In the 1080s, Robert Curthose, son of William the Conqueror, had declared that he would become King of England even if he were in Alexandria when his father died. It was an empty boast. In the entire period between 1066 and 1272, only one King had followed his father on to the English throne as his father’s eldest son, and the circumstances here, with the accession in 1216 of the nine-year-old Henry III, at the height of civil war, with most of southern England under rebel or French control, were hardly an advertisement of the stability of English kingship. By contrast, in 1272, not only was Henry III’s eldest son accepted unquestioningly as England’s King but, in bizarre fulfilment of Curthose’s boast, he happened at the time to be, if not in Alexandria, then returning across the Mediterranean from crusade in the Holy Land. Edward’s very name, chosen in honour of Edward the Confessor, the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings, promised stability and a return to good order.
In the century after 1272, England was to be ruled in turn by three kings, all named Edward, each of them of very different character. The heroic, crusading Edward I is generally ranked amongst the premier league of great English kings, responsible for the conquest of Wales, for the first attempted English conquest of Scotland and for the restoration of royal authority after the chaos and confusion of his father’s reign. By contrast, Edward I’s son and heir, Edward II, ranks if not as the worst, then as perhaps the most feckless of England’s medieval rulers, utterly unsuited to his position, a sexually ambiguous wastrel, literally a layabout who had difficulty even in getting up each morning, persuaded after fifteen years of weak rule and disasters both in foreign and domestic policy into a final period of tyranny and extortion which plunged England into yet further baronial rebellion and led eventually to his deposition and murder.
Whatever qualities Edward I had possessed skipped a generation, being reborn in Edward III, albeit that the character of the new King, like that of Edward I before him, was moulded in quite deliberate determination to avoid the failings of his father. Edward III it was who built up the great war machine of England, reviving the military glories of his grandfather’s reign, setting England on course to become a state organized for war. As the son of the King of England and of a daughter of the King of France, Edward III inherited a claim to the French throne, leading after 1337 to the outbreak of the Hundred Years War, that great slogging match in which the national and political identities of both countries were reforged. It is already symptomatic of the emergence of English identity, that, even in 1340, when Edward III came to devise a new style for himself, as King of both nations, he chose to place England above France in the list of his titles: ‘Edward King of England and France’, positioning (in his letters to the English, though not on his seal or his letters to the French where he styled himself ‘King of France and England’) what in the twelfth century would have been regarded as the cart of French plenty very much behind the proud and no longer supine English horse.
Through to the thirteenth century, the Plantagenet kings of England could still be dismissed as callow new bugs in the playground of European dynastic politics, overshadowed by the sixth-formers and prefects of other nations. Four generations on, by the end of the reign of Edward III, all this had changed. The Plantagenets, first crowned in 1154, were by the 1370s well on the way to becoming the longest established dynasty in Europe. The Hohenstaufen emperors of Germany had vanished from the imperial scene as early as 1250. The royal houses of France, Sicily, Navarre, Castile, Scotland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Armenia, Byzantium, Jerusalem and even Bulgaria had all suffered deposition or dynastic disruption. By the time of the death of Edward III in 1377, only the rulers of Aragon and Portugal could claim that their crowns had passed from King to King in unbroken succession to match the succession of the Plantagenet rulers of England, and even then not without slips and skips along the way. As the crowned representative of a sixth generation of Plantagenet kings, Edward III could claim that he and his ancestors had ruled England for as many generations and for an even longer period of time (six generations, and 233 years as opposed to 195) than that which separated Alfred, true founder of the house of Wessex, from the Norman Conquest. The Plantagenet house had become a venerable and time-honoured institution, just as hallowed by antiquity as the house of Alfred had been in 1066.
As befitted their rank, the Plantagenets had also acquired a family mausoleum, Westminster Abbey, and patron saints: King Edward the Confessor, whose presence there determined the emergence of Westminster as the principal royal family mausoleum from Henry III onwards, and St Thomas Becket who, for all the anti-royal and potentially subversive qualities of his original legend, had been recruited as a supporter of kingship as early as 1174, with Henry II’s reconciliation at his shrine. By 1318, Becket was believed to have endowed the
kings of England with a miraculous gift, the ‘Oil of St Thomas’, supposedly granted to him by the Virgin Mary and intended for use in the English coronation. Edward II asked that he might be anointed with this oil, although it was not actually employed in royal ceremonial until 1399. Its purpose was clearly to rival the oil held in the ‘Sainte Ampoule’ at Rheims, supposedly brought down to earth in the mouth of a dove and used at the inauguration of all kings of France from Clovis in 496 through to its destruction by the French revolutionaries in 1794. Even in terms of its sacral stage properties, the Plantagenet dynasty was beginning to rival the greatest royal actors in Christendom.
To this list of his family’s heavenly protectors, Edward III added the Cappadocian warrior St George, already commemorated as the particular patron of crusaders, now granted his own chapel and cult centre within the precincts of Edward III’s castle at Windsor. England itself had previously been a flagless nation, or at best one that marched under the Plantagenet leopards or the dragon standard of Kings Richard and John, itself perhaps a ‘Draco Normannicus’ (a ‘Norman Dragon’), adopted after 1066 from the dragon banner which Harold’s standard-bearer is shown as holding in the climactic scene of the Bayeux Tapestry, and related to the triumphs of St Michael over the dragon-beasts of Mont-St-Michel or to the dragon tamed by St Romain, semi-mythical patron saint of Rouen, the capital of ducal Normandy. The King’s dragon standard was still being carried into battle by Edward III at Crécy in 1346, albeit by now quartered with the heraldic symbols of Edward III, with leopards and with the French fleur-de-lys. These French, Norman or Plantagenet devices were now replaced by something distinctively royal, martial and chivalric: St George’s banner, the red cross on a white background, first adopted for Edward’s new order of chivalry, the Order of the Garter, in the aftermath of the battle of Crécy. England’s new flag is first recorded as being carried into battle a decade later, by Edward, the Black Prince, during his great victory at Poitiers in 1356. St George was henceforth intended to triumph, in heraldic flagwaving as in legend, over all dragons, Saxon, French or Norman as the case might be. This device, formerly worn by crusaders fighting God’s wars, would lend a new patriotic dynamic to English warfare, no longer viewed as a polite chivalric encounter between cousins in arms but as a stark confrontation between Englishmen and the forces of evil.
If English nationhood and English kingship triumphed in the reigns of the three Edwards, then so too did the English language. There were still those in the thirteenth century who looked to France as the true cradle of civilization. Multilingualism remained a feature of upper-class society into the fourteenth century, as indeed into the twenty-first. English pronunciation of French might be mocked in France, never more effectively than in the thirteenth-century fable The Two Englishmen and the Donkey, in which the inability of a pair of English merchants to distinguish between the words ‘agnel’ (‘lamb’) and ‘anel’ (‘donkey’) leads to one of them being fed donkey-meat rather than lamb. The mistake is only discovered when the men resort to animal noises (‘This isn’t baa-baa, but hee-haw, hee-haw’). As the donkey story illustrates, nonetheless, England was already a land of merchants who had a need to communicate, however inadequate their linguistic means. Moreover, after 1300, the English language itself began to penetrate elite society in a way not encountered since 1066.
In the county courts, as early as the 1250s, Magna Carta and the documents associated with Henry III’s reforms were being recited and occasionally even written in English as well as in Latin and French. Parliament’s business was from the start discussed and from 1331 recorded in French. From the fourteenth century through to the present day, the clerk pronounced the royal assent in French rather than English: ‘Le Roi le veut’ (‘The King wishes it’, with direct and no doubt deliberate echoes of the crusader cry ‘Deus le volt’, ‘God wishes it’). Nonetheless, by royal command from 1362, all pleas in the law courts and, from 1363, the majority of discussions in the Commons had to be conducted in English: one might speculate here on a bilingual Parliament in which, for a time at least, the Commons spoke mostly in English, the Lords mostly in French. Between the two choices, it was clear that English was already beginning to win out. As early as the 1290s, Edward I, himself a French-speaker, had already threatened that a French invasion might wipe not just England but ‘the English language’ from the face of the earth. The Cursor Mundi, a massive poetic description of world history written in English, suggested ‘That we give each country its own language’, explicitly identifying English nationhood with the English language.
By the time of the death of Edward III in 1377, Geoffrey Chaucer was already retained as a royal pensioner, a veteran of Edward III’s wars in France. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales of the 1390s commemorated not just the birth of the new Middle English language, smoothed out from the diversity and barbarity of regional accents into something courtly and polite, but the very saint, Thomas of Canterbury, identified by many as the chief patron of English nationhood. Chaucer’s English, like the vernacular of Anglo-Saxon royal government before 1066, was in many ways an artificial, literary language, far removed from the realities of day-to-day speech. Three of the individual stories that go to make up his Canterbury Tales are set in Italy, two in Flanders and one each in France, Athens or Tartary. Nonetheless, the posterity of Chaucer’s ‘Middle English’ was to prove even more remarkable than that of the now moribund ‘Old English’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ of Beowulf or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. By 1400, English students of Latin, a no less artificial literary language, were being taught their basic grammar directly from the English vernacular rather than via the medium of French.
From the disasters and defeats of the 1060s, and from their Babylonian captivity under the Normans, the English themselves had re-emerged as a nation no longer ashamed of Englishness be it in dress, laws, sainthood, symbols or speech. In the process, they had also acquired an empire. In Ireland, Wales and Scotland, by the death of Edward I, England’s kings boasted an authority that stretched from Galway to Norfolk and from Land’s End as far north as the Firth of Forth. By 1350, at Ramsey Abbey in Cambridgeshire, a map attached to Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, the most popular of fourteenth-century chronicles, itself intended to demonstrate a peculiarly English role in world history, showed Britain as an island on the margins of Europe, now coloured red from north to south, the same colour as the Red Sea and as Jerusalem, itself the very epicentre of the Christian world.
To present the history of England in the century after 1270 as one long upward curve of achievement would be significantly to warp reality. The reigns of the three Edwards witnessed a significant shift in the zeitgeist, but it was for the most part a shift from major to minor, from heroic optimism to pessimistic fatalism. Like ghosts in general, zeitgeists (‘spirits of the age’) tend to have as many people passionately convinced of their existence as there are those who just as passionately deny it. Even so, there seems little doubt that there was a significant shift in both political and cultural norms from around the year 1300.
The two centuries from 1066 had seen violence certainly, but also expansion, discovery and the pursuit of dreams, sometimes on an epic scale. The fall of England to the Normans, the capture of Jerusalem by the First Crusade, the great cathedrals and churches that new wealth now bought, the pushing back of woodland and fen, the increase in the human population, the rediscovery of ancient knowledge and the development of new technologies, all of these suggest an upward curve in human expectation. London’s population is estimated to have increased from 25,000 in 1100 to more than 100,000 by 1300, the population of England as a whole from something like two or three million to five or six million. After 1300, the wheel of fortune turned once more, from fair to increasingly foul. Famine, warfare, endemic disease and ultimately plague brought a significant population decline. God’s vengeance seemed to lie heavy upon the land. The climate itself rebelled against mankind.
Ironically, some of these disasters could trace their origins to the reign of Edward I, generally regarded as one of the greatest of English kings. It was under Edward I that the seeds were sown of English domination over Wales and Scotland. It was under Edward that Parliament was nurtured and that English law reached maturity. It was Edward’s diplomacy and foreign marriages that laid the foundations of England’s later claims in France and in particular those claims to the French throne which were to emerge from the 1330s onwards in the Hundred Years War. As if to emphasize his own greatness, Edward I lived to the age of 68, longer than any other king in the 500 years after the Norman Conquest. Henry I had reached 67. Henry III, despite the great length of his reign, was a mere 65 at the time of his death, Edward III only 64. For the rest, the vast majority (eleven of the eighteen kings between William I and Richard III) died before reaching 50. Yet his very longevity was to ensure that Edward I outlived the triumphs of his early years, to witness the catalogue of failures and setbacks that marred the second part of his reign. All political careers are said to end in failure. The failures of Edward I were to have consequences that overshadowed the lives of many millions of English men and women as yet unborn.
To appreciate this, we need to begin in the sunnier uplands of the 1260s and 70s. Here, Edward had already shown himself gifted with the sort of military and administrative skills necessary for successful kingship, but which his father, Henry III, had so signally lacked. A wild youth (aged only twenty-one, he and his cronies had smashed all of the windows of the bishop of Winchester’s palace at Southwark, in one of the earliest recorded examples of upper-class, Bullingdon Club-like love of the sound of broken glass), the future King Edward I had proved himself both brave and ruthlessly competent. His escape from imprisonment at Hereford in 1265, having pretended to test a number of horses whilst out riding and then making off on the swiftest of them, and his subsequent defeat of Simon de Montfort, his former military tutor, at Evesham, were merely the springboards from which Edward launched himself upon crusade in the East. He thereby fulfilled crusading vows that had been left unfulfilled by every previous Plantagenet king save for his now legendary ancestor, Richard I.
Not only did Edward acquire kudos merely by embarking on crusade, but his expedition, although marked by no dramatic improvement in the fortunes of the Latin East, garnered legends of its own. Within a century, it was being claimed that Edward’s wife, Eleanor of Castile, had sucked the venom from his wounds when a Moslem assassin stabbed him with a poisoned dagger. Other versions attributed his salvation to one of his household knights, or to a magic stone given by the Master of the Temple, perhaps ground up and used as a purgative. Edward’s career as a successful crusader, the Olympic gold, or Oxbridge blue, of medieval warrior prestige, was in no small part responsible for his later fearsome reputation as king. In one person he seemed to combine the heroism of Richard the Lionheart with the administrative efficiency of Henry II.
Three problems above all had dogged the fortunes of Edward’s father: the lack of financial resources by which the crown could pursue its ambitions beyond the frontiers of England; the longstanding rivalries with England’s neighbours, above all the kings of France, focussed upon the continuing demand that the former Plantagenet lands be restored to English rule; and the difficulty of controlling an English political elite unprepared to meet the costs of the King’s own household or military ambitions. Edward was not slow to master all three problems, employing the lessons that he had learned from his uncle, Simon de Montfort, the kudos that he had secured from his victory over Montfort at Evesham, and his newly won status as a veteran of the crusades to advertise a kingly panache very different from the feckless piety of his father. Success in battle would henceforth be matched to reform of government. Reform in turn would be rewarded with financial subsidies from the English elite sufficient to pay for yet further success in war.
Before the 1270s, England’s kings had relied for their income upon the profits of their own royal estates, worth perhaps £10,000 a year, combined with the profits of royal lordship, justice and the law courts, in a good year worth considerably more. This in itself was just about sufficient to pay for the needs of the royal court and household and for the machinery of royal government, the sheriffs and justices who themselves reaped rich profits from their offices. For anything more ambitious, for campaigns beyond the frontiers of the realm, even for successful warfare against the Welsh or the Scots, the King required subsidies from his subjects. Since no such subsidies were awarded to Henry III after the 1230s, Henry’s administration had lurched from one financial crisis to another, with never enough funds to pay for its schemes. Edward I determined from the outset to avoid these difficulties.
He did so by imposing a tax on wool exports, the principal overseas trade of England and the source, perhaps for several centuries before this, of much of England’s wealth. The tax itself would be paid by the merchants responsible for exporting wool, but they in turn would recoup their losses by reducing the prices they paid to wool growers in England and by increasing the prices they charged to wool buyers overseas. In turn, these new customs duties, of 6s 8d per sack of exported wool, amounting to perhaps £10,000 a year, were linked to the offer of good government for the realm, first broadcast via a county by county investigation of the King’s resources and of abuses of royal authority, instituted almost from the moment of the King’s return to England in 1274 and known as the ‘Hundred Rolls’ enquiry.
