History of England 1-6

So the incidence of criminality was great. The justices who travelled to Lincoln in 1202 were confronted with 114 cases of murder and 49 of rape; this is not to mention the scores of incidents of theft and assault. When the body of a murdered man was found the men of the neighbourhood were summoned, while the corpse was raised upon a wooden hurdle and exhibited for seven days with logs burning around it to provide recognition at night. All males over the age of twelve, from the four nearest villages, were summoned to an inquest.

There was a popular phrase for a felon – ‘to become a wolf’s head that anyone may cut down’. He could be killed on sight by anyone who encountered him. Real wolves did in fact still inhabit thirteenth-century England. They were not exterminated until 1290. In that year Richard de Loveraz was noted as holding land by the service of hunting the wolf in Hampshire ‘if one can be found’. The wolf was deemed to be vermin, fit for nothing except death. So his fate was transferred to the unfortunate offender.

If the life of the nation was harsh, so was the system of punishment and death. The stocks, and the gibbet, were the common properties of English life. ‘Let him see a priest’ were the last words of the judge in a hanging matter. If you were convicted in Wakefield, you would be hanged; if you were found guilty in Halifax, your head would be cut off. Thieves, apprehended in Dover, were thrown over the cliffs. At Sandwich they were buried alive, in a place known as Thiefdown at Sandown. At Winchelsea they were hanged in the salt marsh there. At Halifax the axe would be drawn up on a pulley, and then fastened with a pin to the side of the scaffold. If the prisoner had been caught in false possession of a horse or an ox, the animal was led to the scaffold with him; the beast was then tied to a cord that held the pin and, at the moment of judgment, the beast was whipped and the pin came out. The proceedings were accompanied by the plaint of a bagpipe. It was a very ancient practice, perhaps predating even the time of the Saxons. The ancient privilege of the private gallows was also in demand; by the old law of infangtheof, a lord had the right to string up a thief caught on his property. In the early thirteenth century sixty-five private gallows were set up in Devon alone.

But thieves were not always put to death. A young offender was often blinded and castrated instead. When in 1221 Thomas of Eldersfield, of Worcester, was accused of malicious wounding he was sentenced to the same punishment; the judges decreed that the relatives of the victim could perform the blinding and castration. They threw the eyeballs to the ground, and used the testicles as little footballs. The apparent severity of the penalties was necessary in a violent society where relatively few offenders were caught. In the absence of a police force or a standing army, condign punishment was one of the few ways of upholding social obligations. That is why the local people were generally compelled to witness the performance of the sentence. The objective was to maintain order.

The trial by water and the trial by ordeal were also considered to be acceptable punishments in criminal cases. Trial by ordeal was conducted under the auspices of the Church. The accused spent three days in fasting and in prayer. On the third day, in a secluded part of the church, a cauldron of water was brought to boiling point by fire; a stone or piece of iron was then placed in the water. The accuser and the accused, each one accompanied by twelve friends, were arranged in two lines opposite one other, with the cauldron in the middle. The participants were sprinkled with holy water by the priest. Some litanies were recited, and the water was once more checked to see that it was at boiling point; the accused then plunged his hand and arm into the water, and took out the weight. The scalded flesh was then wrapped in a linen cloth; if the flesh had healed after the third day the accused was pronounced to be innocent. If the flesh was burned or ulcerous, the prisoner suffered the penalty for his offence.

Another form of divination by water was practised. A man or woman was bound and then lowered into a pit of cold water; the pit was 20 feet (6 metres) wide, and 12 feet (3.6 metres) deep. The priest blessed the water and then called upon God ‘to judge what is just and your right judgment’. If the man began to sink, he was deemed to be innocent; if he was guilty, he floated. The blessed water had rejected him.

The trial by fire was slightly more ingenious. The ceremony once more took place in a church. At the beginning of Mass a fire was made, and a bar of iron placed upon it. At the end of the Mass, the red-hot metal was taken to a small stone pillar. The accused then had to pick up the glowing metal and walk with it for three steps before throwing it down. The treatment was then the same as that of the trial by boiling water.

A strange mode of punishment, known as the ordeal of the morsel, was reserved for priests. A piece of cheese, 1 ounce (28 grams) in weight, was placed on a consecrated host; it was then given to the accused cleric on the solemn understanding that it would stick in his throat if he were guilty. The angel Gabriel was supposed to come down and stop the man’s throat. It is not clear how this worked in practice.

The concept of sanctuary was clearer. A felon who fled to one of a number of specified churches might remain inviolate for forty days; no person might hinder anyone bringing food and drink to him. The church was watched closely during this period, in case the man tried secretly to escape. After forty days the thief or murderer could formally be expelled by the archdeacon, but he could be permitted to stay. He could choose to abjure the realm, however, in which case he was taken to the church porch and assigned a port from which to sail. He was obliged to walk along the king’s highway, deviating neither to the left nor the right, carrying a cross in his hand. When he reached the port he would seek passage within the time of one tide and one ebb; if that were not possible he was to walk every day into the sea, up to his knees, until he found a ship.

Violent crime was of course closely associated with the incidence of drunkenness. The English were well known throughout Europe for their addiction to ale and wine and cider. The French were proud, the Germans were obscene, and the English were drunkards. In English monasteries the daily allowance was a gallon (4.5 litres) of strong ale and a gallon (4.5 litres) of weak ale. Every village had its alehouse. Twelfth-century London was castigated by the chronicler William Fitzstephen for ‘the immoderate drinking of fools’. There was private, as well as public, drinking. The most flourishing trade among the women of an English village was that of brewing. It is one of the essential continuities of national life. ‘The whole land’, Roger of Hoveden wrote, ‘is filled with drink and drinkers.’

The court rolls contain many stories of people who fell out of windows, slipped into cauldrons, tumbled from horses, or plunged into rivers, as a consequence of drink. In 1250 Benedict Lithere had been drinking in a tavern in Henstead in Suffolk, and by the end of the session ‘he could neither walk nor ride, nor barely even stand up’. His brother, Roger, put him on his horse; he fell off. Roger hauled him up a second time, and again Benedict fell off. Then Roger decided on a more drastic measure. He put him back on the horse, and tied him onto the animal. Benedict slipped and fell off once more, killing himself in the process.

John de Markeby, goldsmith, ‘was drunk and leaping about’ in the house of a friend when he wounded himself fatally with his own knife. Alice Quernbetere, extremely drunk, called two workmen by the insulting name of ‘tredekeiles’; she was then murdered by them. Richard le Brewer, carrying a bag of malt home while drunk, stumbled and ruptured himself. William Bonefaunte, skinner, stood ‘drunk, naked and alone at the top of a stair … for the purpose of relieving nature, when by accident he fell head-down to the ground and died’.

The records of madness evince some of the general qualities of the medieval mind. Robert de Bramwyk took his sister, deformed and hunchbacked from the time of her birth, and plunged her into a cauldron of hot water; then he took her out and began stamping on her limbs in order to straighten them. When Agnes Fuller refused to have sex with Geoffrey Riche, he cut off her head with a sword; he informed his neighbours that he was a pig, and hid beneath a trough. Eventually he went home, found a needle and thread, and tried to sew Agnes’s severed head back to the body.

17

A simple king

With the death of King John, the civil war was suspended. Prince Louis was still in England, pursuing his claim to the throne, but his progress met an impediment. John’s nine-year-old son, Henry, was in the southwest. The young boy’s supporters quickly declared him to be king, and he was crowned as Henry III at Gloucester Abbey in the autumn of 1216; Westminster Abbey was not available, because Louis was in control of London. Another unfortunate circumstance was reported. Since the royal crown had been ‘lost’ in the Wash, the young king wore a circlet of gold borrowed from his mother. Henry swore an oath of allegiance to the papacy, and the pope duly extended his blessing. Prince Louis and the rebel barons were no longer opposed to a ruthless and violent king; they were the enemies of a young boy in the protection of the see of Peter. They were not liberators, but irreligious usurpers. Even the prince’s father urged him to desist. He fought on, for a time, since the instinct for power is a strong one. He held London and much of the southeast, but the sentiment of the realm was against him; he also had a fair share of misfortune, his supporters being overwhelmed at Lincoln and a French fleet sending reinforcements beaten back at Sandwich. Finally he agreed to a truce, and was given £7,000 to leave England.

The young king had been asked by his barons to confirm ‘the liberties and free customs’ enshrined in the Magna Carta, so that even those who had remained loyal to King John realized the value of that document as a curb on sovereign power. It had already become an outline of shared principles that could unite the feuding barons. A council was held in St Paul’s Cathedral, where the Great Charter was published in slightly modified form. It had become in essence a new coronation charter. Henry III’s reign had effectively begun. It endured for fifty-six years. There was hardly a moment when he could recall not being a king. This gave him, perhaps, a certain laxity or lack of wariness. He never had to fight for his rule, or fight for land.

There had not been a boy king since the reign of Ethelred the Unready. So in this difficult situation Henry’s most prominent supporters established a regency council. Henry came under the tutelage of three men – the bishop of Winchester, the papal legate and the earl of Pembroke known as the earl marshal. As regents they effectively controlled the administration of the country. They acted quickly and effectively; within a matter of months the exchequer was open for business and the judges had been despatched on their legal peregrinations.

But the consequences of the civil war were plain. Would the barons loyal to John be allowed to retain the castles or lands they had captured from the rebels? Would the various factions within the baronage once more oppose each other? The death of the earl marshal, in 1219, proved the instability of the realm under the boy king. Certain mighty lords declined to hand over royal castles. They were also refusing to pay the taxes levied on them. Small-scale wars sprang up over disputed territory.

A new regency council had been established under the leadership of the papal legate, Pandulf. The head of the judicial system, the judiciar, was Hubert de Burgh. The king’s tutor and guardian, the bishop of Winchester, was Peter des Roches. These three men would play a major role in the vicissitudes of the early reign. They fought among themselves for primacy, and of course provoked hostility in all quarters. It cannot be said that they had any real conception of national well-being; with the possible exception of Pandulf, they were concerned to promote the interests of themselves and their families. That was what rule was all about. De Burgh and des Roches, for example, were engaged in a violent feud. At one meeting the two men broke out in argument against one another; de Burgh accused des Roches of being the instigator of all the troubles in the realm, whereupon des Roches said that he would bring his opponent ‘to his knees’. Then he stormed out of the meeting. These were the men who were supposed to tutor the king in good government.

It is evident enough that, in the period of the king’s minority, the rule was given to the strongest party or parties; by threat or violence, for example, Hubert de Burgh eventually gained control of the administration and began to deal with recalcitrant barons as well as over-mighty subjects. An approximation to order was maintained, but on de Burgh’s terms. Henry does not seem to have been particularly restive or uneasy during de Burgh’s ascendancy, but the time came when he was obliged to assert himself. At the beginning of 1227, at the age of nineteen, he declared himself to be of the age when he should assume all the duties of sovereignty.

This is the occasion, perhaps, to take a closer look at the young king. He was of modest height, and seems to have had no remarkable physical characteristic – except perhaps for his left eyelid, which was inclined to droop. He was amiable, but not perhaps docile. He tried to evict his younger brother, known as Richard of Cornwall, from some lands; the combined fury of the other barons prevented him from doing so. It was an early lesson in the limitations of power.

His personality has been variously described, no doubt because it was compounded of various parts. Some people considered him to be a simpleton, while others believed him to be a fool. He was described as vir simplex, an adjective that might mean without guile or without sense. He was criticized as weak and credulous, submissive and impulsive. He was very impressionable, and tended to favour the opinions of the last person to whom he had spoken. His resentments, and his affections, did not last for very long. It can safely be argued then, that he was not a strong and ruthless king in the manner of his father and grandfather. Unlike them, he had never been schooled in adversity. He had a temper and he could be sharp-tongued, but was not wantonly cruel.

He was pious, perhaps excessively so for a king who must sometimes assert his own rights over the Church. Every day he used to hear three masses. When he journeyed to Paris he could not pass a church where Mass was being said, without participating in the sacred ceremony. When the priest raised the eucharist at the solemn moment of elevation, Henry would hold the priest’s hand and kiss it. King Louis of France once told him that he preferred to hear sermons than to attend Mass. Henry replied that he would rather see his friend than hear one speak of him.

God was his immediate lord. No one on earth was closer to Him than the king. Henry revived the cult of Edward the Confessor, and considered the old king to be his spiritual protector. He rebuilt Westminster Abbey in veneration of his memory, and he now lies buried close to the shrine of the saint. In one sense he was English. He was born in England, at least, and his nickname was ‘Henry of Winchester’; he gave his sons the names of Anglo-Saxon saints.

When a relic of the holy blood of Jesus was sent to him by the patriarch of Jerusalem and the master of the Templars, it was kept in closely guarded secrecy at the church of the Holy Sepulchre in London. The young king carried the phial in solemn procession from St Paul’s Cathedral to Westminster Abbey, his gaze fixed upon the relic at all times. He wore a simple robe of humility, but this ceremony was in part designed to re-emphasize the theory of sacred kingship. When after the service in Westminster Abbey he put on his crown and cloth of gold, he became an icon with his finger pointing upward to the heavens. Henry’s concept of kingship was one of ritual and spectacle. He crossed himself in the manner of ecclesiastics, and ensured that the words of ‘Christus Vincit’ were chanted before him on holy days. His father had spent his days on the road but Henry, less driven by his furies, preferred to settle down in comfort and splendour.

Above all he desired, and wished to be remembered for, a reign of peace. He did not like wars. He was no soldier, in any case. In one declaration he commended his reign for the absence of ‘hostility and general war’ and stated that he had never ceased to labour ‘for the peace and tranquillity of one and all’. He might even be considered a ‘good’ man, but good men rarely make good kings. No quality of greatness could be found in him. Two other shafts of light may help to illuminate him. He liked fresh air and insisted that the windows opposite his bed should be made to open. And he liked images of smiling faces. He ordered a row of smiling angels to be sculpted on either side of a rood screen for the church of St Martin le Grand.

He was in fact the most lavish patron of religious art in the history of England. He built chapels and churches; he was the patron of monkish historians and monkish illuminators; the great development of Gothic art occurred in the course of his long reign when the stones themselves cried out ‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’ Under the gaze of the king the High Gothic of Westminster Abbey emerged, to be seen at its grandest in the octagonal chapter house. Irresolute as he may sometimes have been, he was responsible for the creation of many of the architectural glories of England. In his reign 157 abbeys, priories and other religious houses were established; there was an efflorescence of Lady chapels.

It so happened that, at the beginning of his reign, the first friars came to England; the Dominicans arrived in 1221, and the Franciscans three years later. Their significance has long since been eroded, but at the time of their first presence in the country they materially affected the cultural and spiritual life of the people. They established themselves in the major towns, where they found favour with the leading merchants who had long fallen out of love with the parochial clergy; they preached, literally, in the marketplace.

They did not live in the cloister in the manner of Benedictine monks; they were in the world. They were mendicants, beggars, who roamed the streets seeking clothes and food. They were not, at least in the beginning, supposed to ask for money. Some of the first Franciscans in London lodged in a street known as Stinking Lane. They preached as poor men, therefore, and as a result helped to change the sentiments and perceptions of the townspeople. They told stories and jokes; they described miracles and marvels. They turned English preaching into a folk art. Before their arrival, there had been few sermons in England. It was a new experience for most of their auditors. The first pulpits were in fact not erected until the middle of the fourteenth century.

Of course the friars went the way of all flesh; they became successful and popular; they attracted patrons who endowed them richly; they built friaries and priories that rivalled the monasteries in comfort and prosperity. They became confessors to the great. Anyone who has read the Canterbury Tales will know that, 150 years after their arrival, they had become a byword for worldliness and even licentiousness. Their decline is a measure of the decay of all human institutions, sacred and secular.

On 29 July 1232, Hubert de Burgh was dismissed from the court and the king’s presence. He was accused of stirring up attacks on Italian clergy and expropriating their property. The pope had been making enquiries into the baron’s third marriage, and de Burgh wanted revenge. He miscalculated the depth of the young king’s devotion to the papacy. So the king, on the advice of ‘certain men of good faith’, dismissed him. One of those men of good faith was of course, Peter des Roches; as de Burgh fell, des Roches rose. Within a short time the bishop of Winchester brought in his nephew – or perhaps it was his son, no one was quite sure – as treasurer and head of the royal household. Peter des Rivaux was, like Peter des Roches, from Poitou. This was the king’s maternal homeland. Other Poitevins joined them. A strong affinity existed between them all and it was generally believed at the time that the king preferred their company – and their abilities – over his compatriots.

Yet England was an intrinsic part of a larger European order. Henry’s sister Isabella had married Frederick, the Holy Roman Emperor, known as stupor mundi, or the astonishment of the world. Henry himself married Eleanor of Provence in 1236, and her relatives played a large role in the king’s court. Eleanor’s sister had married King Louis IX of France. Those happy few who had inherited royal blood married one another, so that a network of relatives controlled the fates of kingdoms. But this extended family was not necessarily a happy one, and almost by default Henry became engaged in the endless broils of France and Italy. Europe was a nest of warring principalities, none of which had the internal coherence of England. The king of France, the pope and the emperor were ever vigilant and ever suspicious, ready to take advantage of one another at any opportunity.

Henry’s relationship with France was in any case strained and uncertain. His father had effectively lost the Angevin Empire and, despite his preference for peace, he was determined to retrieve it. But he had a formidable enemy. King Louis had taken over the whole of Poitou. Another part of the erstwhile empire, Gascony, was threatened by Louis and the kings of Castile, Navarre and Avignon. An expedition under the command of the king’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, saved the duchy – if ‘saved’ is the word for precarious Angevin authority over self-assertive local lords. Very little else was achieved. Henry sailed to Normandy, hoping that it would rise in his favour. This did not happen. The king marched about a bit, but there were no battles. Then Henry sailed back. It had been a most ineffectual invasion. It was said that the commanders of the king’s forces had behaved as if they were taking part in a Christmas game.

The king returned to France twelve years later, but his army was routed; Henry was forced to retreat into Bordeaux, the administrative centre of Gascony, and arrange a truce. This second expedition is remarkable for one reason, apart from its failure. The English barons were most unwilling to trust their money, or their men, to Henry’s campaign. They considered that an English king should no longer fight for supposed ancestral lands in France. Normandy or Poitou or Gascony were no longer to be viewed as an extension of England. The island was pre-eminently an island. That is why Henry’s son, Edward I, was more intent upon the conquest of Scotland and of Wales

It was also clear that the Angevin Empire, once broken, could not be put back together again. Only Gascony remained, to provide England with much of its wine. The vintages of Bordeaux are still very popular, and so the Angevin Empire can be said to remain in the wine racks of England. But Gascony provided more forbidding fruit: as the price of his title to the duchy Henry pledged fealty to the king of France. But how can one king be the vassal of another? The uncertain status of the area, poised between France and England, was to become an occasion for the Hundred Years War.

