All language subtitles for A.History.of.Britain.05of15.King.Death.DivX5-AC3.www.MVGroup.org

In the summer of 1348,

the English could be forgiven for
thinking themselves unconquerable.

They had vanquished the old enemies,
the Scots and the French.

Their king, Edward III, seemed
the most powerful ruler in Europe.

But they would be conquered,

and by a king
against whom neither longbows

nor warships offered any defence...

King Death.

His weapon was plague, and by the end
of his terrible campaign,

almost half the people of Britain
would be dead.

The country would survive the trauma,

but first it had to undergo
a purgatory of unimaginable misery,

because hard on the heels
of pestilence

would come rebellion and civil war.

The century of plague
was a pilgrimage through pain,

and this is the story
of that journey.

Yersinia pestis, the germ of plague,

came to Britain
in the guts of infected fleas.

They were hidden away
in cargoes of grain,

bales of cloth
and in the fur of black rats.

The most probable point of entry
was Melcombe Regis, near Weymouth.

By the time it got to the great ports
of Southampton and Bristol,

there were already stories
from traumatised cities of Italy

as to how and where it had begun -

in the East,
on the plains of central Asia,

another of the horrors carried
on the backs of the Mongol hordes.

The plague cut a swathe
of destruction

eastwards to China and India
and westwards into Crimea and Turkey.

At Caffa, the Tartars had thrown
infected bodies over the city walls

to hasten the surrender
of the defending Genoese,

a first in the annals
of biological warfare.

Once it arrived by sea in Italy,
it spread quickly into mainland Europe.

There had been devastating calamities
before visited on Britain -

countless numbers died
in the apocalyptic famine of 1315 -

but it was the merciless, indiscriminate
swiftness of the plague's progress

which so unhinged the cities
and villages caught in its onslaught.

No one, rich or poor, could escape.

This is how Welsh poet
Jeuan Gethin saw it,

waiting for his own infection,
which, sure enough, came in 1349.

We see death coming
into our midst like foul smoke.

A plague which cuts off the young,

a rootless phantom
which has no mercy.

Woe is me
of the shilling in the armpit.

It is of the form of an apple,
like the head of an onion.

Great is its seething,
like a burning cinder.

A grievous thing of ashy colour.

It is an ugly eruption
that comes with unseemly haste.

They are like a shower of peas,
the early ornaments of Black Death.

It took about six days
from the bite of an infected flea

for the tell-tale swellings,
the buboes,

to appear on a victim's neck,
groin or armpit,

accompanied by violent fever
and agonising pain.

The immune system
would be overwhelmed within a week.

If the infection reached the lungs,

death came after just a couple
of days of bloody coughing.

Anyone who inhaled
even the tiniest droplets of mucus

would be doomed
to suffer in their turn.

No one knew it at the time,
but the tightly-packed streets, alleys

and houses of a place like Bristol

made a perfect factory farm
for the bacillus.

Vermin, crawling with fleas,

lived alongside the crowded
population of people and animals.

The nibble of a flea
was a common irritation

in this lousy, ant-heap world.

And even when the buboes appeared,

there was no reason to suppose
that fleas or rats were responsible.

But there was no doubt
about what would happen next.

The youngest,
the oldest and the poorest -

those with least resistance -
would be taken first...

but then everyone else, too.

In a town this ripe for infection,

almost half the population would
have perished in the first year.

Among them,
15 of Bristol's 52 city councillors,

their names struck through
as they died.

Terrified and bewildered, the healthy
abandoned the sick to their fate.

Whole towns, villages, even families,

were cruelly divided
into the living and the dying.

Husbands
would have shunned their wives,

fathers and mothers recoiled
from contact with their children.

It's almost impossible to imagine
the utter desolation and terror,

the complete collapse of everything
you've taken for granted.

How do you find bread
now the bakers are all dead?

How do you find a physic
now that none work?

And, at last, how do you find someone
to cart away the bodies

that have to be
disposed of... somewhere?

The bigger the city,
the greater the shock.

In 1348, London had a population
of close to 100,000.

In the first wave of the plague,
300 died every day.

At Spitalfields,

there had long been a medieval
hospital with a cemetery attached.

Within its walls,
the dead were dutifully laid to rest

in their individual graves,
pointing east,

so that come the Day of Judgement,
they would rise facing Jerusalem.

But in the grip of the epidemic,
there was no time for such pieties.