In its way as ambitious as the Domesday survey of the 1080s, the ‘Hundred Rolls’ enquiry set the pattern for two subsequent investigations of resources and encroachments upon the King’s rights: an inquest known as Kirby’s Quest, headed by John de Kirkby commissioned in the 1280s to investigate debts to the crown and the King’s local income, and a wholescale impeachment of royal justices and investigation of their crimes that followed the King’s return to England from Gascony in 1289. In each instance, the offer of reform was linked to the crown’s financial needs, with the King demonstrating his willingness to sacrifice his own ministers in order both to buy public support and to advertise his credentials as a virtuous prince. This had been very much the policy of Louis IX, who himself had exercised a significant influence over the methods of Simon de Montfort, King Edward’s own tutor turned bitterest foe.
The virtue of King Edward was itself chiefly broadcast via Parliament, now summoned on a near annual basis as a forum for the display of royal authority, through to the 1290s largely supine in its approach to royalty, yet broad enough as a representative assembly of national opinion to negotiate grants of taxation to the crown. The first such tax, negotiated in 1275, yielded upwards of £80,000, more than enough to repay the King’s outstanding debts. Parliament both granted subsidy and heard petitions from the King’s subjects, once again acting as a safety valve to the grievances of those previously denied access to the King’s grace.
In turn, petitioning and parliamentary debate went hand in hand with the issue of new laws. Between the First Statute of Westminster in 1275 and the first real crisis to engulf his regime, after 1290, Edward’s administration enacted an impressive array of legislation, much of it directly modelled on or indeed simply copied from the reformist legislation of the 1250s and 60s. It was intended to clarify relations between lords and tenants, to prevent the wholescale alienation of property to the Church, to ensure that lords were not deprived of the services that land had formerly rendered, and to regulate such processes as the pursuit of debt or the indictment of crime.
In 1290, this very public advertisement of the King as lawmaker and father of his people was crowned by Edward’s expulsion of the Jewish community from England. Already bled dry after decades of punitive royal taxation, the Jews were in effect used as yet another sacrificial victim to broadcast a carefully controlled image of the King as virtuous Christian prince. Their property and houses supplied Edward with a timely pool of patronage from which to reward his friends and followers. The Jews themselves were shipped across the Channel to France, not officially to return to England until the time of Oliver Cromwell, after 1656. Like various rather more notorious rulers of the twentieth century, Edward was in effect employing the persecution of a minority as a means to advertise his leadership and benevolence to a grateful majority.
Ironically, none of this would have been possible without the assistance of precisely those ‘aliens’ – Frenchmen and foreign merchants – who had previously served as the chief targets of English xenophobia. With his new customs duties, Edward widened the circle of virtue by farming receipts from the wool tax to Italian merchants, most notably the Riccardi family of Lucca, the centre of the Italian silk trade, borrowing large sums of money in the short term, repayable from future customs revenues. The capital from the Mediterranean silk trade was thus invested in English armies financed on the security of future profits from wool. With the resources now at his disposal, and with the immediate situation in France governed by the peace that had been put in place since 1259, Edward could turn his attentions first and foremost to the Welsh, using attacks upon yet another minority group to advertise his glory and invincibility.
Ever since the 1050s, when Harold Godwinson had earned his military reputation as a slayer of Welshmen, the English had sought to expand their authority westwards across the Wye and the Dee into territories ruled by Welsh-speaking princes. The Normans after 1066 had continued this process, seizing most of southern Wales as far west as Pembroke and extending the frontiers of the county of Cheshire in the north. Henry II’s conquest of Ireland in the 1170s had further embedded this English ‘Drang nach westen’ (‘push to the west’), ensuring English control over one side of that Welsh–Irish axis around which had been focussed a great deal of the native Welsh economy and with it the tribute, in silver and cattle, paid to the native Welsh princes.
As early as the 1180s, Henry II was being advised how to defeat the native Welsh by the Anglo-Norman-Welshman, Gerald of Wales, author of two great books on Welsh affairs. Gerald advised that in their mountain fastnesses, above all in Snowdonia, the Welsh were impregnable. As with the Vietnamese of the 1960s or the Afghans of the early twenty-first century, no amount of head-on confrontation would bring the Welsh to decisive engagement. Threatened by the shock and awe of an English expeditionary force, they would merely retreat to the hills, avoid pitched battle, emerging to raid and pillage once more when the threat had passed. What was needed, Gerald suggested, was a chain of castles and centres of Englishry running along the Welsh coastline, to contain Welsh access to their Irish sea-borne trade and to confine the rebellious Welsh to the uplands from which few resources for future rebellion could be obtained. The problem here was that the means for such an undertaking were lacking to Henry II’s successors. Both King John, after 1215, and Henry III, in the 1250s and 60s, had been forced to stand mutely by as the Welsh capitalized upon English political weakness to extend their authority, raiding the Welsh Marches and burning castles. The princes of Gwynedd – Llywelyn ap Iorweth (d.1240) and his grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd (d.1282) – without any settled capital ‘city’ but ruling from the enclave of Garth Celyn overlooking the Menai straights, between Bangor and Conway, had exploited English political turmoil to obtain recognition of their special status as rulers over the native Welsh, entitled to the homage of the other Welsh princes and to a degree of legal autonomy from England and its kings.
It was this situation which Edward I now sought to reverse. In the summer of 1277, an English army, more than 15,000 strong, advanced from Chester along the north Welsh coast. Ships transported further troops to Anglesey to harvest the grain and hence deprive Llywelyn ap Gruffydd of the means with which to wage further war. The outcome was a negotiated settlement in which Llywelyn abandoned various gains he had made in the 1260s and was forced to promise a war indemnity of £50,000, a figure which in itself suggests a booming Welsh economy, based upon Irish sea-born trade. At this rate, Edward’s wars could be made almost to pay for themselves.
Open hostilities with the Welsh erupted again in 1282, when Llywelyn’s disgruntled younger brother, Dafydd, believing himself to have been insufficiently rewarded for his part in Edward’s success of 1277, broke with the English and on Palm Sunday attacked Hawarden Castle in Flintshire (future residence of a very different sort of English statesman and a far more assiduous observer of the Sabbath, W.E. Gladstone). Once again, a concerted land and sea force, including levies from Edward’s dominions in Gascony, and the construction of a great pontoon bridge between Anglesey and the mainland, forced the Welsh into surrender. This time, however, Llywelyn himself was lured into an ambush at Irfon Bridge, near Builth Wells, and killed. Dafydd’s resistance continued for a further six months until he too was betrayed, handed over to the English and, at Shrewsbury in September 1283, hanged, disembowelled for his breach of the Sabbath at Hawarden and his body then cut into quarters to mark his treason. The heads of both Llywelyn and Dafydd were exhibited on spikes outside the Tower of London. Llywelyn and Dafydd’s children were imprisoned and, in the case of the daughters, forced into English nunneries where the last of them died half a century later.
In less than a year, the last effectively independent Welsh princes had been removed from the scene. Only fifteen years separated the official ‘English’ recognition of Wales as an independent principality in 1267 and the brutal suppression of that independence in 1282. So feeble was the image of these Welsh princes conveyed to posterity that, in the 1890s, when it was proposed to raise a monument to Llywelyn at Irfon Bridge, so little money was subscribed in Wales that a neighbouring English squire, an Eton-educated disciple of Sigmund Freud, was obliged to step in to supply the funds.
The extinction of Llywelyn’s family did not in itself bring an end to Welsh resistance. Despite (or rather, precisely because of) the building of that chain of castles which Gerald of Wales had proposed, stretching from Harlech to Conway and from Caernarvon to Beaumaris in Anglesey, despite the wholesale importation of English settlers to a series of new towns, at Flint, Rhuddlan and elsewhere, and despite the division of Wales itself, including Snowdonia, into a series of administrative units modelled on the English shires where major felonies were now to be tried according to English rather than native Welsh law, the Welsh themselves rose in rebellion in 1287 and even more seriously in 1294. This second uprising required the efforts of nearly 30,000 men and subsidies of more than £50,000 to suppress.
Nevertheless, by 1295, Wales was effectively conquered. The Welsh princely regalia, Llywelyn’s treasures, were fashioned into plate off which the English king might dine. Edward I had achieved something which no predecessor on the throne of England could claim: the complete conquest of a neighbouring principality and the obliteration of its future independence. Not even Ireland, only partially conquered or settled after 1172, had suffered such a fate. Wales thus became the first and greatest of Edward I’s military conquests, and England’s first imperial colony. These imperial connotations were deliberately emphasized at Caernarvon, where the walls of Edward’s new castle were banded in layers of light and dark masonry, in imitation of the land walls of the Roman imperial city of Constantinople and in conscious reflection of the Welsh legend that the father of Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome and the founder of Constantinople, had been buried at Caernarvon, his tomb supposedly discovered there earlier in the thirteenth century.
Further south, across the Bristol Channel, as early as 1278, Edward had presided over the reburial, at Glastonbury Abbey, of the supposed bodies of two other figures prominent in Welsh legend: King Arthur and his wife, Guinevere. The intention here was simple: to demonstrate to the Welsh, once and for all, that Arthur was dead and buried, not waiting to rise again as champion of an independent Wales. It was at Caernarvon, in April 1284, once again almost certainly a carefully stage-managed event, that Edward’s queen, Eleanor of Castile, gave birth to a son destined to be the future King of England, Edward II. If the intention here was that the new Edward emulate the imperial glories of Constantine, then these arrangements were entirely in vain, the absurdity of Edward I’s expectations presaged as early as 1294 when the unfinished fortress at Caernarvon was the only one of Edward I’s new castles to be captured in the Welsh rebellion. Meanwhile, Edward’s English empire was itself constructed on foundations that were very far from firm. Italian merchants had financed Edward’s Welsh wars and his Welsh castles were built not by an English architect but according to the instructions of Master James of St-George, from the Franco-Swiss-Italian frontier duchy of Savoy.
By the mid-1290s, other shadows had begun to fall across Edward’s imperial horizons. If his ultimate goal was the consolidation of the British Isles under English imperial authority, then he needed to look not just westwards to Ireland and Wales but northwards to the kingdom of the Scots. Here, since the late eleventh century, a dynasty of kings, as much Anglo-Norman as Scoto-Gaelic, had been established in the lowland regions with their own network of earls and barons, in many cases themselves of Anglo-Norman descent, stretching out into the still essentially native-ruled highlands and islands. The last of this Scots royal line, King Alexander III, died after a fall from his horse in March 1286 while attempting a late-night crossing of the Firth of Forth, having ignored the advice of those with whom he had feasted in Edinburgh Castle, in order to visit his young new queen. As with many a highland motoring accident, neither lust nor strong drink was ever publicly alleged as a factor contributing to this tragedy. Alexander’s son, born to a first marriage to a daughter of King Henry III of England, had died only two years before, in his early twenties. No doubt, Alexander’s anxiety to visit his new wife had something to do with his desire to replenish the royal quiver.
His untimely death ensured that his only surviving heir was a granddaughter, Margaret, known as the ‘Maid of Norway’, herself born in 1283 to a marriage between Alexander’s daughter and King Eric II of Norway. After 1286, Margaret was in theory Queen of Scotland. In practice, the Scots themselves chose a committee of guardians, who eventually, after negotiations between Scots, English and Norwegian ambassadors, agreed that Margaret should be dispatched from Norway to Scotland, leaving open the possibility that she might in due course marry Edward, the eldest son of King Edward I of England and thereby bring about a union in which the future Edward II would become de facto ruler of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland. In the event, Margaret died in October 1290, in the Orkney Islands (not sold by Norway to the Scots crown until the 1470s), without ever having set foot on the Scottish mainland. Edward I’s plans for an easy imperial succession were brought to nothing. The Scots themselves were left with neither king nor queen. The union of the Scots and English thrones was postponed by three hundred years.
It was into this situation that Edward I now stepped, claiming to act as arbiter in the ‘Great Cause’, to nominate a successor to the Scots crown. Two candidates emerged, both of them members of Normanno-Scots families with landed interests both in Scotland and in England: Robert de Bruce, lord of Annandale in the central lowlands, and John de Balliol, lord of Galloway. The Bruces were of Norman descent, from Brix near Cherbourg. Robert himself held extensive lands in Essex and had fought in Edward’s army during the English conquest of Wales. The Balliols were ultimately from Picardy, from Bailleul, near Abbeville. Established in northern England under the early Norman kings, like other northern French families, they had risen to greater prominence during the rule of King Stephen, himself Count of Boulogne. One of John de Balliol’s ancestors had been captured alongside King Stephen at the Battle of Lincoln in 1141. Another had fought for Henry II, playing a leading role in the campaign which culminated, in 1174, with the capture of the Scots King, William I, near Alnwick.
Neither the Balliols nor the Bruces, therefore, were exactly unfamiliar to the English court. From the Great Cause, in 1292, Edward chose the claims of John de Balliol over those of Robert de Bruce of Annandale. It was a fateful choice. Balliol, favoured precisely because of his pliancy (he had already named his eldest son and heir Edward, which supplies a rather heavy-handed clue as to his loyalties), proved incapable of bringing order to Scotland. Bruce’s son, the rather more famous Robert Bruce, rebelled, almost certainly with his father’s sanction. A council of a dozen Scots barons now claimed to have wrested authority from Balliol. Early in 1296, this council negotiated a treaty with the King of France, the origins of the so-called ‘Auld Alliance’, by which the Scots and the French sought mutual support against their common enemy, the King of England.
Techniques which Edward had employed against the Welsh, by using English law and his status as overlord to undermine Welsh independence, had been applied with equal success by the French to Edward’s own subjects in Gascony who were encouraged by the French King, Philip IV, to present their cases for arbitration not before Parliament in England but before the French Parlement in Paris. War with France broke out in 1294. Edward’s response was rapid and apparently overwhelming. In a campaign lasting barely twenty-one weeks, he brought the Scots to heel, seizing the border fortress of Berwick and defeating the Scots army at Dunbar. Having suppressed the Welsh rebellion of 1294, he negotiated a series of alliances in Germany and the Low Countries to launch a two-pronged attack on the French timed for 1297. Here, however, his luck ran out.
The costs of war in Wales, Scotland and France were too high for royal finance to bear. Additional charges of 40s per sack of wool exported from England merely brought outcry against this ‘maltote’ or ‘bad tax’, not least from English landowners and wool growers who feared that the price that they received for their produce would be lowered so that wool merchants could recoup the tax. Edward’s allies in the Rhineland, like the earlier allies recruited by King John of England for his campaign of 1214, demanded extortionate subsidies, in excess of £250,000. Meanwhile, the clergy of England, spurred on by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and backed by papal letters intended to starve both the English and the French war machines of finance, resisted attempts to impose subsidies on the Church. The Riccardi bankers upon whom Edward had relied for credit were bankrupted, probably already overstretched by the costs of the Welsh campaign and owed nearly £400,000 by the crown, in theory repayable from future proceeds of the customs, in practice just as useless a security as the junk bonds of modern Wall Street.
