In medieval world maps – like the famous Mappa Mundi at Hereford Cathedral – continents are arranged around the central point – Jerusalem and, at its heart, Christ’s sepulchre. The British Isles are usually to be seen close to the margin, at the edge of the universe. But the fatal linkage of the people of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland to the fortunes of the Eurasian landmass was never more evident than in the year 1348, when the epidemic which came to be known as the Black Death reached the English shore at Melcombe Regis (now Weymouth) in Dorset in the month of June, perhaps carried by a ship which had crossed from Gascony to Bristol.
A disease which had become evident among the Mongols of the Golden Horde just a few years earlier, and which spread along the silk routes to the Lower Volga regions, the Black Sea, and was then carried into Europe by the many merchants, sailors and travellers who habitually crossed the Mediterranean. Great, rich and populous cities succumbed: Constantinople in 1347, Florence in 1348. From Dorset it was a matter of months before it reached the Highlands of Scotland and the eastern parts of Ireland. The effects of mass mortality were profound and varied: those infected usually died just days after the appearance of buboes under their armpits and in their groins, accompanied by a high fever and a vile stench. The chronicler Henry Knighton recounts that corpses lay in the streets for want of hands to gather and bury them, and people lost all: their loved ones, their neighbours, their carers, their workers. In the much longer term there were changes which only historians and hindsight can reveal.
Perhaps the simplest approach is to think of the overwhelming loss of between a third and a half of each and every community through the different social contexts in which it was experienced. Evidence from the appointment of men to clerical benefices shows in East Anglia a turnover of almost half during a period of twelve months in 1349–50, with particularly rapid change over the summer months of June to August 1349. Similarly, in the diocese of Norwich, touched by the plague in late March 1349, hundreds of vicars were instituted in these months and several heads of religious houses. So many had died and there was so much fear that the dying might die alone, without Christian rites, that the Bishop of Bath and Wells, Ralph of Shrewsbury, ordained in 1349:
The continuous pestilence of the present day… has left many parish churches without parson or priest… if they are on the point of death and cannot secure the services of a priest, then they should make confession to each other… if no man is present, even to a woman.
Attempts to explain so overwhelming a calamity implicated almost everyone in guilt, but especially the rich and powerful. The Archbishop of York blamed those caught up in ‘the delights of prosperity’, who forgot God’s gift to them in the rules of Christian morality. Yet while guilt singled out the fortunate few, all were touched by the plague of 1348–9. Families could no longer fulfil their essential functions: when a manorial court wished to record legal guardians in the years 1348–50, only 28 per cent of minors had parents, compared to 60 per cent in later decades. Urban workshops missed crucially skilled members, without whom products could not be completed: even the making of a simple saddle required the coordinated work of a joiner, a lorimer and a painter. The ranks of royal officials, who travelled widely on the business of dispensing justice and collecting taxes, seem to have suffered greatly. After the initial catastrophe, mortality became more regionalized: in the second visitation of the plague, in 1361–2, King David II of Scotland moved to Aberdeenshire, to escape the plague that had already affected the Borders and southern Scottish counties. Immunity developed in some sections, creating patterns of infection in later outbreaks: that of 1361 in London killed children in the autumn, and men and women only later in the spring. None of those who had witnessed the plague could ever have forgotten it. It hit all regions, and where it became endemic it recurred. The Welsh poet Gwilym ap Sefnyn (c.1400) lamented the loss of seven sons and three daughters to the plague.
The mortality affected young and old, rich and poor: but it spread with the most devastating speed in areas of dense population and in the proximity of animals. Thus towns were badly and repeatedly affected, and nucleated villages were more prone than were the sparsely settled areas, where single hamlets surrounded by fields and meadows were the rule. Archbishop FitzRalph of Armagh wrote to the pope in 1349 with a report that two thirds of the English in Ireland had been destroyed. Since most Anglo-Irish were town-dwellers, this is not surprising; conversely, the Gaelic Irish seem to have been largely spared.
What did this mean for life in the countryside? Since some 90 per cent of the population lived in rural communities, it is this population which saw the highest absolute loss of life. A glimpse of agrarian life – cast through the artistic sensibility of the illuminator of a luxury manuscript, the Luttrell Psalter, around 1340 – depicts the countryside peopled by men and women at their characteristic chores: ploughing, breaking clods of earth, sowing, weeding, reaping, stacking up sheaves, threshing. Food is shown on its route from field, cottage yard or pen, through the gathering of fruits, slaughter of animals, and preparation by pantrymen and cooks, on to the lord’s table. The countryside is represented as containing various natural resources tamed and nurtured by country people: a woman feeding her chicks, windmills and rabbit warrens, fish-traps in the mill-race. There were the labours of those who offered services, such as the smith sharpening knives, bowmen in training, a barber letting blood. The Psalter shows a manor as a differentiated and interlocking community of people with differing skills, of high and low status, active in a wide range of interdependent – though not equally rewarded – activities.
Such was the countryside before the Black Death, for, by the time it struck, the population had recovered, probably fully, from the mortality caused by the famine of 1315–22. Indeed, it seems that by the 1340s renewed pressure on resources was experienced. This is suggested by the contraction of some villages – in Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire – where exhausted poor soils were no longer worth tilling, and were thus abandoned. It is also the underlying cause of measures aimed at increasing food production through the bringing of new land under the plough, as in 1347–8 at Petworth Park, where rabbit warrens were filled to allow peas and oats to be sown. The routines of agricultural work – on the tenancies of servile peasants or in the choice lands of seigneurial demesnes – were seriously disrupted with the arrival of the plague in the months of July and August 1348. At the death of a servile tenant the holding was transferred in the manorial court to a male heir. But in the absence of a male heir, what was to be done? Rental rolls tell the tale of tragic absences: the columns in which peasants’ payments were to be noted now recorded the word vacat, ‘it is empty’. Where much land was left unused, lords were moved to reduce the expected payment from an heir, or to waive it altogether. Order, income and the flow of payments in kind had to be re-established between the lord of a manor and his tenants, and if this meant a reduction in income, this was accepted as the price for keeping the land from reverting to wilderness. Communities were thus saved from falling into disarray, and seigneurial accounts were saved from total confusion.
The burden of commemoration of the dead, the expectations that prayers be said for the souls of those suddenly departed, fell now upon surviving individuals. An institutional framework for commemoration was considered most fitting and reliable since monasteries did not die, and confraternities lived on through their memberships, whereas family and friends might succumb to disease. These foundations came to bear the burden of prayer, and in doing so enhanced their own importance and the extent of their endowments. New types of commemorative arrangements were also created. The surviving members of the Corpus Christi fraternity of Cambridge, the religious society which united the town’s leading burgesses, decided to found a new academic college in 1352, and invest in it the duty of prayer and commemoration. It transferred its properties, many of them legacies of dead members, to the college, which was in turn charged with commemorative tasks. Its clerical scholars were particularly fit to fulfil these duties in the parish church of St Benet’s, which served as their chapel. The onus of commemorating and serving the dead had inspired this unique form of endowment.
Apart from a small group of wealthy, landed and sometimes leisured families, the work of men and women was greatly intertwined and complementary in the households of this complex economy. Work was organized within the family, be it in the customary holding of the manorial village, or the craft workshop in the town. It was among the poorest urban labourers and the most privileged aristocratic households that male and female activities were least integrated. Among the former, both man and wife – and from an early age their offspring – worked for wages; among the latter, warfare, politics and office took men away from home regularly, and into spheres that were almost exclusively male. But for most people the household economy required high levels of cooperation and work side by side. Guild records reveal the names of members – carpenters, mercers, butchers or chandlers – but they also attest that women were involved in training apprentices, preparing raw materials and, in many crafts, occupying the role of vendor at the street-facing frontage of workshops, selling the goods produced indoors.
In the household economy a number of external rules supported the male head of household’s privilege. In most instances he represented the household in secular courts, and hence entered into contracts of purchase and sale, paid tithes, delivered labour services for the tenancy and paid its dues. Furthermore, apprenticeship was a lengthy process (seven years in most crafts) of training and guidance, a contract in which the apprentice’s father and the master craftsman were involved. In practice, however, women participated in training and nurturing apprentices (who began their training as young as seven), and they even completed it if their husbands died without an adult heir. Inasmuch as the craft guild was a political organization which not only administered its business but sent representatives into urban institutions, men alone were expected to partake in its activities. But women, wives of members, were accorded some benefits of social and religious support, in penury or after death. Much more interaction between men and women probably occurred informally as crafts coincided with particular quarters and neighbourhoods. In these a plethora of exchanges, debts and kinship links co-existed, necessary cooperation and craft solidarity involving women even more than men. For women, domestic work and craft work were intertwined; they also found themselves training and supervising the work of other women, skilled or semi-skilled labourers in the workshop, or domestic servants.
On rural holdings a similar discrepancy between the legal status of women and the realities of family work prevailed. The basis of a family’s existence – the tenancy – was granted to the male and his heirs, but clear expectations of benefit and usufruct were accorded to daughters and, in the eventuality, widows. As to work, women put their hands to every type of rural work. They maintained the household, participated in agricultural work as necessary, and ran a whole series of related agrarian operations such as tending to livestock, poultry, vegetable gardens and herb gardens (Plate 3). Carding, spinning and weaving took place in households which possessed the necessary tools, or in cooperation with neighbours. Much medical lore was passed on within households, and villagers rarely used the services of surgeons, let alone of physicians. Child-rearing was perceived as a far less structured set of activities than it is today, yet its priorities are familiar. Attempts were made to make houses safe for children. Special attention was invested in securing water vessels and open fires, around which a high incidence of sad accidents and deaths were recorded by coroners; ecclesiastical statutes recommended that mothers and wet-nurses avoid sleeping with babies for fear of smothering them. Children, at least up to the age of six or seven, were cared for in the household, and largely by their mothers and other female relatives.
Although a servile family was defined in law by the holding of servile land and the rendering of labour services, in fact such a family could possess properties, incomes and other economic interests quite apart from the tenancy held from its lord. The land hunger of the thirteenth century left a legacy of small parcels bought dearly but conscientiously in order to provide sons with inheritances and daughters with dowries. Serfs were active in the local land-market, in which they used savings and income from labour and exchange to provide for their young. Whereas a certain alleviation had set in following the famines of 1315–22, the trend of high land-prices continued in many regions up to the Black Death. Rural families encountered growing difficulty in providing land for their maturing sons and daughters in preparation for marriage, and so youngsters probably stayed at home longer, under patriarchal discipline and in dependence, than their forebears had done. This may partly explain the tensions underlying the high levels of violence between family members recorded in manorial court rolls. Migration to a town was an option followed by some – the more enterprising or the better skilled – and particularly in those areas like East Anglia and Kent, where a buoyant urban economy offered attractive opportunities. But wages were low and expectations similarly modest in this period of over-abundance of labour, before 1349. On Welsh estates the change was perhaps less noticeable because of the importance of the wider kin-group. Welsh tenant families never ‘died out’, because land passed on even to distant relatives: when Maredudd ap Madog ap Llewellyn of Dyffryn Clwyd died in 1322 without an heir, two of his second cousins stepped into his holding. So land was available from a wider range of family sources for Welsh young people than it was for English ones. One might say that English patterns of tenure and household came to resemble the Welsh ones, as pressure on resources placed greater power in the hands of older landholding men. In the years just preceding the Black Death not a single family at Kibworth Harcourt (Leicestershire) left the village or ceded its customary land.
The late medieval economy offered a wide range of sources of income and productive outlets for family labour. The village, although highly regulated by custom, also offered possibilities: there was pasture for livestock, and in the months of low agricultural activity a variety of craft was pursued in homes. In the north, where abundance of wool was a marked economic feature, spinning and weaving absorbed much work of younger and female members of households. This in turn trained young women in a transferable craft which could also be practised in towns, in return for wages. Indeed, the fourteenth century saw a high proportion of ‘spinsters’, women who lived singly or in groups with similar women, and, working in the textile workshops, produced cloth of varying quality from the rougher russet to the soft woollen cloth for export.
In pursuit of greater security for the elderly the maintenance agreement – a form of provision for old age – developed on manors. This was a formalized exchange between a person or a couple close to retirement and a younger couple, whereby the land was handed over to the young in return for annual amounts of food and clothing, bedding and a degree of assistance. For those of higher social standing some religious houses offered a venue for such arrangements, with the benefit of a religious setting for their retirement years. Even quite modest people could benefit: in 1352 the small nunnery of Yedingham in east Yorkshire promised its dairywoman Emma Hart at her retirement a place in ‘le sisterhouse’. People planned for retirement with the aim of securing a flow of food and clothing and adequate shelter – all within a familiar community.
The overall picture of the response to the Black Death and its aftermath is only discernible when we assemble a wide range of examples of the choices made by lords and peasants as they confronted a new, shifting and unpredictable reality. Inflation and demand for food still held high the prices of foodstuffs in the 1360s and 1370s, but many estate managers had already decided that the labour-intensive arable systems which typified so much of southern and central England could no longer be maintained with the decline in availability of labouring hands. A number of solutions emerged in consequence: in areas of intensive mixed farming in north-east Kent, for example, wage bills were cut by greater investment in horse-power for pulling ploughs and carting manure. In 1366 the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury, lords of the manor of Ickham in east Kent, purchased carthorses and oxen and thus reduced the number of ploughhands needed from ten to four and their plough-teams from five to two. A widely adopted change was the move from arable to pasture: the south Kent manor of Wye had 660 sheep and lambs in 1350 and 964 in 1371–2, while the manor of Ickham had some 300 sheep in 1349–51 but 499 in 1370. The Bishop of Winchester’s estates had an overall number of 22,500 sheep in 1348, 30,000 by the mid-1350s and 35,000 by 1369. Cattle-herds also grew: on Norfolk demesnes the average of 5–25 cows per herd before 1350 had risen to 35–40 later in the century. With these great numbers of sheep and cows dairy production was refined in the traditional dairy centres in the south-east, but it spread, and its produce was consumed more widely, providing useful protein for the diet of working people.
Sheep-rearing required less investment of labour than did arable fields; sheep produced wool, meat and, if carefully folded on fields at night, could fertilize the remaining arable and legume fields. Areas such as the Breckland (Norfolk–Suffolk border), with poor soil and traditionally low arable yields, came to develop another profitable line, the warrening of rabbits. A modest initial investment expended on situating and enclosing warren areas and introducing the rabbits could result in high returns: meat and fur were easily marketed to London. Such moves to pasture and warrening reflected and reinforced new consumption patterns which saw a greatly increased demand for meat in the diet of workers in town and country: farm servants at Sedgeford (Norfolk) gained 2 per cent of their calories from meat in the late thirteenth century, and some 23 per cent by the 1420s.
