Heretics and Heroes Read online

  In ancient times, rhyme was generally eschewed as childish babble, silly stuff lacking the dignity that was so precious to the ancients. For this reason none of the classical writers and orators of the Western tradition (or of any other tradition, so far as I can judge) made use of rhyme. The sole exception was the Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who was something of a wing nut anyway and who told his wide-eyed followers that word combinations that rhymed contained hidden spiritual meanings. In the early fifth century of the Christian era, Augustine of Hippo did occasionally play with rhyme, especially in his sermons, for the sake of giving his African congregation an easily remembered phrase, such as bona dona (good gifts). One might almost wonder if his method is the prototype for the rhyming of African American preachers like Jesse Jackson. In the late sixth century, we find a few examples of what may be intentional slant rhyme in the slick hymns of that urbane Italo-Gallo-Germanic courtier Venantius Fortunatus.

  In the eleventh century, we find the Old French poets, the authors of The Song of Roland and other stirring chansons de geste, who employ rhyme as a matter of course, as do the jingly Latin writers of Germany in such twelfth-century collections as the Carmina Burana. In the thirteenth century, in the jolly, singsong Latin hymns of such writers as Thomas Aquinas (who was no doubt taking a day off from weightier pursuits), rhyming took a definite place in church ceremony. Thence it traveled easily to all the emerging European vernaculars, useful in giving shape to both song and spoken poetry. Medieval playfulness had won a permanent victory over classical dignity.

  But we should never minimize the importance of rhyme as a mnemonic device, especially useful to both street monger and preacher (or, in more modern times, to politicians) who want their spoken message to stick permanently in the minds of their listeners. And it was in this guise that a single rhyme brought about a late-fourteenth-century rebellion that would reverberate through all of subsequent European history.

  When Adam dalf and Eve span,

  Who was thanne a gentilman?

  This was the question John Ball put to his many audiences. Ball was an English priest, and his question was posed perfectly in the English of his day. “Dalf” is the original past tense of the verb “delve” (or dig); “span” is the original past tense of the verb “spin.” So, when Adam and Eve, expelled from the Garden of Eden, were the only humans on earth, toiling away at their various tasks, who stood on the sidelines at leisure? Why, no one. In the original order of the fallen world, decreed by God himself, there were only laborers, who toiled at all the necessary obligations imposed on human beings. There was then no leisured class, no gentlefolk whose privilege it was to observe the laborers and idly profit from their ditch digging and cloth spinning and all the rest of the work that was their lot in life.

  The only conclusion to be drawn was that the nobility, those who lived off the honest sweat of others, were not only unnecessary but a thwarting of the will of the Almighty, an undoing of God’s own plan. To an English peasant of 1381, this struck home, an amazing, unforgettable, unassailable idea. If it weren’t for the backdrop of Judeo-Christian theological belief, the reasoning might have come straight out of Karl Marx: the members of the leisured class were no better than leeches, sucking the blood of decent working men and women!

  Contemporary chronicles, written by clerics, who were employed by nobles and bishops, are all against Ball, so much so that it is impossible to separate fact from fiction in their accounts. Ball, they say, was a “hedge priest,” a self-ordained preacher without parish or other normal clerical post. He wandered from town to town, barefoot and stirring up trouble. He preached not in churches but in the open on village greens. He had been excommunicated for his opinions, and the English had all been forbidden to hear him preach—forbidden by competent ecclesiastical authority. But still the ignorant and unlettered came to learn what they might from “the mad priest of Kent,” as the French chronicler Froissart contemptuously called him.

  However despicable and unwelcome Ball may have appeared to his betters, to the peasant farmers—the so-called villeins or serfs in bondage to their local lord, who had the right to extract unpaid service—he was a truth teller; and the few sentences of Ball’s that have survived only confirm his powerful—and long-echoing—eloquence: “From the beginning all men were created equal [emphasis mine] by nature, and … servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord.”

