King Death A History of Britain by Simon Schama

In the summer of 1348, the English could be forgiven for thinking themselves unconquerable.

They had vanquished the old enemies, the Scots and the French.

Their king, Edward III, seemed the most powerful ruler in Europe.

But they WOULD be conquered

and by a king against whom neither longbows nor warships offered any defence...

King Death.

His weapon was plague

and by the end of his terrible campaign, almost half the people of Britain would be dead.

The country would survive the trauma,

but first it had to undergo a purgatory of unimaginable misery,

because hard on the heels of pestilence came rebellion and civil war.

The century of plague was a pilgrimage through pain and this is the story of that journey.

Yersinia pestis, the germ of plague, came to Britain in the guts of infected fleas.

They were hidden away in cargoes of grain, bales of cloth and in the fur of black rats.

The most probable point of entry was Melcombe Regis, near Weymouth.

By the time it got to the great ports of Southampton and Bristol,

there were already stories from traumatised cities of Italy as to how and where it had begun.

In the east, on the plains of central Asia, another of the horrors carried on the backs of the Mongol hordes.

The plague cut a swathe of destruction eastwards to China and India

and westwards into Crimea and Turkey.

At the port of Caffa, the Tartars had thrown infected bodies over the city walls,

to hasten the surrender of the defending Genoese,

a first in the annals of biological warfare.

Once it arrived by sea in Italy, it spread quickly into mainland Europe.

There had been devastating calamities before visited on Britain.

Countless numbers died in the apocalyptic famine of 1315.

But it was the merciless, indiscriminate swiftness of the plague's progress

which so unhinged the cities and villages caught in its onslaught.

No-one, rich or poor, could escape.

This is how the Welsh poet, Euan Geffin saw it,

waiting for his own infection which sure enough came in 1349.

"We see death coming into our midst like foul smoke

"A plague, which cuts off the young

"A rootless phantom which has no mercy

"Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit

"It is in the form of an apple like the head of an onion

"Great is its seething like a burning cinder

"A grievous thing of ashy colour

"It is an ugly eruption that comes with unseemly haste

"They are like a shower of peas, the early ornaments of Black Death."

It would take about six days from the bite of an infected flea

for the tell-tale swellings, the buboes, to appear on a victim's neck, groin or armpit,

accompanied by violent fever and agonising pain.

The immune system would be overwhelmed within a week.

If the infection reached the lungs, death came after just a couple of days of bloody coughing.

Anyone who inhaled even the tiniest droplets of mucus would be doomed to suffer in their turn.

No-one would have known it at the time, but the tightly packed streets and houses of a place like Bristol

made a perfect factory farm for the bacillus.

Vermin, crawling with fleas, lived alongside the crowded population of people and animals.

The nibble of a flea was a common irritation in this lousy, ant-heap world.

And even when the buboes appeared, there was no reason to suppose that fleas or rats were responsible.

But there was no doubt about what would happen next.

The youngest and the oldest and the poorest, those with least resistance, would be taken first.

But then everyone else, too.

In a town this ripe for infection, almost half the population would have perished in the first year,

among them 15 of Bristol's 52 city councillors,

their names struck through as they died.

Terrified and bewildered, the healthy abandoned the sick to their fate.

Whole towns, villages, even families, were cruelly divided into the living and the dying.

Husbands will have shunned their wives, fathers and mothers recoiled from contact with their children.

It's almost impossible to imagine the utter desolation and terror,

the complete collapse of everything you've taken for granted.

How do you find bread now the bakers are all dead?

How do you find a physic now that none of them work?

And at last, how do you find someone to cart away the bodies that have to be disposed of somewhere?

The bigger the city, the greater the shock.

In 1348, London had a population of close to 100,000.

In the first wave of the plague, 300 died every day.

At Spitalfields, there had long been a medieval hospital with a cemetery attached.

Within its walls the dead were dutifully laid to rest in their individual graves,

pointing east, so that come the Day of Judgement, they would rise again, facing towards Jerusalem.

But in the grip of the epidemic, there was no time for such pieties.

Recent excavations have turned up mass pits

where bodies were pitchforked into the dirt in haste and desperation.

