United Kingdom

A steady advance was made in the creation of parishes, and monasticism flourished and received support from Offa. A great event in ecclesiastical history was the arrival of a papal legation in 787, the first since the conversion. It drew up reforming statutes, which were accepted by the two ecclesiastical provinces, meeting separately under the presidency of Offa and Aelfwald of Northumbria. Offa used the visit to secure the consecration of his son—the first recorded coronation ceremony in England—and also to have Mercia made into a metropolitan province with its see at Lichfield. The latter seemed desirable partly because he disliked the Kentish archbishop of Canterbury, Jaenberht, but also because it would seem fitting to him that the leading kingdom should be free from external interference in ecclesiastical affairs. This move was unpopular with the church, and in 802, when relations with Canterbury had improved, the archbishopric of Lichfield was abolished. The decline of Mercia and the rise of Wessex

Offa died in 796, and his son died a few weeks later. Cenwulf, their successor, suppressed revolts in Kent and East Anglia, but he never attained Offa’s position. Cenwulf allowed Charles to intervene in Northumbria in 808 and restore Eardwulf (who had been driven from his kingdom) to the throne—a unique incident in Anglo-Saxon history. Mercian influence in Wessex was ended when Egbert became king there in 802, though there is no recorded warfare between the kingdoms for many years, during which Egbert conquered Cornwall and Cenwulf fought in Wales. But in 825 Egbert defeated Beornwulf of Mercia and then sent an army into Kent, with the result that he was accepted as king of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Essex. In that same year the East Angles threw off the Mercian yoke, killing Beornwulf. In 829 Egbert became ruler of Mercia and all regions south of the Humber, which caused the chronicler to add his name to Bede’s list of kings who held the imperium, calling him bretwalda. The Northumbrians accepted Egbert without fighting. Yet he held this proud position only one year; then Wiglaf recovered the Mercian throne and ruled without subjection to Egbert.

By this time Danish Viking raids were a grave menace, and Aethelwulf, who succeeded his father Egbert in 839, had the wisdom to see that Mercia and Wessex must combine against the Vikings. Friendly relations between them were established by marriage alliances and by a peaceful settlement of boundaries; this paved the way for the acceptance in 886 of Alfred, king of Wessex, as lord of all the English who had not fallen under Danish rule. The period of the Scandinavian invasions Viking invasions and settlements

Small scattered Viking raids began in the last years of the 8th century; in the 9th century large-scale plundering incursions were made in Britain and in the Frankish empire as well. Though Egbert defeated a large Viking force in 838 that had combined with the Britons of Cornwall and Aethelwulf won a great victory in 851 over a Viking army that had stormed Canterbury and London and put the Mercian king to flight, it was difficult to deal with an enemy that could attack anywhere on a long and undefended coastline. Destructive raids are recorded for Northumbria, East Anglia, Kent, and Wessex.

A large Danish army came to East Anglia in the autumn of 865, apparently intent on conquest. By 871, when it first attacked Wessex, it had already captured York, been bought off by Mercia, and had taken possession of East Anglia. Many battles were fought in Wessex, including one that led to a Danish defeat at Ashdown in 871. Alfred the Great, a son of Aethelwulf, succeeded to the throne in the course of the year and made peace; this gave him a respite until 876. Meanwhile the Danes drove out Burgred of Mercia, putting a puppet king in his place, and one of their divisions made a permanent settlement in Northumbria.

Alfred was able to force the Danes to leave Wessex in 877, and they settled northeastern Mercia; but a Viking attack in the winter of 878 came near to conquering Wessex. That it did not succeed is to be attributed to Alfred’s tenacity. He retired to the Somerset marshes, and in the spring he secretly assembled an army that routed the Danes at Edington. Their king, Guthrum, accepted Christianity and took his forces to East Anglia, where they settled.

