected. These articles, copied by Gascoigne in his earlier hand, are interpolated in his latest, and it seems clear that, in the minds of many persons, the succession of the sixth Henry was tainted by the usurpations of the fourth. There is not indeed the least hint in the ' Liber Veritatum' that the claims of Richard of York were conceived to be superior to those of the reigning monarch, or that the misfortunes of Henry's reign should be a pretext for his deposition, still less that the young prince, Edward of Lancaster, as the partisans of the rival house at last affirmed, was supposititious, or even worse.

The defects in Henry's title, the perjuries or the harshness by which he had gained and kept his crown, the mean concessions by which he had disarmed or conciliated opposition, were forgotten in the splendid career of his son. Henry of Monmouth was twelve years old at the time of Richard's deposition, and sixteen when he fought at Shrewsbury against the Percies. Perhaps the stories of his wild youth are exaggerations, suggested by the stern morality of his riper years. Never has an English king been more thoroughly popular than Henry the Fifth. A conspiracy against him in the beginning of his reign was put down without difficulty, and with little scandal. It is stated that Henry was induced to undertake the conquest of France, or at least the recovery of Normandy and Guienne, at the instance of Chichele, the newly-appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, in order to ward off a threatened attack on the temporalities of the regular

LXTRODUCTION. xxi

clergy. But this is improbable. Henry seems to have entered on the French war, partly with the view of recovering at least that which had been lost by the rupture of the peace of Bretigny, but quite as much with the object of chastising the frightful scandals of the French Court and of French society. The language in which he announces and justifies his purposes is like that of a Puritan commander in the early days of the Civil War, as if he were one who was sent by God to chastise the guilty. Severely orthodox, scrupulously just, a model of private virtue, of dauntless heroism, of consummate military skill, and favoured by unexampled good fortune, he united all the qualities which the English admire, but have hardly ever witnessed together in their most popular kings. Henry urged on the assemblage of the Council of Constance, in order to effect the union of the distracted church. If his conscience would not allow him to spare the heretic, his bene- volence induced him to condescend to argue with the sectaries, whose opinions, as he believed, were ruinous to those who held them, invited the vvrath of God, and threatened the downfall of society His army, well drilled and invincible, was, as far as the king could make it, as secure in its own discipline, as confident in the genius of its general, and as pious as CromwelFs Ironsides, but as severe in the hour of battle and of victory. But the English army under the Plantagenet kings rarely suffered a defeat. Unlike the national levies of other countries, it was from an early period an enlisted, picked, drilled, and highly effective service. The church and the king's army were the two roads to fame and wealth, by which a peasant or even a serf could rise to a bishopric or a knighthood. In the end, this army was divided between rival partisans, who fought with intermissions through the thirty years' war of succession, till, worn into two fragments, the relics encoun- tered at Bosworth, and the succession was changed again.

The war with France was continued with hardly a truce from August II, 1415, when Henry the Fifth sailed from Southampton, till July 17, 1453, when Talbot and his son fell before Chatillon. It did not exhaust the wealth of England, but it demoralised the English people, and gave occasion to the civil war, which, without materially diminishing the national resources, destroyed the English nobility, exterminated the military classes, weakened the spirit of enterprise, disturbed for more

xxii INTRODUCTION.

than a century the equipoise of the constitution, and gave the opportunity for a despotism, which in the hands of Henry the Eighth so impoverished England as to make it, till the time of Cromwell, a third-rate power in Europe. The beginnings of the civil strife were witnessed, its causes discovered, and its effects in some measure predicted by Gascoigne. And though in his estimate of these causes, my author dwells almost too exclusively on ecclesiastical abuses, it will not be difficult for us to see that those abuses were at once an effect and a cause, and that the greediness, selfishness, neglect of duty, and political perfidy which cha- racterised the churchmen of the fifteenth century were possible in the clergy by reason that they were even more rife and more scandalous in the laity.

The war which Henry commenced was carried on vigorously by John, Duke of Bedford, who was two years younger than the king. There was only a year's interval between each of the three younger sons, Thomas, Duke of Clarence, having been born in 1388, and Humphrey of Gloucester, the youngest of the four, in 1389. Thomas had been killed at Beauge in 142 1. The administration of home affairs was generally in the hands of the younger brother, whose impetuous temper and rash acts embroiled him with his uncle, the Bishop of Winchester. These differences began as early as 1424, and lasted with little intermission till the Protector's suspicious death in 1446. Gascoigne tells us that it was owing (p. 155) to the intrigues and deceits of Beaufort that Otho Colonna (Martin V) was elected to the Papacy in 141 7, instead of a better man, at the Council of Constance, by certain cardinals and certain deputies of the Council. The election of Martin V was the cause of grave scandals in the Roman Court (p. 154), and might have caused serious complications between England and the Papacy (p. 17) had not the Pope's death occurred.

But a curse seemed to hang over the House of Lancaster. The three sons of Henry the Fourth married and were childless, two of them, the Dukes of Bedford and Gloucester, having married twice. In 1446 it seemed that the family would become naturally extinct, unless issue might be expected from the King and Queen who had been married in the summer of 1445. But no child was born of this marriage for more than eight years, when the Queen gave birth on October 23, 1453, to Edward of

INTRODUCTION. xxiii

Lancaster, during the time of the King's insanity. Between the death of Gloucester and the birth of Edward, the possible rivals for the throne, should it become vacant, were the niece of the Duke of Somerset, whose family, it appears. had been legitimated without reservation, the nearest representative of the house of Lancaster, and the Duke of York, who had assuredly never forgotten his superior claim to the throne, and was looked on by all parties as first prince of the blood.

The episode of Joan of Arc was vexatious, and led to the raising of the siege of Orleans, and the occupation of Rheims. But the English held possession of Paris till April, 1436, and of Normandy and Guienne for a much longer period. But in fact, no army of English, however numerous and however well appointed, could have kept France in sub- jection. It would have been necessary to garrison every town with English troops, at least in other than the hereditary dominions of the Plantagenet kings. and to have secured the constant services of a strong ally on the mainland. For a time the English had such an ally in the Duke of Burgundy. But when the alliance was broken by the raid on Calais, and the death of Bedford, the hope of occupying France was gone, and the utmost which the exertions of the English could expect was the retention of Normandy and Guienne, the connecting link of which was Anjou and Maine.

The possession of Normandy was, according to the policy of Eng- land in the fifteenth century, and indeed for a long time afterwards, of signal importance. It enabled the English navy to keep the mastery of the narrow seas, and the control over those seas was equivalent to the control of all commerce by sea. This is shown with great clear- ness and detail in that remarkable political tract, published in the Rolls' Series, among other political songs and ballads of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, by the late Mr. Wright, under the title of ' A Libel of English Policy.' The whole mercantile marine of Europe was engaged in coasting along France to the Low Countries, with the exception of that, — already almost lost, owing to the decline of the Greek empire, — which passed up the Danube, and that which was carried on the highway of the Rhine. The occupation of two strongly fortified ports at the narrowest part of the Channel, at Dover and Calais, was the key of the position, and the repulse of the Flemings from before Calais, in

xxiv INTRODUCTION.

August, 1435, was great cause of pride in English prowess, though it fore- shadowed Burgundy's desertion. But the occupation of Normandy was hardly of less importance. If Normandy were in the hands of England, she could prevent piracy or privateering in the numerous ports of that duchy, and could keep in check the corsairs of Brittany, who were for many a year after that time the pests of the coasting trade. Long after the discovery of the New World, and that of the Cape passage, had made the ancient routes of commerce less important, the retention of Calais was supposed to be the key to England's maritime power, and a bridle on the Netherlands and on France. A century after Calais was lost, Cromwell consulted that old instinct of England which desired a fortified port on the French and Flemish frontier, by the seizure and fortification of Dunkirk, the sale of which to Louis the Fourteenth was conceived to be a political crime and a political blunder of the gravest kind.

The mastery over the narrow seas was not only a political security, but in the opinion of the age, a mercantile necessity. The principal articles of English exportation at the time were wool and hides. The wool trade was the chief source of English wealth, and almost the only means by which England could acquire possession of foreign products. It may seem strange to us now, but England was almost the only European country from which this absolute necessary of life, second only to food, could be procured. A small quantity, and that, as we are told, of a quality which was unworkable except after mixing with English pro- duce, was obtained by a tedious sea voyage from Spain. England in the fifteenth century had the monopoly of the wool market to a greater extent than even the United States had of cotton before the outbreak of the war between the slave-owners and the Commonwealth of the States. The free export of wool from England meant that the looms of Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp, and a hundred other thriving Flemish towns, should go on merrily, that employment should be abundant, that profits should accumulate, that wealth should be diffused. Restraints upon this article meant the decay of industry, discontent, and serious outbreaks. The basis of those negotiations with the Low Countries, which began with Philip Van Arteveldt, and were best illustrated, in the days of Henry the Seventh, by the success of the Intercursus Magnus, was English wool, its free or restrained export.

INTRODUCTION. xxv

But its uses as a financial instrument were even more remarkable. It is the only produce which I have been able to find, in the long range of my enquiries into the history of finance, which was, in the middle ages, so absolute a necessity and so absolute a monopoly that an export duty could be levied on it, without diminishing the demand for it, in the foreign market. Financiers have always desired to find some product on which they could levy such a tax as the foreign consumer would be constrained to pay. Except in the case of English wool, from the thirteenth to the end of the sixteenth century, the search has been as profitless and as disappointing as that for the philosopher's stone or the quadrature of the circle. But during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, English wool satisfied every condition of that financial problem which is seeking to impose an import duty that is to be paid by the consumer. It was a necessity. There was no substitute for it. It could hardly be economised. There was no other source of supply. The hundred years' war was carried on out of the taxation of wool, and the tax was paid by those upon whom war was made. There is a remarkable petition in the rolls of Parliament under the year 1454 (32 Henry VI) in which the various qualities of English wool are specified. They are forty-four in number, and differ in value from the highest, 260 shillings the sack, the price of Hereford produce in the neighbourhood of Leominster, to 50 shillings the sack, at which the worth of Sussex wool is fixed. These, beyond question, are the rates at which the brands of English produce were sold in the Flemish markets. English wool again was the means by which the Roman Court was enabled to extract the enormous revenues which it gained from England in the pre-reformation period. Gascoigne (p. 52) com- plains of the manner in which England was robbed by the agency of the Lombard exchangers. Their operations were carried on by com- mercial instruments based on English wool and Flemish cloth.

While the passions, roused by successful war and by the reverses of war, were being called into activity, while the strife abroad was languishing, but was to be succeeded by a fiercer strife at home, there was one figure, the chief person in English life, whom every one revered, whom no one consulted, and whom every one who could do so, pillaged. To the English of the fifteenth century the son of the great warrior,

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xxvi INTRODUCTION.

Henry the Fifth, vvas a saint. He was not a monk, as some have said, for the English monk of the fifteenth century was, as a rule, a gross and greedy voluptuary, whom no one respected, but no one yet saw how to get decently rid of, except piecemeal, as for example when Waynflete was founding his college at Oxford, and Alcock his at Cam- bridge. Nor did Henry affect asceticism, or pretend to dispense with natural affections. He loved his mother, he was warm-hearted to all his kinsfolk, he loaded the man who was afterwards his rival with benefits, he heaped favours on the Neviles, who owed everything to his dynasty, and on the Mowbrays, who had been the hereditary foes of his family, as well as on the Beauforts, the Percies, and the Poles, who were his para- sites and his ruin. He was gentle and affectionate to the imperious woman whose fortunes were tied to his own, whose mad fury destroyed his dynasty by putting an end for ever at Coventry to all hopes of reconciliation between the factions, whose northern army, by its devastations, set all Eastern England and London against the house of Lancaster. He bore no malice to the savage old pedagogue War- wick, who seems to have scourged all spirit out of him in his youth. Henry was the only English saint of the fifteenth century.

As a king, Henry was the most unlucky of English monarchs. He inherited a war, in which indeed he took no part, except as part of a pageant. The war which made others rich made him a pauper. Sir John Fastolfe and Lord Cromwell collected gigantic fortunes from their spoils and from lucrative trade. The opulence of the houses of Nevile, Beaufort, Holland, Pole, Stafford, and the rest, was prodigious. The riches of the English nobles were a matter of wonder even to those who had been familiar with the wealth of the house of Burgundy, and of the Flemish burghers. But the English King, on whom and on whose revenue the cost of all the administration was imposed, was far poorer than most of the nobles who supported his throne, and had good reason for supporting it, but were quarrelling over the succession ; while an infinite mob (we can read them in the exceptions to the acts of resump- tion) was squabbling over the plunder of the Crown, which was really the plunder of the nation. (Rot. Parl. iv.)

Matters came to a crisis in 1450. The debts of the Crown, mainly for the maintenance of the King's household, amounted to £372,000,

IXTRODUCTIOX. xxvn

and the arrears owing for the purveyance of provisions was an intolerable grievance. The necessary expenses of the household were £24,000 a-year, irrespective of extraordinary charges. The ' livelihood ' of the King had sunk to £5,000 a-year. The House of Commons attempted to grapple with the difficulty. They appropriated, from various sources of the hereditary revenue, as yet I presume untouched, £5,582 \%s. y\d. for the payment of those who supplied provisions to the household, and put the proceeds into the hands of the Steward, Treasurer, and Comp- troller of the Household for the time being. They added to this sum all the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster, saving the Queen's jointure, the fees, wages, reparations, costs and expenses of the Duchy, a large exception. They fortified their resolution by drawing up the limitation in the ordinary form of a modern act, By the King, with theadvice and assent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and of the Commons in Parliament, and declared that it should hold for seven years from May 7, 1450.

After less than four years, the act was repealed, and a more man- ageable but slightly smaller income was devised. The first grant set aside 122 sources of revenue. The next sought to procure £5,187 6s. Sd. from 22 sources. Then came the civil war, and the epoch of bad debts on the part of the Crown. There can be no doubt that the old arrears were swept away into the unknown, and that the deficit on the experiment of 1450 followed them. The House of Commons, in the Parliaments of 1450 and 1453, was as incapable of checking and con- trolling the charges of the Administration as the House of Commons is in 1880. The difference is that men wondered and were rebellious in the former period. But the art of the financier is so subtle in our time, that men wonder and are patiently impoverished.

The taxation of the fifteenth century was, except for the import duties, which were insignificant, and the export duties on wool and hides, which a modern Chancellor of the Exchequer might well envy, all direct. The Crown had a right of preemption of all products and all services, and as a rule, it did not abuse the power. In the many thousands of accounts which I have read, I have seldom discovered any evidence of wrong doing on the part of the King's purveyors, as long as the accounts display the debits and credits of nobles and of wealthy corporations. It is true that the Despencers in Edward the Second's time ventured on

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xxviii INTRODUCTION.

purveyance on their own account. The fact is recorded, not in the process taken against them only, but in the private accounts of indi- viduals who were wronged, and whose complaints are contained in a private audit. But in the time when nobles and gentlefolks found that it was not worth while to cultivate their land, and more convenient to live on rents, when the competition of occupancy did not indeed raise rents, which were singularly customary and immovable in the middle ages, but lowered the rate of income on investments in land from ten to five per cent., and the Crown incurred debts, which turned out to be bad, the burden of these bad debts fell on the small proprietor, whose domestic records have not been preserved, and on the farmer who never had any records to preserve, and thus, despite the saint on the throne, augmented the unpopularity of poor Henry's government. He was praying, striving to reconcile partisans, himself no partisan, and heaping up wrath against his party and his friends, though the strange spectacle of a wholly saintly King continually suspended the war which was imminent. Had Henry been chargeable with any vice, his throne would have passed away in 1449. Had he possessed any administrative vigour — had he even known the temper of his age — had he been able to interpose between himself and his difficulties any man of financial genius (one such man, Tresham, was murdered by Henry's sycophants and betrayers), such, for instance, as James the First found in Cranfield, and William the Third in Montague, his dynasty would have been saved.

Henry's administration indeed, when it was on the eve of its darkest night, had a chance, which a skilful and sagacious partisan of his, or perhaps a servant of his exchequer, was able to make use of. Normandy and Guienne had been lost, and to all appearance, lost irrecoverably. The communications between these two great provinces had been sacrificed by the concession of Maine and Anjou, nominally to the sham King of Sicily and Jerusalem, Margaret's father, really to Charles of France. For the first time in English history, an English King had taken a portionless foreigner to wife. Had the King married an English wife, and Gascoigne finds excellent reasons why he should do so (p. 219), and thereupon abandoned the mischievous passion for foreign posses- sions, which only bring war and loss, and the weakening of national ties, and national interests, all would have been well. Had his wife,

LXTRODUCTIOX. xx ix

though of foreign origin, come to him with that which would have set up the King's household, and saved the peasant from the forced sale of his ox, his wheat, his butter and cheese, or whatever else was the produce of his little holding, the portion of the wife would have been a benefit, and foreign entanglements might have been dealt with discreetly. But here was a furious woman, who brought loss instead of gain, dishonour instead of power, whose dower was the cession of the key to the two great provinces which had been, with interruptions, but these usurpations, in the hands of English kings for three centuries, and beyond all this, was setting the good monarch against his nearest kinsfolk and best friends, while she sacrificed all to the men who had put her in her undeserved position. (See pp. 204, 205, 219,220—1.) She was the evil genius to Henry, as Henrietta Maria was to Charles.

I have referred above to the political importance of Calais and Normandy, of the control which they afiforded England over the most important commerce of the age, and of the singular financial aid which the export of English wool afforded to the exchequer of the fifteenth century. But the cession of Anjou and Maine was supposed to have not only effected the loss of Normandy. but that of Guienne (p. 205). To the English, the retention of Guienne was only second in importance to that of Normandy, and in some particulars, was even more vital. It was the country from which England derived one of its most important necessaries, and one of its most familiar luxuries. The reader of modern times will readily understand why the English desired an uninterrupted supply of Bordeaux wine, and the difference between a supply from a foreign country, and that from one which was politically united with England. He will understand the facts none the less clearly, when he hears that the political severance of Guienne from England involved a doubled price of French wine. As long as England held Guienne, wine was procured at prices so low, that it was within the reach of persons who had moderate incomes. When the French King regained it, or rather usurped it, the produce of the country was accessible only to the compara- tively wealthy. This, however, might be borne ; but there was a further loss in the revenue derivable from this ancient province of England.

My reader will be perhaps surprised to hear that this more serious difficulty was the loss of a cheap market for salt. But such is the fact.

xxx INTRODUCTION.

The importance of salt in the economy of medieval life was very great. From November to May, the mass of the English people lived on salted provisions. On every fast day salted fish was the customary diet of those who had anything more than bread to eat. The trade in salted fish was a very important and lucrative employment. It was the princi- pal means of preserving food in winter, and was the first condiment at all times. It was in the period I write about entirely derived from solar evaporation. A wet summer raised the price of salt far more than it did that of wheat, and in ordinary times the price of salt away from the sea closely corresponds, the above exception taken,.to the price of wheat. It could be procured abundantly and cheaply from the salterns of Western France. Long after the severance of Guienne from England was an accomplished fact, English monarchs, in their treaties with France, demanded the free export of Gascon salt as a condition of their negotiations. (Corps Diplomatique, Tom. iv. pars i. 1527).