Unearthed now, just the way they were dumped in, they look as if they're protesting at the indignity.

By the summer of 1349, the plague had spread to the furthest corners of England, Wales and Scotland.

Now it travelled across the sea to Ireland.

According to John Clyn, a Franciscan friar writing at Kilkenny,

14,000 had perished in Dublin alone.

"Since the beginning of the world, it has been unheard of for so many people to die in such a short time.

"This pestilence was so contagious

"that those who touched the dead or the sick were immediately infected themselves.

"I, seeing these many ills and that the whole world is encompassed by evil,

"waiting among the dead for death to come,

"have committed to writing what I truly have heard and examined,

"and I leave parchment for continuing this work, if perchance any man survive

"and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and carry on the work which I have begun."

At this point another hand has written, "Here it seems the author died."

When the survivors recovered from the first brutal shock of the Black Death,

they asked, inevitably, "Why us? Why now?"

The best guess was that the plague was caused by a corruption of the atmosphere - putrefaction -

the mark of men and beasts rising from lakes, swamps and chasms.

This dank smog even had a name - miasma.

If sickness grew in stench, then sweet smells were an obvious remedy.

Physicians and herbalists lost no time in devising recipes

for pomanders and potions to guard against infection, or even to act as an antidote for the stricken.

"Five cups of rue if it be a man, and if it be a woman, leave out the rue.

"Five little blades of columbine,

"a great quantity of marigold flowers.

"An egg that is newly laid

"and make a hole in one end and blow out all that is within,

"and lay it to the fire and roast it till ground to powder, but do not burn it.

"Brew all these herbs with good ale, but do not strain them

"and make the sick drink it for three evenings and mornings.

"If they hold it in their stomach, they shall have life."

But if God decided otherwise, all the potions in the world would be of no avail.

The inescapable conclusion was that the pestilence had been laid on mankind

as a chastisement for its manifold sins.

Lewd necklines, lascivious dancing and shameless adultery had brought on the plague.

It would end when the world was contrite, but it never seemed contrite enough.

In the meantime, the country was laid waste.

Farms were abandoned,

whole villages deserted.

The accounts for the Bishop of Winchester's lands at Farnham in Surrey

tell the story of a rural society in shock.

In the first year of the Black Death, 52 households, a good third of the villagers, were wiped out.

Given the mark, "Defectus per pestilentum".

The Farnham rolls put names to the numbers, names like Matilda Sticker.

She died, together with her entire family.

Or a servant girl, Matilda Talvyn, who saw her master and his entire household succumb to the plague.

By the time it ebbed away in 1350, 1,300 had died in Farnham.

While the plague took, it could also give.

In the first year of the Black Death, John Crochet, who was a minor became an orphan, but an orphan with assets,

because he could now inherit the lots left to him by his father and another relative.

This must have been the making of a small, but serious, village fortune.

In another place in the rolls, we learn that the harvest had become twice as expensive to gather in.

Twelve pence, written in Roman numerals, per acre

because, the rolls say, of the plague and the scarcity of labour.

Workers it seems were thin on the ground and were beginning to charge accordingly.

The Farnham story could be repeated all through Britain.

The countryside after the Black Death was an irreversibly altered world.

For one thing, there were no more serfs.

For centuries, being a serf meant being tied by custom and by birth to your local lord.

He gave you a tiny spot of land on which you could farm

and in return you put in hours of grinding toil, unpaid, on his very big farm.

There were other ways, too, in which you were not free.

You had to ask his permission to marry and you were not, repeat not, ever to leave.

Until, that is, the Black Death.

Now there was a desperate labour shortage.

The laws of supply and demand meant that for the first time you could set the terms of the deal.

He wanted some labour out of you. You could say, "Why not start by paying me something?"

He wants you to move in to a piece of land which otherwise would go to rack and ruin,

and you say, "OK, cut the rent."

And if the lord then says, "Not a chance, you impertinent so and so,"

you just up sticks and find someone else who's got a more secure grip on the new economic facts of life.

Hundreds of thousands of peasants must have done just that. There was nothing anybody could do about it.

It was not just the social order that the plague shook loose.