The importance of Alfred’s victory cannot be exaggerated. It prevented the Danes from becoming masters of the whole of England. Wessex was never again in danger of falling under Danish control, and in the next century the Danish areas were reconquered from Wessex. Alfred’s capture of London in 886 and the resultant acceptance of him by all the English outside the Danish areas was a preliminary to this reconquest. That Wessex stood when the other kingdoms had fallen must be put down to Alfred’s courage and wisdom, to his defensive measures in reorganizing his army, to his building fortresses and ships, and to his diplomacy, which made the Welsh kings his allies. Renewed attacks by Viking hosts in 892–896, supported by the Danes resident in England, caused widespread damage but had no lasting success. Alfred’s government and his revival of learning

Good internal government contributed to Alfred’s successful resistance to the Danes. He reorganized his finances and the services due from thegns, issued an important code of laws, and scrutinized carefully the exercise of justice. Alfred saw the Viking invasions as a punishment from God, especially because of a neglect of learning, without which men could not know and follow the will of God. He deplored the decay of Latin and enjoined its study by those destined for the church, but he also wished all young freemen of adequate means to learn to read English, and he aimed at supplying men with “the books most necessary for all men to know,” in their own language.

Alfred had acquired an education despite great difficulties, and he translated some books himself with the help of scholars from Mercia, the Continent, and Wales. Among them they made available works of Bede and Orosius, Gregory and Augustine, and the De consolatione philosophiae of Boethius. Compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle began in his reign. The effects of Alfred’s educational reforms can be glimpsed in succeeding reigns, and his works continued to be copied. Only in his attempt to revive monasticism did he achieve little, for the monastic idea had lost its appeal—in England as well as on the Continent—during the Viking Age. The achievement of political unity The reconquest of the Danelaw

When Alfred died in 899, his son Edward succeeded him. A large-scale incursion by the Danes of Northumbria ended in their crushing defeat at Tettenhall in 910. Edward completed his father’s plan of building a ring of fortresses around Wessex, and his sister Aethelflaed took similar measures in Mercia. In 912 Edward was ready to begin the series of campaigns by which he relentlessly advanced into the Danelaw (Danish territory in England), securing each advance by a fortress, until he won back Essex, East Anglia, and the east-Midland Danish areas. Aethelflaed moved similarly against the Danish territory of the Five Boroughs (Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln, and Stamford). She obtained Derby and Leicester and gained a promise of submission from the Northumbrian Danes before she died in 918. Edward had by then reached Stamford, but he broke off his advance to secure his acceptance by the Mercians at Tamworth and to prevent their setting up an independent kingdom. Then he took Nottingham, and all the Danes in Mercia submitted to him.

Meanwhile another danger had arisen: Norsemen from Ireland had been settling for some time west of the Pennines, and Northumbria was threatened by Raegnald, a Norse leader from Dublin, who made himself king at York in 919. Edward built fortresses at Thelwall and Manchester, and in 920 he received Raegnald’s submission, along with that of the Scots, the Strathclyde Welsh, and all the Northumbrians. Yet Norse kings reigned at York intermittently until 954. The kingdom of England

Athelstan succeeded his father Edward in 924. He made terms with Raegnald’s successor Sihtric and gave him his sister in marriage. When Sihtric died in 927, Athelstan took possession of Northumbria, thus becoming the first king to have direct rule of all England. He received the submission of the kings of Wales and Scotland and of the English ruler of Northumbria beyond the Tyne.

Athelstan was proud of his position, calling himself “king of all Britain” on some of his coins and using in his charters flamboyant rhetoric carrying the same message; he held great courts attended by dignitaries from all over England and by Welsh kings; he subjected the Welsh to tribute and quelled a revolt of the Britons of Cornwall. His sisters were married to continental princes—Charles the Simple, king of the Franks; Otto, son of Henry the Fowler; and Hugh, duke of the Franks. Among those brought up at his court were Louis, Charles’s son; Alan of Brittany, Athelstan’s godson; and Haakon, son of Harald Fairhair of Norway; they all returned to win their respective inheritances with his support. He was a generous donor to continental and English churches. But Athelstan is remembered chiefly as the victor at Brunanburh, against a combine of Olaf Guthfrithson, king of Dublin; Owain of Strathclyde; and Constantine, king of the Scots, whom Athelstan had defeated in 934. They invaded England in 937, and their defeat is celebrated by a poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Immediately after Athelstan’s death in 939 Olaf seized not only Northumbria but also the Five Boroughs. By 944 Athelstan’s successor, his younger brother Edmund, had regained control, and in 945 Edmund conquered Strathclyde and gave it to Malcolm of Scotland. But Edmund’s successor, Eadred, lost control of Northumbria for part of his reign to the Norse kings Erik Bloodax (son of Harald Fairhair) and Olaf Sihtricson. When Erik was killed in 954, Northumbria became a permanent part of the kingdom of England.

