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The weak kingship of England’s Henry VI let slip the curs of
chaos: private local wars that could
bring mayhem and death to one’s door.
In the fifteenth century, England had no standing army, let
alone any standing police force. A strong king could win the allegiance, if not
the affection, of enough powerful nobles throughout the realm to maintain civil
peace and administer justice as it was so often called for. Henry VI’s father,
the hero of Agincourt, had won the hearts of his countrymen in a way that his
decent but incompetent son never could.
Home-grown violence, unchecked by royal authority, became
rampant as private squabbles were settled by force and private greed became the
prime mover of so many men. The Paston Letters, consisting largely of documents
and correspondence between members of the Norwich-based Paston family and their
associates, give us great insight into the troubles of the Wars of the Roses. The
Pastons were landed gentry, although not of the wealthiest sort. Their letters and private papers are now
housed primarily in the British Library and at Oxford’s Bodleian Library.
As early as 1423, with Henry V dead but a year and his royal
son a mere infant, it had become apparent that the new reign would be anything
but peaceful. Greed manifested itself in disputes over property rights and
other issues, with events frequently careening into violence. One document has
the landowning William Paston giving testimony (recounted with modernized
spelling and phraseology in The Pastons:
A Family in the Wars of the Roses, edited by Richard Barber for the Folio
Society 1981) that on the night of December 31st
“certain unknown malefactors, felons and
breakers of the king’s peace, estimated at 80 or more in number, with malice and imagination aforethought, feloniously broke into the dwelling place of
John Grys of Wighton in the shire of Norfolk, and hewed down the gates and
doors of the said place with carpenters’ axes.
They took John Grys, his son, and a serving-man of theirs, and led them to a pair of gallows
a mile from the said dwelling place, in
order to hang them there.
“But because
they had no rope to hand for their felonious purpose, they slew and murdered
the said John Grys, his son, and his man in the most horrible fashion ever
heard of in that country…….”
Horrific acts such as this instilled fear, always a weapon
in itself. Even churches were not always regarded as sacrosanct. Margaret
Paston writes of a property dispute involving the Duke of Norfolk in which his
men
“ransacked the
church and carried off all the goods that were left there, both ours and the
tenants, and left little behind; they stood on the high altar and ransacked the
images……..they shut the parson out of the church until they had finished, and
ransacked everyone’s house in the town five or six times……and what they could
not carry they hacked up in the most spiteful fashion….”
Students of human behavior might not be surprised to learn
that when disputes developed into mayhem, all manner of people at times got in
on the act; mention is made in the Paston documents of one courtier, Thomas
Denys, who had run afoul of an earl over a range of disputes and, according to
editor Barber, “in early July 1461 was back in Norfolk, and was abducted from
his house by a gang led by the parson of Snoring, who murdered him. In troubled
times it was a matter of life and death to win a great lord’s favor.”
In the reign of a strong king, it is less likely that such
felonious acts would have gone unpunished; but the pious and weak Henry VI,
even grown to manhood and assuming royal power in 1437 after 16 years of rule
by a regency council, did not command
the power or respect to prevent such
lawlessness.
As if to lend an insightful touch to the pattern of shifting
local alliances and sporadic disturbances, The Duke of Norfolk had taken
Caister castle from the Pastons but returned it in 1470, when Henry VI was
briefly restored to the throne in the stead of the Yorkist Edward IV. The Duke
of Norfolk evidently didn’t want to run afoul of the people who had managed to
put Henry back on the throne, and that meant putting a gloss over some of his
earlier years’ most rapacious behavior.
Not that he didn’t have plenty of company; more than a few
other nobles had simply taken what they could get, when they could get it.
The wicket gate at Agecroft Hall might be looked upon as a
reminder that life on an English manor, during the worst of times, was not
nearly as bucolic as we might like to imagine. The Paston letters lend much
credence to the argument that the civil unrest collectively known as the Wars
of the Roses involved a wide variety of motivations that cannot be so neatly
attributed to Yorkist or
Lancastrian allegiances. There were times when personal scores to
settle, greed and vindictiveness carried the day.
The Wars of the Roses were ended with the ascension of Henry
Tudor as King Henry VII, who has generally been regarded as a strong king and
an almost excessively thorough administrator of his realm. The English people
must have breathed a collective sigh of relief.
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