September 2005

Parish History Episode 53
Lords of the Marches

Langley was, as we have seen, a very active bishop: active in his own Diocese, Durham, where he saw to the reconstruction and improvement of parts of the cathedral, and to founding a new school for the city; active in the Kingdom, where he served both Henry IV and Henry V as Lord Chancellor; and active abroad, both in international diplomacy and in two
Ecumenical Councils, those of Pisa and of Constance. It might be expected that he would also be active in maintaining the security of England’s Northern frontier, for the Percy family, “the Lions of the North”,
who had, for the past century or so, taken on more and more of the responsibilities for the defence of the North, traditionally vested in the Palatinate Bishopric of Durham, had, it would seem, gone into deep eclipse, in consequence of their participation in unsuccessful rebellion. The Fourth Lord Percy (“Old Percy”) and his son Harry “Hotspur”, had both been killed in battle by the Lancastrian adventurers, Henry IV and V, after allying themselves with Glendower, a Welsh rebel. With the destruction of the Percies, the defence of the Border should have reverted to the Bishops of Durham - and that would have meant Langley becoming distracted from national and international politics, and his surrogate,
Rector Newton of Houghton-le-Spring,taking responsibility for the Border
fortresses.

Hotspur, we may recall (from July 2005's history) had been killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, after which his father had, in 1405, fled to Scotland. But Old Percy had returned to England in 1408, and had been killed by the King’s men in the Battle of Bramham Moor. That, one might have expected, would have been the end of the House of Percy.

However, Old Percy had, during his three years’ exile in Edinburgh, got on well at the Scottish Court. King Robert III had secretly supported him in his bid to regain his position in the North of England, encouraging Scottish knights to join Old Percy in his plans for an invasion of England. A close friendship had also been allowed to develop between the King’s own son, Prince James, and Old Percy’s grandson. This lad, young Henry Percy, became a squire to the young prince, and when, late in the year 1405,
Prince James (aged eleven) was despatched on a boat to France, to learn
something of polite manners and statesmanship at the Court of King
Charles VI (there presumably being none to teach such arts in Scotland) he was accompanied by his squire, Young Percy (aged nine).

Unfortunately the young gentlemen never reached France. Their boat was
attacked by pirates off Flamborough Head, in Yorkshire, and they were held by their captors in the hope of exchanging them for a rich ransom. But the Scottish Crown was poor, and King Henry IV was able to outbid the King of Scotland, and bought both the hostages from the pirates, thus obtaining possession of the heirs to both the Stewart and the Percy power.

The prisoners were, however, well treated, and became particularly close to King Henry’s son, “bluff Prince Hal”, the three youths becoming drinking
companions. When the old king died, in 1413, and Prince Hal became Henry V, he arranged, before departing for France, for Young Percy to be given back his grandfather’s castles and estates, honours and titles. The lad rode North in 1414, took possession of his lands, and also agreed to take responsibility for the defence of the Border. The “Lion of the North” was once again in residence at Alnwick.

Young Percy took his duties seriously, and the cross-Border family feud
between the Houses of Percy and Douglas was soon under way again. The new Earl of Northumberland (as Young Percy had become) appears to have longed to avenge the defeat of his father, Harry Hotspur, at Otterburn, in 1388.

In 1436 the Houses of Percy and Douglas, with thousands of men on each
side, met once again in full-scale battle, in a Cheviot dale called Piper Dene. In this battle, generally known as Chevy Chase, Young Percy was as gloriously defeated by the Douglas as his father had been at Otterburn. These Border feuds had an important influence on local literature. Bards were kept busy, composing triumph songs for the Douglas and laments for the Percy. These ballads came to be sung or recited elsewhere, and the Borders came to have a reputation throughout England and Scotland as a wild and lawless land.

It might however have been expected that, with the crushing of Wales after the defeat of Glendower, the Welsh Marches (of England) would soon come to be an area no different from other Midland shires. But it was from these lands that a rebellion was to erupt which was to prove to be the first attempt to draw England out of her Catholic heritage, and the Roman obedience that she had espoused throughout the Schism, and to nudge her into what traditionalist churchmen would declare to be heresy.

Sir John Oldcastle, Lord of the Manor of Almeley, a Herefordshire village in the Wye valley, some four miles from the Welsh border, a knight who had enriched himself in the recent campaigns in Wales, and who had been several times elected by his fellow borderers as a member of parliament (“a knight of the shires”) was to prove to be the unlikely leader of a
“Protestant” conspiracy against the Crown.

Oldcastle seems to have been influenced by the preaching of William
Swinderby, a Wycliffite “hedge-priest” - or “Lollard”, as they were coming to be nicknamed - who was active along the Welsh borders. Oldcastle seems to have imbibed Swinderby’s anti-establishmentarianism,
together with his heretical views about Transubstantiation and similar matters, and taken these opinions with him to London. There, besides
presumably undertaking his parliamentary duties, he became another
friend to, and another drinking companion of, “bluff Prince Hal”. With a
reputation as a bold Border warrior in the campaigns against Glendower, he found it easy to make friends, and his ideas attracted attention, while Lollardry was given additional publicity by the public burning of several “heretics”.

By 1413, the time of Henry IV’s death, Oldcastle was hoping that the new king would withdraw the laws against heresy, and allow the reform movement to proceed. While Henry V certainly toyed with such ideas for a while, he was more interested in pursuing the chimera of a conquest of France, and certainly did not want to disturb the peace of his own country while he was campaigning abroad. In 1414, while the new King made preparations for an invasion of France, he ordered the arrest of prominent Lollards, including his former friend Oldcastle, who was lodged in the Tower of London, and sentenced to death.

However the prisoner escaped, and then conspired with other Lollards, who assembled in London, and attempted to seize control of the city.

The rebellion was a fiasco, and was quickly suppressed, and Oldcastle and other leaders were executed. But it had been good publicity for the cause of Reform, and continuing arrests of suspects, inquisitions into their beliefs, and burnings of condemned heretics, kept Lollardry within the public eye.

Moreover, men of learning were aware that at this time the Kingdom of Bohemia, on the other side of Europe, was drifting away from its traditional base within Western, Catholic, Christianity. The Council of Constance had well-nigh brought the Schism between Rome and Avignon to an end, but, through the burning of the Czech reformer, Jan Hus, it was bringing about a new schism, whereby the Bohemian Church found itself opposed to all the other Western Churches.

Lollards took heart at the news from the East - just as, centuries later, other
English radicals would be inspired by reports of Bolshevik successes in
Twentieth-Century Russia. But English Lollardry was not the same as Bohemian Hussism.

The Bohemian reformers may have introduced Communion “in Both Kinds” (with the laity partaking of both Bread and Wine, Body and Blood), and may have used the Czech language in the Liturgy and the Bible, and accepted the ministry of married priests, but their Liturgy was still centred on the Eucharist, and on the Real Presence (of the Body and Blood of
Christ) within the Eucharist.

The English reformers became very anti-clerical, denied Transub-stantiation, talked of “the Blasphemy of the Mass”, and ceased, for the most part, to make the Eucharist the centre of their worship.

Lollardry may have been the beginning of a great English tradition of
radical non-conformity, but, while the movement was certainly an inspiration to later Anglicanism, it cannot really be seen as the beginning of a separated Church of England.

Perhaps the spiritual ancestors of modern Anglicans were more to be found, unfortunately, in the ranks of the persecutors, burning Lollard heretics at the stake, than among the “Bible men” who were the victims.

Dick Toy

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