It is a commonplace of English history that Henry III was an ineffectual king. When the royal seal was changed, in the middle of the reign, he was portrayed as bearing a sceptre rather than the original sword. But in the course of his life the economy of the country improved, with the absence of war playing some part in this general prosperity. The lords and tenants of the land were not removed to fight in foreign territories, and were allowed to concentrate upon the condition of their estates. The surviving documents suggest that there was increased traffic in the sale and purchase of land. A vogue for manuals of estate management soon followed, with advice on matters from dung to dairy production. 14 gallons (63.6 litres) of cow’s milk should produce 14 pounds (6.3 kilos) of cheese and 2 pounds (0.9 kilo) of butter. There had not been such a profitable farming industry since the days of Roman England.

The king exacted fewer taxes from his subjects than any of his predecessors and so encouraged the flow of wealth about the realm. Henry relied upon the exploitation of his royal lands, and on the profits to be gained from justice. Richard and John had open mouths, swallowing England’s silver; Henry, partly under the strictures of the Magna Carta, was obliged to hold back.

Other reasons for prosperity can be found. The uncertain relations of England with both France and Flanders were eased by the late 1230s, allowing a great increase in the export of wool to those countries. A threefold increase in overseas trade took place in the course of the thirteenth century; this was the age of road-building, easing the routes of commerce. The silver poured in, much to the advantage of the merchants in the towns and ports. The ‘marble of Corfe’ and the ‘scarlet of Lincoln’, the ‘iron of Gloucester’ and the ‘cod of Grimsby’, were celebrated in doggerel rhyme. They provide the context in which we may best understand the king’s programme of church-and chapel-building.

Some unknowable bond exists between the economic and physical health of the nation, marked by the fact that in the period of Henry’s rule the population began to rise ever more rapidly. As a result demand at home grew for corn, cheese and wool; the economy expanded together with the number of people who took part in it. There were 5 million inhabitants and 8 million sheep. Yet growth is not always or necessarily benign. Prices were rising as a result of increased demand; the consequence of a larger working population was that wages could be kept low. While the more efficient or prosperous farmers flourished, and enlarged their properties, their poorer neighbours were generally left with smaller and smaller plots of land.

The king once remarked that there were no more than 200 men in England who mattered, and that he was familiar with all of them. Many of them were bound together by ties of marriage or of tenure; many of them were associated in local administration and local justice. They were all in kinship and alliance, one with another. They were bound within regional as well as courtly groupings; and there were times, as Henry soon learned to his cost, when they could act together.

The problem was that the majority of these significant lords were distrustful of a king who surrounded himself with his advisers from Poitou, the greatest of whom were Peter des Roches and Peter des Rivaux. The issue was, in part, their foreignness. The English lords were by the thirteenth century all native-born, and in written documents professed their affection for ‘native ground’ or ‘native soil’. In the sixth year of Henry’s reign the feast of St George had been turned into a national holiday. The monkish chronicler of St Albans recorded that those people who did not speak English were ‘held in contempt’.

The foreignness of the Poitevins was compounded by their greed. They came to the court to receive annual stipends. They were eager for lands and for money, but these could only be granted at the expense of the native lords. In the spring of 1233 these magnates let it be known that they would refuse to attend the king’s council if ‘the aliens’ were present; the king’s representative replied that he had every right to choose foreign counsellors and that he would find the force necessary to quell this baronial mutiny. In June 1233 the lords were summoned to the king’s presence in Oxford; they refused to obey. They also delivered a message to the effect that they would throw Henry and the foreigners out of the country before electing a new king. The barons were declared contumacious; they were exiles and outlaws, their lands nominally granted to the Poitevin courtiers.

In this lay a cause for war. The barons went on the offensive, and within six months the king’s forces were defeated. The lands and properties of ‘aliens’ were despoiled. The bishops of the land enforced a truce, in which the king effectively surrendered. The rebel lords were pardoned, and certain of the Poitevins were banished from court. Yet Henry could not separate himself from his instinctive partiality for his extended family of Frenchmen. He was himself half-French, the son of Isabella of Angoulême.

His marriage to Eleanor of Provence in 1236 only compounded the problem. According to Matthew Paris, ‘he took a stranger to wife without the advice of his own friends and natural subjects’. The twelve-year-old girl had brought in her entourage her uncle, William of Savoy. He was half-brother to the king himself, sharing a mother in Isabella. He knew that Henry was impressionable and pliable. He had come to stay. The Savoyards were soon everywhere. Peter of Savoy was given the territory in Yorkshire known as the honour of Richmond. It was he who built the Savoy Palace between the Strand and the Thames, now the site of the Savoy hotel. Boniface of Savoy was granted the archbishopric of Canterbury. Henry had not learned the simple lesson. He believed that the country was his alone. Why should he not distribute it to half-brothers or second cousins or great-nephews if he so wished? He was king.

The opposition to Henry, over succeeding years, took various forms and the expressions of grievance were variously couched. The Poitevins and Savoyards were still too much favoured. The queen was playing too dominant a role. The king was being given ill, or indifferent, advice. He was irresolute and inconstant in policy. He was too much in thrall to the pope. When one of his English barons remonstrated with him for ignoring the clauses of the Magna Carta he is said to have replied, ‘Why should I observe this charter, which is neglected by all my grandees, both prelates and nobility?’ The answer came, that he ought as king to set an example. The general impression is of weak or bad government on a sufficiently large scale to merit some intervention.

In 1244 he demanded a large sum from parliament. In return the lords insisted that they be given authority to elect the justiciar and the chancellor, thus taking command of the law and the exchequer. The king agreed only to renew his vow to accept the provisions of the Magna Carta. Four years later, when he asked parliament to grant him more money, the lords refused. They told him the revenue was wasted on wax candles and on useless processions; they also informed him that the food and drink he consumed, even the clothes he wore, were snatched from their lawful owners. Five years later Henry again demanded money, on the ground that he was about to lead a crusade to the Holy Land. No one really believed him. Once more he only exacted the sum by a solemn vow to obey the precepts of the Magna Carta. Once more he reneged on his promises. We see here the unsettled reign of the first king of England struggling in the restraints of law.

Then there came what was called at the time ‘a new and sudden change’. On 7 April 1258 a parliament was called, since the king again needed money. He had promised the pope the vast sum of 135,541 marks, in return for his son Edmund being installed as king of Sicily; the Sicilian adventure was a fiasco, but the debt remained.

The king’s demands were all the more onerous because this was a time of famine. The harvest of 1257 had failed, and by the spring of the following year the price of wheat had increased two and a half times. We may survey the activities of kings and lords, but another life sometimes escapes observation: the life of the wretched. Matthew Paris reports, in this year of dearth, ‘an innumerable multitude of poor people, swollen and rotting, lying by fives and sixes in pigsties, on dunghills, and in the dirt of the streets’. The resources of the country were confined to relatively few people. Approximately 60 per cent of the agricultural population was deemed to be too poor to pay taxes. They were not on anyone’s list to be saved or protected. No ‘state’ was in place to succour them, and so they went to the wall. The king was in any case only concerned with his own financial problems.

The barons of England were not inclined to honour his debts. At the end of April 1258, after much fruitless debate, a party of barons made their way to the court at Westminster. They deliberately put their swords beside the entrance to the king’s hall before saluting Henry in the expected manner. But he was unnerved by the sight of their weapons. An eyewitness report, placed in the Tewkesbury chronicles, describes the scene. ‘What is this, my lords?’ he asked them. ‘Am I, wretched fellow, your captive?’

Roger Bigod, the earl of Norfolk, replied for them all. ‘No, my lord, no! But let the wretched and intolerable Poitevins and all aliens flee from your face and ours as from the face of a lion, and there will be glory to God in the heavens and in your land peace to men of good will.’

This affords a glimpse of the colourful and spirited speech of the thirteenth century. Bigod then asked the king to accept ‘our counsels’. Henry, naturally enough, asked what they might entail. The barons had already agreed among themselves on their demands. The king was to be guided and advised by a group of twenty-four councillors, twelve to be chosen by the king and twelve chosen by the barons. If the king had refused these terms, he faced a real prospect of civil war. He knew as much himself, and so after deliberation he accepted the terms offered to him. He must also have been swayed by the fact that the barons agreed to grant him ‘aid’ in his financial embarrassments.

A committee of twenty-four was chosen and, in the summer of 1258, published what amounts to a manifesto on domestic and international affairs. The major proposal was a simple one. The king was to be directed by the advice of a council of fifteen men nominated by the barons, and parliament itself would choose the justiciar, chancellor and treasurer. The king’s acceptance of what became known as the Provisions of Oxford was issued in English as well as in Latin and French, testimony to the manifest identity of the realm. In practice the council was soon ruling the country. It took possession of the great seal. It settled all the matters of state without the king’s presence. If he remonstrated with them, they replied that ‘this is how we wish it’. Henry had become a minor again. This was no longer the government of a king.

That was the reason it did not, and could not, work. How could the power of the country, exercised by one man for thirty-one years, now be dispersed between fifteen people? Quarrels broke out between the barons over the nature and purpose of their control of the king, and they found it difficult to deal with international affairs without the direct intervention of the king with his fellow monarchs. The barons themselves had their own local interests – they were, after all, primarily regional magnates – which were not necessarily compatible with national administration. It was said that they were concerned only with self-aggrandizement.

The baronial government collapsed within two years. A papal bull was published, releasing Henry from any promises made under duress to his lords; the bull stated that when a king was distrained by his subjects it was as if a woodman was assaulted by his own axe. Henry also declared that the barons had stripped the king of ‘his power and dignity’. He moved into the Tower, both as a defence against his enemies and as a potent symbol of that power.

Not greatly chastened by events, he resumed the exercise of sovereignty. It lasted for only two years. The ‘aliens’, the Savoyards in particular, were once more blamed for being ‘over-mighty’. Henry had also introduced a body of foreign mercenaries, provoking rumours that the country was about to suffer an invasion. So in 1263 a group of dissident barons found themselves a new leader to press their claims, and in particular their demand that they should be governed only ‘per indigenas’ or by native-born men.

Simon de Montfort, summoned by the barons, sailed to England. It has been said that he was the first ever leader of an English political party. He was perhaps an odd representative of the English cause. He was born in France and was part of a noble French family. Yet he had native connections. He had inherited the earldom of Leicester, by virtue of the fact that his grandfather had married the sister of the previous earl; it was a circuitous route, but it was a proper one. He had also married the king’s sister Eleanor. So, as one chronicler put it, he became ‘the shield and defender of the English, the enemy and expeller of aliens, although he himself was one of them by nation’. The barons summoned the representatives of the shires to an assembly at St Albans, while the king called them to Windsor.

The confrontation between Henry III and Simon de Montfort could not be contained. De Montfort himself was an obstinate and intolerant man, with an obsessive hatred for Jews and heretics. He was something of an isolated figure in England, with a disdain for the compromises and irresolution of his English supporters whom he had once described as ‘fickle and deceitful’. He was impatient of fools, and could be high-handed both in his manner and in his methods. He was, in other words, a bully. He knew what was right. He knew, or thought he knew, what had to be done. He had in the past commanded a crusading army, and Henry himself had once despatched him to Gascony as his seneschal or viceroy. The king was notoriously fearful of storms. It was an aspect of his simplicity. But on one occasion he told de Montfort that ‘by God’s head, I fear you more than all the thunder and lightning in the world’.

A large element of self-righteousness existed in de Montfort’s nature that may have helped to conceal, even from himself, his true purpose. Like the rest of his family he wanted to extend his power and lordship. That was where proper honour lay. He preferred strong rule as a moral and theoretical imperative, but surely it would be all the stronger if it were wielded by him? Further questions arose. If he were able to gain the victory, would he allow the king to resume his rule under baronial restraint? Or would he himself take on the role of sovereign?

The members of both parties engaged in intermittent conflict after his arrival in England. They were also involved in what would now be called a propaganda war, with open letters to the shire courts and sermons in the churchyards. The political ballad also emerges in this period. In the early months of 1264 the struggle turned into open and intensive warfare, on a scale not seen in England since the battles of King John with his barons. The peace that the king craved was snatched from him. He had an uneasy relationship with his elder son, Edward, since Edward had the stronger and more valiant character. At his instigation the king marched on the rebel town of Northampton, bearing the royal standard of a red dragon with fiery tongue; this bloody flag was a sign that no quarter would be given to those who surrendered. The king took the town. Edward then pillaged rebel lands in Staffordshire and Derbyshire. De Montfort himself was using London, where the citizens had turned decidedly against the king, as the centre of operations. Here he was impregnable. But Henry had the larger army.

A decisive confrontation could not be avoided. Otherwise the administration of the country would perish with a thousand cuts. On 11 May Henry and his entourage arrived at the Cluniac priory of Lewes in Sussex. The baronial army took up its position 10 miles (16 kilometres) to the north. Two days passed in inconclusive negotiations, but then de Montfort moved forward to the high downs overlooking Lewes. The armies faced one another and, as battle began, Edward led a furious attack upon the contingent of Londoners; he broke them, and pursued the scattered bands for several hours. That was the mistake. By the time he returned the rebels had won a signal victory, with the king himself immured in the priory. De Montfort had not flown the red dragon on his standard, so an armistice was quickly arranged. The Lord Edward, as he was known, was confined in Dover Castle as a hostage for the king’s good intent.

A Latin poem of 968 lines, entitled The Song of Lewes, was written soon after the event. Its intent was to celebrate what de Montfort had called ‘the common enterprise’, and it justified the armed rebellion of the barons as the only means of ensuring that they played their proper role in the administration of the country. ‘Commonly it is said, as the king wishes, so goes the law; the truth is quite otherwise, for the law stands, though the king falls.’ It would not be wholly fanciful to suggest the presence of something like a communal sentiment of the realm in the face of manifest injustice. Strong evidence also exists that the working population of the countryside took matters into their own hands and sided with the barons. Some Leicestershire villagers, for example, surrounded a captain and his men who were fighting in the king’s army; they attempted to arrest them on the grounds that they were ‘against the welfare of the community of the realm and against the barons’. These were not idle or theoretical concepts; they were part of living reality.

Many hundreds of villagers were also fighting as foot soldiers beside the mounted knights. The poorest of them had knives and scythes, the more prosperous were obliged by law to possess an iron cap and a lance. They were fighting against the king’s exactions. At the beginning of the nineteenth century three pits were uncovered in Lewes; each one contained approximately 500 bodies. They had just been piled one on top of another, the unmourned and unremembered casualties of war. They are described by one chronicle as ordinary people bred ‘de vulgo’, from the masses. Very few knights were killed in the battle.

Henry III was returned to London after his defeat, where he was placed for safekeeping in St Paul’s Cathedral. A small body of nine barons, under the leadership of de Montfort, assumed power while all the departments of state continued to operate in the name of the king. But it was only a name. De Montfort was now the strong man of the state. It is the first instance in English history of a subject seizing rule from an anointed sovereign. He confiscated the lands of eighteen barons who had fought on the wrong side, and took the lion’s share of ransom money. He even turned on his fellow barons, and consigned one of them to prison; another fled the realm. De Montfort was becoming a tyrant. That is what happens within oligarchies; one climbs over the others. As a result his support was soon fatally weakened. Who would not prefer a king to a tyrant?

Yet in the search for support he summoned two parliaments, at one of which the representatives of the towns as well as the knights and lords were present. From a period of authoritarian rule emerged an instrument of liberty; it can be said that the growing identity of the nation itself was shaped in opposition to the king. Out of contrast comes growth; out of opposition emerge principles. The exploitations of Richard and John had helped to foster a sense of communitas in towns and villages; the weakness of Henry now led to a more general recognition of the ‘community of the realm’.

The growth and development of parliament were part of the same process. There had always been parliaments of a kind. The structure itself existed before the moment it reached selfconsciousness, thereby acquiring an identity. We cannot look back into the darkness of prehistory, but we can be sure that the tribal leaders had their own councils of wise or noble men. The Saxon invaders had brought with them the idea of the witan, which means literally ‘the knowing’, or witenagemot (the word itself is not recorded before 1035); this was an assembly, made up of bishops and nobles, that met once or twice a year. They were consulted by the king, and deliberated upon the making of new laws or the raising of new taxes. They may have had the power of electing, and even deposing, a king.

The Norman council, established after the successful invasion of England, was a smaller body of perhaps thirty-five ecclesiastical and secular lords. In 1095 William Rufus called together a larger assembly, comprising all the abbots, bishops and principes or chief men of the land. This became the template for the councils of later reigns; with the absence of the Norman and Angevin kings in France and elsewhere, the assembly of magnates learned how to act collectively to enforce its will. They also assumed a collective identity. In the reign of Henry II the abbot of Battle declared that the king could not change the laws of the country without ‘the counsel and consent’ of the barons. That was still debatable.

The first parliamentary summons came from King John who, in the summer of 1212, demanded that the sheriff of each county should come to him with ‘six of the more lawful and discreet knights who are to do what we shall tell them’. The knights were not present to advise the king. They were there to communicate the royal will to their regions. Yet the provisions of the Magna Carta, three years later, were designed to curtail the powers of the king; in particular it was ordained that no monarch could levy extraordinary taxation without the ‘common counsel’ of the realm. The realm, at this juncture, of course meant only the barons and the bishops.

In 1236 Henry III called a parliament at Westminster. This represents the first official use of the term, but the actual assembly consisted only of lay magnates and bishops. There were no representatives from the shires or the towns. But the king needed money from various and different sources. He could no longer rely on the feudal tax paid by his barons, or on taxes collected from their tenants. So in 1254 the sheriffs were ordered to send two knights from each county chosen by the county court. The lower clergy were also graciously admitted to the parliamentary assembly.

Simon de Montfort, after his victory, summoned two representatives from each town. Knights and the leaders of the towns, known as burgesses, then became as much part of parliament as the bishops and lords. We have here the rudimentary beginnings of the House of Commons. No one seems to have noticed this at the time, however, and there is no extant commentary upon the change. It was not in any case a great exercise in democracy. De Montfort’s immediate purpose was simply to have more supporters in place against the great lords who were antagonistic to him; a large gathering would also help to disguise the enforced absence of his enemies. So he brought in the knights and the townsmen.

Unintended and unforeseen consequences followed the appearance of the parliament. Its growing importance, for example, elevated the role of knights as well as the richer townsmen. A knight can be defined as one who possessed one or several manors and who was generally involved in the government of his local area in such posts as sheriff or forest official. He took on the royal work of his shire, administrative and judicial.

The knights were known as buzones or ‘big men’. They were approximately 1,100 or 1,200 in number. They are the men whose images are seen, in wood and stone, in the old churches of England. They wear body armour, and some of them are about to draw the sword; some carry shields; others are shown with their hands folded in prayer; they are often cross-legged; double images of husband and wife are sometimes preferred. This was the period when coats of arms were recorded, and the science of heraldry emerged in all its fancifulness. Early in the fourteenth century, knights’ burials were commemorated with full-figure brasses.

