The secrets of the past are all around us, hidden in our streets
and buried under our feet and in this series
I'll be uncovering those
secrets as I explore Britain's Most Historic Towns.
I'll decipher physical clues.
You can make out details of her face, her ruff.
And get to know some extraordinary
characters who are often over-looked.
With the help of Ben Robinson's eye-in-the-sky I'll discover
which towns across the UK reveal the most about each period
in British history and find out how those stories still resonate today.
3,880.
More and more individuals are still dying from the plague.
It's quiet overwhelming.
From the adventurous Elizabethans to the elegant Georgians,
from medieval knights through to the height of empire,
I'll tell the story of an era through the story of a single town.
Today I'm in Britain's most medieval town.
A town that found itself at the centre of an era-defining battle.
I think I'm holding my breath.
Where powerful merchants stylishly challenged the status quo.
So I'm regal? Or a merchant's wife who is breaking rules.
Oh, I like that.
Home to a stunning cathedral and an awesome castle,
the site of one of the most decisive battles in English history.
If the French had won this battle, history would have played out
very differently. Yes, we would have had a French monarchy.
If you want to understand the power and the politics, the cut
and thrust of medieval England, Lincoln is the place to come.
Modern Lincoln is a picturesque university town,
where the medieval period is very much still on show.
And its 100,000 residents get used to rubbing shoulders with
four million tourists every year.
It's not hard to see the draw.
Beyond the cathedral walls,
there's a wealth of history woven into the very fabric
of a beautifully preserved old town, that perches on top of quite a hill.
Lincolnshire is fairly flat, so a vantage point like this,
with clear lines of sight for miles in every direction,
makes Lincoln a prime location for military strong hold and there's no
doubt that Lincoln castle saw plenty of action during the Middle Ages.
I'm focusing on the Medieval Period from the explosive Norman
invasion in 1066 until the catastrophic arrival
of bubonic plague in 1348.
Through almost three centuries,
conflicts between the crown and the people have reshaped England
and laid the foundations of identity that are still being built
upon today. Worshippers thought an all-powerful church held the keys
to heaven but an evil king could make everyday life a living hell.
War, rebellion and stark inequality put huge strains on the population.
But despite the hardship, many in England somehow thrived, until
that lethal, cataclysmic plague which rocked the pillars of society.
Lincoln was witness to so many pivotal moments during this
pivotal period, but why was the town established here in the first place?
150 miles north of London
and 70 miles to the south of York,
it was the Romans who put Lindum,
as they called it, on the map.
As well as being on a main Roman road, Lincoln was
also bisected and connect by major waterways that flowed from the rich
farmland and out to the North Sea.
After the Roman army withdrew from Britain in the fifth century,
Lincoln would became a Saxon town but changed
little until William the Conqueror's
invading Norman army arrived in 1067.
Recognising the strengths of the old Roman fortress, William decided
this would be home to one of several huge new cathedrals across England
that would become the lynchpins of a new Roman Catholic Church.
Lincoln's would be one of the finest.
In 1072 the Normans begin building their cathedral on the site
of pre-existing Anglo-Saxon church.
It was ravaged by fire,
almost completely demolished by an earthquake but it kept coming
back and you can just imagine in, teeming with activity, labourers and
stone masons and when they paused, worshippers and pilgrims here.
Lincoln Cathedral was the beating heart of Medieval Lincoln.
It's impossible to resist the magnetism of a structure that
stood as the world's tallest building for over 200 years
until its spire fell in the 1500s.
Medieval expert Dr Antonella Luzzia Scorpo wants to show me how the
cathedral transformed Lincoln
from a simple Anglo-Saxon settlement.
It is a magnificent cathedral,
and the oldest bits of it the origins of it are Norman? They are.
And in this case William the first
I think is actually suing it to make a very clear statement
about controlling the North. Yes.
It's the start of Lincoln booming as a centre, not just
an ecclesiastical centre, a centre of power, administration but also
a centre of trade and commerce that would continue actually throughout.
A really booming medieval economy. Indeed.
The busy cathedral boosted footfall to the area.
Add to that the security provided by a powerful
garrison of soldiers in the castle and it wasn't long before
Lincoln had a bustling high street, complete with merchants' houses.
