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Just as constantly, though, over the passing centuries, other warnings were doled out by the old to the young. Lineage was not enough: you had to earn your place in the class. The superbly obnoxious Lord Chesterfield, in his advice to his nephew, maintained that line. ‘Never be proud of your rank or birth’, he told Philip Stanhope, the nephew, ‘but be as proud as you please of your character.’
Education was all, ‘a smattering constitutes a coxcomb’,
and ‘A drayman is probably born with as good organs as Milton, Locke or Newton; but, by culture, they are much more above him than he is above his horse.’
For Geoffrey Hickes in the early eighteenth century ‘Peasantry [was] a Disease (like the Plague) easily caught by Conversation’,
but he nevertheless thought it vulgar to talk of your family or to ‘fling the Register of your Genealogy on the Table before all Company’.
‘Whoever rakes in the Ashes of the Dead, may fall upon the Stench instead of Perfumes.’
This radical uncertainty at the core of English class consciousness was its principal virtue. As a result, this book is in part about money and struggle, and also about blood and family, but essentially about the fusion of those categories, the blood-and-money struggle for survival. The gentry depended above all on the coherence and efficiency of the family, the genetic corporation, as the most reliable form of keeping going in a rival-thick world. The varying power-relationships of father, mother, siblings, step and half siblings, stepmothers, mothers-in-law, brothers-in-law, uncles, nephews, cousins and nieces take up many of these chapters. This was where the questions of enterprise and lineage, inherited virtue and self-generated virtue all intersected. There is much more here than a simple picture of the patriarchal family, in which the father ordained and the family obeyed. Even at the medieval beginning, or at the height of Victorian patriarchalism, the children did not always do what they were told. In several of these families, the father failed and the mother sustained the business. Women are ever-present in the archives, as writers and recipients of the letters, as managers and entrepreneurs, plotters and shapers, signing themselves ‘your bedfellow’, ‘your owne lover’ and ‘deare hart’. When looking at these connections between individuals, so alive in the manuscripts they left, and the subtle power-balances they represent, it is difficult to think that much has changed in 600 years. Family histories cannot be generalized but almost any one of them could be transferred without difficulty to another point in time. That is one of the purposes of this book: to make the experience of individual moments, with all their contingencies, the substance of the story.
PART I
The Inherited World
1410–1520
The high Middle Ages, from about 1100 until about 1300, had been blessed with golden summers and mild winters.
That beautiful warmth in the northern hemisphere had created both the great cathedrals of Europe and the contemporary surge far to the east in the population of the Mongol steppes. By the early fifteenth century, though, bleaker conditions prevailed, so that the growing season was at least three weeks shorter than it had been 150 years before. Winters were sharper and summers wretched. One winter in the 1430s a frost lay over London unbroken from the middle of November until the middle of February. The Thames froze solid and the French and Gascon wines usually delivered by ship to the Vintners’ wharves in the centre of the city had to be brought in by wagon through Kent. Frost in May, when flowers on vines are at their most vulnerable, had been unheard of in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By 1400 it was common, even usual, and the vineyards disappeared from England. The Norwegians and Icelanders were finding ever more summer icebergs on their route to Vinland, while the English and other northern Europeans suffered from wetter summers, low productivity in their difficult and heavy lands, a shortage in seed corn, a deficit in calories, a dimming in the spark of life and a shrinkage in rents.
Walk over the Plumpton lands in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire now in the early spring and the clay thickens around your boots: England was never the easiest of land to work. Even though the fourteenth-century epidemics of plague had savagely reduced the number of Europeans, a century later villages, particularly those on north-facing slopes or at some altitude, were still being deserted. The continent was short of money and the general crisis of authority which spread across the whole of Europe, the bitter squabbling over lands and lordships which marked the end of Middle Ages, may have been simply the reaction of a human population to the most difficult of planetary changes: global cooling. The story of William Plumpton and his family may be a private reflection of a world in bio-climatic decline.
The governors were still for the time being the crown, the church and the great lords. Between them they owned over half the country. Gentry like the Plumptons were dependent on them, feudally attached, and owning no more than 20 per cent of the land themselves, the same as the yeomen farmers in the social stratum below.
It was a legalized and commercial world – lawyers appear at every turn – but at the same time one heavily dependent on personal prestige and power. Law, for all its complexity and expense, was chronically vulnerable to the corruptions and distortions of big men’s threats. A glowing Arthurian vision of nobility and gentleness may have floated over these people but more as a longed-for world than a reflection of their own reality. Members of the medieval gentry can seem at times like little more than armed businessmen, gangsters on horseback, cannily in tune with the ways of the law but usually prepared to assert their will through their own and their gangs’ physical violence.
