CHAPTER 9

Cautious to make his curiosity seem light, Joliffe said, “I thought I’d heard Lollards were against plays and players.  Mockers of God’s creation.  Mockers of the divine.  All that manner of thing.”

“They wouldn’t live long in Coventry crying havoc against our plays,” Powet said easily.  “Nay, it’s only the worst of them that go that far with things.  Same sort as think they can overthrow the king and lords and church and all.  I’d guess most have naught against it at all, just enjoy suchlike with the rest of us.”

The town of Coventry was a prospering place in the 1400s, and as was usual in prospering medieval towns, the citizens showed their gratitude to God (and, not so incidentally, their prosperity) by building grand churches. In Coventry’s case, that included three churches with fine spires.

Over the following centuries, Coventry’s prosperity fell and rose in cycles, but always rising proud against the sky above the town were the three spires of its great churches. Of course when Joliffe comes to Coventry in 1438, there are only two finished spires. He sees the third, unfinished, as he approaches the town, and later, he has an assignation in the church there – St. Michael’s, a parish church so grand that when Coventry became a bishopric, St. Michael’s became its cathedral.

In my travels around Britain, I’ve been in many cathedrals, collecting guidebooks, taking notes, garnering impressions, but although I’ve been to Coventry several times, I’ve never been inside medieval St. Michael’s. It isn’t there anymore. When the medieval heart of Coventry burned in 1940, its cathedral burned with it. The handsome church that Joliffe walks through in A Play of Heresy was hit with too many incendiary bombs to survive even the heroic efforts made to save it. The lead covering the roof melted and ran like rainwater. The carved roof timbers burned and crashed into the nave and chapels. The stained glass windows shattered. The great stone pillars cracked and fell into rubble.

What the people of Coventry did afterward is an inspiration to warm the heart, but it’s not for telling here. Here the question is: If St. Michael’s is gone, what do we actually know of what Joliffe sees there?

Happily, the age of photography had come before St. Michael’s went. There are useful books and online sites in plenty that show its floorplan and how it was before World War II. For me, though, the source that touched me most deeply came in a fat bundle of little pamphlets from a series called Notes on Famous Churches and Abbeys. Sent by English friends, they include one on St. Michael’s, Coventry, and while other sources had much to tell me, there is sometime particularly immediate in reading words about St. Michael’s written by someone when St. Michael’s was still “alive”, when it was an actual place that could be walked through and experienced, not merely a memory and a regret.

For me, this particularly matters, because bringing alive a past time and place and people is what I try so hard to do in all my books. So much is gone from medieval times, most of it leaving behind far less trace than St. Michael’s has, that the recreating can be laborious, but I’m always glad to do the most I can to make lost places, lost people, lost times seem immediate and real, giving a kind of life to what is otherwise altogether gone.

At Historic Coventry, if you go to the bottom of this page, there is an aerial photograph of St. Michael’s as it was in the late 1800s. Click on the picture to see an identical photo the day after the German raid in 1940.

– Margaret

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CHAPTER 8

Joliffe went with him willingly, wanting escape from there almost as much as Powet did but even more wanting escape from the chill foreboding cramping at the base of his gut.  He was never comfortable when Fortune, that treacherous goddess with her wheel that rolled you high only so she could roll you low, seemed to play suddenly into his hands.  The mourning behind him was for a man expected home a week or more ago and now found dead, and Joliffe was afraid of the answer even as he questioned…

Of all medieval symbols that have lost their potency over the centuries, perhaps the most debased is Fortune’s Wheel.

Let me write “Wheel of Fortune” now, and what probably comes first to most modern minds is that long-running television game show dedicated to the fulfilling and frustration of plain greed.  The medieval goddess Fortuna’s Wheel had a more complex meaning than that.

First, of course, Fortuna was not considered an actual goddess (polytheism not being an acceptable concept in medieval Europe).  Like her Wheel itself, she was a symbol – a way of illustrating a complicated idea in an abbreviated, visual form.  The symbol for a sports team or other popular product presently serves that same purpose, but Fortuna and her Wheel had deeper significance.  Sight of them was supposed to remind mankind that nothing lasts.

Pictures of Fortuna with her Wheel show a beautifully gowned woman, often crowned, often blindfolded, standing beside a giant, upright wheel in her control.  Around the rim, small figures of humans cling.  Some are obviously being carried upward toward the top of the Wheel where a richly garbed figure is always perched, an obvious winner who has Made It To The Top.  But below him, opposite to the rising figures, are figures clinging desperately, head downward and all too plainly being carried down against their will, while at the Wheel’s bottom are those fallen as far as they can go, ragged and impoverished.