By becoming rulers of all England, the West Saxon kings had to administer regions with variant customs, governed under West Saxon, Mercian, or Danish law. In some parts of the area of Danish occupation, especially in northern England and the district of the Five Boroughs, the evidence of place-names, personal names, and dialect seems to indicate dense Danish settlement, but this has been seriously questioned; many “Danish” features are also found in Anglo-Saxon areas, and Danish names do not always prove Danish institutions. Moreover, the older Anglo-Saxon regions, such as Mercia, which often cut across both Danish and English areas, were politically more significant. Money, however, was calculated in marks and ores instead of shillings in Danish areas, and arable land was divided into plowlands and oxgangs instead of hides and virgates in the northern and northeastern parts of the Danelaw. Most important was the presence in some areas of a number of small landholders with a much greater degree of independence than their counterparts elsewhere; many ceorls had so suffered under the Danish ravages that they had bought a lord’s support by sacrificing some of their independence. Excavations (1976–81) have shown 10th-century Jorvik (York), a Danish settlement, to have been a centre of international trade, economic specialization, and town planning; it was on its way to becoming by 1086 (in the Domesday survey) one of Europe’s largest cities, numbering at least 2,000 households.

The kings did not try to eradicate the local peculiarities. King Edgar (reigned 959–975) expressly granted local autonomy to the Danes. But from Athelstan’s time it was decreed that there was to be one coinage for all the king’s dominion, and a measure of uniformity in administrative divisions was gradually achieved. Mercia became divided into shires on the pattern of those of Wessex. It is uncertain how early the smaller divisions of the shires were called “hundreds,” but they now became universal (except in the northern Danelaw, where an area called a wapentake carried on its fiscal and jurisdictional functions). An ordinance of the mid-10th century laid down that the court in each hundred (called “hundred courts”) must meet every four weeks to handle local legal matters, and Edgar enjoined that the shire courts must meet twice a year and the borough courts three times. This pattern of local government survived the Norman Conquest. The church and the monastic revival

To those who judged the church solely by the state of its monasteries, the first half of the 10th century seemed a period of inertia. In fact, the great tasks of converting the heathen settlers, restoring ecclesiastical organization in Danish areas, and repairing the damages of the invasions elsewhere must have absorbed much energy. Even so, learning and book production were not at so low an ebb as monastic reformers claimed. Moreover, new monasteries were founded and benefactions were made to older ones, even though, by post-revival standards, none of these monasteries was enforcing a strict monastic rule and several benefactions were held by secular priests. Alfred had failed to arouse much enthusiasm for monasticism. The movement for reform began in England about 940 and soon came under the influence of reforms in Fleury and Lorraine. King Edgar, an enthusiastic supporter, promoted the three chief reformers to important positions—Dunstan to Canterbury, Aethelwold to Winchester, and Oswald to Worcester and later to York. The secular clergy were violently ejected from Winchester and some other places; Oswald gradually replaced them with monks at Worcester. All three reformers founded new houses, including the great monasteries in the Fenlands, where older houses had perished in the Danish invasion; but Oswald had no success in Northumbria. The reformers, however, were concerned with more than monasticism—they paid great attention to other needs of their dioceses; the scholars Abbot Aelfric and Archbishop Wulfstan, trained by the reformers, directed much of their writings to improving the education and morals of the parish clergy and, through them, of the people.

The monastic revival resulted in a great revival of both vernacular and Latin literature, of manuscript production and illumination, and of other forms of art. It reached its zenith in the troubled years of King Ethelred II (reigned 978–1016), after a brief, though violent, reaction to monasticism following Edgar’s death. In the 11th century monasteries continued to be productive and new houses were founded; there was also a movement to impose a communal life on bodies of secular priests and to found houses of secular canons. The Anglo-Danish state The Danish conquest and the reigns of the Danish kings

