Rather Feared than Loved
HENRY VII AND HIS DOMINIONS
1485 - 1509
Only Richard III's usurpation of the throne, his murder of the young princes in the Tower - alleged
against him but never proved - and the violence of his subsequent rule made Henry Tudor, an onscure and exiled claimant, a likely contender for the throne of England. In August 1485, after long years of precarious exile, Henry landed in South Wales to challenge the throne with a motley army of French and Scottish troops and English fugitives. Presenting himself as the unifier of the warring Houses of York and Lancaster, and as heir to both dynasties, he promised to free an oppressed people from Richard Plantagenet, 'homicide and unnatural tyrant'. At Bosworth Field in Leicestershire Richard charged into the midst of the usurper's army and, abondoned by his supposed allies and by the God
of battles, was cut down. He lost his kingdom and his life and left Henry Tudor, for the while, without a rival. The Tudor adventurer found himself king by right of conquest, by inheritance and by acclamation, of a countryhe neither knew nor understood.
Henry Tudor was born in Pembroke in 1457, and had fled there once before, for shelter, in 1470 - 71.
It was to Pembroke and to Wales that he returned in 1485, hoping for popular support and promising to restore lost freedoms. As he marched through the coastal lowlands and northwards he saw at first a landscape of mixed farming, where the furrows of ploughland traced agricultural progress. Making his way through the centre of the principality, he entered a bleaker territory of mountain and moorland,
of rocky, barren heath where sheep and cattle grazed, but where otherwise signs of cultivation were few, for the people accepted the constraints of nature. Perhaps 200,000 people lived in Wales then, bound by a strong sense of national identity', made clear in their use of the name Cymry, 'people of the region'. Most of these people lived in the lowlands, in villages, while in the pastoral uplands there were single farmsteads in lonely valleys. Henry Tudor's forced march into England led across the mountains of mid Wales to the lordships of the Welsh Marches, to Welshpool and the Shropshire plain
beyond. He marched over Long Mountain down the Roman road to Shrewsbury, into the English Midlands, and to victorious battle with Richard III on 22 August.
Henry's passage from Wales to Bosworth Field in the heart of England showed in the diversity of the dominions he now claimed. Nature had defined the patterns of terrain and soil, of lowland and hills, of the prevailing wind and raianfall, which human labour could exploit but never change. The landscape determined the patterns not only of cultivation, but also of inheritance and social relations; as the landscape changed, even within counties, so did the character of settlement. The fenlands and marshlands and wild upland dales each created their own distinct agricultural and social worlds, and with transport slow and laborious, every region was highly localized and fragmented. In Leicestershire, where he took his crown, Henry was in the heart of open-field countryside - ploughland, where land was intensively cultivated according to communal rules. Here he could survey a patchwork of green and gold, furlongs of corn and crops in hedgeless fields. There was forest there also, Charnwood Forest, and tilled fields might always revert to forest. The people of England had waged war upon nature - clearing, felling, ploughing, draining - but with more energy at some times and in some places. The retreat of the population after the devastation plagues of the mid fourteenth century, and the continuing epidemic illnesses and stagnation of the population through the next century, had brought a retreat in cultivation. As Henry entered this kingdom he claimed, there were
perhaps two and a half or three million people in England and Wales. Within a generation the population began began to rise dramatically, and with that rise came great alterations to the seemingly
immemorial, changeless character of rural society.
Describing the landscape, contemporaries distinguished not between highland and lowland, but between champion (open) ground and woodland, between a pattern of arable farming and a pastoral
landscape with isolated farmsteads set amidst their closes of pasture. In fielden country there were numerous villages and towns, surrounded by their common fields, with houses and hovels clustered around parish church and manor house. In woodland areas towns were few and far between, settlement
dispersed. The distinction between arable and pastoral was moral as well as topographical: where the land was uncultivated so the people were believed to be also. Forest and pastoralism were associated with a more primitive, barbaric state.
As Henry surveyed his realm, he saw more sheep then people; those sheep which More would characterize as 'devourers of men'. Vast areas of open-field arable land were being converted to sheep and cattle pasture in the later fifteenth century, and where before a hundred arable labourers had tilled
and harrowed, now a few sheperds watched. In most of England - the south-east, south-west and north - the countryside had been fenced and enclosed before, often long before, and these anciently enclosed lands had their own character. Nearly a century later, in 1572, the Duke or Norfolk defended himself
against the charge of planning an invasion through Harwich of asking rhetorically who would choose to lead an army through an area so wholly enclosed by hedges and encumbered by narrow paths.
In the Midlands conversion from tillage to pasture was taking place as Henry Tudor came to the throne, as lords of the manor and great freeholders took commercial decisions with devastating consequences for communities, evicting tenants who were powerless to oppose when lands and lives
were determined at the lord's will. Enclosure was caused by decay and depopulation, as well as causing them, for population decline had led to labour shortage. But now the population began to rise, and with that rise came a drive to cultivate in order to feed.
The new king could see the patterns of landscape and cultivation as he passed. He knew that all lordship, influence and status rested upon land, and understood the sanctity of of landed property,
which no king must violate. His seizure of the crown had made him the greatest landowner in England, and he would become greater still. Yet what neither he, nor anyone else, could tell just by looking was how the land was held; who held freehold as free tenants, and who held land at the lord's will as customary tenants and copyholders, owing him fees and fines and duties. The nature of ownership dictated where power lay and determined or disturbed the peace of the countryside. Some land was left 'waste', in its natural state, for the common grazing which was vital for the whole economy, and especially for the landless poor. This common land was about to become overstocked
and under threat. If the King had cared to observe them, the social inequalities, and the poverty, were manifest, even in the fertile landscape of the east Midlands. Here about one third of the male population were cottagers and labourers, with little hope of acquiring their own farms, and facing a hard struggle even to defend their common grazing. A quarter of the personal wealth of Leicestershire villagers in the early sixteenth century was held by 4 per cent of the people. Such inequalities were taken as part of the divine and natural order, which no one should question. As the first Tudor king passed by, the common people looked on, their lives affected more by the fecundity of the harvest, which happened to be good in 1485, than by any change of dynasty.
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