If we are to appreciate the scale of devastation which the Great Famine of 1315–22 brought to the British Isles, as it did to the whole of northern Europe, we must bring to mind calamities such as the Irish Famine, and the distress and dislocation that they generate. This is apposite even though the subsistence crisis was caused not by drought, but by unusually hard and prolonged rainfall, accompanied by sharp cold spells. These calamitous climatic conditions affected regions which had known steady population growth in the thirteenth century. Expansion had for a number of decades relocated rural families, creating new hamlets and communities with the encouragement of their lords. Tenants cultivated these increasingly marginal, poorer lands, often combining smallholding tenancies with income from labour for support of the family group. Of the 10–15 per cent of the population that perished during the Great Famine, a large proportion must have been among the landless and these precarious smallholders. Conversely, people migrated away from such devastated villages, swelling regional centres, such as Norwich, in the famine years. The social fabric was strained by horrific rumours: from reports about men and women eating dogs and horses in Northumbria, to cases of cannibalism. Those who memorialized these times adopted biblical and moralizing language and imagery. The calamities – famine, disease, raids by the Scots – were described by chroniclers as punishment for sin, while the illuminator of the Queen Mary Psalter (c.1325–6) gave pride of place to the figure of Joseph, who had wisely stocked Pharaoh’s granaries before the coming of famine. Edward II’s seven fat years, 1307–14, followed by seven very lean ones from 1315 to 1322, seemed to be part of a divine plan.
The famine was accompanied not by shocked economic lethargy but by frenzied activity, as poorer and needier folk sold land and livestock to their better-off neighbours, all in an attempt to gain coin and purchase ever dearer food. The many small transactions recorded in manorial courts in East Anglia reveal the anxiety of the times: the evidence of litigation over strips of land discloses not only expectations of heirs hopeful of inheriting, but the demands of creditors and arrears in rents accumulated in the years of dearth. As is often the case, credit was all but withdrawn in the years of bad harvest, to the benefit of the few who could afford to buy the lands forfeited by those forced to sell in order to buy food. The active land-market may also reflect exchanges of land from parents to sons and daughters, which anticipated inheritance, and aimed to help young families during the famine years.
To the crisis in agricultural production was added diminution in the number of livestock: sheep, pigs and cows, ducks and geese were slaughtered for food, and added to this was the high mortality among cattle and sheep due to murrain. This nasty epidemic was highly contagious and affected the cows, oxen and sheep so vital as traction animals, as sources of food, and for the production of wool. On the estates of Bolton Priory (Yorkshire) between 1319 and 1322 the number of oxen fell from 139 to 53, and of cattle from 225 to 31. The hides and wool of dead animals had to be buried, since burning was difficult in the very wet weather, a miserable task in the muddy expanses which the fields had become. Several regional economies depended upon wool: by the early fourteenth century, 40,000 sacks of wool were exported from Britain, mainly by Flemish and Italian merchants. Pastoral regions were thus doubly hit – through high corn prices and through the loss of livestock. The Welsh community of Morgannwg (Glamorgan) pleaded for relief from dues because it was left without any animals.
Beautiful barns and granaries kept food for the seigneurial family and its guests, and stored crops awaiting transfer to the market, like that built in warm Cotswold stone, at Great Coxwell. Such barns were later likened by William Morris to cathedrals, and Thomas Hardy imagined in them a true religious quality. During the famine years they were the targets of frustrated looting, and of conspiracies to empty them of their precious contents. King and parliament tried, although with limited success, to encourage the distribution of grain, and to counter speculation and buying up bread-corns before they could reach the market. Edward II wrote to men of influence, such as Richard Kellaw, Bishop of Durham, in 1316, with the request that he ensure that grain was sold and not hoarded. Parliament attempted to control the price of livestock in 1314, and of ale in 1317. Some institutions made special provisions in this emergency, for example Westminster Abbey in 1318–19, with additional distributions of grain for the poor. But most provision depended on the workings of thousands of local communities who were in the habit of vigilantly monitoring production and distribution of corn. By 1319–20 prices were stabilized in Devon through the import by sea of grain from East Anglia and Normandy.
The famine put further pressure on the internal workings of these communities. The neat provisions for communal cooperation, such as team-ploughing, which expected each member to contribute plough-beasts, collapsed as animals lay dying. Times of sowing were regulated, so that a neighbour’s sprouting growths would not be trampled under the sower’s foot: at Moundsmere (Hampshire) in 1327 by-laws recommended that Lent sowing be done when oak leaves were the size of mouse ears, and no later. All this careful regulation of pasturing and gleaning meant very little when crops failed to thrive, and the care taken to identify and punish offenders foundered as the familiar landscape and its makers disappeared. The intricate array of relations which supported agricultural production also deteriorated; with the famine vital services and structures suffered too. Everywhere, but above all in the north, mills are reported as being left in disrepair, standing untended because of the absence of millers, and in Lancashire and Cumbria the powerful water supplies to mills destroyed them in floods. These years saw the emergence in many areas of official commissions for the supervision of banks and sewers. Thomas of Ingoldisthorp was commissioner for the four Wiggenhall parishes on the Great Ouse upstream from King’s Lynn and his report of 1319 described ‘incalculable damage’. Throughout the 1320s commissioners supervised expenditure on the building of sea-dykes and the shoring-up of river-banks. Such maintenance and vigilance depended on local people, and thus a new tier of officialdom was added to existing governance: local dyke-reeves supported by a system of by-laws by which negligence to maintain banks was fined, with doubling and tripling on recurrent offences.
All this change affected the income of landlords: Canterbury Cathedral Priory, whose manors produced a surplus up to 1315, fell into deficit, which reached a shortfall of 45 per cent by 1318. Large institutional employers were also faced by growing wage-bills: the heavy waterlogged lands of champion England – that is, unenclosed and level tracts of country – required more labour if crops were to be planted in the hope of yields which might fetch the unusually high prices. In 1315 and 1316 Bury St Edmunds Abbey continued to pay its agrarian workers in bushels of wheat, food which was now much dearer than it had been in the past. Bolton Priory aimed to increase its income in these hard years by selling retirement packages to well-off pensioners, like Ranulf of Otterburn in 1314 and Adam Prophet, a local farmer, in 1317/18. The priory thus raised some £152 in two years. The management of estates and relations with tenants and labourers were supervised by reeves – who also hired carters, herdsmen, ploughmen and dairywomen, as necessary – crucial agents in the ravaged landscape.
When the weather improved slightly after 1318, and then finally after 1322, population recovered quickly and the cohort that had survived, together with its children and livestock, was better off in terms of diet and resources – a classic Malthusian pattern. In Taunton (Somerset) there was population loss of some 9.3 per cent between 1313 and 1319, but by 1330 population had recovered. Halesowen (Worcestershire) suffered a 15 per cent drop between 1315 and 1321 but experienced steady growth of 0.4 per cent a year thereafter.
Social patterns responded to the calamity with great subtlety and also remarkable speed. Earlier in the century, with pressure on land, young men married landed widows in order to establish themselves as tenants. In some regions up to half of marriages were of this type: John, son of Reginald Attepond of Redgrave (Suffolk), paid five marks for the hand of Agnes, widow of John son of Nicholas, in 1316, while only two shillings were paid for her sister’s hand. After the famine rates of remarriage fell as pressure on land diminished and the prices paid for marriage of landed widows declined, as more ‘companionate’ marriages were made, between men and women of similar age and situation. In such marriages the bride was expected to bring with her some property: in 1312 a Derbyshire woman from a servile family brought 20s. in cash, a cow worth 10s., a dress worth 13s. 4d., and the promise of a house.
Rents and incomes recovered by the 1330s and the fruitful interdependence between the villages of England and Wales and their neighbouring market towns and smaller towns was re-established. Wherever agrarian and commercial diversification had developed in the period of growth this was now a useful bulwark in the aftermath of crop failure: tinmining in Cornwall, fishing on the eastern coast, animal-trapping in Pickering Forest (Yorkshire), the keeping of rabbit warrens in the Breckland of East Anglia, charcoal-burning in the Forest of Inglewood (Cumbria), glasswork in the Weald of Sussex.
Crucial to recovery was the re-establishment by seigneurial households of their patterns of expenditure, which could reach thousands of pounds a year on food alone, often a third and sometimes a half of their annual incomes. Bread and ale were baked and brewed locally, and fed servants, but members of aristocratic families and their guests expected supplies of meat and fish and wine. Meat was salted and kept, but fresh meat was expected at the best tables, and it had to be hunted or bought, whatever the cost.
Most of these goods were to be acquired at local markets. The country was dotted with market towns, and it was to such small towns that much migration was directed. In them people were more likely to be known by a name of occupation than by their place of origin, which was frequently close by and shared by many others. In most small towns specialisms were rare, but manufacture of vessels and tools, building, baking and brewing, even scribal services, merely reflected the variety of skills that a well-administered manor required and rewarded, and which could be easily transferred from village to town. Manors supported the services of many such trades and skills. Bolton Priory supported a miller, carpenter, brewers, baker, smith, cook, carters; and all of these could find work in towns. Thus wheelwrights, smiths of all kinds, brewers, masons, butchers, bakers, coopers, farriers, could move easily between village and small town, facilitating trade and distribution. Such skilled workers were welcomed into small towns such as Brill in the Forest of Bernwood (Buckinghamshire), which was recognized in 1316 as a royal borough, with its prison and market, mills and fishponds, clay-pits and kilns, as well as being a royal residence. The evidence of debts among villagers further demonstrates the continuity between the work of substantial villagers and small-town enterprise: Alice Spileman claimed in 1329 that William Kembald from Walsham-le-Willows (Suffolk), as was she, owed her a bushel of wheat, some ale as well as vats, casks and bowls, all probably for use in brewing. More modest householders, like Thomas Bouzon of Woodford, near Thrapston in Northamptonshire, whose accounts have survived for the year 1328, displays this dependence on a combination of home production and additional bought goods. Flour was dispensed to his kitchen once a fortnight for big batches of baking; and every Saturday meat was bought at Higham Ferrers market, as were poultry, eggs and a variety of fish.