It also ate away at the sense of security offered by the Church,

especially since the regular clergy seemed powerless to provide help for the afflicted,

or even for themselves.

In 1349, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, seeing that there was a serious shortage of priests,

authorised laymen to hear the confession of the dying.

"Or," he wrote, "even a woman if no man is available."

The most daring took matters into their own hands, seeking redemption directly from the Scriptures.

The Lollards, or Mumblers, took their name from their mouthing out loud of the Bible

and encouraged others to do the same by translating it into English,

liberating it from the obscurity of Latin.

As few as they were, the Lollards were a dramatic threat to the authority of the Church.

They were only saved from persecution by the protection of their most powerful patron,

King Edward's third son, John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster.

Men like him were drawn to new forms of piety and penance

because the plague had made them acutely aware that King Death was no respecter of rank or wealth.

Should he strike without warning, they had better be ready for a reckoning.

They all knew the cautionary tale of the three living and the three dead.

A trio of handsome young kings out for a decent day's sport

suddenly find themselves confronted by three not so handsome cadavers,

each in a different state of decomposition - the Marx Brothers from hell.

The three living pipe up, "I'm afraid."

"Lo, but I see," and, "Methinks these devils be."

Back come the other three...

"Such shall you be,"

"I was well fair," and, "For God's love, beware."

The furthest gone of the gruesome threesome then makes a little speech.

"Know that I was head of my tribe, princes, kings and nobles, royal and rich, rejoicing in wealth,

"but now I am so hideous and bare that even the worms disdain me."

This was an invasion that Plantagenet England had not prepared for.

The invasion of the space of the living by the dead.

The sense that the borders between backyards and boneyards had collapsed produced a sudden nervousness.

In the face of King Death,

neither riches nor earthly fame could buy salvation, or guarantee immortality.

This insecurity found expression in a very peculiar kind of tomb,

the transey, which means appropriately enough, "gone off".

In transey tombs, like this one at Canterbury Cathedral, you got remembered twice over.

They were double-decker affairs.

In the top deck, you were seen very much in the guise the world expected,

as a knight in armour or a bishop in full episcopal rig.

In the lower deck, though, there you were, a naked skeleton...

..the flesh fallen away from the bone.

Now, the mindset that produced the transey tomb was a kind of reverse envy.

A determination to fall behind the Jones's, to bow to no-one in your painful awareness

that however grand you were, pretty soon you were going to be reduced to a heap of dust and maggots.

The idea was to contrast, as shockingly as possible, two sorts of self-consciousness.

On the one hand, the way we should like to be remembered, dying in splendour and piety.

And on the other hand, the way we really are...

..pathetic in our cadaverous mortality.

"I was Pauper born," reads the inscription on Archbishop Chichele's tomb.

"Then to primate raised.

"Now I am cut down and served up for worms.

"Behold my grave."

Only the highest office in the land seemed to have survived unscathed.

Edward III, once the glamorous, invincible warrior, was now an ageing father to a fragile nation.

Still, the royal succession SEEMED secure.

Edward's son, the Black Prince, the heir to the throne, was already a legendary hero.

But then, against all expectation, the picture changed.

The Black Prince succumbed to dysentery in 1376

and a year later the old king himself finally expired.

And so the crown passed to Edward's grandson, Richard of Bordeaux.

A boy king, called upon before his time, Richard was ruler in name only.

Everyone knew that his uncle, John of Gaunt, worked the real levers of power.

Richard's coronation was orchestrated by John of Gaunt as a festival of loyalty,

a statement of faith in the undimmed future of England's glory.

There had been no coronation for half a century,

but the mix of solemnity and festivity never failed to work its spell.

Knights of the shire rode in from all over England to witness the spectacle.

The next day in the Abbey, little Richard had his shirt taken off him behind a golden screen

and his face, hands and chest touched with the holy oil.

As they listened to him in his little boy's voice promise to protect the Church,

do justice and respect the laws and customs of his ancestors,

the assembly of nobles and priests must have imagined him

growing to fit the huge throne of his ferocious great, great grandfather, Edward I.

Inevitably, as the long ceremony droned on in the darkness, Richard fell asleep.