Recent excavations
have turned up mass pits

where bodies
were pitch-forked into the dirt

in obvious haste and desperation.

Unearthed now
the way they were dumped in,

they look as if they're protesting
at the indignity.

By the summer of 1349,
the plague had spread

to the furthest corners
of England, Wales and Scotland.

Now it travelled
across the sea to Ireland.

According to John Clynn,
a Franciscan friar writing at Kilkenny,

14,000 had perished in Dublin alone.

Since the beginning of the world,

it has been unheard of for so many
people to die in such a short time.

This pestilence was so contagious

that those
who touched the dead or the sick

were immediately infected
themselves.

I, seeing these many ills

and that the whole world
is encompassed by evil,

waiting among the dead
for death to come,

have committed to writing
what I truly have heard and examined,

and I leave parchment
for continuing this work

if, perchance, any man survive,

and any of the race of Adam
escape this pestilence

and carry on the work
which I have begun.

At this point,
another hand has written,

"Here it seems the author died."

When the survivors recovered from
the first brutal shock of the Black Death,

they asked, inevitably,
"Why us? Why now?"

The best guess
was that the plague was caused

by a corruption of the atmosphere -

putrefaction -
the mark of men and beasts

rising from lakes, swamps and chasms.

This dank smog
even had a name - miasma.

If sickness grew in stench, then
sweet smells were an obvious remedy.

Physicians
and herbalists lost no time

in devising recipes
for pomanders and potions

to guard against infection, or even
to act as an antidote for the stricken.

(MAN) Five cups of rue
if it be a man.

If it be a woman, leave out the rue.

Five little blades of columbine.
A great quantity of marigold flowers.

An egg that is newly laid,
and make a hole in one end

and blow out all that is within,
and lay it to the fire

and roast it till ground to powder,
but do not burn it.

And brew all these herbs with good ale,
but do not strain them.

And make the sick drink it
for three evenings and mornings.

If they hold it in their stomach,
they shall have life.

But if God decided otherwise,

all the potions in the world
would be of no avail.

The inescapable conclusion

was that the pestilence
was laid on mankind

as a chastisement
for its manifold sins.

Lewd necklines, lascivious dancing

and shameless adultery
had brought on the plague.

It would end
when the world was contrite,

but it never seemed contrite enough.

In the meantime,
the country was laid waste.

Farms were abandoned,
whole villages deserted.

The accounts
for the Bishop of Winchester's lands

at Farnham in Surrey tell the story
of a rural society in shock.

In the first year of the Black Death,
52 households -

a third of the villagers -
were wiped out,

given the mark
"defectus per pestilentum".

The Farnham rolls
put names to the numbers,

names like Matilda Stikker.

She died,
together with her entire family.

Or a servant girl, Matilda Talvin,

who saw her master and his entire
household succumb to the plague.

By the time it ebbed away in 1350,
1,300 had died in Farnham.

While the plague took,
it could also give.

In the first year of the Black Death,
John Crudchate, a minor,

became an orphan,
but an orphan with assets,

because he could now inherit
the lots left to him

by his father and another relative.

This must have been the making
of a small but serious village fortune.

In another place in the rolls,

we learn that the harvest had become
twice as expensive to gather in.

Twelve pence,
written in Roman numerals, per acre,

because, the rolls say, of the plague
and the scarcity of labour.

Workers, it seems,
were thin on the ground

and were beginning
to charge accordingly.

Farnham's story could be repeated
all through Britain.

The countryside after the Black Death
was an irreversibly altered world.

For one thing,
there were no more serfs.

For centuries,
being a serf meant being tied

by custom and by birth
to your local lord.

He gave you a tiny spot of land
on which you could farm,

and in return,
you put in hours of grinding toil,

unpaid, on his very big farm.

There were other ways, too,
in which you were not free.

You had to ask
his permission to marry,

and you were not, repeat not,
ever to leave...

until, that is, the Black Death.

Now there was
a desperate labour shortage,

and the simple operation
of the laws of supply and demand

meant that for the first time,
you could set the terms of the deal.

He wanted labour out of you,

well, you could say, "Why not start
by paying me something?"

He wants you to move into land
which otherwise would go to rack and ruin,

you respond by saying,
"OK, cut the rent."

And if the lord says, "No chance,
you impertinent so-and-so,"

well, you up sticks and find someone
who's got a more secure grip

on the new economic facts of life.

Well, hundreds of thousands
of peasants must have done just that,

and there was nothing
anybody could do about it.

