The Gentry: Stories of the English. Adam Nicolson

      In early May, under the narrow footbridge at Brafferton, a few miles north of York, the river Swale flows over the shallow bed of what was once Brafferton Ford. The water is dirty, a thick, chocolatey brown, its silty fertility drawn from the rich country of the Vale of York through which it has run. A giant fresh-leaved beech tree shades the churchyard of St Peter. Pollarded ashes and grey-green willows stand on the river banks. It doesn’t take much to imagine these broad wet acres in the Middle Ages: the oxen from the plough teams grazing on the spring fallow, the boys with their goads, the open fields with the new wheat up and growing, the crows scattered across the ridge-and-furrow and beside the river the long meadows thick with the first of the summer grass, the corncrakes hidden there and the skylarks above them.

      Here, just at this crossing, deep in the middle of comfortable, unremarkable England, one morning in May 1441, this first story of a gentry family and its own particular catastrophe begins.¹ Sir William Plumpton was thirty-seven years old. He was a strong man, a soldier, knighted in the French wars, energetic, violent and assertive but also canny, a manipulator and deceiver, endlessly weaving webs of connection and influence, knowing how to court the great and suppress the weak, consciously looking to sustain the fortunes of his ancient and dignified name, happy to receive the hatred and contempt of those he had crossed or betrayed, confident that in the turmoil of this chaotic and desperate century he would emerge a winner.

      He was approaching the peak of his powers and had come here this morning, Friday 5 May, with his tenants and followers, the twenty-four men of his own household and many others, perhaps a hundred or more, with the idea of having a fight. His men were armed with bows, swords and pole arms, the semi-agricultural instruments with which a man could slash at an enemy as he would at a hedge.²

      Plumpton had seen chivalry and heroism in action and had heard of it from his father and grandfather. That grandfather, in defence of ancient honour, had rebelled against the usurper Henry IV and been executed, his boiled head displayed for months on York’s Micklegate Bar.³ His father, Sir Robert Plumpton, had been a knight at Agincourt, a retainer of Henry V’s brother, the beautiful and cultivated 25-year-old Duke of Bedford. Robert went to France, with his squire, two valets and eight Yorkshire archers, each paid five shillings a month, horsed, clothed and fed by him on condition that they ‘pay unto him halfe the gude that they win by war’.⁴ Money was never far from these chivalric arrangements. But this Robert was to die in the war, at the mud-drenched siege of Meaux on 8 December 1421, at which an English army, debilitated and made squalid by dysentery, subsided in its flooded trenches outside that city on the banks of the Marne.⁵

      William was eighteen when his father died. Within five years he too had gone to France, as a squire, also with the great Duke of Bedford, and William was knighted there as his father had been. But English fortunes were on the wane. The siege of Meaux had been an early portent of English failure abroad. Joan of Arc soon swept them out of the country and the Plantagenet empire was reduced to the stump of the Pas de Calais. The Hundred Years War ended in English failure, and as it ended the English turned their appetite and genius for violence on themselves. The English civil wars, known since the sixteenth century as the Wars of the Roses, were, at least in part, the behaviour of a military class with no one left to fight.

      The plague had become endemic in England since its first devastating eruptions a century before, and it struck again in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1438 and again in 1439.⁶ Harvests had failed, people were starving, their immune systems weakened. By the spring of 1441, something desperate was in the air. Since 1438 William Plumpton had been steward of the big royal forest of Knaresborough, 4,500 acres, much of it the wild and moory waste stretching up into the Pennines to the west of where Harrogate now stands. This royal appointment made him lord over hundreds of tenants, who were under no obligation to pay tolls levied by other authorities – on bridges, fairs, roads, quays and markets. In 1440, William and 700 of these Knaresborough men had ridden over in a frightening posse ‘arrayed in manner of war, and in ryotous wise assembled’ to the market town at Otley, where the Cardinal Archbishop of York had been trying to enforce the payment of his market dues.⁷

      He was no innocent in this and from the mid-1430s onwards had been aggressively attempting to widen his influence and enlarge his income.⁸ He hired mercenaries from the Scottish border, battle-hardened and well-armed men from the valley of the Tyne and near Hexham on the Northumberland moors, and on Thursday 4 May, decided to send them on a raid out into the Knaresborough country, south-east of Ripon towards York. In the twin villages of Brafferton and Helperby, Plumpton’s men put up a road block to meet them, ‘with stoks, thorns, and otherwise, to thintent that when the said officers, tenants and servants came thither, they should be stopped their and incumbred’.⁹

      The crisis came early on Friday 5 May and moved fast. Before sunrise, ‘on the morne, by the spring of the day’,¹⁰ William and his gang came up the road ‘with all the diligence that they could, makeing a great and horrible shoute upon the said officers, servants, and tenants.’ The archbishop’s men, attempting to get away, made for the ford over the Swale at Brafferton, crossed the river, where the footbridge now is, and rode up past the church into the main street of Brafferton-Helperby.

      Here they met Plumpton’s roadblock. Desperately the Archbishop’s gang looked for ways of escape, some finding ‘a long straite lane’ along the back of the village; others got out ‘by breaking of an hedge into a feild’.¹¹ But Plumpton and his men were not happy with frightening their enemies. They pursued them out of the village on to the dark wet boglands of Helperby Moor, riding after them for more than half a mile, shouting at them, as they had all morning: ‘Sley the Archbishop’s Carles’ – an Old Norse word meaning ‘men’ – and ‘Would God that we had the Archbishop here.’¹² The brutality was unforgiving. The Plumpton mob killed Thomas Hunter, a gentleman, and Thomas Hooper, a yeoman, even after they had given themselves up to their pursuers. They were killing prisoners in cold blood. A man called Christopher Bee, one of the Archbishop’s affinity,

      was maymed, that is to say, smitten in the mouth and so through the mouth into the throat, by the which he hath lost his cheeke bone and three of his fore teeth, and his speech blemished and hurt, that it is not easy to understand what he speaks or saies, and may not use therefore the remnant of his teeth and jawes to th’use of eating, as he might before.¹³

      Others were maimed and left for dead out on the moor.¹⁴ Those not beaten, stabbed and cut by the Plumpton men were robbed and terrorized, their horses, harness, gold and silver all taken from them, gentlemen, yeomen, artisans and labourers alike. Plumpton was left in possession of the field, his war transferred from the wet fields of France to the springtime green of the Vale of York, his status enhanced and his future good.

      When people think of the English gentry, this may not be the picture that comes to mind: the unforgiving assertion of violent authority in a disintegrating world; the application of the habits of war to a legalistic, economic and almost domestic dispute; the gathering of one’s people, ‘the affinity’, as a form of self-promotion; the crude gang identity of

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