Another notable change was the increase in the consumption of ale, probably reaching around three pints a day on average in the late fourteenth century and resulting in an important contribution to calorific intake. Demand for brewing corns also affected the landscape, in determining the type of corn sown, above all in the counties which supplied that ever-thirsty consumer, London.
Human life and relations changed following the mortality of the Black Death, and so did the environment: it was transformed both in the short and in the long term. Villages in Lincolnshire were on the verge of turning into marsh by 1375. So great had been the change in tenancies, and so confusing the emergent patterns of land-holding, that the rota of responsibilities for maintaining dykes and ditches had all but disintegrated. Rivers such as the Smallee in Norfolk became almost unnavigable through the dearth of people to clear them regularly of growth and silting. Some areas previously worked for their salt now turned into salt-marsh; yet by the 1370s carts carrying salt were still a commonplace in Lindsey (Lincolnshire) for local distribution and even for transport from Wainfleet, by sea. Changes in the landscape had unexpected and pervasive environmental effects. As the development of rural industry required and encouraged the erection of dams, timber-mills, fulling-mills and sawmills, migration of fish was blocked, and thus new species of fish became more accessible for fishermen. The annual catch from a millpond at Cryfield (Warwickshire) included bream, tench, roach, perch and pike. Indeed, the general rise in the standard and diversity of the late medieval diet generated new demand for fish and the development of inland fisheries as well as regional specialized fishing industries such as those on the south Devon coast. Tin-miners ate fish rather than meat, as it was easily available for purchase on the beach, as well as in rural fish-markets just inland from the coast. So extensive was investment in fishing that a statute of 1351 called for the dismantling of weirs and mills which impeded boat traffic on the Thames, the Severn, the Ouse and the Trent.
With greater availability of land and the dearth of settled villeins satisfied to work it, looser attachments between lords and peasants developed. Where lands had traditionally been held by villeins, outsiders (extranei) were now in tenure. If a single family held two or more tenancies, it might neglect buildings, ditches, gardens on those lands it did not inhabit, contributing in this way to the increase and visibility of disrepair and dislocation. The overall number of people on the land continued to decline, although the phenomenon of village desertion did not become fully evident until the 1380s: by 1381 an estate in Dyffryn Clwyd had only 47 of its previous 212 villeins, while by 1386 Kingsthorpe (Northamptonshire) had lost its entire population. Those who did remain on the land were aware of their relative advantage and bargaining position: in 1364 a manorial injunction at West Rainton (Co. Durham) prohibited calling the tenants of East Rainton ‘neifs’ (nativi), that is serfs, of the lord.
Even if demands from servile tenants were transformed after the great mortality, and landlords’ expectations were adjusted to the new reality, the trend of depopulation persisted in the countryside. The 1360s and 1370s, therefore, saw a real transformation which affected landscape, organization of labour routines and thus of family and community relations. In England, and even more in Wales, collective agrarian undertakings, such as joint ploughing and joint leasing of pasture, depended on shared interests and the ability of each household to invest time, effort and funds. The cooperation which was required of open-field communities was clearly being eroded by the fragmentation of activities and even the abandonment of whole tracts of land to waste. This often took the forms of contraction and ultimately desertion of villages, traces of which can still be clearly seen at Egmere and Pudding Norton (Norfolk). Patterns evident in the east Midlands show, interestingly, that villages in river valleys rarely disappeared, and that nucleated villages – settlements in which buildings were clustered together, most common in the east and south of England – tended to be more vulnerable in the post-plague years, especially the rather poorer ones. In such villages households tended to be more interdependent economically and socially, and thus more vulnerable to erosion with the decline in cohesion of this network. On the other hand, hamlets and more dispersed settlements were accustomed to greater self-sufficiency; they often produced basic manufactured goods and could thus bear the brunt of dislocation and mortality better. Furthermore, proximity to a town sometimes hastened depopulation: the Ouse valley saw little shrinkage in its villages, except those near towns such as Bedford, Buckingham, Newport Pagnell, Oundle and Towcester. Status as an administrative centre for a large estate might further enhance a community’s chance of prosperous survival. In many areas this period saw the beginning of long-term change, with a trend to depopulation that was never halted, a fate sealed when whole villages were turned into pasture by the late fifteenth century.
Landlords cast a sharper look and brought some radical thinking to the question of the character of husbandry as they reassessed the assets under their control: pasture, water, parkland, mines. This meant a change in lifestyle for lords and tenants alike. Parkland was a lord’s reserve of deer for the hunt, but it could also provide timber for construction and sale, and its underwood could be sold or leased. Parks became more closely monitored after the Black Death by a complex hierarchy of managing manorial officials: by 1385–6 the lord of Walsall Manor (Staffordshire) had his whole park enclosed to protect the wood and to fatten twenty heifers, as well as poultry and game birds. Areas of woodland which once dominated the landscape – oak, birch, ash, hazel, elm – diminished. Hedgerows continued to mark important property boundaries, while their fruits were highly valued by country people, and even more so by urban consumers. Decisions were taken in consultation with professional managers of estates, who were rewarded for success or dismissed for failure. Their status probably rose too: in 1354 Lord Berkeley was regularly joined by his reeve and household officers for meals at Raglan Castle.
The reallocation of land and other resources between lords and peasants took a variety of forms and resulted in complex life-changes, the full effect of which is hard to discern. In general, migration was more extensive: in York around 1300, 51 per cent of surnames indicating place of origin were from within 19 miles, and 7 per cent from within 19–37 miles; whereas by 1360 34 per cent were from the closer, and 35 per cent from the further points of origin. The mortality clearly affected family relations: the young tended to migrate, confident in their ability to find work, and perhaps pushed by the gloom which descended on so many contracting villages. Moreover, as land and work became more plentiful, so did opportunities for the employment of men offered by the French and Scottish wars, and training opportunities for women in the expanding textile industry. The links of dependence which had kept so many young people close to the family hearth in the days of scarcity were diminished. People were on the move, coming and going by sea and road and river, within the wide domains which the King of England ruled. There were foreign workers too, such as the Flemish men and women at work in Brancaster (Norfolk) in 1368 and known as ‘Pekkers’ (from Picardy), and Welsh men who worked for high wages on Midland estates in the late summer and autumn.
There was ever more land to be had within the manorial system. Increasingly we find tenants amassing large holdings: Roger de Salkeld (Cumberland), for example, held c.200 acres in 1371. By the 1370s landlords were eager to rid themselves of large tracts of arable. Where they were not turned to pasture, choice demesne lands were leased out for terms of years, and those keenest to enter into them were the greater peasant-holders who had sufficient savings to buy, stock and work the additional land. The shedding of customary duties of serfs meant that in Caldicot Manor (Gwent) the 1,000 labour days which were provided in the 1340s had dwindled to some 114 in 1362. So while average peasant holdings grew after the Black Death, the distribution of land tended to favour a stratum of large tenants, who saw their standing in their communities enhanced accordingly. New types of tenants entered into village holdings in these circumstances: on Welsh manors Welshmen now leased or bought land of English tenure from which they were previously excluded. Burgesses and priests with ready cash could buy lands which were previously customary holdings of serfs on estates. The texture of community based on neighbourhood and shared responsibility was clearly changing rapidly. Mobility affected the ability of neighbours to maintain cooperation in the many ways required by village life, down to the smallest institutions such as the communal pound for stray beasts maintained by contributions of the tenants in Glentham (Lincolnshire) or the maintenance of dykes around Wisbech (Cambridgeshire).
The 1360s and 1370s saw not only seigneurial reactions which favoured diversification of production and rationalization of estates, but a reinvigorated attention to the viability of legal and customary rights. Some lords were happy to shed some seigneurial rights in return for a regular income or a lump sum: the Bishop of Norwich accepted in 1369 12d. per annum from each tenant in Honingham (Norfolk) in place of compulsory use of his mill. The men of Brecon were obliged to pay £500 for overall exemption from tolls, and those of Denbigh village £400 in 1356. The legal profession played a crucial role in such negotiations. In areas of particularly rampant lordship, such as the Welsh Marches, compensation for decline in revenues could take spectacular form: the dues from the Brecon lordship doubled between 1340 and 1399, through the imposition of taxes on economic activity, such as the payment of £400 for the right to buy and sell land in the Tegeingl (Flintshire and Denbighshire). Lordship was asserted through close administration, and in Wales in particular it resulted in an intensified scrutiny through seigneurial land-surveys, as well as in determined exploitation of income from justice.
Serfs did not remain passive in this changing environment; they too sometimes sought and acquired good legal advice. The economic and demographic transformations which followed the Black Death contributed to the growing frequency of legal litigation and thus to the development of the professional prospects and utility of those with legal training. The array of legal frameworks and the remedies they offered was vast – ecclesiastical, borough, King’s Bench, Chancery Court – as well as arbitration within families, neighbourhoods and wards and within a lord’s affinity.
This fluid world where the young were on the move, where landed assets posed challenges to their owners, was shrewdly understood by contemporaries to be radical in its promise and disturbing in its effects. Those whose incomes and authority were most affected – employers and landlords – mobilized their influence in parliament, and achieved a quick royal reaction to their plight. A royal ordinance of 1349 was turned into statute by parliament in 1350: the Statute of Labourers. The statute fixed the price of labour in various sectors, and set the minimum term of contracts of employment. It became a resource that was used in localities pragmatically: it was usually ignored, but when expedient it was applied. Even the king exempted himself from its operations when his clerks sought masons for the great building works in Windsor of the 1360s. The system of labour control became increasingly integrated into the evolving system of local justice administered largely by the gentry, the very land-holders so concerned with the maintenance of a cheap and constant supply of labour. Within a generation labour legislation, although patchily enforced, became the byword for unjust oppression.
The issues of labour and wages, of poverty and merit, of vagabondage and charity – all areas of the social contract – developed into chronic preoccupations of those who employed labourers in town and in country. This anxiety elicited legislation from a third of the parliaments of the following century. It became one of the most acute political issues of the later fourteenth century, inspiring expressions repeated in all grievances, minute or spectacular. In 1356 a vicar and a hermit of Hertfordshire, Robert Gerard and Richard Fulham, were presented to court for contemptuous public talk about the statute and ordinance: they claimed that no laws should stop artisans and labourers from earning as much as they could get. When legislation was repeated in the statute of 1361 the pain for infraction was no longer a fine, but imprisonment and branding with the letter F for Falsity, although we do not know that it was enforced. Some sumptuary legislation emphasized a similar preoccupation with social hierarchy. The statute of 1363 fixed the quality of cloth appropriate for each social group: lords, knights, esquires. Although it was not enforced – the Commons even sought its reversal in the following year in support of free and more buoyant trade – these legislative acts express areas of concern and anxiety which animated political debate and attitudes in localities.
Cities attracted young labourers in particular into service in households and workshops. These were unattached youths away from home, and they came to be seen as a menace during these anxious times. In 1351 London already sensed the effect and intended to arrest ‘misdoers’ who had come to it since the end of the pestilence. Its efforts against migrant workers continued with a 1359 order to expel all unemployed migrants. In the growing and buoyant textile industry there was now place for many young men and women, and for servants, working for wages at a relatively young age, before marriage. It was the fear of such servants that the Statute of Treason of 1352 attempted to address, for it defined treason not only as plotting against the king’s well-being, but as a series of acts against authority: servant against master, wife against husband. Coroners’ records reveal very few cases of servants killing their masters, and many more injuries caused by masters to servants, but the anxieties which turned into petitions in parliament and subsequently informed statutes were those of the Lords and Commons, in a world where traditional relations of deference and dependence had been dramatically transformed.
The responses of towns to the pressures and the promise of these decades took administrative forms which varied by region. The towns of the north invested in maintaining and sometimes building anew protective walls, while those of East Anglia did not. The towns of Wales, especially the plantation boroughs set up by Edward I, contended with complex issues resulting from the legal and social ‘dualism’ – distinctions between Welsh and English – which statutes created. Irish towns faced similar problems of ‘separation’. The southern English ports all feared a French invasion, and invested in and received help towards their fortification: in 1339 Edward III ordered that defences be erected in Southampton following the French raid on the port. Every town had to make a contribution to the national effort, through taxation and by raising fighting men: in 1346/7 Cambridge contributed eight men to Edward III’s expedition to Calais. The funding of such ventures was one of the many tasks of the emergent group of town treasurers, under the supervision of town councils.
The men who administered towns benefited from the prestige, connections and information which such positions offered, but they could also be held responsible for failure, and they did not operate in a free field of action. Cathedral cities confronted the presence of huge cathedral households and administrations with privileges that exempted them from contributing to the city’s taxation and from answering to its courts. Such exemption covered clerical personnel, their servants and their families, and a whole array of ecclesiastical institutions such as hospitals, colleges, schools, chapels and hermitages. Internal competition over influence and jurisdiction within cities moved the Bishop of Bath and Wells to build a moat and wall around his palace at Wells against militant townsmen; the wafer-thin walls marked territory and autonomy. In 1345 Coventry’s incorporation marked its new freedom to elect officials and run a merchant court; the political centre of gravity was shifting from cathedral precinct into a distinct civic space. Conversely, towns were developing ceremonies and symbols of autonomy to match the heavy burdens that its officers carried. The process was encouraged and supported by the crown, which depended greatly for its income on the fluidity and buoyancy of trade. Towns were part of national political life, through their representatives in the parliamentary Commons. There were town seals, such as Winchelsea’s (Sussex) combination of a ship with a tower and the royal arms, and public buildings such as guildhalls. This making of constitutions and solidification of urban institutions coincided with the invention of local traditions and myths of origin. In 1372 the prosperous town of Colchester claimed that the foundations of its Norman castle marked the site of King Cole’s palace, while the inhabitants of Totnes (Devon) claimed that Brut the Trojan was their founder.
And there was London, with a population of perhaps 100,000 in the 1340s and about 20,000 by the 1370s. This was a complex city, a patchwork of some 104 neighbourhood parishes, containing over a hundred occupations, tens of guilds, hundreds of chapels, and a multitude of ethnicities, estates and languages. Although the Jews of England had been expelled in 1290, London still had its Jews, sometimes described as converts from Turkey, Spain or the Low Countries. One Jew was even moved to convert in London itself, and became John of St Mary. London was the heart of the commercial community, and inasmuch as this was becoming increasingly drawn into overseas trade and national politics, London was the stage for events that in turn affected the lives of men and women on both sides of the Channel. Any object could be bought, any service hired in mid-fourteenth-century London: sex, banking, learning, gastronomy and entertainment. News and fashion reached London easily, within a week from Paris or Bruges, and sufficiently pressing news could then reach the regions of the British Isles within days through an excellent network of rivers, roads and waterways.