The wrath of the English, when they coupled the marriage of Mar- garet of Anjou with the loss of Maine and Anjou, and the subsequent loss of Normandy and Guienne, knew no bounds. ' That Oueen Margaret,' says Gascoigne (p. 205), ' with whom the kingdom did not get the worth of ten marks (the value of his own prebend), did much in England after her husband, King of England, fell into a notorious lunacy, and what will come of the Queen's acts in the year of the Lord 1457, God knows.' 'The King of England, Henry the Sixth (p. 221) gave under his Great Seal, Anjou and Maine, to the father of the Queen Margaret, and to the heirs of Queen Margaret's father, him who called himself King of Sicily, and had neither obedience nor revenue from that kingdom, which was subject to the then King of Arragon, and the aforesaid Queen begged this gift from the King of England for her father by the agency of the Duke of Suffolk and his wife, who had promised their aid in the request ; and we are told that the Duke of Lorraine swore to the Duke and Duchess (of Suffolk) that he would bring about a final peace between France and England, if the King of England would cede the provinces, as he did by his seal, giving possession of them by the hands of Adam de Moleyns, then Bishop of Chichester. What the end will be (p. 204) God knows, who knows everything. May His will be done, as in heaven so in earth.' There were Englishmen,

INTRODUCTION. xxxi

whose resignation was neither so complete nor so pious as that of Gas- coigne. Sufifolk, they concluded, had brought another Helen to new Troy.

Gascoigne tells a curious story about the marriage of Margaret (pp. 190, 205, 219). He says that after Suffolk had negotiated the marriage, he lost sight of Margaret, and remained seventeen weeks in France, without knowing where she was ; that subsequently he returned to England and procured a grant from Parliament, and on returning to France, found that Margaret was detained by the French King, who, on the ground that she was Queen of England, and had no ' safe conduct ' out of France, declared that she should not be given up without ransom, and that he, fearing the consequences, induced the King to resign Maine and Anjou under the Great Seal, in order to get possession of the King's affianced wife. This cession, says Gascoigne, not only cost England Normandy and Guienne, but put the French into such a position that they could refuse the payment of an annual tribute for the cession of the provinces, and were even able to evade a final peace between the two kingdoms.

There are few portions of the parliamentary history of England which can be more fully written out than that of the years 1453-4. In 1452 the Gascons, who had been annexed to the French Crown after the events of 1450, became discontented. They found the little finger of the King of France thicker than the loins of the King of England, and were irritated at the taxes which their new master heaped on them. He had perhaps imposed, in imitation of the export duties on wool, export duties on wine and salt, and they had found that foreigners did not pay these taxes, but that the impost damaged Gascon trade. At any rate, they sent envoys to the English Court, promising to revolt if they were assisted by a competent force. Their ofifers were accepted, and the old Earl of Shrewsbury, who had risen to an earldom by his conduct in the war of the French succession, was made Lieutenant of Guienne on September 3. There seemed to be a chance that the events of 1450 would be reversed, and on March 6, [453, a Parliament was summoned, in which Thomas Thorpe, one of the officials of the Exchequer, and six years afterwards one of its barons, was elected Speaker. The House, in the absence of the Chancellor (Kemp), was addressed by the Bishop of Lincoln, who declared that the cause of the summons was the sound

xxxii INTRODUCTION.

and solid government of the realm of England internally, and its external defence.

The remarkable financial expedients adopted at the crisis were undoubtedly the work of the Speaker. He had been member for Ludgershall in the Parliament of 1450, and was now returned for Essex. In the fifteenth century, the Speaker was an infinitely more important ofncer of the House than the more familiar machinery of Parliament has left him now. He was, in fact, the agent between the Commons and the Crown, who presented petitions and announced grants. Thorpe had now a rare opportunity for aiding the Crown by new financial expe- dients, for the news of a revival of loyalty in Guienne gave hopes to the administration, which had not recovered from the prosecution, the banishment, and the death of Suffolk, from the ill-disguised feuds of the great nobles, and from the unpopularity of Somerset. Thorpe was therefore able to recommend a scheme for raising supplies before a sym- pathising house, and to venture on bold expedients for the relief of the exchequer and the conduct of the war.

On March 28, 1453, Thorpe, in modern phrase, brought forward his budget. It consisted of four parts — a property-tax, with certain exceptions ; an increase in the customs' duty ; a licence duty ; and a special fund, distributed over the counties and towns rateably, ac- cording to their wealth, for the maintenance of an army of 20,000 archers (afterwards reduced to 13,000), during six months, at the pay of sixpence a day during service, the men to be equipped, but all further charges, as it appears, to be defrayed from the exchequer. The last item was so nicely distributed that, the men to each county and town being apportioned, the actual number so provided is 1 2,999. The distribution of the tax may be found in the rolls of Parliament, and is one of the few documents preserved in the national archives which instruct us as to the distribution of wealth in England during the middle ages. There is no doubt that this budget must have been carefully prepared during the interval in which Talbot accepted the lieutenancy of Guienne and the summons to a Parliament.

In 1450 the House of Commons — in which the reforming party was hostile to Suffolk and the Court, and friendly to the admission of the Duke of York to the councils of the King — had granted an extra-

INTRODUCTION. xxxiii

ordinary tax on rents, annuities, and salaries, including the estates held in ancient demesne, and ordinarily exempted from parliamentary taxation. This income-tax was graduated. Incomes under forty shil- lings a-year were exempt ; on those between forty shillings and twenty pounds, the tax was sixpence in the pound ; on those between .£20 and ^200. it was a shilling; on those above £200 a-year, two shillings. The tax was 'thought reasonable' by the Lords and assented to by the King. But I shall have to refer to the Parliament of 1449-50 lower down, and in connection with other facts.

Thorpe did not follow this precedent in 1453, b°ld and just as it was, but proposed the familiar fifteenth and tenth, which had now become for a long time a fixed quantity. The grant is to be dimi- nished by ^"6,000, in consideration of certain towns which had become impoverished, Lincoln and Great Yarmouth being specially designated. The proceeds of these grants were to be applied, in the first instance, to the discharge of loans which had been contracted by government and certified by a record of court. Members of the House were disabled from acting as collectors, evidently lest they should favour their constituents. The increase of customs' duties was — (1) an additional tax of three shillings on the tun of wine ; (2) a poundage of five per cent. on goods exported or imported either by natives or denizens ; (3) ten per cent. to be paid by strangers exporting tin ; (4) the tax on wool was readjusted : English subjects were to pay 435-. ^d. on every sack of wool or twenty dozen of woolfells, strangers icoj. ; English subjects 100^. on every last of hides, and strangers io6s. 8d. Of these receipts 20S. on every sack of wool, pack of woolfells, and last of hides are appropriated to the defences of Calais, two-thirds to be paid in wages, and one-third on the jetties and fortifications.

The licence duty is levied on foreigners only. All alien house- holders are to pay a tax of sixteenpence a year, and all aliens not householders, sixpence, during the King's life. Foreigners, being mer- chants, factors, or brokers, having establishments, are to pay a yearly licence of forty shillings, or if resident in England for not more than six months, twenty shillings, the persons with whom they lodge being liable in default of payment. If they become denizens, they are to pay ten marksyearly (£6 13J. ^d.), and are thereupon discharged from the above

xxxiv INTRODUCTION.

named dues. The fourth grant is that 20,000 archers, to be provided rateably by the counties and towns, and paid sixpence a day for six months ; a schedule being annexed to the act, in which the proportion is set forth to the extent of 13,000, which the King declared to be sufhcient. On the announcement of these particulars, the King in person, and Kemp the Chancellor, thanked the Commons for ' their faithfulness, their con- sideration, and their immense generosity.' The House then adjourned for the Easter holidays, and was ordered to meet again on April 25.

When they met again, Somerset, the Captain of Calais, laid his accounts before them, and prayed a settlement of outstanding obliga- tions, both for himself and his predecessor the Duke of Buckingham. The Commons direct that the arrears and the current charges should be liquidated from the Customs, and the Speaker, Thorpe, on behalf of the Commons, expedites the payment of the grants made on March 28, i.e. Wednesday before Easter, 1453. The King again thanked the Commons warmly, and on July 2, remitting 'the nobles to their recreations and de- lights, the commons to the harvest,' prorogued Parliament to Nov. 12, when it was to meet at Reading.

I have gone through these expedients at some length, partly because they are an instructive illustration of medieval finance, partly because they specify the resources which the country possessed at the time. There was, the times considered, abundance of wealth in England at the period immediately preceding the outbreak of civil war. The fifteenth century was a period of singularly unbroken agricultural prosperity, of plentiful harvests, of high wages, of accumulated opulence. Land which a century before yielded in rent a return of ten per cent. on the purchase money, now yielded five or less. Farmers were gradually acquiring free- hold estates and becoming yeomen, were the progenitors of the small gentry who played so conspicuous a part in English History two cen- turies later. In the universal passion for acquiring land commons were enclosed, often by usurpation, and men of free estate became the pur- chasers of copyhold, thus giving stability and a higher position to those estates which the law books still affected to call base or precarious. The tenants of these base fees resisted even the payment of customary rents, and succcssfully demanding arbitration between themselves and their lords, succeeded in reducing and permanently fixing their liabilities.

IXTRODUCTIOX. xxxv

A great export trade in barley was carried on between the Eastern counties and the Flemish towns, which in return taught the Eastern farmers the use of hops as a means of flavouring and preserving malt liquors, and established the distinction between ale, which was brewed without hops, and beer which contained them. For it is remarkable that during the whole of the sanguinary struggle between the rival Houses, one reads nothing of devastations committed by either army, except those of Margaret's northern troops in the winter of 1460 and the spring of 146 1. The record of prices in England, especially those of wheat and barley, gives no indication whatever that war produced scarcity. During the whole of the fifteenth century, the harvest was a failure in only one year, t 438-9. When the strife was at the hottest, bread and beer were abundant and cheap, for the cost of a labourers maintenance was from 8d. to yd. a week. In the reign of Elizabeth, contracts for the board of the men in her employ were as high as 4?. 6d. to $s. for the same time.

When the Parliament of 1453 was prorogued, there were hopes that Shrewsbury would re-conquer Guienne, and finally Normandy. But all was lost on July 17, when the veteran and his son fell before the fortress of Chatillon, and the English army was destroyed or captured. Soon after, Bordeaux was invested and surrendered, and every hope of re- covering the ancient dominions of the English Kings in France was irrevocably gone. Calais and the forts near it alone remained. and the etTorts of the year, both military and financial. had been wasted.

The news of these accumulated calamities, as is most probable, brought about the insanity which afifected the King at this time. He had gone to Clarendon in Wilts, when he fell into a helpless melancholia, accompanied by utter debility and insensibility. When his malady com- menced is not clearly stated. But if we can infer from Rymer, no state paper was issued between July 27 and Dec. 3, 1453. His son was born on Oct. 23, while he was unconscious of all that passed. He did not know that this event had occurred, as we learn from the Paston letters, till Christ- mas, 1454, when he recovered his reason as suddenly as he had lost it.

Public opinion had now completely veered round. The Parliament which had met in high spirits, in a generous mood. and with a determin- ation to make sacrifices for its foreign policy, which even acquiesced in the administration of Somerset, and accorded to him a temporary confidence,

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xxx vi INTRODUCTION.

was now thoroughly dissatisfied and discontented. The Duke of York brought an action of trespass against Thorpe in the Exchequer Court, in which alone, it appears, he could be prosecuted. Thorpe, it appears, had a sufficient delay accorded to him in which to prepare his defence, stood his trial, pleaded not guilty to a venire facias directed to the Sheriff of Middlesex, and was convicted before a jury, which assessed the damages at ^iooo, and the costs to the Crown at £\o. (See Rot. Parl. v. 239, vi. 294). On Nov. 12, Parliament was again adjourned till Feb. 1 1, when it was summoned to Reading. It was formally opened there, and immediately adjourned to Feb. 14, at Westminster.

In the meanwhile, Somerset was committed to the Tower, Thorpe, with another member — the bearer of an illustrious name, Walter Raleigh, knight for the shire of Devon — to the Fleet, and a commission had been issued under the Great Seal, appointing Richard Duke of York lieu- tenant of the kingdom, with power to hold Parliament, finish and dissolve it. The Commons claimed the release of these two members on the day of meeting, and York put in his reply on the day following. The case of Thorpe is a leading and familiar one in the annals of Parliamentary privilege, and has been frequently commented upon, sometimes as illustrating the position taken by James the First, that the privilege of Parliament was a precarious concession of the Crown, which could be resumed at pleasure ; sometimes as a proof that this particular Parliament was cowed, sometimes as an illustration 'of the iniquity of the times.' But if the averment of York, in his reply of Feb. 15, be correct, Thorpe had been legally convicted, in the proper court, and with all deference to his function as one of the ofhcers of the Exchequer, of a serious trespass, accompanied by a gross breach of the peace. There appears to be no informality in the proceedings and no haste, for it is impossible to believe that the Duke could have inserted a reply on the Roll of Parlia- ment, the particulars of which, if false, could have easily been refuted by a recent record of judgment, enrolling a debt due to the Crown. Besides a trespass vi et armis is a breach of the peace, and the privilege of Parliament did not protect a member who was guilty of a breach of the peace. In their changed mood too, the Commons would not be unwilling to be rid of a partisan Speaker, whose authority and initiative was at that time so great in their House. That their temper was changed is shown

INTRODUCTION. xxxvii

by their curt answer to the Chancellor on March 13, vvhen he informed them that £40,000 was urgently and instantly wanted for the defence of Calais and the marches which were in jeopardy. They fiatly refused to make any more grants, reminding Kemp of an unfulfilled promise to them, that public affairs should be directed bya 'sad and wise council of right discreet and wise lords and others/ The Commons elected a new Speaker, Sir Thos. Cherleton, and Thorpe remained in prison. No further information is given as to the fate of Raleigh. Thorpe must have been released soon afterwards. He was present next year at the affair of St. Albans, and does not appear to have been distinguished by personal courage on that occasion.

The malady of the King continued. He had been moved to Windsor, and some means had been taken for the conduct of ordinary business by the appointment of the Duke of York to the function of presiding over the Parliament, now most unwontedly in the second year of its sitting. But a crisis soon occurred. On March 22, Kemp, Archbishop of Canter- bury and Lord Chancellor, died suddenly. He had been nominated to the archbishopric, Gascoigne tells us (p. 37), by Somerset, and had been successively Bishop of Rochester, Chichester, London, York, and lastly Canterbury, having sat on the episcopal bench since 14 19. If my author can be relied on, his neglect of duty during his long episcopate had been uniformly scandalous. ' For nearly twenty-eight years, during which he was Archbishop of York, he was wholly absent from his diocese, residing in London, or in Kent, or in other parts of England far away from his diocese, except that once in ten or a dozen years he stayed there for two or three weeks. He was seldom or never in York, and suffered his palace to fall into decay, for he never repaired it during the time he filled the see.'

My readers will remember the manner in which Macaulay dilates on the flight of James from Whitehall, and the disappearance of the Great Seal, which the King threw into the Thames. In the fifteenth century, the continuous use of the Great Seal, always in the custody of the Chancellor, was even more important. It was absolutely necessary for the conduct of business to fill the vacant office, and none but the King could appoint the Chancellor. Hitherto it appears that he had been in the Queen's keeping, and that no one had seen him since his malady had commenced, except the members of his household. It was determined at once to appoint a

xxxviii INTRODUCTION.

committee of the Lords to wait on the King at Windsor, and to inform themselves as to the state of his mind. It appears clearly to me that the Peers had no conception of the extent of the King's derangement. With considerate delicacy they did not appoint York as one of their number. The committee consisted of twelve persons, Waynflete Bishop of Win- chester, Bourchier Bishop of Ely, who was soon Kemp's successor in the primacy, and Bowles Bishop of Litchfield ; the Earls of Warwick, Oxford, and Shrewsbury, Viscounts Beaumont and Bourchier ; the Prior of St. John, and Lords Falconbridge, Dudley, and Stanton.

The report which these personages gave of the King's condition is well known. They found that his physical powers were almost gone, and that his mind was entirely gone. They made their report on the 25th of March. On the 27th York was appointed Protector and Defensor Regni, the term implying such powers as had been conferred during Henry's nonage on Humphrey Duke of Gloucester. The instrument provided that York should hold office till he was superseded by the King, or till the prince, now about five months old, should come to years of discretion. It is evident that the Committee of the Lords, who had waited on the King, inferred from what they saw that the disease was incurable. On April 3, three letters patent were issued conferring powers on the Duke of York. The Great Seal was given to the Earl of Salisbury, who is known as father of the Earl of Warwick, as the staunchest partisan of York, as included in the attainder of Coventry, and as sharing his fate at Wakefield. The Archbishopric was given to Bourchier, brother of Viscount Bourchier, who in later times was also a Yorkist. Bourchier remained Archbishop of Canterbury for thirty-four years, and seems to have acquiesced in all the changes of the succession from the downfall of Henry the Sixth to the accession of Henry the Seventh. The govern- ment of Calais was taken by the Duke of York, and Somerset remained in the Tower.

At Christmas, Henry recovered his physical and mental health as completely, it appears, as he lost them, released Somerset, superseded York, and took Calais into his own hands. It appears from Gascoigne (p. 203) that Somerset had been committed to the Tower by the Council, and that after his ' illegal release, the Duke of York wrote to the King by the hands of Wulfet his confessor, while he was residing at St. Albans,

IXTRODUCTIOX. xxxix

entreating him to re-commit Somerset into the hands of two knights, who should convey him to the Tower into lawful custody ; that this petition was refused, and that thereupon he attacked Somerset, who was then in St. Alban's, preferring that Somerset should be taken prisoner, than that he (the Duke of York) should be seized and slain by Somerset. No one was spoiled of his goods with the Dukes will, but against it, as I heard from trustworthy persons, and the Duke of York, Richard, had his pardon or indulgence granted him by Parliament in London, along with his adherents in the battle of St. Alban's, for all that had been done in that battle, and for everything occurring there, on which any man might make plea or quarrel against the Duke or against his comrades.' Somerset, who was killed at St. Alban's on May 22, T455, with the Earl of North- umberland, and Lord Clifford, had been released from the Tower on Feb. 5 preceding, by the King's writ.

The battle of St. Alban's, though in itself a mere skirmish, developed the inextinguishable feuds of the civil war. The quarrels of Lords Devon and Bonvile, the feud which came from the marriage of Thomas Nevil, son of the Earl of Salisbury, with the niece of Lord Cromwell, between the bridegroom and Thos. Percy, Lord Egremont ; the anger of the House of York at being excluded from the King's councils, and the sight of Somerset and the Oueen in the. conduct of all affairs, stirred bad blood enough. The Queen, after the loss of three among her more zealous partisans, made up her mind to the ruin of York, and the ad- vantage which York gained at St. Alban's made him equally determined to secure himself from risk by obtaining a recognised position in the state, under the authority of Parliament. The King did his best to mediate between the parties, and effected from time to time formal but hollow reconciliations. But nothing could erase the bloodshed of St. Alban's, and as Gascoigne is fond of saying : sanguis sanguinem tetigit.'