The greatest market of all was London. Over a third of overseas trade passed through it, requiring regulation, accommodation, and the enforcement of law and order to allow it to prosper. The growth in government in Westminster and the establishment of parliaments drew members of the political class more regularly into its orbit. Persons or corporations of importance sought to have a pied-à-terre in the capital: by 1311 the bishops of Hereford had a London residence, an inn, in St Mary Munthaw parish, which they occasionally leased out, but which was also used for storage of wool from their estates. Magnates such as Thomas of Lancaster, with an annual income of some £11,000 and estates all over England and Wales, also owned an inn in London, with elaborate quarters and stables, an island of self-sufficiency within the city. Even the king had a house built in Southwark in 1325, the Rosary, in Abbot’s Lane. To secure the services and goods for its diverse and growing population, London government occasionally moved to break up conspiracies to defraud and developed methods for recording its acts. The first surviving London customal – a book recording the city’s customs – was compiled in these decades, and in it examples of good practice in governance from other cities were preserved. The creation of such records was the product of efforts by men such as Andrew Horn, a fishmonger from Bridge Street, who was chamberlain of London in the 1320s and had extensive and direct knowledge of the practices of trade and manufacture. Such knowledge was essential if disruptive plots, like that contrived by some bakers in 1327 to bake with perforated moulding boards (hence using less dough), were to be spotted and suitably punished. Such control was necessary if London was to retain its primacy and see its share in trade grow.
While governance in the south was recovering from the famine, in the north this Europe-wide disaster was compounded by challenges to authority and physical ravages. By far the most menacing was the challenge from Scotland, the consequences of which also led to an invasion of Ireland and the possibility of rebellion in Wales. The collapse of Anglo-Scottish truces saw the beginning of a period of fierce raiding, mostly from Scotland into the north of England. Any notion of a linear border is anachronistic; dominions were marked by strongholds and castles, open to seizure and loss. At the northern Borders they attracted the attention and ambition of Robert Bruce, King of the Scots.
Robert Bruce succeeded in establishing his family’s hegemony in 1308 following a civil war which saw him encounter and vanquish the Comyns at Invercurie, and follow this with a campaign of destruction in Buchan. At the parliament which met at St Andrews in the following year his power was solemnized in oaths of loyalty to him and to his dynasty, taken by both barons and clergy. Once the north and west of Scotland were subdued, these provided additional sources of fighting men and expertise for the warfare which was to follow. Robert Bruce now turned his attention to the lands further south, with two raids in 1311, to which there was no effective English answer. Robert Bruce announced in October 1313 that at the end of a year he would confiscate the lands of those who remained loyal to Edward II. Added to this, Stirling Castle was under siege by Edward Bruce, Robert’s brother. Edward II was forced to respond. Writs for recruitment were sent out in December 1313 and recruitment in Wales began, although Edward did not have the support of the disaffected group of barons who had been challenging his actions since his accession.
Edward II mustered a great army of some 15,000 infantry and 2,500 cavalry, which marched towards Stirling. The Scottish army, some 8,000 men strong, sought to avoid an open battle outside the city – such encounters were very rare in British arenas more used to raids and skirmishes – and offered battle at Bannockburn, a hilly area just west of Stirling. An English mounted offensive, supported by infantry and archers, was devastated by the Scottish force, largely made up of infantrymen. The first day saw fierce fighting by spearmen, and the next (23–24 June) the definitive failure of heavy mounted cavalry. Although chroniclers claimed that Edward II had fought like a lion under the standard of St John of Beverley, which his father had used before him, Bannockburn was a disaster. Edward only narrowly saved his own life, and many magnates lost theirs. Governments rarely survive defeat in war, and this was to be a nemesis for Edward.
At the same time success buoyed Robert Bruce. It silenced his opponents in Scotland, attracted to him English landowners with lands either side of the Borders, and it encouraged his visions of hegemony over the north of England. This was to be maintained by ravaging the countryside, which had disastrous effects on all areas of life in the north. The chronicler John of Trokelowe, monk of St Albans Abbey, describes the events of 1315:
Meanwhile the Scots, with their forces, moved throughout the whole of Northumberland and the western parts, from Carlisle to York, slaughtering and looting without any opposition, and destroying with sword and flame whatever crossed their path. And it is known that there remained in these parts nowhere where the English could be safe, unless it was within the town of Carlisle or the borough of Newcastle upon Tyne and the priory of Tynemouth, and other towns in Northumbria which were defended with exhausting effort and at immense expense…
The Scottish Wars marked the north in several ways: they forced families to decide whether they were to offer allegiance to the King of England or of Scotland; they pauperized the countryside, distracted attention and deflected resources from the business of the south of England and the habitual desires of its political classes. The constant invasions and raids also took a toll of royal authority. For the kings came to depend on a heavy contribution from magnates, both in resources and in blood, and compensated those who shouldered the burden most significantly. Just as William the Conqueror had favoured the earls who settled and maintained the Marches, so great families developed out of the relative power and autonomy which the wardenships of the north entailed. The Nevilles and the Percies, whom we shall meet repeatedly in these pages, came to prominence in these years: Robert Neville was captured at Bannockburn and died during the siege of Berwick in 1319, and the Percies acquired Alnwick Castle from Archbishop Bek, of York, together with the duty of maintaining it and protecting the hinterland which depended on it. The need for wardenships of the north and of the Marches, offices created by Edward I, was to be crucial for British history for centuries, marking political power and aspiration which could make a magnate dream of kingship. The office was at once both utterly necessary and highly destabilizing to political order. Welsh leaders stood by the king in the Principality, but they also stood each man beside his own Marcher lord – as did Rhys ap Hywel who was loyal to the Earl of Hereford, Lord of Brecon, and Iorwerth ap Llywarch Lleweni to Thomas of Lancaster, Lord of Denbigh.
The long years of Edward I had set out a vision of English political hegemony with the impressive conquest of Wales and the attempts to dominate Scotland. But in the first years of Edward II’s reign this level of engagement was not sustained. Cities and towns in the north were left to defend themselves: they did so by raising murage, payment for protective walls, as in Berwick, Hartlepool and Hull. Edward II’s distraction in struggles with his magnates facilitated Robert Bruce’s attempts to consolidate his position as King of Scotland. Bruce was not without his enemies – crucially the Earls of Buchan and Ross and Argyll – but he sought support in the lowlands, and benefited from an occasional windfall, like control of Moray in the absence of its lord. The victory at Bannockburn encouraged Bruce to create a single focus of loyalty for Scottish magnates instead of the shared loyalty to the King of England and the King of Scotland. Those who held lands from both rulers had now to choose, and they were encouraged to join an emerging alternative political vision: no longer English, but British.
The new vision of Bruce saw Scotland, Ireland and Wales as a political unit of cooperation, supported from across the channel by sympathetic French neighbours. It was to be a confederation of lordships loosely centred around kings in each of the countries. Such cooperation could realize the reclamation of territories conquered and settled by the English, from Anglesey to Ulster. Although there were peace negotiations in late 1314 between England and Scotland, these failed and so a Scottish assembly in Ayr in April 1314 produced a muster in support of an invasion of Ireland, an invasion aimed at inspiring a rising, with supporters such as Domnal O’Neill, King of the Irish in Ulster. In May 1315 Robert Bruce’s brother, Edward, led a fleet to Carrickfergus in Ulster, the first stage of the campaign.
Edward Bruce promoted a plan of coordinated rejection of English rule through pressure from Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Indeed, Scottish ships captured Welsh vessels in autumn 1315, and in 1316 a rebellion led by Llewellyn Bren agitated Glamorgan. Edward II had nurtured his Welsh alliances, promoting men and awarding them royal offices, more in opposition to Marcher lords than to the unforeseen Scottish invasion. These, on the whole, stood fast. Robert Bruce attempted to mobilize Gruffydd Llwyd, a loyalist who had fought with Edward in Scotland and in Wales, leading Welsh forces. Edward II acted swiftly, responding to Welsh petitions and turning the attention of his court to discussion of the state of Welsh castles and requests from Welsh subjects. The Lincoln Parliament of 1316 agreed to respect Welsh custom and to remove restrictions on the purchase of land by Welsh people. Later that year Edward mustered some 1,500 men from north Wales, led by Sir Gruffydd Llwyd and Iorwerth ap Gruffydd. It is impressive to note just how committed Welsh leaders were to maintaining the political reciprocities achieved during Edward II’s early years. Welsh royal castles were favoured as centres for mustering troops on their way to Scotland, and for exercising royal dignity and authority. Few Welsh were attracted by the rumour of Irish ascendancy and the promise of Celtic brotherly usurpation. For if Scotland and Ireland were Greater and Lesser Scotland, what was Wales to be in such a commonwealth?
Edward Bruce’s campaign was a failure, and it made even harder the lives of the Irish during years of famine. In Ireland and the northern counties of England these were years of ravage and plunder, years which might otherwise have seen recovery from the famine and epidemics in these regions. Above all the West Riding and Lancashire suffered, and a variety of sources describe the depredation in all areas of life. After the fall of Berwick Castle in May 1318 several other castles simply capitulated and the Scottish force moved as if in its own land. The raids habitually began with entry into Yorkshire from the east, and exit from the west after a full sweep of manors and religious houses, small towns and villages. While the English standing army was occupied in the attempt to relieve Berwick, fortified by many able men, townsmen and rural folk, those unfit for battle were left behind to suffer the attacks. Lists from 1319 show the failure of tens of villages to pay their dues to ecclesiastical houses: the most common reason given was burning at the hand of the Scots. With the ravaging and burning of crops and buildings, there was a dramatic fall in incomes for those who owned land in the north: lay lords, ecclesiastical houses and monasteries large and small. The natural resources of the Forest of Knaresborough and the settlements of lower Wharfedale suffered in 1318/19 and then again in 1322. Durham, Northumberland and the north-west did not recover from these blows for a very long time.