This country, just recovering from mortality, was also plunged into war, and some were to benefit greatly from the opportunities offered by it. The will and character of Edward III and his government made a great difference at many levels. His boyhood was marked by exile in France with his mother Isabella and later a return to England which ended in the deposition of his father and ultimately saw this teenager end his mother’s rule. He had married Philippa, daughter of the Count of Hainault, in 1328, and soon after, in 1330 at the age of seventeen, was ready to rise against the rule established by his guardians: his mother and her lover Mortimer. He then painstakingly established his rule through networks of patronage which were to be cemented in the French wars from 1337 which were followed by his claim to the French crown in 1340.
Edward III’s rule confronted some of the greatest challenges faced by a monarch of an empire of British and French lands: there was war with Scotland, a newly enhanced war in France, a country struck by plague, depopulation and economic uncertainty. The political system enabled the sounding of dissent and complaint through clamour for the king’s attention in parliaments. Edward III was above all active in war and its finance; the politics followed. No wonder that contemporary prophetic texts saw him as a lion, where they described his father as a goat, a lover of luxury, who had been impotent at war. Edward III gave the fighting and trading men of his country – his political community – the taste for war and its rewards. And so even when he wished to sign treaties for peace, as he did in the Treaty of Brétigny of 1360, and to enjoy the fruits of his efforts, there was always a group which goaded him towards war. Belligerent political programmes were presented as oracular prophecies. A volume of the prophecies of St John of Bridling-ton was dedicated to Humphrey of Bohun, the king’s lieutenant in Calais; it pronounced that the job in France would not be complete until the Black Prince – Edward, Prince of Wales – was King of France.
The awesome images constructed in Edward III’s youth and prime – warrior-boy, Arthurian hero like Edward I – were powerful political tokens, which seemed to gain depth from comparison with the memory of his father. Nowhere was this more so than in the conduct of the Scottish wars. Here the dynastic legacy was strong: testing in the Scottish wars marked his grandfather’s and father’s reigns as well as his mother’s short regency. From 1332 Edward III invested, for a while, in efforts to re-establish English hegemony and to secure a recognition of English overlordship; it had, after all, been the conciliatory Scottish policy of Isabella and Mortimer that had incensed the Londoners and pushed Edward to depose his guardians. Edward III offered support to Edward Balliol, a claimant to the Scottish throne, encouraging him to return from exile in France. This was a war of Bruce against Balliol, supported by the English crown, at a moment which saw the Bruce camp in some disarray following the deaths of Robert Bruce and his most trusted and experienced lieutenants, the Earl of Moray and James Douglas. Following his success in July 1333 at the battle of Halidon Hill outside Berwick, Edward Balliol and some of the disinherited Scottish lords landed by sea in Fife, and by 1334 accepted Edward III’s overlordship for the whole of southern Scotland, which he now held. King David Bruce II was forced to flee to France and in 1335 Balliol’s forces reached the north of Scotland, fighting their way through Scottish resistance by the new Earl of Moray. Yet that very year saw a reversal, at the battle of Culblean (Deeside), where William Douglas and Andrew Murray defeated Balliol’s supporters and captured Balliol’s lieutenant, David Strathbogie.
This instability had to be settled and called for decision on Edward III’s part. He continued to pour some £25,000 a year into the short three-month Scottish fighting season, an extravagance soon to be stopped as his attention and every other resource was turned to another part of Europe, against the Bruces’ ally, to France. When the English armies were removed it was relatively easy for Murray to recover and recapture lands and strongholds by 1337, as had been the case in previous decades. While he did so, the young Bruce heir was safely maturing on French soil. Edward III’s later campaigns to Scotland, above all his victory at Neville’s Cross in 1346, where he imprisoned David II, King of the Scots (1329–71), allowed him to turn fully towards the French war. Given these challenges it was both expected and expedient that energetic border lords, whose estates were most at risk from Scottish raids, and who could raise and command forces, should be empowered to shoulder the burden of defence. The Percies, who rose to prominence as lords of Alnwick around 1309, are a good example. The Nevilles, alongside the Bishop of Durham, were charged with the tasks of defending the north and led the forces at Neville’s Cross in 1346.
The Scottish wars were a burden, but they trained a whole cohort of men, bonded them to the king and to each other, and allowed tactics to be perfected which were to prove significant in the encounters on French soil. The lesson of Bannockburn (1314) was applied at Dupplin Muir (1332) and Halidon Hill (1333). Edward III now conducted battles with wings of archers fighting with longbows, either side of a group of men-at-arms. The Scottish forces led by Sir Archibald Douglas at Halidon Hill attacked uphill as a group of spearmen, but were overwhelmed by the English assault of swift archers. The combination was extremely powerful: two wings of archers – using bows weighted by over 100 pounds – shot down thousands of attackers and protected the men-at-arms in the centre. This fighting style proved highly successful in the first stages of the wars with France. Edward had also learned a great deal from the Bruces’ ravages of the north of England: such raids impoverished and demoralized the affected region. The chevauchée – the destructive ride through the countryside, that tool of terror used so knowingly in the French wars – was developed in England’s northern Marches.
A number of strands of dynastic aspiration and economic benefit came together in Edward’s claim to the French throne in 1340. Although he took the ambition further than his immediate predecessors, Edward was not the author of the English claim. He was, after all, the grandson of Philip IV, King of France (d. 1314), and stood in direct lineal descent through his mother. This claim through female descent was not wholly new to the European political community: women had inherited or mediated a claim in the Iberian kingdoms and in Flanders, as well as in England itself. Edward III’s direct descent through a daughter was superior, so he claimed, to a lateral descent through a man, as was the case of Philip VI. In January 1340 he styled himself King of France. Whereas his predecessors had their initials decorated at the head of royal charters, Edward had several letters presented in this way, and sometimes his whole name. The seal used by him from June 1340 styled him King of England and King of France, in a mode to be used by his successor, and he quartered the fleur-de-lis with the Lions of England.
In turn, French polemical writing, such as the Treatise on the Coronation by Jean Golein, argued that a woman cannot be anointed, hence it followed ‘by the accord of all, that the kingdom of France must be held by succession of the male heir the closest of the line…’. Edward was simply mistaken: ‘and that the king of England, Edward, who has long held that error saying that because of his mother he has a right to the kingdom of France, he is not well-informed on this fact’. Edward III was extremely well-informed of the French reality. He had long held dynastic lands, inherited by his grandfather Edward I from his own mother, Eleanor of Provence; for Gascony he had already rendered homage to Philip VI. There was the added issue of the safety of English trade with Flanders, access to which depended so much on the control of Normandy. By throwing his claim into the arena, Edward created a focal point for disgruntled vassals of the increasingly ambitious French crown, such as the Count of Flanders and the Duke of Normandy. He also created a theme for his own reign, a purpose for mobilization and cooperation, uniquely led by him.
The confrontation with France must also be linked to Edward’s British vision: in recent history the King of France had supported Scottish political aspirations. Continental rulers, all of whom were linked by marriage to the French royal family, also enjoyed the thought of a dynastic rearrangement, which might cut territory away from the vast lands of the kings of France. Diplomats, lawyers, poets, chancery clerks, chroniclers and artists were engaged in the effort of making Edward III’s claim to France something more than an outrage. Far from being offensive or aggressive, this claim was an assertion of justice and reparation. By the 1340s, it was a question of safety: claims were made that the King of France sought to conquer England and distribute its lands among his nobles.
Seen from the Low Countries, St Omer and Tournai, the northernmost cities of France offered obvious targets for land warfare. Already in July 1337 a small force led by Robert of Artois, containing Flemish foot-soldiers and English longbowmen, had been sent to St Omer, and Edward III himself was to lead the remaining forces to the city of Tournai. Edward and his allies had hitherto experienced relatively easy victories: this was not to be repeated. Robert of Artois burnt his way to St Omer, but was routed by the energy and the offensive tactics of the French garrison there. Forced to retreat to the English forces around Tournai, Edward III witnessed over the following months some of the frustrations of the French war, and the enormous expense which this type of enterprise inflicted on his kingdom.
While the king was learning to expect and perhaps even accept criticism from parliament, he must have reacted more sharply to the criticism of his court by someone who knew it well, such as the author of the poem Vows of the Heron in Anglo-Norman French. Set in 1337, and written soon after, the poem depicts the court of Edward III at a feast. Goaded by Robert of Artois, the angry exile who had caught the heron for their meal, the king vowed to go to war, as did Robert. Nobles took oaths promising prowess in the future war with France over the heron’s cooked flesh. The Earl of Salisbury would not open his right eye until he had battled in France in support of his king; while his beloved, the daughter of the Earl of Derby, swore not to marry until he fulfilled his vow. Walter de Mauny would conduct a raid on the town of Godemar de Fay, burn it and return. The Earl of Derby swore to fight Louis of Flanders, and the Earl of Suffolk to fight the King of Bohemia and throw him off his horse. John of Fauquemont swore that since he was poor he would follow Edward III and spread fire in the Cambraisis, sparing no church or altar, no pregnant woman or child. The queen for her part promised that the child within her womb would not be born until his father returned from battle.
To those in the know, this was a parody: the Earl of Salisbury had already lost his eye in Scotland, and the Earl of Derby’s daughter would have made him a ridiculously young bride; Walter de Mauny’s attempt had been a failure, as had that of Robert of Artois on St Omer. But the representation is one of isolated vanity, of war couched in misplaced chivalry rather than in careful reflection.
Any such dissenting sentiment was countered by the first great English victory in 1340, a victory at sea, the battle of Sluys off the Flemish coast. There the French lost their whole navy and some 20,000–40,000 men, a force amassed by Philip VI for an invasion of England. Edward commanded a row of ships – the contribution of Yarmouth and the Cinque Ports – from his flagship Thomas. These ships were mounted with wooden fortifications, and resembled a row of castles. Against them were 200 French ships in three close rows resembling a single flank. But they were destroyed by Edward III’s manoeuvre, simply to ram into them, mount them, and fight on them man to man. It was a strange victory, sustained by an alliance created by Edward III out of a multiplicity of interests; a volatile coalition which was as brittle as it was wide-ranging. At its heart was Flanders, erstwhile fiefdom of the kings of France, whose wealth depended on turning English wool into cloth which was then used all over Europe. Edward III used vast funds to support these alliances in a decade of extraordinary extravagance and expenditure, which ended in financial embarrassment. His allies were William Count of Hainault (his father-in-law), Jan III Count of Brabant, and Jacob van Artevelde, a merchant of Ghent who had usurped the leadership traditionally offered by the counts of Flanders. The alliance suffered from tension arising between the old Brabançon noble and the upstart banker of Ghent. The victory at Sluys and its afterglow kept everyone happy for a short time, during which Edward visited his family in Ghent. Edward III’s son John – the fourth of a dozen children – came to bear this great city’s name. He was known as John of Gaunt.
Although the success was a famous one it was also clear that the French were not yet beaten on land, that they still had armies and allies. Siege warfare was costly and time-consuming; Tournai did not fall. King Philip VI did not engage in battle and, moreover, the dowager Countess of Hainault, Jeanne of Valois, presented peace proposals which sowed dissent within Edward’s alliance, restive in the absence of the payments upon which the whole cooperative venture relied. A truce for five years was signed on 25 September 1340 at a chapel in Esplechin, and this provided a useful breathing space for all involved. Philip VI of France gained an ally in the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria and the Flemings agreed to accept Louis of Nevers as their count. In return, Philip removed his economic sanctions from the Flemish cities, and tens of villages seized by the French on the march to the north were returned to the Duke of Brabant and the Count of Hainault. All that remained was for Edward to return home in November 1340 and to vent his fury at ministers who had failed him and at nobles who had given only lukewarm support.
England’s wealth was hard to collect in coin. It was assessed and scrutinized by the crown’s servants, who had recommended in 1334 the move to tax quotas on each community, rural and urban. This change shifted the burden on to local assessors, who estimated the ability of members of each community to make a contribution. The new system yielded some £38,000 per collection until 1360. After 1353 another plank to the tax policy was added, as a regular export tax on wool was fixed annually by parliament. Although it no longer stated a minimal threshold for taxation as earlier subsidies had done, there is evidence that assessors used their discretion in judging who could and who could not make a contribution. Under the effect of frequent taxation, a fiscal footing for the war needs, a reassessment of priorities followed.
The new tax regime affected the economy in several ways. Large landowners did not indulge in much building, de novo, and cut down on maintenance: on one of the estates of the Bishop of Winchester where £458 9s. was spent in 1309–10, £356 6s. was spent in 1340–41. Investment was low, and with it demand for labour in rural areas. However, others, such as some big merchants and victuallers, stood to gain from provisioning the armies. A literature of complaint developed even before Edward III’s demands reached their peak, as in the Song against the King’s Taxes of c.1338:
People suffer such ill that they can give no more;
I do not doubt that, if they had a leader, they would rise.
Cumberland, which had been exempted from taxation following the Scottish raids of Edward II’s reign, petitioned parliament for continued exemption, and was also able to manipulate the work of commissions operating in the damaged areas, to gain lower assessments. Taxation had become the major topic of local and national politics.
Taxation was not the only source of royal income in support of the wars in France. During the first years of the war Edward had been content to deal with Italian bankers and raise sums on the expectation of royal incomes. This very soon proved to be unrealistic. In 1340 Edward III had to borrow £6,500 from his trusted Italian physician, Pancio de Controne, a family adviser and favourite, who had served his father before him. This was a speedy and cheap mode of raising money, but it had to be supported by frequent taxation which weighed heavily on an impoverished countryside. As shortfalls were emerging in tax assessments in the 1330s, a novel attempt to locate sources of wealth and to assess for tax was employed in 1340–41 in the production of the ‘rolls of Ninths’ (Nonae). Communities throughout the realm (excluding franchises and the Welsh Marches) were asked to assess their wealth: villages were to contribute a ninth of the year’s yield in grain, wool and lambs; towns to contribute according to the value of stocks of merchandise; and rural markets were assessed on grain, wool, lambs and merchant goods. The method of assessment was responding to emergent economic realities: the tax base included some tens of very rich towns and vast areas of countryside, but economic activity – manufacture and exchange – was most commonly conducted in rural markets and small towns: for a single large and prosperous Colchester, for example, there were tens of more modest towns like neighbouring Braintree. Such small towns were now caught in the net of taxation.
