ABSTRACT
Earlier chapters have touched on the vast range of ideas of which everyone in fifteenth-century England partook. They were not always or everywhere the same. They were affected and even altered according to rank and occupation, locality and the passage of time. Political values were not the same at court as in the provinces: fidelity, honour and justice had different meanings in different contexts.1 So too had worship and service. Chapters 4 and 5 stressed how much (and inevitably) social orders diverged. How could a rural peasant share much with a great magnate? What common perspectives had a tenant and his landlord? What could commoners make of the elite codes of honour and chivalry? Were not their lifestyles and horizons inescapably alien to one another? One of Cade’s manifestos denounced abuses of the statute of labourers – the classic piece of class legislation. Few aristocrats can have shared popular apprehensions of judicial descents. When, in fact, was the last harvest of heads? It was king’s bench, the principal criminal court, that ‘was grief-full to the shire of Kent’.2 Were rebels harking back to folk memory when judicial eyres in the provinces were money-raising exercises akin to the great sessions in Wales?
