The changing face of england

Historians are agreed that the estimated four million of 1348 constituted 'overpopulation' in the sense that the working population was greater than required for the available amount of work, as generated by the economic and social system. There was surplus labour available, wages fell, and there was privation and hunger where too-large family groups had use of too-small plots of land within the manor. The consequence of the plague was to reverse this situation. Many manors were untenanted, fields were left to revert to wilderness, and the wages of rural workers rose sharply as they found their services in demand, while agricultural prices fell and the cost of manufactured articles rose sharply. Larger estates were often rented off in small units. Struggling to oppose a sense of universal social upheaval, government with its limited resources found it impossible to cope; a cloth industry arose in many parts of the country, from Westmorland to Somerset, and from Yorkshire to the Cotswolds. The interdependence of weaver and sheep farmer did much to develop the internal economy and to foster a sense of national cohesion. A class of middlemen and wholesalers managed the trade, so that the activities of small farmers and cottage-based weavers culminated in a substantial industry which not only catered for the home market but quickly became a large export trade, which in turn benefited the seaports and the shipbuilding industry.

Chaucer’s england

This was the age of Chaucer's England – the first era in which we gain a picture of English life written in the English language. Geoffrey Chaucer, London wine merchant, member of parliament, royal diplomat, for even his own generation above all a poet – 'first finder of our fair language', said his younger contemporary Thomas Hoccleve – was the leading light in the first great age of English literature. Among his works, The Canterbury Tales has always enjoyed the greatest popular acclaim, but this collection of verse stories and linking passages, veering from high literary modes to crude folk humour, shot through with sardonic and satirical vision, is not intended as a realistic or complete portrayal of English life.

Chaucer was a member of the 'establishment' of his time, and though he recognized many of the ills of society, from brigandage to the decline in faith and holiness of the clergy, he was not a reformer in social or religious matters.

Many events still to come would test or question that moderation and tolerance. Violence was endemic at all levels of society. Henry IV would approve of the burning of heretics. Englishmen in positions of power could be as grasping, harsh and relentless as any Italian condottiere or iron-fisted Teutonic knight. An English army could wreck and raze and commit rape and looting in a captured foreign city as readily as any other. But the roots of a more measured and self-disciplined approach went very deep. They lay above all in respect for the law and in the feeling that the law was everyone's possession. It was a remedy for those who were offended against, and a warning to those who offended. The king, as ever, was its guarantor, but if the king went beyond the law, he could be made to retract, or he could be removed.