ter with the white rose of the House of York.Wars of the White and Red Roses were the last eruption of feudal anarchy before absolutism was established. In the course of the wars the greater part of the old aristocracy was exterminated while the property confiscations undermined their power. At the same time the social significance of the new nobility and the appearing bourgeoisie which became the chief support of Tudor absolutism, grew immensely. [3, pp. 80-81]
.3 Government and Society in the 14 th - 15 th Centuries
.3.1 Social Structureyear 1485 has usually been taken to mark the end of the Middle Ages in England. Of course, nobody at the time would have seen it as such. There was no reason to think that the new king Henry VII would rule over the country any different from the one ruled over by Richard III. Before looking at the changes in England under the House of Tudor it might be worth looking back at some of the main social developments that had taken place in the late Middle Ages.was still based upon rank. At the top were dukes, earls and other lords, although there were far fewer as a result of war. Below these great lords were knights. Most knights, even by Edward Fs time, were no longer heavily armed fighters on horses. They were «gentlemen farmers» or «landed gentry» who had increased the size of their landholdings, and improved their farming methods. This class had grown in numbers. Edward I had ordered that all those with an income of twenty pounds a year must be made knights. This meant that even some of the yeoman farmers became part of the «landed gentry», while many «esquires», who had served knights in earlier times, now became knights themselves. The word «esquire» became common in written addresses, and is only now slowly beginning to be used less.to the gentlemen were the ordinary freemen of the towns. By the end of the Middle Ages, it was possible for a serf from the countryside to work for seven years in a town craft guild, and to become a «freeman» of the town where he lived. The freemen controlled the life of a town. Towns offered to poor men the chance to become rich and successful through trade. [4, pp.57-61] the beginning the guilds were formed to protect the production or trade of a whole town. Later, they had come to protect those already enjoying membership, or who could afford to buy it, from the poorer classes of the same town. As they did not have the money or family connections to become members of the guilds, the poorer skilled workers tried to join together to protect their own interests. These were the first efforts to form a trade union. Several times in the 14 th century skilled workers tried unsuccessfully to protect themselves against the power of the guilds. The lives of the skilled workers were hard, but they did not suffer as much as the unskilled, who lived in poor and dirty conditions. However, even the condition of the poorest workers in both town and country was better than it had been a century earlier.fact, the guilds were declining in importance because of a new force in the national economy. During the 14 th century a number of English merchants established trading stations, «factories». The merchant organizations necessary to operate these factories became important at a national level, and began to replace the old town guilds as the most powerful trading institutions. However, they ...