This was in effect the first and in some ways still the most serious sovereign debt crisis in the history of England. Into this perfect storm of financial catastrophe, strode two further heralds of apocalypse. The earls of Gloucester and Hereford, long resentful of the King’s extension of authority over the Welsh Marches, refused to serve in France unless with the King in person. In other words, they would sail with the King to Flanders but they would not take up independent command of the King’s army in Gascony. By the time that this crisis was resolved and Edward was ready to sail for Flanders, his allies had already been defeated by the French. The only real hostilities left for Edward to witness took place amongst his own sailors, between the men of the Cinque Ports of Kent and Sussex and the fishermen of Yarmouth. Worse still, the King left England at the precise moment that events in Scotland reached climax.
In May 1297, a freeholder from Ayrshire, William Wallace, apparently already outlawed as a robber and brigand, murdered the newly imposed English sheriff of Lanark. Perhaps with the tacit approval of the bishop of Glasgow, perhaps as an independent agent claiming to act on behalf of King John de Balliol, Wallace now launched himself on a campaign of terror. He attempted the assassination of the English justiciar, William Ormsby. At Stirling Bridge, in September 1297, he lured an incompetently led English cavalry into slaughter by his own Scots spearmen. The army’s commander was so determined to observe the chivalric conventions that he effectively required the battle to be started twice, recalling more than 5,000 troops who had already crossed over to the Scots side of the bridge, in order that he might publicly confer knighthood on various of those about to fight. Edward I’s treasurer of Scotland, Hugh of Cressingham, was killed in the ensuing bloodbath. His body was flayed and his skin reputedly used to make a sword belt for Wallace’s waist.
A great deal of myth-making obscures our image of the true William Wallace. Much of what is recorded of him depends upon the testimony of a fifteenth-century Scots bard, ‘Blind Harry’, whose writings are as wildly romantic as his name and who seems to have made up most of what he wrote. Blind Harry’s lead here has been followed by any number of later bards, romantics and Hollywood film producers. What is clear is that Wallace’s rebellion could not have come at a worse time for Edward and the English. Stirling Bridge was followed by a wholescale invasion of Scotland by Edward I, for the first time making use of Welsh archers and infantry as a major contingent in his army, culminating in the defeat of Wallace’s spearmen at Falkirk in July 1298. In English eyes, one set of defeated barbarians was to be used to bring order to another.
Wallace melted away in the confusion and was not captured for a further seven years. Tried in Westminster Hall, he was eventually hung, disembowelled and quartered, like Dafydd of Wales before him, and his head displayed on London Bridge.
Meanwhile, the Scots, emboldened by Wallace’s victory at Stirling, and not subsequently cowed even by expeditions which Edward I launched against them in 1300, 1301 and 1303, found both a cause and a leader, the younger Robert Bruce. Robert Bruce had toyed with rebellion at least twice before, on each occasion making his peace with King Edward. In February 1306, however, during a meeting with John Comyn, another major player on the Scots political scene, at the church of the Greyfriars in Dumfries, Bruce murdered Comyn before the high altar. A month later, on the feast of the Annunciation, 25 March, at Scone near Perth, Bruce was crowned as King Robert I of Scotland by the patriot bishop Robert Wishart of Glasgow.
The Stone of Scone, an oblong block of red sandstone on which Scottish kings were traditionally inaugurated, had been removed to Westminster Abbey in 1296, after the opening campaign of the Anglo-Scots war, and incorporated into a wooden chair used at the coronation of subsequent kings of England. It was not officially restored to Scotland until 1996, 700 years after its removal, and even now is due to be returned to Westminster whenever required for a British coronation.
Meanwhile, and although few at the time might have guessed it, the coronation of Robert I of Scotland, the first ever conducted without the Stone, ensured a renewal of Scots independence and a further three hundred years of Scots kingship. Far from the English absorbing the Scots, in 1603 the Scots King, James VI, was crowned in England as King James I. Where the Welsh princes had fallen before the might of Edward’s armies, fading into an impotent nostalgia for a vanished Welsh past, Scotland recovered both its independence and its own line of kings.
The reasons for this disparity in the fates of Scotland and Wales were both geographic and economic. Scotland was not only wealthier than native Wales but a far more extensive landmass. The network of castles which Edward constructed around the Welsh coast, to contain the princes of Snowdonia, was unfeasible in the case of Scotland. Even though in 1296 Edward had pursued his enemies as far north as Aberdeen, and in 1303 English troops were garrisoned in Inverness, there were always points further north or west to which the Scots could retire, from where they could sally forth once the threat had passed. Scotland was ideal bandit territory, and Wallace’s victory at Stirling Bridge was a classic example of the way in which a poorly equipped, pastoral people could nonetheless inflict total defeat upon an army accustomed to more chivalric usages.
Within only a few years of Stirling Bridge, at Courtrai in 1302 where the Flemish town militias of Bruges, Ghent and Ypres inflicted a crushing defeat upon a mounted French army, and at Morgarten in 1315, when a small army of Swiss infantry inflicted total defeat upon the cavalry of Duke Leopold of Austria, the powerlessness of cavalry in the face of spearmen and archers, and the essential futility of much that passed for chivalric valour, were more than amply demonstrated. Scotland, Flanders and Switzerland were each born from the actions of small ‘primitive’ armies faced with what should have been overwhelmingly more ‘sophisticated’ opponents. Brawn triumphed over boasted birth and courtesy just as surely as the peasants of Indochina or the tribesmen of Afghanistan have triumphed over the helicopter or the smart bombs of our own ever more sophisticated and murderous age.
It is ironic that those things which Edward I himself might have supposed to be the crowning achievements of his reign – the expulsion of the Jews, the recognition of Edward’s client John Balliol as King of Scots and the crushing of Welsh independence came at almost precisely the same moment that the wheel of fortune elsewhere in Christendom began to revolve from hubris towards nemesis. On 18 May 1291 the great sea port of Acre, last bastion of the crusader states, fell to a siege by an Egyptian army. From here onwards, Christendom itself was placed on the defensive, with Saracens ruling in Jerusalem, a Mongol hoard threatening the outposts of Christian Russia and, within a century, Turkish armies on the loose in Serbia, threatening to lay siege to Prague.
Less than a year after the fall of Acre, in April 1292, the death of Pope Nicholas IV ushered in a period of crisis for the western Church, from which emerged an Italian pope, Boniface VIII, so at odds with the kings of the West that in 1303, at much the same time that Edward I was garrisoning Inverness, a French army surprised the Pope at Anagni, just south of Rome, and beat him so badly that within a month he was dead of injury and shame. The outcome was the election of a French pope, Clement V, and the removal of the papacy from Rome to Avignon in southern France. For seventy years or more the Avignon popes were more concerned with taxation and meeting the costs of their own bureaucracy than ever they were with the right order of Christendom. Finally, to add to this catalogue of man-made disasters, nature itself began to rebel.
The European peasant economy depended upon agricultural surpluses to supply a population that had more than doubled over the previous century and a half. A series of hot, wet summers now left crops rotting in the fields. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in Iceland, sun spots, some other great yet mysterious terrestrial or solar cataclysm, or simply the slow revolution of the climate from a ‘medieval warm period’ to a ‘little ice age’, have all been proposed as ecological explanations for the impending catastrophe. Radiocarbon data suggests a sudden increase in the size and spread of the Alpine glaciers at Aletsch after 1230, at Grindelwald from 1280. Pastures where trees had grown and the local inhabitants grazed their cattle, were now, for the first time since the eighth century, covered in ice. None of the explanations for these phenomena is entirely convincing, though, like modern dogmas on climate change, each tends to attract its own small band of fanatics. Although after 1066 vines were cultivated as far north as Gloucester or Norwich, implying a climate in the twelfth century warmer than we might expect, winters were sufficiently cold in London in the 1150s for William fitz Stephen to describe skating on the Essex marshes, and the Thames is reported regularly to have frozen throughout the Middle Ages.
Whatever the underlying climatic changes, by 1300 the demographic expansion that had characterized the period since 1066 had reached what seems to have marked a natural ceiling. The food supply was the key factor here. The yield of cereal crops such as wheat or barley remained pathetically low, promising even on prime agricultural land and in years of relative abundance no more than ten times the weight of seed-corn sown, and in years of famine less than a doubling of the seed. As a modern comparison, and even before the introduction of techniques of seed selection and fertilization, nineteenth-century farmers expected a yield nearer to thirty times the quantity of seed sown. The clearance and cultivation of new acreage, although conducted on a massive scale throughout the thirteenth century, tended to bring land under the plough that was at best marginal, such as the Cotswold uplands or the Norfolk Breckland, and often of little use for anything save the poorest of sheep or livestock farming.
By 1300 there were perhaps ten million acres of land laid to arable in England, a figure not achieved again before the early nineteenth century. Cattle murrain and sheep disease, which accompanied the poor harvests after 1290, reduced the value of marginal land yet further. The expanding human population was vulnerable even to relatively brief periods of dearth since, rather as in nineteenth-century Ireland, an over-abundant population was dependent upon what, even in good years, was a barely sufficient supply of food. Hoarding or long-term food storage, as in the modern Third World, was a luxury that only the wealthier could afford. For the peasantry, the inability to store agricultural produce ensured not only that people starved as a result of poor harvests, but that, when the harvest produced too much rather than too little, goods had to be sent to market at prices unprofitably low. Add to this the ravaging of much of the north of England and lowland Scotland as a result of the Anglo-Scots war after the 1290s, and rural England was already poised on the cusp of disaster even by the final years of the reign of Edward I.
With famine and disease came despair and ultimately violence. There had been only a light death toll amongst the leaders of baronial rebellion throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Richard Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, had been killed in the midst of his rebellion in 1234, but in Ireland and as a result of treachery rather than publicly stage-managed brutality. The slaying and subsequent mutilation of Simon de Montfort at Evesham in 1265 ushered in a new period of unease in dealings between rebels and kings. Above all, perhaps, Montfort’s brutal end demonstrated that, short of killing a king, there was no way to bind a king to his promises, even if he were as weak and changeable as Henry III. In the meantime, the families of those slain at Evesham continued to dream of vengeance. In 1271, Henry of Almain, Edward I’s cousin and the eldest son and heir of Richard, Earl of Cornwall, King of Germany, stopped at Viterbo in Italy on his way to join Edward I’s crusade. There, hearing Mass at the cathedral’s high altar, he was set upon by two of Simon de Montfort’s sons and brutally murdered in revenge for the killing of their father at Evesham. The deed was so notorious that it earned a place in the seventh circle of Dante’s Inferno. Blood still called to blood, and the royal family found itself now part of a revenge tragedy.
This was a violent age, even though ‘popular’ historians are inclined to slaver rather too much over the details and to forget that judicial violence remained a feature of English society for several thousand years. The last woman to be publicly burned in England for petty treason (in this instance for counterfeiting) was executed in 1789. Women were still being publicly hanged as late as 1868, and there was a working gallows at Wandsworth Prison until 1994, tested every six months and still displayed as a museum piece. The death penalty was mandated in the Middle Ages with a frequency that we today might regard as barbaric, even though juries showed a marked reluctance to condemn to the gallows anyone not convicted of homicide. Until increased by a statute of Edward I to a minimum of one shilling, the theft of goods worth no more than four pence was deemed a capital offence, and children as young as fourteen were considered old enough for the rope. In certain localities, local punishments still operated. Thieves in the Scilly Islands were left on a rock to be swept away by the tide. At Dover, they were thrown from the cliffs.
Elsewhere, the general rule was that felons should be hung, though, as early as 1076, the public beheading of Earl Waltheof had suggested that noblemen might expect distinction, in death as in life. The lord’s private gallows was as significant a symbol of his lordship as the deer park or the seigneurial mill or dovecote. Hanging itself could prove a messy affair. The gallows might collapse, the rope break or the prisoner make a run for sanctuary. At a time of only poor understanding of the distinction between death and life, the person hanged might be cut down too early, or even recover from the hanging. Like other ‘miraculous’ escapes either from danger or from death, this occurs as a regular theme in miracle stories of the saints. In 1335, the vicar of Cowley in Oxfordshire was charged with burying alive a thief, hanged nearby but not yet dead. In an age without doctors to certify death, the vicar’s offence was perhaps not manslaughter but lack of due professional diligence.
Into the 1290s, the death penalty in itself had been deemed sufficient punishment for all save a handful of crimes. The very worst of traitors might be humiliated as well as hung, dragged by horses through the public streets on a hurdle or an animal skin, as was the fate of William de Marisco, the Lundy pirate, who in the 1230s had plotted the death of King Henry III, or Peter of Wakefield, a Yorkshire prophet who preached that King John was about to be toppled from his throne and who was drawn and then hung in 1213 when his prophecy failed to come true, his body torn apart between the horses before ever it reached the gallows. But such cases were extraordinary. Only from the 1290s, as Edward I began to grow impatient with the speed of progress in Wales and Scotland, was the full array of judicial violence brought to bear upon his enemies. Thomas de Turberville, convicted in 1295 of treasonable conspiracy with the French, the Scots and the Welsh, was dragged on an ox-hide from Westminster to Cheapside and hung at Smithfield, with six tormentors dressed as devils to attend his final moments. His body was left to rot on the gallows ‘so long as anything of him should remain’.
The punishments meted out by Edward to the leaders of Welsh and Scottish resistance, above all perhaps the deliberate dismemberment of Dafydd of Wales, of the Lord Rhys (leader of the 1287 Welsh rising) and of William Wallace, signalled a new brutality in English dealings with reluctant colonials. None of these ‘traitors’ was of Anglo-French noble birth, even though Dafydd and the Lord Rhys might claim that the blood of King Arthur flowed in their veins. In 1306, however, and in response to Robert Bruce’s final defection, Edward for the first time turned his anger not just against noble prisoners but against women, ordering the execution of John, Earl of Atholl (the first earl to have been executed, rather than killed in battle, since the beheading of Waltheof in 1076) and the imprisonment of Isobel, Countess of Buchan and of Mary, Robert Bruce’s sister, deliberately displayed in cages of wood and iron in the castles of Berwick and Roxburgh. Judicial violence had jumped the species barrier, from foreign enemies to the Anglo-Norman aristocracy. From this to the execution of English earls, the deposition and murder of kings and the killing fields of the civil wars of the fifteenth-century was only a short chronological step.
The young heir to the throne whose youthful escapades had led to broken glass at Southwark had grown into an elderly king filled with bitterness and cold hatred. We can almost hear King Edward’s foul temper seeping out of a letter to the Earl of Dunbar written in 1304, accusing the earl of excessive caution. The King’s original choice of metaphor (‘Whilst the dog shits, the wolf runs off’) has been scratched out and something superficially more polite but no less sarcastic written in its place (‘Once the war was over, Audigier drew his sword’, Audigier being the hero of a particularly scatological parody of French chivalry). We can sense the mood at court from an account book of 1297, recording the cost of repairing a coronet belonging to the King’s daughter Elizabeth, hurled by Edward into the fire. By the same token, royal kindness (the shilling paid by Edward to a poor Welshman who showed him to his lodgings, his clearly genuine expressions of care for his wife and children), appetite (Edward’s box of stem ginger) and sickness (the cordial of amber, jacinth, musk, pearls, gold and silver, or the sugar rosettes made with pearls and coral, fed to him in his final months), emerge from the records with a vividness that makes our knowledge of modern royalty seem paltry by comparison.
The king’s personality remained a fundamental element, for good or bad, in all late medieval English government. Edward I died in 1307, wracked with dysentery, on his way to what was already proving yet another doomed attempt to impose English authority upon the Scots. Edward was a harsh man. His anger is said, as late as 1304, to have killed the Archbishop of York stone dead.