Their pre-eminence led to a general stratification in the various ranks and classes below them. By the middle of the fourteenth century, at the latest, there had emerged the outlines of what has become known as the gentry, including knights, esquires and gentlemen. An esquire was a prosperous landowner who for various reasons had surrendered the status of knighthood. A gentleman was of lower standing, simply the head of a landed family. By 1400 this difference was stated in monetary terms. An esquire earned between £20 and £40 a year, while a gentleman would earn between £10 and £20. Knights and esquires might serve as sheriffs or as Justices of the Peace, while gentlemen took on such lesser roles as undersheriffs and coroners. Gentlemen were often parish gentry, while knights were always county gentry. It is a matter of some interest that this social structure survived, with modifications, until the latter part of the nineteenth century. It held together the country for more than 500 years.

Wherever we look in the thirteenth century, we see evidence of greater formality and control. In the towns of England an oligarchy of the richer merchants was strictly organized, in consort with royal officialdom; the crafts and merchants were now gathered into guilds and trade associations. The bureaucracy of the king’s court was becoming ever more complex and methodical. Administrative historians have noticed the huge proliferation of documents in the reign of Henry III. Even the crusaders setting out from England to the Holy Land were given written contracts that stipulated certain common terms of service. Every right, or verdict, was defined in writing. A royal bailiff, approaching a small farmer for taxes, tells him that ‘thou art writen yn my writ’. It is a paradox, perhaps, that in the reign of a weak or indecisive king the apparatus of the Crown had never been more efficient or adaptable. But how else are we to explain the fact that, despite the disasters of his government, Henry III continued to rule for so long? By degrees the nation was fixed and rendered stable, despite the manifest tempests upon its surface.

One of the tempests gathered at the end of May 1265. The Lord Edward, still in custody, was allowed to go riding; he was a prince of the royal blood, after all. But on this spring morning he tried one horse after another, going further and further out; then he chose one particular horse and, on the signal of a gentleman rider in the distance, he galloped off. Before long, he reached the safety of Ludlow Castle. Edward was at liberty. He was free to raise his father’s standard against de Montfort and the other rebels.

The threat was immediate, and the result not long in coming. The two armies met on 4 August at Evesham in Worcestershire. When de Montfort saw the royalist forces approaching him in well-ordered array he remarked that ‘they learned how to do that from me’. At their head was the Lord Edward; now, at twenty-six years old, he was de facto leader of the realm. De Montfort had taken Henry with him as hostage and, as the battle grew more fierce, he and his knights fought in a circle around the king; one of the royalists, Roger Leyburn, managed to rescue Henry from the mêlée. Edward had already appointed twelve men in what might be called a death squad, whose only task was to kill de Montfort. They were successful. His head was cut off, and his testicles dangled on each side of his nose; the trophy was then sent to the wife of the man who had beheaded him. A general slaughter ensued, the first of its kind in medieval England where lords and knights were ordinarily spared for ransom or for the sake of honour. Edward would not be the same kind of king as his father.

Simon de Montfort’s body was given to the monks of Evesham, in whose abbey it was buried. His tomb lies now in the ruins, beneath the high altar, marked by a granite cross. In his death he was by some considered to be a martyr and his burial place became an object of pilgrimage. Here was the grave of a rebel in the cause of righteousness, and failure only added lustre to his reputation. Rumours spread of miracles in the abbey.

But they were not enough to save his supporters. Those who were not slaughtered on the field at Evesham were scattered. Some fled to Kenilworth, the castle of the de Montforts, while others took refuge in the Isle of Ely. Some escaped to the wild woods, and it is possible that the saga of Robin Hood emerged from the life of one such wandering lord. They were known as the ‘disinherited’, and they only found their way back into the king’s grace with massive payments.

Henry resumed his reign. The great seal was returned to him, and he sat as before with his council. The imposition of order was swift enough, although in truth the country had not been much affected by the wars between its lords. Local difficulties had occurred in the immediate neighbourhood of the fighting, but the business of the realm continued as before. Henry’s son and heir, Edward, felt able to leave the country and take the part of a crusader in the Holy Land. He prepared himself to ascend the throne in the service of Christ.

The king himself was free to press ahead with the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey, where he was impatient to remove the relics of Edward the Confessor to a new shrine. The abbey itself was another example of the community of the realm. For twentyfive years 800 men had worked upon the glorious fabric with its new presbytery, new chapter house, new crossing and a slowly rising north front. It was a work for the generations. The stonemasons of Purbeck, the craftsmen of all England, the sailors and wagoners, had all played their part in this mighty enterprise. The tilemakers, the mosaicists and the workers in metal had collaborated in the service of the king’s passion for curiously crafted things. He lavished so much money on the building that it has become a permanent memorial of his reign. He expired in the fifty-sixth year of that reign, on 16 November 1272; at the age of sixty-five, he is likely to have died simply of old age. The tomb of Henry III, with a gilt-bronze effigy of the king, is still to be seen in the abbey that he built.

18

The seasonal year

Of the ways of marking time in England, the calendar of the years of the king’s reign was the least significant; the sacred calendar and the seasonal calendar were pre-eminent. They represented the habitual and unchanging nature of the world; they expressed a deep sense of belonging to the land and to the everlasting that are the true horizons of the medieval period. Seasonal and sacred time were intermingled.

Winter, lasting from Michaelmas on 29 September to Christmas, was the season for sowing; wheat and rye were known as winter seed. Some of the cattle were removed from their summer pastures to the relative warmth of the stalls, while the rest were slaughtered; the pigs were hustled to their sties. November was known as the blood month. What was not eaten was salted. The twelve days of the Christmas celebration were the only long holiday that the farmers and labourers enjoyed; it was a time of feasts and drinking, and of the mysterious rituals of the mummers’ plays.

In spring, from Epiphany on 6 January to the Holy Week of Easter, the men set the vineyards and made the ditches; they hewed wood for fences and planted the vegetable garden. The world of work had begun again. The first Monday after Epiphany was known by the women as Distaff Monday and by the men as Plough Monday, thus neatly describing their two occupations. One spun and the other delved.

On Plough Monday, a ‘fool plough’ or ‘white plough’ was dragged about the village by young ploughmen covered in ribbons and other gay ornaments; they asked for pennies at every door and, if refused, they ploughed the ground before the cottage. The leader of the ploughmen, or ‘plough-bullocks’, was a young man dressed up as an old woman and known as Bessy. Another participant would wear a foxskin as a hood, with the tail hanging behind his back. This ancient ceremony was still being performed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perhaps testifying to the customary nature of English rural life. It is still practised in certain areas of eastern England, where its origins in the Danelaw are assumed to lie. The feast of Candlemas on 2 February, commemorating the Purification of the Virgin, was the time for tillage to be resumed; it was the moment for the ‘lenten seed’ of oats and barley and beans to be sown. This was also the time for the pruning of trees.

From Hocktide, the second Monday and Tuesday after Easter, to Lammas, on the first day of August, came the summer. That is why the May queen or Flora was known as the summer queen rather than the spring queen. On the day before Hockday the females of the village captured and bound as many men as they could find, and kept them until a fee or ransom had been paid. On Hockday itself the males of the village engaged in the same sport. Days of festival were always celebrated before the resumption of serious agricultural work. This was the time when the husbandman must lay down the manure, cut the wood, shear the sheep, clear the land of weeds, repair fences, rebuild the fish-weirs and the mills. The fallow fields were ploughed. Midsummer occurred on the feast of the nativity of St John the Baptist. On St John’s Eve, 23 June, as a thirteenth-century monk from Winchcombe observed, ‘the boys collect bones and certain other rubbish, and burn them, and therefrom a smoke is produced on the air. They also make brands and go about the fields with the brands. Thirdly, the wheel which they roll.’ The wheel was the wheel of fire, set aflame and sent rolling down the hills of the region. In this way the pagan rituals and the Christian calendar were united in one celebration. On St John’s Day itself the harvest of hay was brought in. When all the hay had been stacked a sheep was let loose in the field; it became the prize of the mower who caught it. Only after St John’s Day were the thistles in the fields cut down; it was said that if they were removed earlier, they would increase threefold.

From Lammas to Michaelmas, at the end of September, came the harvest time of corn known as autumpnus. The name Lammas came from the Anglo-Saxon hlaf-Mass or loaf-Mass; in a good year it was a time of fruitfulness. When the last sheaf had been ceremonially cut, a supper known as harvest home was served. As Thomas Tusser wrote in the sixteenth century,

In harvest time, harvest folk, servants and all

Should make altogether good cheer in the hall.

In their laughter and in their dancing they were keeping time with the seasons and at the same time celebrating the continuities of the earth; they were part of a universal rhythm which they experienced but did not necessarily understand.

After the harvest had been taken in, the cattle would be allowed to graze on the stubble. At the same time rye and wheat would be sown in the fallow fields after they had been ploughed and harrowed. After the sowing was over there was customarily a feast with seed cake, pasties and a dish of milk, wheat, raisins and spices known as furmenty or frumenty. Then came a time when the sheaves of the harvest were threshed, separating the ears from the straw; this was followed by the winnowing, when the grain was divided from the chaff. Also at this period the labourers were obliged to prepare the sheep-pens and the pigsties.

So the agricultural year was embedded in the ritual year. That is why, in the churches and cathedrals of England, the capitals and pillars were decorated with images of the months; the mowers are carved to celebrate the month of July, while a husbandman with sickle is the stone emblem of September. In Southwell Minster the pigs snuffle among the great stone oak leaves for the acorns of November. The natural world is familiar and immutable. The ease of summer and the woe of winter are part of the eternal order in which the humblest labourer participated; in medieval poetry, the ploughman was often considered to be holy. On sacred days the worshippers in the parish church, and the labourers in the field, were participating in complementary rituals. On the three rogation days preceding the Ascension Day, the parishioners would walk around the boundaries and bless the fields.

Murrain, the infectious disease that blighted sheep and cattle, was considered to be susceptible to prayer. A Mass in celebration of the Holy Spirit was sung, each parishioner offering up a penny. The sheep were then gathered in the field, and passages from the gospels were read out to them; then they were sprinkled with holy water while a hymn was chanted. This was followed by the recital of the Pater Noster and Ave Maria. Nevertheless animal mortality remained very high.

The nature of agriculture, month by month, hardly changed over the centuries. Open-field systems were common in the midlands, where large and unfenced fields were divided into strips which were owned by individual families; small enclosed fields were ubiquitous in Kent and in Essex; in the north and west rectangular fields were aligned one with another. From the thirteenth century there emerged the device of enclosure, whereby individual farmers exchanged their strips of land with one another; they could then create a larger portion that could be enclosed by hedges or fences.

Hamlets and small fields were typical of the north of England, while villages and large fields spread across the midlands. Considerable variety, however, existed within the counties. East Somerset was the home of open fields, while the west of that county was enclosed. East Suffolk was enclosed, and West Suffolk was open. The standard tenement of land was known in the south as yard-land, and in the north as oxgang, and its location is ascertained in documents by the position of the sun. The south and the east were considered to be the brighter part of the earth. The lie of the land, the nature of the soil, the patterns of the climate, all played their part in shaping the farming system of each small territory. Parts of Wiltshire were clay land and other parts were chalk; the soil of Hampshire was basin gravel.

An infinite variety of agricultural practice existed in every part of the country, enforced or determined by custom and tradition. The families of each village or hamlet could have been tending the same parcel of land for many centuries, living in intimate relationship with it. They were part of the soil. In an early book of law we find that a hamlet is defined as possessing ‘nine buildings, and one plough, and one kiln, and one churn, and one cat, and one cock, and one bull, and one herdsman’. The different kinds of field and pasture may also reflect the persistent influence of tribal customs that cannot be assigned a definite date. The communal history that allowed the partition into small fields or strips is also now irrecoverable; it is merely present as far back as we can look. Every portion of land had over the centuries acquired its own character of uses, rights and duties; it was a living thing, created out of custom and habit.

It was through land that a man gained honour and prestige as well as wealth; the extent of his lands measured the size of his military obligations. It was a commonplace that if you did not own a parcel of land you could not marry or raise a family. The landless man in the countryside was a nonentity. The law was essentially the will of the majority of those who owned land. Social life was dominated by the sale or purchase of land, in which 90 per cent of the population were involved one way or another. Castles were at the centre of military campaigns, from the eleventh century onwards, precisely because they dominated the surrounding land. The most severe form of punishment was the ravaging of the land. The pattern of landholding, rather than any administrative division, determined the nature and policy of each district and each shire.

Land was in fact the single most important cause of violence and social dissension. When one knight named only as Edward refused to do services to the prior of St Frideswide in exchange for a hide of land at Headington, the matter was resolved by judicial combat. ‘After many blows between the champions, and although the champion of Edward had been blinded in the fight, they both sat down and as neither dared attack the other, peace was established as follows …’ Less forceful means of justice could be tried. A farmer from Evesham claimed land from the abbey there; he took the precaution of filling his shoes with earth from his own estate so that he could swear in front of the monks that he was standing upon his own land.

Ploughing time, and the season for mowing, were earlier in some parts of the country than in others. Yet the rewards of labour were the same. The scythe and the sickle, the flail and the winnowing fan and the plough, were part of the common inheritance. A medieval folk song celebrated the appearance of ‘oats, peas, beans and barley’ that in The Tempest became ‘wheat, rye, barley, fetches, oats and peas’. In the great fields we would see fifty or sixty men working on the land, scattered over the strips, bent over with toil. Many illustrations of them can be found in calendars and books of hours, dressed in tight breeches with a smock or blouse made of cloth and tied at the waist by a belt; in cold weather they wore a hooded mantle of wool that covered the upper part of the body. Sometimes they wore woollen caps.

‘First thing in the morning,’ the peasant recites in a tenth-century treatise, ‘I drive my sheep to pasture and stand over them in heat and cold with dogs lest wolves should devour them, and I lead them back to their sheds and milk them twice a day and move their folds besides, and I make cheese and butter …’ On the common land of the village, the cattle would be watched by a boy.

The farm animals of the medieval period were smaller and weaker than their modern counterparts, and the productivity of the soil was far inferior. It was a continuing and earnest business of survival for the farmer and the labourer, who often lived in conditions of rank squalor. The world was not progressing; it was believed to be in a state of steady deterioration from the age of gold to the age of iron. This portrait of the seasonal year must not be taken as an advertisement for a ‘merry England’. Even the entertainments, those sports and games and rituals that are at the heart of the ritual calendar, were often brutal and violent. It was a life of sweat and dirt, but one that was quickly over.

19

The emperor of Britain

At the time of Henry’s death the Lord Edward was in Sicily, recovering from an attempted assassination. He had been in the Holy Land, where he had achieved nothing. He had been attacked in the city of Acre by a man wielding a dagger dipped in poison and almost died from the wound; the blackened flesh, corroded by the poison, had to be cut away in an operation almost as deadly as the original assault. But he survived, and sailed to safe harbour in Sicily. It was here that he learned of the death of his father.

He did not hurry back for his coronation. He had already been declared king in his absence, but he did not arrive in London for another eighteen months. He lingered in France until the summer of 1274. He had been born at Westminster, but he was by inheritance still essentially French; more pertinently, he was a member of the royal family of Europe. One of the reasons for the delay in his coronation had been his desire to put the affairs of Gascony in order. Gascony was, for him, just as important as England.

In his absence a parliament had been held, suggesting the solid continuity of the country’s administration. But there had been instances of disorder, and of rivalries between magnates, that the new king would be obliged to quell. He was one who in truth demanded submission; unlike his father, he was a good soldier. He came back with his crusading knights who would in large part make up his royal household; they were in effect a private bodyguard for the king, descended from the warrior bands of an earlier period. It is evidence of the militaristic nature of his reign that, at his coronation in the new abbey (not yet entirely built), his retainers rode into the transepts on their horses. The new reign opened with the clatter of hooves upon stone.

Edward I looked the part. He was of ‘great stature’, according to Nicholas Trevet, a Dominican scholar who knew him well. His long legs caused him to be known as ‘Edward Longshanks’; when he hunted, he galloped after the stag with his drawn sword. He was considered to be ‘the best lance in the world’, which meant that he embodied all of the chivalric virtues of pride and honour. He was quick to anger, and quick to forgive. Trevet stated that the king was guided by ‘animo magnifico’, or what might be described as magnanimity, but this may merely be a truism applied to a warrior king. He had a slight lisp, or stammer, and his left eyelid drooped in the same manner as that of his father. He could be very fierce. When the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral approached him in order to complain about the taxation of the clergy, the unfortunate cleric expired on the spot. The archbishop of York, after being rebuked by Edward, died of depression. The aura or presence of the king was very powerful.

As soon as the great golden crown of state had been placed upon Edward’s head at his coronation, he removed it with a dramatic gesture. He then made a statement that deviated from the set procedures of the ceremony. ‘I will never take up this crown again,’ he declared, ‘until I have recovered the lands given away by my father to the earls, barons and knights of England and to the aliens.’ He was as good as his word. Over the next twenty years he established commissions that looked into the supposed rights and claims of the landowners of the country. The phrase used was quo warranto?, ‘by what right or title’ do you hold these lands? Which of course might mean – surely they are mine? The whole process created a nest of lawyers. As a piece of contemporary verse put it:

And the Quo Warranto

Will give us all enough to do.

One old nobleman, when asked by what right, simply brandished his sword. That was the ancient and instinctive response. Come and fight me for it. But no lord, however mighty, could fight Edward. He had learned the lessons of his father’s long and confused rule.

In the first parliament of his reign, convened at Westminster in the spring of 1275, Edward further strengthened his hold upon the kingdom. With some 800 representatives, it was the largest parliament ever assembled. Edward can in fact be considered the first king to use that body in a constructive manner. He invited its members to submit complaints about malfeasance or maladministration, some of them no doubt designed to trim the power of over-mighty lords. These complaints were known as ‘petitions’ and from this time forward parliament was held to be in part a judicial tribunal. Petitions soon arose from all over the kingdom. There were too many of them, and they impeded the work of the parliament, but they had one valuable function. They allowed the king to see what was going on in the various regions of the realm.

At the same time the demand of the king for more taxes turned the knights and burgesses into a definite group; they were the ones, after all, who would have to levy the money from their shires and their towns. So they began to deliberate together, in the chapter house of Westminster Abbey, and came to be distinguished from the prelates and barons. They were not a ‘House’ of Commons, but they had common interests. They were essentially a parliamentary committee, duly subservient to the full parliament of their betters. They were not always summoned by the king, but steadily they grew in importance. The bishops and magnates still determined the great matters of state, but the knights and burgesses were the voices of those who were being taxed. There would soon come a time when their assent, and oversight, became vital. It should be stressed, however, that there was no general demand from the towns and the shires for representation. It was the king who called forth the knights and townsmen; he imposed upon his subjects the duty of coming to parliament, where he might command them and tax them. When they had obeyed his will, he dismissed them.