Particularly effective are pictures where the little figures around the rim are the same man, rising to the height of prosperity, only to be cast down by blind Fortune.  But still Fortuna’s Wheel is always turning, and there he always is, still clinging to the rim, still trying to rise, always repeating the fate no human can escape – Life’s constant rise and downward sweep and rise again, only to sweep downward once more.  Inconstant Fortune.  This was meant to be a potent reminder of the world’s inconstant ways and a lesson to Man that he should strive to escape his clinging to Fortune’s Wheel by stepping away from worldly things and cleaving to those of the eternal realm of the spirit.

Not, of course, that this high purpose kept ordinary folk, in the ordinary way of things, from praying for Fortuna’s favor when they went to cast the dice or wager on a horse race.

– Margaret

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CHAPTER 7

The players were readying to bed when Joliffe came up the stairs.  Someone – probably Rose – had already laid out his pallet, pillow, and blanket.  Basset asked how the practice had gone with Sendell and all.

“Not so bad as he feared,” Joliffe said.  “He has some players who will do.”

“But then there’s you,” Ellis said.

Making show of ignoring that, Joliffe went on…

A number of records survive from Coventry, including accounts of the expenses for various guilds in various years.  From 1450, the craft guild of Smiths’ accounts include:

Accounts in other years have such things as:

The mending of Herod’s gown is probably explained by the fact that the actor playing Herod was generally expected to fling himself about as he ranted and raged, a tradition that held for probably close to two hundred years at least, as evidenced by Shakespeare having Hamlet warn his players not to “out-Herod Herod.”

We also have a pay scale for 1490, where God is paid 2 s. [shillings], Caiphus 3 s. 4d., Herod 3s. 4d., Pilate’s wife 2s., two devils and Judas 18 d., Peter and Malkus 16 d., Pilate 4s.

From the Coventry Leet Book, in the accounts kept for the expenses of producing the Weaver’s Play in the year 1542:

Or, as those last two items are actually spelled:

These are all from Records of Early English Drama: Coventry, ed. R.W. Ingram, University of Toronto Press, 1981 – one of a series of marvelous books where scholars, having gone back through local records, from the earliest ones available on into the 1600s, gathering all references to drama and other entertainments.  There’s hardly a better way to see the plays from the working side of them – and a delightful way it is, too.

– Margaret

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CHAPTER 5

Before he went his way, Will Sendell offered to come for Joliffe late in the afternoon, to take him where his company (said somewhat scornfully) would have their practice.  He added, “If we’re somewhat before the others, you can have chance to look through the script, to see if there’s aught to be done with it.”

Chapters 5 and 6 are taken up with Joliffe’s first involvement in the play that’s mainly his through the rest of the book.  Under the guise of the rehearsal, I slip in our first acquaintance with people later vitally involved in the story.  That said, though, I have to admit I greatly enjoyed the chance to blend in some finer points of medieval stagecraft.

Because of that, questions can arise over just how likely it was that medieval players brought the degree of skill to their work as Joliffe and Sendell show here and require of their fellows.  Besides the evidence of the plays themselves, requiring a high level of acting skill to make them effective, we have documentation from the time that shows how acting was seen as a complex and demanding skill.

At its most basic is the hope expressed in one play that the players’ “pronunciation of what they are to say here may be firm and sure, and no bad delivery [of lines] obscure the matter.”  (Something devoutly hoped by all directors to this day.)  In another play are the instructions “And let Adam himself be well instructed when he must reply, lest in replying he be either too quick or too slow.  Let not only Adam, but all the persons be so instructed, that they shall speak coherently, and make gestures agreeing with the thing they are speaking of; . . . and to the metre of the verse let them neither add nor subtract a syllable, but let them pronounce every thing clearly; and let those things that are to be said be said in their due order.”  Obviously someone had had to deal with players both insufficiently professional and far too free-form in their playing.

Even more telling is an ordinance recorded by the city of York for April 1476 as part of readying for their great cycle of Corpus Christi plays.  It decrees that “…yearly in the time of Lent there shall be called afore the Mayor … four of the most cunning [skilled], discrete, and able players within this city to search here and examine all the players and plays and pageants throughout all the artificers belonging to the Corpus Christi play, and all such as they shall find sufficient in person and cunning [skill] to the honor of the city and worship of the said crafts for to admit and able and all other insufficient persons either in cunning, voice, or person to discharge, remove, and avoid [dismiss].”