The evidence of destruction appears in all areas of life in the north, and hence in several types of surviving sources. The records of Cocker-mouth (Cumberland) show a fall in rents in the years 1316–18 because of the raids, and the destruction of the fulling-mill. A well-endowed tenancy in Paxton-on-Tweed, including house, granaries, pasture and cottage, worth £2 16s. 8d. in time of peace, was reported as valueless in 1315. So marked was the damage done to the local economy that Cumberland was totally exempt from taxation from 1313, a very rare concession. And the raids continued, so normal business of church officials was disrupted. The Archbishop of York wrote to priories to postpone his visitation in 1319 because of the Scottish invasion. The religious institutional terrain was shifting too: whole religious houses were dispersed because of the danger, as with Moxby nunnery in 1322 (Yorkshire). When the Bishop of Whithorn was consecrated in 1323, the Archbishop of York protested that it was an English diocese, but the pope went ahead with a Scottish confirmation. A new campaign against the Scots was being planned for 1323. Communities were assessed for their potential contributions; each village was assessed for the number of foot-soldiers it could yield, two to three men per village. So from Hemingford, near Huntingdon, Simon atte Style, Simon Everard and Henry Barber made their way north. Half of the resulting army’s infantry was made up of Welshmen, a sign of a regional specialization which was to hold in future decades. But the campaign never got off the ground. Those who committed the events to memory could only blame ‘English arrogance and pride’; God was using the Scots as a tool of vengeance.
While the Scottish invasion devastated the north of England, it promoted a sense of political purpose and ambition among the Scots. In 1320 a fascinating document of national self-assertion was composed by the clerks in Robert Bruce’s service, a document which laid out the claim for Scottish sovereignty and the rejection of English overlord-ship, the Declaration of Arbroath. As is often the case in the annals of nation-making, a small group of men (here thirty-nine earls and barons) declared a claim for liberation, through the assertion of shared historical roots and moral right, and in a propitious political climate. The Declaration of Arbroath is a very elegant document. It laid the blame on Edward I:
Thus our people lived free and in peace till the noble prince Edward king of England, father of the present king, attacked our kingdom under the guise of friendship and support when it was without a head.
The signatory barons requested that the pope encourage Edward II to leave Scotland in peace.
The reality was, of course, quite different, for the north of England had much more to fear from the Scottish king than Scotland did from Edward II in the years that followed Bannockburn. Moreover, the rhetorical stance of an appeal to the pope, beautifully executed by the draftsman of the Declaration, chose to ignore the fact that at the time Bruce had been excommunicated for fourteen years, a punishment most recently renewed in January 1320. Bruce did not convince Pope John XXII, to whom the letter was directed. But the Declaration manifests the ambition which the defeat of the English at Bannockburn and the recent invasion of England had produced, which even the lacklustre aftermath of the Irish invasion did not diminish. It is a founding document of Scottish history and myth-making, as it establishes an imagined genealogy and ethnic origin for the Scottish people (tradition linked the Scots to the daughter of a Pharaoh), strengthened through the struggle against Britons, Picts, Norwegians, Danes and the English. These were claims which no English king and no English army could ignore or counter. These achievements were not only blows to the English king and his subjects, they also silenced the opposition to Bruce’s dynastic hegemony.
For the English crown Ireland was a land of conquest, and hence was settled and endowed with a set of English-style institutions: parliament, dioceses, taxes, boroughs, army and royal appointees. Anglo-Irish settlement concentrated along the east coast, and the centre of administration was Dublin, where an Irish exchequer and parliament developed in parallel with those in Westminster. When Edward II was crowned in 1308, it was as King of England, Wales and Ireland. Following the ceremony, he sent a letter which included the Statute of Winchester (1285), a gesture which incorporated Ireland within the king’s peace, and declared his own commitment, a bond grounded in his coronation oath. But English control was limited; it failed to penetrate the highlands of Leinster, and much of Ulster and Connacht was ruled by Irish kings. In areas of Anglo-Irish hegemony lordship was held by families who lived and ruled in symbiosis with the native Irish population. Such families attempted to keep a mixed landed estate in England and Ireland. By this period most Anglo-Irish families had decided to pursue a single course, either as absentees, or as lords permanently settled in Ireland.
The constant state of low-level warfare in Ireland, aggression which never reached pitched battles but which none the less informed all aspects of life, produced important interactions and borrowings. Following his father, Edward II mobilized the effective power of Irish light horsemen, who rode saddle-free on slightly built horses that were quite different from the heavy English war-horse. They were effective on difficult terrain, and in guerrilla action. These Irish hobelars formed part of the garrison of Berwick Castle in 1311/12, and helped relieve Carlisle in 1314. Such units became an established part of the Anglo-Irish army under the Lieutenant of Ireland in future decades.
Subsidies were raised from Ireland in support of the Scottish wars, and while in England notions of knight-service were becoming obsolete, they were maintained in Ireland as the basis for recruitment of local personnel. Anglo-Irish lords also used native retainers, and when these great men died they were lamented in traditional Irish song. A sense of Anglo-Irish identity emerges in adversarial conflicts over spheres of influence: Arnold Power protested to the English Bishop of Ossory at the Dublin Parliament of 1324 that Ireland, which should rightly be called the ‘island of saints’, was treated by newcomers as if all natives were heretics. It is not surprising that the Lieutenants of Ireland preferred to bring their own armies when they took up office and treated with suspicion the Anglo-Irish political class, whose members seemed too Irish for comfort.
‘Blessed be the time that he was born, for we shall see the day, an Emperor chosen worthy of Christianity.’ The birth of Edward, son of Edward, was hailed in these exultant words in the prophetic text Adam Davy’s Dream of Edward II. He was, after all, the son of a man whose long reign and many conquests had animated the English crown and turned its territories into an empire. Like all colonization and conquest this came at a mighty price, borne by English subjects, who paid for it, and by the people of Wales, Ireland and Scotland, whose destinies were shaped by it. Edward II was not made for the level of activism and aggression that his father had maintained until his death. On their way to Scotland in 1300 father and son spent some time as guests of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, resting before the exertions of battle and seeking the traditional protection of St Edmund. Edward I left his teenage son there for a while; when he was sent for by his father, the prince was far from eager to leave.
Yet Prince Edward passed adequately through the rites of passage which prepared him for kingship. His knighting ceremony in 1306, at which many other heirs to great men were dubbed, was described by Peter Langtoft, canon of Bridlington Priory, as an Arthurian extravaganza:
Never in Britain, since God was born,
was there such nobleness in towns nor in cities,
Except Caerleon in ancient times,
When Sir Arthur the king was crowned there.
An ode written after Edward I’s death in 1307 expressed the hope that Edward II would
Be no worse a man
Than his father, nor less in might
To uphold the rights of poor men
And understand well good counsel.
Edward II’s dynastic security was never in question, and the machinery of state was well-oiled at his accession. At the age of fifteen Edward had been engaged to Isabella, daughter (then two years old) of Philip IV, King of France. He married her a decade later in London. He succeeded at the age of twenty-three and his coronation was a magnificent affair, celebrated after a delay to follow his marriage to Isabella. A new order of service was used: it included prayers in support of the king against his enemies, rebels and infidels. When their son was born in 1312, it was in a royal bed, secure in his future succession. Isabella was brought up in the mightiest court of Christendom, and contemporary images and comment flatter her. Her husband’s seal presented her with the shields of England and of France, in a position usually reserved for the Virgin Mary. A carved stone at Beverley Minster attributes to her great beauty, while chronicles described her as ‘very wise’. She was not a mere consort but a queen, with political aims and ambitions which sometimes surpassed her husband’s in coherence and effect.
Almost from the start Edward II confronted the pent-up demands of the magnates of his realm. For the habits of the court in which Edward II had developed as prince and lived as king worried and distressed some of the leading political actors. Some of the earls were too old to act, and some too young, but a significant group – Lancaster, Hereford, Warwick – all close to Edward and comrades from the Scottish wars, were acute in observing the operations of political power in the new regime. Edward’s choice of advisers, and his almost total abandonment of the military zone of the north – so important to the landed security of any Earl of Lancaster – created an atmosphere of anxiety and distrust. Edward’s leadership ran contrary to the aspirations of a political class, and of a bureaucracy almost totally ecclesiastical, which expected and respected royal direction and reward. This concern was to animate much of the politics of the subsequent two centuries: the balance between royal autonomy and the expectation that the king act as a linchpin of good government, as the arbiter between the institutions of state, and as a sensible leader to a group of extremely powerful, autonomous and ambitious magnates.
Even as he gained the throne, Edward II’s wisdom and choices were being questioned. This crystallized in 1308 around the elevation of his brother-in-arms and close friend, the Gascon Piers Gaveston, to the title of Earl of Cornwall. Edward’s friendship with Gaveston gave focus to political complaints. It was believed that the king was under his sway, and hence was not ruling independently. A very intense working relationship had developed between the two men: a few contemporaries commented on Edward’s ‘excessive love’ for Gaveston, and a generation later the court chronicler Jean Froissart described the relationship as ‘sodomitic’. As in other famous political partnerships, the ‘friend’ attracted complaint and acted as a lightning conductor, deflecting wrath from the official holder of power, in this case the king, at least for a while. The barons resented the elevation of the king’s best friend to positions of wealth – he had married the heiress Margaret of Clare – and administrative clout. On Gaveston were showered the Earldom of Cornwall, the Keepership of the Realm; he became Lieutenant of Ireland and Chamberlain and played a prominent role in the coronation. The barons requested Gaveston’s exile in 1308, and the king finally acceded, with very little grace.
