AS WAS THE CASE with all medieval royal families, and indeed has been with the great families in general, the degree to which individual Plantagenet kings were seen as strong and successful or foolish and weak varied greatly. One reason was that the knowledge of obstetrics and gynecology in the Middle Ages was rudimentary, resulting in the possibility of brain damage to the royal infants. The future kings were often raised in a very slovenly manner, and very young princes were mistakenly treated as adults. Of the Plantagenet kings, John (r. 1199-1216) was a severe manic depressive, and Edward III (r. 1327-1377) was a weakling and a coward, lacking self-confidence. Richard II (r. 1377-1399), as well as Edward II (r. 1307-1327), preferred young men over women, which aroused the nobility against them. Therefore it is not surprising that after Henry II, the founder of John of Gaunt’s dynasty, among the Planta-genets only two kings before 1377 were regarded by contemporaries (and have been by most modern historians) as being strong and successful. Fortunately for England, Edward I (r. 1272-1307) and Edward III (r. 1327-1377) had very long reigns—although in the case of Edward III the reign turned out to be be too long, because in his later years he suffered bad health and dementia.
But Edward I and Edward III in his prime were not without major flaws, notably the tendency to use the country’s wealth and superior institutions for adventuresome wars that were beyond even their substantial resources, thereby producing strains on the political and taxation systems.
Edward I conquered Wales, which brought no additional wealth to his kingdom; there was not a strong market for coal until the end of the fifteenth century. He also intervened in a dynastic dispute in Scotland and tried to conquer the country; he failed, leaving a mess for his incompetent successor. Finally, in 1297, Edward I got into an expensive and doubtful war with the French monarchy; he didn’t achieve anything in this venture either.
By the time of Edward I, the Plantagenets had lost most of their ancestral family domains in France. They held only a small strip, never more than a hundred miles wide, that ran along the West coast of France from Bordeaux to the Pyrenees. This territory was called Gascony. Edward I had his eyes on the industrial powerhouse in the north, Flanders, and expansion of the wine-growing area along the eastern border of Gascony. He was unsuccessful.
Edward III, Gaunt’s father, revived this imperialist push, launching the Hundred Years’ War, Gaunt’s war. In the first twenty years of the Hundred Years’ War, Edward III’s armies were victorious, but not enough to take Paris, which the English king now also claimed. For the rest of his reign Edward III made no headway against the French king, but his armies laid waste to much of the western third of France, becoming a curse on the French peasantry.
Edward I financed his wars by getting consent to heavy taxation through the representation of the landed and moneyed classes in Parliament. Edward III did the same in his early years, but this approach did not yield enough to support his grandiose ambitions. He resorted to taking huge loans from Italian bankers and then defaulted on the loans. In the last decade of his reign, old Edward III’s government suffered severe fiscal stringency. John of Gaunt would have to use some of his abundant personal resources for his campaigns in France and Spain.
Of the early Plantagenet kings who followed Henry II, none was as effective as the two great Edwards. Henry II was succeeded by his eldest surviving sons, Richard I the Lion Hearted (r. 1189-1199) and John. The most influential Hollywood film about medieval England, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), has stamped indelibly in the popular mind the picture of Richard the Lion-Hearted as the hero and John as the villain. The real story is more complex.
Richard was six feet two inches tall—a giant in a society where very few men were taller than five feet five inches. Richard was a mean bully who got into noisy quarrels with people of his own social standing. He spent much of his reign on a Crusade in the Middle East, where he accomplished nothing and was held for ransom by the German emperor. He spent only a year of his reign in England and was unable to focus on the business of governance. Although Richard married, he was homosexual and had no issue.
King John was all business and showed himself to be an unusually skillful administrator, especially in financial matters. Unfortunately he was also paranoid and manic-depressive. He constantly suspected the great families of disloyalty, until they actually did rebel in 1215 and forced him to put his seal to a reform program called the Magna Carta. In one of his depressive periods (1204-1206), John, putting up very little resistance, allowed his enemy the King of France to conquer the Plantagenet ancestral lands in northern France.
Henry III (r. 1216-1272) was pious but weak and confused. He was pushed around by his brother-in-law, the King of France, and some of the great aristocratic English families. Finally, in Henry’s later years, his son, the future Edward I, took over and reestablished political stability.
Edward II was a bisexual, married to a fierce French princess. He spent his time losing Scotland, cultivating his male French lovers, and getting overthrown in a palace coup launched by the Queen and her aristocratic lover. He was later murdered.