Ethelred succeeded as a child in 978, after the murder of his stepbrother Edward. He took the throne in an atmosphere of insecurity and distrust, which partly accounts for the incompetence and treachery rife in his reign. Viking raids began in 980 and steadily increased in intensity. They were led by formidable leaders: from 991 to 994 by Olaf Tryggvason, later king of Norway, and frequently from 994 by Sweyn, king of Denmark. Ethelred’s massacre of the Danes in England on St. Brice’s Day, 1002, called for vengeance by Sweyn and, from 1009 to 1012, by a famous Viking, Thorkell the Tall. In 1013 the English, worn out by continuous warfare and heavy tributes to buy off the invaders, accepted Sweyn as king. Ethelred, his wife Emma, and his younger sons sought asylum with Richard, duke of Normandy, brother of Emma. Ethelred was recalled to England after Sweyn’s death in 1014; but Sweyn’s son Canute (Cnut) renewed the invasions and, in spite of valiant resistance by Ethelred’s son and successor, Edmund, obtained half of England after a victory at Ashingdon in October 1016 and the rest after Edmund’s death that November.

Canute rewarded some of his followers with English lands and ruthlessly got rid of some prominent Englishmen, among them Edmund’s brother Edwy. (Edmund’s infant sons, however, were carried away to safety in Hungary.) Yet Canute’s rule was not tyrannical, and his reign was remembered as a time of good order. The Danish element in his entourage diminished; and the Englishmen Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and Godwine, Earl of Wessex, became the most powerful magnates. Canute married Ethelred’s widow, Emma, thus removing the danger of Norman support for her sons by Ethelred. Canute fought a successful campaign in Scotland in 1031, and Englishmen were drawn into his wars in Scandinavia, which made him lord of Norway. But at home there was peace. Probably under the influence of Archbishop Wulfstan he became a stout supporter of the church, which in his reign had the vitality to engage in missionary work in Scandinavia. Religious as well as political motives may have caused his pilgrimage to Rome in 1027 to attend the coronation of the emperor Conrad; from the pope, the emperor, and the princes whom he met he obtained concessions for English pilgrims and traders going to Rome. Canute’s laws, drafted by Archbishop Wulfstan, are mainly based on those of earlier kings, especially Edgar.

Already in 1018 the English and Danes had come to an agreement “according to Edgar’s law.” No important changes were made in the machinery of government except that small earldoms were combined to make great earldoms, a change that placed much power in the hands of their holders. No attempt was made to restore the English line when Canute died in 1035; he was followed by his sons Harold and Hardecanute, whose reigns were unpopular. Denmark passed to Sweyn, son of Canute’s sister Estrith, in 1043. Meanwhile the Norwegians in 1035 had driven out another Sweyn, the son whom Canute had set to rule over them with his mother, Aelfgifu, and had elected Magnus.

The close links with Scandinavia had benefited English trade, but they left one awkward heritage: Hardecanute and Magnus made an agreement that if either died without a son, the survivor was to succeed to both kingdoms. Hardecanute died without a son in 1042, but he was succeeded by Ethelred’s son Edward, who was known as the Confessor or the Saint because of his reputation for chastity. Magnus was prevented by trouble with Denmark from invading England as he intended in 1046; but Harold Hardraada inherited Magnus’ claim to the English throne, and he came to enforce it in 1066. The reign of Edward the Confessor and the Norman Conquest

It is easy to regard the years of Edward’s rule simply as a prelude to the catastrophe of 1066, yet there are other aspects of his reign. Harrying caused by political disturbances or by incursions of the Scots or Welsh was only occasional and localized; friendly relations were usually maintained with Malcolm of Scotland, whom Earl Siward of Northumbria had supported against Macbeth in 1054; and in 1063 the victories of Harold, Earl of Wessex, and his brother Tostig ended the trouble from Wales. The normal course of administration was maintained, with efficient mints, writing office, taxation system, and courts of justice. Trade was prosperous. The church contained several good and competent leaders, and bad appointments—like those of the Normans, Ulf to Dorchester and Robert to London and Canterbury, and of Stigand to Winchester—were the exception. Scholarship was not in decline, and manuscripts were produced in great number. English illumination and other forms of art were admired abroad.