Political demands were animated by more than the distaste which Gaveston provoked. They reflected a desire by leading subjects for structural involvement in royal financial and military administration. In 1311 the struggle took the form of a list of demands, Ordinances, in clauses published by a group of barons, who came to be named after them as the Ordainers. They demanded to be involved in all important decision-making – such as deliberation over war – as well as in greater supervision of royal finances and in the judiciary, including collective appointment of sheriffs. The king was accused of wanton expenditure, following rumours that the crown planned to tinker with the currency. A committee was to supervise royal receipts and their administration, and two of the five leading officers of the court – the steward and the keeper of the wardrobe – were in future to be appointed with the consent of the lords in parliament. Another clause demanded an end to persecution of men for debt. The king would submit himself to peers’ advice, and respect the natural constituency of magnates as advisers and close associates. The document was thrashed out mostly among the barons, and the interests of townsmen and knights are hardly present in it.
In the barons’ demands there was a tone of impatience and intolerance. The complaints and demands of these men, who had been the king’s friends and intimates, reflected a tradition of baronial political activism almost a century old. Some of the clauses of the Ordinances of 1311 are reminiscent of grievances put to Edward I in 1297; others were to emerge again in the early as well as in the later years of Edward III. The political gains signalled by the Ordinances of 1311 were that the king must accept suitable counsel and consider the wishes of political constituencies. Increasingly the venue for such debate was parliament; at issue were the processes of policy-making in fiscal and judicial affairs.
Baronial political demands regarding counsel and influence on the king were bound to return to the issue of Piers Gaveston and consequently he was exiled in 1311. Edward tried to pave the way of his close friend, as he travelled to the continent in exile, by dispatching letters to the Duke of Brabant and to the King of France requesting that he be protected and received by them. Gaveston returned to the country stealthily following the birth of his daughter after Christmas 1311. Attempts to arrange for his permanent return failed, and by May 1312 the king was forced to agree to hand him to the protection of the Earl of Pembroke, thus distancing him from court but also keeping him safe. But through a subterfuge the Earl of Warwick gained access to Gaveston, and took him to Warwick Castle, where in the company of Lancaster and Arundel he held a mock trial, the verdict of which was execution for treason. Gaveston was executed at Blacklow, on the land of the Earl of Hereford, by two Welshmen of the earl’s retinue, his body being pierced and then beheaded. Vindictive partisan poetry expressed the visceral delight in his unmaking, and celebrated Lancaster’s achievement:
The comet of Earls shines,
I mean the Earl of Lancaster,
Who tamed him, whom nobody could tame.
Whereby the pestiferous one,
Being wounded by the blades of the Welsh,
Was disgracefully beheaded.
Blessed the hand which expunged him.
Satirical verse created a celebratory liturgy:
Celebrate my tongue, the death of Peter [Piers]
Who destroyed England.
Whom the King, loving him above all things,
placed over Cornwall.
While the annalist John of Trokelowe claimed that England would know no peace as long as Gaveston lived, his execution served to alienate the king, and turn him into an even more dependent figure. Edward II was devastated and resentful. On the first anniversary of Gaveston’s death he petulantly showed how much decorum he wished to maintain: the Wardrobe accounts record expenditure on the services of Bernard the Fool and on a troupe of fifty-four naked dancers ‘with stamping of feet in dance’. He even attempted to have his erstwhile friend canonized. In the space around him the king craved the reassurance of devotees, men beholden to him. The next to enjoy his favour were a family pair, father and son, the Despensers.
The king had been required to act and lead soon after his accession by the military challenge from Scotland. The territorial integrity of England was at stake, and this dictated shifts in the spheres of action and placement of the main political actors. The court dwelt in the north for long periods between 1310 and 1323. The logistical challenge involved in defending the north was enormous: the parliaments of 1314, 1318, 1319, 1320, May and November 1322 met at York, and the courts of King’s Bench, Common Pleas and the Exchequer similarly spent long periods in the north. In forty years spanning three kings – 1298 – 1338 – the royal court spent half its time in the north. Royal servants were constantly packing and transferring furniture and archives and money to Yorkshire and Northumbria. In September 1320 one of the king’s serjeants-at-arms was ordered to move 1,000 marks from London to Fenham Castle in Northumbria with the aid of an eight-strong guard. Such convoys criss-crossed the country northwards, turning the north for a while into the true centre of government. This emphasis came to an end once the war with France dominated military and diplomatic effort from the 1330s. But the northern connection left its mark at the heart of government, with long-standing effects on recruitment of personnel.
In facing all these challenges the king’s need for support and advice was met not only by his bishops, but by a family happy to counter received wisdom, a family as yet not part of the baronage nor a carrier of its aspirations and values. The Leicestershire Despensers occupied pride of place in the middle years of Edward II’s reign, as trusted friends and as a bulwark between the king and his magnates. By 1318 Hugh Despenser, a close associate, who had fought with Edward I, and then with Edward II at Bannockburn, was granted the lucrative wardship of the heir to the Earldom of Warwick. The Despensers managed patronage and filtered information directed at the court from all parts of the country and from Gascony. Father and son worked hard at promoting court identity and royal interest in a narrow sense, but they offended the other partner in the social and political contract – the magnates, who aimed to consolidate and defend those constitutional gains made in the 1290s and in the early years of Edward II’s reign. Magnates sought access to the king, and predominance in the provision of counsel. They also wished parliament rather than the court to be the venue for political deliberation.
Even as famine hit the country and the Scots invaded in the north, the country was on the verge of civil war. Thomas of Lancaster, the greatest and richest magnate of his day, had resigned as leader of the king’s council in 1316, thus marking disaffection and an intention to act. The country was all but divided into two, and access to the north was blocked to royal officials. While prelates attempted to pacify, an agreement was grudgingly accepted by both sides. The Leake Treaty of July 1318 aimed at re-establishing loyalty to the king and allaying baronial anxiety about his lordship. While the parties were discussing their demands, and negotiations were still taking place, chroniclers reported a bizarre incursion. In Northampton a man was arrested – John Powderham, son of a tanner from Exeter – who made a claim to the throne as Edward’s brother. One chronicler describes him as a litteratus, probably a clerk, who had been educated at Oxford. His claim to royal blood was through Edward I, who had removed him from his royal cradle at birth because of an injury. In the unquiet 1320s the story was elaborated into an example of Edward’s deficiency: for the king gave the man a jester’s club and treated the episode too lightly. The barons and the queen insisted on a trial in the king’s absence, and so John Powderham was finally hanged. His dead body was left hanging, as a caution.
As a truce was secured in the north in 1320–21 unrest resurfaced in Wales and among the magnates. The baronial party – a cautious and brittle alliance – expressed its displeasure with the Despensers on their home ground in the Wye valley: in 1321 a force led by Thomas of Lancaster destroyed, sacked and killed in the Marcher lordships. Many unhappy subjects had joined Thomas of Lancaster – such as the Mortimers of Chirk and the Earl of Hereford – and lost their lands even as they brought down the Despenser lordship in the Wye valley. Despenser control had been built with the king’s acceptance, and in the face of rightful heirs, such as John Lord Mowbray in the Gower. Many of the magnates of England were clearly willing to fight in order to achieve a restructuring of the royal court. For they did not aim at deposition, rather at humbling and coercing the king. Throughout 1321 Thomas Earl of Lancaster all but ruled the north; two parliaments were assembled in the summer, at Pontefract and Sherburn, at which magnates combined by oath to oppose the rule of the Despensers. Edward II mustered an army to counter the rebels, marching from Wales through Staffordshire to Yorkshire. At the crossing at Boroughbridge on 16 March 1322, the two forces faced each other: the king and the Despensers on the one hand, and Thomas Earl of Lancaster with the magnates, on the other. The bloody battle resulted in the death of the Earl of Hereford, and in the surrender of Thomas of Lancaster.
Thomas of Lancaster, the richest and most prominent magnate, the king’s first cousin, was tried and executed. He was accused of treason, murder, robbery and arson, of appearing armed at parliament and of treasonous contact with the Scots. His status dictated the more decorous mode of execution, beheading by sword, rather than hanging and quartering, the usual punishment for treason. In the lands of Lancastrian affinity and sympathy he became a martyr of sorts, and the priory at Pontefract, which held his body, became a pilgrimage site. The king had triumphed, but his rule had been a sorry one, for it had witnessed perverse politics. The Brut chronicle lamented the state of the political nation, for as the rebels were caught, ‘they were robbed, and bound like thieves. Alas, the shame and despite, that the gentle order of knighthood had there at that battle!’
Ever alert to Edward’s weaknesses Robert Bruce invaded the north again in 1322, scorched its earth and harassed its people. Despite his victory over rebellious magnates, Edward II was deemed responsible for all this distress.
Following Boroughbridge a new settlement was created. It affected Wales acutely, since half of the Marcher lordships changed hands. Edward II continued to favour the patronage of Welsh gentry families in his service, and he summoned Welsh knights to parliament. But what he achieved in Wales was not reproduced elsewhere in the country and an unsettled mood is evident, as it had been during Edward I’s last dozen years. Conspiracies were reported, urging people to join gangs for mutual support and protection; groups connived to defraud and to commit treason. Such a case was revealed in the course of the examination of Robert le Marescal, who was tried for murder in 1324. Among his many confessions – for he had turned king’s witness – was the claim that twenty-seven men of Coventry had conspired to kill the king and the Despensers, who supported their local adversary, the Prior of Coventry. They were guided by a magician in occult rites, during which the king’s wax image was pierced with a lead pin on several occasions. Why did a group of burgesses resort to magic in their struggle with the Prior of Coventry over market rights? Why, in a country so well provided with legal personnel and procedures, this desperate act? The law was evidently no longer sufficiently trusted. Only a few months after Robert was executed for his crimes, the king himself was killed.