Unlike his bitterness, which he bequeathed to his son and heir, Edward II, the old King’s heroism and competence were not transmitted via the royal DNA. Edward II, although raised for glory, born in imperial Caernarvon, proposed as husband for the Queen of Scots, and crowned as Prince of Wales in 1301 as a symbol of his father’s conquest of the furthest west, proved to be perhaps the medieval King least-well qualified for kingship. A nature-lover, a keen swimmer (as early as 1303, one of his jesters was compensated for an injury sustained ‘through the prince in the water’), a digger of ditches and holes in the road, Edward was a pleasant enough young man, albeit over-passionately attached to his friends.
It is nonetheless symptomatic that his first proper taste of government came in 1297, aged only thirteen, when he was appointed head of the regency council whilst his father campaigned in Flanders. The result was turmoil, the transformation of Parliament from a supine display of royal authority into a forum for anti-royal polemic, and the forced issue of a series of decrees, including a reissue of Magna Carta, as tokens of the regime’s desire to establish harmony with barons and the community of the realm. The 1297 reissue was in effect Magna Carta’s swan song. Although recited at the head of endless collections of statutes thereafter, and granted one final outing in 1300 (reissued under Edward I’s great seal this time, rather than the seal of absence which had been employed in 1297), it was not again officially issued by an English king. Its principles, of binding the King to some sense of right and wrong government, had become deeply ingrained in the English political subconscious. Its precise terms were now superseded by other needs and other quarrels, most notably from the 1290s onwards by disputes over taxation, over the King’s right to take subsidy without the consent of Parliament or his leading subjects, his rights to purveyance (the forced sale of goods to the court, often at well below market values) and prises (his right to seize supplies, most notably wool or foodstuffs for the needs of his armies, repayable at low and often long-delayed terms).
The first major crisis over these issues came in 1310, when Edward II, less than three years into his reign, was forced to agree to the appointment of a committee of twenty-one ‘ordainers’ to draw up detailed proposals for reform, the so-called ‘Ordinances’, eventually issued in 1311. Behind these disputes lay one fundamental issue: the King’s powers of patronage. Edward II had developed a passionate and, so far as his critics were concerned, unhealthy affection for a Gascon courtier named Piers Gaveston, son of a minor captain in the royal armies. Introduced to Edward’s household as early as 1300, Gaveston was already the subject of controversy before the death of the old King. After his coronation, Edward II’s very first act had been to create Gaveston Earl of Cornwall, previously a royal dignity held by successive members of the ruling royal family. Shortly thereafter, Gaveston was married to Edward’s niece, herself a very considerable heiress. When Edward himself was married, in January 1308, to Isabella, daughter of the King of France, his betrothed bride for the past ten years as part of the guarantees of Anglo-French peace, he is said to have sent his marriage bed to Piers as a love token.
Twentieth-century writers had little doubt what was at stake here, and even in less sexually liberated times, the Victorians were happy to portray Edward and Piers mincing and simpering at one another in a fully Oscar Wildean way. Yet both Edward and Piers fathered children, both in and outside wedlock. Edward, on those occasions when he could be persuaded to rise early enough in the morning, was a not inconsiderable commander of men. Piers met his end with grim stoicism bordering on bravery. If their love was illicit (and there is no doubt that by this date, whatever might have been the case a few centuries earlier, sodomy was considered one of the very worst of sins, close cousin to heresy and the denial of God), then it was probably a very long way from the sort of effeminacy against which the bearded Victorians were inclined to pronounce anathema. It may even have been not sexual love but a sworn blood brotherhood.
The problem here was that it was a pact between two very unequal partners. Only in romantic fiction could princes and paupers be friends. Moreover, like a lot of upstarts, Piers was possessed of a particularly wicked tongue. He had nicknames for all of his rivals at court, none of them polite, including ‘Bust-Belly’ for the Earl of Lincoln and ‘The Black Dog of Arden’ for the Earl of Warwick. The King’s cousin, Thomas of Lancaster, himself a grandson of King Henry III, would not have relished being described as ‘Ham actor’ by a man half his age and without a tenth of his noble ancestry. As early as April 1308, there were demands that Piers be exiled and his earldom confiscated. But, although Piers was sent to Ireland as the King’s lieutenant, and although the Ordinances of 1311 included specific clauses against ‘evil’ or ‘deceptive’ counsellors, Edward was not prepared to dispense with his favourite.
Patronage, the choice of who to promote and who to keep out, has always been one of the most jealously guarded of royal powers, least susceptible to limitation. It had been the attempts by the rebels of 1215 to force King John into recognizing the authority of a committee of twenty-five barons in the final clauses of Magna Carta, and by the barons of the 1260s to control appointments to household offices at court, that had proved, from the King’s perspective, amongst the most objectionable clauses in earlier ‘reforming’ legislation. As late as the 1840s, one of the very last constitutional crises for the English monarchy turned on just this issue of appointment to household offices at the court of the young Queen Victoria, and it could be argued that the most recent such crisis, came in the Abdication of 1936, itself provoked by outcry against a particularly feckless King and his choice of royal favourite. A direct line can be traced between the sharp-tongued and all-too heterosexual Wallace Simpson and the sexually ambiguous though no less sharp-tongued Piers Gaveston.
If a king could not choose his own friends and bedfellows from his own court, then he risked becoming a mere cypher of his enemies. Just as Edward II was determined that Piers Gaveston remain, so his enemies were determined that Piers must go, by violent means if necessary. With the approval of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the earls of Pembroke and Surrey were appointed early in 1312 to pursue and arrest Piers. In May, at Scarborough, Piers surrendered to his pursuers who took him south. At Deddington in Oxfordshire, the party was ambushed by the Earl of Warwick. Piers was carried off to Warwick itself and there executed, on Blacklow Hill, with the approval of the earls of Lancaster, Hereford and Arundel. The effect was to create an undying enmity between the King and his critics, in particular between Edward and his cousin, Thomas of Lancaster.
Thomas was himself the beneficiary of one of the great achievements of royal government in the 1260s and 70s. To supply a portion for his younger brother, Thomas of Lancaster’s father, Edward I had ensured the transfer not only of the estates in Lancashire and the north once held by King Stephen, but the honour and earldom of Leicester confiscated from the heirs of Simon de Montfort, and the earldom of Derby whose holder, Robert Ferrers, a rebel of the 1260s, was in effect cheated of his inheritance, confronted with impossible terms for the payment of a ransom. The result was an assembly of lands greater than any other honour in England, with estates in most of the English counties and an income with which to recruit a substantial body of followers. From the death of Piers Gaveston until the deposition of King Richard II in 1399, Thomas of Lancaster and his successors as earls and dukes of Lancaster were inevitably to play a significant role in English history.
In the immediate aftermath of Gaveston’s execution, the infighting at court was obscured by events in Scotland. Ever since the coronation of Robert Bruce in 1306, English armies had struggled to impose terms on the Scots. Early in 1314, news arrived at the English court of the fall of both Roxburgh and Edinburgh castles. Unless relieved by midsummer, the English constable of Stirling was also pledged to surrender to the Scots. To forestall this, Edward advanced into Scotland with the greatest English army mustered since his accession, albeit an army from which the earls of Lancaster and Warwick were signally absent. At Bannockburn, near Stirling, on 24 June, in an even more catastrophic rerun of the Battle of Stirling Bridge fought twenty years before, Edward’s cavalry was cut to pieces by the Scots spearmen. The Earl of Gloucester, accused by the King of cowardice on the day before the battle, was killed leading a courageous but entirely futile charge. The Earl of Hereford was taken prisoner. Edward himself had a horse killed beneath him before being led to safety.
Bannockburn was one of the most crushing defeats in English history. It secured Robert Bruce his throne in Scotland and ushered in a period during which the Scots overran or taxed large parts of northern England, perhaps as much as one-fifth of the English realm. Amidst the recriminations that followed, Edward was forced to reissue the Ordinances and to allow Thomas of Lancaster a new supervisory role at the centre of English government. More catastrophically still, Bannockburn was followed by pillage, poor harvests and extended periods of famine in the English countryside, a great famine from 1315 to 1317 (with rumours of cannibalism), exceptionally poor harvests in 1320 and 1321, and outbreaks of cattle and sheep murrain in 1319 and 1321: perhaps the worst agrarian crisis in English history since the Viking invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries. Teeth recovered from plague pits or other burial sites of the 1340s often reveal patterns of decay and deformity (in technical terms ‘hypoplasia’, tell-tale ridges in the enamel of developing teeth) which suggest severe malnutrition for at least a generation before the arrival of plague in 1348. Scurvy and rickets, caused by deficiency in vitamins C and D, and iron-based anaemia, revealed through a characteristic honeycomb pattern in the bone of the eye-socket, occur in a remarkable proportion of such medieval skeletal remains. In other words, it was the children of the famines of Edward II’s reign who grew up, already malnourished and lacking resistance, to become the adult victims of the great pestilence, twenty years later.
Meanwhile, having been deprived of one favourite, Piers Gaveston, Edward II merely turned to others, and in particular to the two men, Hugh Despenser the elder and Hugh his son, whose rise at court began shortly after Bannockburn. Once again there were probably unfounded rumours here of a sexual infatuation, but above all a pattern of over-lavish patronage and dependence which speaks of a King unable to keep either his emotions or his public actions under proper restraint. Most of the English earls had hated Piers Gaveston. Pretty much everybody hated the Despensers. The irony is that, although fiercely loyal both to Edward II and to his father, the Despensers were descended, as son and grandson, from another Hugh Despenser, baronial justiciar during the 1260s, who had died as a rebel fighting alongside Simon de Montfort at Evesham. From traitors to royal favourites over three generations, the Despensers were held in check only by the power still exercised by Thomas of Lancaster.
In 1321, in an attempted repeat of the coup against Gaveston, Thomas and a group of northern magnates entered into a pact with the Earl of Hereford and other barons from the Welsh Marches, intended to force the Despensers into exile. Within a year, the King was openly at war with his barons. In March 1322, outflanking the army of Thomas of Lancaster and the Earl of Hereford, Edward forced the earls to flee. They had got only so far as Boroughbridge in Yorkshire when they were intercepted by the King’s captain, Andrew Harclay. The Earl of Hereford was killed in the fight that followed. Thomas of Lancaster was taken prisoner, tried before the King at Pontefract and beheaded as a traitor. At least a hundred of his baronial and knightly followers lost either their lands or their lives. Harclay, who had been created Earl of Carlisle in the immediate aftermath of Boroughbridge, was himself executed, drawn and quartered within less than a year, following allegations of defeatism and treason in his dealings with the Scots. Mistrust and the fear of conspiracy were (and remain) contagious commodities.
King Edward, with the Despensers at his side and with the hated Ordinances of 1311 now officially revoked, embarked on a policy of terror and extortion unprecedented since the reign of King John. Like John, Edward became immensely rich, amassing a fortune of at least £60,000 to set against the debts of nearly £200,000 that his father had bequeathed. Also like John, he became the object of dark rumours, not only of sexual deviancy but of sorcery and plots, leading to the arrest of twenty-eight conspirators in Coventry, accused of employing a necromancer, John of Nottingham, to make wax images and cast spells so as to harm Edward, the Despensers and the prior of Coventry, one of the principal local landholders. This, the first public accusation to combine witchcraft with treason, was an ill omen of many such accusations still to come, not least against those in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries accused of ‘maleficium’ against the Tudor and Stuart kings. An attempt by Edward to follow up his success against the rebels of 1322, with a campaign in Scotland, ended in failure with his army forced southwards by starvation and disease. Even so, in Scotland, and from 1323 in France, Edward now had the resources, thanks in large part to the confiscations made after 1322, to wage war on a scale unseen since Bannockburn.
In the longer term, none of this was of any account. Thomas of Lancaster had been a self-seeking and uninspiring politician. Despite his great wealth, his finances, like those of the King, were permanently overstretched so that, like the other earls, he found it difficult to operate outside the court, whilst his pursuit of royal patronage brought even him, the richest baron in England, into competition with Edward II’s low-born favourites. His had been a futile career. He was nonetheless the grandson of a king. His death, by many regarded as a martyrdom, was followed by a popular outcry for his recognition as a saint. In much the same way, the monks of Evesham, after Simon de Montfort’s death in 1265, had encouraged the veneration of Montfort and his relics as a focus of miracles and political opposition to the crown.
The rise of the Despensers and the King’s inability to curb either their greed or their cruelty led to the defection even of Edward’s queen, Isabella of France, who in 1325 ensured that neither herself nor her twelve-year-old son, the future Edward III, returned from France to which they had been sent as mediators with the French King. In France, Isabella entered into a liaison with her fellow exile, Roger Mortimer, a leading baron from the Welsh Marches who now became the Queen’s lover and the principal focus of opposition to the Despenser regime.
In September 1326, in league with Mortimer and the Count of Hainault, whose daughter had hastily been married to the future Edward III, Isabella took ship from Holland to Orwell in Suffolk, leading the first but by no means the last invasion of England to have been mounted from the Low Countries. Like a much more famous invasion, by William and Mary of Orange in 1688, this was one in theory led by a woman, resulting almost immediately in the collapse of a hated royal authority, the flight and the arrest of the King. In November, Edward II and the younger Despenser were captured at Llantrisant, between Neath and Caerphilly, the irony here being that it was the Welsh, conquered by Edward’s father only forty years before, who proved Edward’s staunchest supporters in adversity. For the third time in less than fifty years, a ruling Prince of Wales was taken captive in the principality and handed over to English enemies.
The Despensers, father and son, were executed. The King was held prisoner at Kenilworth whilst desperate measures were taken to arrange a succession. Once again, the problem lay in bridling a sovereign above whom stood no authority save for God. As the rebellions of the thirteenth century had clearly demonstrated, short of killing the King, there was little that an opposition could do to prevent him from revoking whatever promises he might be induced to make under compulsion. As a result, in the first weeks of 1327, in a Parliament carefully managed by Isabella and her supporters, Edward II was declared a tyrant, incapable of rule, governed by others rather than by his own will. Even his favourite pastimes, swimming and digging, were now held against him as activities unbefitting a king. On 20 January, the bishop of Hereford met the King in person and demanded that he abdicate. With great reluctance, Edward agreed. In a series of premeditated and theatrical gestures, William Trussell, acting in the name of Parliament, formally renounced his homage to Edward. The steward of the royal household broke his ceremonial staff of office. Edward III officially acceded to the throne on 25 January and on 1 February was crowned in Westminster Abbey.
None of this theatre was sufficient to calm the violence that was now becoming an ingrained part of English high politics. Edward II remained in captivity, first at Kenilworth, later at Berkeley Castle on the Bristol Channel, from where various attempts were made to rescue him. In September 1327, as it was later announced, Edward died at Berkeley, either as a result of illness or, so it was rumoured, killed in a botched rescue attempt. In all probability he was suffocated by his gaolers; the later claim that the murder was committed secretly, using a red hot poker to burn out his entrails, appears only in accounts written twenty or so years later. Even more extravagant rumours, that Edward had survived as a wandering hermit in Italy or southern France, seem to derive from romance and the tradition of the disguised and undying king; similar stories, equally groundless, had been told of King Harold after 1066. In 1327, Edward II became the first English King since Stephen to have been deposed, and the first since Harold to have been, in all probability, killed in his rivals’ scramble for power. Having killed a king’s nephew at Viterbo in 1271 (with the murder of Henry of Almain), and a king’s grandson in 1322 (with the execution of Thomas of Lancaster), English politics had now encompassed the murder of the King himself. Edward II’s fate was all the more horrific for having been arranged by his own wife, Isabella of France. Nor did the killing end here.