As he was carried from the Abbey, his legs dangling, one of his oversized slippers fell off,

but who could think that an ill omen?

He was, after all, only ten.

How was the child marked by all this?

Twenty-two years later, did he remember this moment of anointing as a kind of apotheosis,

a magical transformation from a little man into a little god?

Perhaps it was just as well that Richard mistook himself for a messiah,

since only someone with that kind of innate self-confidence could have faced down, at the tender age of 14,

the most violent upheaval in the history of Medieval England.

It happened with astounding, terrifying swiftness, starting in the kind of place you'd least expect it.

Not some destitute mud hole in the back of beyond,

but in the most economically developed region of rural England.

The belt of rich, fertile country, stretching from Kent, over the Medway and Thames to Essex and East Anglia.

The thing about the Peasants' Revolt is that the people who started it weren't really peasants at all.

At any rate, they weren't the straw-chewing, pitchfork-waving yokels of legend.

No, they were people with something to lose - the village elite.

Men who'd served as constables and stewards and jurors.

Men who'd moved into those vacant lots that had been left behind by victims of the plague.

They'd made some money and weren't about to see it go down the drain

in order to line the pockets of some lawyer and pen pusher in Westminster.

What's more, they knew how to make an army out of those one rung down on the social ladder.

Families just above the poverty line who had to sell their labour to make ends meet.

They were already angry at government attempts to peg back their steadily rising wages to pre-plague levels.

The balance had tipped in favour of the survivors and they were determined to keep it that way.

In their different ways, all these people were, or thought they were, up-and-comers

and they would fight if necessary to prevent themselves from sinking into the down-and-outers.

Was this a class war? A phrase we're not supposed to use since the official burial of Marxism.

Yes, it was.

The suspicion amongst the men of village England was that the real power behind the throne,

John of Gaunt, the Queen Mother and the Chancellor, were gathering in fresh taxes,

not to finance a patriotic war in France, but to lavish on their own palaces and private estates.

So when, in November 1380, parliament approved a new poll tax,

one which for the first time took no account of individual wealth,

the yeomen farmers must have imagined the awful prospect

of all their hard-won gains being snatched back by a greedy government.

There was outrage, bloody-minded fury and mass evasion which escalated into outright rebellion.

Tax collectors and sheriff's men were attacked, a few killed.

In Maidstone, they elected Wat Tyler, a yeoman craftsman, as their general and captain

and freed a Lollard anti-cleric called John Ball, who'd been imprisoned in the bishop's palace.

John Ball is a recognisable type,

a preaching friar who pushes Black Death radicalism to its logical extreme.

"Get rid of the priesthood and the property owners," Ball argued,

"and Christ's embrace of the poor will once again be honoured."

"Are we not descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve?

"And what reason can they give why THEY should be more masters than ourselves?

"They are clothed in velvet and rich ermine while we are forced to wear poor clothing.

"They have wines and fine spices and fine bread,

"while we have only rye and the refuse of the straw and when we drink it must be water.

"We are called slaves. If we do not perform our services, we're beaten.

"Let us go to the king and remonstrate with him.

"We may obtain a favourable answer.

"And if not, we must seek to amend our conditions ourselves."

And so they marched, the levelling fever of the Black Death buzzing in their brains,

slogans of equality and retribution in their mouths.

After all, who were Wat Tyler, John Bull and Robert Kaye of the Dartford baker, but the three dead

confronting the spoiled, rich and mighty with their day of judgement.

On the morning of 12th June 1381, an enormous army,

at least 5,000, perhaps as many as 10,000 strong,

was camped here on the fields of Blackheath on the edge of London.

Below them, they could see the city.

Old St Paul's, the bridges crowded with shops and Westminster beyond,

all seemingly at THEIR mercy.

This was not a rabble. From the start of the revolt, its targets had been selected carefully to make a point.

Rich abbeys, estates belonging to tax collectors.

Any document bearing the Seal of the Exchequer was marked out for destruction.

Manorial accounts were burned. They knew what they were doing.

Paradoxically, the rebels remained fervently loyal to the crown.

Though they had made themselves outlaws, they were fired by the certainty that their cause was just.