Edward II did not manage to settle the kingdom into a clear political order which saw the smooth interaction of crown, magnates and parliament. In these years new contributions were made to the already rich literature of complaint in all the British vernaculars. Poems such as ‘On the evil times of Edward II’, in an east-Midlands dialect, complained about all manner of men (and men only) – priests and lawyers and physicians, court officials and judges of assizes. Natural catastrophe was linked to human misconduct and so after years of ‘plenty and mirth’ came those of ‘hunger and dearth’. All this was a punishment from God, and a nemesis for periods of vanity and ambition, which probably allude to Edward I’s reign.
Yet Edward II’s example also inspired patrons to build and fund religious and educational institutions. Bishop Hothum of Ely (1316– 37), whom Edward II saved from the wreck of Gaveston’s household, realized the plans for the foundation of the King’s Hall in Cambridge in 1317 as a training branch of the Chapel Royal; it accommodated forty boys destined for service in the royal chapel and chancery. Edward II had started something of a trend; his son Edward III amplified the institution, and hence is considered as a founder. His statue is still to be seen in the Great Court of Trinity College. His Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harvey de Stanton, founded Michaelhouse in 1324 (now part of Gonville and Caius College). In Oxford the example – part fashion, part expedient – was followed by his Treasurer, Walter de Stapledon, in Exeter College for men of Cornwall and Devon, and by Adam de Brome, at Oriel College.
The expenses of the royal court show it to have maintained a western European network with contacts of diplomacy, marriage and cultural exchange. Like his father, for most of his reign Edward II spent some £13,000 per annum, an amount which fell to £10,000 in 1323–6. Expenditure covered a wide range of activities in England, the Scottish Borders, Ireland and Gascony, and was disbursed under the knowing eye of a series of proactive treasurers. Some attempts were made to strengthen Gascon administration by establishing there a royal archive, as suggested in 1310 by the Bishop of Norwich, and the Earl of Richmond was charged with conducting an inquiry. In 1315 the royal council in Gascony petitioned the king’s council to supply copies of seminal documents to support their efforts in negotiations with the French over rights, lands and castles; in 1319 it requested that some documents be checked against the originals in Westminster. The many rights through which the king’s lordship in Gascony was realized – oaths of fealty, control of castles, legal determinations – had to be maintained properly, if the competing lordship of the French king, conveniently offered to Gascon subjects, was to be countered. The complicated nature of the claim to Gascony – by Edward, who was both a mighty king and a vassal of the King of France – was further enhanced after Philip V’s death in 1322. For Edward II’s homage for the Duchy of Aquitaine and the County of Ponthieu became due.
When Charles IV ascended the throne of France in 1322 he did not press his claim, as Edward II was occupied yet again by Scottish troubles. But in 1323, after the successful negotiation of a truce with Robert Bruce, Edward II was expected to pay him a visit in France and offer homage. While Edward II prevaricated, the situation in Gascony became unstable and in some ways lordless, for many cases awaiting resolution – above all disputes over land and inheritance – could not be resolved with a gap in the feudal chain. Edward would also lose his French fiefs if he were to remain absent. And so, as ever in Gascony when the king seemed remote, local lords pushed their claims. A bastide, a fortified village, at Saint-Sardos, whose building had been authorized by the parliament of Paris, was burnt by a local lord, vassal of Edward II. Between 1323 and 1325 a war broke out over this dispute, a foretaste of some of the issues over which a future war, far greater in scale and bloodier, would rage – the Hundred Years War.
Edward II had a great sense of public display and was inventive in the forms it took and the occasions on which it was deployed. He retained much from visits to France, as when he attended the sumptuous pageant of 1313 at the knighting of his brothers-in-law, the sons of Philip IV, in Paris and Boissy. Philip IV was the most important European monarch of his day, and at his death in 1314 Edward II requested that prayers for the departed be said in all churches of his realm. The business of Edward’s court was managed by a vast diplomatic network, and despite its frequent itineration, this seems to have been an efficient system, assisted by the diplomatic services of a French queen. Edward relished court occasions: he revived the ceremony of royal Maundy, suspended since the days of King John.
Livery was used knowingly, for it was costly and potentially divisive; to it were also added distinctions such as placement at table and precedence in procession. Under the ordinances for the royal household of 1318 royal servants were rewarded in combinations of wage and garb: so bannerets received twenty marks in fee and livery worth sixteen marks. Inasmuch as those surrounding a lord in his household were also partisans and protectors, representing loyalty to his cause, livery always carried martial connotations. These could be reversed and used against the king. When in 1321 Marcher lords approached the king to demand the dismissal of his favourites the Despensers, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, Humphrey Bohun Earl of Hereford and Essex, Roger Amory, and Hugh Audley the Younger – all associates of Thomas of Lancaster – distributed distinctive livery to their knights-followers: coloured coats of armour. Those who were accused and then tried for joining the baronial force, such as Roger de Elmerugge, former sheriff of Herefordshire, who did so while in royal service, were hanged in their livery.
From his court Edward II maintained a wide range of connections and supervised the affairs of England, Wales, Ireland and Gascony. The court drew its talent from the wider British domains: Edward II’s bodyguards in 1317/18 were two Welsh archers, the brothers Gough, his trumpeter in 1325 was John the Scot, who had served at his side at Boroughbridge. When possible, he used trusted bureaucrats who had served his father. One such long-standing servant in a pivotal position was Andrea Sapiti, the king’s representative at the papal court of Avignon, who also negotiated important loans for the king with Italian financiers. Edward II was in constant correspondence with a number of cardinals, several of whom led the papal efforts in negotiation between England and France over Gascony. Edward II was deeply involved in governance. He came to the throne a grown man, and occupied himself with the minutiae of government. He favoured and promoted administrators, even as he seemed to need close friends loyal to none but himself. He experimented in maintaining contact with his prelates and magnates: he used writs to the clergy to inform them of diplomatic and military developments and turned to the country with requests for prayers in support of initiatives such as Queen Isabella’s trip to France in 1325. His interests ranged from the state of outstanding debts to Jews who had been expelled by his father in 1290, debts which he cancelled in full in 1326, to dealing with corrupt officials in Gascony, and ordering excellent Spanish horses for his army.
The rule of Gascony and diplomatic ties with the Low Countries and Castile together formed the backdrop for Britain’s trading activities. These years also saw the steady refinement of England’s place in the European wool trade, and established England’s ports as stations for Castilian and Portuguese traders. Italian merchants in England were deeply involved in the wool trade; they dealt in over half of exported wool and in turn brought bullion, Mediterranean goods and exotica with them. The flow of traffic saw Portuguese ships offload cargoes of figs, raisins, leather, dyes and honey, and leave laden with broadcloths, hangings, tin, lead and Welsh cloths. All this was unprecedented in extent. The number of commercial transactions was rising dramatically, almost doubling between the 1280s and the first decade of the fourteenth century. Most wool came from Yorkshire, followed by Norfolk, Devon, Herefordshire and Derbyshire, though the Scottish wars diminished Yorkshire’s portion. Regional variations developed, and were appreciated by exporters, who could choose from a range of blankets, worsteds, kerseys, russets, mendips and bluets. Edward II’s government attempted to foster and favour international exchange, seeing it as benign and beneficial. Protectionist reaction can be seen only in a few specific cases, such as action against the fishing of herring off the East Anglian coast by Netherlandish fishermen.
The ability to move food and livestock across the country with relative speed and ease facilitated the commercialization of medieval England and Wales in this period. The Gough Map of the mid-fourteenth century shows five main roads linking London to all parts of the realm: to Exeter, to Bristol, to St David’s, to Carlisle, and, by the Old North Road, to Yorkshire. This basic grid of communication was supported by waterways, and it enabled a person to reach London from any part within a fortnight. York to London could be made in four days, weather allowing, for flooding was a constant problem. The able-bodied could walk some 30 miles a day, and ride perhaps 40 miles. Progress was much slower when travel was encumbered. A unique drover’s diary of 1323 describes in great detail the progress of John the Baker, a valet of the royal household, from Holland in Lincolnshire to Tadcaster in Yorkshire, with 19 cows and a bull, 313 ewes, 192 hoggasters (young sheep), 272 lambs and a ram, of which he and eight boys and a shepherd were in charge. On 13 May 1323 they set off, wending their way through towns and villages, picking up more livestock and help. The trip took twelve days, and involved passage of the Trent on a ferry at Littleborough.
Most towns contained a dense array of religious institutions. By the early fourteenth century parishes were well established, and with them the houses of religious orders, as well as hospitals. There were twenty-two cathedral cities in England, three in Wales, twenty-three in Ireland and seventeen in Scotland, and in them the presence of clergy was highly noticeable. Pilgrims, clerks and cathedral servants mingled in cathedral precincts, which were unique in their architecture, style and the protected status of their inhabitants. Cathedrals and religious houses exercised considerable economic power over their urban neighbours. They accumulated properties and incomes through bequests left to them, but above all through planned extension of their landed estates. Thus even in the decade and a half which saw economic calamity for most in England, the Dominicans of Norwich gained at least twelve urban plots from the local land market. Religious houses were major builders and thus also employers. When the central crossing of the great Anglo-Norman cathedral of Ely collapsed in February 1322, repair began almost immediately, producing the impressive Octagon of Ely, sumptuously decorated with sculpted arches and decorative reliefs. Such projects created demand for the craft skills of masonry, but also for the highly prized expertise of internationally renowned sculptors.