Edward III (r. 1327-1377) was a good-humored man ever trying to give his many sons and daughters a helping hand. He arranged John of Gaunt’s marriage with the Duchess of Lancaster. On the battlefield Edward III was forever seeking military glory. He had no empathy whatsoever with the peasants and the poor. He was totally devoted to his family and their advancement.
It made a difference who was king of England in Plantagenet times. The king was, in effect, his own prime minister; therefore, the government could become unwound during the reign of a weak and foolish king. But there was an underside to the rule of even the supposedly strong and successful kings; they got involved in foreign wars and drained the royal treasury. Glory did not necessarily mean royal prosperity and stable government.
No one is going to understand the development of Plantagenet England by focusing on the doings of this motley collection of monarchs, even though we know a lot about them due to the thickness of government records and the anecdotes and gossip circulated by monastic and courtly writers. The dynamics of Plantagenet England lie more in the economic and cultural spheres than in the political sphere.
There are three models of economic development in medieval England. The first is the demographic model: the rise and decline of the population level affected everything else. The second model is the Marxist one: the struggle of the serf peasantry for freedom was key. The third and recent model reverts to an idea popular among historians around 1900: commercial markets and the growth of cities was central. It is possible to overlap these three models and also include cultural and religious history as affecting the development of Plantagenet England.
The lay of the land and its exploitation, the rural and urban entrepreneurial classes, the entrenchment of a parish system and the coming of the friars, the rise of the universities and the growth of literacy and learning, the spread of chivalry and courtliness among the nobility: these were the forces that stimulated and shaped Plantagenet England and made it by medieval or even modern standards a relatively prosperous and progressive society.
The population of England in 1066 was 1 million people. By 1300 it was approaching 6 million people because of the expanding food supply resulting from benign weather. Then, because of famine, disease, and economic problems in the fourteenth century as well as deteriorating climatic conditions and a shorter growing season, the population sank to 3 million people and did not again reach 6 million until the middle of the eighteenth century.
The glory of England lay not in its kings but in its lands. The central part of the country was the best grain-growing area of Europe alongside the black-earth country of the Ukraine, which was not exploited until the sixteenth century. The northern third of England was not suitable for intensive agriculture but its verdant hills and quiet valleys offered rich pasturage for sheep and cattle, which flourished in enormous numbers.
By 1250 there were probably 10 million sheep in England. They provided the best raw wool in Western Europe, mutton for a carnivorous population, and skins that were stretched and bleached to become parchment, which was the prime writing surface before the late fifteenth century.
The raw wool was exported to the cloth-weaving towns of Flanders, and from there much of it went to Florence to be further refined. The people who benefited from the wool trade comprised all classes of society: the great families who held at least a third of the land; the lesser nobility, or gentry, who along with the monastic order of the Cistercians held the rest of it in the north; the merchants in the towns; and the hardy, well-fed peasants.
In 1100 there was a lot of underdeveloped land in the great central grain-growing region (called “champaign” country in the Middle Ages). By 1250 it had been fully developed; there was a shortage of land for the gentry and peasant families; and real estate prices skyrocketed. Given that the yield per acre in the thirteenth century was very modest by modern standards, the product of the plowlands of central and south-central England was just sufficient to maintain the nutrition of a rapidly expanding population.
Since the great families held perhaps a third of the grain-growing land as their private domains, they benefited enormously from the rural inflation. It allowed them to cultivate their now extravagant lifestyle and meddle in national politics.
In 1300 in England, 85 percent of the population lived on the land. There was, however, a growing urban population; the numbers living and working in urban areas ranged from five hundred people to ten thousand (York) to sixty thousand (London).
The great merchants were engaged in exporting wool to Flanders and importing wine (“claret”) from Bordeaux. But there were also thousands of local traders selling grain, meat, fish, writing materials, clothing, and shoes. Every town had its public market. The craftspeople were organized in guilds, which provided welfare services and entertainment for the middle class and working class in the towns and tried to set prices, wages, and standards of manufacture.
In the fourteenth century England began to develop its own cloth making, although exports of immense bales of raw wool to the Continent continued. The cloth industry was organized according to the putting-out, or domestic, system. Representatives of the great entrepreneurs supplied peasants with looms for their houses, and raw wool, and every few weeks went out to pick up the cloth, pay the workers, and provide new materials.
