Medieval Lives (2004) s01e07 Episode Script

(Low whistle ) oh, why, it's the sheriff.
seems you have not shaved this morning.
curses, Robin, once again you've made a fool of me and my wicked schemes.
(Terry ) In the lawless world of the Middle Ages, a poor man,s only hope of justice lay with those bold men living lives of freedom in the forest, the legendary outlaws of medieval England.
Heroes who bestrode the Greenwood fearlessly wearing only tights and little short tunics that hardly covered their bottoms, the medieval outlaw has come to represent freedom and justice for the common man.
But were there really outlaws like Robin Hood in medieval England? And if not, why do we think there were? And another thing.
Was the law so out of reach for ordinary people? And did the forest merely represent freedom? And of course the key question, did outlaws never wear trousers? My investigation into medieval law and order starts on the trail of a real life 14th-century outlaw gang in the tranquil village of Teigh in Rutland.
sweet, isn't it? one afternoon in 1340, however, the peace and quiet of this little village was shattered by a dramatic shoot-out.
A group of armed men laid siege to this church.
After a ferocious battle, the rector, whose place of worship it had been for twenty years, was dragged outside into the street and beheaded.
But the situation wasn't quite what it might seem.
The gang of armed men who slew the man of God weren't the outlaws.
They were supposed to represent law and order.
It was the rector who was the outlaw.
His name was Richard Folville and he was a member of that notorious gang of outlaws, the Folvilles.
A generation after their deaths, the Folvilles were celebrated as the kind of outlaws who righted wrongs.
one chronicle tells how they took the law into their own hands and rode out to right injustice by force of arms.
The Folvilles' laws became a synonym for justified robbery.
so were the Folvilles the real-life Robin Hoods? Well it'd be nice if they were but I'm afraid not.
The Folvilles were aristocratic brothers whose father was the lord of the manor of Ashby-Folville.
But why were the sons of nobility turning to crime? When old John de Folville died in 1310, he left his entire estate to his eldest son, which is what you did in those days.
The younger sons were supposed to go to into the church or join the army.
In the Folvilles' case, however, there were another six brothers.
Enough to take a third alternative - form a gang and embark on a life of crime.
According to local legend, this stone with its cross marks the spot where the Folvilles began their career as outlaws.
For it was here that they helped murder a local bigwig.
But you couldn't become an outlaw just like that.
There were various requirements the Folvilles would have had to fulfill.
The chief qualification for becoming an outlaw was failure to turn up for trial on three successive occasions.
The Folvilles passed this test with flying colors.
It meant that from now on they could practice as fully qualified outlaws, pursuing their trade of assault and robbery, extortion and kidnapping to fill their own pockets.
And they weren,t the only gangs of upper-crust gentlemen who terrorized the country.
There was sir William cheddleton,s gang in shropshire, sir Gilbert Middleton,s in Durham, and sir Henry Leybourn,s in Kent, not to mention the cogerel gang who sometimes joined forces with the Folvilles.
These aristocratic gangs weren't robbing from the rich to give to the poor.
They were career criminals.
With a network of spies and informers and with political connections.
John Bromyard, the Dominican friar and preacher, complained that England was more crime-ridden than any other country, mainly because of the gentry turning to crime or employing thugs to do their robbing for them.
so if the outlaws actually were the bad guys, where does that leave their traditional foe the sheriff? The wicked sheriff.
Well done.
You're finally learning how to treat these animals.
Here in sherwood forest the old melodrama is still being played out, to the delight of audiences.
Isn't he tall?.
Don't you think he's tall?.
Now undoubtedly, there were sheriffs who abused their power.
One sheriff of Nottingham for example even ran a mafia-style operation in the 14th century, which involved his wife, clerk and chaplain.
But wicked sheriffs were the exception rather than the rule.
I am disappointed to have to tell you the vast majority of sheriffs were pen-pushing bureaucrats overloaded with work constantly grappling with a stream of writs from litigious peasants or orders from central government.
They were the one-man county councils of their day.
We'll teach him some manners.
Torturing peasants and oppressing the poor? Most sheriffs were too busy organizing the home guard or tracking down regional cheeses for the royal household, or a decent set of hunting dogs for the king.
(Terry ) We like to think of the story of the outlaw as a black and white tale of goodies and baddies.
The reality was less clear cut.
During the Middle Ages the very notion of what an outlaw was changed dramatically and so did the legal system the outlaws sought to avoid.
In Anglo-saxon England, people had been accustomed to administering the law themselves, a sort of neighborhood watch.
But with this big difference - you could make money out of it.
You see, the Anglo-saxons weren't particularly bothered about punishments.
What interested them was victim compensation.
And there was a strict tariff.