In the parliament of 1275 Edward extracted from the assembled lords and knights and townsmen a tax upon the export of wool; from this time forward the king received 6 shillings and 8 pence upon every sack shipped out of the country. At one stroke, his finances were improved. He handed over their care to the Riccardi bankers of Lucca. In other legislation he bore down heavily upon the Jews, but this is matter for Chapter 20. In the same parliament a long and complicated Act, known as ‘the statute of Westminster the First’, was passed by which the king intended ‘to revive neglected laws that had long been sleeping because of his predecessors’ weakness’; these neglected laws, of course, were those that implied or required strong royal control. In a similar move towards royal dominance he replaced most of the sheriffs of the counties with men whom he knew and trusted.

Edward I, unlike his ancestors, had no great empire. Instead he had a kingdom, which he determined to strengthen and consolidate. He first marched into Wales, where he set up the line of castles that still endures. Edward’s castles are magnificent creations, in part conceived as the edifices of chivalric romance. The king had a very strong attraction to the mythical history of Arthur and the Round Table; by claiming kinship with his fabulous predecessor, he could also claim sovereignty over the whole island. Arthur was known as ‘the last emperor of Britain’. Yet he had been considered by many to have been a Welsh or British king fighting against a Saxon enemy. It was rumoured that he was not dead, only resting, and that he would come again to destroy the enemies of the Welsh. This was not comforting news for Edward’s English soldiers.

So his death, and permanent removal from the arena of combat, had in some way to be confirmed. It was fortunate that the bodies of Arthur and Guinevere had been discovered by miracle, in the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey, during the reign of Henry II. Now Edward decreed that the bodies should be dug up, and then reinterred in a magnificent sarcophagus. The corpses of Arthur and Guinevere, if such they were, were wrapped in silk by Edward and his queen before being placed in a tomb of black marble. Their skulls were retained for public display. They were definitely dead. Such was the pious belief in the efficacy of the past, however, that elaborate rituals were considered to be necessary.

The Welsh castles of Edward I, like the stone edifices of imperial Rome and of Norman England, are tokens of brute power. The walls of the castle at Conway are 10 feet (3 metres) thick. Fifteen hundred workmen and craftsmen laboured on its construction for four years. The towers and masonry of Caernarfon Castle are based upon the double line of walls built around Constantinople by the emperor Theodosius in the fifth century; it was written in legend that the father of the emperor Constantine was buried at Caernarfon, so the historical allusions are clear. The new building also retains the motte of the Norman castle, originally built upon the site, as an emblem of previous English sovereignty. The supervisor of the works at Caernarfon, Conway, Criccieth, Harlech and Beaumaris – Master James of St George – was one of the great spirits of the age through whom the genius of a warrior aristocracy was embodied.

Edward believed that, in the conquest of Wales, he was pursuing his own regal rights in the same spirit that inspired the ‘quo warranto?’ investigations. This was his land. Or so he declared. The Atlantic folk, who had lived in the territory for many thousands of years, may not have agreed with him. With a cavalry force of approximately 1,000 men Edward chased the Welsh from mountain to mountain, and from hill to hill, until the native princes finally submitted to his authority. English law, and the English system of shires, were then imposed upon them. In the safety of the shadow of the castle walls, settlements of English colonists were introduced. Towns sprang up from markets. The life of the country was being quickened. Subsequent revolts and rebellions disturbed the peace, but the settlement itself has never since been overturned. When all was complete the king held an Arthurian tournament at Nefyn, a small coastal town from where the Prophecies of Merlin were supposed to emanate.

The costs of this war of conquest had been huge. That is why Edward called so large a parliament early in his reign; the wider the net, the larger the catch. The whole country was soon enmeshed in a general system of taxation that heralded the rise of a fiscal state. It was a necessity of war that became, almost by accident, a principal element of the English administration.

The taxation on wool, also passed by the parliament, materially assisted the king’s treasury. But it had further consequences. Edward set up the system of customs that, for better or worse, has been a feature of English economic life ever since. For the first time the king was seen to be acting in concert with the merchants, to whom he now offered his protection. Foreign traders were granted certain privileges. They were allowed to come and go as they wished, were made free from interference by local officials and were immune from local taxes. The merchants of Gascony and elsewhere were given the status of citizens in all dealings with Londoners.

The king’s connection with the bankers of Lucca meant that he was now involved in questions of international finance; that is why he took great care to preserve the standard of the money supply. Debased coinage would not bolster his prestige with the brokers of Europe. A more elaborate system of credit, borrowed from the financiers of Venice and Genoa, was introduced to England. The necessities of war once more created the context for innovation.

Edward also found ingenious ways of making money. The law stated that those with property worth more than £20 a year were obliged to adopt the status of knights; but knighthood was an expensive business, with the cost of equipment alone, and many landowners were ready to pay a relatively large sum to avoid the honour. By an order known as ‘distraint of knighthood’ Edward ordered that all eligible men should bear arms, and then proceeded to collect the money from those who wished to remain exempt. It was a legal form of extortion.

Edward I was once known as the ‘English Justinian’ on the grounds that he gave shape and purpose to English law. The great jurist of the seventeenth century, Edward Coke, remarked that he enacted ‘more constant, standing, and durable laws than have been made ever since’. The ‘Statute of Westminster the First’, passed in the earliest parliament of his reign, was followed by nine other statutes ranging from matters of law and order to the debts of merchants. They were practical and specific measures to confront immediate problems. In the Statute of Winchester, for example, it was decreed that all hedges and underwood should be cleared from the sides of the highways to a distance of 200 feet (61 metres); they could not then be used to provide shelter for thieves.

The measure was timely and necessary. Parts of the countryside were beset by marauding gangs, many of them drawn from the soldiers who had fought in Edward’s wars. There were no other rewards for old soldiers. Other groups of ruffians were hired by members of the local gentry in order to pursue private feuds or to terrify their tenants. So special courts known as ‘trailbaston’, which meant the act of clenching a club or staff, were set up to deal with acts of felony and trespass. The name originally described the ruffians themselves, and then became applied to the judges who sentenced them.

The king took his share of the proceeds of justice, of course, and the judges themselves grew rich. They were despised as much as they were feared. In some of the popular verses of the period the judges are compared unfavourably to those outlaws who sought refuge in the woods. What difference between the thieves in hiding and the thieves in office? In one song the usher of the court addresses a defendant. ‘Poor man, why do you trouble yourself ? Why do you wait here? Unless you give money to everybody in this court, you labour in vain. If you have brought nothing, you will stand altogether out of doors.’ We have here a medieval paradox. Even as the law was being shaped and refined, the exponents of the law were mocked and vilified. Royal law was being condemned even as it was being extended.

Nevertheless forms and procedures had to be followed; there had developed a legal routine. In the period of Edward’s reign the number of attorneys rose from approximately 10 to 200. They became a new elite. Where there is money to be made, there are people who will wish to create privileged access to it. The phenomenon itself is of a piece with other developments of the early fourteenth century. The households of the great were being run by staffs of trained managers, and farms were organized by estate managers. War itself was being professionalized. The king no longer summoned a national host from the shires; instead he came more and more to rely upon paid troops led by full-time commanders. As the business of the realm became more complex, it became the province of full-time officers whom we might describe as a civil service; the chancery alone employed more than 100 clerks, and had a secure home at Westminster. The first proper parliamentary record, giving an account of proceedings, dates from 1316.

Yet the force of the royal will was still paramount. Two judges were once arguing a case in the king’s presence. Edward was beginning to lose patience with their lengthy deliberations. Eventually he interrupted them, saying, ‘I have nothing to do with your disputations, but God’s blood, you shall give me a good writ before you arise hence!’ He did not mean good in the sense of meritorious; he meant one that worked in his favour. The monkish author of The Song of Lewes had written of Edward, when he was a prince, that ‘whatever he wants he holds to be lawful, and he thinks that there are no legal bounds to his power’.

Edward had remained in Gascony from 1286 to 1289, seeking to control the affairs of the land that mattered as much to him as England. On his return he discovered, according to one chronicler, ‘a very real oppression hanging over the country’. One of his clerical servants, Adam de Stratton, had acquired an unsavoury reputation for various financial malpractices. He was part of a system of bribery and corruption that had flourished more than ever in the king’s absence of three years. The rage of the king was wonderful to behold. He stormed into the chambers of the man, exclaiming, ‘Adam! Adam! Where art thou?’ In Adam’s house, at Smalelane near the Fleet Prison, was found a hoard of £13,000.

Edward could trust only the advisers whom he had taken with him to Gascony, and he ordered them to find out the truth about all accusations. As a result of their enquiries many judges were found to be manifestly corrupt. One of them, the chief justice on the Bench of Common Pleas, fled for sanctuary to a Franciscan friary. From there he was forced to abjure the realm, walking barefoot to Dover with a cross in his hand. The king had returned from abroad, and had become an avenging angel. Once more he had proved his strength.

In November 1290, his queen died. Eleanor of Castile is not well known to history. She is supposed to have been devout, but her principal devotion was to her family’s interests; she speculated in land, for example, and took financial advantage of those who were heavily in debt to the Jews. One contemporary reveals that ‘day by day the said lady continues to acquire plunder and the possessions of others by these means. There is public outcry and gossip about this in every part of England.’ In this she was not very different from other members of the family who, travelling in the wake of Edward, were inclined to be rapacious and mercenary; it was one of the settled policies of his realm that his kinsmen should be granted the great earldoms of the realm. Four of his daughters were safely married to the richest magnates and were given extensive lands.

The king was much affected by his wife’s death, and along the route of her burial procession from her deathbed in Nottinghamshire to her sepulchre in Westminster he caused to be erected a series of crosses. These are the ‘Eleanor crosses’, three of which still stand at Geddington, Northampton and Waltham Cross. Another of them, at Charing Cross, is a replica and is in the wrong place. After the funeral the king went into a religious retreat for more than a month.

By March 1291, however, he was on the border with Scotland. He had travelled there to arbitrate between the claimants to the Scottish throne, on the assumption that he was somehow overlord of the kingdom. He chose one of them, John Balliol, and then proceeded to treat him as a vassal. The Scots would not endure this situation for long. Four years later Balliol was persuaded by his barons to renounce his homage to the English king, ally himself with the French monarch, and declare for independence. Edward then marched north and, within a matter of weeks, had subdued the Scottish army. Dunbar opened its gates to him; Edinburgh made a token resistance; Perth and St Andrews submitted unconditionally. He destroyed Berwick and butchered the people savagely; according to a chronicler thousands of the inhabitants ‘fell like autumn leaves’. He seemed to have a thirst for blood.

Edward now believed himself in truth to be the proper king of Scotland. Lia Fáil, ‘the speaking stone’ otherwise known as ‘the stone of destiny’, was taken from Scone Palace and removed to Westminster Abbey where it remained until 1996. According to legend it formed the pillow on which Jacob’s head rested when he was vouchsafed the vision of the angels ascending the ladder. It is in truth an oblong rectangular block of limestone, pitted and fretted with age. But it was a token of Scottish destiny. When Edward handed the seal of Scotland to its new English governor, he remarked that ‘a man does good business when he rids himself of a turd’. One Scottish patriot was determined to cure him of this complacency. William Wallace had fled to the safety of the woods, having been convicted of murder, and there he gathered together a band of disaffected men.

Curiously enough Edward had placed Balliol in an invidious situation similar to his own; as lord of Gascony and duke of Aquitaine, Edward was theoretically the vassal of the king of France. This meant that, in practice, he was continually colliding with the interests of the court at Paris. It took only a small spark to light a modest flame. Some rowdy fights between English and Norman sailors led to reprisals and confrontations; the French king then summoned the English king to his court and, when he refused, he declared Edward’s lands in France to be confiscated.

Edward sailed with his army across the Channel in 1297, although many of the participants were quite unwilling to join this continental endeavour. Why should they fight for Edward’s lands in France when they derived no benefit from them? The earl of Norfolk and marshal of England, Roger Bigod, had refused to take command of the army. ‘Bigod,’ the king said in a rage, ‘you shall go or hang.’ ‘By God, sir,’ the earl replied, ‘I shall neither go nor hang.’ He did not go. In fact Edward never actually engaged his opponents in battle. He sailed to Flanders to attack the French king from the north, but he did no more than bluster. In the end he signed a treaty, by which he retained Gascony, and then he sealed it with a kiss. He married the French king’s sister, Margaret, making sure that European power stayed within the family.

The news nearer home was more disquieting. Reports of a Scottish invasion were widespread and, in the autumn of 1297, William Wallace and his men defeated an English army at Stirling Bridge. More significantly, a domestic rebellion was growing in the face of royal extortions. The taxation for the French expedition had been immense. The king had taken one fifth of the income of the clergy; the clerics had at first refused to grant as much, and the king promptly outlawed them on the grounds that a body which did not support the country did not deserve to be protected by it. The goods of the clergy were seized, and the courts of law were closed to them. Their tenants refused to pay rent, and often physically attacked them. They were in the end compelled to surrender to the force of a powerful and ruthless king.

They were not the only ones to suffer from his depredations. The citizens of London were compelled to part with a sixth of their moveable wealth. Edward had increased the customs on exports of wool, and as a result the merchants had cut payments to their suppliers. The wool tax became known as the ‘bad tax’ or ‘maltote’. The plight of those in the countryside who suffered from excessive taxation is captured in a vernacular poem written in 1300, Song of the Husbandman:

Yet cometh budeles [beadles] with ful muche bost [pride]:

‘Greythe me selver [silver] to the grene wax [official document].

Thou art writen yn my writ, that thou wel wost [know]!’

Every fourth penny went to the king; seed-corn, and immature corn, had to be sold in order to raise money for taxes; the king’s bailiffs seized oxen and cattle; bribes were paid to the royal officials; some people were forced to flee their lands because they could not afford to be taxed. Royal officials had taken grain from the farmers in order to feed the troops in France. Edward also levied fines and taxes on the great magnates, with whom he never enjoyed satisfactory relations.

Whereupon some of the earls – Roger Bigod among them – decided that it was time to confront the king. Another round of warfare between king and barons seemed to be inevitable. The regency council that governed the nation during the king’s absence, under the nominal command of the king’s young son, retreated for safety within the walls of London. A baronial army was assembled at Northampton. At this point the royal party gave in. With the news of the defeat at Stirling Bridge before them, they could not risk a war on two fronts. The earls demanded a reissue of the Magna Carta with important new provisions, such as the removal of the ‘maltote’. This was granted to them. It was now solemnly sworn that there would never be taxation without the consent of those being taxed. The king returned a month later from his inconclusive overseas adventures, and reluctantly agreed. The Magna Carta had, by slow degrees, now become the guardian of English liberty – or at least the English economy – against royal aggression.

The earls then for the most part turned their attention towards the threat from Scotland. Edward convened a parliament in York, a sure sign that he was now intent upon subduing the northern regions. He gathered a great army of more than 28,000 men, including the soldiers previously posted to Flanders and Gascony. Yet a major victory for the English at Falkirk in 1298 over the army of William Wallace did not prove decisive, and the next six years of the Scottish wars consisted of seasonal campaigns in which the English forces were matched by fierce native resistance. The Scots eventually came to terms in 1304, and a year later William Wallace was captured; he was dragged on a pallet from Westminster to Smithfield, where he was ritually hanged, disembowelled while still alive, and quartered. A plaque is still fixed to the wall close to the point where he was killed. Yet all the butchery did not work against a determined people. A year after Wallace’s execution, Robert Bruce was crowned king of Scotland at Scone. The old war continued.

As long as the war was being prosecuted successfully, the magnates took the side of the king; but in periods of failure or indecision the huge sums of taxation that the wars incurred became a matter of considerable concern. The king was, as always, untrustworthy; he tried various means of evading the provisions of the Magna Carta to which he had assented. He was so convinced of his rectitude that any means of attaining his ends was considered acceptable. That is the point – in all his demands and exactions, the king never thought that he was doing anything wrong. He was behaving only as a king ought to behave. He was raising his money from his country in order to wage war against those who threatened him. That was his duty. The magnates were suspicious and resentful, but they did not rebel. They harried him, and chided him, but they did not seek to overthrow him. He was now growing old as well as stubborn and irate. They waited for his death, and the reign of his son. An unfinished war, combined with a rapidly growing debt, were the two stones against which the last ten years of Edward were ground. The king’s finances were in disorder, with all the prudent measures of previous years discarded or ignored. Edward had been made by war, and would be broken by war.

In 1307 Robert Bruce appeared at the head of an army, ready to claim his rights as the crowned king of Scotland, and at Loudoun Hill in Ayrshire defeated an English force that had been ordered to hunt him down. Edward decided to march north, with the settled purpose of destroying Scottish royal ambitions for good, but even the best-laid plans are never perfect. In the summer of 1307, at the age of sixty-eight, Edward I died at Burgh-by-Sands on the Solway.

We may grow weary of the life and death of kings but in truth, for an historical account of medieval England, there is no other sure or certain touchstone. The general current of the nation persists beneath the surface of action and event but, as a result, it is not susceptible to chronology. The institutions of the state are similarly outside the historical record. They can be inferred and described, at rough intervals, but there is really no appropriate timescale. Administrative history has no proper narrative. This is also the case with the life and development of the English towns. As for the English people themselves, they can be glimpsed fleetingly in political ballads and in court records. Of their suffering, and of their pleasures, little is known. They are largely absent from the written record simply because they were not considered important; they were not worthy of representation.

They emerge, however, in certain manorial accounts. We may read for example, in the accounts of the manor of Sutton, of Stephen Puttock. He was a nativus who, at the end of the thirteenth century, lived and worked on the prior of Ely’s land in that manor. He owed labour services to his lord and was obliged to pay certain fines or taxes at the ritual moments of his family’s life. He had to pay a fine, for example, when he married each of his two wives; his sister was similarly taxed when she was married. He was also fined when he failed to carry out his labour services; he may have been negligent in planting or harvesting his lord’s crops. Yet he was a significant man in his own village. He had a large holding of his own land, and was appointed both as reeve and as ale-taster in his community; he was also frequently selected as a juryman. He was an acquisitive purchaser of land, buying it in parcels of several acres at a time. Stephen Puttock was a man of his time, taking part in an unconscious life of custom and tradition. He was unfree, but he was prosperous; he was a labourer, but he was also a landowner. He was part of a nexus of duties and obligations, but he was also a prominent part of his community. He has now returned to the soil of England.

Another means of access to the general life of the period comes in the now voluminous court reports. They provide of course a haphazard account, based upon civic or criminal offences, but they are suggestive. The fowler, Robert, spends a great deal of money but no one knows how he earns it; he wanders abroad at night, so he is suspected. John Voxe was fined fourpence for cutting down two ash trees on his land. Another man was fined for fishing in his lord’s pool. Ranulph, the fishmonger, goes out to the oyster boats in order to buy up their catch before it reaches the market. Three men were arrested as ‘common breakers of hedges to the common harm’. The butchers of Sprowston bought infirm pigs cheaply, and then sold sausages unfit for human consumption. John Foxe, a chaplain, was fined one penny for attacking William Pounchon with a knife. Walter of Maidstone, a carpenter, brought together an assembly or parliament of carpenters at Mile End in order to agree on a policy to defy the mayor. The butchers of Peterborough were reminded that they must cleanse the churchyard of all filth and bones that their dogs brought into it. Certain people made ‘a great roistering with unknown minstrels, tabor-players and trumpeters’ to the grave disquiet of the entire neighbourhood.