It was not just the social order
that the plague shook loose.

It also ate away at the sense
of security offered by the Church,

especially since the regular clergy
seemed powerless

to provide help for the afflicted...
or even for themselves.

In 1349,
the Bishop of Bath and Wells,

seeing that there was a serious
shortage of priests,

authorised laymen
to hear the confession of the dying.

"Or," he wrote, "even a woman,
if no man is available."

The most daring took matters
into their own hands,

seeking redemption
directly from the Scriptures.

The Lollards- or Mumblers -

took their name from
their mouthing out loud of the Bible,

and encouraged others to do the same
by translating it into English,

liberating it
from the obscurity of Latin.

As few as they were,
the Lollards were a dramatic threat

to the authority of the Church.

They were only saved from persecution

by the protection
of their most powerful patron,

King Edward III's son John of Gaunt,
the Duke of Lancaster.

Men like him were drawn to new forms
of piety and penance

because the plague
made them acutely aware

that King Death
was no respecter of rank or wealth...

and that should he strike,
they had better be ready for a reckoning.

They all knew the cautionary tale
of the three living and the three dead.

A trio of handsome young kings
out for a decent day's sport

suddenly find themselves confronted
by three not-so-handsome cadavers,

each in a different state
of decomposition -

the Marx Brothers from hell.

The three living pipe up -
"I'm afraid," "Lo, what I see"

and "Methinks these devils be."

Back come the other three -
"Such shall you be,"

"I was well fair"
and "For God's love, beware."

The furthest gone of the gruesome
threesome then makes a little speech.

"Know that I was head of my tribe,
princes, kings and nobles,

"royal and rich, rejoicing in wealth,

"but now I am so hideous and bare
that even the worms disdain me."

This was an invasion that Plantagenet
England had not prepared for -

the invasion of the space
of the living by the dead.

The sense that the borders between
backyards and boneyards had collapsed

produced a sudden nervousness.

In the face of King Death,
neither riches nor earthly fame

could buy salvation
or guarantee immortality.

This insecurity found expression
in a very peculiar kind of tomb -

the transi, which means,
appropriately enough, "gone off".

In transi tombs, like this one
at Canterbury Cathedral,

you got remembered twice over.

They were double-decker affairs.

In the top deck, you were seen
in the guise the world expected,

as a knight in armour
or a bishop in full Episcopal rig.

In the lower deck, though,
there you were, a naked skeleton,

the flesh fallen away from the bone.

The mindset that produced the transi
tomb was a kind of reverse envy;

a determination
to fall behind the Joneses,

to bow to no one
in your painful awareness

that however grand you were,
pretty soon you'd be reduced

to a heap of dust and maggots.

The idea was to contrast,
as shockingly as possible,

two sorts of self-consciousness.

On one hand, how we'd like to be
remembered - in splendour and piety.

And on the other hand,
the way we really are -

pathetic in our cadaverous mortality.

"I was pauper-born,"

reads the inscription
on Archbishop Chichele's tomb,

"then to primate raised.

"Now I am cut down
and served up for worms.

"Behold my grave."

Only the highest office in the land
seemed to have survived unscathed.

Edward III, once the glamorous,
invincible warrior,

was now an ageing father
to a fragile nation.

Still, the royal succession
seemed secure.

Edward's son, the Black Prince,
the heir to the throne,

was already a legendary hero.

But then, against all expectation,
the picture changed.

The Black Prince succumbed
to dysentery in 1376,

and a year later,
the old king himself finally expired.

And so the crown passed to Edward's
grandson, Richard of Bordeaux.

A boy-king, called upon before his time,
Richard was ruler in name only.

Everyone knew that his uncle,
John of Gaunt, worked the levers of power.

Richard's coronation
was orchestrated by John of Gaunt

as a festival of loyalty,

a statement of faith in the undimmed
future of England's glory.

There had been no coronation
for half a century,

but the mix
of solemnity and festivity

never failed to work its spell.

Knights of the shire rode in
from all over England

to witness the spectacle.

The next day in the Abbey,

little Richard had his shirt taken
off him behind a golden screen

and his face, hands
and chest touched with the holy oil.

As they listened to him
in his little boy's voice

promise to protect the Church,
do justice

and respect the laws and customs
of his ancestors,

the assembly of nobles and priests
must have imagined him growing

to fit the huge throne of his ferocious
great great grandfather Edward I.