This is a Norman house from the 1170s. That's lovely.
That's Norman up there, is it? The window is.
It means people must've lived on the first floor while downstairs
would have been used for commercial activity or transaction.
Yeah, it's lovely that we've got
these bits of Norman Lincoln still there.
It is, it is, and it's still there.
I love the fact that they've still got this market here
and there's still trade going on
that would have been here in the Middle Ages. Yeah.
It's brilliant. Lots of people of Lincoln
and the surrounding countryside pouring into the city.
Foreign merchants would have been
here as well trading different goods, different products,
it's a place of gossip, of sharing news, information.
It must have been really lively, really colourful.
Think about the languages,
the sounds, the colours as you say, the textures as well.
There are a loads of tourists here and there would have been lots
of people coming from further afield centuries ago.
Already with the Normans, I mean, coming over and that brings
a lot of different communities,
we know the Jewish community, for example, massively increased
and the market place really was a
place where you could see a lot of them.
Lincoln's markets really flourished from the late 11th century
with people coming from right across Northern Europe to trade crafts
and goods. And the locals here played to their strengths using
the surrounding fertile grazing lands to produce
much sought-after sheep's wool.
And the producers of the wool. Are these your sheep?
These are my sheep, yeah.
They'll be clipped some time around earlyjune, we'll package it
all up, roll it up and we'll be selling it.
They'll be about 2.5 kilos of wool from that sheep.
My sheep actually graze around an abbey that was built upon
the wool trade initially. Really?
Yeah. Oh, yeah, there's a few round the area.
Indeed, and obviously wool was one the main products that was
exported by Lincoln, a key centre of trade internationally.
Space hungry sheep and their produce were crucial to Lincoln's
medieval economy and the Norman's recognised the need to grease
the wheels of commerce with advances in infrastructure.
Aerial archaeologist Ben Robinson is using his eye-in-the-sky to get
a better look at the transport links that helped Lincoln prosper.
Lincoln was developing into a thriving economic hub with
cash pouring into the city, filling up the coffers of not
only its increasingly rich merchants but also, the crown.
To get his cut, the king needed a local tax office.
Lincoln Guildhall stands on the site of the medieval town's
administrative centre. Many merchants,
traders and kings would have passed under the archway here,
but it's the ancient documents, which are now held above it,
that dictated how costly or profitable their visit would be.
Oh, you've got these lovely documents out.
Aren't they beautiful? They're amazing.
The mayor's officer Richard Storey has retrieved
some of the town's most historic archive from under lock and key.
Thank you for getting these documents out for me
to have a look at such close quarter as well, this is fantastic.
Is that oldest document you've got here in Lincoln?
The oldest one that survives, yes. When does that date to?
That dates to 1157.
That's Henry II. It confirms previous privileges as far
back as Edward the Confessor which compels all the merchants
of the county of Lincolnshire to come to the city of Lincoln
to trade so if you want to conduct
your business you have to come to Lincoln to do that.
You've got to come here? You've got to come here.
It increases the revenue in the city, there by increases
the revenue to the crown.
The city paid the king directly for the monopoly on trade in the area.
This was always a flat rate of tax regardless of profits,
a privilege granted only to the most important trading
and financial centres in England.
So we pay £180 at this stage to the crown to hold the city
of the king in chief, we account for our own revenue at the Exchequer.
Anything we make over and above
£180 is for the purse of the city, the common purse.
And was Lincoln making money over and above that rent? Yes.
Substantially we believe, yes.
But there's no doubt the money from the additional purse
did go to make the ruling elite even
wealthier than they had been for years.
The peasants weren't doing very well. No, not really.
These ancient documents,
and subsequent Royal charters laid the foundations upon which
Lincoln's elite built their most profitable trade.
So throughout this period, how important is wool?
Is it kind of the primary trade?
It does start to develop, certainly after 1262
when a man called john de Blighton, in about 1307 he exported
the equivalent of 33,000 kilos of wool through the city of Lincoln.
That sounds fairly impressive to me. It's hugely impressive.
The crown's trust in Lincoln is obvious from the impressive
relics here at the Guildhall.
