ABSTRACT
Times had changed. Fifteenth-century political culture was the culmination of what preceded and caused it and was itself the foundation of what followed. The ideas of the Wars of the Roses, themselves the results of evolution, slowly evolved into something new. Old notions of treason were passing their sell-by date. New ideas, momentarily fashionable, new movements and new institutions failed to survive. The decisive involvement of the commons in fifteenth-century politics proved premature, dwindled into tax revolts and had to be revived in later centuries. Fortescue’s impractical recipes for political reform became prophetic after his death. Every age is an age of transition and the fifteenth century is no different in this respect from any other. Evolution was slow. The fifteenth-century kings, their constitution and principles appeared so familiar to Shakespeare and his audiences that they overlooked the nuances and read their own age into the past. Much more of the fifteenth century endured essentially the same into subsequent centuries than was changed. Transformations so obvious with hindsight to modern historians occurred at rates too slow for contemporaries to perceive, experience or explain. History comprises a series of successive states, each of which is deserving of study, in context. To understand the context – the pressures, assumptions, prejudices and principles – we need to appreciate the constituent institutions and ideas. Fifteenth-century political culture, this book reiterates, witnessed no fundamental turning points. It was amazingly complex, rich and worthy of historical study. All classes at all times and in all regions subscribed to a common core of standards and values on which they had their own slant and by which they lived predominantly peaceful lives. Much less is known than we need to know. Much we cannot know or coherently intermesh. This book summarises much that is known, and contributes and indicates (often by implication) what remains to be done. It brings out what the author finds significant, intriguing and exciting about English political culture in the fifteenth century.