Here is another vignette of medieval England. John and Agnes Page, from a village in Kent, took John Pistor to the manor court. Agnes Page had purchased John Pistor’s wife in exchange for a pig worth 3 shillings; John Pistor was happy with the arrangement for a while, but eventually he asked that his wife be returned to him on payment of 2 shillings. The bargain was agreed, but Pistor did not pay the sum. The jury found against him.

We may sense here a life more intense and more arduous than our own; it was at once more sensitive and more irritable. The contrasts of life were more violent, and the insecurities more palpable. This evidence is all of a piece with a strident and often violent society where the growing number of people provoked collision and unrest.

It has been estimated that by the beginning of the fourteenth century the population had reached in excess of 6 million. The figure, in isolation, means nothing at all. But it is salutary to realize that it was not matched again until the latter part of the eighteenth century. The England of Edward I was more populous than that of Elizabeth I or of George II. So in the relatively crowded conditions of the early fourteenth century, land was at a premium. The woods and underwoods were cleared. Farming land was often divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller parcels, owned by men who also earned their living as carpenters or shoemakers. But many landless men were also available for hire; wages, therefore, were not ordinarily very high. Great pressure, and competition, existed within all sectors of the economy. The first ‘strike fund’, to support workers who refused to do mowing services, was organized in 1300.

The condition of England was made infinitely worse by a series of harvest failures from 1315. The price of bread, and other essential commodities, rose and rose. ‘Alas, poor England!’ one chronicler of the time wrote. ‘You who once helped other lands from your abundance, now poor and needy are forced to beg.’ This was one of the worst periods of English social history, and may act as a suitably troubled context for the last years of the reign of Edward I as well as the unhappy reign of Edward II. It might have been said at the time – the kings of England do nothing but harm.

20

The hammer

Edward was known as ‘the hammer of the Scots’ but he could more pertinently be known as the hammer of the Jews. He exploited them and harassed them; finally he expelled them. Their crime was to become superfluous to his requirements. The history of the Jews in medieval England is an unhappy and even bloody one. They had arrived, from Rouen, in the last decades of the eleventh century; they were first only settled in London across a broad band of nine parishes but in the course of the next few decades they also removed to York, Winchester, Bristol and other market towns. The previous rulers of England, in the ninth and tenth centuries, had not welcomed them; Jewish merchants would have provided too much competition for Anglo-Saxon traders.

William the Conqueror brought them to England because he had found that in Normandy they had been good for business; in particular they provided access to the silver of the Rhineland. The Jews of Rouen may also have helped to finance his invasion of England, in return for the chance to work in a country from which they had previously been barred. Another reason can be given for the favour they found with the king. Since Christians were not allowed to lend money at interest, some other group of merchants had to be created. The Jews became moneylenders by default, as it were, and as a result they were abused and despised in equal measure. But they did not only lend money; they were also moneychangers and goldsmiths. They exchanged plate for coin. They provided ready money, a commodity often in short supply.

The Norman kings of England, therefore, found them to be very useful. They could borrow from them but, more profitably, they could tax them. They could levy what were known as ‘tallages’, and succeeding kings were able to take between a third and a quarter of the Jews’ total wealth at any one time. As a result the Jews, in the twelfth century, were afforded royal protection. No Jew was allowed to become a citizen, or to hold land, but the neighbourhood of the Jewry was like the royal forests exempt from common law; the Jews were simply the king’s chattels, who owed their life and property wholly to him. They were granted the protection of the royal courts, and their bonds were placed in a special chamber of the royal palace at Westminster. A Jewish exchequer was established there, with its own clerks and justices.

In return for royal favour the Jews brought energy and prosperity to the business of the realm; their loans helped to make possible the great feats of Norman architecture, and the unique stone houses of Lincoln and Bury St Edmunds are credited to them. Jacob le Toruk had a grand stone house in Cannon Street, in the London parish of St Nicholas Acon. The Jews also introduced the more advanced forms of medical learning, and were able to serve as doctors even to the native community. Roger Bacon himself studied under rabbis at Oxford.

More dubious legal tactics were also enforced. William Rufus decreed, for example, that Jews could not be converted to Christianity; he did not want their number to fall. That may not have been a very Christian act, but William Rufus was never a very good Christian. He supported the Jews partly because it offended the bishops; he enjoyed causing affront to his churchmen.

That royal protection did not necessarily extend very far. At the time of the coronation of Richard I, in 1189, some Jews were beaten back from the front row of spectators; the crowd turned on them, and a riotous assault began upon the London quarters of Jewry. The incident became the cause of fresh outrages as the news of the attack spread; it emboldened native hostility, and gave an excuse for further carnage. 500 Jews, with their families, took refuge in the castle at York where they were besieged by the citizens; in desperation the men killed their wives and children before killing themselves. Richard was even then making preparations for his crusade to the Holy Land; violence and religious bigotry were in the air. His successor, John, renewed his protection in exchange for large sums of money. In 1201 a formal charter was drawn up, giving the Jews their own court. They were allowed to live ‘freely and honourably’ in England, which meant that they were here to make money for the king. Nine years later John took over all the debts of the Jews, living or dead, and tried to extract the money from the debtors for his own benefit. It was another reason for the barons’ revolt that led to the sealing of the Magna Carta.

Anti-Semitism was part of the Christian condition throughout Europe. The Jewish people were abused for being the ‘killers of Christ’, with convenient forgetfulness of the fact that Jesus himself was a Jew, but other more material reasons accounted for the racial hatred. By the middle of the twelfth century several prominent Jewish moneylenders had extended very large loans to some of the noblest men in the kingdom; men like the famous Aaron of Lincoln were the only ones with resources large enough to meet the obligations of the magnates. If they could be attacked or killed, and their bonds destroyed, then the great ones of the land would benefit. The myth that they were engaged in the ‘ritual murder’ of Christian infants became common at times of financial crisis, when the populace could be incited to take sanguinary vengeance. It is a matter of historical record that England took the lead in the execration of the Jews. The first rumour of a ritual crucifixion emerged in 1144, with the story of the death of William of Norwich, and thereafter the tales of ritual murder spread through Europe. England was also the first country to condemn all Jews as criminal ‘coin-clippers’, and the iconography of anti-Semitism is to be found on the west front of Lincoln Cathedral.

In 1239, during the reign of Henry III, a great census of the Jews and their debts was carried out. The representatives of all the Jews in England were then obliged to convene at Worcester and agree to pay over 20,000 marks to the king’s treasury. This measure effectively bankrupted some of them, which meant that their usefulness had come to an end. Fourteen years later, Henry III ordained a Statute of Jewry that enforced a number of disciplinary measures, including the compulsory badge of identification. This was a token or tabula of yellow felt, 3 inches by 6 inches (7.5 by 15 centimetres), to be worn on an outer garment; it was to be carried by every Jew over the age of seven years. Two years later Henry investigated the death of a boy, Hugh, in Lincoln; he believed or professed to believe that this was a crime of ritual murder and, as a result, 19 Jews from that city were executed and 100 despatched to prison in the castle.

Edward I was even more ferocious. He ordered that certain Jews, who had been acquitted of the charge of ritual murder, be retried. In November 1278, 600 Jews were imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of tampering with the currency; 269 of them were hanged six months later. In 1290 he expelled all of the remaining Jews from his kingdom; they were now approximately 2,000. He did not take this step out of misplaced religious zeal; it was the measure demanded by the parliament house before they would agree to fresh taxation. In fact the expulsion was seen by many chroniclers as one of the most important and enlightened acts of his reign. The anti-Semitism of the medieval English people is clear enough. Some have argued that, in subtly modified forms, it has continued to this day.

21

The favourites of a king

The new king, Edward II, had been born in 1284 on the site of his father’s new castle at Caernarfon; Eleanor’s labour came to an end in temporary accommodation beside the castle that had only been begun in the previous year. She may have been brought to the spot in a deliberate move by the king to lay claim to this part of the island. In later life the new king was known as ‘Edward of Caernarfon’ and in 1301 he was acclaimed as ‘prince of Wales’, the first heir of the throne to be thus designated.

He did not care much for his principality. In 1305 he sent a letter to his cousin, Louis, count of Evreux, in which he promised to send ‘some misshapen greyhounds of Wales, which can catch a hare well if they find it asleep, and running dogs which can follow at an amble. And, dear cousin, if you would care for anything else from our land of Wales, we will send you some wild men, if you like, who will know well how to give young sprigs of noblemen their education.’ If nothing else, he had a sense of humour.

He was brought up in a military household, and was engaged in his father’s last Scottish wars. After the defeat of the English army by Robert Bruce at Loudoun, he vowed that he would not spend two nights in the same place until he had exacted revenge. He never kept the promise. He was not in any case as bellicose or as overbearing as his father. He always disliked taking part in tournaments. The writer of a contemporary life of the king, Ranulf Higden, remarked that ‘he did not care for the company of lords, but preferred to mingle with harlots, with singers and jesters’. He also was most at ease with ‘carters and delvers and ditchers, with shipmen and boatmen, and with other craftsmen’. It is hard to interpret this last remark, except as a general indication that the young prince was not particularly interested in royal pursuits. This was the rebuke that followed him in succeeding years. He did not behave like a king.

The coronation of 1307 did not go quite according to plan. The crown was carried, much to the scandal of the great lords, by a close companion of the king with the name of Piers or Peter Gaveston. The number of people at the ceremony was so large that a plaster wall collapsed, bringing down the high altar and the royal scaffolding for the service. One knight was killed. The service was then quickly and even summarily completed. There was an indication that the new king was not altogether trusted. A new provision had been added to the coronation oath. The king now declared that he would ‘uphold and defend the laws and righteous customs that the community of the realm shall choose’. The ‘community of the realm’, in this instance, meant the magnates and prelates. It was an ominous beginning.

The royal banquet, after the ceremony, was also badly managed. Piers Gaveston seemed inclined to outshine even the king with a costume of imperial purple and pearls. When Edward preferred the couch of Gaveston to that of his queen, Isabella of France, his wife’s relatives returned indignant to their homeland. We have here the makings of a royal disaster.

Gaveston was the same age as Edward. The old king had placed him in the prince’s household to provide a fitting military example to his heir, but they may have had other interests in common. There quickly grew up an attachment between the two young men that some have considered to be sexual, but which others have believed to be simply fraternal. He has been described as Edward II’s ‘minion’ but that is a courtly and chivalric term which does not imply homosexuality; Henry VIII had his minions. It was considered proper that the king, at court, should lean upon the shoulder of his minion. It was an accepted posture. Modern sexual terms have no meaning in fourteenth-century England, where in any case they would not have been understood. Edward did have a bastard son, Adam, even before he became king. Isabella herself would subsequently give birth to two sons and two daughters.

It is certain only that the young king preferred the company of Gaveston to that of his new bride. He had married the twelve-year-old Isabella, daughter of the king of France, on the orders of his father intent upon creating yet another grand and prosperous territorial alliance. The wedding had taken place in France a month before the coronation and, in his absence, Edward had appointed Gaveston as the keeper of the realm. This in itself was enough to arouse the envy and wrath of the English magnates. One of Edward’s first acts as king was then to honour Gaveston with the earldom of Cornwall, a title generally kept within the royal family. This was a serious blow to courtly protocol, and was more than a problem of etiquette. It was a question of land and money as well as title; if they were not properly distributed by the king, was then anyone safe? It was even believed that Gaveston himself had been given charge of patronage at court, granting goods and benefits without consultation with the barons. There could be no more important office in the fourteenth-century royal court, and it raised immediate problems about the king’s judgment.

Gaveston did not help matters with a waspish wit and a strong sense of his own importance. He was reported to be ‘haughty and arrogant’ with a pride ‘intolerable to the barons’. He invented nicknames for the leading magnates, such as ‘black dog’ for the earl of Warwick and ‘burst belly’ for the earl of Lincoln. He revelled in the king’s grace.

A parliament was held in the spring of 1308, at which the earl of Lincoln invoked the new provision of the coronation oath and demanded that Gaveston be dismissed from court. Edward refused but two months later, cowed by the presence of the magnates with their armed knights, he agreed to exile his favourite to Ireland. He wrote to the pope admitting that there had been ‘disturbance and dissension’ and that he had not yet ‘fully enforced unity’. This was the period, too, when his cousin abruptly left the court. Thomas of Lancaster was another grandson of Henry III, and was perhaps the richest as well as the best-connected noble in the land. He had also become disaffected, with fatal consequences for Piers Gaveston.

A year after his exile in Ireland, the favourite was back. The king had recalled him for assistance in his campaign against Robert Bruce. The Scots refused a set battle, however, and so the king was reduced to a number of sorties and skirmishes that still left the northern part of his kingdom unprotected against attack. Unlike his father, he had not kept the peace.

He had not kept his promises, either. The likely shape of his reign had already become clear. He was considered by the magnates to be weak and ineffectual. He slept late. He prevaricated. None of this would necessarily disqualify a modern monarch but, in fourteenth-century England, it was inexcusable. A king was supposed to embody the prowess and vigour of the country. The failure of the Scottish campaign was a specific sign of the king’s general incapacity. It was further stated that he had so badly managed his resources that his entire household was in decay; as a result he had extorted money unfairly. Numerous complaints were also made concerning specific infringements of Magna Carta, such as the unjust seizure of lands and the misuse of writs.

The parliament of 1311 issued a set of twenty-four ordinances by which the king was supposed to govern. It was declared that the country was on the point of open revolt ‘on account of oppressions, prises and destructions’; ‘prises’ were the confiscations made by royal officials. One contemporary chronicler wrote that the threat of deposition was made against Edward if he failed to comply; if that is correct, then the forces against the king rivalled those against King John a hundred years before. The rebel lords called themselves ‘the community of the realm’ but they were no abstract or objective force; they were not a constitutional ‘party’. It was a world in which the force of individual personality was the cause and spring of action; personal rivalries and affections made up the politics of the period.

The ordinances themselves were designed to produce what might be called baronial rule. The king was not permitted to make war, or leave the kingdom, without the consent of the barons; the king’s justice and the king’s treasury must come under their supervision. A parliament, naturally under their control, would meet once a year. One other stipulation was made. Gaveston, once more, had to go. He was to be banished from the realm before All Saints’ Day, 1 November.

The king refused to countenance these demands and prepared himself for civil war. Gaveston did sail from Dover, two days after the stipulated date, but he returned a month later. Edward and his favourite then moved to the north, and began recruiting an army. It was at this point that the king’s cousin, Thomas of Lancaster, became his most prominent challenger; Lancaster wrote to the queen, promising to rid the court of Piers Gaveston forever. And this was what he proceeded to do. Gaveston was taken at Scarborough, when the forces of the barons besieged the castle there, and a month later he was beheaded in the presence of Lancaster. Two sayings of the period have survived as an apt accompaniment to these events. ‘There is no one who is sorry for me,’ the king is supposed to have complained, ‘no one fights for my rights against the barons.’ The other is a more generalized statement: ‘The love of magnates is as a game of dice, and the desires of the rich like feathers.’

The execution of Gaveston was according to precedent unlawful, since as earl of Cornwall he should have been judged by his peers, but it had the effect of bringing to a summary end the threat of civil war. The gratuitousness of the deed seems to have surprised everyone. Some of the rebel barons returned to the king. If there were a civil war, only the Scots would benefit. The prospect of further hostilities, and the threat of an enemy on the border, concentrated the minds of the lords. Negotiations, in and out of parliament, took place for the best part of two years. In October 1313 the rebel lords made a public apology in Westminster Hall, and the king resumed his powers very little affected by the ordinances of 1311. He had won a marginal, and provisional, victory that was compounded by the birth of a son that guaranteed the continuation of his dynasty. His hatred, for the murderers of his ‘minion’, smouldered.

But his power soon fell apart once more. He took an army into the north, finally to dispose of Robert Bruce, but at Bannockburn he suffered a mighty defeat. The battle was fought in what was called ‘an evil, deep and wet marsh’ wholly unsuited to the English cavalry but more amenable to the Scottish infantry; the earl of Gloucester led a charge into the Scottish ranks, but was cut down. The army of the Scots then attacked the horsemen, crying out ‘On them! On them! On them! They fail!’ The English were massacred, their bodies lying in the marsh or in the river Bannock. The king fled for his life and, with a few followers, sailed to Berwick where he hoped to find safety. He had lost Scotland. The battle of Bannockburn ensured the independence of that country, and was perhaps the worst military disaster of any medieval English king.

It is difficult for a sovereign to survive the shame of defeat. It implies the forfeiture of his single most important duty, that of protecting his realm. Edward I had been known as ‘the most victorious king’ and ‘the conqueror of lands and the flower of chivalry’. His son bore no such titles. When Edward eventually arrived in York he was in disgrace. Thomas of Lancaster insisted that once again he should be bound to the ordinances of 1311. A contemporary chronicle reports that ‘the king granted their execution, and denied the earls nothing’.

Lancaster at this juncture took effective control of the kingdom, but he proved no more popular or effective than his cousin; he was considered to be arrogant and overbearing. He stayed on his estates, and was loath to attend councils or parliaments. He did not take advice. It was also rumoured that he was in secret contact with Robert Bruce on the principle that the king’s enemies might become his own friends. The king stirred himself out of his weakness or incapacity, and began to gather his supporters. Two centres of power and of patronage existed, with the retainers of the king and the earl vying for mastery. There cannot be two suns in the sky.

A weak king seems always to presage, or to represent, a weak country. In the medieval period there is some strange alchemy between the state of the nation and the state of the monarch. The harvests of three successive years from 1314 failed, as a result of prolonged and torrential rain, and according to one chronicler there ensued misery ‘such as our age has never seen’. It became known as the ‘Great Famine’, and from that period we can date the continual fall in the English population throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the summer of 1315 the archbishop of Canterbury ordered that every parish perform solemn processions; the clergy were to walk barefoot, surrounded by the sound of bells and by chanting, in order to implore mercy from God.

But God was not listening. The cost of wheat rose from 5 shillings to 40 shillings a quarter (28 pounds or 12.7 kilograms). Often there was no bread to buy. The prices of the basic commodities rose to a level higher than any previously recorded. The cattle and the sheep were destroyed by outbreaks of murrain. The population itself, laid low by starvation, was attacked by various forms of enteric fever that often proved fatal. Rumours of cannibalism abounded, but they were plausible rather than probable. The situation of the English garrison at Berwick, however, is instructive; as the horses began to die the cavalrymen boiled their carcases in order to eat the meat, and then left the bones to the infantry.