The troubles of the reign came from the excessive power concentrated in the hands of the rival houses of Leofric of Mercia and Godwine of Wessex and from resentment caused by the king’s introduction of Norman friends, though their influence has sometimes been exaggerated. A crisis arose in 1051 when Godwine defied the king’s order to punish the men of Dover, who had resisted an attempt by Eustace of Boulogne to quarter his men on them by force. The support of Earl Leofric and Earl Siward enabled Edward to secure the outlawry of Godwine and his sons; and William of Normandy paid Edward a visit during which Edward may have promised William succession to the English throne, although this Norman claim may have been mere propaganda. Godwine and his sons came back the following year with a strong force, and the magnates were not prepared to engage them in civil war but forced the king to make terms. Some unpopular Normans were driven out, including Archbishop Robert, whose archbishopric was given to Stigand; this act supplied one excuse for the papal support of William’s cause.

Harold succeeded his father Godwine as earl of Wessex in 1053; Tostig was made earl of Northumbria in 1055; and their younger brothers were also provided with earldoms. To settle the question of succession, negotiations were begun in 1054 to bring Edward, Edmund’s son (nephew of Edward the Confessor), from Hungary; but Edward died in 1057, leaving a son, Edgar Aetheling, then a child, who was passed over in 1066. In about 1064 Harold of Wessex, when visiting Normandy, swore to support William’s claim. Only Norman versions of the incident survive and the true circumstances cannot be ascertained, but William used Harold’s broken oath to help secure papal support later. In 1065 Harold acquiesced in the appointment of Morcar, brother of Edwin, Earl of Mercia, to replace Tostig when the Northumbrians revolted against him, and thus Harold turned his brother into an enemy. King Edward, when dying, named Harold to succeed him, and, after overcoming Northumbrian reluctance with the help of Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, Harold was universally accepted.

Harold might have proved an effective ruler, but the forces against him were too strong. The papacy, without hearing the defense in favour of Harold’s succession, gave its blessing to an invasion of a people who had always been distinguished for their loyalty to Rome, and this papal support helped William to collect his army widely. The threat from Harold III Hardraade, who was joined by Tostig, prevented Harold from concentrating his forces in the south and took him north at a critical moment. He fought at Hastings only 24 days after the armies of Mercia and Northumbria had been put out of action by enormous losses at Fulford and only 19 days after he had defeated and killed Harold III Hardraade and Tostig at Stamford Bridge. Harold was slain at Hastings, and on Christmas Day, 1066, William of Normandy was crowned king of England. Although the Anglo-Saxon fighting force was perhaps the best in Europe and the defeat at Hastings due largely to a series of historical accidents, it is not difficult to understand the English chronicler’s view that God was angry with the English people. Dorothy Whitelock William A. Chaney The Normans (1066–1154) William I (1066–87)

The Norman Conquest has long been argued about. The question has been whether William I introduced fundamental changes in England or based his rule solidly on Anglo-Saxon foundations. A particularly controversial issue has been the introduction of feudalism. On balance, the debate has favoured dramatic change while also granting that in some respects the Normans learned much from the English past. Yet William replaced his initial policy of trying to govern through Englishmen with an increasingly thoroughgoing Normanization. Resistance and rebellion

The Conquest was not achieved at a single stroke. In 1068 Exeter rose against the Normans, and a major rising began in the north. A savage campaign in 1069–70, the so-called harrying of the north, emphasized William’s military supremacy and his brutality. A further English rising in the Fens achieved nothing. In 1075 William put down rebellion by the earls of Hereford, Norfolk, and Northumbria. The latter, the last surviving English earl, was executed for treason. The introduction of feudalism

The Conquest resulted in the subordination of England to a Norman aristocracy. William probably distributed estates to his followers on a piecemeal basis as lands came into his hands. He granted lands directly to fewer than 180 men, making them his tenants in chief. Their estates were often well distributed, consisting of manors scattered through a number of shires. In vulnerable regions, however, compact blocks of land were formed, clustered around castles. The tenants in chief owed homage and fealty to the king and held their land in return for military service. They were under obligation to supply a certain number of knights for the royal feudal host—a number that was not necessarily related to the quantity or quality of land held. Early in the reign many tenants in chief provided knights from their own households to meet demands for service, but they soon began to grant some of their own lands to knights who would serve them just as they in turn served the king. They could not, however, use their knights for private warfare, which, in contrast to Normandy, was forbidden in England. In addition to drawing on the forces provided by feudal means, William made extensive use of mercenary troops to secure the military strength he needed. Castles, which were virtually unknown in pre-Conquest England and could only be built with royal permission, provided bases for administration and military organization. They were an essential element in the Norman settlement of England. Government and justice

