17

1350

Women enjoyed unprecedented opportunities for employment in the times of acute labor scarcity that characterized the years after the Black Death. The king and his council recognized that female labor had a crucial role to play if the gap between supply and demand was to be closed, when they required able-bodied women as well as men to work when asked to do so. An abundance of eager employers not only meant higher wages for women, but a far greater choice of occupations than ever before, including work as assistants to skilled artisans. Records of prosecutions of offenders against the Ordinance and Statutes of Laborers show the existence of gangs of workers which included women as well as men, and also lone women “who move from place to place” demanding excessive wages for their work.

It usually made better sense for farmers to pay high wages than to have essential jobs not done, and employers of all ranks competed fiercely with each other for the few available workers, commonly offering free food, clothes, and bonuses in cash and kind to attract and retain them. The east of England was an early target for the commissions set up to enforce the Ordinance of Laborers. In February 1350 justices of the peace were sent into the counties of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, which bordered Suffolk to the west and the north, and into Essex, to the south, soon afterward. Suffolk was the subject of commissions issued in November 1350 and March 1351, headed by Sir John de Aspale. The preamble to the first Suffolk commission states that it was issued in consequence of complaints of the nonobservance of the ordinance that reached the king’s council, and that special justices were appointed to punish all offenders. Visits by the justices caused great alarm and resentment.

In normal years pressure on farmers was always greatest at harvest time, when they had a limited period to get their crops reaped and safely stored before they deteriorated, and naturally workers were quick to seize any opportunity to maximize their earnings. Therefore, it is not surprising that in the general turbulence of 1350 conditions at harvest time were especially chaotic. Statistics from demesne farms across the country show that the 1350 harvest, with yields of wheat and barley little more than 70 percent of normal, and oats around 60 percent, was not much better than the disastrously poor harvest of the previous year. As a consequence prices began to rise in the ensuing months.

Viewed from a distance of time, the long-term changes that took place in the later Middle Ages assume a clarity and inevitability that must have appeared anything but clear or fated to those who lived through the early years after the Black Death. Here we are dealing with the first weeks and months, when the shock of the massive mortality gave rise to an abundance of confusion and doubt, and nowhere was this more in evidence than in religious and spiritual life. To the survivors of the mid-fourteenth century, the pestilence was undoubtedly the work of God. But what sort of God would have wreaked such cruel devastation, and why? The faith of many of the clergy must have been severely tested, along with that of the laity. A new and urgent hunger for moral and spiritual guidance was exhibited by the laity, which they sought not only from their priests but from a growing corpus of spiritual literature. The works of Richard Rolle, who died of plague in 1349, were especially popular. But few clergy were equipped, either theologically or temperamentally, to provide all that the laity demanded. Moreover, many pious folk were insufficiently learned and had a tendency to take teachings out of context or apply them too literally.

The pestilence multiplied the workload of parish priests by taking away, through death or promotion, most of the formerly prolific freelance and assistant clergy. Even experienced parish priests might be enticed into performing the light duties of chantry priests retained to sing Masses for the souls of the departed in private chapels, selling their services to parish guilds or acting as confessors and spiritual guides in rich households. Moreover, many of the more conscientious and rigorous clergy who continued to toil in their parishes found themselves seriously out of joint with the times and the formidable and often conflicting challenges they threw up. These could range from seemingly audacious demands of the pious to be taught ever more of the mysteries of the relationship between man and God, to the dangerous impiety of those who, by striving to take advantage of a world turned upside down, were subverting the divine order and threatening divine retribution.

Although Lady Rose possessed other manors and properties, she relied heavily on the profits from her Walsham farm to maintain her household, and was shocked to hear of the late and shoddy plowing. When, soon after Christmas, further reports about the poor state of the manor were brought by her treasurer, who had just returned from a visit to collect some of the cash Geoffrey Rath had accumulated from the sales of farm produce, she dispatched Blakey and her son, Henry, back to Walsham in haste. Rath had little warning of their arrival and was dismayed to learn that there was scarcely anyone working on the farm when they visited it. The next day, when he and the hayward accompanied Sir Henry and Blakey on a tour, the visitors discovered that little muck had been spread on the fields, and they had been poorly plowed and sown. Many hedges and fences were broken, ditches were blocked, the roof of the barn was leaking badly, and the dairy was in disorder. The pessimism of the lady’s emissaries was confirmed in the afternoon when they inspected the demesne livestock and found them in very poor condition, with many animals showing clear signs of malnutrition, disease, and neglect.