In northern England as a whole the situation was rendered increasingly desperate by the raids of Scottish gangs. The incidence of violent crime also increased, as the hungry and the dispossessed looked for relief. There are records of gangs of ‘vagabonds’ perpetrating robberies and assaults. Reports of ‘corrupted air’, and of strange alterations in the atmosphere, were frequent. Human beings were, as always, powerless in the face of great natural disasters. The bodies of the dead were lying in the streets. According to the Brut chronicle, ‘so miche and so faste folc deiden, that unnethes [scarcely] men might ham bury’. Life for the majority of the English people was nasty, brutish and short.

Yet this was the period when, for two years, direct taxes were levied upon the people to pay for the Scottish wars and the royal household. Twelve thousand quarters (336,000 pounds or 152,480 kilograms) of corn and malt were needed to feed the armies, further depriving the people of their necessary food. The king and the noble lords were not particularly interested in the sufferings of the English, despite their claims to represent ‘the community of the realm’; they were concerned only with their own wealth and power. The citizens of Bristol rose up in their despair and occupied the castle. It was written that ‘to seek silver for the king, I sold my seed’.

By 1318 the worst of the famine was over, the spectre of starvation banished by a bountiful harvest. Prices steadied, and then fell. But signs of overall decline were still in evidence, with the spread of disease among cattle and a general contraction of agricultural production. There would be really no sustained recovery for a hundred years.

The king always relied upon a strong confidant to deal with the business of the realm; he could not of course put his faith in Thomas of Lancaster, because his cousin was implacably opposed to him. So he placed his trust in a new favourite. The successor to Gaveston was Hugh le Despenser who, together with his father of the same name, gained a considerable hold over the irresolute king. Despenser soon acquired lands and castles, particularly in Wales where the family was already strong, and as a result he alienated all the other lords of the principality. His officers assaulted or threatened anyone who stood in their way; they burned down barns, and laid false charges against prominent landowners.

Despenser, as the king’s chamberlain, tried to conceal his thefts and extortions under the guise of constitutional propriety; it was his duty and responsibility to bring order to Wales. But everyone knew that his case was fraudulent. The king’s favourite had once more become arrogant and over-mighty at the expense of the barons. Thomas of Lancaster then stepped forward, and announced that no reliance could be placed in the king or his courtiers. In the spring of 1321 the land and property of the Despensers were attacked by those whom they had disinherited; it was a form of revenge that came perilously close to civil war. One chronicler, Robert of Reading, wrote that now the king’s ‘infamy began to be notorious, his torpor, his cowardice, his indifference to his great inheritance’.

At the beginning of August in the same year the great lords of the north and the west came to London with their armed retinues, and insisted that the Despensers be expelled from the realm. They were accused of ‘encroaching’ upon royal power, and of controlling access to the king’s presence. They had perverted the law and illegally gained custody of lands. Edward, faced with the solid phalanx of their enemies, yielded. The Despensers were banished from England.

Yet this was only the beginning of what turned into a general civil war. The king had decided that it was better to remove his opponents one by one. He besieged Leeds Castle, the home of one malcontent, and executed its garrison. These executions were not part of the chivalric code, and were met with widespread disapproval. They demonstrated, however, that the king was in earnest. He then recalled the Despensers, and began to organize a military campaign to defeat those whom he considered to be rebels against his power. Having mustered his forces at the beginning of March 1322, he defeated Thomas of Lancaster in battle. He had cornered his old enemy at last and, after a summary trial, he executed him. It was the first time that a sentence of death, on the charge of treason, had ever been directed at a member of the royal family. Lancaster had cut off the head of Piers Gaveston; Edward, long meditating his revenge, beheaded Lancaster.

Other members of noble families, who had taken Lancaster’s part, were now at the king’s mercy. ‘Oh calamity,’ the anonymous author of a life of Edward II wrote, ‘to see men recently adorned in purple and fine linen now dressed in rags and imprisoned in chains.’

Many of these lords were hanged on the lands that they had once owned. The king ordered altogether twentyfive executions. No English sovereign had ever punished his enemies among the barons so mercilessly.

A curious sequel to Lancaster’s execution can be recorded. He was conceived by many to be the noble opponent of a vicious enemy. As such, his memory was revered. At the site of his execution, and at his tomb in Pontefract Priory, there grew a sacred cult in which miracles were attested. A drowned child returned to life beside the tomb itself; a blind priest recovered his sight at the place of Lancaster’s death. A servant of Hugh Despenser decided to shit on the same spot, as a gesture of contumely, but a little later his bowels were parted from his body. Another centre of piety was established at St Paul’s Cathedral, in London, when a stone table commemorating Thomas of Lancaster became the site of further miracles. The king issued ordinances to dissuade the people from making pilgrimages to Pontefract or St Paul’s, but he could not thwart the piety of the populace.

In this uncertain and disordered period sporadic outbreaks of violence arose throughout the country. In 1326 the chief baron of the exchequer, Robert Belers, was ambushed outside Melton Mowbray and murdered; the gang, led by Eustace de Folville, was well known. Five sons of a lord of the manor, John de Folville, had turned themselves into a criminal fraternity; they terrorized their home county of Leicestershire, with numerous murders and robberies. They hired themselves out as mercenaries, and kidnapped prominent local people in return for large ransoms. They even fought in foreign wars as part of the retinue of lordly patrons.

One of the brothers, Richard de Folville, had been appointed as rector of Teigh by his eldest brother. It was a convenient cover. When he and his followers were one day pursued by various officers of the peace, they took refuge in his church. From that vantage they shot many arrows, killing at least one of their pursuers. But then the local people took the law, literally, into their own hands; they dragged Richard from the church and beheaded him on the spot. The other brothers managed to escape justice.

Other criminal bands were to be found in the early decades of the fourteenth century. One leader called himself ‘Lionel, king of the rout of raveners’, and he wrote threatening letters from ‘our castle of the wind in the Greenwood Tower’. So violence at the centre rippled through a country already troubled by famine and disease.

Smaller incidents of disorder are recorded. Robert Sutton insulted Roger of Portland, clerk of the sheriff of London, in open court; he put his thumb to his nose and exclaimed, ‘Tprhurt! Tprhurt!’

John Ashburnham rode up to the sheriff ’s court, held in the open air, and so threatened the sheriff that he fled; at which point Ashburnham whistled on his fingers, as a signal that his men should rise up in ambush.

When a writ was served on Agnes Motte, she appealed to her neighbours; with drawn weapons they compelled the servers of the writ to eat it, wax and parchment.

When the mayor of Lynn tried to change the rules of trade, a crowd of tradesmen, under the leadership of the prior, dragged him from his house, placed him on a stall in the marketplace, and forced him to swear on the host that he would make no changes. It is interesting here that the prior of Lynn led the charge. But other clerics were involved in lawlessness. A gang of six monks from Rufford Priory attacked, and held to ransom, a local gentleman.

The rector of Manchester invited a local couple, with their daughter, to dinner. The rector’s servants seized the daughter, broke two of her ribs, and then deposited her in the rector’s bed; he had sex with her that night, but the unfortunate girl died from her injuries a month later.

The king’s court at Westminster was not immune from lawlessness. An attorney was sitting on a table in the great hall – ‘close to the sellers of jewels’ – when the other party to his suit threatened to kill him if he did not abandon it; he was then dragged off the table and struck on the head. Someone else pulled a knife on him. The attorney extricated himself from his attackers and ran to the bar of the court calling for help; the men followed him, their swords drawn, but the officials of the court somehow managed to bar the doors against them. They were then disarmed and taken to the Tower.

In the summer of 1322 the king called a parliament at York, in the course of which a statute was passed that allowed him complete and independent rule. The ordinances of 1311 were once more abandoned. Contemporaries were in no doubt about the situation. The magnates were now too frightened to thwart the will of the king. Parliaments were of no account. Reason had given way to threats and penalties. Whatever pleased Edward, now had the force of law. He sought out the rebels in every shire, confiscating their lands or fining them heavily. His treasury grew and grew on the proceeds. ‘Serve us in such a way that we will become rich’, he wrote to the officials of his exchequer.

He was not to find riches in conquest. He led a campaign in Scotland against Robert Bruce, but achieved nothing except the detention of six Scottish prisoners; with the absence of provisions severely affecting his troops, he marched southwards across the border. But the Scottish army pursued him, and almost caught him near Bridlington in East Yorkshire; he fled in panic to York, a singularly unfortunate end to a futile expedition. He was forced to sign a treaty with Robert Bruce at the beginning of 1323, the principles of which he broke almost immediately. The king’s bastard son, Adam, was killed in the course of the campaign.

The difficulties with France, over the disputed territory of Gascony, had not been resolved. The French had even planted a bastide or fortified town in the middle of the duchy. So the king sent his wife, Isabella, to negotiate with the French king, Charles IV; since she was that king’s sister, some hope of success could be conjectured. But there was a problem. Edward did not trust Isabella, and Isabella had no affection for Edward. Once they were separated by the Channel, anything might happen. The king made another fateful decision; he sent his eldest son, Edward, to the French court to do fealty for the land of Gascony. Both wife and son were now in France.

The king did not travel there himself because he was too concerned about the stability of his own kingdom. It was said at the time that the Despensers advised him to stay at home, because they feared the wrath of the other barons descending upon them in his absence. There were reasons to be fearful. Edward’s rule had become a form of covert tyranny. He became according to one chronicler ‘as wood [mad] as a lion’. He disinherited many magnates so that the Despensers could have their lands; as a result, no landowner felt secure. When a king of England disregards the rights to property, he cannot long endure. For four years, however, Edward lavished earldoms and other titles on his favourites; he harried and persecuted all those who opposed his will. It was so arranged that revenue went into the king’s own chamber rather than to the general exchequer, and the king demanded absolute secrecy from his officials. He resembled a later king in his counting-house, counting out his money. In truth his opponents could do nothing. After the execution of Lancaster, and the imprisonment of other prominent nobles, he was pre-eminent.

Yet he still had enemies in exile, particularly in France. One of them, Roger Mortimer, had been part of the rising against the Despensers; he had submitted to the king and had been imprisoned in the Tower of London. From that place, with a little help from his friends, he managed to escape; it is reported that he drugged his captors and then climbed down from his chamber on a rope. It sounds apocryphal, but it may be accurate. There were very few other paths out of the Tower, except of course by way of the gallows. He sailed to France and offered his services to the French king. It was at Charles IV’s court that he began an intrigue, in every sense, with Queen Isabella. Around the queen there now gathered a cluster of exiled or disaffected barons and bishops. When her son arrived to offer fealty to her brother, she had found the perfect weapon. The king ordered her to return to England, but she refused to do so; she declared that she would come back only if the Despensers were banished. In any case she preferred the more benign atmosphere of the French court.

Throughout 1325 rumours and fears of invasion circulated through the kingdom. It was believed that Isabella would sail with the French king, but she was more immediately concerned to increase her support among the interlinked royal families of northwestern Europe. She travelled north to Hainault (a Flemish province now in southwestern Belgium) where the count of that region was amenable to the proposition that his daughter, Philippa, should marry the lord Edward; this young man of fourteen would, in all likelihood, be the next king of England. With Philippa’s dowry Isabella and Mortimer then raised troops for the coming invasion.

Fifteen hundred men took to their ships from the port of Dordrecht in Holland and, having endured storms at sea, landed at the haven of Orwell in Suffolk on 24 September 1326. There had been no attempt to harry or prevent them, and it is likely that Edward still believed that the invading force was to come from Normandy. The commander of the royal fleet along the eastern coast, in any case, allowed her to land without obstruction. He had in the past been an opponent of the king, and once more turned against him. It is also reported that English sailors refused to fight Isabella because of the hatred they felt for the Despensers.

Her progress was swift. Her supporters flocked to her, and the king’s secret enemies now rose in defiance of his rule. The queen moved on to Dunstable, her troops ransacking the lands of the Despensers on their way, where she learned that the king and the Despensers had in their panic fled from London and marched to the west; it is a measure of their confusion that they left most of their treasure behind. The king’s supporters now changed sides; one who remained loyal, the elder Despenser, the earl of Winchester, was executed in Bristol under the distraint of martial law. His son, Hugh, was captured and awaited trial.

Edward fled into Wales, with only a handful of supporters, and the last surviving record of his reign is an account book found at Caerphilly. He had nowhere to turn. He was pursued by Isabella’s men, and taken somewhere near Neath in the middle of November. From there he was escorted under armed guard to the royal castle of Kenilworth.

Hugh Despenser had refused food and drink since his capture, hoping perhaps to die before he was painfully killed. He was taken to Reading, where he was crowned with a ring of nettles; words of execration were cut into his skin. To the sound of drum and trumpets, and to the shrieks of the crowd, he was hanged from a gallows 50 feet (15 metres) high; while still alive he was hacked down and his intestines were burned before his face. Finally, he was beheaded.

Despenser had been executed in Reading rather than in London because the capital was in a feverish state. The citizens, having long been under the financial constraint of the king, exulted in their liberty and turned on any of the officials of the old regime they could find. Bishop Stapledon, once the royal treasurer, was dragged from his horse and butchered. Merchants and bankers, who had financed the king, were murdered.

Yet how were the victors to depose a lawful king? It was illegal and unprecedented. The king was supposed to be protected by the majesty of God. It would be difficult to lay hands on God’s anointed. At the beginning of 1327 a parliament was held – although, without the requisite presence of the king himself, it should more properly be called an assembly, or convention – in the name of the king’s son, the prince of Wales. He had been appointed as keeper of the realm for the duration of the king’s absence ‘abroad’, although of course Edward had got no further than Kenilworth Castle. Various acclamations and proclamations were made in favour of Isabella and Prince Edward, so that the power of London could be shown to be firmly with them. Two bishops were despatched to Kenilworth, but no record of their interview with the king survives; it is reported that he cursed them, and refused to return with them to London.

A second meeting of the assembly was then convened, under the control of Mortimer, at Westminster. In careful words he declared that the magnates of the land had deposed Edward, on the grounds that he had not followed his coronation oath and had fallen under the control of evil advisers; he had been bent on the destruction of the Church and of the magnates of the realm. Adam Orleton, bishop of Hereford, then delivered a sermon with the theme that ‘where there is no true ruler, the people will be destroyed’. There seems to have been a general assent.

Another delegation visited the king at Kenilworth, where they gave him an ultimatum. Adam Orleton lectured him once more on the evils of his arrogant and unworthy reign before declaring that ‘his son should be substituted for him if he should give his assent’. The assent was crucial for lending at least a veneer of legality to the proceedings. It is claimed that the king, wearing a black gown, was consumed with tears and sighs; when he saw the delegation, he swooned in fear. On recovering he first refused to surrender his crown but then, after further argument, reluctantly assented. The threat, of course, was that he could be forcibly removed and someone else put in his place. The truth of the proceedings will never be known, but it can be assumed that the whole affair was messy, unpredictable and uncertain. Too many interests were at stake to make it otherwise. Some magnates and bishops, for example, must have doubted the legality of the whole exercise.

Yet it had come to pass. The dethroned king was taken from Kenilworth and consigned to Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. He seems to have been treated well at first, but an uncrowned king can never be safe. Two attempts at rescue were made, one of them partially successful, and with the possibility of escape his fate was determined. It has been said that ‘between the prison and the grave of a king there is little space’. His death, in September 1327, has a quality of barbarity that has scarcely been equalled in the annals of England. It was said that he was slain with a poker, red-hot, inserted into his fundament. Or as Ranulf Higden put it in his Polychronicon, ‘he was sleyne with a hoote broche putte thro the secrete place posterialle’. Yet this may simply be a poetical touch, an allusion to his supposed sodomitical tendencies. His heart was taken from his body and placed in a silver vase, which was put later in Isabella’s own coffin. His body was viewed, at a distance, by the knights and magnates of Gloucestershire. At his funeral, in Gloucester Abbey, large oak barricades were built to hold back the crowds. None of his gaolers were ever convicted of his death; two were found innocent, one entered the service of Edward III, and the fourth was murdered in strange circumstances.

There is a stranger epilogue still. In the archives of the French province of Languedoc was found a letter addressed to Edward III, from an important papal official named Manuel di Fieschi. He repeats the confession of a hermit, whom he calls ‘your father’. In specific and circumstantial detail the hermit gives an account of his flight, arrest and detention in Kenilworth and Berkeley castles. He describes how his guard in Berkeley warned him that two knights, Lord Thomas de Gornay and Lord Simon d’Esberfort [Beresford], were coming to kill him. The specific details, again, are given. The king put on different clothes, and made his way out of the castle. He killed the porter, sleeping, at the last door and then took his keys before escaping into the night.

It is recorded that the two knights, thwarted of their victim and terrified of the wrath of the queen, cut out the heart of the porter and put his corpse into a wooden chest. They then pretended that the organ and the body were those of Edward II. In this account, therefore, the queen was buried with the porter’s heart, and the porter’s body still rests beneath the canopied shrine of Edward II in what is now Gloucester Cathedral.

The hermit goes on to recount a period of concealment in Corfe Castle before he began his wanderings through Ireland and France. He was received by Pope John in Avignon, where he remained for two weeks. In the habit of a hermit he crossed into Germany and then into Lombardy, in which region he wrote down his confession. The letter ends with a sentence from Manuel di Fieschi to the king. ‘In testimony of these things I have appended a seal for your lordship’s consideration.’ This was, perhaps, the privy seal that accompanied the king’s person. It all sounds the merest melodrama, unworthy of serious consideration, but the writer of the letter was a papal official of repute. He would not have written to the king of England on a mere whim. The details of the account, too, are accurate as far as they can be checked in the historical record. So it remains a surmise and a mystery. It is possible, to put it no higher, that Edward II ended his life as a hermit in Italy. It would have been an edifying end to a not very edifying life.

The brief supremacy of Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer, lasting from the autumn of 1326 to the autumn of 1330, was not itself a glorious one. The lands and treasures of the deposed king, and of the Despensers, were seized by the victors; the queen and her consort took the greater share, of course, and the rest was distributed among their followers. They also had to reward the mercenaries they had brought with them from Hainault. So the financial reserves of the Crown were severely depleted; the sum of £61,921 left by Edward in 1326 had been reduced by 1330 to £41. Taxation, and loans from Florentine bankers, were the only expedients.

The young king was crowned in 1327, but his power was nominal rather than real. He was governed by a council of barons and bishops, while Roger Mortimer was at the head of affairs. Robert Bruce could not let slip this opportunity of a minority and so invaded the northern territories of England; Mortimer and the young king led armies to oppose him, but achieved nothing. It is said that Edward III wept at the failure of the campaign, which was followed by a treaty in which the title of Bruce to the throne of Scotland was recognized. The capitulation did not bode well for his future reign.

Yet the new king was of a quite different stamp from his father. At the age of eighteen, he was becoming restless and resentful. Like his grandfather, Edward I, he longed for martial glory as the prerogative of sovereignty. He may have blamed Mortimer for the fiasco in Scotland, and have held him responsible for the decline of his revenues. Mortimer had become another ‘over-mighty’ subject at odds with the king.