Isabella and her lover, Roger Mortimer, now attempted to employ the fifteen-year-old Edward III as a pawn in their own schemes. In March 1330, they arranged the execution of Edward II’s half-brother, Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent (son of Edward I and grandson of a king of France), accused of plotting to restore the late Edward II to the throne. Shortly afterwards, in November 1330, only a week after his eighteenth birthday, Edward III, attended by a small band of friends, entered Nottingham castle via an underground passage and arrested Roger Mortimer. Once again, Parliament was used as a stage for the condemnation of treachery. Mortimer, the Queen’s lover, was executed. Queen Isabella was deprived of rule, spending the remainder of her long life in comfortable but enforced retirement. By the time of her death in 1358 she had, either in remorse or hypocrisy, endowed a chantry at Eltham in Kent for the soul of her late husband, Edward II. She was buried in London in her wedding mantle, with Edward II’s embalmed heart placed over her breast. Meanwhile, a pattern of bloodshed and murder had been established, up to and including the person of the King, unparalleled in English history at least since the blood feuds of tenth- and eleventh-century Northumbria.
Kings who failed to heed political opposition henceforth went in fear not merely of correction but their lives. Parliament, devised as a showcase of royal clemency and conciliation, had been transformed, in a crisis, into the chief mouthpiece of criticism directed against the crown. The popular French belief, widely circulating after 1400, that ‘the English kill their kings’ had already been proved true. Even so, king killing remained a secretive affair. The King himself was God’s anointed. Even his authority to abdicate, let alone the authority of barons or Parliament to depose him, remained uncertain. Not for a further 320 years, until 1649 and the trial of Charles I, did Parliament dare to put a king openly on trial. In the meantime, what is perhaps most remarkable about the aftermath of all the killings that resulted from Edward II’s misrule, at Boroughbridge in 1322, at Berkeley in 1327 and at Nottingham in 1330, is that the new King, Edward III, managed, albeit without altering the underlying impulses of society, to curb the violence between crown and aristocracy, between Englishmen and their rulers. It was almost as if the bloodshed had been forgotten.
The reasons for this lull can in part be sought with Edward himself, determined to avoid the character faults of his father. Edward’s personality, however, remains shadowy and uncertain. For all of the vast heaps of parchment piled up by the great offices of the crown, still stored in the Public Record Office at Kew, the wellsprings of power become more rather than less difficult to fathom the greater the quantity of our evidence. By the 1330s, each single term of the Exchequer or the chief law courts produced a vast slab of parchment sheets, closely written, containing hundreds of thousands of words, only a tiny number of which have ever been or are ever likely to be published. Somewhere amidst this routine, in the anonymity of the chancery and Exchequer’s scribes who now vied with one another to adopt identical handwriting and standard bureaucratic language, the leaves and branches of the modern state had already begun to sprout. Yet the very wealth of the detail here tends to render our view of policy that much more opaque.
We know the names of the King’s hawks (under Edward I ‘Clynton’, ‘Strathbogie’, ‘Droxford’, suggesting that these at least were gifts from particular courtiers). Under Edward III we have the crazy logic of horse lists, recording the condition of horses in the royal stables, and the colour and value of particular war horses lost on campaign, now to be repaid from royal funds. By the fifteenth century, besides an officially appointed ‘Keeper of the King’s Swans’, we even have illustrated rolls of swan marks, paintings that show the ownership symbols notched into the beaks of swans belonging to the King, his dukes, earls and bishops. In the meantime, our insight into the human processes of politics, into the formulation of policy and the interaction between King, councillors and Parliament tends to recede. The lists of earls and bishops witnessing the King’s charters, previously our most important glimpse into the attendance and ranking of courtiers, tend to decline into mere formality, even as early as 1300. The burning question of who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out’ at the royal court is rendered difficult or impossible to probe.
The rolls and the petitions of Parliament survive in considerable quantity from the 1280s onwards, but we learn from them virtually nothing about debates nor about how or by whom Parliament was controlled, nor indeed about such basic matters, before the 1320s, as whether the Lords and the Commons met together or as two distinct chambers. For any single year in the 1250s, the careful historian could hope to read all of the evidences generated by royal government, for the most part using printed editions. The whole process might take a day or two of careful research. By Edward III’s reign, the task has become virtually impossible. Too much remains unpublished. Too many details cloud the overall picture. The wood cannot be seen for the sheer number of its individual trees. The historian risks producing a mere chronicle of departmental or bureaucratic initiatives rather than a portrait of political society or of royal government in the round. The history of the reign of Edward III becomes a history in two parts: one part chivalry and derring-do reconstructed from the exaggerated reports of chroniclers, the other part generating all of the excitement of a history of income tax, reassembled from the dullest and driest of archival materials.
Edward III’s personality mattered. Indeed, Edward’s is perhaps the first English royal face whose appearance has been preserved to us in a real portrait rather than via some generic image of kingship. His wooden funeral effigy, perhaps carved from a death mask, suggests a twisted expression and hence, perhaps, that it was a stroke that killed this King, the first even remotely plausible diagnosis that we have for the cause of death of any medieval English king save for those, like Harold, killed in battle. Before he declined into senility or chronic ill health, Edward stamped his authority on most government initiatives: the arrest of Mortimer in 1330, the equally dramatic coup in which, almost exactly a decade later, the King returned secretly to England from war in France, to arrest and impeach those ministers he blamed for the shortage of funds for his troops. It was Edward in person who commanded the English forces against the Scots at Halidon Hill in 1333, against the French at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, and against French, Genoese and Castilian forces in the maritime encounters known as the battles of Sluys in 1340 and Les Espagnols ten years later. It was Edward’s personal claims, as son of a King of England and grandson of a King of France, that provoked the Hundred Years War. It was Edward’s own devotion to chivalric and knightly pursuits, his love of tournaments and round tables, his determination to outdo the mythical King Arthur and to supply England with an order of knighthood fit to rival the greatest knights in France that led, after Crécy, to his establishment of the Order of the Garter, in many ways his most personal creation, established with its own chapel dedicated to St George at the heart of Windsor Castle, the King’s birthplace, itself redesigned as a pleasure palace and public display of royal splendour, very much at Edward’s own command.
At Windsor and in the royal residences at Westminster and King’s Langley in Hertfordshire, hot water was for the first time piped into the King’s baths, and mechanical clocks make their earliest appearance as royal rather than as exclusively ecclesiastical luxuries. Devotion to chivalric principles explains a number of Edward’s political actions: his horseback dash, forty miles in a single day, to Lochindorb, south of Inverness, in 1336, to relieve the widowed Countess of Atholl besieged in the castle; the mercy he showed to the burghers of Calais in 1347 whom he had intended to hang but instead pardoned after intercessions on their behalf by his Queen, Philippa of Hainault; his determination in the 1350s to prosecute the bishop of Ely, Thomas Lisle, in the face of concerted opposition from Lisle’s fellow bishops, for attacks said to have been made by Lisle’s men upon the King’s cousin, Lady Wake, sister of the Duke of Lancaster. Like a lot of gallant gentlemen, Edward perhaps behaved less politely in private than the perfection of manners that he affected in public might lead us to suppose. Accusations that he raped the Countess of Salisbury were almost certainly untrue – French propaganda copied from the ancient Roman legend of the rape of Lucretia. Even so, there was certainly a seamier side to his relationship, late in life, with Alice Perrers, royal mistress, accused of corruption and scandal in the handling of government finance.
As this dependence on his mistress suggests, Edward was a ruler, perhaps the first since Richard I in the 1190s, whose ministers enjoyed a higher profile in day-to-day government than the King himself. It was upon officers such as his chancellor, Robert Stratford, bishop of Chichester, and his treasurer, Roger Northburgh, bishop of Coventry, that Edward pinned both the credit and blame for the financial exactions of 1340. Later, it was another chancellor, William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, overseer and presiding genius of Edward’s work at Windsor, who headed the King’s administration. Removed from office after clashing with the King’s son, John of Gaunt, Wykeham was nonetheless still sufficiently powerful to play a leading role in the constitutional crisis at the end of the reign and to survive as a major political force into the reigns of Edward’s grandsons, Richard II and Henry IV. Many of the King’s ministers were clerks, subsequently promoted as bishops. They can appear on occasion a self-serving but monotone bunch. The worst of the fourteenth-century bishops could barely begin to match the crimes attributed to their eleventh-century predecessors such as Stigand or Ranulf Flambard. Even so, there had been an undoubted shift after 1250 or so, from the saints and scholars of the twelfth century to the competent ‘all-rounders’ of the later Middle Ages. The Franciscan friar, John Pecham (archbishop 1279–92) was the last intellectual of truly European stature to serve as archbishop of Canterbury before the Reformation of the 1530s, though the mathematician and theologian Thomas Bradwardine might have revived this tradition had he not died only thirty-eight days after obtaining the archbishopric in 1349.
The period from 1170 to the 1260s had witnessed a remarkable flourishing of saints’ cults in England, associated principally with English bishops famed for their devotion to the liberty and reform of the Church: Thomas Becket (d.1170, canonized 1173), St Wulfstan of Worcester (d.1095, canonized 1203), St Hugh of Lincoln (d.1200, canonized 1220), St Edmund of Canterbury (d.1240, canonized 1246), St Richard Wyche of Chichester (d.1253, canonized 1262) fell within this category, as did the bids, unsuccessful though they proved, to obtain the canonizations of Stephen Langton (Archbishop of Canterbury d.1228), Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln (d.1253) and even, most improbably, King Henry III’s half-brother Aymer de Valence of Winchester (d.1260), and Henry’s uncle Boniface of Savoy (Archbishop of Canterbury, d.1270). Boniface was rumoured to have worn chain mail under his clerical habit and to have once delivered a distinctly un-archiepiscopal punch to the jaw of the prior of St Bartholomew’s Smithfield. He was nonetheless a conscientious visitor of monasteries, an issuer of reformist legislation for the English Church and even, in the 1250s and 60s, an upholder of the rights of the community of the realm to better government than had previously been supplied by his royal nephew’s incompetent favouritism. In Italy and southern Europe, saints in the thirteenth century were almost exclusively holy men set apart from the mainstream of ecclesiastical administration or secular politics. In England, with its well-regulated Church matching the state’s increasing obsession with law-making and legality, it was bishops who achieved sainthood and a role as intercessors for their local communities from beyond the grave.
The last of these saint bishops, Thomas Cantiloupe of Hereford (d.1282), was canonized in 1320 having been so at odds with his archbishop, John Pecham, that he spent the final months of his life as an excommunicate exile in the court of Rome. Thereafter, the electrical matter of sanctity seems to have passed underground, no longer channelled through an episcopal hierarchy increasingly reserved for civil servants and royal diplomats. Virtually every archbishop of Canterbury after 1300 had seen previous service as King’s clerk or ambassador, and several of them continued, even after their promotion as archbishop, to hold office as chancellor or treasurer to the crown. It was not that Pecham’s successors lacked either courage or competence. Even the supine civil servant Archbishop Walter Reynolds had broken with Edward II in the 1320s and assisted the court coup which brought Edward III to the throne, preaching on the ancient proverb ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God.’ Most of these men were well schooled. Archbishop Reynolds owned an impressive library, although he was perhaps more familiar with the covers than the contents of his books.
With the exception of William Courtenay, son of the Earl of Devon and great-grandson of Edward I (the first archbishop of Canterbury to have been of direct royal lineage, succeeded by Archbishop Thomas Arundel, a great-great-grandson of King Henry III), most of these men emerged from precisely that stratum of the lower gentry or upper levels of freeholder that had produced the Thomas Beckets or Stephen Langtons of the past. William of Wykeham’s father was a man with the far from aristocratic name John Long, a yeoman freeholder, married above his station to the granddaughter of a minor local knight. Compared with their predecessors, nonetheless, the bishops of the fourteenth century can only be regarded as second-raters. They included the first English bishop ever to be tried for incitement to homicide (Thomas Lisle of Ely, a Dominican friar, accused of leading a gang of fenland brigands) and the only two bishops ever to have been beheaded by the London mob: Walter Stapeldon, bishop of Exeter, treasurer of the deposed Edward II, decapitated in Cheapside with a breadknife in 1326, and Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, killed during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, his head displayed on London Bridge with an episcopal cap nailed to the skull. Both Stapledon and Sudbury were ‘building’ bishops, Sudbury as principal benefactor of the new nave at Canterbury Cathedral, Stapeldon as the second founder of the cathedral church of Exeter. Yet in neither case was there even a token suggestion that these agents of royal government be acknowledged as martyrs or workers of miracles.
Many but not all of these bishops were learned men. Louis de Beaumont, a cousin of Edward I’s Queen, was accused in 1318 of floundering through the Latin of his consecration service and of muttering, after one particularly troublesome polysyllable, ‘By St Louis, he was no gentleman who wrote that word!’ Beaumont was amongst the first of the English bishops to plaster his episcopal seal with his own heraldic arms. From the time of his successor, Thomas Hatfield, the bishops of Durham, as ‘palatinate’ lords of their county, employed a double-sided seal, on one side showing them enthroned, on the other as a mounted warrior, with sword and crested helmet barely concealed beneath their episcopal mitre. Not since Odo of Bayeux in the eleventh century had an English bishop been portrayed in this way on his seal, riding into battle. Meanwhile, rather like star conductors or musicians of the twentieth century, the bishops of fourteenth-century England were capable of a virtuoso performance using the materials already at their disposal, but were not themselves able to rewrite the music, let alone to compose new tunes.
This lack of charisma was all the more significant because the Church, as an undying institution, its lands guarantied against division or alienation, in theory growing richer year by year, was perhaps the only force in England that might have held in check the violence that was increasingly the hallmark both of relations within the English political elite and of England’s dealings with its neighbours. In the past, it had been English monks who had supplied the intellectual and moral example of good government. By the fourteenth century, however, even the more ascetic orders of the twelfth century had become ossified, sometimes almost literally so, under a weight of tradition and oligarchic self-interest. In the richer Benedictine communities, such as Westminster Abbey, the monks are estimated to have been served, on a daily basis, at least a pound’s weight of fish or two pounds of meat, a loaf of bread weighing a further two pounds, half a dozen eggs, large quantities of cheese and milk and at least eight pints of beer. No wonder that the Benedictines were depicted in contemporary satire as overweight gluttons, or that modern archaeological investigation has suggested that, in the richer of their communities, they suffered from a variety of bone diseases associated with excessive eating.
The monastic cloister was not a prison but a place in which to open the mind to spiritual enquiry, to the heavenly as opposed to the earthly Jerusalem. Hence the richness of the decoration assigned to the cloister itself, as an aid to meditation and not least to the meditation of the careers and spiritual well-being of the monastery’s donors, whose arms were emblazoned on heraldic shields, as in the cloisters at Westminster or Canterbury or Norwich, placed directly over the heads of the monks as they contemplated the kingdom of heaven. As this juxtaposition of the secular and the sacred should suggest, rather like today’s public school headmasters, or the more superior sort of tradesmen, there were few greater snobs than England’s medieval monks, themselves often of humble background yet thrown into almost daily contact with the noble dead. As the existence of monastic deer parks, none more famous than Westminster’s Hyde Park, should remind us, although monks themselves were not supposed to hunt or engage in blood sports, they did not baulk at associating themselves with the most aristocratic of sports, with venison as a further supplement to the monastic diet. Even the Cistercians on occasion maintained deer parks. As long ago as 1215, the Cistercian abbot of Beaulieu, one-time diplomatic envoy of King John, was accused before the Cistercian General Chapter not only of engaging in public drinking contests, in a game known as ‘garsacil’, but of keeping a greyhound tethered to his bed on a silver chain. These were not the sort of thinkers or moral leaders capable of resisting the trend either towards war or disorder.