By the time King Richard ll gifted this sword to the mayor
the senior townsmen reaping were healthy profits.
And as Lincoln's wool trade grew, so did the traffic to the city,
demanding improvements in the road network serving the town.
We're just coming up the river to this very beautiful bridge.
Is that medieval? It is, 1160 the high bridge was built.
The River Witham runs right through town and joins the Fosse Dyke
canal at Brayford pool.
This bridge replaced an archaic ford, propelling the city towards
a more permanent, prosperous future.
It was as important as the water networks to one extent.
So those people that didn't have goods to move them via boat
along the river, could still bring them in and access the
city markets and commerce could continue.
And building bridges like this, that's part of reinvesting
that wealth coming to the city. Absolutely.
I think I'm holding my breath. SHE LAUGHS
With its farmland, transport networks
and thriving commercial hub,
Lincoln in the 12th century was a key player in England's economy
and was poised to become one of the nation's five most populous towns.
But then King John arrived on the throne - greedy, rapacious,
not the best liked of kings and trouble was brewing on the horizon.
I'm in Lincoln, exploring the advances that revamped
medieval England in the 11th to 14th centuries.
A wool-fuelled economic boom placed this cathedral town
firmly within the crown's favour, but the good times weren't to last.
Relations between Norman kings and the wealthy barons,
who actually controlled places like Lincoln,
had always been strained, but outright conflict had been avoided.
When Richard the Lionheart died in 1199
the barons accepted his brother as king.
It was a decision they would come to regret.
A hapless military leader, early in his reign John lost Normandy -
and its huge revenues - to the King of France.
To try to compensate he waged expensive
and largely unsuccessful campaigns in Ireland and Wales, mercilessly
taxing his barons, making ever more enemies along the way.
In 1208, John managed to fall out with the Pope,
over who should be Archbishop of Canterbury,
and the result was a papal interdict.
This was a colossal price to pay.
Religion was so important in people's lives and this
interdict meant that people couldn't be buried in consecrated ground.
John had effectively locked his subjects out of heaven.
Matthew Paris, the chronicler of St Albans, gives us a bit of an insight
into just how unpopular John had become.
He wrote, "Foul as it is,
"Hell itself is defiled by the foulness of john."
Within five years his dominance had faltered.
King John was forced to agree to Magna Carta,
limiting the power of the crown for the first time in English history,
guaranteeing many rights to his angry barons.
For a while it seemed like things would proceed on an even keel.
But then he started to flout the terms of the Magna Carta
and the political situation became dangerously unstable.
John's rebel barons turned to France's Prince Louis to
challenge the English throne,
and key parts of the country soon became war zones.
By 1217, huge swathes of England lay in rebel hands
and things were looking bleak for the future of the Norman dynasty.
Professor Louise Wilkinson has studied this critical moment
and how the fate of England would come to be decided at Lincoln.
So what was Lincoln's role in this? What was the official position here?
Are they supporting John
or supporting the French claim to the throne?
Within the castle they were very, very firmly royalist, but in the
city, I think they were definitely more sympathetic towards the rebels.
But who was in charge here at the castle?
Here at the castle there was a brilliant noble woman,
then in her sixties, called Nicola de la Haye.
She governed the royal castle on behalf of the king... Right.
...and she presided over the prison,
over the life of the castle and its garrison... Yeah.
...so she was the leading royal figure in the locality.
She sounds like an extraordinary woman.
Yeah, I think Nicola really was an iron lady of her day.
When the rebels occupied the city early in 1217,
when Prince Louis came and visited in February,
she held the garrison very loyally.
Oh, my goodness. So he's here?
So he's herembriefly.
Presumably expecting to take the castle, to...
I think he was very opti... ..Take the north.
Hoping to take the castle, being the operative word. He didn't.
But she's kind of holed up in here, and there are, if not French forces,
then French sympathisers out there in the town.
Yeah, a whole sea of danger just out in the town,
so it must have been really incredibly stressful for her. Yeah.
Outnumbered more than three to one, Nicola de la Haye
and her besieged forces were almost defeated.
This battle for Lincoln was the last throw of the dice
and the royalists were depending on a 70-year-old knight,
William Marshal, and his scratch army approaching from the west.