Isabella was also now carrying Mortimer’s child, and Edward feared a forced change in succession. He was told that it was better to eat the dog than allow the dog to eat him. So an assassination was planned. Mortimer and Isabella had travelled to Nottingham Castle, where a party of knights under the command of Edward had concealed themselves in the undergrowth outside the walls. An official of the castle had revealed to them a secret passage that led directly into the private quarters; there they surprised Mortimer, and arrested him. Isabella ran out of the chamber, shrieking, ‘Good son, have pity on noble Mortimer!’ But, in that period, pity was in short supply. He was tried, and summarily executed, in London. Isabella was sent to one of her private houses. Edward III had obtained his kingdom.

22

Birth and death

The infant mortality rates of the medieval period were high, with over a third of boys and a quarter of girls dying at or soon after birth. That is why baptism was of overwhelming importance to the family of the child; if not baptized, the infant would go into the indeterminate eternal world of limbo and be denied the bliss of heaven. In the event of imminent death the midwife was permitted to sprinkle water over the child and pronounce ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’ If the mother died in labour, the midwife was obliged to cut the child from the womb in order to save its soul. In extreme cases the infant was baptized even before birth, given a name such as ‘Vitalis’ or ‘Creature’ or ‘Child of God’.

The room of birth was supposed to be warm and dark, with a scent of rose petals somewhere in the air, but of course not all births could be performed in ideal conditions. That accounts for a large number of the deaths. Men were not allowed to witness the birth. The husband was permitted to mimic a symbolic act of release at that moment, however, by firing an arrow into the air or opening a box.

The infant survivors came into what was for some a world of pain and suffering. There is widespread evidence of anaemia, sinusitis, leprosy and tuberculosis; osteoarthritis and diabetes were common, but essentially for no larger a proportion of the population than in the twenty-first century. Eye complaints such as sore eyes, red eyes, watering eyes, running eyes and ‘boiling eyes’ were ubiquitous.

Doctors or ‘leeches’ could be summoned for a relatively large fee. Their medical skills were not remarkable. One of the more famous of them in the fourteenth century, John of Arderne, wrote in a treatise that a young doctor should learn ‘good proverbs pertaining to his craft in comforting of patients. Also it speedeth that a leech can talk of good and honest tales that may make the patients to laugh, as well as of the Bible and other tragedies.’

Laughter was perhaps, under the circumstances, the best medicine. The cure for toothache was to burn a piece of mutton fat under the affected tooth, so that the ‘worms’ would fall out. A remedy for the stone was a mash made out of the bodies of beetles and crickets applied to the sick part of the body. The cure for tonsillitis was inspired. ‘Take a fat cat, skin it, draw out the guts and take the grease of a hedgehog and the fat of a bear … All this crumble small and stuff the cat, roast it whole and gather the grease and anoint the patient therewith.’ The lice of hogs was a sovereign curative of consumption. If you combed your hair with an ivory comb, your memory would be improved. For a condition known as ‘web in the eye’ the marrow from the great bone of a goose wing was to be mingled with the juice of the red honeysuckle, but the flower had to be plucked ‘with the saying of nine paternosters, nine aves and a creed’.

It is easy to mock what seem to be absurd provisions, but they belonged to a tradition that viewed the human and natural world as part of the same unity. That is why doctors prescribed the flesh of tame beasts rather than of wild ones; a carp from the pond was better than a shrimp from the seashore. It calmed, rather than excited, the patient. Melancholy men must avoid eating venison; the deer is a beast that lives in fear, and fear only augments the melancholy humour. If a man was sick of the jaundice and saw a yellow thrush, the man would be cured and the bird would die. The power of suggestion was also very great, judging by the extraordinary number of miraculous cures that took place at the shrines of the saints. The majority of people never saw a ‘leech’ in the whole course of their lives; they relied upon the herbs and potions of the local wise woman.

Buildings known as hospitals did exist, but they were essentially large chapels in which invalids were lodged; prayer was as good a remedy as medicine. No medical attendants were employed in the hospitals, only monks and chaplains. If illness was a punishment sent by God, then it might be impious to seek to cure it. The soul’s health was in any case more important than that of the body. Yet the hospitals played their part. An interval of rest and care was probably more efficacious than many of the available remedies.

The medical treatment of the period, where available, was based on folklore or the instructions of Galen from the second century ad which were based on the doctrine of the four ‘humours’. Just as the universe was made of four elements – earth, water, air and fire – so the human body was comprised of phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine and melancholy humours in various proportions. The house of melancholy, for example, lay in the spleen. Good health was the result of the balance between them. The doctor would taste the blood of his patient, after one of the frequent bloodlettings considered to be necessary. Healthy blood was slightly sweet.

The inspection of urine, in special glass vessels or urinals, was also an important part of the doctor’s regimen; it bears a resemblance to the modern blood test. Urine is in fact still inspected as part of a general health precaution. Twenty types of urine could be found, with certain broad divisions based upon the humours. If the urine was white and thin, for example, it signified melancholy; melancholy was considered to be cold and dry. The doctor would observe, smell and taste the urine to discover the governing condition of the patient and the part of the body most in danger. A good doctor also had to be an astrologer. When the moon was in Aries, a fiery and moderately dry sign, it was proper to operate upon the head and the neck. The leaves of henbane, good for the gout, could only be picked on Midsummer Eve.

The possibility of saintly intervention was also at hand. St Blaise was the patron saint of throat disease, St Hubert of hydrophobia and St Martin of the itch. The top joint of the second finger of the right hand was dedicated to St Simon Cleophas, while the second joint of the third finger of the left hand was under the protection of St Bartholomew. By various means, sacred and secular, the good doctor was thus able to prepare a diet and a routine of life to suit the particular temperament of each patient; if the body was in tune with the stars and the elements, then it would not suffer.

Bathing was a luxury of the upper classes and those who liked to imitate them; bathhouses were established in the larger towns, and the magnates possessed their own wooden bathtubs which were shaped like vats and bound with hoops. Soap was readily available, as well as instruments for cleaning the teeth and ears. Bathwater was supposed to be tepid, the same temperature as that which ran from the side of Christ at the time of his crucifixion. The prayer ‘Anima Christi’ has the invocation, ‘Water from the side of Christ, cleanse me.’

Only four English kings of the medieval period lived beyond the age of sixty, which can be considered as the gateway to old age. It was once widely supposed that men and women over the age of forty were considered to be old, but that is not the case; only after sixty was that attribute used. In the century and a half after 1350, 30 per cent of the members of the House of Lords were over sixty, and 10 per cent over seventy. It would still be considered a respectable proportion of that parliamentary chamber. Life expectancy was of course a different matter; throughout our period it has been variously estimated at forty or fifty years. In some regions it might have been as low as thirty.

When death arrived, the body was wrapped in a shroud tied at head and neck. Coffins were not used for the ordinary dead. The favoured part of the churchyard was the south, the north part being considered damp and mossy. The corpse was met at the principal gate of the churchyard by the priest, who led the mourners in procession to the site of the grave where the burial service was held. Only the rich dead deserved a stone memorial, which was to be found within the church. So the cemetery itself was free of gravestones, except for a few wooden markers and small carved stones. The churchyard itself was considered to be part of the common space of the parish, used for sports and markets; it could also be used as a pigsty and as pasture for cattle. As the dead multiplied, so did the surface of the churchyard rise.

23

The sense of a nation

The new king, Edward III, was compared to the Israelites taken out of the house of bondage; he was free at last from the schemes and wiles of his mother who had sometimes been known as ‘the she-wolf of France’. After the capture of Mortimer in Nottingham Castle a public proclamation was issued, to be read by the sheriffs in churchyards, courts and marketplaces. It stated in part that ‘the king’s affairs and the affairs of his realm have been directed to the damage and dishonour of him and his realm, and to the impoverishment of his people’; it went on to promise that the new king ‘will henceforth govern his people according to right and reason, as befits his royal dignity’.

He could not have made a stronger contrast with his unfortunate father. He is generally reported to have been convivial and engaging. One of the mottoes woven into his jacket stated simply ‘It is as it is.’ Another, worn by the courtiers as well as the king, read ‘Hey, hey, the white swan, by God’s soul I am thy man.’ He also spoke English much better than his predecessor.

He had personal courage, too, and identified himself with all the chivalric virtues. As a result he inspired loyalty among the magnates. He restored lands that had been rendered forfeit by his father, and actively helped to enlarge the membership of the nobility; four of the senior members of his household, for example, were granted earldoms. He had to rely at first upon the councillors and courtiers he had inherited, but over a few years he gathered together a group of knights and nobles who would remain with him for the rest of his reign.

Yet the token of a righteous sovereign was still success in war. The new king realized that his father’s military incapacity was the single most important reason for his failure, and he strove very hard to reverse the image of weakness. That is why his first enterprise was against Scotland. The tears he had shed, at his earlier humiliation by the Scots, had not been forgotten. An opportunity soon arose for action. The death of Robert Bruce in 1329 put his infant son upon the throne of Scotland, but Edward III espoused the cause of a rival claimant, Edward Balliol; he was eager to undo the damage of the previous campaign, and in 1333 he won a notable victory at Halidon Hill two miles outside Berwick. Balliol then became the client king; Berwick and the surrounding area were returned to English rule. This was only the beginning of further raids and campaigns in the area of the border, but Halidon Hill was in fact the only battle Edward himself fought on English soil. The field of his other military endeavours lay across the Channel.

The kings of France and of England were, at the time, the two most powerful sovereigns in Europe; much of the continent was divided into dukedoms and principalities that fought only against each other. So it was perhaps inevitable that France and England should vie for mastery. That is the law of life.

The particular source of conflict was, once again, the duchy of Gascony that represented the last piece of the Plantagenet Empire still in English hands. In the Treaty of Paris, signed more than eighty-three years before, Henry III had given up his old French empire in exchange for its possession. Yet Gascony was still considered to be part of France, and therefore the new king of England on his succession was obliged to do fealty (or ‘liege homage’ as it was known) as a vassal of the French king. But how could an English sovereign owe loyalty to a foreign sovereign? He would be obliged to supply the French king with arms and soldiers. He was not allowed to enter an alliance with the enemies of France. If he did so, Gascony might be confiscated.

It was unthinkable. It was also an anomaly, a structural imbalance, that could only end in discord. Edward III refused to accept that he was a feudal subject of Philip of Valois and instead declared himself to be the king of France as well as of England. He claimed that through his mother, Isabella, he was in the direct line of royal succession – despite the fact that the French crown could not by law be transmitted through the female line. His declaration was inspired in part by bravado and in part by pride. He declared that he was fighting ‘to recover his rights overseas and to save and defend his realm of England’. He was looking for an excuse to attack the enemy.

In the largest perspective it might be said that he was helping to break down the old European feudal order and to supplant it with the new recognition of the power of nation-states; in this period England and France became more centralized and bureaucratized. Edward III himself, however, is most unlikely to have seen it in those terms. He just wanted to preserve his honour and perhaps win some spoils. Of arms and the man, I sing. His fighting spirit had the unfortunate consequence, however, of beginning a conflict that became known as the Hundred Years War. The controversy lasted for a much longer period. Only in the nineteenth century did the English throne renounce its claim to the French crown.

The war, costing so many lives and so much money, had little permanent consequence. The English gained Calais, but that town became a burden rather than a glory. The real interests of England were not involved in the conflict, except perhaps for the consumption of wines from Gascony. But the appetite of the king for power and glory took precedence over the claims of the nation.

It is true to say that when war was first declared in 1337 some enthusiasm might be found, at least among the magnates, for a campaign against France. The indolence and indignity of the previous reign were supplanted by something approaching martial fervour. War might be said to animate the leaders of the nation, and bring together its disparate and sometimes feuding parts. There would be no need for the magnates to fight each other if they could reap the spoils of battle in an enemy country.

This newly found unity of purpose was dramatized when, in 1348, Edward III instituted the Order of the Garter. The celebrated motto, Honi soit qui mal y pense or ‘Shame on him who thinks ill of it’, refers to Edward’s claim upon the throne of France. Almost all of the original twenty-six knights, divided into two groups for the sake of jousting competitions, had taken part in the French campaigns. It was a military brotherhood.

The king had in any case a strong sense of the dramatic, and loved ceremonial occasions; he engaged in all the panoply of chivalry and, more than a century before Sir Thomas Malory wrote Le Morte Darthur, he tried to restore an Arthurian sense of kingship. The king was therefore popular among the grandees of the realm. They were once more part of a great adventure, and Edward had become their warrior king. The king’s eldest son, Edward – dressed as Lionel, cousin of Lancelot – took part in a grand tournament. The contemporary chronicler, Jean Froissart, wrote that ‘the English will never love or honour a king who is not a victor and a lover of war’. Other kings of Europe might be celebrated for their piety, or for their learning, but in England those criteria did not apply.

The king’s lavish architectural patronage was part of the chivalric programme. He had been born in Windsor Castle, but he proceeded to demolish the existing castle and build an even grander edifice in its place. It was his way of advertising his own glory and of proclaiming his superiority over the French king. It was here, in 1344, that the Round Table was recreated; the king and queen, clothed in red gowns, led a procession of knights and barons into the castle chapel where their quest for valour and virtue was consecrated. In the circular Round Table building, larger than the Pantheon of Rome, lavish feasts and dances were held in which the participants dressed as characters out of Arthurian romance. The foundations of this early theatre, or centre of ritual activity, were uncovered in the summer of 2006.

As the knights sat on a stone bench running around the wall, and watched jousts as well as tournaments, the real conflict of the period was proceeding slowly enough. The first two of the hundred years of war (in fact 116) were spent in posturing; Edward sailed over to the Low Countries for the purpose of launching an invasion from Flanders, and for purchasing new allies. It was said that he was spending his time, and the money of the country, idly. The complaints against heavy taxation were mounting all the time. The poems and chronicles of the period are filled with complaints about oppression and shortages; no farmers or merchants were safe from the king’s depredations. It had become a familiar refrain of the fourteenth century. ‘He who takes money from the needy without just cause’, one versifier wrote, ‘commits sin.’ The wool merchants, in particular, were forced to pay for the king’s armies; the proceeds of 30,000 sacks of wool were to be lent to the king, accompanied by a temporary ban on exports to keep the prices high. Since wool was the single most important aspect of the English economy, the king’s demands led directly to unemployment and consequent poverty. The country had become essentially a cash cow for Edward’s military needs.

Yet his plans for a rapid campaign were frustrated; the scheme for financing the war through wool proved disastrous; problems arose both with the merchants and the collectors of the customs. The king’s financiers were growing restless, and threatened to cut off supplies. With the king out of the country, too, rumours spread of invasions from France and from Scotland. The members of the council that Edward had set up to rule England in his absence were growing fractious; the king accused them of withholding money from him, while they in turn complained that they had many expensive duties to perform including the defence of the realm. It was said that the king was growing as reckless and as extravagant as his father. ‘I counsel that ye begin no war in trust of your riches,’ Dame Prudence declared in Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Melibee’, ‘for they … suffice not wars to maintain.’

In 1340, three years after the declaration of war with France, a taxpayers’ revolt was organized in the parliament house. It was said that ‘a king ought not to go forth from his kingdom in manner of war unless the commune of his realm agree to it’. The parliament had become the institution that, according to the injunctions of Magna Carta, gave the consent of the realm to fresh taxation. Successive kings, under force of circumstance, had accepted its role. The knights and townsmen had already begun humbly to submit petitions from their various neighbourhoods, to which appropriate royal legislation came in response. It was a system of quid pro quo.

The parliament had already granted heavy taxation for the first three years of the conflict. In the summer of 1339 the king asked for a further grant of £300,000. The Commons, made up of the townsmen and the knights of the shires, prevaricated; they asked leave to return to their own districts, and consult the people. When they assembled again, in the early months of 1340, they offered a grant in return for certain concessions from the king. They had in effect distinguished themselves from the Lords. They were beginning to feel their power.

Their principal submission was that the finances of the nation should be ordered and controlled by a council of magnates answerable to parliament. It was to be directed by John Stratford, the archbishop of Canterbury. The king, in desperate need for the means to wage war, conceded this demand. As long as he was fighting, he was happy. His agreement also marks the moment when the Commons became a coherent political assembly that gradually began to formulate its own rules of procedure. War, and taxation, had brought them together. The parliament itself was now supposed to meet on a regular basis; it was also the assembly in which the council of the nation, and the custodians of taxation, were chosen. Thirty-five years later, it would be strong enough to impeach the king’s principal councillors. The idea of an independent parliament, then, was part of the consequence of the Hundred Years War.

On 22 June 1340, Edward returned to the Low Countries in the full expectation that hostilities would soon be resumed. Stratford would ensure that the money reached him. Yet the fresh exactions of the king provoked hostility and violence throughout the country; the collectors were supposed to take up 20,000 sacks of wool, from the nine most productive sheep-rearing counties, and sell them to the local merchants. But the people successfully resisted this extortion. As a result the king was not receiving the aid he had expected; he could not pay his debts, or his troops, and his active campaign came to an end.

In his fury he turned upon Archbishop Stratford. He sailed back to England and, in the middle of the night of 30 November, he suddenly arrived at the Tower of London. He asked for the constable, but the absence of that official confirmed the king’s sense that his realm was not being properly administered. Edward accused the archbishop of wilfully withholding money; he believed, or professed to believe, that Stratford had wished to sabotage the French campaign of which the cleric disapproved. The senior members of the council were dismissed. Stratford fled back to Canterbury, where he was in theory safe from the king’s wrath.

Then Edward, in defiance of his previous pledge to parliament, took control of the country without consultation. He embarked upon a reassessment of the whole administration, and in particular of its financial resources; he appointed new collectors of the wool supplies; he levied fines on individuals, and communities, that had evaded the tax. On 29 December Stratford entered the pulpit of Canterbury Cathedral, and delivered a sermon in English defending his actions. He declared that he was only enforcing the collective will of the parliament and that the king had been swayed by evil councillors. He alluded to the Magna Carta, with the clear implication that the king had broken its provisions. He knew that the nation was supporting him, and he demanded a trial by his peers. He was effectively defying the king to do his worst.

The king then called a parliament, to which he reluctantly admitted Stratford himself. The archbishop was formally reconciled to the king – he was received ‘into the king’s grace’ – and the work of parliamentary negotiation began. In return for an extra 10,000 sacks of wool, Edward agreed that his chief ministers would in future be approved by the magnates and the council. Accommodations and compromises were agreed on every side; the king was reconciled to the Lords on the condition that he would be their good lord, and he eventually reached a settlement with the Commons on the understanding that he would ‘rule them by leniency and gentleness’. He had a more astute understanding of political realities than his father had ever shown. He knew when to turn his cheek. It was only to be expected that, five months later, he reversed his concessions on the grounds that he had granted them unwillingly. Within two years he had regained most of his power. In his duel with parliament he had survived.