The Parliament of 1455 met on July 1 1, and the Commons presented Sir John Wenlok as their Speaker. They were soon prorogued to Nov. 12, for the harvest was at hand. On Nov. 19 York was again appointed Protector, for the King's mind was again affected, though not, it appears, so seriously on this occasion. There is, indeed, a commission issued on June 5, to Gilbert Keymer, Dean of Salisbury, and Doctor of Medicine, the King's physician, and on March 10, 1456, another commission is

xl INTRODUCTION.

issued to purvey minstrels, in order to give the King solace. On Dec. 12, 1455, York takes the precaution to which I have referred above, on the day before the House rose for the Easter holidays, of getting his Protectorate continued till he be discharged by Parliament. But on Feb. 25 he is again exonerated from his office by the King himself. 'After he had been appointed,' says Gascoigne (p. 204), ' protector of the realm of England by the Parliament in London permanently (futnris annis), Margaret, Queen of England, with whom England got no goods, but the loss of Maine and Anjou, which lands her husband, Henry the Sixth, gave in perpetuity under his Great Seal to the Queen's father, so laboured by herself and other lords who were thought ill lords to the realm, that the Duke gave up the authority which the whole Parlia- ment had entrusted to him before, and then she carried off to her own place, in the county of Chester, the King and the prince too, then two or three years old ; and she so ruled in the year 1456, that everything in the realm was wrought by right or wrong, as many said, at the Queen's will/ No Parliament sat between Feb. 1456, when York was dismissed, and that held at Coventry in Nov. 1459, rnore than a year after Gascoigne's death, when the whole Yorkist party was attainted.

I suspect that Gascoigne is in error when he states that the Queen carried the King off to Cheshire. No public instrument is to be found in Rymer between July 26, 1456 and Jan. 28, 1457. But the diocese of Lichfield and Coventry is commonly called the Bishopric of Chester during the fifteenth century, and Coventry was the stronghold of the Lancastrian party, remaining faithful to that house long after its fortunes seemed desperate. Several documents in the early part of 1457 bear the King's teste at Coventry, and it is probable that during the summer and autumn of 1456, when there are no instruments, he was at Coventry.

A few days after Gascoigne's death, on March 24, 1458, Henry issued the instrument of Pacification, which is transcribed in Whitehamp- stede, under which the victors at St. Alban's were to be bound to found a chapel for the repose of those who had perished in the battle ; and that both parties should acquiesce in the amity which the King strove to bring about. I would fain see in this document the hand of some among- the better churchmen, who had, in this short calm before the storm, gained access to the King.

INTRODUCTION. xli

One event, however, occurred in the autumn of 1457. which made a deep impression on Gascoigne's mind, the trial and condemnation of Pecok. The singular circumstances which attended this trial, the fact that this bishop is the only prelate of the pre-reformation period who was formally condemned for heresy, the ambiguous and obscure character of the charges made against him, and the happy accident that one of the books at least for which he was condemned has been preserved in the Cambridge University Library (having been printed in the Rolls' Series by Mr. Churchill Babington), and is, apart from any intrinsic merits which it may possess, a most interesting wrork. written in fifteenth-century English by an educated churchman, have surrounded the memory of Pecok with a reputation which his critics and judges would have hardly anticipated. In his search after witnesses, Fox makes him a devout precursor of the Reformation, a pious prelate who was grievously sinned against. Lewis, who has written his life, but certainly has never read Gascoigne's MS., speaks of 'his lordship' with similar feelings of re- verence. Gascoigne tells us more about him than any one else, for he detested him heartily, and rejoices over his condemnation with the most orthodox satisfaction.

Reginald Pecok was by birth a Welshman, a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, who at first (p. 18) had a considerable reputation for learning and orthodoxy, who quitted Oxford for the court, and graduated in theology by special licence, or dispensation of the regents in the Oxford Schools (i.e. the younger masters), in the year 1445, when Gascoigne was Chancellor (pp. 26, 215). He had been made Bishop of St. Asaph in 1444, by the influence of two well-known persons, and forthwith took an active part in public affairs, writing and publishing both English and Latin books, the names of two of which, ' De Fide ' and the ' Provoker,' have been preserved by Gascoigne. In 1447 and *449 he preached at Paul's Cross, to the effect that bishops were not bound to preach by virtue of their office ; that originally the function of bishop and parish priest were one, but that since the parochial clergy had been entrusted with local duties, they had relieved the bishops from their previous obligations. It appears that he published this sermon in English, and that it made him highly popular with his episcopal brethren. He further held that it was the bishop's duty to be better informed about

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xlii INTRODUCTION.

the more abstruse points of theology, and not to trouble themselves about giving that elementary instruction which may be well left to the parochial clergy and the curates, unless they think proper ; that they may be very reasonably absent from their dioceses if they have more important work to attend to, which it may be their duty to perform, there being many more important spiritual functions for a bishop than preaching sermons. He further held that neither pope or bishop were simoniacal in giving and accepting papal provisions, and by paying and receiving the first-fruits of benefices. This denial of the obligation to preach Pecok afterwards softened down to a statement that bishops are not bound to preach in the customary manner, viz. by taking a text and dividing its matter into heads. This explanation (p. 35) did not satisfy his hearers, who said 'That bishop is now preaching publicly, and showing that his deeds and his words are contradictory/ ' The fact is,' says Gascoigne, 'he was always altering what he uttered, and when pressed to explain his published opinions, tried to escape by saying that uncorrected and unauthorized works of his got into circulation.'

Perhaps these opinions, though they grievously offended such zealous and diligent preachers as Gascoigne and some of his friends were, might have been tolerated, had he not entered on the dangerous ground of disparaging great ecclesiastical authorities. Thus he allowed himself to state that the works of Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory were of no higher authority than those of ordinary men, and are quite as much open to question. He also denied the authority of the Apostles' creed, which he alleged to be of far later date than the Apostolic age ; and in particular asserted that the descent into hell was an interpolation of no authority whatsoever, not being in the creed in the time of Augustine (p. 210). He further averred that reason was superior to authority, and hinted not obscurely his doubts about the incarnation. ' He put,' says Gascoigne (p. 211), ' the lavv of nature above Scripture and above the Sacraments, and said in word and deed, " my soul loatheth this light food," meaning the works of the fathers and other saints/ It was, perhaps, a minor matter, that he held that the constant attendance of the bishops at court, and their filling offices of state, was not only excusable but commendable, and that the income of ecclesiastics was as much their own to dispose of

IXTRODUCTIOX. xliit

as the private or secular estate which they or others might enjoy (p. ico). To Gascoigne, however, such tenets or rules of conduct were as odious as any heresy, and in his opinion the principal causes of corruption in Church and State. ' He claimed,' says my author, ' to be tried by his peers, by which he did not mean the English bishops, who were not at that time, as some thought, found to be competent, but he wanted to have such examiners of his books as he called his peers in scholastic disputations, and in the popularity which he expected to get from his young partisans, who were noted for unsound belief, and reputed to be his followers.'

Pecok was, it appears, an erastian, to use a phrase of later theology. He held that a man ought to believe that there is a Catholic Church, but need not abide by its decisions if he has sufficient ground for object- ing in his own mind against them (pp. ioo, 214). But his objections were to be esoteric, not schismatic, and to be coupled with outward con- formity. He would have the laity respect the motives and accept the teachings of the clergy, that it should not break away as the Lollards and Bible men did, but he would exact no more than conformity. But it is again difficult to doubt that he inclined to Arian tenets, if Gascoigne (p. 217) is correct in ascribing the couplet to him, for which he supplies a rejoinder. ' The law of England is that the lords of Parliament, when accused of any great crime. should by twelve lords barons. their own peers, be acquitted of the crime charged against them, or be pro- nounced guilty ; but that Bishop Pacok' (Gascoigne is plainly punning on his name), 'a Welshman by birth, accused these holy old doctors of falsehood, or incompleteness in their writings, but he was proved to be their equal, neither in holy life, nor in their great learning and miracles, and so, in rejecting them, he shot his arrow at the sun, and his own arrow, by the just judgment of God, fell on the proper head of that Bishop of Chichester, Reginald Pacok.'

Still it is not probable that the bishops of Pecok's day would have proceeded to such lengths against their brother, who had excused them their duties so handsomely, and in his book, ' The Repressor of too much blaming of the Clergy,' had published a defence of the whole clerical order, had he not committed some other fault. This I think must have been the letter which Pecok sent in 1456 to Cannyng. the Lord Mayor

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xliv INTRODUCTION.

of London. This man, who was brother of the more celebrated mayor of Bristol, to whom the magnificent church of St. Mary Redcliffe was due, and was a member of the Company of Grocers, with the Chicheles, brothers of the Archbishop. All that is known of this letter is contained in Gascoigne, who (pp. 212-13) mentions twice over that the Lord Mayor, on reading it, and detecting in it very suspicious passages, tending to change of fidelity (for I interpret cfides', here to mean loyalty to the king) and of insurrection in the realm of England, sent it on to the king, and that when the king and lords read it, they detected the same ten- dencies, and that great scandal arose about the great lords in the realm, who, he said in his letter, were on the side of him and his English books. And he observes that all the temporal lords of the realm, who were with Henry, demanded that he should be expelled from the king's council and that of the lords. This expulsion took place about St. Martin's day (Nov. 11), T457, for no temporal lord in the king's council would state his opinion and advice, or utter what he thought would be for the good of the kingdom until Pecok was driven out of the council chamber. Then Pecok was ordered to bring his books, nine in number, to the archbishop, in order that they might be examined by such doctors as the archbishop might appoint.

Pecok was degraded, his books burnt at Paul's Cross, where, Gascoigne says, the populace would have burnt him too if they could have got at him, 011 Dec. 4. The same ceremony was performed at Carfax in Oxford, by Chandler, Chancellor of the University and War- den of New College, on Dec. 17. He had made his abjuration on Nov. 28 at Lambeth, in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the other bishops, and many doctors of theology, two temporal lords, Lords Stanley and De Scales, and many Knights. He was then committed to Maidstone to await judgment. Pecok, we are informed, was ultimately sent to the Monastery of Thorney, where a decent allowance was made him, but where he was not to be allowed writing materials. He thence- forth disappears from history. The particulars of his trial, as far as known, are given in the edition of the 'Repressor' published in the Rolls' Series.

I am convinced that the 'brawlers in the pulpits,' as Pecok calls the orthodox preachers, would have dcnounced his heresies in vain had he not ruined himself by his letter to the Lord Mayor. I have already sug-

INTRODUCTION. xlv

gested that the kings mind was again clouded in the second half of the year 1456. In February and March 1457, the king was at Coventry and Banbury, in June he was at Coventry again, in July at Kenilworth. The letter was probably received by the Council in November, shortly before the bishop's expulsion from the Council. From August 1, 1457, to June 8, 1459, all the instruments in Rymer are witnessed at Westminster. In July 1459, tiie king is at Coventry, whither he went again in November to hold the Parliament of Coventry. But what it was that Pecok wrote to Cannyng is, and probably will remain, unknown. That Ffenry and his counsellors were entirely deceived as to the ultimate intentions of the Yorkist party is plain, by his having conferred the government of Calais on Warwick. It is possible that the party had no ultimate intentions till after the Coventry Parliament. It is possible that the bishop divined their motives, and that they thought it convenient to destroy him. It is certain that Henry was convinced of Pecok's heresy, for he inserted in the statutes of King's College, Cambridge, a new clause, bidding the fellows expel any of their number who might incline to Wikliffs or Pecok's teaching.

Gascoigne tells (p. 176) a characteristic story of the king. He had gone to Windsor, probably to ask the king to grant that charter to Oxford University, by which the Chancellor was ex officio a justice of the peace. ' The king asked me at his Castle of Windsor, " WThy, Doctor Gascoigne, are you nota bishop?" and I answered him, "Sir, I tell you, if I wished to honestly get much*money, I would rather be a good tailor than the most learned doctor in England, while matters hold in England as they do in modern times." ' That the bishop-maker in England should ask Gascoigne why he was not a bishop, shows a simplicity which is hardly conceivable. The allusion to a good tailor probably refers to the tight-fitting dress of Henry's time, on the indecency of which Gascoigne comments (p. 145).

Henry was not indeed a mere cypher in his government. Had his reign fallen on quieter days, his blameless life and sincere piety might have made him respected, and his kindness have humanized his people. There are stories told of him which show that he had some force of character, and that the people about him were anxious to keep him in the dark, lest he should undertake a reformation in society. There

xlvi INTRODUCTION.

were preachers in Gascoigne's days, our author informs us, who denounced the vices of the time. These were chiefly the London clergy, three of whom, the Rectors of St. Andrew"s, Holborn, and All Saints', and the Master of Whittington College, spoke out boldly. But James Say, Lord Fiennes, took care that the King should not hear what they said, ' for he and others about the King would allow no one to preach before the King unless the sermon were written and submitted to them, or unless the preacher promised on oath that he would not preach against the King's household, or against the King's doings, or against the doings of his Privy, or to be more accurate, his depraved, Council ; and so he un- justly and unfairly, and they who sided with him, bound the Word of God, lest it should go forth to the public good and duty ' (p. 191).

Fiennes was one of the victims of Jack Cade's insurrection in June 1450. In the autumn of 1449, discontent with the government was universal, and when the Commons met on Nov. 6, the popular opinion pointed to Suffolk as the cause of all the national calamities and national disgrace. He had negotiated the marriage of Henry with the pauper daughter of the pretended King of Sicily, who brought the king no dovvry but loss, the loss by cession of Maine and Anjou ; and again by conquest or by treachery of Normandy and Guienne. He and those about him had impoverished the king and enriched themselves. The commons on meeting elected Sir John Popham Speaker. He declined to serve, on the plea of age and infirmity, and they chose Thomas Tresham, who had been Speaker in tne Parliaments of 1439, 1442, and 1447, and was one of the knights for Northamptonshire.

The air of Westminster was pestilential, and the first session of the new Parliament was held at the house of the preaching friars near Ludgate. The House debated public affairs, but there are few records of their doings on the Rolls between the day of their meeting and Dec. 17, when they were prorogued. But it must have been to this time that t'he following passage of Gascoigne refers. 'The Parliament of England (p. 190), continually worried by annoyances and expenses, openly said that it would never grant the king a tax unless he first by the authority of Parliament resumed all that really belonged to the Crown of England, which the king had previously given and alienated from the Crown.' It is also to this Parliament that we must refer the passage (p. 1 89) which

IXTRODUCTIOX. xlvii

speaks of the threats which were made against the Commons by the king and his young counsellors ; and of the orders given to the House, that they should proceed with that business which the king put before them, and not meddle with the acts of the king and those of his lords. It is plain that in the session before Christmas they had debated topics which were unpleasing to the court, had delayed supply, and had begun to contemplate an act which would afford the gravest and most serious precedent in Parliamentary action. On Dec. 17 the House is adjourned to Jan. 22.

On Jan. 9, Adam de Moleyns, Lord Privy Seal and Bishop of Chichester, one of the aristocratical prelates whom Gascoigne describes (p. 39-40) as constantly hanging about the court, neglecting the care of their dioceses, and collecting fortunes by very doubtful, perhaps dis- creditable expedients (p. 174), who had been engaged with Suffolk in negotiating the marriage of Margaret and Henry, and the cession of Anjou and Maine, was murdered at Portsmouth by divers sailors and others there. He had gone to Portsmouth to see about the troops for the French service, and probably to pay them or arrange for their pay. He was not, it appears, killed in a sudden fray, but after some kind of enquiry or trial, for it is stated that he alleged in his defence, that he was not responsible for the losses which the country had suffered, but the Duke of Suffolk qnly, the King's minister and the Queen's favourite, who was, as he alleged, in collusion with France. It is to such an understanding that Gascoigne refers when he narrates the conversation (p. 205) between Powntes, the French herald-at-arms, and St. Barb, a Somersetshire esquire.

The determination to attack Suffolk was matured in the Christmas recess. On the day that Parliament met, the Duke petitioned the king to the effect that rumours had been current against his loyalty and character, and that the Commons had eagerly adopted and given shape to them. He protested that he was innocent, appealed to the services of his family and himself, of how many of them had lost their lives in the king"s service, and begged that he might meet his accusers. The circumstances remind one of the trial of another royal favourite and unpopular minister 190 years later. Suffolk was well-nigh as friendless, even in the Lords, as Strafford was, for beyond the protest of Lord Beaumont, which is

xlviii INTRODUCTION.

only technical, no one seems to have interposed on behalf of the favourite.

On Jan. 26, the Commons reported to the King that the Duke ad- mitted that there were heavy charges against him. They declared that they were seady to make these charges good, and requested that in the interval SufFolk should be committed to prison. The Lords, in their capacity of the Crown's advisers, consulted the Judges as to the law in such a case. After consultation with his brethren, the Chief Justice appears to have advised them that it was necessary, before committal on so grave an issue, that particulars should be alleged ; for they answered on the same day unanimously, that the Duke ought not to be taken into custody, till the details of the charge were laid before them.

The Commons were ready. On January 28 the Speaker, Thomas Tresham, exhibited nine articles from the Lower House. In the first of these it is stated that the Duke of Suffolk had betrothed his son John to Margaret, the only daughter of John Duke of Somerset, who was, failing issue from the King, the next heir to the throne, and that since the impeachment had been determined on, the pair had been married. Margaret Beaufort, afterwards the wife of Edmund Earl of Richmond, and mother of Henry the Seventh, was at that time nine years old, having been born in 1441. Suffolk's son actually married Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of the Duke of York, and appears to have been neutral through the whole of the civil war. If the marriage or rather the betrothal had taken place, it must have been subsequently rescinded, as the marriage of young minors constantly was. But the introduction of this statement into the indictment is important, because it shows that as early as 1450 people were speculating as to who would be the heir to the throne, in the probable event of Henry's dying childless ; that the Beauforts were not considered illegitimate, while the prevalence of such a rumour goes far to explain, concurrently with the fact that Somerset had superseded York in the government of France, the early enmity between the two dukes, which culminated in the affair of St. Alban's. This indirect acknowledgment of the power of women to inherit or transmit a title to the crown is a very significant hint that Richard Plantagenet's descent gave a better claim, at least theoretically, to the throne, than that of the reigning family.

IXTRODUCTIOX. xlix

It was perhaps at this time, if the story which rests on the authority of William of Wyrcestre be correcf, that Thomas Young, member for Bristol, a lawyer, and a brother-in-law of the Cannyngs, moved in Par- liament that the Duke of York be declared heir apparent to the throne. It is added that Young was thereupon committed to the Tower. This story is supposed to be connrmed by the fact that nearly six years after- wards Thomas Young petitioned the House to the effect that he had been arrested and imprisoned without indictment, and with loss of goods, for matters said in Parliament. The Commons endorse his prayer, and request that he may have a sufficient and reasonable recompense. The petition is referred to the Lords of the Council to provide according to their discretion. It seems strange, however, that Young should have allowed so long a period to elapse without stating his grievance. Gas- coigne, though no friend of the Royal House and the Court, is absolutely silent as to any claim to the throne, near or remote, in the house of York.