Geoffrey attempted to assure Sir Henry and Blakey that everything possible was being done to rectify the faults and headway was being made, but they curtly brushed aside his excuses. Geoffrey then started to blame the sorry state of the livestock on the shortage of staff, and the scab the sheep were suffering from on the wet weather. He bemoaned the lack of experience of those few shepherds and herdsmen he had managed to get to replace the trusty servants who had died in the pestilence, but Sir Henry was in no mood to listen. His mother was facing hardship because of reduced revenues from all her estates, and Walsham was performing particularly badly. Yet again, Lady Rose had been forced to postpone her hopes for a substantial improvement in her income until the next harvest, and although it was eight months away, from what Sir Henry had already seen this was unlikely to happen. No longer could he tolerate his mother’s rights being trampled by incompetent and malicious rustics. What annoyed him most of all was the behavior of the reeve and his cronies. Geoffrey had dressed in his finest outfit in order to impress Sir Henry but had angered him instead.

“No wonder the manor is being so badly run,” Sir Henry ranted to John Blakey. “This mere base reeve looks more like a knight than a knave. He is more concerned about the state of his dress than the state of the farm! Where did he get the money to buy such luxuries? They offend against all order and decency.”

Blakey did not answer but tried to placate his lady’s son by saying that things were bound to get back to normal soon, and in the meantime they would have to be patient.

So outraged was Sir Henry by the demeanor of Geoffrey Rath that he began asking around Walsham what the villagers thought of their reeve (see figure 40). He soon learned, from those who bore grudges, that Rath had committed as many offenses against the poor rustics as he had against Lady Rose. So Geoffrey found himself subjected to interrogation. Ignoring the evidence that the reeve had taken a succession of small bribes, for he knew these were commonplace on every manor, Sir Henry concentrated on charges that Rath had repeatedly kept his fine new horse in the stables of the manor house, where it had consumed large quantities of Lady Rose’s oats, and that he had routinely claimed far too much for the wages of the laborers he hired and recorded far too little from the receipts of grain, livestock, and other produce he had sold. Geoffrey readily admitted stabling his horse at the manor house but claimed he had done so rarely, and then only when the urgency of business on his lady’s behalf made it necessary—to stop thefts of corn from her barns, for example. He strenuously denied false accounting or cheating his lady of money, and asserted that the accusations were invented by troublemakers he had refused to hire at excessive wages or to sell grain to at low prices. He went to his cottage and came back bearing tally sticks on which he had marked every major transaction since he had become reeve six months earlier. But Sir Henry waved them aside, saying that they could be false as well.

It was especially worrying for Sir Henry that the reeve and hayward appeared to be far too close to the rustics. In fact, Henry gained the distinct impression that the two of them often connived with the villagers against his mother. As Blakey had foretold, every attempt Henry made to persuade Geoffrey to take a tough line with the tenants was met with cunning counterarguments about the advisability of trying to win them over by offering compromises, and warnings that excessive severity would force them to abandon their holdings. Finally Sir Henry could stand it no longer and instructed John Blakey to summon Geoffrey Rath and tell him that he was going to be brought before the upcoming February court and fined heavily for his manifold defaults. Much as Blakey had predicted, Geoffrey responded to this by threatening to leave his post, and he stormed out abusing both Blakey and Sir Henry.

In the following days tempers cooled and a compromise was reached: the charges against Geoffrey would be dropped if he swore to amend his behavior. Geoffrey had a keen sense of his own value to Lady Rose. He was convinced that if he left she would not be able to get anyone nearly as competent or more honest to replace him. Certainly she would not find the qualities she wished in the second choice reeve, John Nobel. Thus he decided not to reform his behavior but simply to take greater care to cover his tracks.

During the new year Agnes Chapman attended Mass meticulously and was never absent when prayers were said for the souls of those who had recently died. On these occasions, which were very frequent, her thoughts were plagued with fears for the plight of her husband, John, who had not been fully confessed when he departed the world, and for her three dead brothers, who had shared a similar fate. As John’s life slipped away before her eyes, Agnes had not been able to rouse him from his ramblings and had stupidly failed to remember the correct words of the Placebo, so condemning him, she believed, to suffer torments in Purgatory that would be prolonged far beyond his just deserts. Even worse, she kept recalling the harsh words of the traveling friar who had recently visited Walsham to impart a warning that another plague would surely come soon to punish them for their continuing sinfulness. For him, the majority of the victims of the late plague were now in Hell because they had died unshriven. And he pronounced to his terrified audience: “In Hell a man shall weep more than all the water in the earth—alms, Masses, and prayers shall not avail him. Heaven is for those who serve God, and those who died in the plague did not serve God” (see figure 41). Master John had driven the friar from the parish and poured scorn on his erroneous views, but doubts remained in some minds.