Surely it would be seen that they were not threatening the king, but rescuing him as well as themselves?

The discipline of the march, however, did not survive contact with the big city.

Prisons were broken open, churches looted, palaces put to the torch.

Thirty-five Flemish merchants were decapitated on the same block, one after the other.

Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury was captured while at his prayers in the Chapel of St John.

The rampaging rebels hacked his head off, stuck it on a spike and paraded it triumphantly through the streets.

On the evening of Thursday, 13th June, the teenage king climbed one of the turrets in the Tower

and what he saw ought to have broken him in terror.

The sky red with flames.

London crumbling into smoking ruins.

But hostage to a nightmare, Richard doesn't seem to have panicked.

When the councillors asked him negotiate with the rebels, he evidently showed no hesitation.

It was the boy who was the man of the hour.

It was a brave front, for Richard must have thought there was a good chance he might not survive.

Before his meeting with the rebels,

he prayed at the shrine of Edward the Confessor, the patron saint of all the Plantagenet kings.

Then, he rode through the jostling crowds to meet Wat Tyler and the rest of the leaders at Smithfield.

When he got to Smithfield, the king could see the rebels camped on the west side of the field

and the royal party on the east.

Wat Tyler rode over to Richard, got off his little horse, knelt very briefly, not very convincingly,

but then shakes his hand and calls him brother.

"Why will you not go home?" asked the king rather plaintively,

to which Tyler responded with a loud curse and a set of demands.

The most important was for a new Magna Carta - for the ordinary people.

It would abolish serfdom, liquidate the property of the Church,

it would offer a general pardon to all outlaws.

And if all this wasn't radical enough, it would make every man equal below the level of the king.

Now to all this Richard answered, "Yes," perhaps crossing his fingers behind his back,

and maybe Wat Tyler was so amazed by the concession, he didn't quite know what to do next.

So an eerie silence settles over everybody on the field, broken only by Tyler asking for a flagon of ale.

He gets it, he downs it, he gets back on to his mount, a big man on a little horse,

and at that moment... history changed.

There was someone on the king's side who had not been reading the script,

or perhaps was just unable to take the humiliation any longer.

It was a young esquire, someone Richard's own age who shouted at Tyler that he was a thief.

It broke the strange spell.

Walworth, the Mayor, who had always taken a hard line, tried to arrest Tyler.

There was horseback fighting,

Walworth getting in the decisive blow, cutting Tyler through the shoulder and neck.

As soon as he was down, the king's men surrounded him, finishing him off,

but making sure the rebel camp could not see what was going on.

One way or another, this was the moment of truth.

It was also the moment when Richard himself acted, decisively and with amazing courage.

He rode straight at the rebels shouting famously, "You shall have no captain but me."

The words were brilliantly chosen and were, of course, deliberately ambiguous.

To the rebels, it seemed that Richard himself was now their leader, just as they'd always wanted.

But the words could have been meant as the first reassertion of royal authority.

Either way, it defused the immediate crisis

and gave Mayor Walworth the opportunity to get back to London and mobilise armed men.

Now the process of breaking up the leaderless rebellion could begin.

Cautiously at first, with offers of pardons and mercy, but then with implacable resolution.

Just a week after the apparent concessions at Smithfield,

another group of rebels met with Richard at Waltham in Essex, but they found a very different king.

"You wretches, detestable on land and sea, you who seek equality with lords, are unworthy to live.

"Give this message to your colleagues. Rustics you were and rustics you are still.

"You will remain in bondage not as before, but incomparably harsher.

"For as long as we live, we will strive to suppress you

"and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity.

"However we will spare your lives if you remain faithful.

"Choose now which course you want to follow."

The rebels took the only option that was realistically open to them.

They fell to their knees. It was all over. The king was literally the only one left standing.

But what was the effect of all this on Richard? What did he now think he was capable of?

"My master, God omnipotent,

"is mustering in his clouds on our behalf armies of pestilence

"and they shall strike your children yet unborn and unbegot

"that lift your vassal hands against my head and threat the glory of my precious crown."