Although Protestant iconoclasm and neglect have allowed most medieval panel painting to perish, some of the finest surviving examples attest to a brilliant East Anglian school in these years. It produced works such as the Thornham Parva retable, an altarpiece which probably belonged to the Dominican house of Thetford in Suffolk c.1330. In this piece Christ, his mother and major saints – St Edmund (patron of East Anglia and of the house’s founder, Edmund Gonville, Bishop of Norwich) and St Dominic – are displayed with a delicacy reminiscent of fine and small-scale manuscript illumination, and look as good as Parisian work of the period. Similar in quality and sumptuousness in the warm tones of its oil paints is the oak altar-frontal found in Kingston Lacy (Dorset), depicting a row of seated prelates alternating with saintly kings (Edmund King of East Anglia, Edward the Confessor King of England). In other regions sculpted stone screens and altarpieces predominated, like the more modest and yet ornate rood-screen at Welsh Newton (Herefordshire) of c.1320 displaying the delicate ball-flower motif. This screen separated the chancel off from the laity but also allowed visual access to the altar through its uncluttered arched openings. In religious houses this was also a period of great musical creativity and inventiveness: early fourteenth-century psalters such as the Howard Psalter of around 1310–20 habitually include miniature illuminations, offering snapshots of monks and canons in song. So fine is the image that we can sometimes decode the motet which is being sung, the notes and words unfolding on a music roll before the singers.
The bishops seated in the Kingston Lacy frontal were the figureheads of much that had been achieved in religious instruction, patronage and intellectual work by the early fourteenth century. In England, Ireland and Wales bishops had become pivotal administrators of royal business and overseers of a complex and ambitious system of church law, liturgy and education. Each cathedral was a hub of activity, with its church courts, the synods which summoned to it the many priests of the diocese every Easter, the library of seminal and useful books in theology and church law, the schools which trained clergy, the households which administered vast estates that supported the whole enterprise. Bishops were often absentees, away on royal business, but their dual functions usually enhanced the aims of church and state: in the north bishops were crucial in attempts to secure the Borders, while the Bishops of Lincoln and Ely monitored, respectively, the workings of two of Europe’s most important universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Bishops were patrons of art, innovators in technology, diplomats, and under them were appointed men increasingly trained in both Roman and canon law, members of an ecclesiastical bureaucracy. Such men had the power to regulate a wide range of human affairs: marriage and its dissolution, inheritance, sexual morality, profits and restitution, beliefs and errors, the appointment of 10,000 priests to parishes, as well as the ordination of a multitude of clerics to lower orders.
Christian life in the parish was the subject of ‘micro-management’ by the bishop and his staff. Visitations were meant to be annual events, but were in reality less frequent. Yet when the gaze was cast on a community and its activities, it could be intrusive. The visitation of Kent in 1327–8 showed deficiencies in fabric and provision: Ickham church had broken windows and no suitable lecterns or seats for the congregation; its parish priest was found to be married, and so another had to be instituted in his place. The rector at Westwell was also cohabiting and was thus demoted to the lower order of sexton, one which could be held by a married clerk. Well-trained priests were often attracted by the prospect of further study, or service to influential households. Bishops allowed them periods of leave, as long as these did not result in neglect of their parishes: the rector of Swanscombe in Kent was allowed, in the visitation of 1326, to go on a year’s leave to serve the Countess of Pembroke.
The level of provision for parishioners depended greatly on the wealth and disposition of the religious houses or gentry families who were their patrons. Parish income was often allocated to the support of religious houses and these were obliged to provide suitable care and maintenance of the fabric of the churches. The peculiar English custom, that the rector maintained the chancel, meant that religious houses were obliged to do so in the churches appropriated to them. This provided in some cases, as in Cherry Hinton (Cambridgeshire), a great difference in quality and style between the chancel and the nave. When the system worked, it had advantages for parishioners – for example the high level of instruction enjoyed by some 300 communities in East Anglia which the Augustinian friars of Clare (Suffolk) visited regularly, providing preaching, hearing confessions and collecting alms and offerings.
By the late thirteenth century a corpus of basic Christian teachings had been composed by John Pecham, Archbishop of Canterbury, and several handbooks were created to assist priests in teaching and in further explanation of these themes. To be of widest use these texts had to be in English, and several compositions provided just that. William Shoreham, a member of the priory at Leeds (Kent), and from c.1320 the vicar of Chart Sutton parish, composed a rhymed work on a wide range of themes in catechism and devotion: the seven sacraments, prayers to the Cross, the ten commandments, the seven mortal sins, the five joys of Mary, some prayers to the Virgin Mary, and an exposition on the Trinity, Creation, Adam and Eve. In vivid Kentish dialect sound theology was conveyed:
To wash us Christ shed his blood
And water out of his wound.
Hereof sprung the sacraments
Of Holy Church worthy.
He explains what a sacrament is:
And is to say sacrament
a sign of a holy thing.
And the eucharist is such a sign:
Token of it is God’s body
At church in form of bread.*
Religious instruction aimed at the knightly and aristocratic circles, often copied into books for private reading, was written in Anglo-Norman, the dialect of northern French introduced to the British Isles at the Norman Conquest. Nicholas Bozon was a Franciscan preacher and poet, who composed clever arguments for a sophisticated audience. His elegant verse sermons flattered with subtlety, as in his argument against those who claimed that the friars spread ideas about possible sins in their lively and daring sermons against sin. He demonstrated:
When the ray of sunshine enters
A room or chamber through the window…
It catches the dust through the glass.
But that ray, he explained – preaching – does not create the invisible dust – sin; it illuminates it, distinguishing thus between right and wrong.
Such verses, easily memorized or read, were sometimes accompanied by schemes of visual representation which were similarly ambitious in telling the Christian story. At All Saints, Croughton (Northamptonshire), c.1310 the interlocking tales of the life of Mary and of Jesus’s infancy were told in bands of painted scenes divided into three tiers on the south wall, and were followed on the north wall with scenes leading up to the Passion. With such aids it was easy to spread the fundamentals of a complex sacramental religion among parishioners, most of whom could neither read nor write. Such stories could even add moralizing depth for those who would reflect further through individual or group reading.
The parish served most people as the fitting place for prayer, liturgy and worship. Church law penetrated the parish through the priest’s questions at confession, or the examination by the officials at visitation. The rural parish frequently coincided with the unit of work and land tenure – the manor. In small towns, it coincided with the whole settlement. In towns and cities in England (like north-west France) many small parishes coincided. The small town of Cambridge had fifteen parishes, each comprising hardly more than a street or two. Through the regulation of marriage and testamentary bequests, church law touched upon the property and material well-being of parishioners. The spheres of work and religion met in the exaction of tithes from produce, in the scrutiny of ill-gotten profits, and the requirement for restitution for illicit work. While the customs of seaboard communities regulated the reclamation of shipwrecked cargo, church law intervened here too. When in July 1313 the ship St Mary of Bayonne was wrecked near the cliffs of Cale Bay on the Isle of Wight, Walter de Godeston and some locals salvaged 174 tuns (casks) of wine, as well as saving the crew. Penance was imposed on Walter since the wine had belonged to a monastery in Picardy: he was, fittingly, made to build a lighthouse on top of St Katherine’s Down in restitution.
Layfolk who could afford investment in religious life also created spaces for worship at home, or experimented with rigorous forms of religious experience. Longthorpe Tower outside Bedford was the residence of the Thorpe family, and in about 1330 Robert Thorpe had a vaulted solar turned into a decorated chamber, adorned with wall-paintings which still delight. Moralizing themes addressed important stages of family and personal life: the seven ages of man depict human progress from cradle to decrepitude, the occupations of the months are shown alongside the twelve apostles and the articles of faith. Here is a secular setting, one in which Christian reflection and imagery provide narrative frame and substance.
Similar in its characteristic mingling of the natural world, life experience and moral precepts is the sumptuous De Lisle Psalter, which was produced c.1320–30, and owned by the daughter of Robert de Lisle of Yorkshire: its prayers to the Virgin are surrounded by lively decorative scenes of country life. A similar work, the Taymouth Hours, was made for Princess Joan, daughter of Edward II and Isabella, the future bride of David Bruce, c.1325–35. The book may have been prepared for the occasion of her marriage, at the age of seven (to a husband aged four), as part of the Anglo-Scottish reconciliation through the Treaty of Edinburgh (1328). It includes prayers and offices for all occasions: the Hours of the Holy Spirit, of the Trinity, of the Virgin, the Office of the Cross, for the Dead, as well as penitential psalms. Once the girl learned her Latin and French she had as good a religious compendium, in this book, as did other noblewomen of her day. It was not only noblewomen who owned such books: the Reydon Hours of c.1320–24, which is somewhat lighter in content and adorned with scenes of Christ’s infancy, is also a prayerbook for all seasons, made for Alice de Reymes, wife of Sir Robert de Reydon, a Suffolk lawyer in royal service.
Such books were for most owners a gift or an inheritance to last a lifetime: precious, even sacred, and personal. People wrote in their prayerbooks, annotated, and recorded on their back-leaves important dates, affairs to remember. Time and life’s course emerge from their pages, with illuminated calendars depicting all estates of women and men, all ages, people in all seasons and of all pursuits, especially rural ones. Books were not the only repositories of images; other artefacts could animate contemplation and reflection. An inventory of the belongings of Humphrey de Bohun Earl of Hereford and Essex, made between 1319 and 1322, recorded ‘an image of the lady made of ivory within a closed tabernacle’, as well as a small ivory image of St Katherine. The personal effects of Roger Mortimer, listed after their seizure following his execution, included an ivory image of the Virgin, which had belonged to his wife.