As William Tydeman well-observes in English Medieval Theatre: 1400-1500, if skill, voice, and appearance “were the three qualities felt to be essential for players in York in 1476, these may well be the criteria which were applied to the field of medieval acting as a whole.”

And so, firm in agreement that if this level of skill was expected of amateurs, an equal or higher one would be demanded of professionals, I set Joliffe and Sendell to coaching their fellows, neatly giving cover to whatever authorial machinations I might be perpetrating the while.

– Margaret

Sources
Robinson, J.W.,  “Medieval English Acting”, Theatre Notebook,  vol. 13 (1959), p.86
Tydeman, William.  English Medieval Theatre: 1400-1500. 1986. p.183

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CHAPTER 4

Since there was no peace to be had in the players’ upper chamber once several women gathered to their sewing there with Rose, Joliffe spent the next morning cramped into a corner of the players’ cart with the scroll of the Nativity (it being called that for simplicity’s sake) play entrusted to him by Basset.  Before seeing what might be done with the Messenger, he made a quick read through the whole play, this being Basset’s copy and so all of it.  Everyone else in the play would have only his own part and whatever line from someone else’s speech cued each of his own speeches.  That saved on ink and paper but could make confusion over what happened when and with whom until everyone became familiar with whatever play they were doing…

There were, upon a time, far more medieval English plays than now exist, and even some of what we have are only fragments, but from what remains, we can build an idea of the richness there must have been.

Probably best known among the survivors are the “cycle plays”, written to be performed in procession on specially-made “pageant wagons” through the streets of cities and towns prosperous enough to afford the extravaganza.  The most complete sets of plays that can be associated with their towns are those from York and Chester.  Others that are known to have existed have disappeared completely or only partially remain, as with Coventry’s, where we have two plays surviving and no more, despite evidence showing there were a number of others.

But there were a number of other kinds of plays to be had in medieval England, and some of those we still have, too: Single-episode biblical dramas; knockabout farces; “action dramas” with Robin Hood and St. George; the exquisite Everyman; the brutal (but fragmentary) Dux Moraud ; and, far from least, large-scale productions like The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, and Mankind that require a large playing place, numerous cast, elaborate sets, and special effects.  Unhappily, they’re only a pittance of what there must once have been, giving tantalizing suggestions of things we’ll never have a chance to see (which makes taking the chance to see modern productions of what survives all the more precious).

To my own ends, when Joliffe appeared in The Bastard’s Tale, I had chance to use both Wisdom and an actual farce from the time, and in A Play of Heresy I use Coventry’s surviving two for the plays Joliffe and his company are most involved with.  With all these plays, as I “produced, directed, and acted” them while writing the stories, I came to appreciate more and more fully just how theatrically effective they are.  In other of Joliffe’s books, most of the plays that Basset’s company have done have been of my own imagining because few small plays, such as would work for a small traveling company, have survived.  But I’m ambitious for Basset’s company: There are still some splendid plays that I very much want to see them do and a number of medieval theatrical experiences I want to explore – with murder and intrigue along the way, of course.

– Margaret

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CHAPTER 3

“The other guilds have only lately begun to ready their plays,” Basset said.  “Word is out that the shearmen and tailors are set to spare nothing this year to make their own splendiferous beyond anything it’s ever been before.  It being the Annunciation and Nativity –”

“And a half dozen other things, like jumble in a box,” Ellis muttered.

“– there are chances in plenty to fulfill their desire,” Basset continued, ignoring him, “and I gather that the other guilds are taking up the challenge to rival whatever the shearmen and tailors are doing.  So there’s now something of a scramble for a greater leavening of skilled players among the general rout of once-a-year folk.  Remember William Sendell?”

Despite what might be thought, there was indeed professional theater in medieval England, and modern scholarly studies show it was thriving.