After the 1220s, the friars, followers of St Francis and St Dominic, in theory pledged to lives of poverty like the original disciples of Christ, had settled in many English towns and had brought new insights to their preaching, in particular in their condemnation of materialism and the pleasures which money could buy. Jesus, so they argued, had sent his followers penniless into the world, and it was by abandoning money rather than by fleeing the world that the religious could best pursue their vocation.
Because of their emphasis upon preaching, generally regarded as a learned pursuit, the friars had established particular connections with the schools, settling in both Oxford and Cambridge almost immediately after their arrival in England. Already by the time of Gerald of Wales in the 1180s, Oxford was emerging as England’s pre-eminent seat of learning. Even earlier, Geoffrey of Monmouth, weaving his fabulous account of English history, claimed to have relied upon a book belonging to the archdeacon of Oxford, just as today’s fantasists and conspiracy theorists might cite anything that lent the approval of Oxford University Press to their own fantastical ideas. Walter Map, court chronicler and wit under Henry II, was himself archdeacon of Oxford.
Why Oxford? In part because the town was a regular meeting place for ecclesiastical courts, one of the most convenient points close to London in a diocese, the see of Lincoln, which stretched from the Thames as far north as the Humber. It was also, perhaps, a place of cheap rents. With Oxford today boasting some of the highest property prices in England, it is hard to imagine that the city was once awash with tenements, plots and halls where students could be lodged at little expense. In the twelfth century, however, the silting up of the Thames reduced navigation and ensured a glut of cheap property into which teachers and students now moved. It was precisely to guard against the further congestion of the Thames and the Medway navigations that Magna Carta, in 1215, forbade the construction of fish weirs on either of these rivers.
The self-government of the University of Oxford dates from this same period, with the removal of authority over students and schools from the bishop of Lincoln and their investment in a new officer, the University’s Chancellor. The dominance of the University over the city of Oxford, gown over town, was not finally cemented until the reign of Edward III, following a full-blown riot, provoked by an argument in the Swindlestock Tavern on St Scholastica’s Day 1355 (10 February). In penance for the slaying of a considerable number of students, the mayor and corporation were condemned to pay an annual fine to the University (last paid in the 1820s), and the University henceforth obtained wide-ranging authority over the city’s markets and commerce.
Cambridge, likewise a port town with a declining trade and navigation, emerged as the location for a much smaller and, during the Middle Ages, less-distinguished university only a few years after Oxford. The precise circumstances here remain unclear, but perhaps, where the presence of the bishop and archdeacon’s courts had been crucial to the emergence of the schools of Oxford, the freedom of Cambridge from supervision by the local bishop, and the fact that, in the 1220s, the archdeacon of Ely was an absentee Italian, more often to be found acting as papal agent in Croatia or Hungary than on the wind-swept banks of the Cam, encouraged the emergence, by 1225, of a university Chancellor apparently ruling the scholars and their schools.
To begin with, both at Oxford and at Cambridge, scholars and masters were lodged in halls and dormitories, bought and sold as private enterprises, with no permanent endowment to ensure their long-term survival. The first of the endowed Cambridge colleges, Peterhouse, was founded in 1284 by a Benedictine monk, Hugh of Balsham, bishop of Ely, whose statutes grafted elements of the Benedictine rule on to decrees already awarded, twenty years earlier, to one of the first of the Oxford colleges, founded by Walter de Merton, chancellor to King Henry III. Another of the early Oxford colleges, Balliol, was founded in the 1260s by the father and mother of the future King of Scotland, John de Balliol. New College at Oxford, was the work of William of Wykeham, chancellor to Edward III, established in 1379 as the Oxford end of an educational network that was intended to channel boys from school at Wykeham’s foundation at Winchester to higher learning at Oxford. All told, of the surviving Oxford and Cambridge colleges, fourteen were founded before 1370, a further eight between 1370 and 1480.
Extending beyond the immediate needs of education, the idea of the college, served by a body of clergy celebrating the liturgy in honour of their founder, often with elaborate choir schools or professional musicians attached, itself became one of the most characteristic phenomena of the late medieval English Church, inspiring the actions of Edward III himself in his foundation of the colleges of St George at Windsor and St Stephen’s at Westminster, within the shadow of the monastic abbey and royal palace. Music, that great accomplishment and delight of the English, appears as an especially royal art from the 1350s onwards, associated with the collegiate foundations of Edward III, as later of William of Wykeham or King Henry VI. Those who tune in to the service of nine lessons and carols from King’s College Cambridge at Christmas each year are probably aware that this particular service is a Victorian pastiche. The basic idea, however, of a college, with a royal or distinguished founder and with religious songs to accompany the good and godly learning of its fellows is at least seven centuries old.
Like Walter de Merton and other college founders, Wykeham, both at Winchester and New College, laid particular stress upon the obligation of his foundations to support and educate his own kinsmen. Even now, the names Balliol or Wykeham have a resonance, thanks to their educational foundations, that others, just as famous in their day now lack. Wykeham was in some ways a less competent or significant administrator than his predecessor as bishop of Winchester, William Eddington, yet, thanks to his school and his college, it is Wykeham not Eddington whose memory has survived. Founders’ kin were still being admitted to Oxford, on preferential terms, as late as the 1850s, resulting in a lucrative though shadowy trade in false pedigrees intended to demonstrate kinship to long dead bishops. In particular, kinship to Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, founder of All Souls College Oxford, could guarantee a handsome lifelong stipend in a college which had no undergraduates but only fellows whose original purpose had been to pray for the dead of the Hundred Years War. It is sometimes asserted that medieval monasticism was swept away in England by the Reformation of the sixteenth century. In practice, a large number of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges retain identities that are essentially medieval and monastic, the arrangement of their buildings, and the election, dining and self-government of their ‘fellows’ (or teachers) being conducted according to procedures remarkably similar to those practised by medieval monks. Even monastic celibacy persisted long after the Reformation. The majority of the fellows of the Oxford colleges were not permitted to marry until as recently as 1881.
The fourteenth century marked a high point for the universities, especially for Oxford where a rich tradition of theological speculation emerged, associated with such names as Duns Scotus (perhaps trained at Oxford, though owing his fame to his teachings at Paris), William of Ockham (trained at Oxford, but for most of his life an exile from England), and John Wycliffe (one time master of Balliol College, who we will encounter again in due course, and who throughout the 1360s and 70s was the most distinguished theologian permanently resident in Oxford, albeit later denounced as a heretic). Even these representatives of the highest of high learning nonetheless had their feet firmly on the ground of politics and the day-to-day management of the Church.
Ockham wrote in support of the legitimacy of royal or imperial authority judged against that of the Pope. Wycliffe stood on the fringes of the circle around Edward III’s son, John of Gaunt, employed as a tame intellectual to bait the advocates of the Avignon papacy and to deny the Church’s claims to temporal as well as spiritual rule. All of these scholars, and in particular Scotus, played with the Latin language and invented their own terms of reference in ways that, on occasion, rival the most baffling of the statements of Wittgenstein or the modern philosophers of language. Nonetheless, grammar and the correct apprehension of terms and meanings remained at the heart of academic discourse. The outcome in the late medieval schools was perhaps a growing divorce between the worlds of thought and action, the relegation of much academic discourse to that bickering over abstractions that later critics would decry as ‘mere scholasticism’. Even so, the most famous question said to have been debated in the late medieval schools – ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’, probably invented by critics – was nothing like so absurd as it might appear. Behind it lay debates over mathematical infinity, the nature of corporeal bodies and abstract entities, the mechanics of space, time and movement that would still engage university students in the lecture rooms of Oxford or Harvard today.
As in nineteenth-century England, where an intense grounding in the ancient languages of Latin and Greek was assumed to be the best training for those who would go on to rule nation and empire, so in medieval Oxford, there was an intensely practical side to a lot of tuition. ‘Business’ or ‘Management’ studies were already a feature of the Oxford curriculum in the fourteenth century, long before the twentieth-century mania for capitalist efficiency led to the endowment of some of the most hideous structures in a city famed for the ugliness of much of its modern building. Students were taught about angels, but also how to draft a letter, how to read a budget, how to conceal or disclose meanings from linguistic statements. From the debates of Ockham to the running of a diocese or service as a King’s clerk was only a short step. It was civil servants, not philosophers, that the universities were chiefly intended to produce.
The civil service of Edward III was awash with such men. Government itself grew at a pace unparalleled since the twelfth century. By the 1350s, the royal chancery was issuing at least a hundred, and sometimes as many as two or three hundred routine legal writs on any day of its business, besides the longer or more significant of chancery letters that were then copied and enrolled in the chancery archives. The chancery was just one small part of government, and already stood apart from the business conducted under the King’s privy seal, itself now the focus of a bureaucracy of its own, or subsequently of the King’s signet with which the most personal of royal letters were sealed. All of this work, to which we must add that of the law courts and the massive efforts of the Exchequer to extract the revenues with which to fuel this bureaucracy, required the labours of several hundred clerks.
Westminster Hall was the focus of these activities, partitioned into a series of spaces rather like those of the vaster ‘open plan’ offices of the twentieth-first century, with various other parts of the old palace of Westminster given over to the Exchequer or the annual three- or four-week-long meetings of Parliament, all of these institutions and occasions crammed in almost as afterthoughts to the domestic needs of the King, his household and family. The construction of houses, many of them on a lavish scale, up Whitehall and along the banks of the Thames, was intended to accommodate the greater men in attendance on the court. Long before Downing Street became the home of a prime minister, the surrounding properties were given over to courtiers and counsellors, direct antecedents to the ministers and chief secretaries of the modern departments of state.
This state building was itself the product of pressures placed upon English government by the needs of war. Through the reigns of the first two Edwards, credit arrangements had been put in place to employ the future revenues of customs on wool and baronial taxation to raise loans from Italian bankers. Into the footsteps of the Riccardi of Lucca, bankrupted in the 1290s, stepped firms such as the Frescobaldi, the Bardi and the Peruzzi of Florence, who had continued to prop up royal finance into the 1330s. Quite why such firms were willing to undertake this work remains unclear, since all of them were eventually bankrupted when the crown, as was inevitable, defaulted on its debts. Perhaps they found themselves only slowly sucked into an arrangement from which it was then impossible to extricate themselves. Perhaps, like modern bankers, they had their eyes too firmly on future profits to remark the more imminent signals of apocalypse. From the 1330s, however, the King had somehow to raise cash himself, without mortgaging future revenues in return for injections of foreign capital. Far from this reducing Edward III’s appetite for war, the 1330s were to prove the decade in which, after fifty years of being a regular though by no means annual business, warfare and the taxes to pay for it became a more or less permanent feature of royal government.
To distance himself from the catastrophes of his father’s reign, to divert the violent impulses of the aristocracy into foreign rather than domestic strife, to satisfy his love of chivalry and daring deeds, to associate himself with the glories of his family’s past (Henry II, Richard I and Edward I), Edward III embarked on a series of military campaigns that involved English armies in warfare in Scotland, France, the Low Countries and Spain, and at sea from the Firth of Forth to the Bay of Biscay. Intense military activity, against Scotland in the 1330s, immediately after Edward’s seizure of personal power, and against France from 1337 onwards, with the outbreak of the Hundred Years War, was punctuated by periods of truce, both with the Scots and the French. Even here, however, there was no permanent peace but a series of near annual raids and ‘chevauchées’ (mounted ravagings of the French or Scottish countryside).
In Scotland, Edward III to some extent rebuilt the position that Edward I had enjoyed in the first decade of the fourteenth century, before the disaster of Bannockburn had led to the Scots overrunning of northern England. Edward Balliol, son of the humiliated King John de Balliol, was supported as an English pretender to the Scots throne, against the claims of King David II, son of Robert Bruce. At Dupplin Moor, in 1332, Balliol’s army inflicted a significant defeat upon the Scots, which was followed by a full-scale English invasion that was to last for most of the 1330s, leading to the transfer of Edward’s Parliament, Exchequer and chancery to York, to the successful siege and recapture of Berwick upon Tweed and, at Halidon Hill in July 1333, to a major English victory in battle. The English army won the day by mimicking precisely those techniques that the Scots had previously used to defeat English cavalry charges at Stirling Bridge and Bannockburn, adopting a defensive position and using mixed formations of archers and dismounted men-at-arms to see off the Scots’ attack. Henceforth, archers, many of them recruited from Wales or the Welsh borders, and the mounted infantry, riding to the battlefield but fighting on foot, were to become the hallmarks of English warfare.
Just as after Hastings in 1066 the Normans had adopted the Anglo-Saxon technique of riding to war but fighting on foot, so, after a brief flirtation in the thirteenth century with mounted warfare and the magnificence of the cavalry charge, Edward III and his successors put aside such chivalric but potentially disastrous techniques in order to win their battles by patient defence and endurance. It was by precisely these means that Edward III won the Battle of Crécy in 1346, Henry V the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, or indeed the Duke of Wellington the Battle of Waterloo a full 400 years later. The English ‘square’ was first introduced to the King’s army at Halidon Hill, in direct and deliberate imitation of the Scots ‘schiltroms’ that William Wallace had commanded at Stirling. The techniques of Welsh archers and Scots spearmen, regarded in chivalric circles as mere barbarians, were now deliberately copied by what was intended to be the most chivalric fighting force in Christendom.
Edward III’s Scottish campaign was arguably already grinding to a stalemate by 1337 when a far more ambitious prospect of war presented itself. Ever since 1328 and the death of King Charles IV of France without an heir, there had been a prospect that Edward III, son of Isabella of France and therefore the eldest living grandson of Philip IV of France, might be regarded as right claimant to the French throne, in preference to Philip of Valois, Charles IV’s cousin, who in 1328 had stepped in as King Philip VI, the first of the Valois kings. Edward’s claims had passed through the female line, but the so-called ‘Salic’ law, forbidding inheritance by women, was not cited in Valois propaganda until 1413, as part of a later attempt to revive defunct early-medieval law codes to justify the exclusion of Isabella and Edward from the French royal line. Even so, the English claim to the throne of France was not nearly so strong as might be supposed. Women claimants, even those themselves the daughters of kings, had been excluded both in 1316, following the death of the six-day-old King Jean I ‘the posthumous’ (the first time that the Capetian bloodline had failed in more than 300 years), and again on at least three occasions, following the deaths of the last of the Capetian kings in 1322 and 1328. Both in 1325 and in 1329 to Philip VI, Edward had performed homage for his lands in France, which by this stage included not only Gascony and the southernmost remnant of the old Angevin empire of Henry II, but the county of Ponthieu, on the mouth of the river Somme, acquired as part of the dower of Edward I’s wife, Eleanor of Castile.
It had been as a result of his landing in Ponthieu, in 1066, that Harold had been taken captive and handed over to the Normans, a scene famously illustrated in the Bayeux Tapestry. It was from the port of St-Valery, within sight of Ponthieu, that the Norman fleet had embarked for England in 1066. Now, in 1337, it was because of Ponthieu and his own connections, by blood to the Capetian throne of France, and by marriage to Philippa, daughter of the Count of Hainault (in modern-day Belgium), that an English king for the first time contemplated a reverse restaging of the Norman Conquest, leading an English army across the Channel for what was intended as a full-scale ‘conquest’ of France. Like William I in 1066, Edward possessed a claim to the French throne that was very far from secure. Like William, he had to rely on propagandists to boost his cause, upon foreign allies to sustain him in hostile territory, and ultimately upon the fortunes of war controlled by God to determine the justice of his claim.