Of all the great medieval letter collections that survive, those of the Plumptons reveal these desperate conditions, a frontier existence in which personal extinction and the possibility of an entire family being extinguished did not seem like a distant prospect. As the authority of the English crown, weakened by the personal unworldliness of Henry VI, collapsed around them, and the great magnates fought themselves to a standstill, gentry families were caught in the backwash of chaos. Different branches of the Plumptons ended up facing each other in a pair of long, growling and destructive court cases, which is why most of these documents survive, gathered in evidence by the teams of opposing lawyers. That is also why little of the sweetness and elegance of life is apparent here. Not all of England was like this – typicality cannot be read from any of these families – and there are alternative visions. Englishmen, according to the Tuscan historian Polydore Vergil, writing at the very beginning of the next century, were
tall, with handsome open faces, grey-eyed for the most part. Their women are snow-white and handsome, and graced with the most decent apparel. And just as they are very similar to the Italians in the sound of their language, so the build of their bodies and their manners do not greatly differ from theirs. They have fine manners, they take counsel with deliberation (since they know that nothing is as inimical to counsel as haste), they are gentle and inclined by nature to every act of kindness.
That is not what it seemed like in the world of the Plumptons.
1410s–1520s
Survival
The Plumptons
Plumpton, Yorkshire
In early May, under the narrow footbridge at Brafferton, a few miles north of York, the river Swale flows over the shallow bed of what was once Brafferton Ford. The water is dirty, a thick, chocolatey brown, its silty fertility drawn from the rich country of the Vale of York through which it has run. A giant fresh-leaved beech tree shades the churchyard of St Peter. Pollarded ashes and grey-green willows stand on the river banks. It doesn’t take much to imagine these broad wet acres in the Middle Ages: the oxen from the plough teams grazing on the spring fallow, the boys with their goads, the open fields with the new wheat up and growing, the crows scattered across the ridge-and-furrow and beside the river the long meadows thick with the first of the summer grass, the corncrakes hidden there and the skylarks above them.
Here, just at this crossing, deep in the middle of comfortable, unremarkable England, one morning in May 1441, this first story of a gentry family and its own particular catastrophe begins.
Sir William Plumpton was thirty-seven years old. He was a strong man, a soldier, knighted in the French wars, energetic, violent and assertive but also canny, a manipulator and deceiver, endlessly weaving webs of connection and influence, knowing how to court the great and suppress the weak, consciously looking to sustain the fortunes of his ancient and dignified name, happy to receive the hatred and contempt of those he had crossed or betrayed, confident that in the turmoil of this chaotic and desperate century he would emerge a winner.
He was approaching the peak of his powers and had come here this morning, Friday 5 May, with his tenants and followers, the twenty-four men of his own household and many others, perhaps a hundred or more, with the idea of having a fight. His men were armed with bows, swords and pole arms, the semi-agricultural instruments with which a man could slash at an enemy as he would at a hedge.
Plumpton had seen chivalry and heroism in action and had heard of it from his father and grandfather. That grandfather, in defence of ancient honour, had rebelled against the usurper Henry IV and been executed, his boiled head displayed for months on York’s Micklegate Bar.
His father, Sir Robert Plumpton, had been a knight at Agincourt, a retainer of Henry V’s brother, the beautiful and cultivated 25-year-old Duke of Bedford. Robert went to France, with his squire, two valets and eight Yorkshire archers, each paid five shillings a month, horsed, clothed and fed by him on condition that they ‘pay unto him halfe the gude that they win by war’.
Money was never far from these chivalric arrangements. But this Robert was to die in the war, at the mud-drenched siege of Meaux on 8 December 1421, at which an English army, debilitated and made squalid by dysentery, subsided in its flooded trenches outside that city on the banks of the Marne.
William was eighteen when his father died. Within five years he too had gone to France, as a squire, also with the great Duke of Bedford, and William was knighted there as his father had been. But English fortunes were on the wane. The siege of Meaux had been an early portent of English failure abroad. Joan of Arc soon swept them out of the country and the Plantagenet empire was reduced to the stump of the Pas de Calais. The Hundred Years War ended in English failure, and as it ended the English turned their appetite and genius for violence on themselves. The English civil wars, known since the sixteenth century as the Wars of the Roses, were, at least in part, the behaviour of a military class with no one left to fight.
The plague had become endemic in England since its first devastating eruptions a century before, and it struck again in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1438 and again in 1439.