As Agnes stood in the crowded church and listened to the priest bid them “pray for all the souls that abide in the mercy of God in the pains of Purgatory,” she fervently beseeched St. Katherine, her favorite saint, to ensure that the prayers were heeded by God and benefited the soul of her dead husband. But doubts often crowded into her mind. She knew that souls in Purgatory could not pray for themselves and depended on the prayers of the living, but she feared that collective prayers might not achieve much. For it was commonly accepted by both the clergy and the laity, that the benefits bestowed on individual souls were diluted in proportion to the numbers of dead for whom the prayers were said. And, of course, it was John’s further misfortune that the numbers of recent dead were far too many to be counted. At the same time, Agnes was comforted by the words of Master John, who frequently reminded his flock that no prayers were more powerful than those recited by the clergy and echoed by the congregation during a Mass in St. Mary’s church. Nonetheless, whenever she could afford it, Agnes would purchase a candle and place it before the newly painted statue of the Virgin to the left of the altar. Agnes, too, prayed many times each day before the little shrine to St. Katherine, which she had made near the window in her cottage, and before she ate she always said the De Profundis, or as much of it as she could remember, just as she had been urged to do by an old lady who used to work as a servant at Ixworth priory, who assured her that reciting it before eating would feed her dead husband’s soul and enable it to suffer the pains of Purgatory with more patience.

Only a few months ago, on the eve of the pestilence, Agnes had a husband, four brothers, and a daughter. Now she was left with only her daughter, having recently learned that her brother Henry, who had left the village more than two years before, was also dead. Agnes was forever indebted to John Wodebite for his caring guardianship of her precious daughter through the darkest days of the pestilence and, fittingly, the Wodebites had been favored by God and fate and touched but lightly by the pestilence. Among his close family John Wodebite had lost only his sister-in-law Margery. It was because of her deep gratitude that Agnes continued working for John one or two days a week, cooking and cleaning in his house and looking after his pigs and poultry, although he paid her only a halfpenny more than he had paid before the pestilence, which was much less than she could have earned elsewhere.

Like all the widows and single women in Walsham, Agnes thought about remarrying or cohabiting. Although she would have liked more assistance on her smallholding, she had not received any offers that were attractive enough for her to give up her independence. Her heart had pounded when John Wodebite’s wife died suddenly from a seizure a few weeks after the pestilence had departed, but her hopes were crushed when he quickly took up with a young woman and married her just a few weeks later. Agnes remained devoted to the family, but she was not sorry when John failed to invite her to his wedding party. She was delighted soon afterward, however, to be a guest at the grand feast that celebrated the marriage of his daughter, also called Agnes, to Edmund Lene in November. John Wodebite considered it a splendid match because Edmund was one of the richest villagers in Walsham. But Agnes was a little sad, for although Edmund showered gifts on his bride, he was at least twenty years older than the young woman.

Agnes’s friendship with her sister-in-law blossomed as Alice’s pregnancy advanced. However, Alice, unlike Agnes, felt driven to replace her dead husband, and soon after the birth of her son she took up with John Packard, whose wife had died in the plague. Alice had been left to run a large farm, and although Agnes appreciated that it was difficult for her to cope alone, she did not like Packard and was suspicious of his motives. Packard was a substantial landholder in his own right, but he had a reputation for greed and deceit. Agnes could not help feeling that he was courting Alice and was willing to take on the burdens of raising her child in order to get his hands on her land. But perhaps it was the long-standing enmity between the Packards and the Wodebites, which had its origins in a bloody assault ten years earlier by Packard’s wife on John Wodebite’s mother in a row about an unpaid debt, that most swayed Agnes against him. Despite her opposition, Alice married John Packard in May 1350.

It was in late July 1350 that Agnes first became interested in joining the gang of wayfaring workers that William Warde was recruiting in the village. Because of commitments to her smallholding, her child, and John Wodebite, she had so far not been able to profit much from the high wages on offer in Walsham, and she was determined to take better advantage of the approaching harvest season. Harvests had always offered good wages and lots of ale and food for those who gathered in the crops, even when the village was heavily populated with willing hands. Now, with workers so scarce, there were prospects of extraordinarily high wages, even for menial tasks such as gathering and binding the stalks after reaping. But rumors were rife in Walsham that Lady Rose and Sir Edmund and Margery de Welles had entered into a compact with each other to hold wages down and coerce other farmers into doing the same. What is more, it was said that they were threatening to bring in the king’s justices to prosecute anyone who refused to work at the wages they offered.

William Warde was well-known among the village elite as an agitator. Even before the pestilence, he was often to be found instructing workmen on their rights and how to gain the best wages and conditions, and now he had a much larger and more sympathetic audience as he encouraged villagers to join with him and leave Walsham at harvest time to find better pay in the villages around. Employers and their foremen, worried by the influence he was now exerting, tried to pour scorn on Warde’s notions, pointing out that he was a person of no substance, a failure who had twice been forced to dispose of what little land he possessed in order to pay his debts. But they failed to stop him winning the confidence of many of the common people. For Warde was not just a talker, he was a doer. He was renowned for organizing the strike of harvest workers on Lady Rose’s demesne farm two years before, and he had been one of the first to demand greatly increased wages in Walsham during the pestilence; when he was refused he quickly found well-rewarded work down the road in Ixworth.