If the nose be mutilated, six shillings.
If an ear be struck off, twelve shillings.
Fifty shillings for an eye, fifty shillings for a foot, and ten shillings for the big toe.
For each of the four front teeth, six shillings.
For the tooth which stands next to them, four shillings.
For that which stands next to that, three shillings.
And then afterwards, for each, a shilling.
Quick punch in the face could mean a windfall.
This has to be my lucky day.
Back then to be declared an outlaw was a fearful thing indeed.
people then lived in small, self-regulating communities, and to be excluded was like being sent into exile.
Worse, an outlaw was a wolf's head, someone who could be killed on sight.
They were forced to live a life on the run, outside normal society.
But in 1o66, England became an occupied nation.
A legal system that depended on the cooperation of the conquered with their conquerors was simply not going to work.
so the Normans introduced certain legal refinements such as collective punishment and trial by battle.
Now a trial by battle may conjure up images of noble duels fought at dawn between expert swordsmen, but the reality was often a lot more mundane, if not downright comical.
Take for example the case of Thomas Whitehorn and James Fisher.
Well, they certainly met at dawn, but the weapons the authorities provided them with were not swords.
Each was given a ram's horn.
They did their best to kill each other with these but after a few blows the ram's horns broke and the pair were reduced to trying to bite each other to death.
Here's a contemporary account of what went on.
''Whitehorn got Fisher on the ground ''and then bit him by the member causing him to cry out.
'' (Moaning) ''But Fisher bounced back and got his teeth round Whitehorn's nose ''and poked his thumb into his eye.
'' Well, Whitehorn cried for mercy, confessed all and was duly hanged.
Fisher for reasons best known to himself left town and became a hermit.
If that was Norman justice, the Normans could keep it.
Well, that,s what many Anglo-saxons seemed to think.
And they chose to be outlawed rather than stand trial.
By 115o the whole legal system had collapsed so Henry II totally reinvented it, developing a legal process unique to England which put power back in the hands of the local community.
Trial by jury.
But not as we know it.
Medieval jurors weren't chosen for their impartiality, but on the contrary, they were chosen because they knew the people involved in the case.
In 1344, for example, one of the Folvilles, Alice, was acquitted in the king's bench by a jury specially imported from here, her home village of Teigh.
England wasn,t lawless, it was the reverseI There were too many laws governing every little detail of life.
But people quickly learned how to use the law to their advantage.
The common man had no need for Robin Hood to fight his corner, he had lawyers to do it for him.
And the records of these proceedings, some 7oo years old, make fascinating reading.
How would you compare people's access to the law in the Middle Ages with people today? They were extremely litigious.
If you can think of modern-day America and medieval society was using the law and aware of the law.
Was the law expensive? Did it cost a lot? For poor people there was a primitive form of legal aid.
You could also retain a lawyer by giving him goods in kind.
We have a document here which shows us that this particular person retained an attorney paying him in ''fromage et beurre''.
- cheese and butter.
- cheese and butter.
Try that nowadays you might get short shrift.
The royal court was the medieval equivalent of the Old Bailey.
No matter how small the case, they,re all solemnly recorded in meticulous detail.
This is the rolls for the court of common pleas.
All the cases for the year in that court in London.
This particular one is fairly long and involved.
Richard oring from Exeter has brought this case all the way to London and he alleges that the defendant Henry Hull has used force and violence, ''vi et armis''.
He came into his garden with swords, bows and arrows.
You can imagine the picture of it, of this - Dramatic scene.
- Yes.
Destroyed hishis grass and when it boils down to it, he lopped off some branches and basically gone round and collected his hedge clippings.
- so it's a dispute about hedge clippings.
- It is, yes.
With people rushing to court to sue each other over hedge clippings, more and more people were failing to turn up to trial and consequently being outlawed for non-attendance.
By the mid-14th century, almost everybody seems to get outlawed at some point in their lives.
It was no big deal.
It was a bit like having your credit card refused.
As the threat of being outlawed diminished, it became harder to force people to stand trial.
That,s why places like this were created.
prison.
Not as a place of punishment mind you, but as a means to force people to stand trial.
Medieval prisons were privately owned and could be nice little earners.
This one was built and owned by the Archbishop of York.
And he made a packet out of it.
Opened for business in 133o, the prison at Hexham in Northumberland was the first purpose-built prison in England.
Believe it or not, you had to pay to get into prison as well as pay to get out.
Jailers brewed their own beer and sold it to the inmates.
They also had to pay for their bedding, their food, their fuel, and their lighting.
prisoners without money were allowed out onto the streets to beg.
Anything so long as the Archbishop got his cash.
Here at Hexham there were different levels of comfort according to your wallet.