The catalyst to this English invasion was Philip VI’s formal confiscation of Aquitaine and Ponthieu in 1337, on the pretext that Edward III was harbouring Philip’s cousin and archenemy, Robert, Count of Artois. Like Edward I in the 1290s, Edward III now looked for allies in the Rhineland and the Low Countries, at vast expense (at least £124,000 in 1337 alone). Edward’s ultimate intention, perhaps, was to rebuild the empire of his predecessor Henry II, and at last to repair the humiliation of 1204 when Normandy and the Plantagenet lands north of the Loire had been seized by the French. Not for the first time in English history, nor the last, nostalgia for a lost epoch played a significant role in controlling ‘modern’ events. Edward himself set sail in July 1338, from the estuary of the Orwell in Suffolk, which itself had first entered English history in 1326. It was via the Orwell river that Isabella, Edward’s mother, had disembarked at the start of her campaign against Edward’s father. Just up the Suffolk coast lay the fairytale castle of Orford, built by Henry II, founder of Edward III’s Plantagenet dynasty, the only royal residence in this part of East Anglia, left virtually unaltered and unvisited since Henry had built it in the 1160s. Edward’s choice of embarkation point in 1338 was thus highly symbolic, governed by the practical logistics of shipping an army across to Antwerp, but evocative of the triumphs of Henry II and of Isabella of France, of the greatest of Edward III’s Plantagenet ancestors and the source of his claims in France.
Like the world wars of the twentieth century, the Anglo-French conflict generated so vast an archival footprint, in chronicles, contracts for military service, letters and tax returns, that an entire lifetime could be spent in reading the evidence let alone in making sense of it. To summarize, very briefly: from 1338 to 1340, the opening campaign in northern France witnessed Edward himself assume the title ‘King of France’ (in January 1340, largely at the insistence of his Flemish allies who feared that, unless they fought for a titular King of France, they might be accused of breaching their obligations as subjects of the French crown), a major naval victory over the French at Sluys on 24 June 1340 (the exact anniversary of Edward II’s great defeat at Bannockburn in 1314), but also the breakdown of his alliances with the German and Flemish princes and above all the inadequacy of ordinary tax receipts to meet the costs of war. By 1340, for all of his boasted titles, the King was more than £400,000 in debt. In 1341, the threat of concerted action between the French and the Scots nonetheless forced the resumption of war, this time focussed upon the King’s support of the claims of John de Montfort to the succession to the duchy of Brittany, itself poised like a great reef in the Atlantic approaches, between the English Channel and Edward’s colonies in Gascony. The Breton succession dispute shifted the focus of war from northern to western France. An expedition, planned to take place via Flanders in 1345, was itself diverted by the murder of one of Edward’s remaining Flemish allies; the King set sail from Portsmouth instead, in July 1346, apparently intending to make for Gascony and the south.
Only when his fleet was blown off course was it decided to make a landing in Normandy, at St-Vaast-la-Hougue, south-east of Cherbourg. From there, Edward marched to the ancient ducal seat at Caen, the enclave from which William of Normandy had planned his invasion of England, 300 years before. Caen was taken on 27 July amidst scenes of slaughter and pillage every bit as terrible as those witnessed in England after William the Conqueror’s victory at Hastings. The bishop of Bayeux, custodian of one of the chief monuments to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the Bayeux Tapestry, was besieged within the castle of Caen. From Caen, Edward’s army moved eastwards, seeking a way back to the coast and thence to England. A campaign of conquest was fast degenerating into yet another raid on the French countryside: a ‘chevauchée’, in which the land itself would be wasted to feed and reward Edward’s troops. Such ‘chevauchées’, grim though they were, had one distinct advantage over French methods of war: they ensured that English armies received regular and invaluable practice in concerted troop movements. They were also, in a sense, one of Scotland’s greatest contributions to European history, since it was surely in imitation of the Scots raids south of the border and the reprisals taken by the families such as the Percys and Nevilles now set to guard the northern Marches, that these murderous affairs were first adopted. Once again, techniques of warfare normally associated with ‘barbarian’ peoples were adopted by the supposed flower of chivalry.
It was Philip VI who now changed the pace of war. Pursuing Edward and his army across the Somme, on 26 August 1346, Philip forced the English to take up a defensive position on high ground, on the right bank of the river Maie, just outside the village of Crécy. Here an undisciplined charge by the French cavalry broke upon the ranks of dismounted English infantry supported by archers, a formation that had become classic English style. The dukes of Alençon and Lorraine were killed in the attack, as was the blind King of Bohemia, who had insisted on being led into battle. Although he had fought against the English, his emblem of an ostrich feather was now appropriated by Prince Edward (later known as the ‘Black Prince’), son of Edward III, destined, in a design of three ostrich feathers with the Flemish motto ‘Ich dene’ (‘I serve’), to become the symbol of all future princes of Wales: African wildlife, Bohemian chivalry, Dutch courage and Welsh pride combined in a most improbable way.
Another of the badges of modern monarchy, the motto ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ (‘Shame upon him who thinks ill of it’) was first adopted for Edward’s new Order of the Garter, intended to honour the chief captains who had fought alongside the King at Crécy. Like the order’s blue robes, themselves borrowed from the colours of the Capetian kings of France and ultimately from the blue mantle of the Virgin Mary, France’s chief protector, Edward’s motto was a deliberately Francophile gesture, intended both to justify and symbolize his claims to the French throne. Chivalry, as such incidents reveal, was a matter of conduct and appearances, not at all of the sort of patriotic or nationalistic anti-French sentiment that was to become a feature of later Anglo-French wars. War itself was a means by which the King could display himself to the maximum number of his subjects, no longer locked away in the semi-seclusion of his palaces or Parliaments, but parading through the streets or at the head of his armies, dressed in the most gaudy colours, with Edward himself the proudest peacock in the flock.
Victorious, with God’s verdict now cast decisively in his favour and with the heraldic surcoats of 2,200 French knights captured in the battle piled up as booty in his pavilion, Edward III now lay siege to Calais. It fell after nearly a year, in September 1347. Thereafter, it was to remain as the chief port of access to England on the continent, its merchant company recognized after 1363 as the only ‘staple’ (from ‘stapler’, the trade of sorting wool according to its quality) at which English wool merchants could sell their products overseas. Calais, administered from the 1370s in ecclesiastical terms as part of the archdiocese of Canterbury, was destined to return members to the English parliament throughout the 1530s and 40s. In contrast, Manchester had no member of Parliament until the 1650s, Birmingham until 1832. Throughout the Middle Ages, as ‘palatinate’ jurisdictions standing apart from the ordinary counties of England, neither Chester nor Durham sent representatives to the Commons.
Meanwhile, in October 1346, within three months of Crécy, the Scots were defeated at Nevilles Cross near Durham and their King, David II, taken prisoner. Not since 1174 and the crushing defeats inflicted upon the enemies of King Henry II in Scotland and France had an English King enjoyed such extraordinary fortune in war.
Despite the vast cost of these campaigns, Edward III’s winning streak was to be continued into the 1350s. From 1349 to 1360, Edward fought off a threat to Calais, obtained yet another naval victory at the Battle of Les Espagnols, and in 1355 launched a two pronged attack via Calais and Gascony culminating when Prince Edward once again inflicted a crushing defeat on the French at Nouaillé five miles south of Poitiers. This Battle of Poitiers, of September 1356, led not only to the destruction of yet another French army, in circumstances similar to those at Crécy, but to the capture, in the midst of the fighting, of the French King, Jean II. When the Black Prince returned with his prisoners in the following year, the gutters of London ran with wine as part of the victory celebrations, something not reported since 1220 when a similar display, to mark the translation of the relics of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury, had plunged the monks of Canterbury into fifty years of financial hardship.
With both the Scots and the French Kings in English custody, and following a final expedition to France in 1359 in which his plans to have himself crowned in Rheims Cathedral, the traditional coronation church of the French, devolved into yet another ‘chevauchée’, this time through Burgundy, Edward III was able to negotiate treaties, allowing for the ransom of David II of Scotland for 100,000 marks, and, under the terms of the Treaty of Brétigny, eventually ratified in 1361, the ransom of Jean II for £500,000. Edward renounced his claims to be recognized as King of France and, in return, the French abandoned any claim to sovereignty over Aquitaine and the English possessions in France. Edward III now held a position across the Channel stronger than that enjoyed by any previous ruler of England up to and including the legendary King Arthur. This triumph seemed to be cemented in the early 1360s by a series of marriages arranged for Edward’s sons and daughters, by which the earldoms of Pembroke, March, Lancaster, the duchy of Brittany and the counties of Flanders and Burgundy seemed all to have been brought within the royal family’s orbit.
Superficially at least, Edward’s combination of warfare and diplomacy rode high. Beneath the surface, however, lurked deep gulfs of economic and strategic miscalculation. The cost of maintaining garrisons at Calais, in Gascony and on the borders with Scotland were themselves crippling, let alone the costs of mounting expeditions from these redoubts. Edward had perhaps already spent even more on his naval forces than on his land army. On the one hand, this suggests a new bid for sovereignty of the seas, the first occasion since the reign of King John when the English had effectively sought mastery of the Channel: an important contribution towards the pride and reputation of the later royal navy. Edward had new gold coins minted, including the ‘noble’, worth 6s 8d (half a ‘mark’), intended for high value payments in trade and diplomacy: precisely the sort of coin that was needed in an era of massive taxation and no less massive ransom payments. They were stamped with a portrait of the King standing crowned and armed on board a great vessel of war, emblazoned with the heraldic symbols of England and France, the reverse bearing an inscription comparing Edward III with Christ himself passing through the midst of his enemies (‘Jesus passing through the midst of them, went his way’, Luke 4:30). Yet such empty boasting was small recompense for the costs of Edward’s naval operations. Far from the English gaining supremacy over the seas, the Channel itself became a vector of warfare, with French, Genoese and Spanish ships raiding along the southern English coast. Portsmouth was burned in 1338 and 1342, Plymouth was attacked in 1340, Winchelsea in 1356. For the first time in recorded history, English merchant shipping had to travel in convoy. The trade which such shipping carried and the English political classes who profited from it were taxed and taxed again. Meanwhile, the strategy behind Edward’s continental campaigns remained simplistic to the point of idiocy.
The more defeats inflicted upon the French, the more noblemen captured, the more territory ravaged, the greater the proof of God’s favour and the higher the potential profit to the English King. Yet no manner of victory, not even such victories as Crécy or Poitiers, could alter the fact that the English lands in France remained open to counterattack and to essentially French cultural and economic influences, that the ransoms demanded from noble prisoners were often impossible to enforce, and that, even after the Treaty of Brétigny, the French subjects of Aquitaine and the south continued to look to French royal justice and to the French Parlement in much the same way that Capetian influence had been intruded into Plantagenet Gascony in the years after 1259. The basic problems of English rule in France remained unresolved.
Whether Edward or his advisers had any real idea of the broader strategy of their war, as opposed to the potential glory of its individual episodes, remains unclear. Perhaps they pursued a conscious policy of inviting the French to pitched battle which the English believed they could win. Perhaps like one of the war’s chief chroniclers, the French poet Jean Froissart, they were inclined to confound romance with history and to mingle fiction with fact. In the long winter evenings, Froissart had alternated writing his Chronicle with reciting long passages from his epic romance Meliador, in which damsels in distress, wild bears and shipwrecks on an Isle of Man implausibly peopled by the ancient Hebrews rubbed shoulders with more ‘realistic’ events. The Treaty of Brétigny was stored by the English in a special box, the ‘Calais Chest’ (still in the Public Record Office), an exquisite symbol of chivalry and diplomacy, emblazoned with the arms of the Kings and their ministers who had negotiated peace. Its terms, meanwhile, were a dead letter almost from the moment that it was consigned to its magnificent casket.
King Jean of France died in English captivity with the bulk of his ransom still unpaid. The costs of maintaining peace as of waging war mounted beyond all control. The Black Prince’s expedition into northern Spain in 1367, intended merely (and in the final resort unsuccessfully) to ensure a continued alliance with the King of Castile, inflicted a great victory at Nájera but nonetheless cost nearly 3 million gold florins for no tangible economic or strategic return. Strategy was sacrificed to chivalry and common sense to the pursuit of glory, in a way more reminiscent of the posturings of a Napoleon than of the caution and parsimony normally associated with English warfare. The Spanish Armada of 1588 was, in this reading, merely Spain’s belated response to an even more pointless and vindictive English aggression. Long before the Peninsular War of the early nineteenth century, the armies of the Black Prince had trudged through the future battlefields of Vitoria and Burgos in pursuit of their own small measure of fame.
The Great Pestilence or ‘Black Death’ of the 1340s has traditionally been identified with the disease today known as Bubonic Plague or ‘Yersinia pestis’, named after the Swiss bacteriologist, Alexandre Yersin, who in 1894 first isolated the plague bacillus during an outbreak in Hong Kong. The disease itself travels via animal hosts, especially rats, the ultimate agent (or ‘vector’) of transmission being fleas whose digestive tracts become congested with plague bacilli, exciting the fleas into a frenzy of biting and repeated vomiting in their attempts to ingest blood, thereby spreading infected blood, and hence the disease itself, all the more speedily from one flea-bitten victim to another. The fleas themselves travel in the fur of rats, and can on occasion survive, even without an animal host, in the grain or grain debris which is the rat’s preferred environment. Symptoms of infection amongst humans include painfully sensitive ‘buboes’ or swellings, varying from the size of a pea to that of an egg, generally located in the lymph nodes nearest to the point of infection, most often in the groin or armpits, although sometimes in the neck or behind the ears. Infection occurs as, or more, easily in villages and the countryside than it does in towns, perhaps because the ratio of rats to humans in a village is higher than would be the case in urban areas with a denser population of humans.
There are problems in identifying the Black Death as Yersinia pestis. Diseases, like people, change over time. The pathology of bubonic plague as experienced in China or India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will not necessarily assist us towards an understanding of plague in the 1340s. Although fourteenth-century writers describe symptoms, including the painful buboes, that seem consistent with plague, there are other features to the disease – its apparent failure to observe the seasonal life-cycle of the plague flea, the speed both of its distribution and the resulting mortality – which suggest that some other cause should be sought, a pneumonic form of plague perhaps, anthrax, influenza or some other pestilence that may itself have died out or mutated to such a degree that it can no longer be identified with any particular modern virus or bacterium. None of this should be allowed to detract either from the terror of the Black Death or the human suffering that it caused.
To a human population already weakened by the famine and disease that had characterized the period after 1315, living on the thin edge between starvation and survival, the pestilence of 1348–9 brought disaster on a unprecedented scale. From Weymouth the pestilence spread to the West Country, reaching Bristol by August 1348. Probably via multiple points of entry, it infected East Anglia and by the autumn was threatening London. Its causes – a great rain of worms and serpents in China? A foul miasma spread through the air? God’s vengeance? – were as poorly understood as the precautions that might be taken against it. The English had never liked foreigners. In an essentially rural society of villages and villagers, in which everyone knew everyone else’s business, Christ’s injunctions to feed the hungry and shelter the stranger (Matthew 25:35) were answered as much in the breach as the observance. There had always been a tension between the urge to charity towards groups such as lepers, and the law’s insistence that other outcast communities be hunted down and destroyed. Now, in the 1340s, townsfolk in places such as Gloucester tried vainly to stem the progress of pestilence by closing their gates to outsiders. The attempt, needless to say, proved merely that death knows no bounds.