Harvests had failed, people were starving, their immune systems weakened. By the spring of 1441, something desperate was in the air. Since 1438 William Plumpton had been steward of the big royal forest of Knaresborough, 4,500 acres, much of it the wild and moory waste stretching up into the Pennines to the west of where Harrogate now stands. This royal appointment made him lord over hundreds of tenants, who were under no obligation to pay tolls levied by other authorities – on bridges, fairs, roads, quays and markets. In 1440, William and 700 of these Knaresborough men had ridden over in a frightening posse ‘arrayed in manner of war, and in ryotous wise assembled’ to the market town at Otley, where the Cardinal Archbishop of York had been trying to enforce the payment of his market dues.
He was no innocent in this and from the mid-1430s onwards had been aggressively attempting to widen his influence and enlarge his income.
He hired mercenaries from the Scottish border, battle-hardened and well-armed men from the valley of the Tyne and near Hexham on the Northumberland moors, and on Thursday 4 May, decided to send them on a raid out into the Knaresborough country, south-east of Ripon towards York. In the twin villages of Brafferton and Helperby, Plumpton’s men put up a road block to meet them, ‘with stoks, thorns, and otherwise, to thintent that when the said officers, tenants and servants came thither, they should be stopped their and incumbred’.
The crisis came early on Friday 5 May and moved fast. Before sunrise, ‘on the morne, by the spring of the day’,
William and his gang came up the road ‘with all the diligence that they could, makeing a great and horrible shoute upon the said officers, servants, and tenants.’ The archbishop’s men, attempting to get away, made for the ford over the Swale at Brafferton, crossed the river, where the footbridge now is, and rode up past the church into the main street of Brafferton-Helperby.
Here they met Plumpton’s roadblock. Desperately the Archbishop’s gang looked for ways of escape, some finding ‘a long straite lane’ along the back of the village; others got out ‘by breaking of an hedge into a feild’.
But Plumpton and his men were not happy with frightening their enemies. They pursued them out of the village on to the dark wet boglands of Helperby Moor, riding after them for more than half a mile, shouting at them, as they had all morning: ‘Sley the Archbishop’s Carles’ – an Old Norse word meaning ‘men’ – and ‘Would God that we had the Archbishop here.’
The brutality was unforgiving. The Plumpton mob killed Thomas Hunter, a gentleman, and Thomas Hooper, a yeoman, even after they had given themselves up to their pursuers. They were killing prisoners in cold blood. A man called Christopher Bee, one of the Archbishop’s affinity,
was maymed, that is to say, smitten in the mouth and so through the mouth into the throat, by the which he hath lost his cheeke bone and three of his fore teeth, and his speech blemished and hurt, that it is not easy to understand what he speaks or saies, and may not use therefore the remnant of his teeth and jawes to th’use of eating, as he might before.
Others were maimed and left for dead out on the moor.
Those not beaten, stabbed and cut by the Plumpton men were robbed and terrorized, their horses, harness, gold and silver all taken from them, gentlemen, yeomen, artisans and labourers alike. Plumpton was left in possession of the field, his war transferred from the wet fields of France to the springtime green of the Vale of York, his status enhanced and his future good.
When people think of the English gentry, this may not be the picture that comes to mind: the unforgiving assertion of violent authority in a disintegrating world; the application of the habits of war to a legalistic, economic and almost domestic dispute; the gathering of one’s people, ‘the affinity’, as a form of self-promotion; the crude gang identity of those shouted taunts. But there can be little doubt that this triumph stood William Plumpton in good stead. Within two years his feudal superior, the young Harry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, had put him in charge of all the Percy estates and castles in Yorkshire. The crown had rewarded him with a gift of twenty mature oak trees, felled and trimmed, delivered to Plumpton Hall. He was now steward of the castle at Knaresborough and a Justice of the Peace, and was to become Sheriff or chief law officer of Yorkshire and a few years later of both Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, each appointment for a separate year. The violence at Brafferton was a mark of Plumpton’s willingness to impose his authority, even if it was at the cost of murdering gentleman and yeoman prisoners. That entrepreneurial virility, in the unravelling word of mid-fifteenth-century England, was the most valuable quality a man could have.
The Plumptons were loyal followers and tenants of the Percy Earls of Northumberland. They had even imitated the Percy coat of arms (yellow lozenges on a blue background), merely differencing it, as the heralds said, with five red scallop shells. Visually and heraldically the Plumptons bound themselves to their feudal overlords. They were gentry; they had no claim on nobility, but were part of the same knightly world inhabited by the truly great.