The crisis of 1340–41 was one of trust in the king’s good judgement and in the advice which informed his decisions. Government was torn between the arenas of royal action: the councillors in Brabant with the king, and the magnates and churchmen at home around the chancellor, Archbishop Stratford. In July 1340 a loan by parliament had been agreed equivalent to 20,000 sacks of wool; but royal agents in the counties met resistance to their efforts to collect. When parliament was called for April 1341, only three parliamentary representatives from the previous assembly were present; disagreement and disaffection with their representatives was evident in borough and county meetings. Although not a central complaint, there was some mention that royal revenue ought to support crown initiatives, and not be shared around, leaving the royal coffers bare and the king diminished, dependent on his subjects’ offerings. The time had come to move from loans secured by expected income from customs to direct taxes on exports and subsidies based on wealth assessed in and by communities.
Surrounded by well and carefully rewarded men, Edward III was able to make demands, some of them high-handed, for a while. When he had withheld wool from sale in 1337, magnates such as the Earl of Salisbury demurred, but remained loyal. But Edward III was a quick learner. The financially draining years of 1337–40, when he taxed England as it had never been taxed before, led to resistance in the parliament of 1340–41; after it Edward III was forced, or rather persuaded, to change his approach. He raised funds not from bankers, but from the contributions of his subjects and their production – by taxing wool exports – and from the dues paid by barons, prelates and rich merchants. This direct taxation was raised through processes of consultation which were to turn parliaments into effective political assemblies and involve the Commons in comment and advice about the war, the royal household, and strategic and military issues.
The next major campaign began in Normandy; it resulted in the ruin of Caen, and culminated in the battle of Crécy in Ponthieu of 1346 (Plate 7). Edward III drew Philip VI of France into battle after a chevauchée – a swift destructive ride – conducted from disembarkation and up to Caen. As Philip approached, Edward withdrew north-east to the Somme, up to a hilltop at Crécy. The French had destroyed all bridges on the Seine, and so Edward marched deeper inland than originally planned. At Poissy the bridge was rebuilt and Edward was ready for battle. He combined techniques he had observed in the Scottish wars. The force comprised three ‘battles’: the vanguard led by the Prince of Wales, the centre led by the king, supported by the bannerets of the royal household – and the rearguard, led by the Bishop of Durham and the Earls of Arundel, Suffolk and Huntingdon. English archers dug in here, protecting and surrounding the mounted men, all aided by obstacles such as stakes and pits. Philip’s Genoese crossbowmen were without their shields because of a failure of supplies, and their bowstrings were weak and wet. As they retreated, the French ran into their own cavalry, whose men and horses were destroyed by English fire. The King of France had attempted to avoid an encounter since 1338; at Crécy he felt confident, but once he exposed his forces, he suffered defeat. After Crécy the French forces changed their tactics, gave up their horses and fought on foot as their adversaries did. This made warfare bloodier; between men wielding vicious pikes and halberds, face to face, under a shower of arrows.
Uplifted by the victory at Crécy, Edward moved on to besiege the city which represented economic well-being and military advantage – Calais. The city put up resistance, led by its bishop, in the hope that King Philip would arrive and relieve it. Although at the end of July he did, the support did not last long, and the French force retired, leaving the city, its burgesses and the many refugees from its hinterland to face the English force of some 32,000 men. The desperate leaders of Calais sent out Jean de Vienne to negotiate the handing over of the city and its wealth in return for its citizens’ lives. According to the chronicler Jehan le Bel, Edward refused to negotiate and claimed the city, which had resisted him for long tedious months, and its citizens. Geoffrey le Baker reports that after Jean de Vienne many knights and citizens of Calais, bare-headed and on foot, submitted themselves to the king, and begged for mercy for the rest. Jehan le Bel’s report accorded great dignity to the citizens of Calais, and added the intercession of Queen Philippa, a mother figure reminiscent of the Virgin Mary, prime intercessor for humans. Here is a scene of capitulation and of royal strength tempered by queenly virtue. The citizens of Calais were spared, their humiliation complete. Their tale was revived in the nineteenth century as a story of French bourgeois heroism, captured so powerfully in Auguste Rodin’s monument in Calais of 1895.
War offered opportunities for employment, for advancement, for glory and adventure, for vocational fulfilment, and not only to the greatest men of England – the king led an army at fourteen, his son was a hero at Crécy at sixteen – but to hundreds of knights by birth, and to thousands more, men of more modest means, who made up three quarters of his armies. No more than a tenth of the men of England took part in the wars, but this was a substantial group. Among the mounted warriors of this war, the proportion of knightly to non-knightly men was about one to ten, with a somewhat higher proportion of knights on royal expeditions. Knights were paid two shillings a day and esquires one, while foot soldiers had sixpence. Below the ranks of mounted men and skilled archers there was the valet, that factotum on whom every soldier depended. He might be the son of a servile family, who could gain training, experience and patronage which led to social advancement. Whereas knights joined by duty and vocation, modest freemen joined in regional groups in search of employment, adventure and preferment. There was never a shortage of men for the campaigns in France in the 1340s and 1350s, even if some resented the royal assessments of property by which their level of contribution was determined. The household contingents, led by the king’s knights, offered leadership and example, and constituted a sixth of the army in the campaign of 1359/60.
Recruitment to the royal army allowed a son to shoulder some of his father’s responsibilities and, after his schooling in regional tournaments, to make a name for himself. Famous tournaments were attended by recruiters to the contingents of kings and magnates: the Windsor jousts were attended by the Duke of Brabant in 1348 in preparation for his war against the Count of Flanders. Tournaments offered the options of fighting as if in war, or with blunted weapons. When tournaments took place during campaigns or near theatres of war they could act as a dangerous preparation for hostilities: in 1341 four English knights led by Henry of Grosmont Duke of Lancaster (d. 1361) confronted four Scottish knights at a tournament at Roxburgh in the Borders, which was fought with full arms. In a tournament at Northampton in the following year Lancaster’s brother-in-law was killed and others were seriously wounded. Knightly fathers hoped to pass their armour on to their sons, as did Sir Adam of Weil in his will of 1345, leaving to his son John all armour, for both peace (tournaments) and war. The dedication page of the Luttrell Psalter, made c.1334, depicts the scene of a knight’s leave-taking. This is Sir Geoffrey Luttrell bidding farewell to his wife Agnes and his daughter-in-law, Beatrice Scrope. The young woman carries the shield, marked by Luttrell heraldry, the sign of dynastic continuity. This was the armour which was later represented on his son Andrew’s brass in the family’s parish church of St Andrew’s, at Irnham (Lincolnshire).
The work of war was tightly enveloped in myths of chivalry; the French wars encouraged the quest for fame among knights, the rise to knightly status among esquires, and the banding together of men during and especially after campaigns in a continuous invocation and reiteration of the moments of horror and glory. In some men it created the will to fight in other arenas, further afield. Henry Duke of Lancaster joined the efforts of the reconquista – the conquest of Muslim lands in Iberia by Christian fighters: he participated in the siege of Algeciras, and even in the seaborne attack on the city of Ceuta on the North African coast. Like Chaucer’s Knight he also saw action in the north-east corner of Europe, in Estonia and Lithuania, as his grandson, Henry of Derby, Bolingbroke (later Henry IV), was to do.
Despite the ghastliness and danger of war, it could become a way of life, a quite intoxicating one. There was just enough glory and self-approbation in the wars in France to encourage those who needed it to seek justification in the culture of chivalry fostered in and around knightly families: Edward’s war was aimed at defending his birthright, a just war. Yet the military orientation was not the only career path for able men. The years of the wars in France also saw the growing involvement of gentry families in administration and the judiciary. Knightly families invested in education and training which led their sons to administrative careers. Indeed, the absences which war forced upon the king, ministers and magnates, upon large sections of the armigerous class, created the need for focused thinking about provision of justice and collection of taxes in the counties. These years were also a period of experimentation and vigilance on the part of the Commons over the provision of law and order.
To be sustainable the French wars had to meet some of the expectations of the political communities of England and Wales. Rewards came in the form of war spoils, booty which flowed into the coffers and pockets of captains, and which also trickled down to lesser men. The booty had a way of making itself seen and known in the regions from which fighting men originated. Women boasted cushions, garments, hangings and jewellery which had previously adorned the persons or the chambers of French matrons. In March 1359 Robert Knolle captured Auxerre and was paid a ransom of 500,000 moutons d’or – the French gold coin, weighing 3.58 g – and 40,000 pearls to leave the city in peace. Successes were celebrated, and the king and his ministers insisted that news be spread far and wide. Such news – like the capture of the King of France, at Poitiers in 1356 – was announced at county courts, fairs and markets.
English lands saw no sustained occupation, no wartime brutality. This was perpetrated, indeed systematized by the men – high and low – who occupied and rode through France on chevauchées. During one of these infamous rides an army fed itself as it progressed, laying waste wide strips of country on either side of its route. The ride of Jean de Fauquemont through the Cambraisis in 1339 left a furrow thirty miles wide of burning and destruction in which no category of person or institution was spared – even children and pregnant women being reported as victims. When Pope Benedict XII heard of the devastation of summer 1339 he sent an official of the papal court to assess the damage. The survey resulted in the disbursement of 6,000 florins by the pope’s bankers for distribution as alms in the affected areas.
The effect of such rides through the countryside is captured in the French poetry of Eustache Deschamps, and later in English, by Shakespeare. The words pronounced by the Duke of Burgundy in Henry V capture the earlier reality well:
Alas, she [peace] hath from France too long been chased,
And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps…
Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart,
Unpruned dies.
(Henry V, V. ii. 38–9, 41–2)
The most famous, and infamous, chevauchée was the ride of Edward Prince of Wales – the Black Prince – in the Garonne valley in late 1355 (Plate 6). In the company of four earls and many knights who were later rewarded and elevated by his father the king, he led a group of young warriors who wasted the French countryside. Their deeds have been immortalized in the words of Sir John Chandos’s Herald:
This noble prince of whom I speak
Since the day he was born
Thought of nothing but loyalty
Openness, valour and virtue
And he was adorned by prowess.*
When, after a ride of sixty-eight days which devastated nearly 7,000 square miles of Languedoc, they returned to Gascony in November 1355, they brought back booty which became legendary. They rested for the winter and spent the season of 1356 further north in Poitiers. Edward III had mobilized mightily his kingdom’s war machine, and it was able to produce for the new season of fighting tens of ships, requisitioned from merchants and privateers by each sheriff in his county. To these were added 9,900 sheaves of arrows, 5,600 bows, hurdles and stalls to keep horses and pack animals safe during the passage – from Plymouth or Southampton or Sandwich – oats and fare for the crossing, and for the days until new provisions could be found in France. At the battle which ensued, King John II of France was taken prisoner together with several of France’s greatest nobles. The effect of the devastation was deep and long-lasting. After Edward III burnt the suburbs of Paris in 1360 his fully armoured knights met and destroyed sixty Frenchmen armed with spears. In a letter of 1360 the poet Petrarch, who had favoured the English at the victory of Crécy, wrote:
They have reduced the entire kingdom of France by fire and sword to such a state that I, who had traversed it lately on business, had to force myself to believe that it was the same country I had seen before.
These were some of France’s darkest times.
News of the Black Prince’s adventures travelled far. They even appeared in regional chronicles, such as that of the Grey Friars of Lynn, who also noted his return to England in the following year. On a grander scale, the English monastic chronicle, the Eulogium historiarum, apportioned to Edward and young Edward roles in contemporary apocalyptic prophecies. As if sensing their universal significance between 1356 and 1362, the monk recorded in great detail the Black Prince’s deeds. The dynastic battles of the English assumed cosmic significance: they were interpreted as being tribulations marking the beginning of the antichrist’s reign. Even Prince Edward was accordingly imagined as the future ‘reforming emperor’ of prophecies. The capture of King John of France was another sign that the world was in turbulence, an unstable and portentous state, full of millennial promise.
The Black Prince and his men were celebrated for another feat of military adventure in February 1367, with his departure in the company of ‘good bold knights’ to Spain to join his brother, John of Gaunt. There, at the battle of Nájera, they applied the tactics developed in France in support of the claimant to the Castilian throne, Pedro the Cruel. One of these good knights was Sir Richard Adderbury, who had served the Prince of Wales since 1330. He was typical of the parish gentry, men who rose through service as heads of small retinues, ultimately to be knighted. Adderbury’s troop was small at first, four esquires and ten archers. The Black Prince understood the value of such men, and after the battle of Nájera Sir Richard was kept on as a retainer for life, at £40 a year, in war or peace.
The rides through the countryside and even the holding operation of garrisons gave captains great freedom of action. They impressed, seized and destroyed property, labour and lives. A simple example is the forced recruitment of labour in the port of Plavel by Thomas Dagworth, Lieutenant of Brittany in 1349, to unload a boat which carried Prince Edward’s wine cargo. More damaging and brutal was the systematic capture and ransoming which developed in Normandy and Brittany. A particularly devastating form of exploitation developed through networks of protection which English captains spread over the parishes neighbouring their garrisons. The English garrison at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte in the Cotentin in Normandy, left in place after the Treaty of Brétigny of 1360, was self-sufficient in income from ransoms paid regularly by 263 parishes, arrangements which the English coordinated with the French garrisons nearby. More mundane perhaps was John Fotheringay’s establishment of a system of safe conducts in the portion of the Paris–Compiègne road which he controlled and which brought in vast income in the late 1350s.
Exploitation in the arena of war took the form not only of tribute, but of seizures of persons. An English squire, Jack Spore, took the ten-year-old Thenein Flamendeau captive after a raid on Saint-Julien-du-Sault, and when no one would ransom him turned him into his page. The boy had lost his freedom, and was now in service, which took him to Burgundy, Brittany and Spain before he returned to his village in 1368, knowing and known by no one. Women were supplied by local collaborators for the needs of garrisons; Robert Knolle’s soldiers at Malicorne, a castle south-west of Le Mans, were supplied with girls by a local man called Guillaume Jeurbers. Periods of truce were clearly inconvenient for such activities, and so they sometimes prompted the movement of companies to other, more militarily active, areas. The companies which had ridden through Languedoc with ferocity were left idle and expectant after the Treaty of Brétigny came into force in 1360, and turned up in the 1360s and 1370s in Italy, terrorizing Lombardy, Tuscany and Apulia.
Contemporary writers were acutely aware of the horrors of war, some even placing it above the plague in the hierarchy of traumas. In the words of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester, armies go to war not with the prayers of the people, but with their curses. The wider implications of the brutalization of soldiers through the experience of conquest and occupation are hard to assess. In the companies on the move, menace and violence must have been exacerbated by the presence of hardened psychopaths, such as the forty-three murderers among the criminals pardoned for participation in the Black Prince’s chevauchée from Calais to the Ile-de-France in 1370. What were such men like upon return to their homes and communities, men who had lived for years a brutal and violent life, who forced women into sexual slavery and took lives at will, outside the reach of the law, and directed by a camaraderie of complicity in violence? Ideals of chivalry and the realities of warfare were never further apart.
