Medieval panorama : the English scene from conquest to Reformation / by G.G. Coulton.

  • George Gordon Coulton
Date:
1947
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Medieval panorama : the English scene from conquest to Reformation / by G.G. Coulton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    eager spirits experienced the sickness of hope deferred. But, gradually, forest and fen and fell were subdued to the plough; buildings increased in scale and in elaboration; even where the high-water-mark of taste was past in art, the wealth of ornament still increased. By 1500, the inventories of furniture and plate in our parish churches show double the value of those in 1300; for this, again, was part of the forward movement of the common folk. If one of William’s Norman knights or his Saxon tenant could have seen Tudor England, the change in outward aspect would have bewildered him. So was it, again, with the inward organiza¬ tion, quite apart from Parliament and the Court. The growth of the Jury system was a great step: so, again, was the fourteenth- century development of Justices of the Peace, intermediary between the royal judges and the minor magistrates: “an extra¬ ordinary experiment in justice which was at once anti-feudal and a reversal of the hitherto universal trend towards centralization.”* So, again, with the rapidly increasing franchises of the towns, and their experiences in local self-government which bore rich fruit in the national councils of later generations. Then, as now, men were everywhere struggling to combine personal freedom with collective action and efficiency; and the sum-total was progress, if only that of a man who is pursuing a rainbow. There is a deep pathos for all generations in Dr Salter’s quiet remark about the Oxford citizens of 1199: the city obtained royal licence to elect a mayor, “and there seems to have been a general impres¬ sion that to have a mayor would bring the millennium ”.f English trade had expanded by 1500 to a point which would have amazed the Conqueror. Modern capitalism had begun, and society had long since abandoned the original absolute prohibition of taking interest for moneys lent. Edward I had expelled the Jews; but the Christian usurer had not proved more merciful; soon, therefore, the State ceased to interest itself in the lender’s soul, and set itself only to limit his rate of interest. As the citizen grew richer, and was proud to enrich his parish church with paintings or carvings or plate, so he became dress-proud for himself. Our later medieval satirists echo in substance, though in other words, Dante’s yearning retrospect to the palmy days when great citizens were not ashamed to go girt with leather belts and clasps of bone. More * J. E. A. Joliffe, Constitutional History of Medieval England (1937), p. 413. f Medieval Oxford (1937), p. 49.
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