But as gentry they were heavily involved in the dirty details of local government. They had held and ruled the manor at Plumpton since the twelfth century, and others higher in the Pennines, including the beautiful limestone woods and meadows at Grassington in Upper Wharfedale, and the Airedale manors of Steeton and Idle. William’s father had married an heiress who brought still more and richer lands in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire. Like many of the medieval gentry families, the Plumptons had their place, their centre, but were attached to others across the country. They were lords in their own country but tied to their feudal superiors. They could be summoned at will by the earls or by the King. They travelled, as Justices of the Peace, and as Sheriffs of all the counties in which they held their lands and as Members of Parliament in Westminster. They were local grandees but with a national perspective. They pursued without hesitation their inferiors. And they were fuelled by ambition, a desire not only to preserve the name of Plumpton but to enhance it and enlarge it, to insulate it from the shocks of mortality and the failure to breed.
The Brafferton affray was symptomatic of this gentry life: it borrowed from the world of martial glory; it asserted lay and royal authority in the face of the church; it required competence in command; it played fast and loose with legal niceties; it relied on a sense of local loyalty; and it did not hesitate to do dreadful deeds. It may also have looked at the time like the beginning of Plumpton’s ascent to greatness.
From the 1440s onwards William’s public career could not have been clearer. He stayed loyal to the Northumberlands and to the Lancastrian crown which he and his father had both served with such honour in France. He acquired local office and with it influence and riches. And at least to begin with, his policy for his family and its name followed the same well-defined path. He had been married when he was twelve in 1416 to a local gentry girl, Elizabeth Stapleton, and on his return from the French wars in 1430, a son, Robert, had been conceived, born the following year. A younger brother, William, was born four years later. With this male inheritance, the future of the Plumptons seemed secure and Sir William took a mistress to whom a further two sons were born. So powerful was the patriarchal mandate in this class that they too were called William and Robert.
This phenomenon, which was common to the gentry throughout the centuries, was especially marked in the Plumptons: William Plumpton’s father was called Robert, his grandfather William, his younger brother Robert and his eldest son William, his younger son Robert, his elder bastard son William, his younger bastard son Robert, yet another son Robert – of whom much more below – and his grandson William. It is as if these people’s genes did not belong to them. They were no more individualized than pieces on a chess board, all Plumptons but there to play a role. In an age both obsessed with the transmission of value from one generation to the next and struggling with the erosion of knightly values, each successive Robert and William must have felt that burden more acutely than the last.
Elizabeth Stapleton, the boys’ mother, died in the early 1440s and in 1446 Sir William embarked on elevating the prospects of the next generation. His eldest son, Robert, now fifteen, was married to Elizabeth, the six-year-old daughter of a great Yorkshire and Westmorland magnate, Lord Clifford. They were ‘wedded at the chappell within the castell at Skypton’.
The Cliffords’ castle remains complete, a muscled, stony northern fortress at the head of Skipton market, but the chapel in which these children were married is now a bruised and broken wreck, the mouldings on its roof timbers still there but with later windows and doors crudely knocked through its walls. In the 1440s, it was glorious, a family shrine to northern warlords. Here, a Clifford retainer ‘John Garthe bare [Elizabeth Clifford] in his armes to the said chappell’, where her young Plumpton husband was standing waiting for her. It is the most poignant image in this story: a small girl carried into her marriage and her destiny, no choice, little understanding, the men of the cloth, a blessing, a party, smiles, drinks, toasts in the great hall of the castle, the stranger of a boy, a young man, her husband, smiling down at her. It was agreed, as usual, that they were not to ‘ligg togedder till she came to the age of xvi yeres’.
Sir William Plumpton settled wonderful lands on the pair: manors and estates in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, including among many others Edensor, where Chatsworth now stands. For the privilege, he also paid Lord Clifford a fee of £40, two-thirds of a year’s income from his manor at Plumpton.
For William, this was an elevation: the knight’s dream of transition to the nobility was made more likely by such an alliance. The descendants of young Robert and Elizabeth might at least have the money to support the status and dignity of a barony. For old Lord Clifford, his daughter’s marriage to such a boy was not only profitable but politically useful. The marriage of a peer’s daughter to a knight’s son required less of a dowry than would be asked for by a peer, as the increase in status made up for the lack of cash. And Plumpton, with his undoubted vigour, and a connection which Clifford valued with the Lancastrian Earls of Northumberland and the Percy family, was a form of mutual insurance, an element in the power grouping set against the other great northern family, the Yorkist Nevilles, with their power base in the north-west, hated by the Cliffords and with whom the Percys were on the point of a long and brutal feud. Political, martial, personal, dynastic, financial, status conscious, courtly, handsome and splendid: the Clifford marriage can only have warmed Sir William Plumpton’s heart.