  As the national economies of Europe had experienced considerable growth, the gulf between the world of peasants and servants and the world of lords and bishops grew immense. In many places, peasants toiled incessantly, starved in lean times, died young, and saw many of their children die, as they had always done. They had few pleasures, fewer recreations. The lords and ladies, however, and their clerical equals had managed to make for themselves a new world of pleasure. When Boccaccio’s ten privileged storytellers reach their destination in the countryside, they find the grounds “abundant in different kinds of shrubs and trees, rich in green foliage. On the summit of a hill was a great country house, built around a fine and large inner courtyard and containing loggias, halls, and bedrooms, all of them perfectly proportioned and marvelously decorated with depictions of gay scenes. Surrounding the house were glorious meadows and gardens and wells of fresh water and cellars stocked with precious wines, more suited to wine-bibbers than to well-behaved, respectable young ladies. And the party discovered, to no little delight, that the place had been cleaned from top to bottom, all the beds made, fresh and seasonal flowers everywhere, and the floors strewn with rushes.” Though hardworking serfs and servants are scarcely alluded to in such airy descriptions, their solid, loyal, essential presence undergirds everything.

  Whether or not, as the chroniclers report, John Ball encouraged the peasants—at a great assembly at Blackheath, near Greenwich—to assassinate all the chief lords and kill all their lawyers,2 vast throngs of rebels entered the city of London, including an army from Kent led by Wat Tyler (whose name is permanently affixed to this insurrection, known as Wat Tyler’s Rebellion) and an army from Essex led by the priest Jack Straw. They commandeered the Tower and beheaded Simon of Sudbury, the antipathetic archbishop of Canterbury, whose name was associated with an unjust poll tax leveled against the peasants. They beheaded several other Canterbury clerics and even executed Richard of Wallingford, uncle to King Richard II, who was then a boy of fourteen and easily led by his elders.

  When the rebels insisted on meeting with Richard, he agreed and met with them at Mile End, where he promised to address their grievances. This was a ruse, however. The very next day, Wat Tyler would be knifed to death by the Lord Mayor of London, with assistance from one of the king’s knights, in Richard’s presence. Once the armies, charmed by the boy king, had disbanded, Richard went back on his word, Jack Straw was beheaded, and John Ball was hanged and, while still alive, drawn (that is, cut down, castrated and disemboweled, his organs burned while he watched), decapitated, and quartered, his quarters and severed head sent for display to five strongholds of rebellion as reminders of the fate that awaited rebels. When a respectful deputation of peasants later begged the king to fulfill his promises, Richard would dismiss them with the words “Villeins ye are still and villeins ye shall remain.”

  Behind this rebellion and others like it in continental Europe, especially in France, lay a great economic shift that had occurred as a result of the Black Death. Because there were far fewer people, there was no longer any reason for serfdom. Without artificial legal constraints, anyone could make a good living, because there were so many jobs to be done and so few to do them. So the lords of the English manors had got Richard’s grandfather and predecessor, Edward III, to proclaim the Statute of Labourers, according to which landowners could summon as many laborers as they needed and pay them no better wages than what t
hey’d received before the plague. Despite my earlier reference to Karl Marx, a better way to understand the peasant unrest of this period may be to think of it in terms of our so-called free-market economy. What the peasants wanted was a market in which they could get whatever price a customer was willing to pay, so long as each provider of labor could be free and unconstrained in striking his bargain. Though the peasants lost this battle, there could no longer be any doubt that they would eventually win the war.

  We know the punishment given John Ball was one reserved for high treason, not heresy. Convicted heretics were not hanged, drawn, and quartered but burned to death. The rebellion initiated by the preaching of Ball would, nonetheless, result eventually in not a few convictions for heresy and subsequent incinerations. Three especially should be considered.