Though Shakespeare starts his tragedy years after the Peasants' Revolt,

it's hard not to believe that in his portrait of a petulant, self-admiring Richard II,

there is the sense of someone trapped in an adolescent fantasy of indestructibility.

There's no denying that, especially at times of crisis, he was subject to unpredictable mood swings,

between adrenaline rush feelings of omnipotence and abject fatalism.

But it is easy to exaggerate his unfitness to rule,

as though he were somehow suspiciously unsound.

He was built the usual Plantagenet way.

Six foot tall with long, flowing, blond hair.

But unlike his grandfather, he failed to keep mistresses

and seemed, oddly enough, to want to be faithful to his wife Anne.

Real Plantagenets tore at their meat and slurped the drippings. Richard not only insisted on using a spoon,

but inflicted it on the rest of the court.

Real Plantagenets won blood-soaked victories over France and Scotland.

Richard brought England the pocket handkerchief.

Real Plantagenets built fortresses.

Richard instead wanted a great ceremonial space in Westminster Hall with a spectacular hammer-beam roof.

The rows of angels symbolised the king's divine right to rule.

The angels in turn are supported by carved stone plinths,

bearing Richard's own emblem, the white hart.

But the alien strangeness attributed to Richard seems a lot less strange

if you think of him as a Renaissance prince

for whom the idea of the civilised life was not necessarily a mark of being un-English.

The Wilton Diptych is the clearest illustration of his exalted vision of kingship.

Richard instinctively felt he belonged in the company of saints,

so here he is with three of them.

John the Baptist,

Edward the Confessor

and the Saxon martyr king, Edmund.

The other panel reveals him to be in the even more exalted company

of angels, the Christ Child and the Virgin.

He is her appointed lieutenant.

She is receiving his kingdom as her dowry

and in return will bestow on it her special protection and favour.

Ceremonial style was not, the king decided, just an affectation,

the window-dressing of power,

it was at the heart of its mystery, its capacity to make men obey.

This is what Richard had in mind when, for the first time in the history of the British monarchies,

the king let it be known he should like to be addressed as "Majesty" and "Highness",

a kind of mystical elevation.

But what seemed like refinement to Richard,

to the barons was evidence that the king had lost touch with their common interests.

Richard's refusal to continue the war with France was an obvious source of irritation for the nobility.

They prospered from foreign campaigns

and built spectacular castles, like this one at Bodium, to guard against a French invasion.

But it was the king's high-handedness that finally stung them into action.

By issuing royal decrees, Richard could bypass parliament.

He lavished favours on his closest friends and advisers,

men like Sir Simon Burleigh and Robert de Vere who was absurdly promoted to be Duke of Ireland.

The lords retaliated with their only available weapon, parliament.

In February 1388, five of the king's favourites

were charged with "abusing his youth and innocence to promote their own ambitions."

All were found guilty of treason, by what became known as "the merciless parliament".

Robert de Vere, the most hated of the king's confidants,

escaped before sentence of execution could be carried out, but Simon Burleigh was not so lucky.

Richard's queen pleaded on her knees for Burleigh's life,

but to no avail.

Richard may have crushed the Peasants' Revolt, but peers of the realm were another matter.

Chastened by the humiliation, the king withdrew into autocratic solitude.

And yet he had enough of the Plantagenet about him to harbour desires for retribution.

He held his peace for nearly ten years,

but when his beloved Queen Anne died of plague, Richard lost his only restraining influence

and he reasserted himself in an extraordinary storm of revenge.

Using the pretext of an aristocratic plot,

he brutally disposed of the ringleaders of the "merciless parliament" a decade earlier.

The Earl of Arundel was executed, the Earl of Warwick was exiled

and the Duke of Gloucester, Richard's own uncle, was murdered, smothered in his bed on the king's orders.

The old scores had been settled at last.

You would think that Richard would contain his sense of triumph,

if only in the interest of self-preservation.

But now that Richard II discovered that people were, for the first time, frightened of him,

he also discovered he rather liked it.

He drank it in and lashed out at anybody he thought was disloyal,

replacing them with yes-men and toadies,

eating, sleeping and travelling surrounded by a private army, as if he were some sort of Roman emperor.