Inevitably, as the long ceremony
droned on in the darkness,

Richard fell asleep.

As he was carried from the Abbey,
his legs dangling,

one of his oversized slippers
fell off,

but who'd think that an ill omen?

He was, after all, only ten.

How was the child marked by all this?
22 years later,

did he remember this moment
of anointing as a kind of apotheosis,

a magical transformation
from a little man into a little god?

Perhaps it was as well that Richard
mistook himself for a messiah,

since only someone with that kind
of innate self-confidence

could have faced down,
at the tender age of 14,

the most violent upheaval
in the history of medieval England.

It happened with astounding,
terrifying swiftness,

and it started
where you'd least expect it -

not some destitute mud-hole
in the back of beyond,

but in the most economically
developed region of rural England,

the belt of rich, fertile country
stretching from Kent,

over the Medway and Thames,
to Essex and southern East Anglia.

The thing about the Peasants' Revolt

is that the people who started it
weren't really peasants at all.

At any rate, they certainly weren't
the straw-chewing,

pitchfork-waving yokels of legend.

No, they were people with something
to lose - the village elite,

men who'd served as constables
and stewards and jurors,

men who'd moved
into those vacant lots

that had been left behind
by victims of the plague.

They'd made some money and weren't
about to see it go down the drain

to line the pockets
of some pen-pusher in Westminster.

What's more,
they knew how to make an army

out of those one rung down
on the social ladder,

families just above the poverty line,

who had to sell their labour
to make ends meet.

They were already angry
at government attempts

to peg back their steadily rising
wages to pre-plague levels.

The balance had tipped
in favour of the survivors

and they were determined
to keep it that way.

In their different ways,
all these people were -

or thought they were -
up-and-comers.

They would fight, if necessary,
to prevent themselves

from sinking
into the down-and-outers.

Was this a class war, then -

a phrase we're not supposed to use
since the official burial of Marxism?

Yes, it was.

The suspicion in village England was
that the real power behind the throne -

John of Gaunt,
the Queen Mother, the Chancellor -

were gathering in fresh taxes,
not to finance a patriotic war in France,

but to lavish on their own palaces
and private estates.

So when, in November 1380,
parliament approved a new poll tax,

one which for the first time
took no account of individual wealth,

the yeomen farmers
must have imagined the awful prospect

of all their hard-won gains being
snatched back by a greedy government.

There was outrage,
bloody-minded fury and mass evasion,

which quickly escalated
into outright rebellion.

Tax collectors and sheriff's men
were attacked, a few killed.

In Maidstone, they elected Wat Tyler,

a yeoman craftsman,
as their general and captain,

and freed a Lollard anti-cleric
called John Ball,

who'd been imprisoned
in the bishop's palace.

John Ball is a recognisable type,
a preaching friar

who pushes Black Death radicalism
to its logical extreme.

"Get rid of the priesthood
and the property owners," Ball argued,

"and Christ's embrace of the poor
will once again be honoured."

Are we not descended
from the same parents, Adam and Eve?

What reason can they give why they
should be more masters than we?

They are clothed
in velvet and rich ermine,

while we are forced
to wear poor clothing.

They have wines
and fine spices and fine bread,

while we have only rye
and the refuse of the straw,

and when we drink it must be water.

We are called slaves,

and if we do not perform
our services, we're beaten.

Let us go to the king
and remonstrate with him.

We may obtain a favourable answer.

And if not, we must seek
to amend our conditions ourselves.

And so they marched,

the levelling fever of the Black Death
buzzing in their brains,

slogans of equality
and retribution in their mouths.

After all,
who were Wat Tyler, John Ball

and Robert Cave
of the Dartford Baker

but the three dead confronting
the spoiled, rich and mighty

with their day of judgement.

On the morning of the 12th June, 1381,
an enormous army, at least 5,000,

perhaps as many as 10,000 strong,

was camped here
on the fields of Blackheath,

right on the edge of London.

Below them, they could see the city -

old St Paul's, the bridges crowded
with shops and Westminster beyond,

all seemingly at their mercy.

This was not a rabble.
From the outset of the revolt,

its targets had been selected
carefully to make a point -

rich abbeys,
estates belonging to tax collectors.

Any document
bearing the seal of the Exchequer

was marked out for destruction.

Manorial accounts
were thrown on the fire.

They knew what they were doing.

Paradoxically, the rebels remained
fervently loyal to the Crown.