Now that Lady Rose’s steward, John Blakey, was trying to lower expectations by swearing to hire workers for the forthcoming harvest only at the old rates and was cajoling Sir Edmund and other large farmers to do the same, Warde found no shortage of potential recruits to his gang. People were extremely angry that they were being persecuted in their own village, and Warde offered a solution: join him and leave to seek work elsewhere. However, the reeve of Sir Edmund and Margery de Welles had already spoken in confidence with Warde and offered attractive terms for the supply of ten workers, so he intended to harvest their crops first, as long as they lived up to their promise to pay good wages. Then he planned to lead his band of workers out of Walsham into neighboring villages seeking the highest rates of pay they could get. Warde was convinced from all he had heard that they would be welcomed everywhere by farmers anxious to get their crops in at the optimum time, and willing to pay handsomely for it. Warde also knew that as gang master he could negotiate fat bonus payments for himself.

At Hilary Typtoft’s urging, Agnes Chapman finally spoke to William Warde in Robert Rampoyle’s alehouse. She was thrilled by his warm greeting and his cheery optimism. He told Agnes that she would be very welcome and assured her that he would have no difficulty finding her as much work as she wanted, and at 2d per day rather than the 1d per day she would be lucky to get in Walsham. Nor would it be a problem if she brought her young daughter along with her. When Agnes questioned whether farmers would hire women to do work normally done by men, Warde laughed and said that at harvest time they would take anyone who was available—even young children and the old and decrepit. “In a couple of weeks farmers everywhere will be desperate to bring the harvest in. They will have to pay us what we want or they will see their crops rot in the fields. Isn’t it better to pay us a few extra shillings than lose wheat, barley, and oats worth a few pounds?” Then Warde raised his voice to address the whole tavern: “The rich here are threatening to deny us our deserts, but in all the villages around there are farmers who will welcome us as the answer to their prayers. You can rely on me to get you the very best deal for reaping each field, and not just in coin. I will see to it that you’ll eat as well as you have ever done, and for free. There’ll be no cold, stale vegetables or barley bread for us, nor no penny ale. But hot meals, with slices of meat hanging over the sides of the platter, wheat bread and tuppeny ale to wash it down with.”

When Agnes looked incredulous, Warde shrugged his shoulders. “If they won’t pay, then we’ll just move on to the next farm. They’ll soon learn their lesson, you believe me.”

At that point two young men joined them, asking Warde how much they would be paid if they joined him. Warde said he would pay them according to the amount of work they did, which would never be less than 3d a day, with food on top. “Obviously if you reap less or bind fewer sheaves than the others, then you’ll get less money. But if you do more, you’ll get paid more.”

The men then looked at Agnes, and Warde told them that, as women generally took longer to do the same amount of work as men, they would get paid less. But so would old men, lazy men, or young boys. That was only fair. Naturally, if Agnes took time off to look after her child, she would lose money, but if she worked extra hard afterward she could make it up.

As Agnes shook hands on the deal, Warde told her and the two men that he had work waiting for anyone who joined him on three farms within fifteen miles of Walsham. Anticipating Agnes’s next question, he assured her that there was no pestilence to be found anywhere in the region.

A couple of days later, Agnes went to tell Hilary Typtoft that she would be joining her in William Warde’s band of traveling harvest laborers. But, to her surprise, Hilary replied that she would not be going with them after all as she had found something better to do. Agnes’s surprise turned to amazement when Hilary, who had spent all her life working as a domestic servant for little more than board and lodging, announced that she had just started working as an assistant to a local thatcher, and that she was receiving regular work at 1.5d a day and a free dinner with ale. According to Hilary, there was so much work to do and so few people to do it, that many women were being taken on by tilers, carpenters, plasterers, plumbers, and suchlike. In fact, Hilary had heard that in nearby Bradfield a woman and her daughter had taken over the running of the blacksmith’s workshop after the death of her husband in the pestilence.

Later the next week, just as the harvest was ripening, at Lady Rose’s suggestion John Blakey spread a rumor that the king’s justices were on their way from nearby Cambridgeshire to Walsham to force the lazy to work and fine or imprison anyone who had taken excessive wages. The intention was to break the resistance of rebellious laborers, but the effect was to encourage them to flee. William Warde hastily got his gang of laborers together and they left Walsham. Soon they were earning very good money in the villages round about, and Agnes had all the work she could wish for, and more money in her purse than she had ever dreamed of.

The succession of male deaths in the wealthy Cranmer family had left Olivia and her sister Hilary, both widows in their thirties, in possession of very substantial lands, mostly around Cranmer Green and High Hall manor, for which they paid only modest rents. Naturally they faced the same problems of the scarcity and high cost of servants and day laborers as all large farmers, but they fared better than most because they were especially good and innovative managers, and had many insights into how to run their affairs to the best advantage. Olivia, in particular, enjoyed a reputation as an astute trader who could predict how prices would move, and in the 1340s she had speculated successfully in the corn market by buying cheaply and selling dear.