Suffolk was at once committed to the Tower, and on February 12 the Lords reported that in their opinion a copy of the articles of impeachment should be supplied to the judges. From Gascoigne's language (p. 218) it appears that in his time a peer of Parliament, accused of a great crime, was tried by a jury of twelve peers, who were to acquit or declare him guilty, no mention being made as to the presence of the judges at the trial. The answer of Chief Justice Gascoigne to Henry the Fourth appears to refer only to the privileges of the episcopal order. But it is not easy to see why the judges should be furnished with a copy of the articles, unless they were to take some prominent part in the proceedings. The King or Oueen, who evidently thought that the affair would pass off if Suffolk were kept out of sight for a time, refused to adopt the counsel of the Lords.

On Saturday, March 7, the Lords returned to the subject, and insisted that Suffolk should answer the charges made against him. It is impossible to doubt that they were acting in concert with those who had the conduct of the impeachment in the Commons, for on the following Monday, March 9, the Commons, by their 'Speaker, presented eighteen other articles. It was necessary to meet this united attack and these new charges. Suffolk was brought from the Tower, and the

1 IXTRODUCTIOX.

particulars were read in his hearing. He asked for copies, which wcre granted, and he was now put into custody in a tower in the palace of Westminster. On the following Friday, March 13, he made his defence before the King and the Lords. Had the trial proceeded, it seems certain that he would have been convicted, his principal enemy in the Lords at that time, Lord Cromwell, being active in pressing forward the accusation. To save his minister, Henry took the matter into his own hands. On March 17, without affecting to pronounce any judgment on the merits of the articles of impeachment, he bade him go into banish- ment for five years, on or before May 1, and to any country except France. The Peers, through Lord Beaumont, the Constable of England, protested that this act of the King was not done by their advice, assent, or desire. On May 25 Lord Beaumont was ejected from his office, and the Earl of Northumberland, afterwards a zealous partisan of the house of Lancaster, was put in his place. Even he, however, was superseded on September 1 1 by Somerset, who had returned from France. On March 30 Parlia- ment was prorogued, partly because Westminster was unhealthy, partly because Easter (April 5) was near. It was to meet at Leicester on April 29.

Suffolk was now set free at nightfall, and, hardly escaping the London mob, contrived to reach his estate. But he ran no little risk in the country. The public mind was greatly excited. Seditious libels were affixed to the doors of churches and other public buildings, and all the signs of an outbreak were visible. A proclamation, issued 011 Easter Eve (April 4), threatens the authors of these libels with punishment. Suffolk remained at his estate till the time appointed for his banishment, engaged in arranging his affairs. It was at this time that he wrote that long and interesting letter to his son which was printed by Fenn. His voyage from Ipswich, his capture by the Nicholas of the Tower, and his mock trial and execution, are told by all historians. Gascoigne informs us (p. 7), on the authority of one of the Duke's servants, that the astro- logers had told him, as he lay in the Tower of London, that if he escaped thence, their lives for it, he would not die a violent death, and that Suffolks escape from the Tower was effected under the King's private orders.

The Commons met on the appointed day at Leicester, and imme-

LXTRODUCTIOX. li

diately made that grant of an income-tax to which I have already referred. I discover in this tax on annuities and salaries, as well as rents, a determination on the part of the Commons to exact something from those very numerous pensions which had been granted from the estates of the Crown, and which would certainly be exempted from any act of resumption. however thorough, as may be seen to be the case in all the acts of resumption which are recorded on the Rolls of Parliament from the reign of Henry the Sixth to that of Henry the Eighth. After supply, the Commons set to work on the two reforms which were most distasteful to the Court and those jnniores consiliarii of whom Gascoigne speaks, the management of the royal household, and the resumption of the King's hereditary revenue, now dwindled almost to nothing. The mismanagement of domestic affairs was as conspicuous and irritating as the mismanagement of foreign affairs was dishonourable and humi- liating. The country was fleeced by purveyors, who took the farmers corn and cattle, paying for them by tallies on a bankrupt exchequer, which was fifteen years of the ordinary revenue in debt. The army abroad was demoralised. During the Easter recess, the English lost the battle of Fourmigny, and with it all hopes of retaining Normandy. Caen was taken on July i. Falaise and Cherbourg fell soon after, and Charles of France was free to attack Guienne. Domestic bankruptcy and foreign disgrace, the penniless Queen, the loss of Englands ancient possessions, and the malpractices of the ministers and favourites were in every ones mouth. The Court was determined to keep the Parliament together till it became compliant ; the Parliament was equally determined to reform the finances and relieve the people from intolerable extortions. While this struggle was going on, news came which suspended all deliberations. The Parliament and the King's young counsellors were wrangling at Leicester, while the whole south of England was in sudden insurrection.

It must have been in the early summer of 1450 that Gascoigne wrote the notes which may be found in pp. 219-20. ' There might,' he says, ' have been peace between the kingdoms of England and France, with a large annual tribute to the English, if an English duke and bishop had not refused the terms, when the council of either side was at the altar.' ' The Jewish law ordained that men should take wives from their own tribe and nation, that the inheritance should remain in families,

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lii INTRODUCTION.

and the tribes be not intermixed, but remain as they were separated by God, from whence it is plainly expedient, and preventive of many evils, that kings and great lords should take to themselves wives from the same realm, that the inheritance may remain to the people of the same realm, and nations be not intermixed, but remain as God has divided them, viz. by different seas, sometimes by deserts, and by moun- tains ; that different kingdoms may be ruled by different but their own inhabitants, lest the ambition of empire bring mischief on both, when a king is divided into more and greater territories than he is able to rule.'

The news of Cade's revolt struck terror everywhere, most of all into the hearts of those time-serving, greedy, and corrupt bishops who hung about the poor King. They hid themselves in those dioceses which they had so long neglected, for it was death for them to remain in London. Even here they were not safe. William Aiscough, bishop of Salisbury, the King's confessor, had escaped to his manor of Edyndon, in Wilts. Here, after he had celebrated mass on June 29, he was dragged out of church, murdered, and his goods pillaged (p. 15N), the people saying, 'he always kept with the King, and was his confessor, and did not reside in his own diocese of Sarum with us, nor maintained hospitality, there- fore he shall be slain,' and so they beat and stabbed him, wounding him severely with horrible weapons, and cast him naked into the fields after the murder.

The story of Cade has been mutilated by Lancastrian partisans in the Tudor time. He is made out to be an impostor who pretended to a royal pedigree, a noisy and ignorant ruffian, whose aims were plunder and mob government, who had an insane hatred of education, and intended to level the country to a coarse communism. But the captain of Kent, or the captain of the commons, as he was called, was a very dif- ferent person in the eyes of those who witnessed the outbreak. ' He was,' we are told, ' a young man of goodly stature, and right pregnant of wit.' After the battle of Sevenoaks, when he encamped on Blackheath, and the King sent Stafford, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Duke of Buckingham to confer with him, they found him ' sober in talk, wise in reasoning, arrogant in heart, and stiff-in opinion.' Men would not fight against him, for they said that he and his followers 'laboured for the

IXTRODUCTIOX. liii

common weal.' and 'spared not to speak that the Captaitvs cause was profitable to the Commonwealth.' Gascoigne tells us (p. 190) that while the Commons were wrangling with the King's young counsellors at Leicester, and the young counsellors were trying to browbeat the Commons, and ' before the settlement of many articles in that Parliament, the commons of Kent rose under their Captain John Cade. who was descended from a base-born Roger Mortimer, and that this captain, after pardon granted to him and his by the King. was mortally wounded by the treason of his servant, and brought dead to London in July, 1450/

The fifteen articles contained in the complaint of the commons of Kent are well known. They do not, however, occur in the Rolls of Par- liament. They are, speaking generally, identical with those grievances of which the Commons complained, which they had been striving, both in London and Leicester, to redress. The battle of Sevenoaks was followed by the occupation of Southwark, the entry into London, the beheading of Lord Fiennes and his son-in-law, Cromer, the sheriff of Kent, and the battle of London Bridge. This fight was indecisive, and the King. taking advantage of the opportunity, issued a pardon. The expedient had the usual effect. and the insurgents dispersed. Cade, after taking his goods to Rochester, and having attempted unsuccessfully to seize Queenborough Castle. fled to Lewes, where he was slain. and the in- surrection was at an end. How grave it was is to be seen in the attainder of Cade, and in the number of persons who for some years afterwards were charged with complicity in the outbreak. Among these was Sir Wm. Oldhall, Speaker of the Commons in the Parliament of Nov. 1450, who was outlawed in 1453, f°r having been a favourer of Cade. Cade himself professed to believe that the King's pardon was invalid unless it were affirmed by Parliament.

Other disturbances occurred simultaneously with the Kentish in- surrection. In narrating an atrocious crime committed near Newbury, Gascoigne (p. 139) mentions that it took place during an insurrection in these districts. Similar riots occurred in Devon.

The courtly bishops and the King's counsellors accused the ortho- dox preachers of fomenting these disturbances, in consequence of the sermons which they preached against the vices of the age. 'The preachers of the Word of God,' says Gascoigne (p. 188), 'the most

liv IXTRODUCTION.

eminent doctors of the age, were traduced before the King and Council, when the real causes were the wrongs of the kingdom, the enormous taxes, the total failure of justice both in civil and ecclesiastical courts, so that if the preachers had been silent, the stones, i.e. the people, would have cried out.'

Hitherto, all action which had been taken by the Commons or by the insurgents, by Parliament which fairly expressed the national senti- ment, and by associations which professed to do so irregularly, had been on the side of the reforming party. Suffolk had been expelled from the royal councils, and dispatched by an agency only less informal than that of the London mob, who hewed his horse in pieces and slaughtered his stable grooms. It would have been infinitely better for Henry's house — the malcontents would never have touched him — if he had let Suffolk take the trial which Lords and Commons were equally anxious to bring him to. There is nothing more touching in English history than the reverence which all men felt for Henry. Had it not been for the sweet- ness of his character, his gentle piety, his unswerving conscientiousness, the events of 146 1 would have been anticipated in 1450.

William Tresham had been four times Speaker of the House of Commons. Only one other man had been honoured so often vvith the confidence of the House. He had, as in duty bound, led the attack on Suffolk. The precedent, though the purpose of Parliament was baffled by the King's lenity or the Queen's will, was of prodigious importance. After the lapse of two generations, the Commons had reasserted their right to impeach an offending minister, whose acts could not perhaps be exaggerated into treason, but were far more mischievous than the crimes of any ordinary traitor. The session of 1450 was, on constitutional grounds, the most important that had hitherto been held in the history of the English Parliament. The two houses were obviously at one, and it was plain that if the two worked together they could strike terror into bad ministers. Sir John Popham, who had been first elected, declined the office on the ground of age and infirmity, but more probably from timidity, and Tresham had consented to serve again. I do not conclude that he was revolutionary, still less Yorkist in his tendencies. I see no reason to believe that in the sense of hostility to Henry and Henry's family, there was a Yorkist party. It is probable that he was a loyal

7NTRODUCTION. lv

subject of Henry. In those days, blood feuds were not early forgotten, and it is worth noting that Thomas Tresham, his eldest son, of whom we shall hear presently, was Speaker of that Coventry Parliament in which the family of the Duke of York and all his adherents to the number of twenty-four were attainted, and was himself attainted after Towton, though restored by Edward IV. His grandson, Roger Tresham, was also a Lancastrian, served in this interest at Empingham, was at- tainted in 1475, and restored by Henry VII.

The Speaker of the House which had lately separated, we can hardly say had been dissolved, during the hurry and alarm of Cade's insurrection, had appointed to meet the Duke of York, probably at his castle of Fotheringay, who was now returned from Ireland. where he had been sent, says Gascoigne, against his will by the King (p. 42). It was known that Somerset was on the point of returning from France, and it was feared, we may conclude, that Somerset would be worse than Sufifolk. It was known also that another Parliament must speedily be summoned, if indeed the writs for that which met on November 6th were not already issued. It was certain that Tresham would again be Speaker, and it was natural and proper that the Duke of York, who had taken no part in the prosecution of Suffolk, and had not yet quar- relled with Somerset, should confer with the chief commoner in the kingdom. One Simon Norwich, who it is suggested was an agent of Lord Grey de Ruthyn, the head of a family which was peculiarly inso- lent, perfidious, and unmanageable, even in that bad age, determined to waylay and murder the Speaker. It was necessary, however, to learn the route which Tresham intended to take. Norwich therefore sent a spy, who insinuated himself into Tresham's confidence, and became acquainted with the plan of his journey. On Sept. 22, as Tresham and his son Thomas were riding from their home at Sywell to the con- ference, the assassins, to the number of 160 or more, set upon Tresham when he was a little ahead of his retinue, at Thorplandclose, near Moulton in Northamptonshire, murdered the father, wounded the son, and robbed them both, the father of a collar of the Kings livery — a significant fact, a gold chain, signet, and jewels, horse, and £io in money ; the son, of his horse and personal efifects. These particulars are stated by the widow, Isabel Tresham, a daughter of Vaux of

lvi INTRODUCTION.

Harrowden, in a petition presented to the Westminster Parliament of November, in which she gives a long and circumstantial narrative of the manner in which her husband had been trepanned and murdered. She claims the right of appeal to men of Northamptonshire only, on behalf of herself, or, in the event of her death, for her son. Tresham dwelt in his own country, and his widow knew that she could obtain justice from the verdict of her neighbours. I have little doubt that the blow which fell on Tresham was intended for Parliament, and that whosoever set the assassins on, hoped that the fate of the Speaker would counsel prudence to all constitutional reformers for the future.

If the murderers of Tresham intended to cow the Parliament, they were for the time disappointed. The House which met on Nov. 9, 1450, went to work on the lines of its predecessor. It elected as its Speaker Sir William Oldhall, whose opinions it will be remembered were so pro- nounced that in 1453 ne was attainted and outlawed for having been an associate of Cade. But its doings were not factious or revolutionary. It began by confirming the subsidy or income-tax which had been granted in the previous year, and made provision for an accelerated payment of the arrears. The defaulters were to be summoned and examined by commissioners, assigned or to be assigned by the King, who were to have the povver of punishing by fine and ransom those who might make default, and by imprisonment and forfeiture those who resisted the commissioners. To clear up doubts, the liability of the tax is limited to those who have over 40S. clear income in freehold or copy- hold lands, and over 6os. annually from orfice. No person who was a member of the existing Parliament, or had been a member of the last, was eligible as a commissioner. After sitting for a month, during which it endorsed the petition of Isabel Tresham, it was adjourned by succes- sive prorogations to May 5.

It then presented an extraordinary petition to the King, requiring him to ordain, by authority of Parliament, that certain persons, thirty in number, should be banished from the court, at a distance of not less than twelve miles from the king's residence, under pain of forfeiting lands and goods. The most important persons in this list are the Duke of Somerset, the Duchess dowager of SufTolk, William Booth, Bishop of Lichfield, of whom Gascoigne says that he believes (p. 194) 'that his

IXTRODUCTIOX. lvii

memory vvill be accursed for ever." describes as ' indignus episcopus Ces- triae' (p. 40); and again (p. 52), as 'an illiterate man, of bad character, who had never taken a degree, but had been a common lawyer, thrust into his see by a papal provision obtained from Pope Nicholas V by the King's license, and now Margarefs chancellor,' John Sutton, Lord Dudley, and the abbot of St. Peters, Gloucester. Most of the rest are officers of the household, and the petition further demands that such persons among them as hold any office at court shall be discharged of it, and receive no wages from Dec. 1.

The King replied by his Chancellor, Stafford, who, if Gascoigne is to be trusted (p. 231), was the most profligate churchman of the day, that he had often declared to his Parliament that it was his intention to have none but virtuous persons about him, and that he is not informed of any cause why he should dispense with the services of the persons named in the petition. But he is willing that, with the exception of the lords and a very few others, the rest should absent themselves from the court for a year, during which time any one who wills may have an opportunity of alleging reasons in favour of a longer banishment from his presence. The King adds, however, that he reserves the right of using all his subjects without exception, in case he takes the field against his rebels and enemies, i.e. reformers of the type of Cade, and the constant enemy in France. Considering the boldness of the petition, which claimed the dismissal, not only of the household, but of the King's cousin and prin- cipal adviser, of the widow of Suffolk, who was about the person of the Queen, and of Booth, the Oueens principal minister, the mildness of the answer seems to measure the alarm of the court. Next year, however, to Gascoigne's infinite disgust, this ignorant lawyer and unworthy bishop is promoted to the see of York. It was more provoking and more scan- dalous than the promotion of Sibthorp and Mainwaring by Charles I.

The Parliament reenacted the Act of Resumption, totidcm verbis, and attainted Cade, not for the original offence, but for treasons alleged to be committed by him from the 8th to the nth of July inclusive, in Southwark. Dartford, and Rochester. But not content with branding the memory of the King's rebel, it sought to do the same by the public enemy, Suffolk. The Commons petition the King that as Suffolk made no valid and sufficient answer to the charges brought against him. a

h

lviii INTRODUCTIO.X.

schedule of which is annexed to the petition, and as, had a trial taken place, he would assuredly have been convicted and attainted, an Act of Parliament should be passed in proper form to declare William de la Pole a traitor, that his blood should be pronounced corrupt, his heirs incapable of inheritance from him, and his whole estate be forfeited to the crown, except such as he might hold in trust for others. The petition prays that the same forfeiture should extend to his chattels, save moneys paid by a certain date, and gifts made by the Duke to the University of Oxford. The petition concludes by charging Pole, in addition to his other misdeeds, with having contrived and effected the arrest, imprisonment, and final destruction of the Duke of Gloucester, with having abridged the lives of the royal princes, and with having estranged lords who were near in their relationship from the King. The petition was indeed rejected, but its presentation is a proof of how profound was the dissatisfaction which the Commons entertained towards the administration, and how their anger was no way appeased by the exile and murder of Suffolk.

I have dwelt on these particulars at length for many reasons. In

the first place, there is no part of English constitutional history which is

more instructive, and that for several reasons, than the six years which

intervene between the summons of the London and Leicester Parliament

of 1449, and the first protectorate of the Duke of York. The par-

liamentary tactics of Tresham and Oldhall. of Thorpe and Cherleton,

successive Speakers of the House, are on the same lines with those

adopted by Eliot and Pym, Hyde and Hampden. The action of the

House is a genuine refiex of public opinion ; and they who can read

between the lines of the Rolls of Parliament can without any violent

effort recall the motives, the speech, and the acts of those who vainly

but honestly endeavoured to arrest the progress of those impulses

which were hurrying the nation into civil war. Unfortunately for the

statesman of the fifteenth century, there was no remedy to be found

against the two cankers of the time, the total corruption of the church.

and the utter lawlessness of the aristocracy. To pull down one bad

man, like Suffolk, was merely to make room for another bad man, like

Somerset. To ruin and degrade a mischievous and conceited prelate

like Pecok, was to make a place for an equally mischievous, more im-

moral, and infinitely more ignorant person, like Nevil. Pecok indeed

IXTRODUCTIOX.

lix

was a man of learning. who might have held his own despite his sus- picious theology, if he had not meddled with politics on his own account. Nevil was a youth. who was not old enough to be con- secrated, even by the most piiant of popes. to his see (p. 16), and yet he felt himself able in Pecok's humiliation to twit him (p. 213) with his contempt for the holy doctors. I cannot but think that there is not a little sarcasm in Pecok's reply : * I regret that I wrote so, for I did not look sufficiently to the circumstances.'