Though
they had made themselves outlaws,

they were fired by the certainty
that their cause was just.

Surely it would be seen
that they were not mobilised

to threaten the king,
but to rescue him,

and through him, themselves.

The discipline of the march, however,

did not survive contact
with the big city.

Prisons were broken open, churches
looted, palaces put to the torch.

Thirty-five Flemish merchants
were decapitated on the same block,

one after the other.

Archbishop of Canterbury
Simon Sudbury was captured

while at his prayers
in the Chapel of St John.

The rampaging rebels
hacked his head off,

stuck it on a spike and paraded it
triumphantly through the streets.

On the evening
of Thursday 13th June,

the teenage king climbed
one of the turrets in the tower,

and what he saw ought to
have broken him in terror...

the sky red with flames,
London crumbling into smoking ruins.

But hostage to a nightmare, Richard
doesn't seem to have panicked.

When counsellors asked him
to negotiate with the rebels,

he evidently showed no hesitation.

It was the boy
who was the man of the hour.

It was a brave front.
For Richard must have thought

there was a chance
he might not survive.

Before the meeting, he prayed
at the shrine of Edward the Confessor,

the patron saint
of all the Plantagenet kings.

Then he rode
through the jostling crowds

to meet Wat Tyler and the rest
of the leaders at Smithfield.

When he got to Smithfield,
the king could see the rebels

camped on the west side
and the royal party on the east.

Wat Tyler rode over to Richard,
got off his little horse,

knelt very briefly,
not very convincingly,

but then shakes his hand
and calls him brother.

"Why will you not go home?"
Asked the king, plaintively,

to which Tyler responded with
a loud curse and a set of demands.

The most important
was for a new Magna Carta,

this time for the ordinary people.

It would abolish serfdom, it would
liquidate the property of the Church,

it would offer
a general pardon to all outlaws,

and if all this
wasn't radical enough,

it would make every man equal
below the level of the king.

Now, to all this,
Richard answered, "Yes,"

perhaps crossing his fingers
behind his back,

and maybe Wat Tyler
was so amazed by the concession,

he didn't quite know what to do next.

So an eerie silence settles over
everybody on the field,

broken only by Tyler
asking for a flagon of ale.

He gets it, he downs it,
he gets back onto his mount -

a big man on a little horse -

and at that moment, history changed.

There was someone on the king's side
who had not been reading the script,

or perhaps was just unable
to take the humiliation any longer.

It was a young esquire,
someone Richard's own age,

who shouted at Tyler
that he was a thief.

It broke the strange spell.

Walworth, the mayor,
who had always taken a hard line,

tried to arrest Tyler.

There was horseback fighting,

Walworth getting in
the decisive blow,

cutting Tyler
through the shoulder and neck.

As soon as he was down, the king's
men surrounded him, finishing him,

but making sure the rebel camp
could not see what was going on.

One way or another,
this was the moment of truth.

It was also the moment
when Richard himself acted,

decisively and with amazing courage.

He rode straight at the rebels,
shouting famously,

"You shall have no captain but me."

The words were brilliantly chosen

and were, of course,
deliberately ambiguous.

To the rebels, it seemed that Richard
himself was now their leader,

just as they'd always wanted.

But the words could have been meant

as the first reassertion
of royal authority.

Either way,
it defused the immediate crisis

and gave Mayor Walworth
the opportunity to get back to London

and mobilise armed men.

Now the process of breaking up
the leaderless rebellion could begin -

cautiously at first,
with offers of pardons and mercy,

but then with implacable resolution.

Just a week after the apparent
concessions at Smithfield,

another group of rebels met
with Richard at Waltham in Essex,

but they found a very different king.

You wretches,
detestable on land and sea,

you who seek equality with lords,
are unworthy to live!

Give this message
to your colleagues.

Rustics you were
and rustics you are still.

You will remain in bondage not
as before, but incomparably harsher.

For as long as we live,
we will strive to suppress you,

and your misery will be an example
in the eyes of posterity.

However, we will spare your lives
if you remain faithful.

Choose now
which course you want to follow.

The rebels took the only option
that was realistically open to them.

They fell to their knees.
It was all over.

The king was literally
the only one left standing.

But what was the effect
of all this on Richard?

What did he now think
he was capable of?

My master, God omnipotent,

is mustering in his clouds
on our behalf armies of pestilence,

and they shall strike your children
yet unborn and unbegot

that lift your vassal hands
against my head

and threat the glory
of my precious Crown.