Immediately on gaining their inheritance, the sisters began to work together as partners and manage all their lands and assets jointly. Then they decided to specialize in animal husbandry. This was to prove a masterly policy that would bring them even greater wealth. Along with the other farmers of Walsham and Suffolk, the sisters had been depressed by the poor prospects for their neglected and rain-sodden harvest, and the cost and trouble of finding enough laborers to help them cultivate their lands. But instead of lamenting their predicament, they decided to improve it. This they did by drastically cutting back on crop cultivation and expanding their herds and flocks. As Olivia explained to Hilary, growing corn and legumes took far more labor than looking after livestock. In the course of a year every acre of arable might require ten or more likely fifteen days’ work: plowing, sowing, harrowing, weeding, muck spreading, reaping, binding, and so on. Where would they find the workers they would need, and how could they afford to pay them when the price of corn was so low and the yields so pitiful? But even large herds of cattle and flocks of sheep could be managed with relatively few hands, and there was plenty of cheap pasture available in Walsham. What is more, the yields of wool, butter, cheese, milk, meat, and leather were far more reliable than those of wheat, barley, and oats, and the prices better too. As Olivia and Hilary were quick to appreciate, livestock could be bought very cheaply in the months after the pestilence, especially from the reeves of Lady Rose and Edmund and Margery de Welles. So, with money in their pockets from their father’s chest, they set about buying good livestock on a grand scale for bargain prices, which they pastured on rented plots as well as their own lands (see figure 42).

The Cranmer sisters’ strategy soon began to pay off. For the appetite for milk, butter, cheese, and meat rose strongly as the villagers of Walsham eagerly spent a large part of their increased income on better and more varied food. Thus Olivia and Hilary prospered and did not find it at all difficult paying the frequent fines imposed on them when their animals strayed into neighboring fields and damaged crops. They even managed to deliver promptly seven bushels of barley to the barn of Edmund and Margery de Welles, in compensation for the destruction caused when no less than sixteen of their cows and bullocks broke through the fences onto the field called Abovethewood. Though on this occasion the sisters did sack the boy who should have been looking after their herd.

In 1338 Olivia had married Robert Hawys, a union forced on her after she had been fined and shamed in both the manor court and the church court for giving birth to an illegitimate child in the previous year. The marriage had not been happy but had been mercifully short, and Olivia had no intention of marrying again. She enjoyed her independence, and the last thing she wanted was for a new husband to take control of her money and property, as the law of the manor and of England decreed. Hilary, however, thought differently, and she went with a number of suitors before settling on John Margery, a free tenant of independent means whom she married in late 1350. By this time the success of their business ventures had made the Cranmer sisters famous in the village, and it did not take long for Lady Rose’s son Henry to hear of the match. Well aware that Hilary was of unfree status, and therefore by custom liable to pay a fine to the lady of the manor for marrying, he charged her the unprecedented sum of 13s 4d in the November court. Hilary made it clear to her new husband that she would continue her joint ventures in sheep farming and cattle rearing with Olivia, and John Margery, conscious of the pleasing income they produced, was happy to go along with his wife’s wishes.

Although Olivia was the main driving force behind the joint ventures, the close collaboration with her sister proved very helpful to her on occasion, not least when her mind began to turn toward making a pilgrimage to Rome. Olivia had been a founding member of the fraternity of Corpus Christi, and with her growing wealth and intensifying devotion, as well as the demise of so many of her fellows, she had risen to a position of prominence in that guild. When, after a private Mass, the priest told the assembly that Pope Clement, with remarkable foresight, had some seven years previously declared this year to be a Roman Jubilee, Olivia set her heart on making a pilgrimage to the holy city. The priest added to the excitement by predicting that many thousands of pilgrims would be traveling from all parts of Christendom to the basilica of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul and St. John in the holy city, there to give thanks to God for their deliverance from death. Her resolve was further strengthened when the priest went on to say that the pope had also announced that everyone who made the journey to Rome at any time during the whole of the year 1350 would be rewarded with a plenary indulgence, as long as they were fully confessed and truly penitent. The priest was unable to explain quite what a plenary indulgence meant, but Master John said that each pilgrim would receive the full divine remission of the penance due on all the sins they had committed in their life. The pope, Master John said, was able to do this because he held the keys to a vast treasury, in which was stored the merit accumulated by Christ, the Virgin Mary, and all the saints, martyrs, and other exceptionally good folk during their lifetime that was in excess of the quantity needed for their own salvation.

Olivia was exhilarated by the prospect of gaining her plenary indulgence. For, although God had shown favor to her by sparing her during the pestilence, she still felt a great weight of sin pressing on her for her youthful fornication. The other members of the Corpus Christi fraternity were very supportive, since they appreciated that Olivia’s pilgrimage would produce great spiritual benefit for them all. A number of the richer members asked her to try and obtain an indulgence for them in their absence, and she received many donations toward the cost of the journey. Soon Olivia obtained confirmation that the pestilence had not been seen in Rome for many months. In fact, she was reliably told that the dreadful scourge had departed from the city well before it had left Walsham, and the whole region of Italy had been entirely free of the disease for many months. As far as she could gather, the pestilence was now to be found only in the cold northerly regions of the world, whereas the route she had to follow would take her safely to the south.