Many of the larger towns were “cities,” that is, episcopal centers; the town developed around the cathedral. In the fourteenth century these ecclesiastical centers were still important. For example, Lincoln was still one of the largest half-dozen towns in the country. The cathedral clergy and other church officials were an important part of the population of these ecclesiastical towns and in some instances stimulated the burghers to become voluble and politically active.
Whether a town was ecclesiastical or secular, the burghers were in the ruling class (about 10 percent of the population), people to be reckoned with. Gaunt was probably afraid of them because they could get angry and unruly. He was certainly cautious and perplexed in their presence. Furthermore, their grants of taxes were important.
The burghers represented in Parliament (so the king could tax them more effectively) had ideas and opinions, and once in a while they expressed them. Most of the time, however, they kept quiet and followed the leadership of the gentry with whom they were compacted into a corporate House of Commons after 1340. The gentry and wealthy merchants made up the House of Commons; the nobility the House of Lords.
In London and three or four other towns there was a politics of the street—demonstrations and riots among the lower middle class. This could bother the king and the royal officials and some of the great families, including that of John of Gaunt.
In both urban and rural areas a strong push for stability and countering of political activism followed the entrenchment of the parish system. Every village had a church and a resident priest, usually paid for by a lord. London was a city of a thousand churches.
The priests generally reinforced hierarchy and fostered submission. They encouraged reliance on Church formulas and rituals to stave off medical and other misfortunes. Faith healing was a central part of religion, for the magnates, gentry, and burghers, and especially for the peasants. Reliance on faith healing normally kept the peasants quiet and contented in spite of epidemics and inadequate public health facilities.
A contrary, more radically active impulse in society resulted from the coming of the immensely popular Franciscan friars into England in the 1230s. They preached in the vernacular and often outdoors. They too propagated belief in faith healing and preached submission to ecclesiastical and secular authorities, but once in a while their sermons carried a trace of social criticism and class discontent.
In the century after 1150 there was an immense growth in literacy in the vernacular among the aristocracy, the gentry, and the merchant class due to elementary schools provided by towns and the Church. The Franciscans adopted Oxford University and made it into a prime center of Latinate learning and theological, philosophical, and scientific speculation. By 1300 radical thinking about church organization also appeared among a small minority of the friars teaching and studying in the universities.
Another aspect of cultural change deeply affected the behavior and consciousness of the great families and sometimes the upper stratum, at least, of the gentry class. This was the code of chivalry, or courtliness, which was brought to England from France in the reign of Henry II (in the 1160s and ’70s) by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and her hangers-on, including clerics at her court.
Chivalry posited more civilized behavior and a gloss of gentility for the high aristocracy. Aristocrats were to dress well; practice good table manners; participate in tournaments, for which the lords were to accouter themselves in special ornamental armor; take care to improve the bloodlines of their women, horses, and falcons; and be patrons of the arts. They were to treat each other, even on real battlefields, with at least a modicum of care and reciprocity.
Certainly by the early fourteenth century this code of chivalry was well entrenched among the great nobles and some of the wealthier gentry. But it was on relationships between the sexes that chivalry had perhaps its most profound social effect. Women of the upper classes must not be raped or physically abused. They could, however, be seduced.
Marriage could legitimately involve romantic love as well as property and diplomatic arrangements. But marriage vows did not preclude elaborate and ritualized forms of adultery, referred to as courtly love.
Chivalry no doubt improved the treatment of women within noble and gentry families. It also permitted promiscuity. It even gave legitimacy, in high social circles, to homoerotic relationships, which increasingly were condemned by the established Church and the more conservative ecclesiastics.
Chivalry thus included within its makeup a kind of sexual liberation. Sexual relationships among members of the great families and some of the wealthier gentry were seen as a coded mélange of connoisseurship and gamesmanship as much as were tournament jousting and falconry.
This more liberated sexual consciousness is reflected in two literary developments: close description of young women’s physical attributes and elaborate inquiries into the psychology of romantic love, with all its passions and problems.
All aspects of the chivalric code and behavior pattern, save that of homoeroticism, were exemplified in the life of John of Gaunt. Along with hosting, feasting, hunting and jousting, expensive clothes, elaborate housing, and a certain civility and restraint in public behavior, there was in John’s case the libido and love angle.