William hoped to be able to rule England in much the same way as his Anglo-Saxon predecessors had done, though in many respects the old institutions and practices had to be changed in response to the problems of ruling a conquered land. The Anglo-Saxon witan, or council, became the king’s curia regis, a meeting of the royal tenants in chief, both lay and ecclesiastical. William was said by chroniclers to have held full courts three times a year, at Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide, to which all the great men of the realm were summoned and at which he wore his crown. These were similar to the great courts he held in Normandy. Inevitably there were many disputes over land, and the curia regis was where justice was done to the great tenants in chief. William himself is said to have sat one Sunday “from morn till eve” to hear a plea between William de Braose and the abbot of Fécamp.

William at first did little to change Anglo-Saxon administrative organization. The royal household was at the centre of royal government, and the system, such as it was, under Edward the Confessor had probably been quite similar to that which existed in Normandy at the same period, although the actual titles of the officers were not the same. Initially under William there also was little change in personnel. But, by the end of his reign, all important administrative officials were Norman, and their titles corresponded to those in use in Normandy. There were a steward, a butler, a chamberlain, a constable, a marshal, and a head of the royal scriptorium, or chancellor. This scriptorium was the source from which all writs (i.e., written royal commands) were issued. At the start of William’s reign the writs were in English, and by the end of it, in Latin.

In local government the Anglo-Saxon shire and hundred courts continued to function as units of administration and justice, but with important changes. Bishops and earls ceased to preside over the shire courts. Bishops now had their own ecclesiastical courts, while earls had their feudal courts. But although earls no longer presided over shire courts, they were entitled to take a third of the proceeds coming from them. The old Anglo-Saxon office of sheriff was transformed into a position resembling that of the Norman vicomte, as native sheriffs were replaced by Norman nobles. They controlled the shire and hundred courts, were responsible for collecting royal revenue, and controlled the royal castles that had been built both to subdue and protect the country.

William made the most of the financial system he had inherited. In addition to customary dues, such as revenues from justice and income from royal lands, his predecessors had been able to levy a geld, or tax, assessed on the value of land and originally intended to provide funds to buy off Danish invaders. The Confessor had abandoned this tax, but the Conqueror collected it at least four times. Profits from the ample royal estates must have been significant, along with those from royal mints and towns.

The Conqueror greatly strengthened the administration of justice in his new land. He occasionally appointed justiciars to preside over local cases and at times named commissioners to act as his deputies in the localities. There were a number of great trials during the reign. The most famous of them was the trial at Pinnenden Heath of a case between Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury, and the king’s half brother, Odo, bishop of Bayeux and earl of Kent. Not only all the Normans of the shire but also many Englishmen, especially those learned in the customary law, attended. On occasion jurors were summoned to give a collective verdict under oath. Historians have debated as to whether juries were introduced as a result of the Viking conquests or were a Norman innovation, derived from Carolingian practice in France. Whichever argument is correct, it is evident that, under the Normans, juries came into more frequent use. William introduced one measure to protect his followers: he made the local community of the hundred responsible for the murder of any Norman. Church–state relations

The upper ranks of the clergy were Normanized and feudalized, following the pattern of lay society. Bishops received their lands and the symbols of their spiritual office from the king. They owed knight service and were under firm royal control. Sees were reorganized, and most came to be held by continental clergy. In 1070 Lanfranc replaced Stigand as archbishop of Canterbury. An ecclesiastical lawyer, teacher, and church statesman, Lanfranc, a native of Italy, had been a monk at Bec and an abbot of Saint Stephen’s at Caen. Lanfranc and William understood each other and worked together to introduce discipline and order into the English church. The see of York was subordinated to Canterbury, and efforts were made to bring the ecclesiastical affairs of Ireland and Scotland under Lanfranc’s control. Several church councils were held in England to legislate for the English church, as similar councils did in Normandy. William denied that he owed homage or fealty to the pope for his English lands, although he acknowledged papal support in winning the new realm. William and Lanfranc resisted Pope Gregory VII’s claim to papal supremacy: the king decreed that without his consent no pope was to be recognized in England, no papal letter was to be received, no church council was to legislate, and no baron or royal official was to be excommunicated. During William’s reign the controversy over the right of lay rulers to invest ecclesiastics with the symbols of their office did not affect England, in contrast to other parts of Latin Christendom. William’s accomplishments

