It was St George’s Day at Windsor: 23 April 1349. After a winter’s lull, England was once again racked by the pangs of the Black Death. Edward, not to be distracted from his favourite pastime, was hosting a tournament for the knights of the realm, a festival of jousting and prayer in the castle where he had been born, and where he planned a series of elaborate building works to begin the following year.
The twenty-five men invited to the jousts were largely veterans of the French wars. They included the Black Prince, the earls of Lancaster, Warwick and Devon, Roger Mortimer (who would soon regain his grandfather’s title as earl of March), the new earl of Salisbury, William Montagu’s son, also called William, and other royal companions and comrades. They were champions of the tournament and would relish the chance to show off their military prowess before gatherings of ladies.
The form of the tournament was fixed in advance. The knights would divide into two teams of thirteen, and ride against each other until one side was victorious. On this occasion there was added spice. William Montagu, the earl of Salisbury, and his steward Sir Thomas Holland rode on opposite teams. These two were in the unusual position of both being married to the same woman: Edward’s cousin Joan of Kent. Joan, a radiant twenty-year-old of royal blood, had grown up with the Black Prince. She was a granddaughter of Edward I and Froissart called her ‘the most beautiful woman in England’.
Her marital position was extraordinary. Joan had been given in marriage to Salisbury, the young warrior knighted alongside the Black Prince before Crécy. Yet a year before the tournament at which she now took her place, it had been stated by Holland that she was already married, to him, and that the marriage had been consummated. The case was heading to the pope for settlement, and the rivalry between Joan’s two ‘husbands’ was therefore fierce.
With Joan playing the dazzling heroine and watching her two rivals clash in battle, the stage was set for an exciting spectacle. Yet there was more still to single out this tournament: for this was the occasion on which Edward III had determined to launch a knightly institution that would eventually win fame across the world. The tournament at Windsor marked the formal institution of the Order of the Garter, England’s most exclusive knightly club and one of Edward’s most brilliantly realized acts of kingship.
The king, like his grandfather Edward I, was captivated by the Arthurian legend, with its heroic deeds, fearsome military reputation and famous gentleness towards women and the stricken. Like his grandfather, Edward III was determined that Plantagenet kingship should absorb and reflect all the great values of the Arthurian world.
He had made his first attempt in January 1344, as the Breton phase of the war with Philip was under way, when he held an earlier tournament at Windsor to inaugurate a knightly society of the Round Table. The chronicler Adam of Murimuth wrote that the king ‘made a great supper at which he began his Round Table and received the oaths of certain earls and barons and knights whom he wished to be of the said Round Table’. Then, deadly serious about building a physical centre for a cult of royal knighthood, Murimuth says the king issued instructions to his clerk of the works that a ‘most noble house’ should be added to Windsor castle, ‘in which the said Round Table could be held at the time appointed’. This noble house was to be made of stone, 200 feet in diameter, perhaps with a tiled roof around the outside in the fashion of a later Elizabethan globe theatre. In the first year of construction £507 17s 11½ d was spent on the Round Table house – a handsome sum indeed. No expense was to be spared in the pursuit of Arthuriana, and in 1345 Edward bolstered his project by ordering a search for the body of Arthur’s supposed ancestor Joseph of Arimathea.
As war escalated in the mid-1340s, the Round Table project had run short of cash and stalled. The cost of the fighting in Brittany compelled all funds to be diverted to waging war. Five years on, however, Edward had not abandoned his ambitions to form an exclusive brotherhood by which he could bind the elite knights and noblemen of his realm to the Crown. Throughout his tournament season of 1348 the king had been toying with the idea of creating an Order of the Garter. At Windsor in 1349, he formalized the idea and fixed the membership of the Order.
The Garter itself was an odd item to symbolize what was in its very essence a club for men of war. The story was spread that the idea of the Garter came spontaneously, when the countess of Salisbury dropped a garter during a dance, and Edward picked it up, saying ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ (Evil to him who thinks evil of it) and thus coining the Order’s motto. But the tale is apocryphal, and probably muddles an allusion to the countess of Salisbury’s (i.e. Joan of Kent’s) scandalous marital situation with a saucy account of the king adopting a sexualized, feminine item of clothing for the badge of a soldiers’ companionship. Edward’s parties were famously louche; this story found a willing audience among sniffy monastic types who saw decadence and scandal at the English court and shook their heads in disapproval.