Books and images were prized by givers and recipients; they circulated among the living and were bequeathed by the dead, part of the intricate relations of love, memory and commemoration. With the emergence of the vogue for commemoration of the dead, old institutions became homes to new structures expressive of new styles and ideas: the twelfth-century civic chapel of St William at the north end of the Ouse Bridge in York came to house four new chantries founded by York citizens over the decade 1321–31. In these decades were established the patterns of foundation and provision which were to persist until the Reformation: each founder, man and woman, worked towards the accumulation of prayer for the benefit of souls already languishing in purgatory, and in hope of lightening the penalty which would be theirs – or that of their loved ones – after death. Death preoccupied and tantalized, and the many ghost-stories of this period demonstrate that the death of loved ones was seen not as the closing of a chapter, but as a possible link with the mysteries of the hereafter. The Welsh ‘Gwidw and the prior’ of c.1324 reports an imaginary exchange of questions and answers, through a prior’s mediation, between Gwidw and his grieving widow, on purgatory and prayers to the dead. Conversely, a less anxious view is offered in a poem about paradise by the former monk Michael of Kildare: paradise seems too dull a place compared to his image of the land of Cockaigne, a place of gushing plenty.
Women’s duties towards dead spouses, in widowhood and even within the bosom of a subsequent marriage, were an important obligation worthy of careful planning and execution. Joan, sister of Alan, Lord of Kilpeck, made an exalted second marriage to Henry, grandson of Humphrey Earl of Hereford and Essex. After Henry died at Bannockburn she undertook the planning of a suitable memorial and the provision of prayer in a prestigious Lady Chapel at Hereford Cathedral. It was decorated with wall-paintings, among them one of herself kneeling before the Virgin. Joan, who died in 1327, requested that she be buried there, as Lady Kilpeck, and to the prayers of the cathedral monks she also added the intercession of more humble folk, the inmates of God’s hospital at Portsmouth. There is here a real sense of choice, an awareness of the subtly different hues of religious merit produced by different recipients, and of careful judgement as to best effect in the pursuit of prayer after death.
Death in this life could also be chosen, as did few but remarkable men and women who left their families and friends to live a solitary life. While men could become hermits in forests and caves, women were not allowed to wander freely, and so strict instructions on living the ‘anchoritic’ life were developed. By the fourteenth century such women were expected to undergo a ceremony of death and burial officiated by a bishop, after which they were walled into a cubicle usually attached to a parish church. Friends and community were to contribute to the support of such a person, who sometimes brought a maid with her into enclosure. While cut off from the world, a little chink allowed the anchoress to observe the liturgy within the church, and an opening allowed offerings of food to be passed into her chamber. The system was regulated by bishops, but each case was a personal drama enacted publicly. When Christine Carpenter, daughter of William the carpenter of Shere (Surrey), expressed a desire to become an anchorite in 1329, an investigation was undertaken by her parish priest and resulted in the Bishop of Winchester’s approval. Christine was duly enclosed, but her choice was not a happy one, as we know from the fact that less than three years later Bishop Stratford dispatched a letter, into which was copied a dispensation which allowed Christine to return to her enclosure after she had ‘left her cell inconstantly and returned to the world’. An array of styles of perfection was available to men and women, but most people found them too daunting and forbidding even to try, and settled for parish religion. Those few who chose the life of religious striving often found it too demanding, lonely or discouraging, as contemporary reports about runaway religious clearly, and sometimes tragically, attest.
The order imparted on manors and communities, on parishes and even on markets, was created through the parallel and interlocking work of restraint and deterrence, the working of social and moral norms together with the threat and promise of the law. It was thus deeply devastating when the king, the apex of the system of authority and law, was perceived to be out of tune with social propriety and legal probity. Robert, a member of the royal household, was able to ascribe in July 1314 the defeat at the hands of the Scots at Bannockburn to the fact that the king did not attend mass, and preferred to occupy himself with frivolous activities, such as ditch-digging. For this the man was arrested. As a messenger to Kent, Robert later complained that when he turned up with royal writs produced under the Privy Seal, people ‘threw them to the ground and trampled them under foot’. He was released through the queen’s intervention and the surety of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but we glimpse here the type of comment – the king is not in charge – which was exploited to justify drastic actions by ambitious opponents of Edward II, members of his own court and family.
Members of the royal household, some more and some less exalted, not only spread derision, but acted openly against the king’s interest. In September 1317 Gilbert de Middleton attacked the convoy leading the bishop-elect of Durham, Louis de Beaumont – a favourite of the queen – two cardinals and other officials. On the road from Darlington to Durham, on a papal mission to Robert Bruce, these dignitaries were seized; the bishop-elect and his brother were kept at Mitford Castle for a few weeks, while the cardinals were only robbed, and allowed to make their way to Durham. This was an attack by a member of the court, who received annuities and robes from the king’s hand. He was caught, tried and suffered the terrible death of a traitor.
Two contradictory trends were at work in these decades. On the one hand, a system of justice was in place, lawyers were trained, and some 200 were available in the central court of the Westminster Bench – just as some were in the Dublin court – to plead for adversaries before royal justices. These are also the decades in which regular parliaments emerged and became an expected feature of political life. On the other hand, the men whose patronage and leadership guaranteed the system’s operation were at odds with their king: they suspected his competence and his ability to represent their aims in war, finance and the dispensation of patronage. An elaborate system of training and preferment solidified and made homogeneous the practices and attitudes of lawyers and judges. They were trained on the job, as Inns of Court were still a fledgling institution, first mentioned in 1329. Yet when the king’s justice failed to deter and was slow to punish malefactors, people sought other means of protection.
Some differentiation between magnates and gentry was also becoming clearer; for while the barons ordained and appealed and rebelled against the king, the gentry was largely mobilized to the effort of maintaining borders and supervising the delivery of justice in intricate and innovative administrative formations. Royal officials and local communities enforced the common law and deterred malefactors. They were keepers of the peace in the shires, chosen by king and council, and they acted largely on their strength as important local landlords with local knowledge and connections to others like them. Some excellent brasses from this period portray such men – sometimes soldiers, sometimes local officers – such as that of Sir John Creke and his wife Alyne, at Westley Waterless near Cambridge, of 1325, or of Sir John d’Aubernoun the Younger, at Stoke d’Abernon (Surrey). Royal justices were not awarded salaries, but they had access to expenses for their travel, and above all benefited from royal patronage, expressed in the grants of land and of annuities.
One such royal servant was Robert of Madingley, a gentleman from the village of that name just outside Cambridge, probably one of Edward II’s most assiduous royal justices. Robert held three estates in Cambridgeshire, two of which had come to him from his uncles. In the decade preceding his death in 1321 he was, among other things, a commissioner charged with enforcing the statutes for keeping of the peace in Essex and Hertfordshire, assessor of tallages (local taxes) in Cambridgeshire, and commissioner to investigate irregularities related to tax collection in Somerset. He travelled the country from Essex to Somerset, sometimes resting at his estates en route. He occasionally had to appear at Westminster, to which he sometimes travelled with his wife, well supplied with foodstuffs for the journey and sojourn, some of which were the produce of his own estates. His domestic and local base supported his service.
Another interesting example of service is Robert of Adderbury’s career, which was made more dramatic through the regime changes of 1327 and 1330. He was commissioner of array as well as a keeper of the peace in 1325, following his elevation from mere local constable under Edward II. He was then charged with supervision of keepers of the peace in 1328, a position usually held by men of higher status. He reached even greater dignity under Edward III, who used him on peace commissions, and made him sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire in 1333, the year in which he was also knighted. These two Roberts flourished through their local respectability and administrative skill.
In the years which saw turbulence inspired by barons, Robert of Adderbury and men like him, of essentially local importance and influence, were the ones most likely to be trusted and promoted, with tasks beyond the confines of that local circle. The aspirations and loyalties such men harboured were being mobilized in these decades through the working of parliament. Adderbury was now a knight of the shire, a man likely to be summoned to parliament to form the ranks of the Commons, which contained county representatives and those chosen to represent boroughs, who were often also members of the gentry. The Lords comprised magnates and bishops, some abbots and representatives of other ecclesiastical bodies. The clergy also acted as a group following deliberations in Convocation, a gathering headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
In Edward II’s years parliamentary procedure was extended and tested. By the time of his son Edward III, it was a vigorous forum for fiscal and military deliberation. The most telling parliamentary document of Edward II’s reign, the Modus tenendi Parliamentum (The Manner of Holding Parliament), was composed around 1322, probably by a clerk of parliament. It is a technical treatise, which was copied frequently into legal collections in later centuries, and was revived as an aspirational model by John Pym (1583–1643) in the 1640s. The Modus sees parliament as having a number of functions. It was a venue for important trials involving peers, and for treason trials; it was the proper forum for the settling of disputes between the king’s subjects; it served as a court of appeal, and attended to subjects’ petitions. The Modus emphasizes the accountability of the institution, and its long memory: accounts were to be kept in rolls (25 cm wide), and then in files, all kept by five clerks who were paid two shillings a day. The king presided over parliament and around him, in a careful order of precedence, were his officials, his magnates and his prelates. The Modus both described current practices and set out principles for future change. It was used by lawyers, advisers to great men, and by kings, as parliament’s prominence in political affairs steadily increased.
Petitions – from individuals, corporations and communities – highlighted unresolved court cases or conflicting claims to land, or cases touching upon royal rights. This orientation explains the prominence of justices – of King’s Bench and Common Bench – on the panels which sifted through parliamentary petitions. It also explains the frequency with which local lawyers, men of no more than local renown, were elected to parliament. Finally, at parliament the king presented his demands for taxation and there the level was deliberated and the mode of collection determined.