John of Gaunt had many mistresses; that was nothing new among the nobility. But Gaunt treated his favorite mistress with dignity and generosity and ended up marrying her and legitimating their bastard children, an action that was to have far-reaching effects on English politics and even the royal family.
English society in the late fourteenth century was liberal about heterosexual relationships and progressive on treatment of women in the upper and middle classes. But the savage hostility to the “other” that marked continental Europe in the thirteenth century had now penetrated the English kingdom.
Jews had been expelled from England in 1290, after wave upon wave of pogroms. By Gaunt’s lifetime the Anglo Jewish families were in Germany, for the most part, on their way to Poland. In the late fourteenth century a heretical movement among the English clergy appeared, to be ruthlessly hunted down and persecuted in the fifteenth century, although never entirely obliterated. The rising hostility toward homosexuals played a part not only in the downfall of Edward II but also in ending the reign of Gaunt’s nephew Richard II (r. 1377-1399).
England in the middle of the fourteenth century was a boisterous, violent, and crime-ridden place. Radical fluctuations in the land market and the supply of labor exacerbated an already class-polarized, disease-ridden society. Demobilized mercenaries from the wars in France roamed the English countryside in organized gangs—this was the grim social reality behind the Robin Hood legend developing at this time.
There were three forces that engendered a degree of pacification in this tumultuous society: the preaching of the friars, the justice provided in the royal courts, and the imprints upon society of the great aristocratic families, such as the House of Lancaster.
The friars—the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Carmelites—stimulated a spiritual awakening in late-fourteenth century England. Among the manifestations of this awakening were religious processions and dramatic presentations of biblical scenes.
At one end of the spiritual scale, practices such as faith healing became ever more central to the religion of both the commoners and the nobility. At the other end of the spiritual scale, a flowering of mysticism and mystical writings occurred.
Religion became more privatized. Wealthy families and urban guilds established chantries, chapels that afforded a more secluded and intimate worship than was found in the traditional parish churches.
The system of royal justice set up in Henry II’s time had given a central place to the meetings of the county courts twice a year, with itinerant royal justices presiding. The grand jury and, slowly, the jury of verdict became central to criminal procedure. Special panels of royal judges were sent out into the countryside to impanel juries to bring indictments against the organized gangs of bandits and demobilized soldiers, an effort that had some success.
Meanwhile the royal judges developed increasingly sophisticated procedures in property and inheritance cases and laid the foundation for the whole branch of common law concerned with liability (personal injury).
There were plenty of things wrong with the common law and the legal profession, including favoring the rich over the poor, and envelopment of the law courts in a mystique of obscurantism (as in American law today). But the judicial system, creaking along in its disorder, nevertheless contributed to the pacification of a violent society. The common law worked best at protecting the property of the gentry and nobility.
A third important factor in pacifying and stabilizing English society in the fourteenth century was the role played by the great aristocratic families, especially in areas relatively distant from the royal bureaucracy in London. These great families—the Lancastrians in northern England, the Percy and Neville families along the Scottish border—organized chains of social dependency that brought a degree of order and hierarchy into society, from the rural working class through the middle-class gentry.
Thousands of families were bound in loyalty and obedience to John of Gaunt and other great magnates. In this condition of passage from the medieval to the modern state, personal ties counted more than did the sinews of royal government in stabilizing a society that was experiencing the early impact of capitalism but lacked theory to identify the source of economic upheaval.
This was still a world in which lordship was very important. Who are you and your family? Tell me who your lord is, who dominates your county, and I can tell you what is your social status and personal credit.
Even merchants in the towns, in spite of their yearning for urban independence, fell into line, maintaining their association with aristocratic households, which were also their best customers.
Like the American billionaires of today, members of the high aristocracy exercised power and influence beyond their wealth and specific political connections. They exuded an aura of mastery. They set the fashion for high living. They transcended and at the same time stiffened the legal order disseminated by the royal judges and the religious hierarchy preached by friars and priests.
Men like Gaunt were not beyond criticism by the middle class in courts and parliaments or by protesting workers in the streets. But the aristocrats were beyond effective opposition and their word was law and faith. Gaunt and other great lords contributed mightily to the pacification and ordering of this increasingly inchoate and troubled society.
Only the king could strike down a great magnate and reduce his family to misery. And kings could do this only infrequently and in peril to themselves and their hold upon the throne. The classic case is that of Henry IV, Gaunt’s son. Richard II harassed and mistreated the young Henry of Lancaster until the latter invaded England and removed his cousin from the throne.