Ben Robinson is poised to show us the field of battle and demonstrate
William Marshal's strategy as it played out on the 20 May 1217.
So it all comes to a climax here just outside the castle?
It does. The royalists pushed out towards the cathedral
and there was dramatic hand-to-hand fighting in the city streets.
In the meantime, the crossbow men were raining down their bolts
on the rebel barons and the knights below them. It was brutal.
CROWD SHOUTING
So what happens at the end?
By the middle of the afternoon on the day of the battle
the French just turned and ran.
And they referred to the battle actually as the Fair of Lincoln,
really largely just to taunt Louis and the French
for losing such a dramatic battle.
If the French had won this battle, history would have played out
very differently.
Yes, we would have had a French monarchy, so really it's probably
the second most important battle in English history after Hastings.
The weapon that had tipped the battle
in Nicola de la Haye's favour was the crossbow.
Expert medieval armourer Tod Todeschini is showing me
just why the royalist crossbowmen, with their weapons of choice,
were so lethally effective.
Hi.
Hi, how are you doing? Hello.
That's a crossbow. SHE LAUGHS
That is a crossbow.
I recognise that, and that looks more like an ordinary longbow.
You know, we think of the English always using the longbow
but that's not at all the case so sieges particularly,
crossbows were very well-suited.
What were the advantages of a crossbow compared with a longbow?
We've got a crenulation here.
With the crossbow, you can shoot from here, so you're well covered.
What I can also do, and I can't do with the longbow,
is I can get right out and I can shoot here.
But also, I can shoot down, and I can shoot left,
and I can shoot right.
When I'm shooting this one, I have to shoot from back here
because what I can't have, is I can't have the bow ends
hitting the wall or anything like that.
It's great for an open field, where you've got all the room you need,
but where you're tight, it just doesn't work.
Crossbows may have been around for centuries,
but it was the streamlined version of the 11th century...
Whoa!
...that allowed the royalists to defend Lincoln Castle.
Under Tod's expert guidance, I'm going to see
if I've got what it takes to be a medieval sharpshooter.
0h!
Aim it down, because you're quite high at the moment.
So, aim it down, a little bit more, a little bit more,
a little bit more.
Put your left arm down.
Whoa! SHE LAUGHS
Unlucky. The melon survives! The melon survived another day.
I think I'd need a bit more training
before I was able to defend a medieval castle.
Yes, but actually don't forget, look at that.
I mean, all of those would fit within the torso of a person.
S0, yes, you might not have got their heart,
but they're not having a good day.
The Battle of Lincoln turned around the fortunes of Marshal,
De la Haye and the royalists. With King John now dead,
and his nine-year-old son on the throne,
there was hope for a second chance
at the Magna Carta's steadying powers.
But while the powerful men of England found new confidence,
it was the common people that continued
to suffer from neglect and, for one minority, devastating demonisation.
I'm in Lincoln
discovering how some aspects of medieval life in England
still resonate today.
This vibrant cathedral town had become a flourishing centre of trade
and commerce, lining the pockets of the crown and local merchants.
New buildings, bridges and waterways ensured that even more wealth
was flowing through the urban community.
But outside the city walls, for most people,
simply surviving was still a struggle.
Ben is looking at the evidence of what life was like
for the rural population out in the countryside around medieval Lincoln.
Now, at ground level, it's a little bit difficult
to make out what's going on. But from above,
all these shapes, patterns start to make sense
and this is absolutely thrilling
because I can see the layout of an entire lost medieval village.
I can see individual streets here,
these slightly sunken areas with raised banks on either side
and you can really pick out the plan of the village.
And the cottages would have had animals in the back yard.
You've got barns, so obviously they were farming the land.
Those little circles, these are probably dovecots.
In order to keep doves or pigeons for their eggs and their meat
you had to have a licence,
so the only people that would get license were the lords of the manor.
So if I've got a couple of dovecots in there,
I've probably found the site of the manor house.
I think the fact of the matter for a lot of these deserted settlements
was a combination of things.
A combination of environmental factors,
economic factors that just conspired against them.
And then you've got landlords turning vast areas
over to sheep farming,
you've got deteriorating weather conditions,
wet summers, wet winters -
you can't grow much so people are literally starving.