The dungeon was for the penniless, no windows, fresh air or, I hesitate to tell you, toilet facilities.
Whereas on the ground floor you did have a lavatory and on the first floor, you had a fireplace.
or if you were really flush, you could live up here on the top floor with the jailer who had not only a lavatory, but two fireplaces.
Trial by jury was curiously enough, voluntary.
Mark you, if you refused to stand trial you'd be pressed between giant stones until you either agreed to stand or died.
And throughout the Middle Ages, that was really the only torture that was used in England as part of the judicial system.
It wasn't to get you to confess anything or punishment, it was simply to force prisoners to face trial.
perhaps it,s no wonder a lot of people preferred to escape the system by being outlaws, especially those facing serious charges like murder.
The idea of hiding out here in the Greenwood must have had its attraction.
But don't go thinking being an outlaw wouldn't be all that bad because you could always live a carefree life in the freedom of the forest.
The forest was in fact almost the reverse of everything we think.
Even down to the fact that it didn't have to have trees in it.
One of William,s first acts as conqueror was to create the New Forest.
Well, I always imagined that meant he,d planted an awful lot of trees so people could enjoy a nice picnic and shade.
But no.
What it actually meant was that the king grabbed vast tracts of land including entire towns, to be his own private hunting park.
To protect these parks, he imposed harsh laws known as Forest Law.
A forest was simply wherever Forest Law applied.
It was policed by an army of royal officials who ruthlessly enforced the Draconian penalties for poaching imposed by the king.
The Earl of cardigan is the 31st hereditary warden of savernake Forest.
His family have been patrolling these woods on the lookout for outlaws and poachers since the time of the conquest.
Anybody of the local population ever found disturbing the king's deer was in for some horrendous punishment here.
What sort of things would they do to them? I think the standard one was if you'd used your bow and arrow which presumably you had, to kill your deer or kill the king's deer and you'd drawn in your bow with your two fingers, in extreme cases you forfeited those two fingers so you could never again draw your bow on the king's deer.
Hence the, er That's apparently where the expression comes from.
Apparently it was shown to the knights at Agincourt, English archers showed their two fingers to show they could still draw their bow strings.
100 yards half-left under those trees.
- straight in front where you're looking now.
- oh, yes! William the conqueror was said to love stags as much as if he were their father.
Henry I put poaching on a par with murder.
Richard I set the penalty for killing deer as removal of eyes and testicles.
If you owned a farm on the edge of the forest, and the king's deer came out and wiped out your crop that was your bad luck.
You couldn't even fence the Royal deer out of your fields.
You weren't even allowed to fence them out? No, in lots of ways the deer were rated the deer of the forest had more rights and privileges than the locals who lived around it.
Maybe that's one of the reasons why the Robin Hood stories were so popular.
They celebrated a time before the conquest when the forests were a place of freedom.
since the Normans, the forest has become a place of repression and brutal punishment.
But once people had been free to hunt and gather wood here and that was never forgotten.
Losing an eye for poaching deer or having a hand cut off may seem like pretty rough justice to us but mutilation was a fairly common penalty and for a very good reason.
It was a way of not only punishing criminals but of identifying them in the days before photo ID cards.
If you saw a man without an ear, it was a fair bet he was an ex-con.
In the 13th century, a certain John Derouten lost his ear after being kicked by a horse so he insisted on carrying a certificate around with him stating that his earlessness was due entirely to medical causes.
Outlaws and violent criminals who faced the death penalty had plenty to choose from.
It all depended where they were to be executed.
In Sandowne, you,d be buried alive.
In Pevensey, you were thrown in the river at high tide.
In Portsmouth, you were burned.
And in Hastings you,d be chucked off a cliff into the sea.
(splash) Here in Halifax you'd find yourself at the cutting edge of execution technology.
The city was the proud owner of a state-of-the-art guillotine.
500 years before the Frenchman Monsieur Joseph Guillotine gave his name to it.
Makes you wonder what they called it, you know, ''oh, we must execute him with that thing that has no name yet.
''What do you mean, the guillotine?'' ''shh! You can't call it that.
''Monsieur Guillotine has not given his name to it yet.
'' Local residents often made reluctant executioners so the city would resort to poetic justice.
If the thief had stolen a horse or cow, a rope would be attached to the animal and then connected to a pin supporting the blade.
They'd then whip the animal, the pin would get pulled out and the thief would be executed by his own booty.
Becoming an outlaw was one way of avoiding the cow-operated guillotine.
But there was another alternative.
y ou could always run like hell to your nearest sanctuary.
A lot of people sought sanctuary in the town of Beverley and with good reason.
Any criminal on the run was safe once he could reach that stone over there.
