Welsh Journals

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY ATTITUDES: PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIETY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. Edited by Rosemary Horrox. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xii 244. £ 30.00. This collection of a dozen essays sets out to explore the attitudes of fifteenth-century Englishmen to central aspects of their lives from government and law through to religion and death. Although it is difficult to discern any general picture from so wide-ranging a collection of themes, few of the essays fail to convey a clear impression of the present state of research and several provide valuable new perspectives. In the first, Gerald Harriss analyses the relationship between the Crown and its subjects. He argues that the fifteenth century may have witnessed a narrowing of the gap between rulers and ruled, a product of an extension of royal authority-which came about despite civil war-and 'the involvement of an increasing sector of society in the processes of government'. Both served to stress the mutual interest of Crown and subjects in stable government and so reduced administrative problems. What did not change, however, were the difficulties inherent in the maintenance of public order. Edward Powell rehearses the arguments for seeing judicial administration as more effective and less corrupt than it is often portrayed, but concedes that the intrinsic weaknesses of the legal system were so great that no attempted rehabilitation can be entirely convincing. With no tradition of public service and an executive without the resources to create a system of peace-keeping that operated independently of vested local interests, the maintenance of order had to depend on the imperfect agency of local landholders. Other essays examine topics less commonly discussed. Peter Murray Jones describes the century as 'an information age', in which demand for written information far exceeded supply. Knowledge about the natural world was valued, not for its own sake, but 'for what it could provide in the way of guidance in practical matters', and hence the century was not marked by any significant scientific advances. None the less, this firm identification of science with its practical application created a market for information which encouraged the development of printing. In similar vein, Michael Bennett shows that the strong demand for education arose largely out of utilitarian and vocational considerations, and yet the century saw important developments. The foundations of the 'educational revolution' of the Tudor period were laid, particularly with the wave of grammar school endowments in its latter part and the expansion of lay literacy. The availability of educational opportunities was both a reflection and a cause of the high level of social fluidity noticed in other essays in the volume. Mark Bailey, in an excellent study, describes the impact of 'one of the most sustained and severe agricultural depressions in documented English history' on rural society. For landlords, a decline in their landed incomes was accompanied by growing peasant resis- tance to their financial exactions. This resistance could not be readily overcome: the peasantry's growing economic strength, a product of the plague-induced demographic crisis, emboldened them to stronger acts of defiance against a landed class whose ability to impose its will had been diminished by the trauma of 1381. Equally significant were developments within peasant society itself, with the emergence of elites of wealthy peas- ants and a weakening of communal solidarity at village level.