Beneath these delusions of omnipotence, though, Richard remained neurotically insecure.

On the merest suspicion of treason,

he rashly condemned John of Gaunt's son, Henry Bolingbroke, to ten years in exile,

without even the pretence of a show trial.

If such summary justice made the English nobility uneasy, what happened next left them stunned.

When John of Gaunt finally died, Richard decided to increase Bolingbroke's sentence

to banishment for life and seized the young Duke's inheritance,

the valuable Lancastrian estates, in the name of the crown.

The magnates of England must have looked at this and said, "He's got to be stopped, or it's my turn next."

Richard was one blunder away from disaster.

The final, fatal distraction was Ireland.

He had decided to bring the Irish princes to heel,

but he took with him enough soldiers to leave himself defenceless at home

and not enough to cow the Irish nobles.

And before he could finish his business there,

he heard news that Henry Bolingbroke had landed with an army on the Yorkshire coast

and the alienated English lords had flocked to his banner.

By the time Richard returned,

Bolingbroke was in command of the southern and eastern heartland of England.

The odd thing is that Richard seemed to be one step ahead of his enemies in fatalistic pessimism,

so that when he got the bad news

that many of his most trusted supporters and allies had switched to the other side,

his reaction was not to dig in his heels, make a fight of it,

but rather to flee at night across the country, disguised as a priest,

bewailing his misfortunes and as usual blaming them on everybody else.

At some point in his uncontested march towards Richard, Bolingbroke's aims changed,

from simply getting his lands back to overthrowing the king.

"Now I can see my end," Shakespeare has Richard say,

a neat little piece of Lancastrian propaganda

which solved the embarrassing problem of a deposition

by making Richard seem as though he had resigned the crown,

rather than having it snatched from his desperate grip.

It took a month of painful negotiations

to get Richard, now a prisoner in the Tower, to give up the throne.

Three times they asked him to surrender, three times he refused,

before finally bowing to the inevitable.

On 30th September, a report of the king's renunciation was read to parliament,

gathered under the angels of Richard's magnificent roof.

The lords were asked to acclaim Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Hereford, Duke of Lancaster, as King Henry IV

which they did to cries of, "Yes, yes, yes."

Richard, the divine prince no longer, was spirited away and imprisoned in Pontefract Castle.

Most likely he was starved to death, a horrible way to end.

It ensured there'd be no compromising marks of assault on his body when it was given a public burial.

Now, oddly enough, it was Henry who orchestrated this big funeral,

a pre-emptive strike against any conspirators

who might imagine that Richard could be rescued and restored to the throne.

It was Bolingbroke's son, Henry V, who had the body of King Richard buried in Westminster Abbey.

Perhaps Henry wanted to put the charge of murder, as well as its victim, to rest.

He must have hoped that, in his reign, the wounds of the contending parties might be healed.

But it was not to be.

Despite his victory at Agincourt, Henry V remains a might-have-been, dead at 35 from dysentery.

So neither he nor his son, Henry VI, could prevent what the stealing of Richard's crown had made inevitable,

a long and bloody war between the competing wings of the Plantagenet family.

For 30 years, the houses of York and Lancaster slogged it out in a roll call of battles

we know as the Wars of the Roses.

There are only two ways to feel about the Wars of the Roses.

Either the endless chronicle of violent seizures of the crown

makes you thrill to one of the great English epics, or it leaves you feeling slightly numbed.

If you're one of the dazed and confused,

the temptation is to write off the whole sorry mess as the bloody bickering of overgrown schoolboys

whacking each other senseless at Towton, Barnet and Bosworth.

But there was something at stake in all the mayhem -

the sense of needing to make the English monarchy credible again.

To re-solder the chains of allegiance

which had once stretched all the way from Westminster, out to the constables and justices in the shires

and which had been so badly broken by the fate of Richard II.

To understand the way in which lawlessness, violence and chaos

did make an impact on 15th-century England,

we have something incomparably richer than the list of battlefields and barons, kings and king makers.

We have the letters of the Paston family of Norfolk, the very first private correspondence in English,

the authentic voice of middling folk.

Farmers, lawyers, would-be gentry, social climbers.