Documents tell, of course, of travelling companies of players all over the country, performing in all sizes and kinds of venues.  Many of these companies belonged to great and lesser lords and even gentry, and they were certainly more numerous than we know.  Between 1450 and 1496, we have record in Yorkshire’s West Riding alone of performances by companies of players belonging to King Henry VI, the duke of York, Lord Plumpton, J. Harrington, Lord Eure, Sir Edward Hastings, Sir John Selbayne, King Edward IV, Lord Fitzhugh, Lord Lovell, the earl of Westmorland, Lord Tyrell, the duke of Gloucester, Lord Scroop, Lord Percy, and King Henry VII. [1]

We also know that “players of large centres such as Coventry whose core of professional players were familiar figures on the roads of Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, and Gloucestershire”[2] and that there were professional players who hired out individually to produce and direct local efforts, such as for parishes, since “parish drama in its many forms was a money-making venture that allowed the churchwardens to keep the fabric of their ancient churches together.”[3]  For instance, we “know that in Essex and Kent in the early sixteenth century [when things had changed little from the 1400s] they could already call on professional help from ‘property players’ (producers) from London who would organise the set and special effects, using their expertise and local labour.”[4]  And: “By all accounts the non-cycle plays were performed for profit rather than as a display of power and wealth or as a means of pious education for the unlettered.  These plays . . . sometimes acted as an important part of parochial capital building campaigns; they helped build whole church towers, replace roofs, and add aisles to parish churches.  They brought . . . a nearly surefire source of income to ailing or ambitious parishes everywhere in [East Anglia] . . . during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.”[5]

Add to all of that the undoubted fact that a number of cities and towns found it worth their while the mount the elaborate and costly cycle plays on a regular basis for more than a century, drawing on professional help to augment their citizens’ participation, and you have every indication that professional theater was alive, widespread, and doing very well in medieval England.

So the little I was able to use about players and their work in A Play of Heresy leaves much, much more to tell.

– Margaret

[1] John M. Watson, ‘A Parish Play in the West Riding of Yorkshire’, English Parish Drama, ed. Alexandra F. Johnston, p.156.
[2] Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘What Revels are in Hand’, ibid., p.101.
[3] ibid.
[4] Meg Twycross, ‘The theatricality of medieval English plays’, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theater, ed. Richard Beadle, 1994, p.65.
[5] John C. Coldewey, ‘The non-cycle plays and the East Anglian tradition’, ibid.

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CHAPTER 2

He was shortly overtaken by a trotting line of pack-horses, their rope-bound bundles strapped firmly to backs and sides.  Their rider at lead did not give him so much as a look, but Joliffe and the rear man shared friendly nods as they passed.  The titupping of hoofs faded, the rain gave up, and for a time Joliffe was alone on the road again, except companioned now by regret at how much of ease was gone from his day.  He had been looking forward to being simply a player in Coventry.  Now he was supposed to find out what he could about this Master Kydwa.  And Lollards…

Near the beginning of the outline for A Play of Heresy, Joliffe, having parted company with his fellow-spy, “goes on, alone again, into Coventry.  He finds Basset and the others…”  There.  Done.  Joliffe arrives in Coventry; Joliffe finds his friends; now we can get on with murdering people.  Simple enough, yes?

Or not.

In a story set in a modern setting much can go unsaid.  “He pulled up outside the motel office where ‘Vacancy’ glowed in the window.”   That’s all understandable enough to a modern reader.  But “arrives in Coventry” – and medieval Coventry at that – conveys no real sense of place.  Those bald words contain no sense of what Joliffe actually experiences in arriving there in 1438.  So, as the author, I have to make Coventry happen for the reader right along with Joliffe, and that simple statement in the outline —  “Joliffe goes into Coventry” — led to my digging into my files folders for photos, maps, and descriptions of Coventry that I had accumulated over the years, plus accessing my memories of several visits there, plus finding a wonderful site online that amplified and clarified much I already had.

Every bit of all that was then distilled into a few paragraphs of description mixed with action, as Joliffe arrived in Coventry by way of the Warwick road.  Such are the delightful travails of research – much learned so it can be refined down to precisely the little needed in the story itself.  But without the much, a writer can’t be sure exactly what little is needed.

Of course threaded through the whole story, as Joliffe wanders the town in search of secrets and truths, are more details about Coventry.  Drawn from all those maps and photos and descriptions, they help to build a picture of a thriving town full of proud, prosperous citizens – an everyday setting of normal lives into which the story’s deceptions and murders are woven.  To this day, after all the time I’ve spent “walking through Coventry” with Joliffe, I have the nagging suspicion that, if I had to, I could now find my way in medieval Coventry fairly handily.