Though Shakespeare's tragedy starts
years after the Peasants' Revolt,

it's hard not to believe
that in his portrait of a petulant,

self-admiring Richard II,

there is the sense of someone trapped

in an adolescent fantasy
of indestructibility.

There's no denying that,
especially at times of crisis,

he was subject
to unpredictable mood swings,

between adrenaline-rush feelings
of omnipotence and abject fatalism.

But it is easy
to exaggerate his unfitness to rule,

as though he were somehow
suspiciously unsound.

He was built
the usual Plantagenet way,

six foot tall,
with long, flowing, blond hair.

But unlike his grandfather,
he failed to keep mistresses

and seemed, oddly enough, to want
to be faithful to his wife Anne.

Real Plantagenets tore at their meat
and slurped the drippings.

Richard not only insisted
on using a spoon,

but inflicted it
on the rest of the court.

Real Plantagenets
brought you blood-soaked victories

over the ancestral enemies
in France and Scotland,

Richard brought England
the pocket handkerchief.

Real Plantagenets built fortresses.

Richard instead wanted a great
ceremonial space in Westminster Hall

with a spectacular hammer beam roof.

The rows of angels symbolised
the king's divine right to rule.

The angels, in turn,
are supported by carved stone plinths

bearing Richard's own emblem,
the white hart.

But the alien strangeness
attributed to Richard

seems a lot less strange if you think
of him as a Renaissance prince

for whom the civilised life

was not necessarily
a mark of being un-English.

The Wilton diptych
is the clearest illustration

of his exalted vision of kingship.

Richard instinctively felt
he belonged in the company of saints,

so here he is with three of them:

John the Baptist,
Edward the Confessor

and the Saxon martyr king Edmund.

The other panel shows him in the
even more exalted company of angels,

the Christ child and the Virgin.

He is her appointed lieutenant.

She is receiving his kingdom
as her dowry

and in return will bestow on it
her special protection and favour.

Ceremonial style was not, the king
decided, just an affectation -

the window dressing of power -

it was at the heart of its mystery,
its capacity to make men obey.

Richard had this in mind

when, for the first time in the history
of the British monarchies,

the king asked to be addressed
as "Majesty" and "Highness",

a kind of mystical elevation.

But what seemed
like refinement to Richard,

to the barons was evidence
that the king had lost touch

with their common interests.

Richard's refusal
to continue the war with France

was an obvious source of irritation
for the nobility.

They had positively prospered
from foreign campaigns

and built spectacular castles,
like this one at Bodiam,

to guard against a French invasion.

But it was the king's high-handedness
that finally stung them into action.

By issuing royal decrees,
Richard could bypass parliament,

and he went out of his way to lavish
favours on friends and advisers,

men like Sir Simon Burley
and Robert de Vere,

who was absurdly promoted
to be Duke of Ireland.

The lords retaliated with their only
available weapon - parliament.

In February 1388,
five of the king's favourites

were charged with
abusing his youth and innocence

to promote their own ambitions.

All were found guilty of treason

by what became known
as "the Merciless Parliament".

Robert de Vere, the most hated
of the king's confidants,

escaped before sentence
of execution could be carried out,

but Simon Burley was not so lucky.

Richard's queen pleaded on her knees
for Burley's life, but to no avail.

Richard may have crushed
the Peasants' Revolt,

but peers of the realm
were another matter.

Chastened by the humiliation,

the king withdrew
into autocratic solitude,

and yet he had enough
of the Plantagenet about him

to harbour desires for retribution.

He held his peace
for nearly ten years,

but when his beloved Anne
died of plague,

Richard lost
his only restraining influence

and he reasserted himself
in an extraordinary storm of revenge.

Using the pretext
of an aristocratic plot,

he brutally disposed
of the ringleaders

of the Merciless Parliament
a decade earlier.

The Earl of Arundel was executed.

The Earl of Warwick was exiled,

and the Duke of Gloucester,
Richard's own uncle, was murdered,

smothered in his bed
on the king's orders.

The old scores
had been settled at last.

Well, you would think, that Richard
could contain his sense of triumph,

if only in the interests
of self-preservation.

But now that Richard II discovered
that people were, for the first time,

frightened of him, he also discovered
he rather liked it.

He drank it in and lashed out
at anybody he thought to be disloyal,

replacing them with yes-men
and toadies,

eating, sleeping and travelling
surrounded by a private army,

as if he were some Roman emperor.