Again, the events of these six years, compared with the earlier days of the Long Parliament, and the earlier action of the Convention Parliament. not to go later down, are confirmatory of the fact that for centuries the solution of political difficulties has been manageable by a well-ordered and patriotic Parliament. To my mind, the par- liamentary leaders of these six years of the fifteenth century are as real, as noble, and as worthy as any in the long succession of wise statesmen that I have read of, or have known. To reconcile order and freedom, to formulate and maintain all legitimate rights, to in- terpret the prerogatives of government by its duties, and to judge it by its acts and its motives is, and always will be, the function of parliamentary control. And I venture on saying that there is no single principle of government and finance, no serious issue between the administration and the nation, which was not, if one reads the facts aright, present in the constitution which Fortescue lauded, and Tresham and his fellows guarded. The experience of the fifteenth century statesman was narrow ; he had to create his precedents, and to define his procedure, but he was resolved on maintaining the in- stitutions which he had inherited. After the vices of the two most powerful factors in the state, the Church and the nobility, made ruin of those labours which would have given England a genuine Parliament, well fortified by needful privileges, and yet strong in that modest self- respect which assists men more than anything else to wise speech and counsel, after despotism seemed the only refuge from anarchy, and England went back two centuries, the successors of the fifteenth century statesmen cherished their traditions, and in good time revived them for opportune action. The arraignment of Suffolk by Tresham is as in- teresting a study as the impeachment of Strafford by Pym. There is

h 2

1 x INTROD UCTION.

only one figure in the scene to which English history affords no parallel, that of the blameless and helpless king.

Again, in order to read between the lines of these invaluable frag- ments of Gascoigne's ' Liber Veritatum,' and to see how, with naturally clerical leanings, he was alive to the present difficulties and impending sorrows of his own generation, one must know the concentration of English social Hfe in the fifteenth century from its highest and widest mani- festations in Parliament. The personality of Gascoigne is that of a well- connected, fairly-opulent English priest, who was stored with the learning of his age, was honoured by his contemporaries, was orthodox in his beliefs, but unsparing in his condemnation of those who did not reach what he believed to be the standard of public and private duty. Had he set his heart on wealth, he would have done better as an honest tailor. He has friends : Robert Thwaites, master of Baliol, and William Grey, of the same College, afterwards Bishop of Ely, are students like himself. His admiration for some of the London and Cambridge clergy is hearty. The pious knight, Sir Thomas Cumber- worth, who believed in the holiness of Scrope, and who gave (p. 149) lands and tenements to divers parishes in order to make up the loss which the incumbents suffered, by the greedy monks and their impro- priations, is, to Gascoigne, the type of a high-minded and worthy layman. But he has no patience with the worldly bishops, the licentious courtiers, the gluttonous monks, and the corrupt Oxford Congregation. The world of Christendom is saved by the valour of John Hunniades. The Turk is beaten back from the walls of Belgrade ; the Papal Court is even obliged to confess that the Hungarian hero was right in forbidding the exportation of the nation's wealth by the pardon-mongers who came there ; God himself wrought a special miracle by John Capistrano, the monk who led the Christian host to its unequal combat with Waldewach, but the English prelates, with Bourchier at their head (p. 48), the successor of the slothful Kemp and the licentious Stafford, gave no thanksgiving for the deliverance of Christendom, for the first arrest of the great wave which seemed likely to again engulf the West in a savage barbarism. Oxford, indeed, had the grace to give thanks, to sing solemn chants, to make a general procession, with a Te Deum Laudamus, on St. Lucy's morrow (September 20), when an ancient

TNTRODUCTION. lxi

theologian preached a sermon on that occasion (he modestly conceals his own name), who had held long conversations on the facts with Erasmus Fullar, who had been present at the battle, and had much to say of the Pope, and Alphonso's Catalans, who stabled their horses at St. Paul's outside Rome ; of the infamous murder of Thomas de Calva, and of God's judgments on the two cardinals who persecuted him. One can almost see him, feeble in health, but full of zeal. in his upper chamber in Oriel College, which the fellows had gratefully settled on him for life, with his precious folios of school-learning before him — the St. Augustine which had once been Grosteste's, scored with the marks of the great English bishop, doctor, statesman and saint — discoursing with Millington of Clare Hall, Cambridge, or with Eborhal ; contrasting the old with the new in church, in state, in fashion, in society, in manners ; learning the latest news from distinguished foreigners ; reviewing the last utterance of the audacious Pecok, and compiling the vast mass of extracts and notes which his executors, according to his directions, were to copy fairly out into two huge folios. Gascoigne hates heterodoxy, because he thinks it conceit ; but what he loves is piety and charity, a holy life, a good example. a clear conscience, and, in the parochial clergy, frequent preaching, open hospitality, and a desire to extend education.

The Church, to a medieval divine, included the relations of the English establishment to the Pope and the Papal Court ; the govern- ment of the national Church by its bishops and other officials ; the life of the parochial clergy, and the influence of the religious orders. On every one of these heads our author has a great deal to say.

The Pope was the representative of the unity of Christendom. Nothing scandalised the Churchman of the fourteenth and fifteenth century more than the schism which followed on the election of Urban the Sixth in 1378, and was continued down to the election of Martin the Fifth in 141 7. One attempt was made after this date to renew the schism on the election of the Duke of Savoy by the Council of Basle in 1439, under the name of Felix the Fifth. Since this time the Roman Church has not suffered from internal divisions. But very soon it was found that what the Church gained by the cessation of the schism it lost by the discontent which the conduct of its pontiffs caused. The scandals of the Papal administration, on which Gascoigne comments freely, were

lxii INTRODUCTION.

as great in England during the fifteenth, as they were in Germany in the sixteenth century, and had the time been ripe for it, Peter de Monte's sale of indulgences in 1440 was as provocative of secession (pp. 123-5) as that of Tetzel nearly eighty years afterwards. But the grievance felt at the acts of the Papal Court is even worse, because uninterrupted. From John the Twenty-second (James D'Euse), one of the Avignon popes, down to the latest years of Gascoignes life, the Cardinals and other officials of the Court are little better than a gang of brigands, who pillaged Europe and especially England, — who taxed the clergy with first-fruits, claimed and occupied English benefices, extorted huge sums of money from England, sold bulls, presentations and provisions, poisoned popes who checked their ill doings, and murdered on false charges of heresy honest preachers and genuine reformers. The dawn of Luther's reformation was before Gascoigne's mind, and though he would have abhorred schism sincerely, he would have thankfully welcomed an escape from the mercenary crew which constituted the Roman Court. If my reader will take an example, let him read the story (p. 154) of Prosper Colonna, of Louis of Luxembourg (p. 136), of Calixtus the Third (pp. 12-13), and of the unordained fool who, by licence of Eugenius the Fourth, held a number of benefices, whose story (e. g. p. 195) is frequently repeated.

The divines of the fifteenth century seem to have generally held that, in one particular at least, a General Council was superior to the Pope. It could depose him. It did so by Benedict the Thirteenth, Gregory the Twelfth, and John the Twenty-third (Balthasar Cossa), and the decrees of these Councils were accepted. The Council of Constance even took part in the election of Martin the Fifth. In dealing then with the discipline of the Church, as represented by the highest official, a General Council could set aside an existing pontiff, and so was his superior. But in matters of local discipline, and in matters of doctrine, the question of the relative authority of Pope and Council was more debatable. As every one knows, the Council of Constance condemned the doctrines of Wiklif and of the Hussite reformers. ' But the Pope misleads and is misled,' says Gascoigne (p. 152), 'and his grants are not to be interpreted by the grammatical meaning of the words which they contain.' Over and over again our author insists that his indulgcnces

LXTRODUCTIOX. lxiii

and his judicial acts are to be taken according to their intention, and their intention cannot be anything which is morally or doctrinally wrong. A curious illustration of the view which might be taken as to his powers is given in the account of the threat of Martin the Fifth (p. 17) to Chichele and the other English prelates about the year 1430. The Pope was anxious to get the statute against Papal provisions repealed, threatened the English bishops with excommunication for not doing what they were unable to effect, or did not dare to attempt, and actually suspended Chichele from his official legateship. ' Then the bishops openly said that a General Council was superior to the Pope, and there- upon appealed from the Pope to the General Council which was about to be held (of Basle), though very often before they had held different language, saying that the Pope was superior to a General Council, and could dissolve it at his pleasure.'

The authority of the Papacy was very often found to be a conve-

nient instrument of government, which hardly any one would be unwilling

to use on an emergency. On the other hand, the abuses of the Papal

administration were strongly resented. In the case cited above, nearly

all were unanimous in denouncing Papal provisions, that is, grants of

benefices by Papal nomination in disregard of private rights or capitular

elections. Gascoigne dwells upon several instances in which the scandal

was great ; for example, on the bribery which seated Andrew in the

deanery of York, and the disturbances which accompanied Papal inter-

vention in the churches of Sarum and Wells. But though these provisions

were illegal, they were exceedingly frequent. The King often applied

for them, though the grant was a breach of the law. By the Great

Charter, capitular elections were to be free. But kings wished to provide

for their friends, and it was by no means certain that chapters would attend

to royal recommendations, while they could be constrained to submission

by the threat of excommunication — a threat which was not suffered to

lie idle— which, while in operation, deprived the people of religious

offices, and the priest of his fees — a very notable part of his income

in the middle ages. Besides, there were many ways in which the Roman

Court could revenge itself on those who defied its pretensions or its claims.

Its prohibited degrees, for example, made a dispensation for marriage

constantly necessary, for though its rule was strict, it allowed, for a

Lxiv INTRODUCTION.

consideration, marriages between very near kin. It frequently, for in- stance, sanctioned a marriage between uncle and niece in the royal house of Portugal. Beyond the doctrine that the action of the Pope must be in accordance with the law of God, I do not find that Gascoigne recog- nises any control over the Pope in matters of faith and doctrine. Still his opinions on indulgences, and his statement that the Pope is liable to err in matters of fact, is a large qualification.

But, whatever may be his reverence for the Pope's authority, and however large he considers the Pope's powers of government, especially over the monastic orders, he has no respect whatever for the Pope's court and cardinals. ' The Pope' he says (p. 129), cis frequently constrained by the excessive importunity of kings, lords, and officers, of cardinals and referendaries, to grant much which he does not judge either by Holy Scripture or common reason ought to be granted, and what is not in harmony with the divine judgment.' He gives a very dark picture of their conduct (p. 148) towards their master and the church. ' Romanis innata est cupiditas ' (p. 154), says Gascoigne, and goes on to tell how Prosper Colonna rebelled against Eugenius IV, and tried to kill him, and how the brother of this Cardinal had been enriched by his uncle with the goods of the church, how the Pope deposed Colonna, and deprived him of the archdeaconry of Canterbury, which he held in commendam, and how Archbishop Chichele seized the opportunity to put his nephew Thomas Chichele into the vacant benefice. At last Eugenius yielded to the importunity of the Romans and his dread of them, and restored Prosper. But the archdeaconry of Canterbury was gone, and Prosper sued Thomas Chichele in the Roman curia, where it was finally agreed that Prosper should have two English rectories in commendam worth a hundred pounds, and yet this Prosper always went up to the English who might be in the Roman court, saying, ' You English, give me back my benefice.' ' This cardinal was appointed ' says Gascoigne, ' by his uncle when he was only eighteen years old. I have heard,' he says (p. 196), 'that lately, in the time of a pope who died a few years ago — he probably means Eugenius — the Pope, worn out by the importunities and entreaties of those who profferred their petitions and expectant favours (i.e. provisions) written out in deeds, has said, "Since you tease and harass me so, let what you want be done in the devil's name," and so a deed was

IXTRODUCTIOX. lxv

signed with the Pope*s hand, and the grant set under a bull.! He accuses also the cardinals and officials of forging and altering bulls, of vvhich the Pope does not know the contents, or supposes to be wholly different from what they actually are.

:Modern sinners say (p. 123), "I do not care whatand how many sins I commit in God*s sight, because I can easily and speedily get a plenary remission granted me by the Pope, whose writing and grant I have bought for fourpence, or sixpence, or for a game of tennis;" for they who sell letters of indulgences go up and down the country and give such a letter, now for twopence, now for a good drink of wine or beer, sometimes as a wager at tennis if they lose, sometimes for the hire of a harlot, and sometimes as a personal favour. Peter de Monte, who in the year 1440 collected much money by indulgences issued by Pope Eugenius, as he was leaving England and went on board ship, told Doctor Vincent Clement : ':By G — ! Pope Eugenius shall not have a penny out of these bags full of money, unless he sends me a brief promising me the archbishopric of Milan." ' The story is repeated further on with a few variations. There were people who went about the country with baskets full of these letters of indulgence, to sell them everywhere to all who might wish to buy, and some said, ' Now Rome comes to our door,' and some did not care what crimes they committed, thinking they could easily get pardon and grace by the Popes grant, so that Alfonso, King of Aragon, said to Pope Eugenius, 'Now is the Roman church truly a harlot, for she lays herself out to all who ask her with money.' Gascoigne com- pares Peter de Monte to Simon, who deemed that the gift of God could be purchased with money. The Pope found him useful, for though he was disappointed of the archbishopric of Milan, he was made Bishop of Brescia. There were other people besides Gascoigne who suspected these instruments of pardon. One of the fathers of Basle (p. 12 1) wTote a treatise on papal indulgences, and declared that for a thousand years after Christ, such instruments as had become usual had never been seen.

But the scandal which affected Gascoigne more than anything else was that which was always before his eyes, the possession of the arch- deaconry of Oxford, under papal provision, and through the agency of de Moleyns and Aiscough, by Fulk de Birmingham. This person, who is not named by Gascoigne, though he tells the story more than a dozen

lxvi INTRODUCTION.

times, generally with some important addition, was a half-witted fellow, who had been the playmate of a great personage (probably the King), who received by license of Eugenius twelve prebends, an archdeaconry worth a hundred pounds yearly, and a rectory or two, (I cannot trace all the preferments in Le Neve, but my readers will see the dates of several in the Chronological Table, for it is not difficult to discover of whom Gascoigne is speaking,) who was utterly ignorant and illiterate, was never ordained, never visited archdeaconry, prebend, or rectory, was daily drunk, and was wholly incapable of managing his affairs. One layman collected all his receipts and kept them, with an annual stipend of £20, three others have £\o apiece yearly, another 100 shillings, while the accumulations were said to have been in the hands of Bishop Aiscough, and to have been lost after the murder of the bishop. ' This drunken fool lives at Oxford, and has lodged for twenty years in a private family at weekly commons or board of sixteenpence, and as much pocket money as his agent pleases to allow him ; and I,' says Gascoigne, ' a Doctor and Professor of Holy Writ, heard this Archdeacon say in the year 1440 : " I don't care for the clergy. I am better off than your great Doctors, and my belief is as good as theirs. I believe there are three Gods in one Person, and I believe what God believes." I heard him, I Chancellor of Oxford, utter these absurdities in my presence. God knows that I lie not.' And the good Chancellor and laborious preacher not unnaturally contrasts his unrewarded labours with the fortunes of this profane and illiterate idiot.

Scandals such as Birmingham's pluralities were the outcome of a general decline in the character of the English hierarchy. Birmingham was a layman in possession of many benefices. Gascoigne mentions an- other, a physician, married (p-43)- and in possession of two deaneries, two prebends, and a great rectory, who was seldom resident in one of these five benefices, and never in the others, and therefore one of those dumb dogs of whom the prophet Isaiah speaks. This person is most probably Dr. Keymer, Dean of Salisbury, and physician to Duke Humphrey and the King, some not over decent extracts from whose treatise 'De Sani- tatis Custodia' were printed by Hearne from a MS. in the possession of Sir Hans Sloane. But it does not appear that by the law of the Church ordination was essential to the tenure of a dignity in the Church, or even

IXTRODUCTION. lxvii

to a benefice with cure of souls, provided the unordained incumbent did not undertake functions which none but a priest could fulfil. So, from the Reformation to the Restoration and the Act of Uniformity, the canonries in cathedrals, and even parochial churches, were occupied by persons who had not received ordination of any kind, or at least had not received ordination at the hands of an Anglican bishop. Keymer, Dean of Salis- bury (p. 42), was one of those who, with the Bishop Beauchamp, the successor of Aiscough, declared that the orthodox preachers were the promoters of sedition and insurrection against the ecclesiastics in T450.

The bishops owed their elevation to court intrigues, to simony, and to bribes at the Papal court, the weakness of the government allowing the laws to be broken with impunity. They were ignorant and illiterate, minus habentes, as Gascoigne says, bent on accumulating wealth, which they spent in luxury, and on corrupting their own clergy whoni they had provided with benefices, and for whom they obtained from the Pope licenses of non-residence. They welcomed (p. 41) the new doctrine of Pecok, that bishops, as bishops, were not bound to preach. His brethren said, ' That excellent clerk and bishop will defend the practices of us bishops/ But the public judged very differently. Nearly everyone was heard crying out, 'Down with the bishops who grow rich, who wish to be called lords, to be served on bended knee, who ride about with so many and such fine horses, and will do nothing by way of preaching to save men's souls, for the bishops either do not know how to preach, or omit the duty because they cannot preach unless to preach up those ill prac- tices of which the bishops themselves are guilty, and do not preach good works which the bishops do not do, but omit, and deride, and despise such as do them.' ' This,' says my author, ' was common talk about the bishops among clergy and laity, and da)* after day there was more and more stir among the people, and they slew the bishop of Chichester, Adam Moleyns, and the Bishop of Sarum, William Aiscough, and per- secuted the Bishop of Chester (i.e. Lichfield) one Booth, and the Bishop of Norwich, Walter Lyhart, and many rectors and vicars in Kent, and spoiled them at Sarum and Hungerford.' Certainly if there were many such bishops as that described in p. 167, the discontent was natural. But (p. 119) he tells a more shocking story of the shamelessness of one bishop, and the promise he made to a great sinner.

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lxviii INTRODUCTION.

Their acts were criticised by the preachers and the public (p. 44). Dr. William Millington, of Clare Hall, Carnbridge, a Yorkshire man with whom Gascoigne has many sympathies, spoke openly in his sermon at Paul's Cross, immediately after Pecok's famous apology for the non- preaching prelates. ' On pain of my head, I pledge myself that this realm of England will never prosper until they who approve the sentiments of Bishop Reginald are soundly chastised.' This was the opinion of many. Laymen and nobles said of that Bishop Pecok, 'Heigh-ho! we are bound by the Lord's command to teach our families, and that bishop says that tishops are not bound to teach their dioceses.' They were rarely pre- sent there. Stafford, De Moleyns, Lyhart, Lumley, Aiscough, and Booth held offices at court, four of them secular functions, all requiring con- stant absence from their people. Kemp, too, the Archbishop of York, was constantly at court or at his country house in Kent.