But of course there’s nearly nothing of medieval Coventry left for us to wander in for real.  Unlike many towns that still have their medieval streets, Coventry’s medieval heart is gone, bombed and burned along with its cathedral during World War II and afterward rebuilt to meet more modern needs.  Only in our imaginations, drawing on what facts remain, can we still wander there.  But that’s what historical novelists should delight in doing – helping us to walk where otherwise we never could, because that’s one of the reasons we read historical novels, right?  To experience another place in another time, where otherwise we could never go.

I, at least, greatly enjoyed my time in medieval Coventry and deeply hope that you will, too.

– Margaret

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CHAPTER 1

The day was dove-gray, soft under low clouds, with the rain mist-gentle on Joliffe’s face and beading silver on his horse’s dark mane.  His cloak was a long way yet from soaking through nor had he troubled to pull up his hood; the rain felt good against his face.  Too, he judged by blue patches of sky showing in the east that clearing weather was on the way and there would likely be sun enough to dry his hair and cloak well before he came to Coventry, especially since he was making no hurry of his going…

In the opening chapter of A Play of Heresy, I wanted to layer in some details of the spy-work Joliffe had been at before the story starts, both to give a sense of what sort of man he is and build a feeling for the reader of the wider world beyond the circle of the book’s immediate action.  In historicals, this sense of the wider world is useful in making sure the characters are seen as existing in a complex context, not simply in the narrow bubble of the story.  In this case, rather than rather gratuitously resorting to mention of unrelated famous events of the time with no bearing on the story (to be avoided at all costs, in any case), I enjoyed involving Joliffe in more local – but no less real – issues among the region’s gentry and lower nobility, at just the level Bishop Beaufort could make best use of his skills.

Happily, I had my notes from Christine Carpenter’s Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401-1499 and her article “The Beauchamp Affinity: A study of bastard feudalism at work” (English Historical Review xcv, 1980) to draw on for all the details I needed (and more).

Interestingly, this isn’t a book or article I had just read, or even read specifically to use for A Play of Heresy.  In fact, I read them a good many years ago simply because they cover the period in which I’m particularly involved and would serve to add to my layers of my knowledge about the time and people.  I didn’t know if I would ever have particular use for what I read, but this is what it’s like for a fanatic researcher – reading and studying not simply what seems to be needed for your immediate purpose but everything that comes to hand, because you never know what, at some point, will suddenly be of use.

Besides – all right: I’ll admit it – I find this sort of reading-for-research just out-and-out plain fun!

– Margaret

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The Lovell family and their manor of Minster Lovell were not made up for this story.  The effigy of Lord Lovell mentioned here is still in the parish church, and the ruins of their lovely manor house can still be visited beside the Windrush River under Wychwood in Oxfordshire.  I recommend it.

As for Lionel Knyvet’s affliction, epilepsy has been known throughout history.  It takes many different forms and is better understood now than ever before, with ways to often control the seizures, but through most of the centuries it was seen as either a mental disease – madness – or else as a spiritual one – possession by either demonic or shamanistic spirits, depending on the culture in which the person lived (and lives; such beliefs persist in many places) – or of course as madness brought on by demonic possession.

In medieval English law, madness was a recognized defense.  The legal ramifications of Lionel’s supposed crime, given he had apparently committed it while mad, were as compassionate as laid out in the story.  Instead of a legally-recognized madman’s property being seized into the king’s hands and lost after he was found guilty of committing a crime, his property would be held in trust for him, in the hope of him regaining his wits, whereupon his property and his freedom would be restored to him.

Of course the law also includes a warning to beware of someone feigning madness in order to avoid punishment, which goes to show that human nature holds true through the years – and that medieval lawyers and juries were no fools.

– Margaret

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I remember, in my early days in St. Frideswide’s, a morning when I had to leave off my writing for the day, dress in “office clothes”, and go to stand on a corner waiting for a bus to take me to yet another temp job. The day was February at its most bleak: grim, gray, cold, and slush-ridden. Traffic roared past, and all the buses were full or, when one paused with at least standing room left, I failed to scale the dirty snowbank faster than others eager to crowd into the fusty heat beyond the hissing doors. As one bus after another came and went – with nothing to be won by actually getting on one except a day in a cubicle under merciless fluorescent lights — I thought (quite pathetically, as I recall), “I want to go back to my nunnery!”

Historical Tapestry is hosting Why I Love Life in a Medieval Nunnery today.

– Margaret