Beneath these delusions
of omnipotence, though,

Richard remained neurotically insecure.

On the merest suspicion of treason,

he rashly condemned John of Gaunt's
son, Henry Bolingbroke,

to ten years in exile without
even the pretence of a show trial.

If such summary justice
made the English nobility uneasy,

what happened next left them stunned.

When John of Gaunt finally died,

Richard decided
to increase Bolingbroke's sentence

to banishment for life, and seized
the young Duke's inheritance,

the valuable Lancastrian estates,
in the name of the Crown.

The magnates of England
must have looked at this and said,

"He's got to be stopped
or it's my turn next."

Richard was one blunder
away from disaster.

The final,
fatal distraction was Ireland.

He had decided
to bring the Irish princes to heel,

but he took just enough soldiers
to leave himself defenceless at home

and not enough
to cow the Irish nobles.

And before he could finish
his business there,

he heard that Bolingbroke had landed
with an army on the Yorkshire coast,

and the alienated English lords
had flocked to his banner.

By the time Richard returned,
Bolingbroke was already in command

of the southern
and eastern heartland of England.

The odd thing
is that Richard actually seemed

to be one step ahead of his enemies
in fatalistic pessimism,

so that when he got the bad news

that many of his most trusted
supporters and allies

had switched to the other side,

his reaction was not to dig
in his heels, make a fight of it,

but rather to flee at night
across the country,

disguised as a priest,
bewailing his misfortunes

and as usual blaming them
on everybody else.

At some point in his uncontested
march towards Richard,

Bolingbroke's aims changed,
from simply getting his lands back

to overthrowing the king.

"Now I can see my end,"
Shakespeare has Richard say -

a neat little piece
of Lancastrian propaganda,

which solved the embarrassing problem
of a deposition

by making Richard seem
as though he had resigned the crown,

rather than having it snatched
from his desperate grip.

In fact, it took a month of painful
negotiations to get Richard,

now a prisoner in the Tower,
to give up the throne.

Three times they asked him
to surrender, three times he refused,

before finally bowing
to the inevitable.

On 30th September,

a report of the king's renunciation
was read to parliament,

gathered under the angels
of Richard's magnificent roof.

The lords were asked
to acclaim Henry Bolingbroke,

Earl of Hereford,
Duke of Lancaster, as King Henry IV,

which they did to cries
of, "Yes, yes, yes."

Richard, the divine prince no longer,
was spirited away

and imprisoned in Pontefract Castle.

Most likely he was starved to death,
a horrible way to end,

but one which ensured no compromising
marks of assault on his body

when it was given a public burial.

Now, oddly enough, it was Henry
who orchestrated this big funeral,

a pre-emptive strike
against any conspirators out there

who might imagine that Richard
could be rescued

and restored to the throne.

It was Bolingbroke's son, Henry V,

who had the body of King Richard
buried in Westminster Abbey.

Perhaps Henry wanted
to put the charge of murder,

as well as its victim, to rest.

He must have hoped that in his reign,

the wounds of the contending parties
might be healed,

but it was not to be.

Despite his famous victory
at Agincourt,

Henry V remains a might-have-been,

dead at 35 from dysentery.

So neither he nor his son, Henry VI,

could prevent what the stealing of
Richard's crown had made inevitable -

a long, bloody war between competing
wings of the Plantagenet family.

For 30 years, the houses
of York and Lancaster slogged it out

in a roll call of battles
we know as the Wars of the Roses.

There are only two ways
to feel about them.

Either the endless chronicle
of violent seizures of the Crown

makes you thrill
to a great English epic,

or else it leaves you
feeling slightly numbed.

If you're in
the dazed and confused camp,

the temptation
is to write off the whole sorry mess

as the bloody bickering
of overgrown schoolboys,

whacking each other senseless

on the fields
of Towton, Barnet and Bosworth.

But there was something
at stake in all the mayhem,

and that was the need to make
the English monarchy credible again;

to re-solder the chains
of allegiance,

which had once stretched
all the way from Westminster

out to the constables
and justices in the shires,

and which had been so badly broken
by the fate of Richard II.

To understand the way in which
lawlessness, violence and chaos

did make an impact on the not-so-rosy
world of 15th-century England,

we have something incomparably richer

than the list
of battlefields and barons,

kings and kingmakers.

