Though in many ways cold and remote, Richard was not without a capacity for friendship. From the days of his youth he had always cherished the company of a select group of male friends. His deep affection for Robert de Vere in the 1380s is well known. In the 1390s he apppears to have been on intimate terms with a number of the senior clerks in his service. The Evesham writer says that the bishops of Worcester and Carlisle were prominent among his boon companions in 1398. His friendships with other men were almost certainly close and intense; but it is possible that they were also fickle. His friendship with Thomas Mowbray, for example, in the early 1380s did not last. In the 1390s, as he moved from adolescence to adulthood, there are signs that he took a greater delight in female company.

There is contemporary evidence that Duchess Cecily Neville's father-in-law Richard of Conisburgh, Earl of Cambridge, was illegitimate, as historian T.B. Pugh discusses. His mother's affair with John Holland was reported in chronicles in the 1380s (when Richard was conceived and born), and Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, curiously makes no mention or provision at all in his will for his younger son.

Some landlords started to make fundamental reassessments of their systems of estate management at varying points in the 1370s and 1380s. The 1380s saw the start of general leasing on the estates of the archbishopric of Canterbury, for example, and the same chronology fits Durham Cathedral Priory.³¹ In this respect, however, 1376 is an imprecise turning point. Most of the literature on this topic stresses the late 1380s and the 1390s, rather than the earlier 1380s, as a period of crisis in estate management. Regional circumstances allowed the recovery to be more prolonged in some regions than others. In the Breckland land values were rising into the later 1370s and 1380s.³²

In a wave of persecution in the 1380s, an unprecedented number of Jews in Spain converted. Many of these were genuine conversions, or became so over time, but many were not.

After c.1400 the scale of, and profits from, dairy farming declined greatly.⁶⁹ Similarly, in the 1390s cattle rearing began to level off in many parts of the country, but continued to expand until the early fifteenth century in certain areas of northern and southern England.⁷⁰ Chicken prices fell from the volatile highs of the 1350s and 1360s and remained stable throughout the 1380s and 1390s, albeit at a higher level than in the pre-plague period.⁷¹ In the 1380s demesne poultry rearing contracted and became less commercialized, perhaps due to a transfer of production to the peasant sector.⁷²

1380s

Meaning

Noun