The bridegroom was dead within three years, aged eighteen, from an unknown illness, and the marriage of course was unconsummated. But too much was riding on the alliance with the Cliffords for the boy’s death to alter the arrangements. The young Elizabeth Clifford, now aged twelve, was married again in 1453 to Robert’s younger brother, William Plumpton, now aged seventeen, the same terms applying. That is how it had to be: girls did not walk to their weddings; boys stepped up when their brothers died; Williams followed Roberts; and girls complied.
All apparently remained well with the Plumpton enterprise. England was drifting into civil war, but civil war might be an opportunity for a man of his stamp. Sir William was pursuing his personal enemies through the courts both in Yorkshire and in Westminster with unparalleled toughness, crushing his victims with teams of expensive and effective lawyers. He took part in 1459 in the English battles on the Scottish border and emerged from them with martial credit. In the same year a granddaughter, Margaret, was born to Elizabeth and two years later another granddaughter, another Elizabeth, joined her. Daughters and granddaughters were poor currency compared with a male heir, but they were at least a sign of fertility. All might yet be well. There was no reason the Plumpton name would not continue happily into the future.
At Plumpton itself, the towered sandstone hall, with its own chapel of the Holy Trinity, was richly decorated and furnished.
Some twenty servants worked and lived there. Silver-chased hunting horns and salt cellars were part of the furnishings. The family chapel, where they worshopped with their own full-time priest, had rich silk dressings for the altar and for the priest himself. The Plumptons had beautiful clothes: cloaks ‘furred with martyns’,
a coverlet of red satin and a canopy of white silk. Men and women wore silvered belts and girdles, amber beads and gold, sapphire and emerald rings. They had books and psalters covered in red satin and red velvet. The little children learned French and could speak it by the time they were four.
In the great fishponds which are still at Plumpton, bream, tench and pike were raised for the table.
Rabbits, hares and pheasants came from the Plumptons’ beautiful manor at Grassington in Upper Wharfedale. Game, including venison, came from the wide open stretches of Knaresborough forest. The house was well armed with stocks of bows, swords, shields, armour and the pole arms with which the retained men were fitted out. The hall itself, the heart of the manor, was decorated with those coats of arms which reflected the dynastic and land-gathering enterprise on which the family was embarked: Plumpton quartered with Foljambe (his mother’s family from Nottinghamshire), Plumpton with Stapleton (his own wife’s), Plumpton with Clifford (his son’s).
In the cold and frozen spring of 1461, catastrophe overtook them all. A letter from the Lancastrian king, Henry VI, on the run at York, was brought by messenger to Plumpton. Edward IV, known to Lancastrians as the Earl of March, had been declared King in London on 3 March and was now on his way north to destroy his rival. Henry and the whole Lancastrian affinity to which Plumpton had pinned his hopes and loyalty were now to fight for their lives. The letter was endorsed on its outer sheet: ‘To our trusty and welbeloued knight, Sir William Plompton.’ Unfolding it, he read:
By the King. R[ex]H[enricus]
Trusty and webeloued, we greete you well, and for as much as we haue very knowledg that our great trator the late Earle of March hath made great assemblies of riotouse and mischeously disposed people; and to stirr and prouocke them to draw vnto him he hath cried in his proclamations hauok vpon all our trew liege people and subjects, thaire wiues, children, and goods, and is now coming towards vs, we therefore pray you and also straitely charge you that anon vpon sight herof, ye, with all such people as ye may make defensible arrayed, come to vs in all hast possible, wheresoeuer we shall bee within this our Realme, for to resist the malitious entent and purpose of our said trator, and faile not herof as ye loue the seurity of our person, the weale of yourselfe, and of all our trew and faithfull subjects.
Geuen under our signet at our cyty of York, the thirteenth day of March.
Another of the same kind required him to gather the royal tenants from Knaresborough forest. The world of a fifteenth-century court, even in terminal crisis, shines out of these urgent, affecting, courteous and explanatory letters: no fear of violence; an exquisite care in dealing with men of Plumpton’s sort; an underlying brute reality; a dream of Arthurian perfection, already in its fading hours; the prospect of a final battle, a Camlann for real; reliance on the formal, feudal love of a king and dread of his kingdom disintegrating; recognition that ‘the weale of yourselfe’ relied on the bonds of loyalty which, in a kingdom now with two embattled kings, were already broken.