We have, in the letters
of the Paston family of Norfolk,

the very first
private correspondence in English,

the authentic voice
of middling folk -

farmers, lawyers,
would-be gentry, social climbers.

Like many an anxious wife and mother,

the Wars of the Roses
worried Margaret Paston

because they were making England
a bad place

to make and keep a little fortune.

(WOMAN) God, for his mercy, give grace,

for I never heard say
of so much robbery and manslaughter

in this country as is now.

And as for gathering of money,
I never saw a worse season.

Seen through Margaret's eyes,
England might be up for grabs,

but the real disaster was shopping.

As for cloth for my gown,

I pray that you will buy for me
three yards and a quarter

of such as it pleaseth you
that I should have.

For I have done all the drapers
shops in this town,

and here is right feeble choice.

The founder
of the Paston dynasty was Clement.

Clement's described
as a plain husbandman,

which is to say a peasant,

but a peasant
who took advantage of the Black Death

to scramble right up
the social ladder of the village.

Clement Paston was shrewd enough
to send his son William to law school,

clever enough to understand
that it was going to be through learning,

as much as through land,
that the fortunes of the Pastons

would be utterly transformed.

Clement's son did indeed become
a lawyer and married into money.

So did his grandson John,
who acquired Caister Castle,

completing the meteoric rise
of the Pastons

from peasantry to landed gentry
in just two generations.

(MAN) John Jenney informed me,
and I've verily learned since,

you're to be made a knight
at this coronation.

Considering the comfortable
tidings aforesaid,

to attain the necessary gear
be prayed for.

But nothing's ever this easy, is it?

As the Pastons became
influential and rich,

so they also were bound
to attract enemies.

As long
as they were obscure nobodies,

the bloody tides of the Wars of the
Roses would happen somewhere else.

But now that they became owners
of lands and manors and castles,

they also became prime targets
for the heavies,

and no one was heavier
than the Duke of Norfolk.

He'd always coveted Caister Castle,
and now, in September 1469,

he came to get it.

Margaret wrote
in some anguish to her son...

"I greet you well, letting you know
that your brother and his fellowship

"stand in great jeopardy at Caister."

Well, she was clearly desperate,
but she was also extremely angry,

and she lets her son John
feel the rough edge of her tongue,

which is extremely rough indeed.

Every man in this country marvels
that you suffer them

to be for so long in great jeopardy.

They be like to lose
both their lives and the place,

the greatest rebuke to you
that ever came to any gentleman.

John immediately writes back.

Mother, if I had need
to be woken up by a letter,

I would indeed be a sluggish fellow.

I have heard ten times worse tidings
since the siege began

than any letter that you wrote me,

but I assure you that those within
have no worst rest than I have,

nor fear more danger.

Faced with the might
of the Duke of Norfolk's army,

the Pastons had no choice
but to surrender their castle.

But once again, the law
would transform their fortunes.

It took a seven-year legal battle
and an appeal to the king,

but they were, eventually,
rightfully reinstated at Caister,

although for the eldest of Margaret's
brood, the triumph was short-lived.

Three years later,
John Paston died of the plague.

The Pastons got over
these bumps in the road

to become a settled presence
in their county,

and that would be true for countless
other English people just like them.

Essentially, they were survivors.

They'd survived the plague,
they'd survived dethronement,

they'd survived civil war.

Kings came and went,
but the village men -

the same sort of men who'd marched
on London in 1381,

who'd been revolutionaries
and desperados -

were now on their way
to becoming squires of the village.

These people
knew what the worst could be.

They knew that the plague
could carry off babies and children.

They knew that local knights
might go on a rampage,

but they also knew that with an equal
measure of prudence and prayer,

they would get through it.

So come to an English village
like this, far from the mayhem,

say around 1480,
and you'd see what you'd expect -

a church built in the economic
elegance of the perpendicular style...

For the first time, an ale house
called "The Swan" or "The Frog".

And at the heart, a handsome dwelling

for the biggest tenant farmer
in the area.

No longer just a wattle and daub
single-roomed glorified hut,

but a miniature manor
with its own hall

and servants
to wait on the master and mistress.

A buttery, a cellar
and private retiring chambers.

One shouldn't be too complacent
about the condition of Britain

at the end
of its first century of plague.

The end of the road through trauma
was not all buttercups and beer.

There was still grinding poverty
alongside plenty.

But all the same,
the improbable had happened.

Out of the fires
of pestilence and bloodshed

had emerged that most unlikely
example of survivor -

the English country gent.