A custom began, says Gascoigne (pp. 132, 168), in the days of Martin V (evil times in Gascoigne's mind) and of Eugenius IV, of getting licenses for non-residence 011 behalf of their chaplains up to a certain number. One bishop nominated as his chaplain one who was both rector and vicar. But on his admission to this office, he neither resided in the bishop's house, nor at his own cure, but gave himself up for years to hunting and carnal delights, saying that he had the license of the Pope for these practices. Many others, in the same manner, betook them- selves to hawking and hunting. Others, without getting a license to hold pluralities, get benefices for others, and before they present, make the presentee sign a legal bond to the effect that he will pay twenty marks or more yearly to the patron or the agent. This practice, says Gascoigne, was detected by Philip Morgan, Bishop of Ely (1426- 1435), who com- pelled all whom he admitted to benefices to take oath that they had not entered and would not enter into such bonds, and that they had not given security that they would not sue the monks to whom a vicarage had been appropriated for the full value of the benefice.

Against these ignorant, corrupt, and shameless traffickers in the endowments of the church, it was reasonable that the law should accord to lay patrons the protection of those writs, which have been issued since the Constitutions of Clarendon. 'Alas,' says Gascoigne (p. 33), 'how unlucky are the times in which wc live, when the prelates give themselves

TNTRODUCTION. lxix

up to delights, and lords have bishoprics and great offices in the church conferred on thcm before they are vacant, and they give their duties to others and take no share in them ' (he is probably thinking of George Nevil's appointment when under age to the bishopric of Exeter, and the license which the Pope gave him to enjoy the temporalities of the see (p. 16) on the condition that his consecration was postponed till he was 27 years old), ' while all discipline ovep individuals is destroyed by inhibitions and appeals to the Court of Arches in London.' Patrons indeed must be protected against intrigue, but the defence of their rights is the destruction of church discipline. He gives an illustration (p. 32) of the manner in which this injury was effected.

Richard Praty, bishop of Chichester, 1430-45, the immediate pre- decessor of De Moleyns, was a member of Oriel College, and therefore probably an acquaintance of Gascoigne. He had excommunicated and deprived a certain vicar of infamous reputation and naughty life. The vicar, after worrying the bishop a long time in the Court of Arches, demanded that the bishop, under severe penalties, should absolve him from the sentence of excommunication which had been pronounced, on the ground that Pope Eugenius had granted any competent priest the power of absolving all who belonged to the brotherhood of the house of St. Anthony in London. But the bishop declined to revoke his sentence, deprived the vicar of his benefice, and notwithstanding the entreaties of the Earl of Arundel and others, refused to restore him, but thrust him from his diocese like a scabbed sheep. ' This letter,' said the bishop, ' which you say has been granted by the Pope, cuts away all power bestowed by the Lord on bishops, because it follows from this grant, that every culprit must be absolved by the bishop, will he, or will he not, or the bishop must risk offending the Pope, and thus any bishop will absolve the most profligate wretch on the mere shewing of a papal bull, or what- ever other means are employed for your absolution before God. Besides,' he continued, <it does not follow that I ought to absolve you, because you show the bull of a Pope who can err and be misled. I know that in the Roman court, when the Pope has agreed to issue a bull in response to the prayer of a petition, the Pope's attendants, and chamberlains, and courtiers, drunk with the venom of covetousness, draw up the bulls, enlarging or shortening the clauses; putting in what the Pope never knew

lxx INTRODUCTION.

nor granted, nor could grant acceptably in the sight of God, and so,' said the bishop, ' I will not act according to your bull, for I believe that the Pope never gave it in words, and I know that he cannot grant it in fact, for the power given him by Christ is that he should bind what man may rightly bind, and bind and loose without man's consent any human act, but only as it accords with the increase of God's worship and the true safety of souls. No man of sane mind could accept your contention, that any one who has a papal license to the effect, shall be absolved by any competent priest.'

But the most striking illustration of the bishop in Gascoigne's age is to be found in a story which he tells of De la Bere, Bishop of St. David's (p. 35). This man had been Henry's almoner, had been made Dean of Wells by papal provision (p. 200), and had caused infinite scandal by the appointment. To put an end to the scandal, the same agency of a papal provision was brought into operation, and De la Bere was made Bishop of St. David's. ( About the years 1452 and 1453, *ne rectors, vicars, and priests of Wales, who had concubines with them in their houses, said to their Bishop of St. David's, " O lord bishop, we, the priests of your diocese, drawn by the fear of God and the dread of eternal punishment to come on sinners, beseech your fatherhood, that by your pontifical authority you cause or compel our concubines to go away, and be perpetually separated from us and our homes, for we beg and pray that they may be so separated from us and our homes by your authority, that we may never have opportunity of sinning with them, and these concubines may never have an opportunity of sinning by cohabiting with us." And that bishop of detestable memory' (he outlived Gascoigne) ' answered them, " I will not grant that your con- cubines be separated from you or your homes, or be compelled to leave them, for in that case, I your bishop should yearly lose 400 marks, which I receive yearly in my diocese for the priests' concubines, for I get yearly a noble or more from each of many priests for his con- cubine, and the sum which comes to my purse makes annually 400 marks, and I will not have them separated from you." And the priests said to that Bishop of Saint David's in Wales, " O lord bishop, we wish to have them separated from us, and these concubines will not be se- parated from us and our homes, but wish to stay in our homes, and

INTRODUCTION. lxxi

live on our goods, will we or not, and therefore because we do not dare to drive them out, through fear. of their friends, who encourage them in living in our homes, we therefore pray, lord bishop, that they be separated from us and our homes by your means." And the bishop told them, "I will not compel them to leave you, for then I, your bishop, should lose much money yearly/' Now that Bishop De la Bere was the man who was thrust upon the church of Wells, by provision of Xicholas V against the will of the chapter, but he was not installed because he feared a violent death there, and afterwards he was scan- dalously sent by provision to the bishopric of St. David's, because the king of England, Henry VI, who afterwards went out of his mind, gave him a license to accept a papal provision for both dignities/

The story which Gascoigne tells is perhaps a little coloured, at least as regards the unanimous and persistent appeal of the clergy. It points of course to the existence of a married clergy in South Wales, and to the fact that the marriage of priests was very common in the prin- cipality. This, I believe, is well known. It is probable that there might have been some ascetic movement in De la Bere\s diocese which brought about a numerous deputation to the bishop, and that many among the clergy may have wished, on religious grounds, to reform their practices ; some, as their prayer seems to hint, from avarice, and from a desire to repudiate their bargain. The mention of the fear felt for the friends of the women clearly implies that the connexion was re- cognized. But I see no reason to doubt that the recorded answer of the bishop is substantially accurate.

There was, however, another grievance in the policy of the English bishops, of which Gascoigne often complains. The hierarchy, as is well known, was bitterly attacked by the poor priests of Wiklif 's movement, and by their successors the Lollard Gospellers. It was thought, and with reason, that the insurgents under Tyler and Littlestreet were stimulated to their insurrection by the Wikliffite preachers ; and in particular, it is certain that Oxford was a stronghold of the party which favoured Church reform. Henry IV, anxious to conciliate all parties, inserted in the Roll of Parliament of his second year (the Par- liament sat from Jan. 20 to March 10, 1401) a statute giving the effect of law to a ' provincial constitution ' (p. 34), carried previously by

Ixxii INTRODUCTION.

Arundel and his bishops, and agreed to by the Convocation of Can- terbury, by which preaching without the license of the diocesan was inhibited. The motive is stated in the preamble of the Act to be ' that the heretics make unlawful conventicles and confederacies, hold and exercise schools, make and write books/ The Act did not, I ima- gine, trench on the privileges of either University, for the grant of a degree in Divinity has from time immemorial licensed the recipient to lecture on the Epistles in the case of a bachelor, and on the whole of Scripture in the case of a Doctor, and till recently. did not require priesfs ordination for the inferior degree in Divinity.

Gascoigne tells us that Arundel (who had been banished by Richard for participation in the reforms projected by the lords appellants, and was doubtlessly much more of a politician than of a divine), was only a bachelor of arts in Oxford, that is, had merely obtained the slightest rudiments of an academical education. He had studied at Oriel, and Gascoigne would have heard about him as a member of the same college. He was not likely to know or discover what would be the consequence of his enactment. The heretical preachers were not si- lenced, and the orthodox were. One of these Wikliffite preachers, William White, was very busy in disseminating the gospeller's creed. He had been a priest, had cast away his orders, had married a wife, and went about the country on his mission, chiefly in eastern England. For a long time he escaped, and seemed to bear a charmed life, for probably the Norfolk weavers sympathised with him, harboured and hid him. At last he was caught in Norwich, tried by the bishop, condemned, handed over to the secular arm, under the statute de heretico comburendo, and burnt in the courtyard before the cathedral close. When I happened to be at Norwich, just after the recess of 1880, I inspected the Corpora- tion accounts, and found under the year 1427 what it cost the Corporation to burn William White, and two other heretics, William Whaddon and Hugh Pye. They were not the only victims of the year.

The grant of the license to preach was abused. The bishops issued very few licenses, exacted large sums of money for their letters and their seals, and made the license revocable at pleasure. ' The bishops do not preach, and will not suffer others to do so, except at the entreaty of great lords. It may be proper that the unworthy should

IXTRODUCTIOX. Ixxiii

be excluded from the office of the preacher, but why should all be suspended, and be exposed to the extortions or the caprices of the diocesan? Man should not impose silence on all doctors and bishops because several of both kinds are heretics. But/ adds my author, 'the judgment of God came on the archbishop. His throat was choked so that he could neither swallow nor cough ; and thus he, who by his own tongue had stopped the word of God, had his tongue stopped when he was anxious above all things to speak. The silencing of the preachers was a matter to murmur at, having been done in order to suspend a few heretics, but the bishops did not or could not preach themselves, and were angry (p. 35) when men said u Such and such a doctor preaches well, though no bishop, but our bishop neither can nor will preach, and so one who is no bishop does more good than a bishop does." '

The corruption and pride of the fifteenth-century bishops is illus- trated by two stories given in pp. 22 - 23 ; their extortion appears everywhere, but is put in the most flagrant view in p. 123, where an archbishop (undoubtedly Kemp, of York,) bids the curates of his diocese exact fees from all penitents who come for absolution, in order that the works of the cathedral of York may be finished.

The two stories are so characteristic that I am tempted to translate them. ' Henry IV, King of England, asked Henry Bowet, Archbishop of York, i; What can be the reason why bishops in our time are not 'translated' (i. e. their bodies solemnly removed from their graves, with a view to canonization), on account of famous miracles of theirs, as was once the case ? " The bishop was silent, and a clerk standing by said, " If you will, sir, that I should speak, I will mention what seem to me to be the four causes of the fact." The king gladly gave him leave. u One cause," said the clerk, " was, that once God showed by some special sign who was worthier than other men by reason of his wisdom and holy life to be made bishop, and thereupon God made miracles on behalf of persons thus elected in their life and after their death. But now such persons are chosen by earthly persons and by you kings to be bishops as pleases you, and just the same miracles which you kings do, the bishops nominated by you do also. Again, kings used to bow the knee, begging holy and learned men to undertake episcopal duties, because these duties

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Ixxiv I.WTRODUCTION.

require more perfect works than any private rule does, and thus any professed monk could be elected to a bishopric, and the people, who were thus entreated, accepted episcopal duties for the salvation of souls reluctantly, and thereupon were translated after death by reason of their miracles. Again, holy bishops of old, reflecting on the episcopal duties put on them, did not wish to be translated from bishopric to bishopric for the sake of larger revenues, but now they are translated from bishopric to bishopric in their lives, and so do not deserve to be translated by the evidence of miracles after their death. Again, in these days, men buy their translations and their bishoprics so dearly in their lives, that they are not worth translating after their deaths, nor that God should do miraculous works by their merits." And the clerk said to the king, " You, sir, know one man who gave two thousand marks to a great lord to get translated from his bishopric to an archbishopric." The king was pleased with the answer of that clerk.'

' Bishops used, as one can see in the life of St. Cuthbert, to talk humbly and familiarly with their subjects, and every day to give any one of their subjects an audience, if he wished to converse with his bishop. Lately a poor man came to the servant of an archbishop, the son of a great lord (Gascoigne must mean Stafford), and said, " I wonder that the archbishop does not give audience in his own person to his subjects as his predecessor did." The servant of the archbishop answered, " My lord, the present archbishop, was not bred in the same way that his predecessor was bred," meaning by this that his lord archbishop, who was so strange and distant to his subjects, was the son of a lord, and his predecessor, who had been archbishop before him, was the son of a common man (Chichele's father was said to have been a tailor). The poor man ansvvered the archbishop's servant, "The present archbishop and his predecessor were certainly of very different breeding, but it is clear for all that, that his predecessor was the better man, and more useful to his subjects and their souls and the whole diocese."' The ideal bishop, to Gascoigne's mind, was Grosteste — learned, pious, firm, wise. But the great Bishop of Lincoln, as my author knew, was of very humble origin. The friars minor of Oxford, whom in the early days of their activity and saintliness, as it was thought, Grosteste protected and assisted, (a century or more later Wiklif thought very differently of

INTRODUCTIOX. lxxv

them), kept the good bishop's rushen sandals (p. 141) in their convent library, not in that of the students.

To go a little beyond the bounds of Gascoigne's life, no one who studies the history of the fifteenth century, especially that period between 1449-146 1, from which so many important constitutional principles can be, as they have been, derived, can fail of being struck with the singular facility with which the prelates of the age accom- modated themselves to the times. without exception. Mr. Anything, or Mr. Facing-both-ways, in Bunyan;s allegory, were prentices to them. Every English revolution, except that of the Royal Succession, has had its episcopal partisans. Most of the English hierarchy were sacrificed at the Conquest. William the Second, Henry, Stephen, had their friends and foes on the episcopal bench. Henry the Second was in the same position. John had to face a true patriot in Stephen Langton, whom the Pope put on him, a man whose career and conduct must have surprised the Pope as much as it daunted John. Henry the Third had his allies among the prelates, and so had Simon de Montfort. Edward had a struggle with them and quelled them. His miserable, foolish, disreputable son had a foe in Orleton and a friend in Stapledon. Merks, if we can trust the story, strove to maintain the rights of Richard the Second, even when his cause was quite hopeless, as Arundel aided Henry. But no man among the bishops of Henry's time, even those who owed everything to him — men like Lyhart and Wainfieet, Chedworth, Car- penter, Booth, Low — appears to have helped him by word or deed. Bourchier had been made archbishop during Henry's insanity ; Nevil during the first captivity of Henry, i. e. after St. Alban's. But Bourchier served every change with uniform pliancy. He crowned Edward the Fourth in 1461. He had no scruple in welcoming the restoration of Henry in 1471. He congratulated the conqueror of Barnet and Tewkesbury. He acknowledged the title of Edward the Fifth, accepted the usurper's claims with alacrity, and wheedled Elizabeth Woodvile out of her other boy, who was with her in sanctuary. The last public act of his long and contemptible career— for he was primate for thirty-three years — was to crown the founder of the house of Tudor. Among the odious prelates of the fifteenth century this selfish, sordid, heartless, time-serving churchman is the least respectable. Gascoignc formed

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lxxvi INTRODUCTION.

a fair judgment of him, even though he condemned and degraded the hateful Pecok.

The last conclusion which the Council of Constance condemned in Wiklifs doctrines is very sweeping and very startling. ' Omnes religiones indifferenter derivantur de Diabolo.' By this generality Wiklif meant the monks, in whom he discovered much evil and no good. They were the Pope's army of occupation in England, and Wiklif hated them as an Englishman of the fourteenth century hated the Avignon popes, and as a Reformer of the sixteenth who had come to the conclusion that the Pope was Antichrist would hate the Pope's police. Gascoigne is loyal to the Pope, though he has great misgivings, but he loves the monks little more than Wiklif did. The fifteenth century was not friendly to the religious orders. Henry the Fifth, a very devout prince, did what his great- grandfather, with an equally good reason for it, did not venture on doing, for he suppressed the alien priories. The example was followed. Alcock suppressed a nunnery at Cambridge for the purpose of founding a college there, and Waynflete contrived to do the same by Selborne, at least. The wealthy prior of Selborne was certainly — I have read his household accounts — a very luxurious and probably a very scandalous person, who surrendered on the understanding that a round annuity should be paid him in consideration of his vested interests. But I do not remember to have read of the foundation of more than one new monastery in the fifteenth century. This was the splendid and wealthy house of Sion, which Henry the Sixth endowed with part of that which remained to him of the alien priories, the residue being devoted to Eton and King's (or St. Nicholas') College, Cambridge. The occasion of the foundation of Sion was the cultus of a new and a royal saint, St. Bridget of Sweden, in whose holiness, revelations, and miracles Gascoigne is a firm believer, e. g. pp. 140, 156, 165, 169.

Wealthy men in the fifteenth century founded schools, colleges, and chantries, established collegiate churches, of which Gascoigne highly approves, provided the clergy in them keep residence, and built magni- ficent churches. The architecture of the age has lost all grace, has none of that poetry in stone which an older and more imaginative generation possessed in fulness, but, according to the character of the society which produced it, is massive and business-like. But no one cared to found

IXTRODUCTIOX. lxxvii

new monasteries. There were plenty of them in existence. Land was very valuable, and the law very jealous of monasteries acquiring land. There was, however, one way in which an active and ambitious man could better his fortunes, or an ailing sinner could secure his forgiveness. This was by robbing the parochial clergy. The lessee for a very long term on a very beneficial holding of abbey lands, could make a good bargain with the abbey ; and a frightened offender could satisfy himself that he would get the perpetual prayers of the monks, the value of which was not as yet disputed, if either of them could assist the monks in turning rectories into vicarages — that is, in securing the principal tithes to the monastery, and arranging that the monks should provide the services of some vicar who would undertake the cure of souls and the offices of the church for a very much smaller stipend than the income of the rectory. The vicar need not preach ; the bishops thought this unimportant or dangerous ; there was very little to do, and many people were eager to take the priest's office in those days, that they might eat a piece of bread, especially when the war with France was no longer a profitable calling.

The appropriation of benefices to monasteries, colleges, capitular dignities and collegiate churches began very early. The reasoning which led to the practice was very natural. The monks of the older orders were industrious and learned. They reclaimed wastes, improved agricul- ture, and wrote books. Had it not been for the monasteries, every trace of ancient learning would in all probability have vanished. Had it not been for the monasteries, it is difficult to conceive how civilisation could have revived after the aristocracy and caesarism of Rome had ruined ancient culture ; for the barbarians, in destroying the remains of it, imi- tated and perpetuated the hateful institutions which had wasted the whole world. We should not even have known the history of our own people if it had not been for the monks, for the chronicles of the abbeys are the principal materials for the annals of England. In the days of violence the abbeys were nearly the only refuge ; in the days of igno- rance they were the only schools. Many a thriving English town owes its existence to the fostering care of the monks. The two English Universities seem to have grown up obscurely under the shadow of ancient monasteries. It was obvious that these establishments should be endowed with the most permanent source of revenue, a tax on agri-

Ixxviii INTRODUCTION.

culture tn the form of a tithe. Tithes, it is said, were originally granted for the bishop, the clergy, and the poor. The monks could claim their share in this wealth, as coming under the last two heads, and since they frequently obtained an exemption from episcopal control, might even represent the claims of the third. Nor would the parishioners of the impropriated rectory be wronged, for the monastery would supply the services of the parish from the monks. Besides, the efficacy of monastic prayers was far greater than that of the secular clergyman. The offices of the monks were cumulative, that of the parson was single : it was the utterance of men who, being under strict vows, were the peculiar favourites of heaven. But the parish priest was under looser obligations, and therefore his offering was less acceptable. So fully was this feeling entertained, that the monks were entrusted with the election of bishops of many sees, and a monk, as we see in the rejoinder of the clerk to Henry the Fourth, was deemed peculiarly fit for the episcopal office.