The letters mark the beginning of the crisis in William Plumpton’s life. He gathered the men of his household and those of Knaresborough forest and armed them. The young Lord Clifford, Elizabeth’s brother, and the Earl of Northumberland were doing the same across the whole of the north of England. Young William Plumpton joined his father, and the entire Lancastrian affinity marched south to meet the Yorkists. The huge armies, 40,000 on each side, met in the lanes, on the open fields and in the sharp stream valleys between the villages of Towton and Saxton just south-west of York. It was Palm Sunday, 29 March, and desperately cold. Heavy snow showers blustered between the armies all day. ‘This deadlie conflict’, according to Holinshed, ‘continued ten houres in doubtfull state of victorie, uncertainlie heaving and setting on both sides’.
Heaving and setting: the seismic movements of a mass of armed men. The dead choked the streams, making dams and bridges in the water, and the river Wharfe ran red with their blood. Fighting men had to drag the bodies out of the way to clear a space so that others could be killed. About 28,000 men died, ‘all Englishmen and of one nation’,
as Holinshed wrote mournfully, more than the number of British dead on the first day of the Somme, the bloodiest day in English history.
Archaeologists have excavated a mass grave on the edge of the battlefield. It was hastily dug, only eighteen inches deep, and held 43 bodies tightly packed into a space six feet by twenty. In the words of the archaeological report, they were the ‘casualties of an extremely violent encounter’.
Most of the Towton dead had been hit over and over again, suffering ‘multiple injuries that are far in excess of those necessary to cause disability and death’. The cuts, chops, incisions and punctures all clustered around the men’s heads and faces.
Ears had been sliced away, eye sockets enlarged and noses deliberately cut off. Very few of the wounds were below the neck, on parts of the body protected by armour. The archaeologists thought that the wounds had probably been delivered when the victims were already on the ground, helpless, dead or dying ‘in a position that did not allow them to defend themselves’. It was savage and enraged mutilation. ‘Many were left in a state that would have made identification difficult.’
Nor were these men – who as usual had been stripped of their armour after they were killed but before they were thrown in the grave – a crude peasant horde. Analysis of their skeletons has shown that they were stronger than the medieval norm, ‘appearing similar to modern professional athletes’.
Many had clearly trained in lifting, thrusting and throwing. Several had old, healed wounds. Their upper bodies were developed symmetrically, the result of having been trained from childhood in the longbow, which requires strength in both the string-pulling and the bow-holding arms. The trace elements in their bones have also revealed that they had been fed on the best medieval diet: plenty of protein, much of it from fish. These were the best young men the country had. But there was nothing polite, graceful or chivalric about their dying. The Towton mass grave is a monument to brutality, terror and rage, a frenzy of killing and destruction, a dirty desecration of defenceless victims, among the elite warriors of late medieval England. It is a world in which Sir William Plumpton would have been entirely at home.
The Lancastrian cause was broken at Towton and Plumpton’s world collapsed with it. Each side knew this was a fight whose victors would not spare the defeated – ‘This battle was sore fought,’ the chronicler Edward Hall wrote, ‘for hope of life was set on side on every part’
– and that alone explains the scale of destruction. Plumpton’s son William, aged twenty-four, was killed, lying anonymous among the thousands of Lancastrian dead, drowned or mutilated in his grave. The young Lord Clifford, his brother-in-law, aged twenty-six, a brutal warrior and murderer of prisoners, known as the Butcher, lay there with him, thrown like others into some anonymous body pit, stripped and unrecognized, after he had been killed by an arrow in the throat. The Earl of Northumberland, their feudal lord, mortally wounded, staggered off the field and made his way to York, where he died too. An affinity was destroyed that day, between sons and brothers, cousins and brothers-in-law, the whole spreading set of connections that made up a political-social-familial world. It was a community, as Gawain says in the Morte Darthur, which had ‘gone full colde at the harte-roote’.
The Lancastrian peers were attainted, their heirs deprived of lands and titles. This was revolution by butchery, no less traumatic than the events of the 1640s and just as deep a cut into the body of England.
Sir William himself, who at fifty-seven was certainly too old to have been in the thick of battle, fled from Towton field, down the roads of the frozen north, escaping the frenzy of the Yorkist killing machine, and remained on the run for some weeks. But the levers of power were in other hands now. By the middle of May he was up before the new régime, being interrogated by a judge in York, who as a means of maintaining law and order demanded of him a bond guaranteeing his acceptable behaviour for £2,000, more than thirty years’ income from his manor at Plumpton, equivalent perhaps to £5 million today. The bond was set at a level Plumpton could not meet and by July he was a prisoner in the Tower of London, held there as an enemy of the Yorkist state. His decade of suffering had begun.