  Behind Ball stands what many of his well-placed contemporaries took to be a larger conspiracy, that of the Lollards, who probably got their name from their supposedly sloppy, uneducated speech. (They were thought to mutter or mumble “lull-lull” or “loll-loll,” as if their tongues were slow.) For slow-witted, slow-speaking dullards, however, their ideas were many and keen. Churchmen, they thought, should be poor like Christ and prohibited from accruing personal wealth. Wealthy church properties should be taxed. The endless hubbub about the nature of Christ’s presence in the elements of the Eucharist was excessive: no one really knew whether it was symbolic or real, and, if real, in what way. Far too much was made of images and relics in churches, which hardly deserved the reverence accorded them. Let’s stop paying clergy for prayers for the dead, which benefit only the rich. All the dead, as well as all the living, should be prayed for equally. Church ceremony should be simplified and the focus put on reading the Scriptures, which need to be translated into local languages, so that everyone may understand them. There is nothing special about ordained priests; every Christian is a priest. Priests have no special power to forgive sins and should not be expected to be celibate. Nonetheless, official churchmen should not concern themselves with secular matters, which are none of their business. War is wrong, as is capital punishment and the taking of oaths.

  There were probably additional tenets held by various groups of Lollards. Soon enough, they had to meet in secret, and it becomes harder to track their beliefs. That John Ball was a Lollard seems indisputable; so was Sir John Oldcastle, boon companion of Prince Hal (one day to reign as King Henry V) and model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff. At times, Chaucer has been labeled a Lollard and certainly seems, in The Canterbury Tales, to express Lollard-like sympathies. To combat Lollardy, Henry IV, Henry V’s father and Richard II’s successor, had, as early as 1401, issued De Heretico Comburendo (On the Burning of Heretics), which prohibited both the translating of the Bible into English and the owning of such a Bible and made provision for the burning of heretics in England.

  The probable founder of Lollardy was John Wyclif, Oxford don and by traditional acclamation “the Morning Star of the Reformation”—nearly a century and a half before Luther. Besides the convictions of Lollardy outlined above, Wyclif attacked the claims of the papacy as unfounded, reestablished the Scriptures as Christianity’s authoritative norm, translated much of the New Testament into splendid vernacular English (a translation that continued to be imitated by others even as late as the King James Version of 1611), and taught—if in a simpler, more primitive form—what would become Luther’s central doctrine of justification by faith, rather than by works. Though he died in his bed in 1384, he was convicted of heresy by a church council in 1428. His remains were dug up at the command of Pope Martin V, burned, and cast into the River Swift. Despite this posthumous animosity, Wyclif was much loved in his lifetime and known by his many friends and admirers as “the wisest and most blessed of all men.” Like Luther, Wyclif was very much an Augustinian Platonist, so much so that he was dubbed “John of Augustine” by his students. In advance of his time in so many ways, he also despised Aristotle.

  Wyclif’s most famous disciple was Jan Hus, the Czech priest and reformer who to this day is held in special reverence by the Czech nation. He advocated theological and structural reforms similar to those of Wyclif—though it would be difficult to find anything he had to say that would be unacceptable today to a moderate Roman Catholic—and was burned at the stake for his honesty and candor. His martyrdom took place not in his native Bohemia but in 1415 in the Alps at the ecumenical Council of Constance, whither Hus had journeyed to debate his proposals at the invitation of the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, who had assured him of safe passage. He was condemned by a consensus of the bishops in attendance. He said he would die “with gladness” “in the truth of the Gospel.” As the flames licked higher, poor Hus, naked except for a high paper hat inscribed with the single word haeresiarcha (heresiarch), is reported to have called out that “in a hundred years, God will raise up a man whose calls for reform cannot be suppressed.” One hundred and two years later, Martin Luther will—or so it is recounted—nail his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church on October 31, now remembered as Reformation Sunday.