More likely the idea of a garter came from Henry Grosmont, earl of Lancaster, hero of the English war effort in Gascony and Calais, who had sported garters (then a knightly accoutrement and only later an item of female dress) in a dandyish youth. The king, too, had worn garters encrusted with pearl and gold during tournaments at the beginning of his reign, in 1333 and 1334. By the time the Order was founded, Lancaster was thirty-nine years old and Edward thirty-seven. Perhaps the emblem of the Garter served two purposes: an allusion to the knightly prowess they saw in their earlier selves and wished to pass on to new generations of knights, as well as an in-joke about their wild youthful days.
Whatever the case, Edward was certainly following the European fashion: orders of knights were founded throughout the mid-fourteenth century, following the example of Alfonso XI of Castile, who formed the Order of the Band in 1330. In the 1350s Emperor Karl von Luxemburg of Germany formed the Society of the Buckle and Count Amadeus of Savoy the Company of the Black Swan; in the 1360s King Louis of Sicily founded the Society of the Knot and John II of France founded the Company of the Star. Thereafter the trend proliferated.
So the Order was founded on St George’s Day, with solemn oaths sworn by the twenty-six founding members to hold a celebration on the same day each year, together if possible. Any member not able to attend at Windsor was to celebrate in the same fashion wherever he was in the world. The society formed a sacred bond between those who fought at the 1349 tournament, and new members could not be added until existing members died. Hence, great soldiers like Sir Thomas Dagworth, Sir Walter Manny and the earls of Northampton and Huntingdon were not among the original twenty-six knights. All were in France when the founding tournament was fought. Northampton, Huntingdon and Manny would have to wait for their membership: in Huntingdon’s case until 1372. Dagworth, meanwhile, died before he had the chance to receive the Order’s famous robes.
The Order of the Garter struck many contemporaries as crass and insensitive. At a time when England was ravaged by the Black Death and impoverished by the financial demands of war, to a chronicler like Henry Knighton it seemed the height of callousness for the king to indulge in spendthrift carefree tourneying.
But for Edward, the Order had a purpose beyond simple enjoyment and indulgence. Every Plantagenet king since John, in 1205, had been prevented from defending his foreign territories by knights and earls who chafed at the duty to serve abroad. Edward had been lucky with victories – particularly in 1340 and 1346 – which justified the massive expense, effort and death incurred fighting in France. But he knew his family’s history. If God withdrew his favour and victories slowed, the great men of the realm would eventually demand a reason to bear arms overseas.
The answer lay in making foreign service a badge of honour, not a tiresome obligation hanging over from the days of feudal service. It was clear that knighthood was now likely to be a cause of death, expense and discomfort – thus it was necessary for Edward to knit the knightly community of the realm around him by giving it a caste culture, with royalty at its core. The Order of the Garter gave Plantagenet kingship an explicit division by which to celebrate and reward knightly chivalry. The exotic French motto reminded all who aspired to membership that aristocracy was a pan-European brotherhood, not a purely English rank.
Thus, at the great St George’s Day tournament of 1349, the Order of the Garter was formally and finally established. It was a means of binding the king and his sons to the men whom they would lead into battle on the Continent for decades to come. And having abandoned his plans for a Round Table house at Windsor five years previously, Edward now gave orders to establish a college church in the town. The chapel within the College of St George would be the Order’s spiritual and ceremonial home. Work began in 1350, and took seven years to complete, incurring as great a cost as some of Edward I’s greatest Welsh castles. Indeed, £6,500 was spent at Windsor between 1350 and 1357 – almost all of it on the chapel. To give the chapel a truly holy mystique, Edward donated to it the Cross of Gneth – a fragment of the True Cross taken from Llywelyn the Last during the final conquest of Wales in 1283.
For centuries afterwards, St George’s Chapel stood for the intoxicating blend of martial prowess, spiritual devotion, romantic gentility and lavish ceremonial that Edward and his companions cultivated. In building the Order of the Garter and its home, Edward showed himself to be perhaps the greatest and most complete of all the Plantagenet kings. He combined the flair for visual and architectural magnificence of Henry III with the fearsome military capability of Edward I. Truly, this was a high point of his family’s history, visionary propaganda from a superbly assured king.