Put all this together and you got formerly thriving communities
just disappearing,
not necessarily overnight but over a period of time.
Whether it was ruined harvests or rebel barons,
in 1217 the King of England had a lot on his plate.
The fact that he was nine years old, hardly helped.
But his guardians, the knight William Marshal among them,
knew what to do to calm the population down.
Sealed inside the castle is Lincoln's own Magna Carta.
Now, john, and in fact, the barons,
would go on to renege on the terms of that charter,
so it was edited and reissued under the boy king, Henry Ill.
But alongside the Magna Carta,
Henry Ill issued this document, this charter
and I think it deserves much more recognition than it usually gets.
This is the Charter of the Forest.
It's essentially a piece of legislation
that would have a huge impact on the lives of ordinary people,
that enormous section of society that led a hand to mouth existence
and could easily find themselves starving after a poor harvest.
While just out of grasp, in the vast Royal Forests,
lay a potentially life-saving source of food and fuel.
I've met up with Dr Claire Kennan in the ancient woodland
of Lincolnshire's Doddington Hall
to discover why the Charter of the Forest was necessary.
William the Conqueror makes large areas of the country royal forest
and then by the time we get to King John's reign,
a third of England is royal forest.
So this disquiet had been brewing for a couple of hundred years, then?
For a long time. Yeah. Yeah.
The royals essentially locked out the common people from forest lands
and the rich natural bounty that was found there.
Grazing pastures, wild game
and forest fruits were strictly out of bounds.
Previously, there were really hard penalties in place
for things such as felling trees for firewood.
If you were caught poaching a bore or a deer
you could be mutilated, blinded or even executed.
The foresters, as well, would often fine entire villages
if perpetrators couldn't be found. Really?
So they were really severe penalties.
But under the Charter of the Forest,
a lot of these restrictive rules and regulations are removed.
It must have made a massive difference to people
just being able to use land. It freed them up to...
I mean, to do this. Yeah, exactly. Chop down trees, make a fire.
Forage for ingredients for soup. Definitely.
I did not forage for these ingredients. No.
Somebody else foraged for them.
In the supermarket, I imagine.
While the Magna Carta has hogged the limelight,
the lesser known Charter of the Forest
was arguably more important for ordinary people.
Landowner at Doddington Hall, Claire Birch,
honours her duty to provide public access to the ancient woodlands.
I think it's incredibly important.
There's a lot of research, isn't there,
about how access to the countryside and to nature
is so important for mental and physical health,
and you know as landowners, we've got a huge asset here,
it's a massive opportunity to do stuff along those lines.
What sort of things do people come and do in the woodland here?
We have lots of people who walk and they come and pick blackberries,
and more recently we tarmacked over a big farm track
and it actually joins the village to the Sustrans Cycle Route.
So you basically get the whole way in to Lincoln
without having to be anywhere near cars.
I'm sure that many people's lives in medieval England
were absolutely miserable.
But this Charter of the Forest meant that,
for some of the common people,
their lives were set to improve somewhat.
But there was a section of society in medieval Lincoln
that was absolutely thriving
and that was the Jewish community.
A small number of Jewish people arrived in England with the Normans
from Northern France in the later 11th century.
One of the most successfuljewish communities
was established here in Lincoln, second in importance only to London.
And Professor Anthony Bale is showing me
why this community flourished here.
It is.
Yeah.
I mean, this must have been very high value property,
we're right...we're very close to the cathedral,
we can hear the bells clearly.
The building of Norman England,
including Lincoln's own cathedral,
had in part been bank rolled by Jewish financiers.
While Christians were forbidden from money lending for profit,
Jews were not. In return, The Crown's protection
allowed a lively Jewish community to become well established
and largely integrated here by the mid-12th century.
That's a beautiful building.
And what about what the Jews were doing here?
Was there a specific trade or a specific function in society
that they were performing?
It's almost like they're sort of permitted to exist
in a largely Christian society but with very strict rules.
Following strong anti-Jewish guidance from the Pope
in the early 1200s,
the English crown started relying more on alternative funds,
reducing their protection of the Jews
and imposing hefty taxes upon them.