  The most notorious heresy conviction in this period was that of Joan of Arc, an illiterate French peasant who was burned at the stake in 1431, at the probable age of nineteen, for having dared to attempt the military task of reuniting France and expelling its English occupiers. The church court that condemned her as a witch was an irregular one, convened by the sniveling bishop of Beauvais, an English partisan, who had not the ecclesiastical jurisdiction to try her case. Joan, a genuine mystic and visionary, would never have fallen into English hands if her sovereign, Charles VII, had had the courage to pursue the daring military strategies she urged on him. Everything in the extensive contemporary records underscores both her genius and her unadulterated honesty. The record of her trial reads at times like the gospel accounts of the trial of Jesus before Pilate. She was, perhaps somewhat too enthusiastically, awarded the title “the first Protestant” by George Bernard Shaw. However challenging she may have appeared to the official church in her insistence on the truth of her personal inspiration over any supposed norms of Catholic orthodoxy, she was later than both Wyclif and Hus.3

  These ecclesiastical inquiries into heresy—or inquisitions as they were called—could clearly end in dire consequences for the accused. Nonetheless, we should bear in mind that, bloody-minded and misguided as they were and, like so many public trials even to our own day, easily influenced by emotional and political pressures, they were fairly infrequent in the Middle Ages. The gruesome terrors of the rack and other forms of torture belong more properly to the period of the Renaissance and Reformation than to the medieval period to which they are so often referred. More than this, we should recall that in times past even the most reasonable and pacific of men imagined that heresy—that is, diversity of religious opinion—could not be tolerated if a society was to remain whole. As late as the enlightened eighteenth century, we find Samuel Johnson, that most considered of Englishmen, rendering this shocking judgment:

  “They set out for Harwich in the stage-coach … as planned,” writes Christopher Hibbert in his biography. “Johnson, in high good humor, fell in conversation with a fat, talkative, elderly gentlewoman.… In the afternoon, the old lady began to talk violently against the Roman Catholics and of the horrors of the Inquisition. To the utter astonishment of everyone present, except Boswell who knew by now that he would talk on any side of a question, Johnson defended the Inquisition warmly, maintaining that a false doctrine should be checked on its first appearance, that the civil power should unite with the church in punishing those who dared to attack the established religion, that none but such as these had ever been punished by the Inquisition.”

  1452: THE THIRD GREAT COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION

  The first communications revolution was precipitated by the invention of writing in Mesopotamia a little more than five millennia ago.4 To begin with, the invention seemed of use only to ancient accountants, those who counted up the
sheep in the sheepfold and the wares in the warehouse. Soon enough, its manipulators discovered that it could also be useful for recording more complex human events (history) and even for making more permanent records of the tales they told one another (literature). But because writing soon required the mastery of thousands of separate symbols, its use was confined to those who had the leisure to master such a complicated system. Literacy came to serve as a new means of political control.

  The second communications revolution took place a little to the west of Mesopotamia in the Levant, where someone—perhaps a little before the era of Moses, about midway through the second millennium BC—devised the first alphabet, based on Egyptian hieroglyphs but using only twenty-odd symbols to represent not words but sounds. This was an astounding simplification, enabling almost anyone, even a slave, to become a reader. Direct descendants of that first alphabet remain with us to this day as written Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic. Centuries later, the Greeks would make an alphabet in imitation of the Semites (though with innovative symbols added for vowel sounds, which are largely absent from the Semitic alphabets); last of all, the Romans would make an alphabet of their own, based on the Greek. The book you are reading was composed in this Roman alphabet.

  The third communications revolution was a rather drawn-out affair. It involved several inventions: paper, movable type, and the printing press.5 In the early fifteenth century all these things came to Europe from East Asia, where the Chinese and the Koreans had been using them for hundreds of years. But movable type—manufactured symbols, such as the letters of the alphabet, that could be locked in a frame, inked, and impressed onto paper by a mechanical press—proved far more useful to alphabetical Europeans than the invention had ever been to Asians, who needed to draw on thousands of separate pictographic symbols in order to create a text, since their written languages, like those of Mesopotamia, had never known an alphabet.6