All offices were taken from him. The Cliffords and Northumberlands, in whom he had invested every penny of his political capital, were dead meat. A world that had been running in Plumpton’s favour was now a bed of shards set against him and he had to wriggle for his life. He managed to get himself released from the Tower but was confined to London and prevented from returning to the north. Large pockets of Lancastrian resistance were still holding out against the Yorkists, even then being suppressed by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the ‘proud setter-up and puller-down of kings’,
as Shakespeare called him. Warwick was at the height of his powers, in his mid-thirties, arrogant, ruthless, by far the richest member of the nobility England has ever seen, personally responsible for killing the old Lord Clifford in 1455 and so tied by blood-hatred to destruction of the Lancastrian cause. He mopped up all the rewards: Great Chamberlain of England, Master of the King’s Horse, Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable of Dover Castle. Government of the whole of the north of the country was given to him and his brother. Those great estates which had belonged to his enemies were now handed over, including most of the Percy lands in Yorkshire and the Clifford lordship of Skipton. Yorkshire became Warwick’s fiefdom. A Frenchman joked about the country under Edward IV: ‘They have but two rulers: M de Warwick and another whose name I have forgotten.’
Plumpton could have found no refuge in that unforgiving, Warwick-dominated world.
Deprived of his offices and their income, kept away from his own lands in the north, Plumpton found himself exposed to his enemies. Arms were stolen from his house at Plumpton, precious household goods and even a surplice from his chapel was taken. The monks of a monastery sieved his fishponds for bream, tench, roach, perch and ‘dentrices’. His timber trees and underwoods were cut down and taken away. Oxen were stolen from his lands at Spofforth and stones already cut for houses were carted off. In his manors up in the limestone dales of the Pennines, his hay was mown and stolen in the early summer, and rabbits and hares were taken from his warren at Grassington.
From his lodgings near Hounslow outside London, he was conducting secret negotiations with his co-Lancastrians in the north but was caught by Yorkist informers and denounced to the authorities. They had been watching him, the way he ‘had receyved, red, and understaud false, damnable, diffamatory, and slaunderous writing, traiterously by pen and other forged and ymagined against the honor and welfare of our said soveraigne, and the same sent to other suspicious persons to corage and comfort them by the same’.
There had been comings and goings, agents had arrived at his house and Plumpton had ‘secretly cherished them, succored, forbored, and their secrets concealed’.
Foolishly, he had not concealed his true feelings. ‘When any turble or enterprise was leke to fall hurt or scaythe to the Kings people, the said Sir William Plumpton, with oder suspected, rejoyced, and were glad in chere and countenance.’
The pressure did not let up. In a world where legal standing was so dependent on personal strength and status, everything in William Plumpton’s life in the early 1460s was vulnerable. His property was being continually raided. Money to fight for legal redress was desperately short. The letters preserved by the Plumptons describe a world in dissolution, full of the difficulties of dealing with people who were ‘right hard and strange’ and shot through with murderous arguments. His men were being ‘dayly threatened’
with beatings or worse. All involved had to navigate the tangled and expensive jungle of late medieval law. Those with something to get out of Plumpton addressed him with imploring and self-abasing humility. Others wanted only ‘a remedy as shall accord with reason’.
His lawyers prayed that God would give him ‘good speed against all your enemies’.
He seems to have been surrounded by them. His tenants asked him to show ‘good lordshipp and mastership’,
their only hope in a world where their own newly increased vulnerability was exposed to the competitiveness and thieving of those in power.
On top of all this, with his status crumbling, Plumpton was faced with the most intractable of gentry problems: daughters. He had seven of them, most of them coming into marriageable age in the 1460s. To maintain the dignity of the family, daughters had to be provided with dowries. The class average was something near £100 per girl and the deal was usually quite straightforward. The girl’s father would provide the lump of cash (usually payable in instalments over five years or so) and the boy’s father would settle lands on the young couple that would provide an annual income of about 10 per cent of that sum, called a jointure. If the husband died first, his widow enjoyed the jointure for the rest of her life. After her death, the lands would descend to her and her husband’s heirs. It was a civilized and humane arrangement, the equivalent signal in law to the co-presence in every parish church of the knight and his lady laid out side by side in equal honour and with equal dignity. Women were important: they ran estates, they mothered the all-important heirs, they stood as trustees in legal agreements and as widows they became powers in the land. Their arms were quartered equally with their husband’s. It was a given that every father would provide every daughter with an old age that fitted her ‘worship’, her honour. A proper dowry would get a proper husband. The Plumpton coat of arms would continue to be associated with others of equal or better standing. The family corporation would be allied in blood with those who could support it.
But seven daughters! Figures for the dowries provided by Plumpton have survived for three of his girls: £123 for Elizabeth at some time before 1460, £146 for Agnes in 1463 and £100 for Jane in 1468.