You see the area of sanctuary around Beverley was enormous.
It stretched in a circle two miles in radius from the city center, were all marked out by these sanctuary stones.
once you reached here or could touch the stone you were safe from prosecution.
In fact if I had been being pursued and my pursuer killed me while I was on this side of the stone, he'd have to pay the church a fine of eight pounds.
Mind you, I suppose they'd have to be a few witnesses but (Wind howling) Here in Beverley, the heart of the sanctuary was the Minster.
All consecrated buildings offered sanctuary, a cooling-off period while the clergy attempted to arrange a peaceful conclusion.
Generally you could only seek sanctuary for 4o days, but after that if no conclusion was arrived at you would have to leave the country.
y ou,d be provided with a special outfit, carry a home-made wooden cross, have your thumb branded with the letter A, and then be told to hotfoot it to your nearest port.
The amount of time given to reach the port was seemingly random.
One sanctuary man was given three weeks to travel from Norwich to portsmouth, whereas another unlucky fellow, was given just four days for the same journey.
once you'd reached the seaside you'd be expected to get the first ship out of England and for every day you didn't, you had to wade into the sea up to your knees as a sign of your willingness to go.
It's the only known instance of paddling being used as a form of punishment.
For the discriminating sanctuary seeker, however, the most attractive feature about Beverley was that it could offer you protection from prosecution not just for 4o days, but for life.
To qualify for a permanent position as a sanctuary man, sanctuary seekers would have to make a full confession of their crime and have it recorded in a register which was kept here in the Minster at Beverley.
I've got a transcript here and it makes fascinating reading.
It seems that butchers were the most common perpetrators of violence.
I can't think why While the most frequent debtors were builders.
so not much change there, then.
The Minister is visible for miles around and you can imagine it as a beacon attracting all the thieves, murderers and criminals of England to come and enjoy the amenities of this delightful town.
In London the situation got so out of control, parliament was petitioned over the way violent outlaws and criminals were using sanctuary as a legal hideout.
By day they lie low and by night they venture out to commit their murders, robberies and felonies.
But it wasn,t just the church that was harboring outlaws.
so was that other great pillar of society, the gentry, some of whom were running crime syndicates from their castles.
The truth is there was very little difference between the outlaws and the fighting men of the gentry and the aristocratic classes.
In fact, very often, they were one and the same.
The Folville gang, for example, were in cahoots with the nobleman who ran this gaff, Rockingham castle.
Rockingham is in Northamptonshire.
But it borders on three other counties, Leicestershire over there and Rutland over there and cambridgeshire over there.
And it was here that sir Robert De vere entertained fugitives and outlaws from all four shires.
sir Robert was meant to be the custodian of this royal castle and the keeper of the Royal Forest.
And yet the whole place was a viper's nest of criminality.
one contemporary wrote ''sometimes 20 armed men, sometimes 30, ''come to De vere at the castle ''and they leave at dawn or during the night.
''He shuts the gate on the side facing the town ''so that they can leave secretly via a poston.
''Those bringing provisions to the castle ''are not allowed to enter, lest they should come to know ''those armed men.
'' very hugamuga! No wonder parliament was repeatedly petitioned in the 14th century to stop these gentry gangs running wild.
The Folvilles were a pretty rough lot.
I mean, their leader Eustace had five murders and a rape to his name.
And yet what happened to them? Did they hang on the gallows as they undoubtedly deserved? Well, not exactly.
After 16 years of crime, all the surviving Folvilles were pardoned.
And they died respectable men.
sir Eustace here was even knighted for his good services to the crown.
But how could a violent outlaw like Eustace, have become one of the king,s trusted knights? Well, pardoning outlaws in return for military service allowed the king to harness the skills of these violent men to his own ends.
And in the absence of a standing army, the country came to depend on them.
In societies where violent conflict was common, courage and aggressiveness were prized qualities in a man.
But there was something special about England.
In the rest of Europe, knights were aristocrats.
Knighthood was inherited.
But in England, just anyone could win a knighthood.
The road to advancement meant being a warrior when there was a war on and perhaps a robber when there wasn't.
sometime after his death, one of the chroniclers described Eustace not as a reformed murderer and rapist, but as a wild and daring man.
The outlaw of reality had become one with the outlaw of legend.
The story of Robin Hood wove together the myth of pre-conquest freedom together with the later myths of chivalry and knighthood.
The English actually celebrated being a land of bold robbers.
The story of the outlaw is not to be found on the periphery of English history.
It lies close to the heart of what made England England.
Next time on Terry Jones,s Medieval Lives, the king.
Why a lot of the stuff we learnt at school about our medieval monarchs is not to be believed.
Not even the names of the kings of England.