The nobility was expected to perform regularly and for long stretches at the pinnacle of military fitness: they not only led campaigns and supervised the recruitment and provisioning which preceded them, but often filled the governmental positions which followed from occupation. Most gentry families had members who had fought in the wars of Scotland or France, probably in their youth and for one or two campaigns (Plate 8). They then settled down to the work of estate management and local government. The young of such families, who trained at home and in regional tournaments, sought the opportunity for action, booty, and interaction with their peers, under the leadership of their lord or of a regional magnate. Interesting testimonies were garnered in the course of a chivalric dispute over heraldry during a relatively quiet period of the siege of Calais in 1346, a case adjudicated by the king himself. The evidence offered there reflects strong regional patterns of recruitment and training: the witnesses for Robert Morley, an East Anglian knight, remembered tournaments experienced in Bungay, Bury St Edmunds, Dartford, Dunstable and Thetford, and reflect a cohesive and loyal grouping around this famous knight, whose status was greatly enhanced by his performance in French battles. So much was he valued that, although the king was minded to favour his opponent in the heraldic dispute, he determined that Robert Morley, for his lifetime, wear the disputed device he so desired.
Such knights usually spent a limited if formative period on campaign. The lifetime of soldiery tended to be the choice of the non-knightly soldiers, men-at-arms and particularly archers, whose recruitment was also regionally specific, often from Cheshire, Lancashire and Wales. Professionalism developed in the art of war and in auxiliary occupations. Team activity characterized their work and, in the retinues of the mid-century, a continuity of training too. Thus the retinue – 160 men-at-arms and 140 mounted archers – of William de Bohun Earl of Northampton, who acted as Constable at Crécy, practised and perfected tactics from the Wear valley to the fields of France. On both the English and the French sides military surgery becomes increasingly prominent, with famous men serving in the field of battle: men such as John of Arderne and John of Gaddesden, author of Rosa medicinae. Arderne served on the Black Prince’s campaign, where he treated the Prince’s treasurer, Henry Blackburne. He composed a tract on surgery for haemorrhoids, a complaint suffered by men who rode long and hard on horseback. After periods of exertion came imposed rest for recuperation and healing: Sir Thomas Blount explained his absence from the famous adjudication of the Morley case during the siege of Calais by the need to recuperate in his tent after suffering an injury near Thérouanne.
The wars inspired distrust and prejudice towards groups hitherto tolerated and even welcomed. These were now seen as dangerous aliens: foreign monks and priests, foreign merchants, even pilgrims from the continent, who moved around the country, able to pass on information concerning the kingdom. An atmosphere of suspicion and exclusion led to acts of legislation which created procedures for arrest, expulsion or curtailment of freedoms. Innkeepers were enlisted in the service of the state, by reporting suspicious guests; bishops similarly had to report on the presence of foreign incumbents in the parishes of their dioceses. In 1362 the Burgundian physician John of Avence, whose whole career had been spent in London, decided to leave the country with his wife Mary because of the harassment they experienced. A potent mixture of anti-clerical sentiment and anti-foreigner feeling informed the treatment of non-English priests, friars and monks and was cynically exploited by the crown. In 1337 the alien priories on the Isle of Wight were seized by the crown and their monks forced to live inland and away from the sea. Edward III’s Ordinance of Provisions of 1343 ruled that no papal letter or instrument which injured the king’s interests could be introduced into England. In 1347 the Commons petitioned against the presentation of aliens – especially French cardinals of the papal court then residing in Avignon – to any ecclesiastical benefices. This was used to justify both the scrutiny of any person – often the protégé of a foreign prelate – admitted to an ecclesiastical living by papal appointment, and the request of a royal licence for any such appointment to stand.
Espionage was feared, as were economic warfare and the undermining of morale, and these were countered by policing and counterespionage measures. Anxiety about spying was expressed repeatedly in parliamentary petitions. Edward III regularly used spies, ranging from retained ‘explorers’ and ‘espies’, to those rewarded occasionally for information given; thus in 1339 he sent messengers to explore the galleys in Norman ports. Esquires in the Great Company – a raiding troop of soldiers – sent news from Normandy: Roger Hilton and John de Newby earned £100 in this manner in 1370. The crown took pains to secure swift and safe crossing of the Channel in the war decades; a few days before each expedition it closed the ports to all passengers. Edward III’s enemies also accepted spying as part of life in times of war; in 1359 the Dauphin pardoned men of the Burgundian town of Chitry for a double killing; the accused claimed in their defence that they had taken their victims to be spies from the English garrison.
The war was also a battle of colour and heraldics, often a struggle over the right to display the fleur-de-lis. When Sir John Chandos, Constable of Calais, rode to examine French positions on the eve of the battle of Poitiers (1356), he encountered the Marshal of France similarly occupied, wearing the same fleur-de-lis. The war of symbols affected strategy: Edward III besieged Reims in 1359 with the hope of being crowned in its cathedral, the traditional venue for the coronation of the kings of France. Dynastic awareness and ambition grew on both sides of the dynastic dispute: the title of dauphin was created by Charles V for his son born in 1368, the future Charles VI; just as the Black Prince had been granted a new principality, that of Gascony and Aquitaine, to join the Principality of Wales, which he had held since 1343 (Plate 2). The long contest between England and France was fought on several fronts: diplomatic, economic, military, symbolic.
Having come into his youthful inheritance through the blood of a coup, Edward III knew more than most the value of loyalty and friendship. In the first decades of his rule he sought both to neutralize potential enemies and to compensate and empower the men who had supported him in 1330. This could range from the minute business of maintaining the womenfolk of political opponents, such as Margaret le Despenser and her nurse, at Watton in Yorkshire since 1329, to the systematic offering of title and lands to the men who bonded with him on campaigns in Scotland and later in France.
During his minority Edward had wielded little political or patronage power. Mortimer appointed and dismissed royal officials – seven custodians of the Privy Seal and five treasurers of England in three years – and plundered the coffers in Westminster. Edward’s control was aided initially by the surrender of lands by Isabella in December 1330 (in exchange for an annual income of £3,000), and of Mortimer’s lands in the Marches. Although the king wisely kept most of his mother’s lands intact, Mortimer’s were widely distributed: William Montague received, as part of a £1,000 per annum land grant, the lordships of Denbigh, the cantreds (the Welsh equivalent of counties) of Rhos, Rhufoniog and Carmarthen, and the commote (a sub-division of a cantred) of Dinmael, as well as some of Isabella’s lands in Hampshire, Berkshire and Kent. Royal favourites benefited in this redistribution: Robert Ufford received in 1331 Gravesend (Kent) and Burgh (Norfolk) of Isabella’s lands. The confiscated lands of French subjects in England were similarly brought into the pool of patronage: £100 worth of land was granted to Hugh de Audeley in 1337, land previously held by Robert de Stuteville in Eckington (Derbyshire).
The Principality of Wales was especially useful for the reward of loyal men. Its many offices, such as the Justiciarship of North Wales, went to royal favourites like Roger Mortimer of Chirk, Earl of March, grandson of the disgraced Roger Mortimer, Edward II’s enemy. Edward III was careful about handling hereditary titles, but he boosted some old titles with panache, especially by creating dukes – Henry Duke of Lancaster, for example, in 1351. Only a few new earls were created: Thomas Dagworth, who died young in an ambush in Brittany in 1350, and in the 1350s some of the companions of the Black Prince, Reginald Cobham for example. There were several bannerets among his new men, some rewarded with that rank for acts of bravery in battle in the king’s presence, like John Copeland, elevated for having captured King John at Poitiers. But even as he rewarded his loyal supporters, Edward was wary of granting them too firm and enduring a power-base, or of diminishing royal power in the process of reward. It was easier to stop the payment of an annuity than to recover a manor from a vassal who had fallen out of favour. When men were favoured by Edward they rose through the ranks of gentility and chivalry. Yet this was done in stages, not with the abandon and passion which had robbed Edward II of so much power and respect.
Many of the larger grants to his favourites were made for life alone: of 93 land grants only 41 were in fee, and 52 for a term or for life. Some received payment from the Exchequer for a number of years before a suitable manor became free, ‘in expectation’. One of the most favoured was William de Clinton, who received 1,000 marks in land upon becoming the Earl of Huntingdon: 500 marks were produced by the manor of Kirton (Lincolnshire) and the rest was to flow from manors held for life by Queen Isabella and the Duchess of Pembroke. Until they reverted to him, the new earl was to receive 500 marks from the annual fees paid to the crown by the counties of Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Kent, the towns of Winchelsea, Rye and Sandwich and the manor of Higham (Sussex). Hugh de Audeley received in March 1337, upon his elevation to the earldom of Gloucester, £100 per annum, and in September received the manors of Kirkby-in-Ashfield (Nottingham-shire) and Eckington (Derbyshire), which produced £90, the remaining £10 being paid by the Exchequer until another source of income was found. As a reward for long service, Reginald de Cobham was granted an annuity in June 1337 worth 100 marks until lands became available. In March 1337 he had received the manor of Chippenham (Wiltshire) and the farm of Great Yarmouth (Norfolk), valued together at £119. The payments of alien (French) religious houses to secure their lands in England, such as 500 marks paid in 1340 by the Abbey of Fécamp, could similarly be made into an annuity for a royal favourite such as Thomas Bradeston. The collection of some of the incomes from the source – a port, a county’s farm – was fraught with expense, effort and uncertainty.
Through his clerks of Chancery and Exchequer Edward cleverly controlled these grants, and the Exchequer became more of a clearinghouse for payments between the crown and its servants than an accounting house for royal servants. Such clerical household staff benefited in turn from the many ecclesiastical livings which were in the king’s gift. He gave his men opportunities to excel, marry well and improve their positions greatly, but not at the expense of royal wealth or with any ambiguity around loyalty. Edward managed his regalian rights over minors and unmarried aristocratic women without male relatives, and handed these rights to his favoured men. Here was another way of rewarding men with income and even with the prospect of an advantageous marriage: so in 1349, when the three-year-old son of William Welle, an heir to manors in Essex, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, became the king’s ward, his wardship was handed to Guy Brian. Seventy-five grants of land in wardship were made to the king’s favourites: William Clinton, Richard Beauchamp, William Bohun, Guy Brian and others. To some it was a pleasing gift, but to those of lesser expectations it was an important step up the social ladder, especially when it resulted in a good marriage.
Edward managed men well, and some of his charisma clearly inspired his son Edward the Black Prince, who never attained the throne, but passed into legend as a chivalric icon. Edward III also came to terms with the memory of his troubled father, by granting gifts in 1343 to his tomb at Gloucester Cathedral, where an intermittent cult was in evidence.
Parliament came to play a growing role through the process of deliberation on taxation, the life-blood of royal military endeavours. Although it was an institution dependent on royal summons, a balance of consultation and persuasion developed under Edward III, which created an increasingly confident and activist Commons. Parliaments of Edward III’s reign acquired procedures for action and an increasingly political character. The amount of business transacted in them grew and its composition was diversified; its petitions are fully recorded from 1327 onwards. It continued to combine three essential functions: firstly, it was the court of highest appeal, the court of peers and of state trials; secondly, it dealt with petitions presented by individuals and communities; thirdly, it was the forum for the deliberation of royal demands for taxation.
Inasmuch as the king summoned the members of its constituent parts – peers, Commons, and the clergy – to attend him at parliament at a place and time of his choosing, he defined a parliamentary knighthood separate from the other great landholders, the Lords, who still invigilate over legislation. Parliaments thus comprised those magnates obliged to offer counsel; secular and spiritual great lords; as well as representatives of the Commons – of knights and some towns. Summoned to present their petitions and to assent to taxation, the Commons developed skills and political acumen in tying taxation to other requests and needs which arose from the landed and mercantile communities. They were also an excellent source of information on the provinces, and regularly reported on sensitive issues such as the mood in the Welsh Marches or the Borders. By the 1340s there was habitual ‘intercommuning’ – joint discussion and consultation – between the Lords and the Commons, usually through the presence of a number of Lords in the Commons’ debates on taxation. This could also work the other way; in 1348 members of the Commons were invited to join the Lords in discussion of recent trailbastons – ordinances or commissions against violent criminals – appointed especially during periods when kings were distracted by military affairs.
From 1340 the clergy were summoned to Convocation separately, and no longer sent their representatives to the Commons. Bishops continued to form a large section of the peerage: in 1341 Edward III had summoned 51 prelates, 8 earls and 45 barons, whereas in 1377 he summoned 46 prelates, 13 earls and 47 barons. Those summoned could not always attend parliament: episcopal registers from the north of England abound in letters apologizing for absence during seasons of Scottish raids. Bishop John Kirkby of Carlisle wrote in February 1337 that he could not appear since all the churches in his diocese were being attacked by the ‘Scottish enemies’, a reference to Andrew Murray’s initiative in regaining the Scottish counties in 1336 and 1337. In the crisis of 1341, John of Stratford, Archbishop of Canterbury, incurred the king’s wrath. He warned in a letter that bad counsel had been the unmaking of Edward’s own father, had marked the beginning of Edward’s own reign, and threatened to lose him the hearts of his people and his rightful authority (emprise). According to one chronicler, he said:
And, sire, let it displease you not, you may remember it in your own time; for by the evil counsel which our lord your father… made seize, against the law of his land… and what happened to him for that cause, you, sire, do know.
Thus a moral and political critique developed in parliament, a language of cajoling and persuasion. Unpredictable, parliament was often a dangerous occasion, but without it royal enterprises on a large scale could not be achieved.
As parliaments were summoned more frequently and came to play a significant role in a wide range of governmental and economic decisions, a professional group emerged: parliamentary representatives who were re-elected, or successively elected, by two or three (usually adjacent) counties. The fortunes of war and royal need affected the composition of parliament: in 1340, a demanding war year, Edward III’s writs of summons requested that belted knights only be returned to parliament. Such men, veterans of the wars in Scotland and France, were indeed prominent in his early parliaments. Richard Mounchessy (d. 1342), elected to parliament for Hertfordshire eleven times between 1320 and 1336, had seen action in Scotland and France and was singled out for expert consultancies. In 1341 he was asked to determine responsibility in the loss of a tariff ship in Sluys, and to advise on measures against pillaging of royal ships. Sir Stephen Bassingbourne (d. 1350) of Astwick (Hertfordshire), who sat in seven parliaments between 1335 and 1348 and served in Gascony, was used in 1339 to raise the array of arms, and as keeper of the peace in between his periods as representative in parliament. Members representing towns often possessed mercantile and legal expertise, which incorporated complex loyalties. John Parles was a lawyer of Colchester (Essex), active in the royal courts and as representative in at least eleven parliaments. The combination of military experience with knowledge of local government and of the system of justice recommended such men as reliable representatives. Their petitions expressed the sentiment of a county’s middling land-holders, but they could also offer a useful critique of royal and noble proposals.