But there were many other perils and obstacles to be faced on such a journey. The route the pilgrims followed across France and down into Italy had to be very carefully planned, as England and France were at war. So Master John took Olivia to the library of the abbey at Bury, where the old librarian got out the itinerary composed by the chronicler Matthew Paris in the late thirteenth century. He showed her the recommended routes that proceeded southward from either Calais or Boulogne right down to the Alps, and that the mountains were to be crossed using the Mont Cenis pass. Then Olivia had to obtain a special license permitting her to visit the lands of the king’s enemies, which she did from an official of the sheriff of Cambridgeshire when she visited Cambridge. A few weeks later, by a stroke of good fortune that was surely due to divine intervention, she heard that a vessel was soon to sail from Ipswich to Calais, with a small band of pilgrims bound for Rome, so she made her way to the Suffolk port with all haste.

With good reason, Lady Rose continued to fret about the state of Walsham manor. As frequently as they could be spared, she dispatched John Blakey and her son Henry to inspect it. Although there were some encouraging signs of a slow but fitful recovery of interest in a few of the less unattractive pieces of vacant land, buoyed by an upward drift in grain prices, she received no assurance that her Walsham tenants were becoming any more inclined to obey her wishes. What is more, as Henry had warned her many times, this year’s harvest was likely to be even worse than last year’s.

So, when he was summoned for an audience with his mother the day before he left to conduct the midsummer court session with Blakey, Henry expected to receive lengthy instructions on good business practice and efficient farm management. To his surprise, however, his mother told him that she had another task for him to perform while he was in Walsham, which she implored him to treat as an even higher priority than restoring her revenues. She wished to endow a chantry in memory of her dead husband, in which priests would forever sing Masses for his soul and the souls of all departed members of their family. When Henry protested at the exorbitant cost of setting up such a chapel at a time when money was very short and priests very expensive, Rose agreed as a temporary measure to hire only one priest rather than two. And, after further pressure, she accepted for the time being that instead of a costly new building, the chapel could be housed in the small church close to her manor house, in a prominent niche fenced off by wooden rather than stone screen work. To humor the clearly disgruntled Henry further, she told him that the priest would also sing Masses for the soul of Henry’s father, Sir Edmund de Pakenham, who had died when he was but an infant in 1331. Henry was scarcely mollified by these concessions, as he could see his inheritance draining away. But his mother would budge no further, adding that the priest they chose would soon have to sing for her soul as well, as she was bound to die before long. And, she insisted, if they were going to have to make do with only one priest, that priest had to be Master John, one of the most holy clerics she had ever encountered, whose prayers would carry far more weight with God than those of greedy and ill-educated young upstarts or tired and lazy old priests in retreat from their parishes.

Lady Rose was delighted when Henry enthusiastically agreed that Master John should be their chantry priest. But he had had reasons other than piety for favoring Walsham’s vicar. He knew that Master John could be hired very cheaply, since he was an otherworldly man who had little interest in money. Hiring this ascetic and making a small chapel in the local church were excellent ways of keeping the costs of this extravagant venture down.

Unfortunately for Lady Rose and her son, Master John would not consider for a moment giving up his cure of souls to sing masses for sweet silver. So, after a series of fruitless attempts to persuade him, Henry hired Master John’s new assistant as chantry priest instead. This assistant was a promising but very young cleric, who had arrived in Walsham a few weeks before, fresh from Norwich, having been ordained by the bishop at the unprecedented age of twenty-two years. When he first reported he handed a letter to Master John from the bishop, in which it was explained that, because of the great scarcity of priests and the urgency of filling the multitude of vacant posts at all levels in the church, occasioned by the recent disastrous pestilence, the minimum age of ordination had been reduced below twenty-five years for the most promising young deacons. But the bishop had done this only on the understanding that such young men would be entrusted into the care of experienced clergy, and he finished the letter by saying that he deemed Master John worthy to supervise his further training.

Before the pestilence Master John would have railed against such a lowering of standards, which would inevitably follow from the ordination of the young and immature. But now he recognized that vacancies had to be filled for the sake of his parishioners, and that it was better to appoint good young men than to ordain older men who were illiterate or ignorant, or recently widowed and lacking a sense of vocation. However, no sooner had Master John reconciled himself to accepting the new young priest, than he heard that the bishop of Norwich was contemplating seeking papal dispensation for ordaining clerks as young as twenty years, since so many of his parishes were without priests. Master John let his opposition be known, but his protests were to no avail, and in October 1350, with the permission of the pope, the bishop ordained no less than sixty clerks who had barely reached this tender age. However, Master John was delighted to learn that the bishop was founding a school for the education and training of young boys for the priesthood, and also a college in Cambridge to secure a supply of educated priests for his diocese. It was also encouraging that in the same city the Guild of St. Mary and the Guild of Corpus Christi were contemplating joining together to found another new college, and endow it with sufficient property and possessions to fulfill in perpetuity the dual purposes of singing Masses for the souls of its benefactors and educating young men for a career in the Church.