The war with France continued like a piece of vast background music. In the summer of 1340 the English fleet surprised and destroyed French ships on the Flanders coast at Sluys. It was the first notable victory of the conflict and after the battle the king issued a gold coin, called the noble, in which he was portrayed standing on board a warship. Here was the image of the master of the seas. His reign had become identified with the pursuit of war. No French minister had dared to inform Philip VI of the English victory, and it was decided that only his Fool could break the news with impunity. So the Fool declared to his master that the English were arrant cowards; when asked the reason he replied that they, unlike the French, had not leapt into the sea.

The defeat of the French fleet meant that the English were at liberty to invade by means of the Channel. Yet Edward’s squabbles with his allies, and with the Flemish in particular, meant that no immediate successes were achieved. The French forces ducked and wove, refusing to be drawn into battle. This was in fact to become the pattern of the French defence. In the autumn of 1340 a truce was agreed. But it could not last. There were inconclusive hostilities in Brittany, and in Gascony, over the succeeding few years and then in 1346 Edward made the decisive move of invading Normandy; he hoped to join his Flemish allies in an assault upon Paris or perhaps a march into Gascony. He kept the French king guessing.

On 11 July 1346, 8,000 men (half of them archers) sailed south from Portsmouth to northern France. They marched through Normandy on their way to Paris, plundering and wasting everything in their path. They advanced as far as the suburbs of the capital, where they turned north towards Calais in order to join forces with the Flemish allies. Philip VI marched rapidly across the great northern plain of the Somme in an effort to divert or destroy them; on the afternoon of 26 August, he attacked them as they assembled near the wood of Crécy-en-Ponthieu. An impetuous army of Genoese crossbowmen and French cavalry were beaten back by the English forces and, in the ensuing mêlée, the French army was effectively crushed.

Gunpowder cannon were for the first time used in battle, causing more panic than death; but the palm of victory must be awarded to Edward’s archers who, wielding longbows, defeated the knights of feudal chivalry. It had been a day of partial eclipse, of thunder and of lightning; at its close the French knights lay on the field, many of them despatched by the use of long and slender daggers known as ‘misericords’ or mercy killers that ripped open the body from the armpit to the heart. One among the 30,000 dead was John, the blind king of Bohemia, whose motto of Ich dien or ‘I serve’ was adopted by subsequent princes of Wales.

The battle of Crécy was a signal victory, of which Edward took immediate opportunity; he marched north and, nine days later, he was waiting beneath the walls of Calais. This town would be an excellent base for further incursions into French territory; it was also a convenient port for raids against French pirates. The townsmen of Calais endured almost a year of famine. The commander of the French garrison wrote to Philip VI that ‘we can find no more food in the town unless we eat men’s flesh … this is the last letter that you will receive from me, for the town will be lost and all of us that are within it’. The letter was intercepted before it reached the French king and was delivered to Edward; he read it, applied his personal seal and sent it on to its destination.

In the eleventh month the women, children and old people of Calais came out from the gates as ‘useless mouths’ to be removed. The English would not allow them to pass through their lines, and they were hounded back to the town ditch where they expired from want. So the town was forced to submit. The story of the six burghers of Calais, coming out with nooses around their necks and submitting to the clemency of a gracious king, may well be authentic. It is a type of political theatre at which Edward excelled.

He had already vanquished another ancient enemy. In the year of Crécy, David Bruce, or David II of Scotland, had invaded England; he had inherited the ‘old alliance’ with France, and hoped that the absence of Edward would demoralize the English forces. But at Neville’s Cross, close to Durham, the Scottish forces were overwhelmed and David Bruce himself was escorted to the Tower of London where he remained for eleven years. The Black Rood of Scotland, a piece of Christ’s cross kept in a black case, was taken in triumph to Durham Cathedral. So Edward III was victorious over all his foes. The knights and lords now clustered around him in amity. He had become their ideal of a monarch.

Whether it meant as much to the English people is open to doubt. The war against the French represented a quarrel between two monarchs, who were members of the same family and who both spoke French as their native language. What had the affairs of princes to do with the condition of England? The people had in any case far more serious matters with which to deal when, in 1348, all the forces of infection and death were unleashed in an epidemic without parallel.

It was named as ‘the pestilence time’. The disease itself was called ‘the plague’ or ‘the Black Death’. It may not have been bubonic plague, however; it has been variously described as anthrax or influenza or a form of haemorrhagic fever. It may have been a disease that no longer exists. Contrary to popular superstition it is unlikely to have been carried by rats.

It came out of Central Asia in the early 1330s and then spread throughout the known world by means of the trade routes. It had reached Italy by 1347 and, in the summer of the following year, touched Bristol and other ports. By the autumn of 1348 it had reached London before travelling north. It manifested itself in buboes, ulcerated swellings in the groin or armpit; a contemporary described a bubo as in ‘the form of an apple, or the head of an onion … it seethes like a burning cinder, and is of the colour of ash’. In some cases the body erupted in abscesses filled with pus. This was accompanied by aching limbs, vomiting and diarrhoea; the victims were generally dead within three days.

They were buried in mass graves, laid side by side in long trenches, the adults carrying their dead children on their shoulders. An old belief still persists that the parts of certain graveyards must never be disturbed for fear of ‘letting out the plague’. It is not completely without justification; the spores of anthrax can survive for hundreds of years. The cemeteries of London were soon filled, and 13 acres (5.2 hectares) of land were purchased on the borders of Smithfield to be converted into a vast graveyard. One third, or even perhaps one half, of the population died. There had never been mortality on this scale, nor has there been since. At the best estimation a population of approximately 6 million was reduced to 3 million or 4 million. It remained at this level until the early sixteenth century.

It is likely that, before the plague, the country had been overpopulated; it may even be that malnutrition actively hastened the fatalities. So on some form of Malthusian calculation the distemper freed the energies of the surviving population and increased the availability of resources. It did not seem like this at the time. According to Henry Knighton, a chronicler of the period, ‘many buildings, great and small, fell into ruins in every city, borough, and village for lack of people; likewise many villages and hamlets became desolate, not a house being left in them, all having died who dwelt there; and it was probable that many such villages would never be inhabited’. Men could not be found to work the land, so women and children were obliged to drive the plough. In a school textbook of the next generation there is a set sentence, ‘The roof of an old house had almost fallen on me yesterday.’ Ruined buildings were a familiar hazard.

A Franciscan friar, John Clyn, left an account of the period. ‘Lest things worthy of remembrance should perish with time’, he wrote,

and fall away from the memory of those who are to come after us, I, seeing these many evils, and the whole world lying, as it were, in the grasp of the wicked one – myself awaiting death among the dead [inter mortuos mortem expectans] as I have truly heard and examined, so I have reduced these things to writing; and lest the writing should perish with the writer, and the work fail together with the workman, I leave parchment for continuing the work, if haply any man may survive, and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence.

He added, some time later, two words – ‘magna karistia’ or ‘great dearth’. Then another hand followed. ‘Here it seems that the author died.’

The plague was generally considered to be an act of God, punishing sinners for their pride and presumption, their vanity and faithlessness. It represented an evil so great that, according to William Langland in Piers Plowman, ‘prayers have no power to prevent this pestilence’. Langland also stated that the southwest wind, blowing in the evening, was a baleful sign. It was the breath of the devil. It was said that all those born after the arrival of the pestilence had two fewer teeth than those born before. In 1361 the pestilence time returned. It was known as ‘the mortality of children’. A third epidemic followed in 1369, and a fourth in 1374. It was noticed at the time that the wealthier classes were not so severely affected as the rest of the population; they were not forced into close or intimate contact with the sick.

Despite these grievous blows the society of England held together. The courts of justice were closed, and the meetings of parliament were repeatedly delayed, but no general collapse of order occurred. The records of Church and state reveal a surprising continuity and coherence of administration. The level of wool exports, for example, remained stable. Yet the pestilence had slow but permanent effects on English society. The shortage of labour had the immediate result of increasing both the level of wages and the chances of employment. The phenomenon of the landless or impoverished peasant wholly disappeared. But the rising demands of the working people who had survived, their worth now doubled by the epidemic, provoked a reaction from the landowners and magnates. The knights of the shires, in particular, perceived a threat to good order.

An Ordinance of Labourers was passed by a parliament in 1349, forbidding employers to pay more for labour than they had before the pestilence. The same Act deemed that it was illegal for an unemployed man to refuse work. The measures were not realistic. Many workers and their families could simply move to another district and to a more generous employer who was willing to ignore the law. Some migrated to the towns, for example, where there was a great demand for manual labourers such as masons and carpenters. A ploughman might become a tiler. More than enough work was available. So from a court roll of the period we have the following entries.

Thomas Tygow of Hale is a freelance roofer and he took at Hale from Hugh Skynner of Little Hale on various occasions in 1370 a daily wage of fourpence and his dinner, contrary to statute; excess 3s. 4d … William Deye is a freelance ploughman and took from Gilbert Deye at Ingoldsby on 2 December 1370 3d and food, and did this for the rest of the week, and received the same from others in the following year; excess: 12d … John Couper, carpenter, refused to work by the day in order to earn excessive money, and he took a lump sum from William Bourton of Sudbrooke; excess estimated to be 2s.

Many younger people now possessed their own holdings of land. And the best land did not remain vacant for very long. There had once been too many farmers and labourers working too little soil, but now they were dispersed over the countryside. Some lords tried to tie down their servile population by enforcing the obligations and duties owed to them, but any success was balanced by the problems of a reluctant and disaffected workforce. As that workforce became more aware of its value, the old tradition of labour service could not hold.

Wealthier peasants were ready to take on more land; they left wills, written in English, to confirm their aspiring position. The relatively low cost of produce, and the incidence of high wages, encouraged many of the larger landlords to give up production and lease their farms to the highest bidder. Or they converted their arable land into pasture; the rearing of sheep required less investment of labour than the growing of crops.

The old manorial and village ties were being dissipated. The pestilence slowly began to dissolve, therefore, the old certainties of status and position; the traditional network of communal relations was being supplanted by the exigencies of private interest. There is evidence that the remaining people, on the land, now worked harder; manor accounts show that output per man increased, and that women often took over jobs previously reserved for men. Their wages increased proportionally higher than those of men.

In this context we can place the various ordinances and measures taken by the Lords and Commons to discipline the thriving peasantry. Legislation was passed to forbid the wearing of costly clothes, and to impose restrictions on the daily diet. Women were to dress according to the social position of their fathers or husbands, and the wives of servants were not allowed to wear veils above 1 shilling in value. The wives of yeoman were not permitted to purchase silk veils, and agricultural labourers were not allowed to wear cloth priced at more than 12 pence a yard (0.91 metre). A worker’s gown and coat must ‘cover his privy members and buttocks’, and the toes of his shoes or boots ‘must not pass the length of two inches’ (5 centimetres). This was in remonstrance against the fashion for tight-fitting and figure-hugging clothing, as well as the taste for elongated shoes. At dinner or supper the lower classes were to enjoy only two courses. Laws were also passed that prohibited peasants from carrying weapons or indulging in disorderly games. Idleness, if proven, could be punished. Despite these maladroit exercises in social control, the feudal England of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was coming to an end. The English poet, John Gower, wrote at the close of the fourteenth century that:

The world is changed and overthrown

That it is well-nigh upside down

Compared with days of long ago.

There is no known response of Edward III to the pestilence time. He no doubt regarded it simply as a threat to the supply of soldiers for his army. All his thoughts were of war. An armistice was agreed after the fall of Calais that endured for six years before foundering on claims of bad faith. The king combined in warfare against the French with his eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, prince of Wales. The young man would also become known as the Black Prince, on account of his armour rather than his morals or disposition. Edward of Woodstock embarked upon what was effectively a reign of terror by which contingents of his army were despatched to ravage selected bands of French territory; ordered to pillage, burn or destroy whatever lay in their path, they were dedicated to wiping out the lives and the livelihoods of the people of France. They had not been summoned in a feudal call to arms; they were either forcibly conscripted or they were mercenaries paid by the day. Many of them were common thieves or murderers attracted to the prospects of spoil. In this pursuit they were eminently successful. The folk memory of English raids lived in the French national consciousness for many hundreds of years. Edward of Woodstock boasted that, in the space of seven weeks, he had laid waste 500 cities, towns and villages in the region of Bordeaux that had never known warfare in its history. It was a policy that had already been successfully deployed in Scotland.

The strategy of the French seems to have been to refrain from open confrontation but, in the autumn of 1356, the two armies came into contact; a French reconnaissance party stumbled upon the forces of the English. Battle could not be honourably delayed. The new king of France, John II, held a vast superiority in numbers with an army of 35,000 against the Black Prince’s 7,000; but his position, at Poitiers, was on rising ground covered with hedges and vineyards.

The location itself was not the principal difficulty. The English could always now claim the mastery of the field by the use of the longbow, and the Black Prince followed his father’s tactics at Crécy by using the archers as the main fighting force. The French cavalry were flung against the English line, only to be cut to pieces by a hail of arrows; the rest of the French knights then followed on foot, but they were also repulsed by the bows of yew. The average length of the bow was 6 feet (1.9 metres), and the arrows were 3 feet (0.91 metre) in length. The archer drew it to the ear, rather than to the chest, and with that momentum he could send it 250 yards (228 metres); he fired ten volleys each minute. This was a new age of warfare.

The French lines broke and dissolved; a retreat, and a general panic, ensued. In the confusion the French king and his son were captured by the English forces. It was a fresh calamity for the native army. King John was escorted to England by the Black Prince, and a truce of two years was agreed. When John was taken through the streets of London, it became a festive occasion for the citizens as the captive king was led in triumph to Westminster Hall where Edward III was waiting to greet him. It was a thoroughly medieval form of captivity. He was released on the surety of his son but, when his son escaped from England, he voluntarily returned to resume his life as a prisoner. He could not endure the dishonour of violating the terms of the agreement. Four months after his return to London, he died of an unknown disease. The king’s body was then sent back to France.

Edward resumed hostilities after the time of truce, but a campaign in the winter of 1359 did not supply the overwhelming victory for which he had prayed. He was, however, still in the ascendant. So in 1360 a treaty was reached in which Edward agreed to renounce his claim to the French throne in return for full sovereignty over Gascony, Calais, Guienne, Poitou and Ponthieu in northern France.

The Black Prince set up his own court at Bordeaux, the capital of the duchy of Guienne. All seemed to be set fair for English power across the Channel but in 1369 the new French king, Charles V, known as Charles the Wise, reasserted his feudal rights over all the territories of France. The Black Prince defied him, but all of his martial vaunts proved useless in the end. The English prince contracted dropsy and grew too weak to lead his forces into the field; there were in any case no set battles, the French king proceeding by raid, sortie and ambush. This reconquest of French land by stealth was eminently successful, and five years later Charles had taken back almost all of the duchies and provinces once claimed by the English. A truce was then formulated that continued until the time of Edward III’s death. All of Edward’s spoils, acquired at the expense of so much blood and suffering and cost, were one by one stripped from him. Only Calais and parts of Gascony were left. His quest for the French crown was ineffective and ineffectual. This continual see-saw, this claim and counter-claim, demonstrates the futility of the entire conflict. Its major consequences, as we have seen, were wholly domestic in the fashioning of an independent parliament and the formation of a national system of taxation.

Edward of Woodstock came back to England, where he lingered in ever declining health for six years. The morbidity of his symptoms served only to emphasize the sickness at the court itself, where the absence of any military success infected the atmosphere with rancour and suspicion. The ageing king no longer seemed to be wholly in command of affairs and was widely rumoured to be in thrall to his mistress, Alice Perrers; much of the government of the realm, therefore, devolved upon one of his younger sons, the duke of Lancaster known as John of Gaunt. Unlike his older brother, however, John was not widely popular. It was believed that a group of councillors around the king were exploiting the resources of the exchequer for their own ends. When a parliament was called in the spring of 1376, for the purpose of raising fresh taxation, the Commons refused to continue their deliberations until certain ‘evil counsellors’ had been removed from the king’s side.

The Good Parliament, as it became known, wished ‘to make correction of the errors and faults of the realm if such are found to exist’. It proclaimed itself to be assembled ‘on behalf of the community of the realm’, and then moved against corrupt courtiers and merchants who had conspired to defraud the country. They were impeached, and sent to trial before the Lords. One or two of them fled the country; others were dismissed, imprisoned, or forfeited their property. It was an early test for the efficacy of the Commons, which had shown itself to be capable of determined action. It was not representative of some supposed popular freedom, however, since it proved to be equally capable of rebuffing the demands of the peasants and labourers. In the following year it introduced the ‘poll tax’ which was feared and hated in equal measure. The members of the parliament house were concerned only with the interests of their own particular ‘community’ of the realm.

The Black Prince died during the sessions of the Good Parliament, and his father followed a year later in 1377. It is said that Alice Perrers took the rings from his fingers as he lay upon his deathbed in the palace of Sheen, but this may be no more than a morality tale. The baubles of glory had already been stripped from him in France. He had achieved nothing much of his own volition, but during his reign of fifty years England itself had acquired a more coherent or at least more organized national life.

Another consequence of his reign is of equal importance. Edward III’s early victories at Sluys and Crécy, and his capture of Calais, had augmented the sense of national identity. The people may not have cared a whit about Edward’s claim to the throne of France but they understood the force of arms against ‘strangers’. The news of battles was issued from market crosses and church pulpits, spreading quickly throughout the entire country. English merchants, rather than Italian or German traders, were now in charge of the country’s business. In the port of Hull, for example, English exporters of wool had made up only 4 per cent of the total in 1275. By 1330, it was almost 90 per cent.

‘I kan noght construe all this,’ a character remarks in Piers Plowman, ‘ye most kenne me this on Englissh.’ It is worth remarking that Chaucer began his poetic career at the court of Edward III. His first verses were written in courtly French but the power of the vernacular overcame his literary conventionality; it is a measure of the strength of spoken and written English that Chaucer now celebrated it as worthy of comparison with the classical tongues. In Troilus and Criseyde, and more especially in Canterbury Tales, he created or adapted a language that was capable of the highest lyric flights and the most vulgar comic effects. It is already the language of Shakespeare. Within Chaucer’s lifetime English replaced French as the language of schoolteaching, and in the reign of the next sovereign it became the language of the court.

Human ingenuity is unceasing. The first mechanical clock was introduced to England in the reign of Edward III. It marks the demise of the feudal and seasonal world no less plainly than the advent of the longbow and the decline of the serf. The first reference to a crane, working in a harbour, comes from 1347.

24

The night schools

In the reign of Edward III there arose the greatest disturbance within the Church since the time that Augustine imposed the primacy of Rome upon the English at the end of the sixth century. In the succeeding 800 years the Church had become part of the governance of England, with all the obligations and dangers that implies. It had become rich. It had remained powerful, with its principal servants becoming the chief administrators of the king. The bishops were effectively the king’s clerks, chosen and promoted in a complex hierarchy of service; they had their own small armies of knights and retainers, sometimes leading them into battle.