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Professor Holmes also examines the politics of these years–the relations of the kings of England with neighboring rules and with their own subjects. This period includes the successful conquest of Scotland, the series of wars with France known as the Hundred Years’ War, and the War of the Roses, which brought Henry VII, the first Tudor, to the throne in 1485. Here also is an exploration of the heretical movement initiated by Wycliffe in the thirteen-seventies, which began a tendency toward loosening the power of the Church, and a study of the beginnings of parliamentary government in the later fourteenth century, its collapse in the following century, and the emergence of a strong self-sufficient monarchy.

Review: George Holmes’s ‘The Later Middle Ages 1272 – 1485’ was written as ‘an intelligible introduction to this period of history for those who are reading about it for the first time’. It was not original in its contents but drew on all those sources providing recent insight into the period of the time. The result is a book which is a pleasure to read and a reminder of the reasons why history remains such a fascinating subject for anyone who can visualise the life and times of our predecessors from their perspective as well as our own. Of course the Middle Ages did not exist at the time. The term was an invention of seventeenth century historians who wanted to describe the period between the ancient world which ended with the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and what they called the modern world which they considered was created by the Reformation and Renaissance in the sixteenth century. In essence the Middle Ages are ‘an impressionistic description of a phase in the continuous process of historical change’. It was a phase which can be characterised by a dominant Church, feudalism, town guilds, scholastic philosophy and battlers for dynastic dominance in a pan-European context.

Medieval villages consisted of a church, mill, houses and possibly a manor house. Village fields were split up into a number of un-fenced strips. Crops were rotated to prevent the soil being exhausted, the first year spring grain would be sown, winter grain in the second year and the field would be left fallow for the third year. Each tenant had a strip in more than one field in order to take part in the sowing and harvesting of a selection of crops. This required ‘a good deal of communal organisation’. All men were either freemen or serfs. Serfdom was passed from generation to generation. At the end of the thirteenth century customary distinctions were being blurred by rapid social change and economic progress. Labour services owed by tenants to lords were commuted to money rents. This was exacerbated the following century by the impact of the Black Death which reduced the population by a million. As a result the abundance of men and shortage of land which kept people bound to their plots and subjected to their landlords collapsed. Labour was scarce and wages rose to meet the shortage. In addition, manorial tenants were able to find alternative accommodation and employment on lands which had been depopulated by the plague.

Manorial landlords responded by exercising their ancient rights of manorial jurisdiction, forcing villeins to stay on their land and pay rent for holding they did not want. Parliament levied a poll tax which fell more heavily on the poor provoking The Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. The latter demanded an end to villeinage and wanted to set the annual rent of land at no more than four-pence an acre. The revolt collapsed but villeins continued to leave the land to seek free-holdings elsewhere. Declining rents, rising wages, the ending of labour services and the low price of grain made working the demesne lands (those owned by the lord of the manor) suitable only for growing food for home consumption. Consequently, large estates were farmed out to tenants to the extent that by 1422 the old system of manorial lords was ‘practically dead’. Villeinage disappeared in practice so that when Henry V11 manumitted all villeins on Crown estates in 1485 it was an acknowledgement of economic and social reality. Commercial wealth came through trade while craft gilds developed providing a variety of services including cobbling, weaving, tailoring and tanning. Cloth making was widespread throughout the countryside while towns had begun to earn privileges as boroughs which marked them off from the feudal and manorial world. Banking was dominated by Italian families.

The medieval Church was one of the country’s largest landowners while one in fifty of all males was a cleric, some of whom were notoriously absent from their parishes. The Church also accommodated thousands who had taken vows to live in the communal religious life. Roger Bacon was critical of the priesthood who he accused of reciting ‘the words of others without knowing in the least what they mean, like parrots and magpies’. However, in 1277 Benedictine Houses received new constitutions, ‘which attempted to reduce the hours devoted to liturgy in favour of more study which the intellectual movements of the previous century had made fashionable’. The Franciscans and Dominicans were active during the thirteenth century but a Papal bull allowing them to act as priests without the permission of the bishops was met with opposition. The Papacy itself was a powerful political force claiming temporal and spiritual authority over secular states. This declined following the transference of popes to Avignon between 1308 and 1377. The boundaries between the lay and clerical worlds were uncertain but the power of the king enabled him to have the final say in vital matters of State, including the levying of taxes.

The politics of the monarchy were an essential ingredient in the development of medieval life. The Norman origins of the English monarch created a conflict (the Hundred Years’ War 1337 -1453) between English claims to Aquitaine and French rejection of them. Edward 111 led the early invasion but by 1453 Henry VI had abandoned all English possessions in France, except Calais. Royal authority was absolute but the right to contest the Crown was exercised by the magnates on whom the king depended. As Shakespeare put it, ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’. Edward 11 and Richard 11 were deposed then murdered. Royal authority collapsed during the reign of Henry VI (1422-61) resulting in the Wars of the Roses and the triumph of the Tudors. This book can be read for pleasure or research and serves each with equal facility.

George Arthur Holmes, FBA (22 April 1927 – 29 January 2009) was Chichele Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, 1989-94.