The desertion of his recent recruit to Lady Rose’s family chantry chapel hit Master John exceptionally hard, and his morale plunged further when another chaplain, John Kebbil, sublet the lands in Walsham that he had inherited from his father and accepted a benefice in a nearby parish. But the causes of John’s depression extended far beyond his acute need for assistance in carrying out all the essential tasks in the parish. The state of the world, and his inability to correct the behavior of his flock or fathom the purpose behind God’s actions, had cast him into deep despair. Though he knew of a couple of priests in parishes near Cambridge who spoke warmly of the stream of instruction they received from the bishop of Ely, John was a fiercely independent man by nature, and he had little time for the spiritual guidance offered to him by officials of the bishop of Norwich, and he resisted the intermittent interference of the prior of Ixworth and the handful of monks who remained alive in his small monastery.

Much as he strove to restore order to the religious life of the parish and get things great and small back to where they had been, Master John found himself constantly buffeted by new concerns and new fashions. New fashions could take many forms, in worship as well as in clothing and morals, and one of the latest modes was for the celebration of a Mass created by the pope while the pestilence raged in Avignon, which had come to be called Missa pro Mortalitate Evitanda. Through its appeals for mercy to “pie Jesu” and the Mother of Mercy, it was believed that this Mass had helped to bring the pestilence to an end in that city. Now an influential group of pious but simple parishioners began demanding that it be regularly celebrated in St. Mary’s. As word spread that the Mass gave 260 days of indulgence to all who heard it while truly contrite and confessed, and a guarantee that those who heard it on five consecutive days, while kneeling with a burning candle in their hands, would not suffer a sudden death, the pressure on Master John to agree became intense. But he resisted the calls. Not only was he was deeply skeptical of claims that this Mass would grant such rich privileges, he had difficulty tracking down a reliable copy of the liturgy.

While Master John hesitated, however, the eager young priest retained by the fraternity of Corpus Christi celebrated a corrupt version for his employers almost as often as they desired. This inexperienced hireling, as Master John termed him, repeatedly assured his eager audience that the indulgence and freedom from sudden death they craved “is certain and was proved in Avignon and neighboring regions,” before he launched into his recitation of the office: “Remember, O Lord, your covenant, and say to the scourging angel, ‘Now hold your hand,’ so that the earth is not laid waste and you do not lose every living soul.”

Another discomfort for Master John was that he was called regularly to High Hall manor house to attend to the spiritual needs of Margery de Welles. Since the pestilence Margery had spent much of her time reading pious works, and of late she had become anxious to discuss many things contained in a book she had acquired from the estate of a dead relative, written by a hermit called Richard Rolle. It was called The Form of Living, and it was in English, for Margery knew no Latin. She found the author’s “song of love” most affecting, and devoutly following Richard Rolle’s advice to keep it in remembrance, she had taken to reciting it at mealtimes, as well as on many other occasions during each day:

Loved be thou, king, 

and thanked be thou, king, 

and blessed be thou, king, 

Jhesu, all my joying, 

Of all thy gifts good, 

that for me spilt thy blood, 

and died on the rood, 

thou give me grace to sing, 

the song of thy loving.

Memorizing and reciting prayers was the easy part for Margery, but when reading other passages in the book she became overly excited and deeply troubled. As Master John patiently explained, Rolle was a renowned hermit who had devoted his whole life to meditation and trying to attain perfection in a contemplative life, far removed from the everyday world. His book was not a manual to be followed to the letter by someone like Margery, who had a busy household to run. It should be read for insights into an ideal life, which was for someone like her to admire rather than to attain. Master John encouraged Margery to concentrate on the closing pages of the book, which contained excellent guidance for those who led an active life, by keeping the commandments and loving one’s neighbor as oneself. After a long series of visits to her chamber and many hours of teaching, Master John felt satisfied that he had at last settled Margery’s troubled mind.

Yet within a few days he received an urgent summons from High Hall and arrived to find Margery in a euphoric state. She beckoned him into her chamber, where she sat by the window and pointed excitedly with her finger to a passage in Rolle’s book. There he read the dedication: “Loo, Margaret, I have briefly said the form of living, and how you may come to perfection.” Despite his best efforts, including discovering that the Margaret to whom Rolle had dedicated the book was a nun and a recluse, not a rich widow, Margery saw the similarity between their names as a sign, and for many months afterward she strove for spiritual perfection in everything she did and said, and on a number of occasions she was transported into a state of religious ecstasy. This frustrated and even angered Master John, who blamed such books for confusing the minds of simple folk who should rely only on what they were taught by their priests. In his efforts to cool her ardor, Master John had the support of Margery’s brother Edmund, who was driven to frequent outbursts of profanity by her mystical affectations.