The actual rate of mortality from the plague will never be known. The evidence upon which we rely here, chiefly manorial court records and bishops’ registers, tells us only about the death rates amongst certain sorts of priests and peasants. But did all priests seek to bring comfort to the sick, in which case we might extrapolate statistics from the number of priests recorded as dying, or did they instead send auxiliaries, in which case the records will supply no reliable gauge? Three archbishops of Canterbury in succession died during the course of 1348–9, two of them certainly from the pestilence. Of the forty-two monks and seven lay brothers at Meaux Abbey in Yorkshire, thirty-two are said to have died. Plague killed all of the friars living in the house of Our Lady at Norwich, and only three of the twenty-six monks of Newenham in Devon survived. Yet at Canterbury Cathedral, out of a community of more than a hundred monks, there were only four deaths. How are we to extrapolate national trends from such figures?
Modern estimates suggest that anything between a third and two-thirds of the population died as a result of the outbreak of 1348–9, but there is an enormous difference here between the upper and lower ends of this range, and it would be unsafe merely to opt for a median figure of fifty per cent. The poor, infants, the old and those least likely to find a place in the surviving records will clearly have died in greater numbers than the rich and the well-fed, or those able to run for their lives, as appears to have been the case for the King, who throughout the winter of 1349–50 assiduously avoided London, spending Christmas at Otford in Kent, and then moving by easy stages to Woodstock. Any attempt to convene Parliament was abandoned. Even then, the King did not entirely escape the disease which seems to have caused the death of his fifteen-year-old daughter, Joan, at Bordeaux in September 1348. Another of the King’s children, William of Windsor, apparently born in 1348, seems to have died in infancy, perhaps again as a result of pestilence. Even so, no earls died of the plague, and in 1348 the death rate amongst the peerage seems to have run at less than one in twenty, lower than in an average year, rising only to one in eight in 1349.
So great are the possibilities here for statistical analysis, number-crunching and the reduction of human history to a series of graphs and diagrams, that social and economic historians have gone wild in their pursuit of plague as a factor in England’s history. The Black Death has been presented as the wellspring of virtually everything that happened thereafter: social unrest provoked by a labour shortage, followed by rising wages, followed by a transformation in rural society; increased legal regulation and the rise of the modern ‘state’, as kings, from Edward III onwards, issued legislation intended to freeze social relations in their pre-plague state, to guarantee deference to the great and servility amongst the many, coercing every group within society, from bishops to blacksmiths, to stand by their obligations one to another; an upsurge in piety, as humanity petitioned God to remove the scourge of plague, or alternatively a rise in anticlericalism, as men cursed God and his ministers for their failure to prevent the pestilence; the encouragement of such phenomena as prostitution previously regarded as sins, as young men were encouraged to procreate to relieve the population shortage; a recourse to increasing extremes in war and pleasure, as life was counted cheap and to be lived to the full before the inevitable snuffing out; growing fatalism and a fascination with death and decay, seen, for example, in the ‘transi’ tombs of fifteenth-century England, in which bishops such as Richard Fleming at Lincoln or Henry Chichele at Canterbury were shown both robed and magnificent in life, and rotted and cadaverous in death; or a rising tide of optimism and a determination to master nature via medicine and science, leading not just to the rediscovery but to the surpassing of classical knowledge, and hence to the origins of the European Renaissance. Virtually everything, black or white, positive or negative, can and has been traced back from the fifteenth century to the pestilence of the 1340s.
In the meantime, significantly, little changed, even at the King’s court. Far from the pestilence putting an end to the more ambitious schemes of King and nobles, between 1349 and 1357 Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster and the King’s cousin, spent nearly £35,000 rebuilding and decorating his Savoy Palace in the Strand. In July 1349, glaziers moved in to complete the windows in Edward III’s own chapel of St Stephen at Westminster, more than twenty of them working there, with glass brought from Shropshire, London and the Kentish Weald, at a total cost of nearly £4,000 on glass, painting, altars and statuary. Death and disease did nothing to curb the King’s or the court’s appetite for luxury and display, particularly in costume: the £500 spent on a single dress for the Queen to attend Edward’s great annual celebrations on St George’s Day, for example, or the £200 paid by the Black Prince in 1362 for jewelled buttons for his wife, a price equivalent to more than ten years of the wages of a master craftsman or esquire. The war with France dragged on throughout the 1350s, with sufficient money raised and armies recruited to produce the great victory at Poitiers in 1356. What we see here perhaps is the extraordinary resilience of mankind. Amidst the plague pits of the 1340s, as 600 years later amidst the horrors of man-made genocide, humanity has proved itself more resilient even than the bacteria that threaten its continued existence.
The real effects of the pestilence were not felt in its immediate aftermath. Instead, the Black Death of 1348–9 (a term invented much later) was merely the harbinger of a more insidious, endemic pestilence that was to hover on the nightmare edge of society for centuries to come. The high mortality rate of the 1340s could fairly easily be repaired. Where the young and the old had died, the survivors, many of them in the prime of life, could marry and produce children. It was only when plague returned to claim this next crop of humanity that the real demographic effects began to be felt. A falling birth rate, rather than a rising rate of adult mortality, is most likely to lead to a real decline in population.
Plague was reported across Europe again in 1361–2, and this time hit lords as well as commoners: nearly one in four of the English parliamentary peerage died in the course of a single year. A third epidemic erupted in 1369. Both outbreaks resulted in a mortality rate in England perhaps as high as one in ten of the population. Thereafter, its return became cyclical, in 1375, in 1379 to northern England, to the Midlands in 1381–2, to East Anglia and Kent in 1383 and 1387, on a national scale again in 1390, 1399–1400 and 1405–6, and so on throughout the fifteenth century. The effects upon a population already stricken by the initial great mortality were beyond doubt to reduce the human population of England to a level perhaps half of that at which it had stood in 1348, possibly 6 or 7 million, reduced by 1450 to nearer 3 million.
Economic and Social Consequences
The yield of mankind itself fell below even the pathetic levels recorded for sown wheat. Large amounts of land went out of cultivation. The cost of labour and wages rocketed. Food, by contrast, became if not cheaper then more readily obtainable. Green vegetables, fruit and above all meat, beyond the dreams of those who had eked out an existence before the Black Death, were now within the reach of peasant families themselves now able to break free from the restrictions and forced labour services that had previously defined them as ‘villeins’ or unfree. From the 1350s onwards, bondsmen broke their bonds and the age-old shadow of villeinage melted away from the land. The farm labourers of the nineteenth century portrayed by Thomas Hardy might have lived in squalor or ignorance, but they were free to come and go as they pleased. This would not have been the case for the peasants of the generation before 1340. As in Ireland before and after the famine of the 1840s, a human tragedy left behind survivors whose own living standards and expectations were far greater than those that had gone before.
It was against this background that the political history of the final years of Edward III was played out: the reopening of Anglo-French hostilities after 1369, the King’s decline into ill health and senility, his virtual retirement from all state affairs save for his attendance, at Windsor each year, at the great junketings associated with the Order of the Garter and the feast of St George. In 1375, after a series of military humiliations and following vast expenditure on diplomatic display, a year-long truce was agreed by which, in farcical circumstances and without any thought for the consequences, the English negotiators forced the abandonment of recent gains in Brittany. The death of the Black Prince in June 1376, after a prolonged period of infirmity, not only deprived government of its most dashing military leader but opened up the question of the succession to the throne. The King’s younger son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster as a result of his marriage to the heiress to Thomas of Lancaster’s once vast estate, now emerged as a potential rival to his nephew Richard of Bordeaux, born in 1367, son of the Black Prince, grandson of Edward III. Unflattering comparisons were drawn between the position of John of Gaunt in the 1370s and that of a previous King John of England, younger son of King Henry II, who in 1199 had seized the throne and accomplished the murder of his nephew, Arthur of Brittany. In 1376, John of Gaunt as effective vice-regent was forced to stand by as the so-called ‘Good Parliament’ took action against the more corrupt ministers of the King, including Edward III’s own mistress, Alice Perrers.
For the first time on its own initiative rather than merely as a tool in power struggles within the royal family, Parliament emerged as a political force acting in the common interest against the King’s own government. A ‘Speaker’ was for the first time appointed to represent the Commons. The man chosen for this task, Peter de la Mare, was a member of the affinity of the Earl of March and probably owed his promotion to magnate influence. Even so, the very fact that the Commons elected a spokesman represents their claim to new privileges, independent of the authority of the King or the King’s representative in Parliament, John of Gaunt. Ministers henceforth had to work not just to please the King but under the threat of impeachment by Parliament acting as a high court to discipline the executive. As under Henry III or Edward II, the community of the realm, now voiced through Parliament, threatened to subvert the patronage powers of the crown and hence to attack royal authority at its most vulnerable point.
The experiment was short-lived, so short-lived indeed that, had it not served as a precedent for far more radical measures in the seventeenth century, this brief experiment might well have been forgotten. The Good Parliament closed its business in July 1376. By October, the disgraced courtiers had all been pardoned. Peter de la Mare, the Commons’ Speaker, was imprisoned at Nottingham Castle. Within six months, John of Gaunt’s ‘Bad Parliament’ of 1377 had revoked virtually all of the measures of 1376. William Langland, in the late 1370s revising his great English prose poem Piers Plowman, itself intended as a howl of protest against the iniquities of society, introduced a fable to his new preface in which a parliament of rats advised by mice debates but then fails to implement a scheme to place a bell upon the neighbourhood cat; the cat (for which perhaps read the King or more likely John of Gaunt and aristocratic privilege) is needed, so the mice suggest (themselves perhaps symbolizing the ‘Bad Parliament’ of 1377), because the community itself can only cohere and survive under the threat of oppression.
Set in a broader context, the reign of Edward III can be seen not, as Langland might have viewed it, as a slow decline into tyranny and corruption despite all attempts at reform, but as yet a further stage on the road levelling the playing field not just between King and aristocracy but between aristocracy, gentry and peasantry. In the Black Death or the wars with France and Scotland, knight and ploughman died alike, whatever the trappings of their funerals or tombs. Death did not discriminate between palace and mud hut, and there is nothing so effective as death to emphasize that rich and poor share a common destiny, however much the rich may wish otherwise. Even without the great pestilence of the 1340s, Edward’s ambitions in France far overreached the capacity of his Exchequer to finance his campaigns. Just as in the 1290s Edward I had proceeded from hubris in Wales to nemesis in Scotland, so now, once again, the greed for glory and dominion threatened thrombosis to a royal administration starved of the blood supply of tax.
Demands for ever higher subsidies to pay for the King’s wars merely excited the Commons, the aristocracy and such new phenomena as the self-governing oligarchies of towns or trades to combine in developing means to defy the King. Rhetoric, the writings of John Wycliffe, in which such institutions as the established Church were brought into contempt, was matched to a new willingness by Parliament to take practical steps to control the executive, and it is highly significant that the chief voices calling for restraint both in Church and state, however much they have been orchestrated by courtiers such as John of Gaunt, now came from the lower clergy and from simple laymen. Where we learn most of the evils of the early Plantagenets from monastic chroniclers, from the letters of great churchmen such as Thomas Becket, or from the Bible commentaries of Archbishop Stephen Langton, all of them written in Latin and therefore veiled behind the polite conventions of a learned tongue, by the late fourteenth century we can turn to an entire literature of protest, now expressed in the English vernacular itself distinct from the French of the King’s court.
Moreover, the subversion of royal authority continued to gather pace, as the King’s dependence upon subsidy and customs duties became habitual. The introduction of customs on wool exports in the 1270s, their raising to unprecedented levels in the 1330s (when the ‘maltote’ of 40s a sack which Edward I had tried but failed to impose in 1297 became not only accepted but standard), the recognition after the 1290s of Parliament’s authority to grant or withhold tax, and the demand, from the 1340s onwards, and again as a result of the French wars, that such taxes be bestowed on a near-annual basis rather than as occasional subsidies to a King in theory expected to live off his own resources in land and the profits of lordship, served initially to gorge the King’s executive with cash. But the cash itself was then squandered on foreign adventures whose essential futility merely excited resistance to further taxation.
Warfare was to some extent a joint-stock enterprise between King and aristocracy, with large profits for those who supplied the armies, ransomed the more valuable hostages or seized the most valuable prizes. Even so, the costs of fourteenth-century taxation fell ultimately upon the land and upon that class of peasant farmer or labourer whose silver was demanded by their lords in increasing quantities but who themselves gained least from either taxation or warfare. This was an age before old age pensions, before a ‘health service’, before the recognition of any public duty to alleviate the effects of poverty or unemployment. The tax ‘take’ was miniscule compared to that of the modern state, but the profits of taxation were almost exclusively targeted towards the pride, glamour and honour of a King whose subjects gained very little from their sovereign’s glory. As in late Soviet Russia, public display and a massive ‘defence’ budget took priority over all other economic considerations. The ‘state’ in medieval England, save at times of particular crisis or royal incompetence, remained very much the servant of the King.
By the time of Edward III’s death in 1377, the Plantagenets had precious little profit to show for the past forty years of warfare and profligate expenditure in France. The heavier customs duties charged on wool, the decision (motivated in part by a desire to make the garrisoning of Calais a self-financing operation, in part by the selfish interests of those wool merchants working in close cooperation with the court) to establish the Company of the Staple at Calais to tax English exports of wool but to allow foreign merchants to buy wool at English markets and to export it in their own ships untaxed, had already begun insidiously to undermine the taxable profits of an industry which had traditionally defined England as a land of wool and hence of wealth. The Chancellor of England now sat on a woolsack, yet another new symbol of Englishness and of English pre-eminence destined for a long posterity. Meanwhile, in part as a result of demography and the falling population, in part as a result of economic incompetence, the woollen industry itself went into decline.
Rather than export wool at the rates now offered by the Staple in Calais, wool growers turned from foreign markets to the domestic production of cloth. The great trading entrepôts of Flanders and northern France themselves faced economic catastrophe as the cloth industry was transformed from a long-distance into an increasingly localized trade. In the process, the King’s profits, both from tax and from customs duties, began themselves to decline. Wool exports fell from an annual average of 32,000 sacks in the decade after 1350 (each sack being measured as twenty-six stones of wool, so comprising a total export of over eleven million pounds of raw wool by weight), to under 24,000 sacks in the 1380s, 14,000 by 1420, sinking thereafter to 9,000 sacks for the thirty years from 1430 to 1460 (just over three million pounds of wool by weight).
By the 1440s, cloth exports had overtaken the export trade in wool. All told, the King’s revenues from customs and tax declined from an average £70,000 in the 1360s, to £45,000 by 1400 and less than £30,000 in the decades after 1430. As with the lack of strategic thinking devoted to the wars in France, the central failure to grasp economic realities, or to address the declining revenues of the crown, was to have fateful consequences in the longer term. A government which attacks the basis of its own tax revenues, which fails to protect the industry upon which it relies for its financial survival, which mortgages its future revenues on the international money markets, and which spends the money thus borrowed on futile wars or a display of the state’s largesse is heading very rapidly for economic and social disaster. Aquitaine or the kingdom of Castile, the objects upon which were lavished the proceeds of the Edwardian fiscal state of the 1360s and 70s, were as remote from the interests and perceptions of most Englishmen of the fourteenth century as the Falkland Islands or the mud and dust of the Euphrates or the Oxus from those of English taxpayers of a mere recent era.