A more legislative tone came to inform the business of parliaments in Edward III’s later years. Royal officials and ministers busied themselves in preparation for parliament, and summons had to be sent out at least forty days in advance. Here the involvement of justices in the wording of legislation is increasingly notable, as it is in the drafting of responses to petitions. This involvement carried over to the aftermath of legislation: justices were confronted in the courts with questions about the interpretation of laws which ‘they had made’. There were growing areas of the law that king and Commons interpreted differently, and over which the king and his judges might differ. In 1355 the judges of King’s Bench, Common Pleas, Barons of the Exchequer and the serjeants-at-law all insisted before the king that no change could be made to statute, except with the agreement of parliament. A growing role was played in the Commons by non-armigerous gentry. These were men whose prominence resulted from their service to the crown, from their manifold roles as brokers of patronage, arbiters and experts in law and procedure.
Where the opening speech in parliament in the early fourteenth century tended to be given by a chief justice, from 1362 this was offered by the chancellor. Gaining in gravity of tone, the speech presented draft legislation and general statements of intent. Thus the institution that had mediated the deposition of the king in 1327 was developing interestingly into an indispensable and complex assembly, fairly sensitive to the array of political wishes and complaints harboured by the landed people of England, and by some in the Principality of Wales. Even as the political tenor of its deliberations was enhanced, parliament did not cease to be a venue for the airing of private grievances in petitions by individuals, by corporations, arising from conflicts between individuals, between corporations, between an individual and a corporation, and involving men, women, religious houses and towns. Hundreds of such petitions were brought to each parliament, creating a plethora of discussions, arbitrations, and in a few cases leading to the creation of statute law. Whereas the Lordship of Ireland possessed its own parliament in Dublin, Irish policy was still the business of the English parliament, as were Irish finances, operated through the Dublin Exchequer, but scrutinized at Westminster. The resulting information was copied and distributed. At his first parliament the king acceded to the Commons’ request to circulate the resulting statutes far and wide. Upon return from the York parliament of 1332 the representative for Leicester reported his news to the town’s burgesses, his tongue loosened by their wine. Similarly, King’s Lynn (Norfolk) and Bridport (Dorset) incorporated parliamentary reports into their archives. Parliamentary business reflected local interests, and with its growing importance in the political life of the realm it could provide precedent for future political action.
The politics of England – and to some extent that of Wales and Ireland too – achieved a clamorous and public realization in parliament. Many of the petitions which reached it expressed discontent with the elaborate system of devolved government performed through local institutions of the shire. There almost any free man could come in touch with justices and coroners, bailiffs and foresters. The system of justice in the counties was a combination of the procedures initiated by local men appointed as justices of the peace and by ad hoc royal commissions appointed to hear and determine (oyer et terminer) cases. Central appointment of commissioners was a tradition bequeathed by Edward II, who used the method in order to deal with severe disorder, which was often related to periods of political instability during his reign. Thus in February 1332 an ex-junior justice of King’s Bench, Sir Richard Willoughby, was sent to arrest and punish members of the Folville gang who had plagued Leicestershire with abductions, robberies and murders. The 1330s saw some experimentation with the appointment of local justices of the peace under the supervision of magnate commissions of keepers of the counties in 1332 and keepers of the peace in 1336, and the establishment of a trailbaston in 1338. But magnates still retained ‘friendly’ justices, who then provided their men with pardons for heinous lawlessness. Petitions to parliament continued to urge powers of keeping the peace being granted to those who were local in origin and able to act fast and with relatively autonomous powers, just as they sought to have local men, rather than outsiders, elected as sheriffs.
Under Edward III the challenge to order became acute during decades which saw a large number of magnates and knights – the natural providers of deterrence and judgement, though often also the most unruly – away at war, just as the king and ministers were frequently absent. Hence the creation of trailbastons – the special commissions appointed to deal with specific outbreaks of criminality and disorder in a region – which characterized the first three decades of Edward III’s reign. Such national and county trailbastons were sometimes interrupted, as in 1336, when officials turned to deal with preparations for war. The knights who served in local courts were also crucial to the effort of assessment and recruitment in the shires. The men who offered themselves as natural peacekeepers were the very figures who possessed the knowledge of local resources and the networks for mobilization of men and materials during concerted preparation for war. With the growth in the confidence of the Commons in parliament in the 1340s came the pressure there for provision of justice and peace in the counties, voiced strongly in 1341 and in 1346. This argument gained strength since to the habitual business of the courts were now added cases of deserting archers, war profiteers and, from 1350, the enforcement of the Statute of Labourers. From 1351 king and council appointed justices of the peace, who ultimately were also to hear labour cases. Parallel to this development was the Commons’ pressure to ensure that sheriffs were local men. Above this local provision, assizes of royal justices still itinerated and the King’s Bench did its business, but the land-holders in the shires were able to determine a considerable amount of local legal business, thus augmenting their own influence and creating a dense array of reciprocities.
By mid-century there were three royal writing offices which produced thousands of documents each year: Chancery, which was the chancellor’s office (including Exchequer payments and disbursement and liaison with sheriffs), Privy Seal (representing the king’s and council’s authority) and Signet (private instruments related to the king’s household, sometimes called Wardrobe). A growth of business by bill is in evidence, as a form of communication with justices, by which the king’s will and his duty to provide justice were expedited. Although landed people seem to have been involved continuously in litigation, what is most striking about England and the Englishries – areas of Wales in which people of English descent settled and lived by English law – is just how secure titles were. Through marriages of heiresses the landed class incorporated professional men, soldiers and lawyers into gentry and noble networks. Alongside the operations of common law in local courts and King’s Bench, a Chancery court was also developing, providing yet another remedy for those who could not find equity within the forms of evidence and procedure recognized by common law. The chancellor conducted his court as a court of conscience, which usually met at Westminster Hall, representing the king’s role as giver of justice notwithstanding legal convention. Chancery grew as it responded to petitions from most counties of England, though not Wales, in remedy of debt, in settling of complex enfeoffments and breaches of promise.
Growth in royal administration required a constant flow of adequately trained and suitably motivated personnel. Already Edward II had displayed awareness of the need to provide training and channels of recruitment. Men of the court, such as the queen’s chaplain Robert of Eglesfield, followed that example, with the foundation of Queen’s College at Oxford in 1341. In the following decades college foundation became quite a fashion, with the initiatives of a variety of patrons: rich widows such as Elizabeth de Clare, who founded Clare Hall at Cambridge in 1326, or Marie de St Pol Countess of Pembroke, who founded Valence Mary Hall, Cambridge (later Pembroke College) in 1347, with guidance from Edmund Gonville, Bishop of Norwich; or activist bishops such as William Bateman, Bishop of Norwich, papal judge and royal ambassador, who emphasized training in canon and Roman law, at Gonville Hall in 1348 and Trinity Hall in 1350. As opportunities allowed, Bishop Bateman confirmed the appropriation of parishes in his diocese and their livings to these new institutions: Foulden, Wilton and Mutford to Gonville Hall, Saxthorpe to Pembroke Hall in 1354, and to his own foundation a string of churches among which were Briston, Kimberley, Brinningham, Wood Dalling, Cowlinge and Stalham. Universities increasingly attracted monks to higher study, and religious orders maintained halls for the use of their members in Cambridge and Oxford. In this they were led by papal policy, which required that Benedictine monasteries support 5 per cent of their members in university study. Some monks must have felt out of place in the bustling towns: Uthred of Boldon, monk of Durham, received his doctorate in theology at Oxford, but lamented its ‘excessive intellectualism’ at the expense of spiritual progress.
Much of the talent which went into making Edward III’s court and administration was managed by highly educated men, royal servants, in priestly orders. On the one hand, England had a strong, confident crown which insisted on an English tradition by which the prelates were important magnates in the land, and according to which issues of taxation of the clergy, provision for ecclesiastical courts and patronage were settled between the king and his bishops. But England was also precocious in managing the usual tasks of ecclesiastical administration. Pronouncements of the ecumenical councils overseen by popes, new collections of canon law, newly created liturgical feasts and practices, all reached England quickly and were absorbed effectively through the working of an ecclesiastical administration which linked prelates to parish priests and thus to parishioners in town and country. Church courts in England, Wales and the Lordship of Ireland were similarly developed, well-staffed and active in the business of marriage litigation, probate of wills, detection of religious error, defamation and blasphemy.
Prelates advised kings and served as chancellors more frequently than did laymen. They were trusted diplomats whose lack of overwhelming dynastic ambition, as well as their education, recommended them for royal service. For more modest men work was cut out in the parishes, where the complexities of life demanded definition and remedies within the boundaries of liturgy, sacraments and instruction. Bishops were involved in administration, diplomacy and even medicine. This versatility was always fraught with tension and the subject of criticism, even danger. When Archbishop Stratford was blamed for the inadequacy of government in 1341 Edward is said to have declared that men holding high office ‘if convicted of corruption could be tortured, hung and beheaded’. This was quite unlike the case of priests.
Clerics of all orders were immune from such accountability, since they could not be tried by the courts of common law. Even more complicated was the fate of those who held high office through papal patronage: the Dominican Thomas de Lisle, Bishop of Ely, had begun his career in royal diplomatic service, but he was taken up by Pope Clement VI, who appointed him to the see of Ely in 1345. There he became embroiled in a dispute over property in Huntingdonshire with Blanche, widow of Thomas Lord Wake of Liddell, and mobilized with impunity a gang of thugs who perpetrated arson and murder in furtherance of his claim. Here is an extreme case, which none the less demonstrates the disorder in lives of local communities and modest folk which followed from the realities of overlapping jurisdictions and clerical immunity from secular prosecution.
In their absence on royal or papal business bishops relied upon professional administrators, men trained in canon and civil law who managed the wide range of business covered by canon law and episcopal authority. These men provided the legal underpinning for the actions and choices of laity and clergy alike: when the rector of Fledborough (Nottinghamshire) wished to go on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 1334, he had to apply for permission to leave his parish. When in 1331 Agnes and Geoffrey Luttrell, scions to prosperous knightly families, chose to inform the bishop that they were relatives in the third degree – that is, second cousins – it was his official who had to formulate the stipulation that their marriage be recognized despite the impediment. In 1330 he had been called to order the enforcement of the payment of alimony by William del Clay of Markham to Beatrice, daughter of John the Spencer of Upton, for the children he had with her – £5 a year.
Ecclesiastical law intervened at important moments of kinship and social relations. It also had a disciplinary edge, seeking out trouble through episcopal visitations or through the information networks of rural deans, who presided over deanery courts, into which the jurisdiction of a large province like York was divided. At the archiepiscopal manor of Thorp in 1330 Thomas of St Albans, rector of Misterton and holder of a prebend from Durham Cathedral, abjured his mistress Alice Misterton, with whom he lived in the village, promising never to know her again on pain of losing his livings. Similar accommodation had to be made with the vagaries of monastic lives: in 1329 brother Roger de Mar was allowed to rejoin Shelford Abbey (Nottinghamshire), from which he had absconded, reversing the excommunication which had been imposed on him. Episcopal courts were thus a service which not only the high but also the very modest approached either as supplicants or witnesses, and could leave as vindicated victims or as chastised wrongdoers.
The church enabled and circulated a formidable array of teaching, preaching and supervision, devices by which it sought to inform, inspire and correct the lives of parishioners for the profit of their souls and the enhancement of peace and even justice. There was bound to be a chasm between the pronouncements of theologians and canon lawyers, on the one hand, and the perceptions and formulations appropriate for transmission in parishes, on the other. Parishes differed greatly in size, in wealth, and in the degree of sophistication of their priests and congregations. Bishops aspired to provide simple and useful, above all correct and accessible teaching material to assist the work of priests and to make teaching uniform. Take, for example, the initiative of Archbishop Thoresby of York, who around 1357 created a catechism in English for the laity, one which was marked with Latin rubrics for the use of priests. Here was a booklet which adhered to the accepted framework of belief which all Christians had to know – the Lord’s Prayer (pater noster) and the Creed – and which described the moral operations of the five senses, the Ten Commandments, the seven sacraments and the works of mercy. Archbishop Thoresby’s catechism was in turn transmitted to the diocesan clergy after its approval at the annual synod. Henceforward parishioners in Yorkshire were taught from it, through its combination of doctrinal pronouncement, explanation and mnemonic ditties, which remained with people long after they left the church.
Greater depth was provided by Latin texts which aimed to fortify the priest’s own understanding. Only a minority of parish priests acquired specialized university education, but many had a basic Latin education, which could be gained in the grammar schools of most towns. It was for them that a work such as William of Pagula’s Oculus sacerdotis (The Priest’s Eye) was written, with simple summaries of weighty theological and canonical discussions. Such works were not condescending but practical, and although a very expensive manuscript when complete, sections of The Priest’s Eye were often excerpted, copied out in parts, a digest of useful material at a more modest cost. Priests’ wills habitually listed works such as The Priest’s Eye among books bequeathed to colleagues or relatives, other men of the cloth.
Formative social relations and central events of the life-cycle were experienced, attested and remembered in the parish. Marriage was not always celebrated in church, but rules of Christian marriage crystallized by the late twelfth century. They became widely known, and were used knowingly by men and women. The ideal was marriage celebrated before witnesses at the church door, but the binding element was the exchange of vows. The exchange of words and a token between consenting people of canonical age was a simple act, all too easily committed.
It is, therefore, not surprising that so many cases ended up in the courts. Seeking to make good her marriage to John of Bristol, Agnes Huntington arranged for a former worker in the household, Margaret Foxholes, with whom she had shared a bed, to bear witness to the exchange of promises of marriage in 1339. People were aware of what made a marriage, and also of how it might be dissolved. In 1342 Alice, widow of Walter of Kirkbride, was claimed by Sir Thomas Lengleys as his wife, but she sued for divorce in the Bishop of Carlisle’s court, on account of cruelty, seeking to be separated from him. Higher up the social scale, Katherine, daughter of Sir Ralph Paynell, approached the church court of Lincoln with the complaint that her husband Nicholas Cantilupe had used force and abducted her. In the background was her claim that he was impotent (she could not find his genitals), a claim he denied. This led him to abduct Katherine and her servants to Greasley Castle in Nottinghamshire, using force to extract an oath that he was indeed sexually potent. This dramatic case between informed and privileged individuals is one among hundreds brought to the courts every year. The Bishop of Rochester’s court heard seventy-five cases in eleven court sessions in 1363–4: forty-eight on fornication, seventeen on adultery, and one on brutality. Since marriage could be transacted even without public solemnization, many cases dealt with clandestine unions: about 80 per cent of marriage cases heard by the Bishop of Ely’s court between 1374 and 1382 dealt with such unions.