Forced into claiming back the money they had lent,
the Jews of Medieval England were ostracised
and became desperately unpopular amongst a largely Christian society.
The disharmony in Lincoln came to a head in 1255
When the body of an eight-year-old boy was said to have been found
in a well near the town,
it was the Jewish community that was accused of his murder.
His remains were supposedly entombed in the cathedral
in a shrine that once stood here.
And was there any evidence it was the Jews
that had killed this little boy?
Yeah.
The death of a child is a terrible thing...
...but then what it turns in to...
...is persecution of the Jewish community.
Yeah.
Yeah. And that echoes down the centuries.
After becoming entirely marginalised,
the Jews were ultimately expelled from England in 1290,
not to return for over 350 years.
I find this story of Little Hugh so distressing.
It seems dreadfully familiar,
this idea of a community being scapegoated for a crime,
a minority being persecuted.
It rattles down the centuries,
The Holocaust of the 20th century has extremely deep roots.
Jews being marked out, being made to wear...
...yellow stars.
And I think we still see some of that today,
we see minorities being othered,
being persecuted in apparently enlightened, developed countries.
It is medieval.
Today, the city's cathedral welcomes all faiths and none,
to commemorate it's medieval heritage,
to be uplifted by its architectural grandeur and aesthetic pleasure.
But in the 1348, the faith of Lincoln's medieval congregation
would be sorely tested by the arrival of a disease
that ripped through the population
and shocked society to its core.
I'm in Lincoln where I'm immersing myself in the Middle Ages.
Looking at architecture and economy, politics and prejudice.
I've seen how power struggles between medieval England's
elite sowed the seeds of democracy but did little to reduce vast
inequality between the social classes, In the eyes
of the church all people were subjects of a greater power,
a message that needed to be constantly reinforced,
and nowhere were these mind games more evident than in Lincoln's
magnificent cathedral.
This architecture is designed to be awesome, to give you a real
sense of the sublime and a sense of being a small part
of something much, much bigger,
but there are also some tiny intricate details to be found here.
Hidden messages amongst the stone masonry.
There's some really, really curious images.
There's a man's face up there, his hands are curling over
the parapet and his hair is flowing back as
though it were a lion's mane.
I like this jovial fellow with his cap and his prodigious sideburns.
I wonder if he's one of the stone masons.
This one is really weird. Look at that.
A woman playing the fiddle but she has the hind quarters of a cow
and a then there is a man behind her, he has wings.
You think he might be an angel, but look at his body.
It's covered with lizard-like scales.
This is the kind of medieval imagination gone wild.
For the church to remain all powerful in a time of deep
superstition, notions of the afterlife, whether heaven or
hell, had to be omnipresent.
For a largely illiterate congregation,
imagery like this was worth far more than a thousand words.
Art has the potential to let us in to the medieval mind so I'm headed
to the cathedral library to look at a very special 700-year-old book.
Commissioned by wealthy landowner Sir Geoffrey Luttrell,
this celebrated manuscript favourably depicts everyday
life in 14th century Lincolnshire.
It contains 150 Psalms of the Old Testament
but presented in this kind of mind-bending framework of images.
Medieval Art Historian Professor Alixe Bovey is helping me
decipher the images in this beautiful facsimile of the book.
This lady who's been spinning
and she's interrupted her activity to go out and feed her chickens.
So that's looks quite normal, like a normal domestic scene
and then you have a fish with a man's head with a beard.
Right, and these kind of jarring pivots between every day life
and natural world. And then, yeah, these mad creatures.
I might have a go at drawing him, actually.
Between the 13th and 14th century English illuminated
manuscripts abound with inventive and perplexing imagery.
But Sir Lutteral's text completed by around 1340 is surely
one of the most intricate.
I can see some similarities perhaps with Viking art,
with Anglo-Saxon art,
and even going back to the Iron Age where you've got those hidden faces
and animals mixed up with geometric patterns.
It's a very particular response to a Christian system
that has a heaven and it has a hell
and it has a world that's overrun with sinful bodies and rejoicing
bodies and I think there is quite a...
"complex inheritance in this imagery.
