Vanora Bennett - The People’s Queen

But now the King’s old. The knights are old. Their banners have faded. Their armour’s rusting. And there have been no victories in France for years – just losses, and ransom demands. So the talk on the roads is getting louder, and the looks in the eyes of men no one wants to look at is getting uglier.

But Aunty loves it all: the muttering, the mischief, the men no one wants to look at. She’s still taking in waifs and strays, even today, not children any more but furtive men with caps pulled down low on their foreheads to hide whatever burn marks are there. She gets them in to work her fields at her manor at Gaines. She loves that place. She doesn’t act anything like a landlord, of course. She pays whatever they want, no questions asked. She shakes her head over their hard-luck stories. She lets them sleep in the barns they put up. She organises rough feasts for them on holy days. She shares her luck with them, and anyone else willing to have a laugh, and a drink, and a dance, and a chat. They love her for it.

So does Alice. However grand Alice has become, these past few years, she’s gone on taking her worries to Aunty.

As she goes under the Aldgate, looking up from her horse to see if there’s any sign of life at Chaucer’s window (there isn’t), Alice thinks that it’s been good for her to be reminded by Aunty of how things look for the men on the ground. Because there’s more and more reason for the stinking, resentful runaways – the men of the road – to be angry. Because the people who are doing well, especially the post-Mortality new rich, who are doing well so very suddenly, are more dangerously, visibly extravagant than anyone has ever been before.

And that’s what Alice’s personal experience of the changes, in the walk of life she’s chosen, has been.

Clothes, for instance, are lovelier and more expensive than ever before, and on backs ever less noble. In the year Alice first came to court, the envious in Parliament were so anxious that the natural, static, eternal order of things was being upended by the shocking vanity of men in curly-toed shoes and women with a hunger for cloth of gold that the Members of Parliament vainly tried to stop the new rich flaunting themselves. They passed a law insisting that everyone dress according to their rightful station in life.

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