Ecclesiastical courts also dealt with actions deemed to be breaches of charity, especially defamation and harmful magic. In 1346 in the diocese of Lincoln the parish priest of Friesthorpe sued John Joliff for claiming that many of the priest’s patients died following medical treatment at his hands. In 1363 Philip Russel of the village of East Greenwich was presented to the church court of Rochester for working magic on his sheep; he hung around their necks a little purse containing a frog, to cure their scabies. For this he was caned three times in the market-place and was enjoined to perform penance. A deanery court in Lincolnshire mentioned a woman suspected of magic who was tried in each of its sessions of 1338 and 1340. The dividing line between local cures and magic was a thin one, but only the few who blatantly crossed it attracted heavy-handed attention by the courts.
Priests’ responsibilities were many and wide-ranging when undertaken with commitment: theirs was the care of the chancel, an area of the church increasingly adorned with stained glass and wall-paintings, like the enchanting arrangement in glass of c.1320–40, still to be seen in the parish church of Eaton Bishop (Herefordshire) (Plate 4), or the impressive cycle of paintings depicting the Life of Christ and the Assumption of the Virgin (the parish’s patron saint) in Chalgrove (Oxfordshire) of c.1350. In absence or neglect not only did pastoral care suffer, but material provision did so too. In 1341 the executors of the rector of Adisham (Kent) were required to compensate the parish for the deceased’s neglect of the chancel. In the same year the vicar of Rainham (Kent) was accused of using the juice of berries rather than wine at communion.
The ability to engage with such cases and to provide reassuring and authoritative guidance depended on the presence in parishes of suitably trained and convincing priests. All this provision was of no effect when the crucial link between bishop and parishioner – the parish priest – was absent or ineffectual. Bishops attempted to enforce canonical requirements for suitable replacement of priests when they were absent on pilgrimage or on university study. This was never an easy task, and the reality of pluralism was rife. Master Roger Ottery explained his pluralism in 1366: he held six livings, of which five were sinecures, and he claimed that a diligent man could serve his parish while holding other responsibilities. As a graduate in law, he served the Bishop of Hereford, and was suitably rewarded. There was real competition for skilled educated clerks like him. In 1342 the parishioners of St Mary, Carlisle, complained directly to the Chapter at York, over the Bishop of Carlisle’s head, that for many years they had had no parish priest, and were served by an unsatisfactory locum. Desiring to have a ‘perpetual and vigilant minister’, they appealed for help. In defence the Bishop of Carlisle complained that he had much other pressing business; indeed he and his predecessors had been deeply involved in managing a ravaged diocese during the period of the Scottish raids. Parishioners desired a stable and predictable parochial provision for Sunday preaching, baptism, confession, penance and comfort to the sick and dying. They often complained, and sought justice by turning to bishops’ courts and exalted patrons.
People appreciated the provision of parochial services, and were quick to recognize the limitations of priests unsuitable in manner, education or life-style. They may have wondered whether the man they knew to be deficient as a neighbour could fulfil the promise of the sacrament at the altar, and turn bread and wine into Christ’s flesh and blood. Could his rough hands and faltering Latin transmit the grace which erases the traces of original sin from a newborn babe and makes it into a member of the Christian body? Such thoughts need not have led to a fundamental crisis of faith. In England there were as yet no widespread alternative theologies and churches, but rather a practical scepticism about the clergy, about the role of good works, a vein of doubt which surfaced frequently, and especially in moments of crisis. The church worked long and hard to explain and allay such doubts in works such as the accessible Lay Folks’ Catechism or the Lay Folks’ Mass Book, in strings of exemplary and accessible tales which were inserted into sermons, and in the constant efforts to make the spectacle of liturgy reinforce the truths which underpinned it. This was a continuous struggle on the part of the church, which also explains why new feasts, such as the feast of Corpus Christi, were promoted so warmly. Promulgated on the continent in 1317, by the mid-fourteenth century this celebration of the eucharist was a ubiquitous spectacle of summer open-air festivity which exemplified orthodoxy and encouraged participation.
The desire for a trained clergy entailed long periods when they were absent and, as importantly, required a deflection of funds from use in the parish to support in a university town. The administrative machine of Norwich diocese was clearly hard at work devising ways of spreading personnel and resources: modest religious houses were allowed to divert income from parishes in their patronage to their own daily use. Creative solutions were authorized: the family chantry at Thompson (Norfolk), founded by Sir Thomas Shardelowe and his brother in 1350, was allowed to serve the parish’s needs. In big cities the problem was an abundance of overlapping claims for the attention of believers. In 1328 the Archbishop of York arbitrated between the Carmelite friars of the city and the rector of St Crux church, with a resolution that required the friars to remove an attractive statue of the Virgin and cease holding public services, since these drew parishioners away from St Crux parish, to the detriment of the priest and the parish’s income.
The parish church was the centre of community life, and the venue for personal and collective worship. The pinnacle of the ritual year was reached, following Lent, in Holy Week and Easter communion. There was a proliferation of activities in age groups, in fraternities, around special altars and their saints, which allowed further devotions and social interactions to take place. Beyond the parish, people went on pilgrimage, both clerics and lay people, and pilgrimage as far as the Holy Land was not unknown. Rome was an especially desirable destination during the jubilee year of 1350, for which special indulgences were granted. For most people pilgrimage was a local affair, to celebrate and benefit from local shrines and memorials to holiness. Around St Edmund’s chapel at Sailholme, Wainfleet St Mary (Lincolnshire), a number of miracles were recorded, involving deliverance from the dangers of seafaring. A group of sailors off the sea at Skegness appealed to St Edmund when their craft was caught up in a storm: when they were saved they offered a wax ship as a votive sign of their thanks. People treasured souvenirs of their journeys, and there flourished an industry of pilgrim badges to be worn pinned to cloaks or hats, of which hundreds have survived.* The most numerous surviving badges are from the shrines of Our Lady at Walsingham and Thomas Becket in Canterbury. Although most experiences of the holy were sought in local places and through familiar artefacts, occasionally the styles of other regions impinged dramatically on the mundane: in 1349 a group of 120 flagellants – penitents who scourged their bodies with whips, and spread their message through public display and itineration – arrived in London from Zeeland and Holland, an unusually enthusiastic and macabre scene.
People recognized and rewarded holiness around them: they supported those who undertook particularly demanding religious lifestyles. The king granted a modest budget to the hermit Geoffrey de Bolton in 1328, and charged him with filling in the pits in a road near Doncaster. Here were combined hard work for the common good, and God’s work ‘out of charity’. Although for most people adherence to the routine of the parish sufficed, they made use of the spiritual athletes among them, seeking example and wisdom. The fourteenth-century Welsh anchorite of Llanddewi-Brefi composed a summary of theological and pastoral writings for his patron Gruffydd ap Llewellyn ap Phylip ap Trahaearn of Cantref Mawr (Carmarthenshire). People worshipped saints, but also detected holiness in those closer to them: in 1334
Bishop Kirkby of Carlisle allowed the Abbot of Shapey, near Appleby (Cumbria) to exhume the body of Isabel, wife of William Langlays of Appleby, from her tomb, and to have it buried in a ‘more suitable place’ because of her honourable life and conduct, suitable for the veneration which the bishop wished to promote. More modestly, within the confines of a home, in the state of widowhood which granted women relative autonomy over body and resources, daily life could be made into virtuous endeavour. Some women chose to intensify their attendance at church, pray at home and move to a vegetarian diet. The use of sacred materials and prayers became a habit which led to a certain capacity for spiritual self-help.
The power to pronounce messages and display images was increasingly appreciated by the crown, just as the gentry recognized the importance of patronage and display within the churches on their estates. The Scottish and then the French wars presented the crown with challenges of communication and persuasion. Kings had to keep their subjects, and especially the ranks of the Commons, who were increasingly empowered in parliament, informed about successes, warned about setbacks, and in touch with the necessity that forced the king to fight in France for his own dynastic rights and, increasingly, for the safety of his realm. From the 1330s writs brought royal communications, first to the shires and then to the parishes, where they could reach everyone. The news of the lifting of the siege of Berwick (1333), of the victories of Sluys (1340), Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356) and the exotic news of the victory won by John of Gaunt in the Castilian dynastic wars, the battle of Nájera (1367), was announced in parishes.
The challenges of this extended realm were many and varied. The military effort which the crown chose to concentrate in France also had implications for arrangements for security in other parts of the realm. In the Irish Lordship the earlier part of the century had seen attempts to use levies of fighting men – or scutage, a payment in lieu – to support the seasonal, small-scale yet continuous display of might which the government had to perform. Between 1326 and 1360 some £200 was raised per annum from scutage, a not inconsiderable sum in the Irish arena. Contributions were spread more widely on the basis of a schedule of arms related to wealth: in 1333 the inhabitants of county Dublin were assessed for arms although warfare took place in distant border zones. Once the French front was opened, the crown attempted to minimize expenditure on Ireland and to make its rule as self-financing as possible: funding the Lordship’s retinues came to reflect the complex social and political relations which bound the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and its Gaelic-Irish counterpart.
The English parliament envisaged Ireland as an extension of the kingdom, sharing a single set of laws, but with some administrative peculiarities, like those which characterized the Gascon and Welsh Marches. Yet while English Ireland was governed by English rule, protection and aspiration, it was clearly populated by two people: the English ‘liege’ and the Irish, separate by race, language and culture. The Gaelic Irish were perceived as savage, and were the subject of fantasies long held by English communities when encountering societies of pastoralists – as was the case with the Welsh – with different kinship structures, language and values. The Statutes of Kilkenny were presented by the Irish parliament of 1366, which was presided over by the Duke of Clarence, Edward III’s son. It legislated distinctions between the ethnic groups: like more modern racial systems it aimed to keep groups apart through prohibition of marriage and sexual contacts. Henceforward only the English – born in England or in Ireland – were considered the king’s subjects. This group was distinguished by its attire, and the laws which regulated its land tenure, work and trade. Here was an attempt to nurture those who did not ‘go native’ by privileging adherence to a notional set of English moral and social characteristics. Like all such systems the statutes created personal tragedies, were hard to enforce, indeed were risible in their attempts to contain very fluid social relations. Contemporary observers, such as John Clyn in the Kilkenny annals, noted that the English in Ireland spoke a different idiom of English. None the less, the law did create categories: of title to land, of access to royal patronage and of urban self-government.
Retinues in Ireland, like those raised in England, tended to be made of men-at-arms (on horseback), hobelars (light cavalry) and infantry. Sometimes general assessments were used to raise arms, like that of 1333 on the burgesses of Dublin; at other times service was commuted into payment, a custom well established by mid-century, and the income was used to pay soldiers. In 1352 the town supplied 160 troops for six months; in 1358 county Kilkenny paid for 262 men. In Irish retinues the hobelar element tended to be much larger, fitted to rougher terrain and to the challenges of cattle rustling. Whereas an Irish tradition of foot-archers was well established, Irish retinues came to be influenced by technological development in the English army with the introduction, after 1337, of the longbow. The justiciar’s retinue came to depend on the companies which followed his Anglo-Irish magnates, and these could draw from near and far within existing affinities. Companies of foot-soldiers, known as kerns – familiar from Macbeth as ‘skipping kerns’ or ‘wretched kerns’ – hired for low wages by contract, accompanied Gaelic and Anglo-Irish lords alike. The Gaelic element in the justiciars’ retinues of the mid-century could number around half or more. Contacts with the Gaelic-Irish were created through the mediation of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. The Butler Earls of Ormond (with lands spanning south Leinster and east Munster) could mobilize a large number of Anglo-Irish gentry as well as raise kerns from Kilkenny and Tipperary; in the 1350s the O’Kennedys of Ormond first appear as recipients of pay during royal expeditions, clearly through the mediation of their Ormond protector.
New arrivals to Ireland were often shocked to witness the degree of involvement of Gaelic-Irish troops in the crown’s military efforts to secure its rule. Far from remaining separate, Gaelic Irish and English Irish developed complex institutions, characteristic of border zones: customs which regulated ransoming, parleys and negotiation were at the core of cohabitation in Ireland. Government sought to define clearly demarcated areas of peace or war, but on the ground men like Maurice son of Thomas, future Earl of Desmond (d. 1356), regularly negotiated with Irish leaders. Even the justiciars were implicated in rituals aimed at defusing incipient violence: when Donal son of Art MacMurdharha claimed the title of King of Leinster he was imprisoned in Dublin Castle, but by 1335 the same man was fighting with Edward III in Scotland, and for his hegemony among his clan Art’s successor was recognized as a ‘MacMurrough’ chief.
The histories, myths and memories of Gaelic Ireland became part of the cultural world of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. They patronized bards, Gaelic poets who employed native metre and themes, in eulogies and panegyrics. To their Anglo-Irish patrons such poets could ascribe courage, strength, love of country and generosity. In the lament for Richard de Burgh, the ‘Red Earl of Ulster’ (d. 1326), the anonymous bard mourned the fact that he had not died with his lord. Gaelic musicians were offered patronage: in 1329 John Bingham, Lord of Louth, employed the tympanist Maolruanaidh MacCeabhaill. In both Ireland and Wales men wrote with enthusiasm of the king’s exploits: as did John Clyn of Kilkenny in his annals about the deeds of Edward in Scotland and France, or Iolo Goch in his eulogy for Edward III.
The reality of common warfare, interdependence and mutual authorization which these complex affinities could breed was clearly matched by personal and symbolic relations which newcomers from England found incomprehensible, indeed reprehensible. In 1357 Edward III confessed in his ordinances for Ireland that in the past he had failed to provide appropriate defences and justice. He acknowledged that careless neglect had characterized the early years of his reign, when some men were sent to Ireland more to grasp than to remedy. Theirs was a separate identity but they were loyal to the crown. A political class that was Anglo-Irish evolved; an ethos of the Irish Bench was also emerging, many of its members having been trained in law in England. Such men reminded Edward III of his duties to Ireland in messages sent by the great council at Kilkenny in 1360, describing the parlous state of the king’s lands and lieges there. In response, Edward III sent his son Clarence to Ireland in the following year. This expensive campaign marked a new high level of expenditure which lasted for the rest of his reign, of some £91,000, with only a small part paid by the Irish Exchequer.