I love this juxtaposition of the pious text, the Psalms
and then these really playful funny characters in the margins.
I mean, they're just weird and wonderful.
The Lutteral Psalter is teeming with those fantastic beasts
but it also gives us a glimpse of the agricultural year
and Medieval fashion.
By the mid-1300s the streets of Lincoln would have been awash
with a multicultural melange of styles
and fabrics, but no matter your social standing or your costume,
by 1348 everyone was at risk of falling foul of the Black Death.
Plague had reached Britain's shores.
Costume historian Pauline Loven
and hair and make-up historian Olivia Free
are going to help me understand how nice clothes became about
much more than just looking good at the time of a lethal pandemic.
This looks like an undergarment.
I'm going to have to get out of this, aren't I? Yes, 'fraid so.
I'll start getting undressed.
That's your cue to leave!
It's thought the Black Death wiped out almost half of England's
population, forcing a social upheavaL
Oh, I think that's a bit of a shame to cover up the gorgeous
dress underneath.
But for those that survived, ere was hope for a better life
as labour shortages meant increased wages,
reduced taxes and an abundance of now affordable commodities.
Who would have been able to wear materials like this,
dresses like this?
Anyone could who could afford it.
After the Black Death the population is so reduced so everybody's
moving and adjusting their position and they do it through clothing
and if they can afford to dress like a King, they will.
If you can dress in a richer fashion,
than actually befits your social standing... Yes. ..you can possibly
bewitch people in to thinking
you really were a higher status individual.
Yes, than you both would suggest.
Sumptuary laws were introduced to make fabrics like that
exclusive to the elite,
and particularly, cloth of gold was the royal family only.
Right, so I'm regal. Yes.
Or a merchant wife who is breaking rules.
Ooh. Oh, I like that.
Scrambling to maintain the status quo, King Edward Ill
attempted to quash upward mobility with his sumptuary laws.
Members of each of the seven social categories were easily
identified by their dress and personal grooming.
If women are wearing make-up for their husbands alone
and only if it's natural make-up it was allowed.
But it was lightning. It wasn't all white.
Because if you were pale, then that meant that you were a wealthy lady,
you were staying indoors,
you weren't doing any hard labour in sun.
So, you certainly wouldn't want to affect a tan, then.
Fake tan would be... Absolutely not, indeed.
That would make you look like a working-class woman.
Yes, but you still had to look healthy.
Like I'm not just about to drop dead of the Black Death. Sometimes...
...physicians were called in to make somebody look healthy.
Often, kings, lords, particularly the men, actually,
would dye their hair. Mm-hm.
It's all about maintaining this look of a young, robust man,
so a way of keeping hold of his power is looking healthy.
I think world leaders are still doing that, don't you?
Absolutely! Yeah, yeah!
The church relaxed its rules on make-up, but still strictly enforced
veiling of hair, an excellent excuse for some high-fashion accessorising.
So, what did sumptuary law say about veils?
It restricted veiling to a value, so that if you are a lower status,
you could only spend so much on a veil.
Isn't it fascinating that there's this constant push and pull
between the attempt at controlling people and the way
they're expressing themselves and then people managing to push back...
Yes! ..to use the veil as a way of expressing your status in society?
It's lovely, isn't it? Yeah.
I think, at this point now, I need to see myself.
I've got no idea what I look like! THEY GIGGLE
Have you got a mirror? Yes, indeed.
Oh, my goodness.
That's extraordinary!
I feel different. It's really...
I think it's really interesting, putting these clothes on.
I think I knew what it felt like to be...
...an elite lady in Lincoln in the 14th century.
You look stunning, as well!
Eat your heart out, Game Of Thrones!
I've just stepped out the pages of the Luttrell Psalter!
King Edward's sumptuary laws on these fineries had little effect
on the huge upheavals that followed the Black Death -
an event that brought to an end an era which had seen Lincoln
at the heart of the action, a town whose entrepreneurs
refined the advances that reshaped the nation's economics...
...where the great powers of the Monarchy and the Barons clashed in
a brutal town centre battle for the future of England...
...and home to a cathedral rich in stories and covert messages
that dominated the town and its people.
Lincoln beautifully, compellingly captures the story
of medieval England.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media