Like many an anxious wife and mother, the Wars of the Roses worried Margaret Paston

because they were making England a bad place to make and keep a little fortune.

"God, for his mercy give grace,

"for I never heard say of so much robbery and manslaughter in this country as is now.

"And as for gathering of money, I never saw a worse season."

To Margaret, the Kingdom of England might be up for grabs, but the real disaster was shopping.

"As for cloth for my gown, I pray that you will vouchsafe to do buy for me three yards and a quarter

"of such as it pleaseth you that I should have.

"For I have done all the draper's shops in this town and here is right feeble choice."

The founder of the Paston dynasty, Clement, is described as a plain husbandman,

which is to say a peasant,

but a peasant who took advantage of the Black Death to scramble right up the social ladder of the village.

Clement Paston was shrewd enough to send his son William to law school.

Clever enough, that is, to understand that it was going to be through learning, as much as through land,

that the fortunes of the Pastons would be utterly transformed.

Clement's son did indeed become a lawyer, and married into money.

So did his grandson John, who acquired Caister castle, completing the meteoric rise of the Pastons

from peasantry to landed gentry in just two generations.

"John Jenney informed me, and I've verily learned since, you're to be made a knight at this coronation.

"Considering the comfortable tidings aforesaid, 'twere time the necessary gear be purveyed for."

But nothing's ever this easy, is it?

As the Pastons became influential and rich, so they also were bound to attract enemies.

While they were nobodies, the great bloody tides of the Wars of the Roses were going to happen somewhere else.

But now that they became owners of lands and manors and castles,

they also became prime targets for the heavies and no-one was heavier than the Duke of Norfolk.

He'd always coveted Caister Castle. In September 1469, he came to get it.

Margaret wrote in some anguish to her son, "I greet you well,

"letting you know that your brother and his fellowship stand in great jeopardy at Caister."

Well, she was clearly desperate, but she was also extremely angry.

A few lines later, she lets her son, John,

feel the rough edge of her tongue which is extremely rough indeed.

"Every man in this country marvels that you suffer them to be for so long in great jeopardy.

"They be like to lose both their lives and the place.

"The greatest rebuke to you that ever came to any gentleman."

John immediately writes back...

"Mother, if I had need to be woken up by a letter at this time, I would indeed be a sluggish fellow.

"I have heard ten times worse tidings since the siege began than any letter that you wrote me.

"But I assure you that those within have no worse rest than I have, nor fear more danger."

Faced with the might of the Duke of Norfolk's army, the Pastons had no choice but to surrender their castle.

But once again the law would bring about the transformation of their fortunes.

It took a seven-year legal battle and an appeal to the king,

but they were eventually reinstated at Caister,

although for the eldest of Margaret's brood, the triumph was short lived.

Three years later, John Paston died of the plague.

The Pastons had got over all these bumps in the road to become a settled presence in their county.

The same would be true for countless other English men and women.

Essentially they were survivors.

They'd survived the plague, they'd survived dethronement, they'd survived civil war.

Kings came and went, but the men of the village, the same sort of men who'd marched on London in 1381,

who'd been revolutionaries and desperados, were becoming squires.

They knew what the worst could be. They knew that the plague could come and carry off babies and children.

They knew that the knights from over the hill might go on a rampage,

but they also knew that with an equal measure of prudence and prayer, they would get through it.

So come to an English village like this, far from the mayhem, say around 1480,

and you'd see what you'd expect.

A church built in the economic elegance of the perpendicular style.

A village ale house with a name like The Swan or The Frog.

And at the heart, a grand and handsome dwelling for the biggest tenant farmer in the area.

Not a wattle and daub single-roomed glorified hut,

but a miniature manor with its own hall and servants to wait on the master and mistress.

A buttery, a cellar and private retiring chambers.

One shouldn't be too complacent about the condition of Britain at the end of its first century of plague.

The end of the road through trauma was not all buttercups and beer,

there was still grinding poverty alongside plenty.

But all the same, the improbable HAD happened.

Out of the fires of pestilence and bloodshed had emerged that most unlikely example of survivor,

the English country gent.

There's much more to discover and debate about the history of Britain on the BBC History website.