Parliament in this period was an expanding and evolving version of a royal council with its functions of deliberation and information gathering, and its attempts to arbitrate and negotiate reconciliation between political interests. The challenges of war and administration, together with the political desires of barons and townsmen, had formed it in the thirteenth century as a forum for the hearing of grievances, and as long as the king acted as a fair arbiter he could also use it for his own ends. Parliament’s role in the scrutiny of legislation was as yet a future development, but it germinated in complaints about widespread iniquities and in requests for correction. Complaints came from individuals but also from groups, both lay and clerical. Bishops were invited to attend, or rather were ‘forewarned’. The clergy were never required to appear, but rather invited to do so. The archbishops of Canterbury and York held assemblies that purported to gather the clergy for consultation. The clergy too used parliament for the expression of grievances, as in the case of the clergy of Canterbury who refused to pay taxes in 1323. Several bishops and archdeacons were important royal officials, scholars and experienced diplomats; like the judges they provided professional underpinning to parliamentary deliberations.
Edward II’s parliaments were royal affairs, which followed the centre of royal activity, and they had about them a quality of looseness in organization which also allowed charismatic characters to mark the proceedings. As we have already seen, several parliaments met in the north during the Scottish campaigns. In 1311 and in 1327 parliament became the tool for curbing the king, as the barons forced deliberation on royal competence and baronial grievance. Thus it may be said that Edward II summoned many parliaments, but did not always control them, since he did not command the respect of all the political constituencies to which the assembly gave voice.
Parliament was the scene for the last stages of Edward II’s rule. Despite a decade of baronial discontent, the final opposition arose within his own family, led not by disgruntled subjects but by his own wife and son. Queen Isabella succeeded in isolating the king, following her return from France. She arrived with an invasion force, supported by the Count of Hainault, having passed from Dordrecht to Suffolk, landing on 24 September 1326, with her lover Roger Mortimer and the fourteen-year-old prince. Having the prince on their side facilitated the establishment of their party as the ‘community of the realm’. London welcomed her, the king having removed himself from Westminster, retreating to Wales. There Edward II attempted to muster support; he commanded his long-time allies in Wales to raise forces, but this did not achieve much. In the Lordship of Glamorgan, near the Despensers’ castle of Llantrisant, where Edward had sought refuge, he was captured. Wales was the stage for this dramatic political struggle, although the king had many loyal followers and servants there.
The disorder of his household exemplified the failure of Edward II’s rule. His wife battled against him, with the support of a magnate, and his son was forced to decide which parent to follow. The kingdom was pressed, with war in Gascony since 1323 and invasions from Scotland. Parliament provided a venue for the airing of these discontents, and for the first time it enacted the scene of deposition. The heir to the throne was named ‘custodian’ of the realm: he was, after all, the king’s flesh and blood. But his other parent consolidated her disruptive hold throughout the autumn. Eventually the king was made a prisoner and his son came to the throne and was crowned in February 1327.
Even as these events were unfolding a royal clerk, Walter of Milmete, was at work translating a text aimed at imparting wisdom to kings: De nobilitatibus, sapientiis et prudentiis regum (On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings). Begun in Edward II’s lifetime, for the edification of his son Edward Prince of Wales, this was a translation of the book said to have been written by Aristotle for Alexander the Great. It was lavishly illustrated and included much practical advice, adapted to the contemporary English reality. The king should not take sides with factions of his magnates, it taught, and he should listen to their claims, especially those made ‘in parliamentis’ (which means ‘in conversations’, but perhaps, already, meetings of parliament). He should take advice before allocating liberties, marriages, lands and rents; he should consider a whole range of emotions when judging when to reward and when to distance men; he should read and speak Latin and French (and Edward indeed spoke both English and French), be able to write well, and thus be independent of clerks and scribes. A king should show mercy, and attend to the needs of poor vassals, especially old soldiers. He must wish for peace yet prepare for war, and recruit men of different stations, skilled in different ways – such as the rugged peasant who can fight on without baths and luxuries. He should visit his army and raise its morale.
The illustrations to this tract on English kingship present the king enthroned, dispensing justice and largesse, receiving the requests of people of many stations, skills and origins. Yet this was a wish, a dream, an ideal wrought from the inherited wisdoms of antiquity and inflected to emphasize the clear absences of the day: at the apex of the political process stood a leader made weak through his failure to reach accommodation with his potential advisers and supporters.
The removal of Edward II from the throne and the execution of the disgraced Despensers were not presented as parliamentary decisions, nor are they reported in the rolls of parliament. And yet parliament was the setting for the action, so that some have seen 1327 as the true birth of parliament. The parliament which Edward II had summoned for January 1327, and at which he refused to appear, was in reality his son’s first parliament. The mob which had gathered to complain about misrule turned into the crowd which acclaimed the new king.
Edward II abdicated on 21 January, and three days later Edward III’s peace was proclaimed. He was crowned on 1 February at Westminster Abbey at a splendid ceremony for which sumptuous garments were prepared by the King’s Wardrobe, at a cost of £1,323. These marked the political community in its ranks: gold cloth for some, silk for others, and bluett for the lower ranks. Official documents moved with ease from one monarch to another, but bureaucratic continuity conveys little of the political and familial drama which was being enacted. The year 1327 also marked a new stage of parliamentary efficacy: the full set of petitions presented, the first statute arising from them. The troubles of Edward II highlighted the need for political debate and redress more than ever before.
The final act of violence in this regime change was yet to come. The king was kept throughout the winter of 1326–7 in Kenilworth Castle, in the custody of his cousin, Henry Earl of Lancaster. These were months during which Isabella consolidated her income, rewarded followers, and during which at least one attempt was made to release the king. His would-be rescuers, the Despensers from south Wales, plotted in March 1327 but the attempt failed. There were other disturbances in the south-east: in mid-March in Canterbury, in June in Rochester. Therefore in April Edward II was moved to Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, to the care of Thomas Berkeley and John Maltravers. Roger Mortimer marched to the north of England in July, to quell unrest, while the young king fought the Scots – who were buoyed by their recent pact with France – without much effect. The feeling of crisis and lack of purpose which enveloped the new regime led to Edward III’s sense that bold action was required if he was to hold on to the throne. This took various forms: it may have led to the killing of his father at Berkeley on 21 September 1327; it definitely led to the coup against his mother.
Despite the vehement hostility with which some accounts described the later Isabella – the she-wolf of France – she was effective in her diplomatic endeavours, in her ability to create an elevated and autonomous position for herself. She bore her son, the heir, and as relations between her husband and the barons declined she came to fulfil a mediating role in 1318. But as she served the king she was also establishing her own heraldic, domestic, financial and legal domains, which ultimately developed not only into a separate life, but into an alternative to Edward’s rule. Her rise to prominence began with the decline of her husband’s popularity, but it gained its own momentum, ultimately leading to a total change of loyalty, and to the remaking of her life. For Isabella joined her destiny to that of Roger Mortimer Earl of March – both politically and personally – in the early 1320s. He had been Edward II’s childhood friend, and had distinguished himself in tournaments as a young knight and proved himself in the challenges of Ireland. He was now caught up in Edward’s family drama.
The situation was highly unusual in terms of human relations, constitutional propriety and the dispersal of authority. The young king remained strangely unblemished by the circumstances of his father’s death, which was widely rumoured to have been anything but the natural death which parliament had deemed it to be. Edward II’s body was eviscerated and embalmed at Berkeley, as was the custom, and was publicly viewed. There was no precedent for the burial of the body of a deposed king by his widow and his son and heir. But the burial did take place, just a few days before Christmas 1327. Edward’s tomb at Gloucester Cathedral is a splendid creation in alabaster, marble and Cotswold limestone, with a magnificent canopy. After his death the deposition articles were confident in stringing together a whole series of accusations: that the king was incompetent, that he had destroyed the church and nobles and lost the dominions of Scotland, Ireland and Gascony.
Isabella’s ultimate fall was ascribed by the chronicler Henry Knighton to five causes: usurpation, profligacy in use of crown revenues, links with Mortimer, the execution of her brother-in-law, Edmund of Woodstock Earl of Kent, and the shameful peace with the Scots. That she was profligate with the full treasury left by Edward II was true enough: in a few months the £61,921 in the Tower and Westminster treasuries dwindled to a mere £12,031 as a result of her reward to followers. On the day of her son’s coronation – 1 February 1327 – she received a series of manors and revenues from all over England producing £20,000 in annual income. And this was not all; later, much land belonging to supporters of the dead king was also seized and reallocated.
Isabella had lived through extraordinary trials in the court to which she had come at the age of thirteen, where she also had for several years to accept her secondary position, after male favourites and pastimes. In the face of very shabby treatment – emotional, financial and ceremonial – she sought her own way. She developed an ability to resist through gesture, grand gesture: she went into self-imposed exile in 1325, wore black like a widow until she was reinstated to the dignity and familial place that were her due. She nurtured an alternative political and romantic fantasy around a talented and attractive man who terrified baronial rivals, men of lineage and wealth who had far less clout than Mortimer after 1327. A fantasy it was: she and Mortimer appeared at tournaments dressed as Arthur and Guinevere. She had a penchant for Arthurian invention which her son was to carry to new heights.
Mortimer’s period of hegemony alongside Isabella was restless and troubled. While they both sought to rule after Edward II’s deposition in 1327, they were thwarted by Isabella’s precocious and assertive son. In his splendid residence of Ludlow Castle Mortimer prepared an apartment for Isabella’s use, in an ornate wing apart from the one used by his wife. But none of this was to bear fruit. Like Gaveston, Edward’s favourite, Mortimer – Isabella’s partner in ambition and desire – was to die a terrible death. For he was arrested at Nottingham, and was led to a trial in Westminster, a trial at which he was accused, among many other crimes, of murdering Edward II. Although Isabella begged her son for the life of her lover, he was dragged from the Tower to Tyburn, where he was hanged from the gallows, like a thief. Isabella – the king’s mother, crowned queen, daughter of a king – lived on until 1358. Visitors can still see at Castle Rising in Norfolk the remote fortress where she spent the rest of her life. Her body was buried in the Franciscan friary in London; no one seemed to suggest that she might join Edward II in death.