A reaction against the prevailing sentiment set in during the latter part of the thirteenth century. The old monasteries were still wealthy and respectable, but they were insufficient for the public wants. The pious benefactor began to found colleges and schools. All these bene- factors copied that part of the statutes of Merton, the founder of the flrst Oxford College, which peremptorily excluded monks from the College. Merton was soon imitated at Cambridge. In the second epoch of College founding, the second element in Merton's statutes was recognised, that of a school preparatory to, and dependent on, the Col- lege — an institution which was provided by Merton, but long ago suppressed by Merton's fellows. The resources of these colleges were largely composed of impropriations. Merton had large estates, but also the great tithes of several parishes, for the severance of which from the benefkes the consent of Bishop and Pope was necessary. Balliol, Exeter, and Oriel had, in the first instance, very little besides the tithes and dues of impropriate rectories. Magdalene, in Oxford, was largely endowed from this source, for the monasteries whose suppression supplied Wayn- flete with much of his revenues had been themselves endowed in this way. When, after the Reformation, this part of the monastic revenues fell into the King's hands, and the Crown became the largest owner of impropriate tithe in the kingdom, Christ Church in Oxford, and Trinity

INTRODUCTIOX. lxxix

in Cambridge, depended mainly for their revenues on tithes now entirely secularised.

Every one has read of the ingenuity with which the monks sought to evade the various statutes of mortmain. It is said that English law owes many of its technicalities and fictions to the devices of the monks, who were always inventive and always baffled. It is clear from Gas- coigne that they had very much their own way with impropriations. If a landowner wished to improve his estate by an addition, the readiest way was to exchange with the monastery for the great tithes of a benefice which was in his patronage. If a benefactor wished to found a collegiate church, or endow a cathedral with a number of new prebends, the great tithes of parishes were the most obvious source, one which got him the prayers of those whom he had endowed, at little or no expense to himself. If the building funds of a cathedral fell short. if the offerings of the faith- ful, and collections like those made for York (p. i) were insufficient, the tithes of a rectory could be made into a fund. If men believed still in the superior efficacy of monastic prayers, the monks would rather accept tithes than land. The settlement of the former was easy, that of the latter perilous, for the heir of the grantor, or failing him, the crown, was too much interested under the mortmain laws to allow their rights in land to be set aside on account of the grantors soul.

To judge from the frequent and bitter complaints of Gascoigne, this impropriation must have gone on very extensively in his days. He quotes many cases, and dwells indignantly on the practice. A secular priest himself, he believed sincerely in the parochial system, and in the benefit bestowed on a parish by the residence of a conscientious. opulent, hos- pitable, and benevolent rector. Under the significant heading of ' Furtuin (pp. 106-115), ne writes at length on the evil which he saw done by im- propriations. ' I knew,' he says (p. 112), ' a rector, who, from the income cf a single church which he held, maintained at school and the University twenty youths whom he educated for the priesthood. You tell me,' he observes (p. 113),' that these impropriators pray for the parishioners cf these impoverished churches, and this. they say. does more good to them than the prayers of one rector. But pray look at the reason of things. It is better for me that you do good to me, than do good on my behalf ; just as it is better for me, if I be hungry. that you give me food, than that you

Ixxx INTRODUCTION.

give it to another on my behalf or for love of me.' And he applies to those monks the saying of Christ, ' All that came before me are thieves and robbers.' The waste too is serious. ' I have known churches which before appropriation were worth a hundred pounds, but after appropria- tion and non-residence have sunk to half that sum. Besides, there is no end of it. Directly the monks get one church they work for another, pretending poverty, and sic abyssus abyssum invocat? ' What it really means, he adds, ' is more servants, more idlers, more luxuries, more dishes.' In p. 143 he draws a picture of the luxurious monk, who abuses the opulence which pietyhas bestowed on his fraternity; in p. 197 he accuses them of trading on an extensive scale, and over and over again suggests that the Pope should deprive them of their ill-gotten wealth and bestow it to better uses. ' The curates of the parishes have scarcely the means of life. Nay, not satisfied with the tithes, the monks try to get the fees for religious offices. It is known that many infants die without baptism, be- cause parish churches have no fonts, abbeys having by license usurped the right of forcing the inhabitants of certain parishes to bring their children to the abbey church to be baptised, and yet they cannot come conve- niently by night, or at other times, to the abbey font.'

But he is as much offended at the gross neglect of admitted duty in these institutions. The monks used to keep chronicles ; the custom has become obsolete : they used to copy manuscripts ; they have ceased to do so : no work and more dishes is their prayer and, as far as possible, their practice. ' I wish (p. 73) that royal and noble founders, moved by good confessors, would enjoin the abbots of monasteries and convents to maintain a certain number of scribes to copy the works of holy doctors, and of men great in knowledge, under strict penalties inflicted by king or founder ; and that the founders of monasteries should withdraw their benefactions and pensions from them until they bound themselves under the common seal of the monastery to the founder, that they would main- tain a fixed number of such scribes for ever.' University reformers might take a hint from this stringent rule on behalf of ' research ' which Gascoigne commends. ' It is known (p. 167) that good men who have bound wardens, deans, and other priests to remain and reside in the places which they have founded, are cheated, and their purpose is not kept, because the beneficiaries reside elsewhere. The remedy for such

INTRODUCTION. lxxxi

mischief is, that founders and their successors should strictly enjoin, under heavy penalties, that if any of their foundationers takes any license against the will and statutes of the founder, he shall be ipso facto deprived of all right to any benefit accruing to the foundationers, and it shall even be ordained by the founder or by parliament, that the heir or successor of the founder shall expel the culprit who will not obey the founder's statute, that he shall have no power of appeal, and that any appeal he may make shall be a nullity.'

With such bishops and such monks, with dignities openly sold at Rome and scandalously misapplied in England, it was not likely that the parochial clergy would be of a very high order. The proceedings commented on above had impoverished them, the fears and the jealousy of the bishops had silenced them, and the Lollards derided these mass- priests and dumb dogs. Gascoigne dwells more on the loss of good pastors than on the vices of bad ones, on the fact that a few were found whose energy and zeah whose courage and faithfulness were conspicuous, rather than on the shortcomings of the order to which he belonged ; whose restitution to its true place he honestly believed would be the salvation of the country, as in their absence it was hurrying to de- struction. But he does tell a few stories about dissolute clergymen, and hints that there are many such. I have thought it necessary to quote some very plain speaking in the extracts which I have made, but I have been constrained to omit some of the particulars which my author's indignation induced him to record.

The most remarkable and the lengthiest production in the 'Liber Veritatum' is the dissertation or sermon on the seven streams of Babylon, pp. 53~99- This is probably a concio ad clertim, a discourse addressed to the University, and is very instructive, not only as a specimen of an elaborate fifteenth-century sermon, but as a statement of the condition of the Church at the time in which it was composed. The seven streams are : i. The unworthy and scandalous ordination and institution of bishops, rectors, and officials, which is called promotion. 2. The absence of a good rector from a people whom he should govern. 3. Pluralities. 4. The appropriation or annexing of churches and tithes to those who have not the immediate cure of the parishioners. 5. The abuse of absolution by priests. 6. The abuse of indulgences. 7. The abuse of

1

Ixxxii INTRODUCTION.

dispensations and licenses. It will be seen that these heads include nearly all the ground which they covered, who wished to reform the church without altering or tampering with its doctrine, as for instance the authors of the ' Centum gravamina.' It is not too much to say that there is the full dawn of the Reformation in Gascoigne's criticisms on his own times.

Gascoigne says but little about the heretics of his own age, the ob- scure Lollard preachers or gospellers, whose calling was so dangerous. The Wikliffites, he says, abused the miracles of the saints, because they do none themselves, just as Mahomet did in his day, but even here he speaks in the past tense. In p. 117, under the head Haereticns, he gives the principal characteristics of heresy, the chief of which is the preference of human reason to revelation. He makes the time-honoured charge against heretics, that their morals are licentious, but allows that they are of acute perception and active genius. No one, he says, can be the author of a heresy unless he be a man of active genius, though he adds that they are apt to take their place among the spineta of Aristotle and Chrysippus, whose dicta they allow for gospel.

But he has a good deal to say about Wiklif, the Bohemian schism of Huss, Jerome of Prague, the Bohemian students at Oxford, and particu- larly about Peter Payne, or Clerk, who went ofif to Bohemia with Wiklifs books, and persuaded the Bohemians that every one in Oxford was like-minded with the heresiarch, except certain friars, fortifying this state- ment by a document signed with the University seal, which seal he had purloined for the purpose. He says (p. 116) in his account of Wiklif that the University of Oxford, in 1410, condemned more than two hundred of his conclusions and burnt his books at Carfax, in the presence of the chancellor, Thomas de Prestbury, abbot of Shrewsbury. He also gives some account of the proceedings of the Council of Constance against Huss and Jerome of Prague, which he got from a conversation with Spofforth, bishop of Hereford (p. 10), who was present at the execution, and after resigning his bishopric retired to St. Mary's Abbey in York. The cause, he tells us, of the Bohemian schism was the intolerable scandal which was given by the corruptions of the Bohemian church, the prelates and dignitaries of which were discreditable and notorious, and he states that the University of Prague gave the Pope fair warning that if a sharp

IXTRODUCTIOA. lxxxiii

and speedy reformation of abuses in the Bohemian church were not effected, all the consequences which actually ensued would rapidly come to pass.

Gascoigne almost always styles himself Canccllarius studii Univer- sitatis, or Canccllarius Oxoniac, and sometimes Cancellarius uatus, even when he is narrating the events of years during which the records of the University give other Chancellors. It seems that he uses the term natus of himself in relation to this office, as it is used in relation to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who he says is legatus natus papae,non legatus missus, and that at some time the University had conferred upon him this exceptional title. Gascoigne's long residence in Oxford, his inde- pendent position and resources, his high character and conscientiousness, his zeal in the discharge of his clerical and academical duties, his great liberality, and his reputation in the learning of his time, might well, even in that age of the University, when it had greatly declined from its original credit, only to sink lower and lower century after century, have induced his contemporaries to bestow some special honour on him.

A century before GascoigneJs time, he tells us that there were thirty thousand students in Oxford. and that (p. 202) he counted them from the Rolls of the old Chancellors, when he was himself Chancellor. They came from all parts of Europe. Alexander V graduated at Oxford, and then proceeded at Paris. Students came from Bohemia, sat at the feet of Wiklif, and carried his books back to their native country. The number seems incredible, but Oxfordshire was, to judge from its rating for exceptional taxation, after Norfolk, then at the best of its industries, the wealthiest county in England by a considerable proportion, and the circuit of its walls by no means included all its inhabitants, for there was a large population on the north side of the town, and even in some of the villages near it. This concourse of students was diverted by the great plague, the ravages of which were the more serious because our forefathers were closely packed together, and were utterly indifferent to sanitary conditions. Even after the plague, the first quadrangle of New College, minus one of the stories, was supposed to give ample room for a warden, seventy fellows and scholars, ten chaplains, a number of clerks and choristers, and servants too. The site of New College had been once a densely peopled part of Oxford, but now, owing to the plague, was

12

lxxxiv INTKODUCTION

ruinous, deserted, and a hiding-place for thieves and other bad characters. I see no reason to doubt the statement about the exceeding populousness of Oxford in the first half of the fourteenth century. The University had great privileges and a great reputation, and Oxford was a secure retreat against violence, for it was almost the strongest fortress in England, probably even stronger than London.

The University annually elected two officers, who represented them in the conduct of academical business, and a Chancellor who presided over the deliberations of the University parliament, kept order, and con- ferred degrees. It appears that on a sufficient representation made to the Proctors by Masters of the University, the two Proctors, that is the officials who acted on behalf of the general body of superior graduates, were bound to bring forward in the form of a statute the proposals made to them. The Masters and Doctors also elected the Bedels, who were at once the body-guard of the Chancellor, and were invested with important functions in the University. A smaller body, known early as the Con- gregation of the University and consisting of the younger Masters, gave graces for degrees. The fact that this important function was conferred on the junior members of the University is explained or justificd on the ground that those who were nearest to their own exercises were the most competent persons to judge of the qualification of others. The election of the Proctors often ended in riot and bloodshed, and the graduates of the University were not only exceedingly tenacious of their privileges, but warmly resented any interference from bishop, abbot, or other spiri- tual authority, had a perpetual feud with the monks, and occasionally provoked some serious quarrels with the townsfolk.

Degrees were conferred in consideration of the success with which the candidate defended or impugned some thesis. The process was a kind of logical duel, in which one of the parties affirmed, the other denied a position. There was no limit to the subject of debate. Admitted principles of mental science, fundamental rules of moral conduct and duty, the highest verities in religion and church government, were open in these formal disputes to attack and defence. The reader will see one of these on p. 182. It is possible that the sceptical faculty which this kind of exercise developed may account for the innovation which Bishop Fleming (p. 185) introduced in 1420 into the Oxford

INTRODUCTIOX. lxxxv

schools. Fleming had been a Wikliffite and was novv a persecutor, and was even founding a novelty in Oxford, a college of priests, whose business it was to be to defend the Church, its institutions and its doctrines, against innovators, a college whose destiny it was to be the means of educating the Wesleys. There is nothing in the irony of history which strikes one more, than the fact that a college which was called into existence to defend the old ways, should have developed, as time went on, the most successful attack on Anglicanism, whether it be that of the fifteenth or the seventeenth century.

Gascoigne tells us little about the colleges. He alludes to Balliol, but only in connexion with his two friends, Thwaites and Grey ; to Xew College, but only because the Warden happened to be Chancellor when Pecok5s books were burnt at Carfax ; to the libraries of Exeter and Durham Colleges, the latter of which fell with the monastery whose novices it was founded to educate. He refers (p. 96) to a sermon of one Holcot, who may have been the Warden of Merton, and lived in Oxford during Gascoigne's residence, which is quoted to show that a man may get a dispensation, even from a Pope, and be damned for using it, but he gives- the preacher neither Christian name nor place. The fact is, the colleges in Oxford were at this time mere fragments in the University. Some were wealthy, like Merton, New, and All Souls ; but the resources of these foundations were limited to the recipients of the benefaction, and the rule of the founder was to put as many persons on the endowment as the funds would bear. Besides, the fellow was ahvays to be poor. Chichele allowed no man to share his benefaction who had five pounds a year income. The fellows of Merton, to judge from the furious quarrels among them and the trivial causes of the quarrel, must have housed together, and seen hardly any one else, like the Spanish monks in Browning's poem. The fellows of New College were often constrained to go into religion, because they could hardly live. Those of the poorer colleges, like University, Balliol, Oriel, Exeter, Oueen s, and Lincoln, were the recipients of small stipends, derived from some tithes and some build- ings, and eked out their scanty revenues by taking lodgers. Thus Wiklif took lodgings in Queen's, and was probably acceptable, because he was then high in favour vvith the King and his son John of Gaunt, whose son, afterwards Cardinal Beaufort, and grandson, afterwards Henry V, were

lxxxvi INTRODUCTION.

educated within the same college. So George Nevil, Bishop of Exeter, the son of the Earl of Salisbury, was at Balliol, Archbishop Courtenay was at Exeter, Archbishop Arundel was at Oriel ; but they were there, as the Duke of Exeter's sons were in the early part of the same century at the King's Hall, Cambridge, lodgers on pension within the precincts of a humble foundation. So Gascoigne himself lived at Oriel : the only fellow of which, or indeed of any college, that he recognises in his book is the hateful Pecok. He did not concern himself with institutions which were at that time mere excrescences on the University, and were inhabited by students, who were only just different from monks by the rule of their foundation, and bettered their fortunes by turning monks. The day had not come for the more opulent college of Waynflete, into which Cecily, the mother of Edward IV, vainly begged the bishop to introduce a protege of hers. Besides, a country gentleman, whose conscience had led him to take Orders, was not likely to trouble himself about places where pauper students were housed, and in which only one person, the head, was, like an abbot, allowed to be wealthy.

In the fourteenth century, Oxford had stood up bravely for Wiklif, and had disclaimed him and his followers only under the serious threat that they would forfeit their privileges if they did not. That this coercion did not extinguish heresy is to be expected and was proved. The open expression of opinion might have been prevented, but it was no gain for the University that Peter Payne, alias Clerk, alias Freyne, alias Inglis (p. 187) stole the seal of the University, and induced the Bohemians to believe that all Oxford was of Wiklif 's way of thinking, and Gascoigne to lament (p. 50) over the praetensi scolares Oxoniac. In 141 o, the authorities condemned Wiklif and burnt his books at Carfax. But, in 1452, as I have noted in the sheets of my forthcoming volumes on Prices, a book of Wiklif, and other books bearing on the controversy which he raised, were bought in Oxford at a cost of ^s.

The violent suppression of free opinion in Oxford was a turning-point in the history of the University. It lost its spirit, and became a home for adventurers and loungers. It could not be brought to denounce Pecok (p. 38), when London and Carnbridge were loud against him, for fear of displeasing the bishops, though two Oxford clerks tried to prove he was in the right, and were baffled. It was a place where idle and non-

IXTRODUCTION. Ixxxvii

resident rectors and dignitaries lingered (p. 198) as they did at Paris, though few, perhaps, were such scandalous persons as the pluralist and lay archdeacon, the idiot Birmingham. Gascoigne tells two stories (pp. 188, 222) of Oxford clergymen, which prove that the vices of the University had extended to the parish priests, if they were not en- couraged by them, and of a friar minor (p. 139) who openly excused incontinence in a sermon, but was excommunicated afterwards.

Henry the Fifth, we are told (p. 218), intended to reform the Uni- versity of Oxford and its statutes, 'the mere work of young men, by providing that the regents should not hereafter dispense with any University statute, and further said that he purposed founding a college of theologians and artists (i.e. secular students in arts) within the Castle of Oxford, and annex to this college all the alien priories, and the Pope agreed to this plan, but he was prevented by death. His son Henry VI, in his youth, gave these priories to the college of Eton near Windsor, and the college of St. Nicholas at Cambridge, i.e. King's.' The same resources availed for the great foundation of Sion Abbey and Nunnery at Sheen. Henry VI founded Eton and King's on the model of Winchester and New Colleges. He even came down to Osney Abbey near Oxford, and heard the service performed there by the choir of New College (I found the items of the expense to which New College was put for the service in the annual account), but for some reason or other, he took a dislike to Oxford, and tried to persuade Waynfiete, we are told, to transfer his intended benefaction to Cambridge.

Apart from the general corruption, cowardice (p. 38), and sophistry (p. 200) which prevailed in the University, the principal complaint which Gascoigne makes against Oxford is the venality of the regents. They sell graces and degrees for money (pp. 3, 20, 208), they even sell the office of Bedel. The most scandalous case, however (p. 24), was that of a rector, who was caught in adultery with the wife of one of his parishioners, but was disgracefully left in his cure by the bishop. ' Yet,' says Gascoigne, 'Oxford afterwards admitted him as Doctor of Degrees. and thereby affronted numbers of people, and thus by an act of the bishop and an act of Oxford, admitting good and bad to the highest academical degrees, infinite mischief and bold sin follow.'