The Anglo-Irish developed a strong sense of their links to the polity and exhibited wounded pride when the kings showed less interest and exertion than they deemed appropriate. The Anglo-Irish magnates held little land outside Ireland, and were closely bonded by kinship and mutual exertions and almost constant warfare. Such group identity never developed to the same extent among Marcher lords, who had lands and business and patrimonial lands outside Wales. Yet there was a greater integration of Welshmen into the activities of the crown. A sizeable part of royal contingents in the wars, about half of the infantry of England between 1280 and 1350, was recruited in Wales. The Welsh counties were exempt from parliamentary taxation, and although they were hard pressed by the demands of the administration in the Principality and the demands of the Marcher lords, many Welshmen saw in the wars an opportunity. Far from the counties bordering on the Channel, away from war taxation, enjoying the benefits of employment and rewards of war, an involved and enthusiastic attitude to Edward’s wars developed in some circles in Wales. Welsh captains could make a name and a fortune, as did Sir Gruffydd Llwyd (d. 1335) and Llewellyn ap Madog (d. 1343). Inasmuch as royal presence was so much rarer, and never in the form of direct rule, the patronage which bonded men like Llewellyn Gruffydd to Edward III was rarely exercised in Ireland. Magnates played that role instead in Ireland, with intricate affinities, and even marriage alliances with native Irish families.
In the midst of the hectic activities of their courts kings were lonely figures. The young Edward III attempted to break through to those who had supported him and whose support he would always need. He cherished his nobles: restoring some who were sullied by the events of 1330, and creating new ones among his favourites. When, in the enthusiasm of the successful war years, he created the most exclusive club of chivalry and loyalty to the crown – the Order of the Garter – he aimed to balance new valour with old title. Granted its statutes in 1348 and probably already in place on the eve of the battle of Crécy in 1346, the new brotherhood included his closest advisers: it exalted among its twenty-six members knightly status and chivalric accomplishment. Dedicated to God, the Virgin, St George and Edward the Confessor, the Order met annually on St George’s feast-day at Windsor Castle for a three-day assembly. The chapel there was rebuilt as the Order’s own chapel, and St George’s Day 1349 was celebrated there; the members’ cloaks blended with the altar-hangings with their matching garter theme. The Garter was not a royal retaining badge; its rhetoric transcended royal politics and parties, even as it strengthened loyalty to the monarch as chivalrous warlord. It mobilized noble interest in the war, and loyalty to the king who provided the occasion for valour to shine and profit to grow.
The French war is all-important in the early conception of the brotherhood: its Garter of gold and blue displayed France’s colours, and its first members were the band of knights who supported the king in his wars. Edward III ensured that princes were initiated early into the prestigious club: his three sons, John of Gaunt, Lionel of Clarence and Edmund of Langley, were elected in 1360 at the ages of twenty-two, twenty and eighteen respectively (the Black Prince was a foundation member); his sons-in-law were similarly elected in 1365 and 1369, as were his grandchildren, Richard and Henry, in 1377. Peers could expect admission some five years after inheriting their peerage. But service and valour equally won men admission in the spirit of the Order’s inception: Richard of Pembridge, a knight of the king’s household and then of the Chamber, in 1369, as well as retainers of the Black Prince’s household such as Simon Burley and Nicholas Sarnesfield. A few women were granted livery on St George’s Day in a muted sibling institution dedicated to that saint.
A careful balance between noble families, royal officials, favourites and members of the royal family characterizes the composition of Edward’s brotherhood of the Garter. It provides a useful code for Edward’s politics more generally. Royal prerogative was wide and unassailable; the king took great interest in his family – he may even be seen as a ‘family man’ – arranging very good marriages for his numerous progeny: Lionel to the heiress of the Earl of Ulster; John of Gaunt to Blanche, co-heiress of Henry of Grosmont Duke of Lancaster; Thomas of Woodstock to Eleanor, co-heiress of the Earl of Northampton, Hereford and Essex.
Such focused dynastic aspiration was tempered by the advice of the greatest nobles and the promotion and support of a group of royal servants. Royal servants and nobles benefited from the opportunities of revenue offered by warrior kings – Edward III and later Henry V. William Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Lieutenant in Brittany, had crossed over with an expedition in 1342, later to fight with the king during the sack of the lordship of Rohan. In 1345 he led a royal contingent in the Duchy and soon made Thomas Dagworth his deputy, charging him on 28 January 1346 with command of 14 knights, 65 esquires, 120 archers and more. At La Roche Derrien in June, Dagworth was to deal a terrible blow to the French: he took Charles of Blois, Duke of Brittany captive, for which King Edward rewarded him handsomely. Without servants like Dagworth, the younger son of a modest Suffolk family, an erstwhile official of Humphrey Earl of Hereford in some of his Marcher lordships, a nobleman such as William could not prosper in administration of estates, still less in war. William thought so well of his lieutenant that he gave him his own sister, Eleanor, a widow, in marriage. With her came in 1344 the estates of one of the greatest Anglo-Irish families, the Butlers, Earls of Ormond.
The fellowship of the Garter was further reinforced by the Arthurian imagery of the round table revived and explored by Edward and his court. At the Dunstable Tournament of 1334, led by John of Eltham, the king’s son Edward dressed as ‘Lionel’, cousin of Lancelot. A veritable Round Table was re-created at Pentecost 1344 at Windsor Castle, and presided over by the king and queen in furred red gowns, who led a procession of earls, barons and knights to the castle chapel. There they heard a mass and swore on relics to follow the king and queen in creating a Round Table anew, as Arthur had once done.
The court was an arena of complex exchanges of information, favours, gifts and advice. An intimate language of symbol and ritual encouraged relationships, and clear boundaries between the acceptable and the unmentionable were known and observed. Although Edward III’s chancery was producing more letters than ever before, the dimensions of play and entertainment were not diminished in consequence. His court was adorned by minstrels, players and acrobats, servants to whom the king showed singular attention and loyalty. He was also surrounded by bookish people: his mother Isabella, his wife, and Henry of Lancaster, an interesting devotional writer. The courts of England and France, already linked by marriage and blood, were brought even closer with the arrival of a French court with the captive French King John, and new hybrid forms of etiquette and ceremony evolved. Three queens welcomed King John on his arrival in England in 1357 – Queen Philippa, the Queen of Scotland (Edward’s sister Joan, d. 1362), and Isabella, the king’s mother. A royal progress from Bristol to London saw the entry of the captive king into the City, where he was lodged at the Savoy Palace. It was claimed that he had never seen anything like the celebrations of St George’s Day at Windsor, and Queen Philippa’s surviving accounts show just how sumptuous these events were.
Brilliant French writers and musicians captured in their creations the excitement of Edward’s active years. Jehan le Bel had fought with Edward in the Scottish campaigns and recorded the king’s early years. Edward was the epitome of chivalry and prowess rather than an executive ruler of vast lands. The most prominent chronicler was Jean Froissart (d. c.1410), who was part of Queen Philippa’s entourage in the 1360s. Froissart developed an extraordinary mastery of English political mentality, which he deployed in his Chroniques, into which he incorporated Jehan’s earlier work. He also wrote love poetry, and his presence in court, together with the infusion of French literature during the years of King John’s captivity, created a familiarity with French writing which contributed much to the poetry of Chaucer in the following generation.
The court was colourful and exciting on occasions when entertainment rather than strife and anxiety prevailed. Courtiers and guests were cheered by figures like Queen Philippa’s fool. He was dressed in a costume made of striped Ypres cloth, decorated with a lamb’s coat, and a hood of budge fur (lambskin worn inside out). Care was given to the recruitment of staff such as the minstrel Walter Hert, hired by the queen straight out of ‘minstrelsy school’ in London in 1358; a piper was hired for Easter celebrations, and an acrobat was brought in for entertainment on Whitsun of that year. Men in court were becoming more like such minstrels in their own dress: around mid-century the Italian and French fashions which favoured narrow and tight clothes and rich varieties of colour – especially for young men – were introduced into the English court. The men of the court of the captive King John of France used an exclusive style of marbled colouring of cloth, a livery of sorts for the knights and valets of his chamber. Queen Philippa favoured embroidered silks for her body and on the walls of her chamber: in 1348 her evening attire was an ensemble in blue velvet with gold borders – the colours of the Virgin Mary – and her day attire was red, embroidered with figures and pearls.
During the years in England, at court, the king was somewhat insulated by those close and trusted favourites around him, although he was probably well advised by active and informed sons. He was surrounded by trusty guards (vigiles) – such as Ralph le Geyte, William and John Hardyng – who also provided entertainment, as well as by trumpeters who announced his presence as he moved throughout his palace – his favourite was Windsor, though he spent more time at Westminster – and park. Kings sought out advisers and confidants who could comfort and support: one such was the physician Peter of Florence, who earned £40 a year serving both the king and the queen. The holistic understanding of health in this period, which was particularly well expounded in English writings, encouraged this type of dependence: bodily regimen was seen not only as necessary for physical well-being, but for moral fortitude and good judgement. It was a crucial aspect of kingly demeanour and life-style that the king’s body be beautiful, free of pain, a fitting home for a great spirit.
Kings and princes offered their subjects occasions for identification with a land and a language, as a people, as an ‘imagined community’, but they were also extraordinarily uprooted persons, who might share their table, as well as their bedchamber, with men and women quite different in age, ethnicity and language. Perhaps that is why they spent so many resources and so much effort on building homes for themselves, sumptuous and restful places. English kings were great builders, chief among them Edward III. Under him Windsor Castle became a splendid dynastic centre, the hub of an international court of one of the longest-ruling kings of Europe, and home for the chivalric ethos epitomized in the Order of the Garter. Edward was to die in his palace at Sheen, a home which would be deliberately destroyed seventeen years later by his grandson Richard, in a grand gesture of mourning at the death of Anne of Bohemia.
Few English kings could boast the scale of artistic and artisanal patronage of continental courts. But they were stylish organizers of tournaments, to which they drew talented participants from all over Europe. The greatest achievements in building and art were attached to dynastic magnificence: the continued beautification of Windsor Castle, with the adornment of St George’s Chapel there, until the last of its painting was completed in 1362. The style favoured here was not English but European, the fine gilt, ornate and expressive style of painting developed by Trecento Tuscan artists.
The intensive drive and excitement of Edward III’s first decades had altered drastically by the 1360s. The court of the ageing king was demoralized and lacking in inspiration. The turning point may have been the death of his dashing queen and partner in rule, Philippa, in August 1369. The mourning and burial rituals lasted for months and ended in a procession from Windsor to Westminster with stops at five churches on the way, to her burial in a tomb which she had commissioned and designed, a queen among her relatives, with heraldry that stressed her own great lineage. The tomb was all the more powerful for being not flattering but distinctively realistic. This was a remarkable queen, of whose times her court chronicler Froissart wrote: ‘Since the time of the Queen Guinevere, who was wife of King Arthur and Queen of England… there was no queen so good or so honourable.’ This is flattery indeed, but cast in an idiom and imagery which Edward and Philippa had knowingly inhabited and fostered.
The king was seen in public less frequently, his court was less in evidence, as he spent his days on his favourite estates with a small entourage and infrequent itineration. The treaties of Brétigny (May 1360) and Calais (October 1360) meant that a process of disengagement was possible, from campaigns and from their political and financial costs. Having secured his claim to Aquitaine he kept a watchful eye from the strategic garrison of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte in Normandy. He could thus assign Aquitaine to his son, his future heir, and expect the fruits of peace. His son’s son, who was to become Richard II, was born in Bordeaux in 1367, attended there by the kings of Spain, Navarre and Portugal. During these years John of Gaunt became embroiled in the dynastic wars of Castile, in which English and French troops and interests met in battle, and out of which he came with a wife and a claim to the throne of Castile. The companies, left idle during a period of peace, continued to fight and ravage territories in southern France and Italy. When Edward reclaimed the title of King of France in 1369, he marked it as being the fortieth anniversary of his accession. He did so with a great sense of achievement, and with little desire to go further.
Edward’s hopes for his family were dashed. The Black Prince fell ill in 1371, and died in 1376, a death which coincided with the resumption of war. He was buried in Canterbury, not in the undercroft chapel as his will had requested, but above, in the chapel of the Holy Trinity. The space was decorated with his livery sign of feather and scroll, and the Flemish motto which still serves the Prince of Wales, ‘Ich dene’ – ‘I serve’. Outliving a son must always be a depressing and crushing experience. John of Gaunt tried but never succeeded in replacing Prince Edward as his father’s heir, though he did remain a prime military and political actor.
In his last years the king disengaged from politics and warfare. At court others filled the vacuum created by his absence. The household officers, William Lord Latimer the Chamberlain, John Lord Neville the Steward, together with the financier Richard Lyons, linked to the king’s erstwhile mistress Alice Perrers, came to dominate the court. Favours to friends, such as Garter companionship, were awarded to knights associated with the court group: Richard Pembridge, John Lord Neville, and Alan Buxhill.
When in 1375 the last outpost in Normandy was relinquished, this epitomized the mismanagement and lack of leadership which had long worried parliament. Those in charge were brought to account by the parliament of 1376. It was opened on 29 April by Chancellor John Knyvet, who addressed the question of a subsidy and was answered by the Commons’ Speaker Peter de la Mare. In his words an articulate analysis of the country’s troubles was presented: too many interests and factions were undermining the general and common good. This was a critical engagement with the crown, not as an institution, but in the particular state of flawed helmsmanship. The king was being exploited and defrauded by those he had favoured: the staple merchants of Calais across the Channel, and Alice Perrers closer to home.
This best documented of medieval parliaments, the Good Parliament of 1376, reveals how widespread was the malaise. William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, in its version from the 1370s, echoes literally and metaphorically a desire for justice which kings and officials were little able to answer. The Good Parliament made a number of important constitutional innovations, like the creation of the continual council, mainly for fear of the influence on the young future king of his uncle John of Gaunt. A whole generation was passing, men who had mobilized a country’s resources – in soldiers, energy and wealth – to the project of military exertion. Their exploits were just glorious enough to help quell the frustrations and abuse which recent years had inspired. Yet Edward’s years left useful institutions for debate and expression of grievances, a peace of sorts, and a set of expectations. For at his jubilee parliament of 1376 Edward III presented Richard, his grandson, as his heir. Like the infant Christ he was brought to parliament, where he was adored and given gifts. The parliamentary sermon likened the gathering to that of Christ’s Presentation at the Temple.
Edward died at Sheen in June 1377 of a stroke, an imposing figure even at his death, if we are to judge by the wooden funerary effigy carried at his last state ceremony. Even today the authenticity is striking: as in the dog hairs which made up his eyebrows, the flakes of dry glue which had once attached a wig to the wooden head, and the threads of red velvet from his gown. The reign which had seen some of the greatest calamities of European medieval experience, both natural and manmade, was busy and transforming. The political system which he headed mobilized the energies and involved many of the approximately 2.8 million subjects of the king in England and Wales, in the Borders of Scotland and English Ireland, in Calais and Gascony and parts of north-west France. He reigned long and hard, yet, unlike his father before him and his grandson after him, he died, in his bed, in peace.