Catherine, Alice, Isabel and Margaret Plumpton were all married in the 1460s, and all to equally distinguished members of the gentry, most of them knights, who would certainly not have accepted girls with less to offer. Somewhere or other William had to find some £900 to give away with his daughters. It was a necessary investment in new plant. The poor man was caught between his catastrophic political circumstances and the demands which the family business required.
He was no lamb. Beneath the surface, he had plans. Among the many lawyers he was using to fight his legal battles, he employed two from Yorkshire: Brian Rocliffe and Henry Sotehill. Both were rising and brilliant men, making their names and fortunes in the Westminster courts. Both, significantly, were supporters of the great Earl of Warwick. They were Yorkists, Plumpton’s natural enemies, and to each of them, plotting carefully, he sold a granddaughter.
Lying in bed in Plumpton Hall in 1463, William considers the situation. Daughters need dowries, a drain on resources. Both sons are dead, but William, the younger, slaughtered at Towton, has left Margaret (born in 1459) and Elizabeth (born in 1460). Two tiny girls, the joint co-heirs of the entire Plumpton inheritance. On them would descend all the beautiful manors in the Vale of York and up in the Pennine dales, in the Vale of Belvoir and the limestone uplands of the Derbyshire Peak District. Their hands in marriage are worth money. The two Yorkist lawyers Rocliffe and Sotehill would glow at the prospect of their heirs acquiring the Plumpton riches. And more than that, their connections to the great Earl of Warwick might surely ease some of William’s other pressures. And so in November 1463, Margaret, aged four, was sold to Rocliffe for his son John to marry. The tiny bride went to live with the Rocliffes, where she embarked on her education. ‘Your daughter & myn’, Brian Rocliffe wrote about her to Plumpton that December, ‘desireth your blessing and speaketh prattely and French, and hath near hand learned her sawter.’
Her sister Elizabeth, aged three, was consigned to Sotehill’s son John the following February and went to live with them in Leicestershire. Elizabeth, the poor young widowed mother of these tiny girls, can have had no say in their fate. Too much hinged on it.
Brian Rocliffe was to pay for Margaret’s wedding and the young Rocliffes were, to start with, to get the poor little hillside manor of Nesfield in Wharfedale, a beautiful place but scarcely of any value. Rocliffe was to give Plumpton £313, more than the annual income from all of his lands. It was agreed ‘that all these couenants are to be performed without fraud or bad faith’.
At the same time Plumpton made a deal for almost £350 with Henry Sotehill for the other granddaughter ‘the which Elizabeth the said Sir William hath deliuered to the said Henry’.
The price for Elizabeth was a little higher because Plumpton also agreed with Sotehill that if, by any chance, Plumpton should have another son by another wife, he would also deliver this son to Sotehill so that he could be married to one of Sotehill’s daughters.
Hanging behind all this was the knowledge that these little girls would one day each inherit land worth at least £150 a year. Measuring past worth is not easy, but it is relevant to these figures that in fifteenth-century England you could get a spade and shovel for 3d., a spinning wheel for 10d., a sword for 3s. 6d., a bow for the same, a draught horse, an ox or a good linen surplice for £1, a knight’s war horse for £6 and twenty acres of grass, on which twenty cows and their calves could graze for the year, for £10. Land of that kind might cost £80,000 today. The girls were worth over £1 million each in today’s terms.
Everything was tied up. The little girls were securely established as the Plumpton heirs. Sotehill got William to promise he wasn’t lying or committing fraud. He required him to agree in writing not to persuade the tiny Elizabeth or her mother that this marriage was a bad idea. And to pay everything back if it went wrong. Here were the Sotehills, lawyers, small fry, riding high on the Yorkist wave, making their claim on gentry wellbeing. None of it would have been possible unless every single person involved accepted the power of the patriarch to dictate and deal in his family’s lives.
But there was a problem. Plumpton had sold his granddaughters to two up-and-coming lawyers on the understanding that the girls were the joint heirs of all his property. He had taken large amounts of money from those lawyers on the basis of that promise. If those two girls became his heiresses, the name of Plumpton and the great Plumpton inheritance would disappear into other families’ maws. But Sir William wanted to keep his own name and line going and so had embarked on a grand deceit. Since 1452 he had been secretly married to another woman. Very early one summer morning that year, before sunrise, between Easter and Whitsun, a Friday, Sir William and a gentlewoman of Knaresborough called Joan Wintringham came to the parish church of Knaresborough and stood at the door of the chancel. William was wearing ‘a garment of green checkery’, Joan was in a red dress with a grey hood.