The Universities gave the code of morality to the bishops and mthe

«.r-eaS

lxxxviii INTRODUCTION.

priests whom they trained, and the court made them even more depraved. However saintly might have been the life of the king, however ardent his piety, however hateful in his eyes cruelty and licentiousness were, the age was eminently licentious and cruel. The dress of men and women was in the last degree indecent (the fashion [p. 144] began in 1429), and all the vices which might be expected from such fashions followed. The season of Christmas was profaned by ribald songs, so shocking that, says my author, 'an eminent person that I knew of, on hearing one of these indecent ditties, could not get it out of his head, nor forget its images, and became so oppressed by the recollection that he died.' 'The season of 1457 (p. 12) was very deadly, men dying of hemorrhage from all parts of the body, a judgment of God on account of the profane oaths which were then so common, and which took the form of swearing by the person and limbs of Christ.'

Among the other vices of the age, Gascoigne comments on the grow- ing spirit of litigiousness and the enormous increase of common lawyers. ' Formerly (p. 108) when quarrels and squabbles arose in a parish, and between parishioners, they were generally settled by the wise handling and counsel of the clergy, and there were few pleas and actions got up by lawyers. But now quarrels, dissensions, actions, and pleas are multiplied and prolonged, and thus the money, which might have gone to good works, owing to the number of these quarrels goes to lawyers, and advocates, and counsel, and the number of these lawyers, jurists, advocates, and pleaders is far greater than it need to be, the men who defend the bad for base partiality or base fear. And yet many times the cause which has been pleaded long and with great expense gets a settlement and con- clusion by the handling of the great.' * Before the great plague (p. 202), there were few quarrels among the people, and few lawsuits, and few lawyers in the realm of England, and few legists in Oxford ; and then the English judges wore, in their hoods of office, lambskins and not miniver. It was only bishops, doctors, masters in the Universities, and lords of Parliament, who wore miniver, ermine, and grey fur.' ' Men keep to the law (p. 127), not because it is the law, or because it is just, but because doing thus or thus is the means for heaping up riches, and because they love to bring loss and shame on others. Thus, they put a man charged with an offence into ja.il, in order to get ten marks for letting him out on

IXTRODUCTION. lxxxix

bail ; and it is for these reasons that they are glad that the law is trans- gressed. Now, they say, our gains grow, when men break the law, and they rejoice in the worst acts for the villainous gain which comes to them from the ofifences of others. I heard a bachelor of law say " I wish there were more criminals than there are, for then we lawyers should do well." that is, he wished men to be evil-doers, that he might get his profit from trials.' Thereupon Gascoigne tells a story of one Richworth, a bailiff of Henry V, who bribed a man to create a disturbance in order that he might make a good thing of it, and had his head broken, in satisfac- tion of the bargain, by the man whom he had bribed.

In connection with this growth of litigation and chicanery, Gascoigne states that latterly in England, about 1443, what he calls a falsa lex was discovered, by which I suppose he means some precedent was estab- lished in relation to entails. ' If any person has an estate in tail limited to himself and the lawful heirs of his body, and mortgages this estate to another for a certain term, and the mortgage money be not paid on the day appointed for payment, the estate tail will pass to the mortgagee as an estate in fee simple, and the heir in remainder will be unjustly deprived of his inheritance.' And then he says, — the passage is rather obscure, — 'Woe to him by whom the offence cometh, i.e. the origin of such a mischief, that it may be possible to entail land, and that the lord of a fee simple, which he himself has without condition, should give it on condition, viz., that such and such persons should have the lands after him.'

The reader will find much more than I have commented on in these extracts. My object in writing this long introduction has been to give some account of the political and social condition of England in the first half of the fifteenth century, and particularly during the period which followed after the loss of the English possessions in France to the time of Gascoigne's death. The greater part of these notes were made I believe in the last eight years of Gascoignes life. He lamented over the evils which had already come upon England, and he foresaw that greater evils were in store for her. To the modern student not the least of these was the wreck, for nearly two centuries, of public liberty in parliamentary institutions. Dark as the prospect was, unpromising as the materials were, some statesmen in the middle of the fifteenth century believed that they could grapple with the difficulties of the situation. But their efforts were

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xc /NTRODUCTION.

overpowered by the violence of faction, the corruption of the Church, the dangerous adventurers whom the cessation of a protracted war had thrown loose upon English society and who speedily found their field for action, and the violence of the nobles. Yet, strange to say, through the whole of that grievous and protracted strife, wealth was accumulated and generally distributed, and it became possible, though after a long interval, with many labours and much suffering, to build up anew and maintain under more secure conditions, those institutions which were made havoc of in the strife which began when Beaufort, Percy, and Clifford were slain in the skirmish at St. Alban's.

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[p. 10.] Absolucio. Sic tu episcope seu rector, qui es absens a cura tua, occupatus in rebus quae tibi et curae tuae sunt incompossi- biles, vade prius et reconcilia et reforma curam tuam ut debes, et tunc offeras sacerdoti in nomine Domini munus confessionis tuae. Sed forte dicis, necessarius sum concilio regis et regni, ut causae ibi terminentur et lites, et ideo non possum venire. Ostendetur quod dato uno sequuntur plura ; plura enim mala fiunt in pluribus locis quae non fierent si episcopi, rectores, et domini temporales sua loca debite regerent et in eisdem expectarent ; et quia sunt absentes et curam suam negligentes, ideo plura mala fiunt et reformacione indigent per concilia magna in regnis, quia ipsi non sunt cum suis subditis, et quia deficiunt in sua cura eis debita, sicut mala magna fiebant inter Galathas.

[p. 15.] Novi enim quod unius ecclesiae cathedralis1 officiarii in- jungunt et praecipiunt omnibus curatis suae provinciae, ut in quadra- gesima injungant confitentibus, ut solvant quolibet anno matrici ecclesiae aliquid de bonis suis, et pauperi qui non habet iijd injungit et praecipit suus curatus pro penitencia xld solvendos ecclesiae cathedrali, et alius curatus accepit ecclesiam et parochiam suam propriam ad firmam de ofhciariis ecclesiae cathedralis. Novi unum qui solvit v. solidos annu- atim pro sua parochia ecclesise cathedrali, et ipse idem sacerdos parochialis praecepit et oneravit et injunxit cuilibet viro in sua

1 The Cathedral allu^ed to is York. B

1 LOCI E LIBRO VERITATUM.

parochia ut solveret illo anno ecclesiae cathedrali certam summam, ita quod quidam pauperes solverunt xld eidem sacerdoti ecclesiae cathedrali solvendos, et ille injungens habuit illam parochiam ad firmam pro v. s. Sed talis penitencia, dependens ex arbitrio solum sacerdotis, potest refutari teste doctore subtili super quartum.

[p. 16.] Videte haec et intelligite, o confessores ! et vos fratres vocati milites de Rodis, qui plura bona recepistis ad sancte dispensandum et ad sancte militandum, ne pagani intrarent terras Xtianorum, et jam abutimini bonis illis in deliciis peccatorum : in diebus enim meis, milites de Rodis vocabantur fratres, et ipsi equitantes portabant sar- cinas suas super equum super quo equitabant ipsi fratres milites, et unam partem bonorum suorum annuatim domino magistro insulae Rodae, et aliam partem bonorum sanctis et pauperibus dederunt, et terciam partem hospitalitati suae.

[p. 23.] Sic doctor Thomas Walden, in suo Doctrinali antiquita- tum ecclesiae, volumine iij°, ca° sexagesimo ix°, testatur bene et recte quia aliqua Deus ligat quia ecclesia sua prius illa sentenciat seu ligat. Ipse enim doctor Walden1, Oxoniensis Cathedrae, in sacra theologia scripsit contra Wyclyf et Hus et Ieronimum de Praga tria volumina, vocata ab ipso doctrinale antiquitatum ecclesise, et primum volumen est de ecclesia et de ejus membris et continet iiijor libros, secundum volumen est de sacramentis ecclesiae, continens unum librum sc. quintum, et 3m volumen continet unum librum, sc. sextum tocius operis, et est de sacramentalibus ecclesiae. Et mortuus est quando fuit in partibus Galliae cum rege Angliae juvene Henrico sexto, exis- tens confessor suus, sicut prius fuit confessor patris sui Henrici quinti regis Angliae, et frater fuit ordinis Carmelitarum, qui dicunt seipsos esse professores essencialium regulae sancti doctoris Basilii doctoris Graeci.

1 For an account of Thomas Netter of Walden, see Shirley's ' Fasciculi Zizaniorum,' p. lxx.

LOCI E LIBRO VERITATUM. 3

[p. 38.] Cum tum evidet ex magnis evidenciis quod plures sunt pcenae debitae in judicio Dei pro peccatis quae indulgenciae concessae a papa nec tollunt nec quoquo modo tollere possunt.

[p. 42.] Haec magister Joannes Scot ordinis fratrum minorum et doctor sanctae theologiae, natus in villa vocata Duns in Boria Angliae.

[p. 55.] Appropriacio et non residencia. Aliqui nunquam vel raro resident in suis curis, et ille cui ecclesia est appropriata, et ille, qui non residet in ea, semel in anno venit ad curam, vel mittit ad ecclesiam in fine autumpni, et impleta bursa sua pecuniis, et venditis decimis, recedit longe a cura sua in curiam in qua vacat lucro^et deliciis ; de quo verificantur verba scripta per Salamonem proverbiorum 7°, { non est vir in domo sua, abiit via longissima, sacculum pecuniae secum tulit, in die plenae lunae reversurus' i. e. in autumpno quando est plenitudo fructuum ; . . . Jam enim in Anglia periit cura animarum per ecclesias appropriatas, et per non residenciam curatorum et prelatorum, et per indignorum promocionem et per pluralitates beneficiorum seu male- ficiorum, et per pessimam collacionem gradus scolastici et concessionem graciarum indignis et viciosis et insciis personis in Oxonia, et in aliis studiis, quae collacio mala graduum scolasticorum non erit destructa quousque potestas dispensandi cum bonis statutis retrahatur a regen- tibus, et a procuratoribus Universitatis, qui pessima concedunt pro lucro perveniente eisdem per graduatos et graduandos per eosdem.

Quando una abbathia vel collegium orat pro ipso vel ipsis qui ap- propriabant eis ecclesiam parochialem, unus destruens est tota ; multi- plicacio malorum quae secuuntur ex mala appropriacione ecclesiarum parochialium sc. destruccio cleri, destruccio boni curati, et doctrinae, et boni concilii, et exempli, et hospitalitatis, et exhibicionis pauperum et juvenum ad studium. Haec sunt mala quae secuuntur appropri- acionem, et destruunt et impediunt bonum quod alii optant illi homini qui ecclesias appropriari fecit seu appropriari consensit. et defectus sequens per appropriacionem inter parochianos meretur ipsum maledici

B 2

4 LOCI E LIBRO VERITATUM.

a Deo per inflicciones paenae qui ecclesiam appropriari fecit. Ecclesia tum parochialis bene est appropriata quando est collegiata, i.e. ita quod certae bonae personse in ea fundatae maneant et perficiant in eadem parochia sic collegiata.

[p. 56 .] Item notum est per cronicas et res gestas et nuper visas, quod superflua monasteriorum et redituum eorundem data fuerunt in perpetuum, licencia papse Martini 5* collegio studencium fundato Papiae l, quae olim vocabatur Ticinum, et bona plura monasteriorum et hospitalitatum et capellarum quae vocabantur liberae capellae, et sic credo firmiter, quod sanctum opus esset papae appropriare superflua monasteriorum et collegiorum magnorum et cathedralium ecclesiis parochialibus et earum curatis immediatis, in quibus ex diversis causis homines et animse pereunt.

[p. 59.] Comparacio non esset inter relevamen viginti monachorum per ecclesiam eis appropriatam, et inter rectorem, qui nunquam facit bonum in parochia sua ; sed comparacio esset inter bona opera quae illi viginti monachi faciunt per illam ecclesiam appropriatam, et inter omnia bona opera quae bonus rector post mortem mali rectoris in illa parochia faceret, et omnia opera quae pervenirent in parochianis per ejus sanctam vitam et exemplum, et per ejus dcctrinam et elee- mosinam et hospitalitatem, et per exhibicionem juvenum ad studium in scienciis, et per devotam oracionem curati et suorum ministrorum factam pro parochianis et coram parochianis, ut eorum exemplo ex- citentur ad consimiliter orandum ; inter haec bona debita inter paro- chianos et inter bona opera quae illi approprietarii ecclesiae eis appropriatae faciunt per bona illius ecclesiae appropriatae eisdem. Videtur autem jam manifeste quse deliciae et honores mundi mul- tiplicantur per appropriacionem ecclesiarum, et quae per non resi- denciam episcoporum et curatorum, et per defectum boni regiminis

1 (Papise), i.e. Pavia. I do not find the fact referred to by Gascoigne among the Bulls of Martin V*.

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in sua dyocesi et parochiis mala litigia multiplicantur in eisdem ; ideo fit magnus recursus ad consilia multiplicanda in regno.

Si quis fundaret collegium in augmentum scienciae, virtutum, et doctrinae seu devotae religionis viros, videat quod sic fundaret eos de bonis suis propriis, quae eis sufficiant ad necessaria, non appropriando eis ecclesias parochiales.

[p. 60.] Nuper enim unus comes fecit ecclesiam de Haghkarth appropriari monachis albis de Gervas ad valorem annuatim centum librarum, et ille comes habet sibi et heredibus suis de eadem abbathia terras de eorum fundatione, quae valent annuatim xl libras, quas eadem abbathia dedit comiti et heredibus suis pro illa appropriacione ecclesiae parochialis eisdem monachis. Et consimiliter habent monachi Eborum ecclesiam de Ormyshede pro manerio Scottun appropriatam ; et studium et promocio studencium et exhibicio ad studium pereunt. Item mcnachi nigri Eborum habent xx marchas annualis pensionis eisdem monachis in perpetuum relaxatas per ecclesiam cathedralem Sancti Petri Eborum. Illa enim sic relaxavit monachis illam annualem pensionem xx mar- charum pro jure patronatus unius ecclesiae parochialis concesso per monachos ecclesiae sancti Petri Eborum, ut per licenciam concessam per Henricum Sextum regem Angliae eadem ecclesia Ecclesiae sancti Petri approprietur.

Indigna enim promocio inhabilium personarum et appropriacio ecclesiarum parochialium causae fuerunt destruccionis regni Bohemorum, et hereticorum illam patriam et regnum destruentium, et quando veri- simile fuit quod talia mala imminerent regno Bohemiae, per indignos praelatos, per appropriacionem ecclesiarum, et per curatos non residentes in curis suis, Universitas Pragensis scripsit Martino 50 pro remedio horum malorum, sed remedium non fuit consecutum sed destructum est regnum Bohemorum et ecclesiae destructae et combustae per Hus hereticorum principem et per Petrum Clark Anglicum, magistrum artium inutilem Oxoniae, qui fuit natus in Anglia in villa juxta

6 LOCI E LIDRO VERITATUM.

Grawntham vocata Anglice Hoch, et ibi mansit pater ejus, qui fuit Gallus seu Francus nacione, natus in Gallia, qui Petrus associatus fuit malo heretico Procopio, in Praga principali heretico.

[P. 61.] Abbathia de Byri in tempore Willelmi Cratfeld x abbatis optinuit a Papa Romano licenciam eligendi abbatem quandocunque abbas moreretur sine recursu ad papam ; antea enim non eligerunt abbatem nisi prius haberent specialem licenciam a papa eligendi, et nisi eciam quilibet electus confirmaretur Romae, et pro ista licencia eligendi abbatem sine recursu ad Romam vel ad papam, solvunt praedicti monachi de Byri annuatim xx libras, et eciam solvunt regi annuatim xx marchas pro licencia retinendi sua temporalia in manu monasterii post mortem cujusque abbatis, et ad solvendas istas pen- siones appropriaverunt monasterio suo duas ecclesias parochiales et habent sexaginta sex ecclesias eis pertinentes.

[p. 62.] Nuper unus comes destruxit unam magnam ecclesiam et parochiam in hoc quod appropriavit bona debita Rectori illius ecclesiae uni Abbathiae ea intencione ; ut quolibet anno celebrent exequias et missam pro anima ejus ; et ipsi divites religiosi multum dotati comiti benedicunt, et parochiani illius ecclesiae appropriatae et animae per defectum boni curati pereuntes ei maledicunt, et viduae flent et dolent, et lacrimse coram Deo pcenam comiti merentur, quia sicut ei male- dicunt, sic habent justam causam per quam idem comes maledici a Deo meruit, eo quod per actum suum et per illam appropri- acionem deest eis bonus pastor et rector et honestus victus et hospitalitas in parochia et verbi Dei praedicacio, et sanum et neces- sarium consilium pro salute animarum, et sic per ipsum orta est haec gravis tempcstas plurium malorum in illa parochia.

[P. 65.] Abusus. Ut ostendit doctor Willelmus Wudforth in libro contra Trialogum Wycliffe, i.e. contra 18 conclusiones Wyclyffe ex- tractas a Trialogo Oxoniae et Londoniae dampnatas.

1 1390-1414.

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[p. 66.] Nam Pragenses heretici et Bohemi heretici, qui magnam partem orbis suis erroribus et suis bellis vastaverunt in tempore Papae Martini quinti, ex hoc praecipue in errores venerunt, quod cura animarum inter eos defecit per indignos in ecclesia promotos, et per non residentes in curis et in officiis, et per appropriaciones et per commendas ecclesiarum et prebendarum ; ut patet in literis missis Papae Romano Martino ab Universitate Pragensi, in quibus scripserunt Papae quod verisimile fuit errores in regno Bohemiae pululare pro causis praedictis.

[p. 91.] Astronomorum judicia. Consimiliter dixerunt falsi astrologi -qui vocantur calculatores Willelmo Pule duci Southfolchi3e anno Xti 1450 in turre Londoniarum incarcerato ; duci enim existenti in turri ex clamore communitatis Angliae in Parliamento dixerunt astronomi, 'domine dux, si poteritis evadere vivus ab ista turri Londoniarum, sub pcena capitis nostri exitis tunc securus ab occisione cujuscunque ;' et tum ipse dux per licenciam Regis Angliae Henrici Sexti a turri Londoniarum occulte exiens, in mari captus fuit et occisus per sen- tentiam latam a marinis in navi vocata Nicholaus de Turri. Haec -dixit michi famulus praedicti ducis qui novit ista esse vera.

Consimiliter est dicendum de pluribus indiciis astronomorum qui -in diebus meis in Anglia multa futura praedixerunt quorum contraria oculis nostris vidimus ; praedixerunt enim, quod si dux Suthfolchiae Willelmus Pule esset extra turrim Londoniarum nunquam postea esset occisus, et tamen postea a marinis fuit in mari occisus et de- collatus in parva navi 1450 anno Xti.

[p. no.] Baptismus. Ostendit Sanctus Bernardus, doctor et abbas Clarevallis, in epistola ad Adam