The People’s Queen. Vanora Bennett

ambition, call it what you will – the spirit of the age – has been set free by so much death. That’s what people say. Three bouts of plague since Alice was born, and half of Europe dead: only the naive should be surprised if people’s nature changed. Survivors of the Mortality didn’t bother to bless God for their astonishing luck (for, as a lot of people muttered, what did it have to do with God, their escape? When the Bishop of Bath and Wells tried to thank God for the plague’s passing, at the end of 1349, the howling people of Yeovil kept him and his congregation besieged in the church all night long). People who know what’s good for them have, since then, been too busy for God (who at least, as they often say with tough looks, didn’t hate them enough to strike them dead). They’re busy at each other’s throats, squabbling over the spoils. That’s only natural too.

      The Mortality has brought so much change in its wake.

      First, plain bewilderment: the glut of merchandise, not enough customers, prices plunging, and anyone still alive and with money in his pocket unable to believe his good fortune. That was the lesson old Alison and her London men friends learned so fast. Move into empty houses, sleep on strangers’ beds, take over dead men’s work (or don’t bother to work at all). Eat off silver.

      Then marriages: many more marriages, but much less love. People married orphans, and widows, for greed of goods, then quarrelled their lives away.

      Then the fury of litigation, as the courts filled up with inheritance disputes. The notaries were dead. The cases took lifetimes to settle. Meanwhile squatters or the Church took over abandoned property, brigands pillaged the countryside, and fraudsters tricked yet more orphans out of their lands. And all the while, in the background, in the fields (or what had been fields), with the shrinking of land farmed by men, a greening as the forest threatened to come back.

      Briefly there was no heriot, no merchet, and no tallage for the unfree, those walking skeletons with the caved-in cheeks and the smudgy under-eye skin and the bare, scratchy, scarred stick legs. For a year or two, till the panic eased, and it became clearer how much could still be farmed, villeins were allowed to keep their pennies. They didn’t have to pay an annual cash sweetener to the manor. If their father died, they weren’t forced to give the best beast away to the lord and the second best to the priest. For a few precious months, they didn’t even have to pay when a daughter married off the manor, to compensate the lord for the loss of her future brood of children – tomorrow’s human beasts of burden, each with a cash value in muscle weight, in rendered-down sweat.

      It was only later, when the estate managers and the priests and the lords got their nerve again, and went back to demanding their dues from the skinny men-oxen they owned, that they realised there was trouble afoot.

      For today there are too few villeins still alive, and too many empty fields needing hands, and too many tempting offers of work for cash. A reasonably brave, or greedy, man (and what’s the difference, when it comes to it, between bravery and greed?) can choose to live better than his villein forefathers ever did.

      And the men who have escaped out of their ruts talk. On the road, they talk to the other men with tools flocking on to farms and into towns, who’ve turned their backs on their earthly lords. They talk to the poor hedge-priests on the road, thin men with staring eyes and cheap russet robes – men who don’t believe you need the Church of Rome to intercede for you with God, men who tell the crowds they can turn their back on their spiritual lords too, on the chant of the Latin they don’t understand, and the fees they’ve always paid in the belief they’re saving themselves from damnation, and yet not suffer for it in Hell. God’s waiting, they whisper, in every field and cottage, not just in church, and He’s a kindly God, too, not one to fear after all. You can find Him by yourself, if you only look. You don’t need to pay. The talk’s quiet, among the men who don’t fear God or their lords any longer. But the look in every eye is dangerous.

      It was all still all right, as far as the rulers of England were concerned – or just about all right – while the news from the war still warmed people’s hearts, while drunk men could yell ‘St George for Merry England!’ in the taverns, and there was still a dream of glory.

      But now the King’s old. The knights are old. Their banners have faded. Their armour’s rusting. And there have been no victories in France for years – just losses, and ransom demands. So the talk on the roads is getting louder, and the looks in the eyes of men no one wants to look at is getting uglier.

      But Aunty loves it all: the muttering, the mischief, the men no one wants to look at. She’s still taking in waifs and strays, even today, not children any more but furtive men with caps pulled down low on their foreheads to hide whatever burn marks are there. She gets them in to work her fields at her manor at Gaines. She loves that place. She doesn’t act anything like a landlord, of course. She pays whatever they want, no questions asked. She shakes her head over their hard-luck stories. She lets them sleep in the barns they put up. She organises rough feasts for them on holy days. She shares her luck with them, and anyone else willing to have a laugh, and a drink, and a dance, and a chat. They love her for it.

      So does Alice. However grand Alice has become, these past few years, she’s gone on taking her worries to Aunty.

      

      As she goes under the Aldgate, looking up from her horse to see if there’s any sign of life at Chaucer’s window (there isn’t), Alice thinks that it’s been good for her to be reminded by Aunty of how things look for the men on the ground. Because there’s more and more reason for the stinking, resentful runaways – the men of the road – to be angry. Because the people who are doing well, especially the post-Mortality new rich, who are doing well so very suddenly, are more dangerously, visibly extravagant than anyone has ever been before.

      And that’s what Alice’s personal experience of the changes, in the walk of life she’s chosen, has been.

      Clothes, for instance, are lovelier and more expensive than ever before, and on backs ever less noble. In the year Alice first came to court, the envious in Parliament were so anxious that the natural, static, eternal order of things was being upended by the shocking vanity of men in curly-toed shoes and women with a hunger for cloth of gold that the Members of Parliament vainly tried to stop the new rich flaunting themselves. They passed a law insisting that everyone dress according to their rightful station in life.