Master John’s dealings with a number of ardently pious individuals and groups within his parish were becoming a daily burden to him rather than a source of delight and fulfillment. He was continually pestered by parishioners who demanded more and more explanation of the will of God, and more and more explication of the word of God, all of which was far beyond what was proper for them to be told, and sometimes far beyond John’s wit to tell. Such folk would not be satisfied unless they were offered frequent sermons and innumerable Masses, including those containing the latest version of any rites they had happened to hear about. They were no longer content to follow the methods of teaching that he had used all his life, such as looking in awe at rituals and learning to recite by heart. Now they had seemingly inexhaustible appetites for explanation and participation. Stimulated by loose sermons given by friars and traveling preachers in the open air, by discussions in parlors with their fellows and unsupervised reading in their homes, they strove in a clumsy fashion to interpret God’s will and the Church’s laws and procedures, which they should have left entirely to clerks learned in these matters.

Master John was also troubled by the growing numbers of folk who believed in omens and magic, and had come to pay greater heed to the evil casting of lots, the superstitions practiced by old women, and the auguries and chattering of birds, than they did to following the right and true faith in which he steadfastly tried to instruct them. But when he chastised them, they replied saying why should they abandon trust in the ancient knowledge and magical powers of old women and men at his bidding, when the Church with all its pomp and authority had failed to avert God’s anger and left them defenseless to face the pestilence.

Everywhere about him John saw sinners in their daily lives refusing to abide by the old ways, since they found the new so alluring. Daily he witnessed acts of selfishness and sinfulness in a world of greed and deceit, and he knew such behavior was bound to bring down the wrath of God again. It was against the commandments of God, as well as those of the king, for lowly laborers of little skill with nothing but their own hands to feed them, and clergy without vocation or learning, to demand wages far in excess of the value of the work they did, but everywhere employers clamored for their services and gave them what they desired. This led to the lowly being puffed up with pride and the ignorant misleading their charges. Master John preached and counseled against greed, but he was powerless to persuade laborers to work in his own fields or clergy to labor in his own parish for the old moderate rates of pay. Nowadays contracts and oaths were held lightly and broken on a whim. Since time out of mind, all tenants in Walsham had paid homage and sworn oaths of fealty to their lord or lady, to be faithful to them and render the services due from the tenements they held. Many had sworn thus just a few months ago when they entered into their inheritances on the death of their kin in the pestilence. Yet now these upstarts were breaking their solemn oaths and withholding, withdrawing, diminishing, and knowingly concealing services and rights due to their lords, and in so doing committing perjury and theft.

Many of the rustics, poor villeins as well as rich freemen, gathered together and made conventicles and illicit pacts, bringing false accusations against each other and against the officials of their lords. Disrespect was spreading like a poison through the village. Not only had tenants refused to serve their lady at harvest, there had been a spate of thefts of Lady Rose’s corn. These thefts had not been carried out by poor hungry folk, desperate for food for themselves and their children, for there were few of those in Walsham now. They had been perpetrated by those who were greedy rather than needy, by people who stole rather than labored. Only a few of the thieves had been identified and fined in the manor court, as John the dairyman and John Ryvel had been. But Master John took care to name and publicly rebuke the miscreants from the pulpit of St. Mary’s.

Master John was tired and growing old. He had not recovered from his extreme physical and mental exertions during the months of the pestilence, and found it an increasing struggle to maintain either his authority over his flock or his unquestioning faith in his God. In early March he was briefly elated when King Edward issued a decree pronouncing that the pestilence was nowhere to be found in England. A few days later, while reciting prayers of thanksgiving in St. Mary’s, Master John took care to calm the elation of the villagers gathered there by warning them of the king’s earlier message that their sinfulness and pride was likely soon to bring down on their heads another and probably even more terrible retribution. Nor did he waver from continuing to impart this message, although few cared to listen and even fewer to heed the old man.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1350 Master John often felt unwell, and on some days he found it difficult to rise from his bed, although he rarely failed to do so by six. Whereas he used to find visiting sick or distant parishioners a welcome chore, he now tired when walking farther than a few steps. What was worse, he had become prone to wonder whether many of these visits were worthwhile. While performing Mass in late September, on the Sunday before the feast of St. Michael the Archangel, Master John collapsed, breathless, with pains in his chest while raising the Host and died just a few minutes later (see figure 43). Mercifully, he was rewarded for his holy life with a good death. He lived long enough to be ably confessed by the two priests who rushed to his side, and he passed away surrounded by members of his devoted flock in the house of the Lord, while clutching the Lord’s body and having drunk his blood. Master John’s soul was protected and speeded to salvation by their prayers, on this day and for many years thereafter (see figure 44).