At Christmas 1085 William had “deep speech” with his council and as a result ordered a general survey of the land to be made. Historians have debated the purpose of this “Domesday” survey, some seeing it as primarily a tax assessment, others emphasizing its importance as a basis for assignment of feudal rights and duties. Its form owed much to Anglo-Saxon precedent, but within each county section it was organized on a feudal basis. It was probably a multipurpose document with the main emphasis on resources for taxation. It was incomplete, for the far north of England, London, and Winchester were not included, while the returns for Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk were not condensed into the same form as was used for the rest of the country. Domesday is a unique record and offers rich materials for research.

One policy that caused deep resentment under William I, and even hatred under his successor William II, was the taking over of vast tracts of land for the king’s forest. In some areas whole villages were destroyed and the people driven out; elsewhere, people living in forest areas, though not necessarily removed, were subjected to a severe system of law with drastic penalties for poaching.

William the Conqueror is presented in contemporary chronicles as a ruthless tyrant who rigorously put down rebellion and devastated vast areas, especially in his pacification of the north in 1069–70. He was, however, an able administrator. Perhaps one of his greatest contributions to England’s future was the linking up of England with continental affairs. If the country had been conquered again by the Danes, as seemed possible, it might have remained in a backwater of European development. In the event, England was linked, economically and culturally, to France and continental Europe. The aristocracy spoke French, while Latin was the language of the church and the administration. The sons of William I William II Rufus (1087–1100)

Under William I’s two sons William II Rufus and Henry I, strong, centralized government continued, and England’s link with Normandy was strengthened. Rebellion by Norman barons, led by the king’s half uncles, Odo of Bayeux and Robert of Mortain, was soon put down by William II, who made promises of good government and relief from taxation and the severity of the forest laws. Odo of Bayeux was banished, and William of St. Calais, bishop of Durham, tried for treason. As an ecclesiastic he rejected the jurisdiction of the king’s court. But Lanfranc pointed out that it was not as a churchman but as lord of his temporal fiefs that he was being tried. He was finally allowed to leave the country, in return for surrender of his fiefs.

William II’s main preoccupation was to win Normandy from his elder brother Robert. After some initial skirmishing, William’s plans were furthered by Robert’s decision to go on crusade in 1096. Robert mortgaged his lands to William for 10,000 marks, which was raised in England by drastic and unpopular means. In his last years William campaigned successfully in Maine and the French Vexin so as to extend the borders of Normandy. His death was the result of an “accident” possibly engineered by his younger brother Henry: he was shot with an arrow in the New Forest. Henry, who was conveniently with the hunting party, rode posthaste to Winchester, seized the treasury, and was chosen king the next day. Henry I (1100–35)

A good politician and administrator, Henry I was the ablest of the Conqueror’s sons. At his coronation on Aug. 5, 1100, he issued a charter intended to win the support of the nation. This propaganda document, in which Henry promised to give up many practices of the past, demonstrates how oppressive Norman government had become. Henry promised not to exploit church vacancies, as his brother had done, and guaranteed that reliefs, sums paid by feudal vassals when they took over their fathers’ estates, would be “just and legitimate.” He also promised to return to the laws of Edward the Confessor, though this cannot have been intended literally.

Following the suppression of rebellion in England, the conquest of Normandy was an important priority for Henry. By 1105 he took the offensive, and in September 1106 he won a decisive battle at Tinchebray that gave him control of the whole of Normandy. Robert was captured and was to spend the rest of his 80 years in castle dungeons. His son, William Clito, escaped and remained until his death in 1128 a thorn in Henry’s flesh. Success in Normandy was followed by wars against Louis VI of France, but by 1120 Henry was everywhere successful in both diplomacy and war. He had arranged a marriage for his only legitimate son, William, to Matilda, daughter of Fulk of Anjou, and had received Fulk’s homage for Maine. Pope Calixtus II, his cousin, gave him full support for his control of Normandy on condition that his son William should do homage to the French king.

Relations with the church had not always been easy. Henry had inherited from William II a quarrel with the church that became part of the Europe-wide Investiture Controversy. After Lanfranc’s death William had delayed appointing a successor, presumably for the privilege of exploiting the resources of the archbishopric. After four years, during a bout of illness, he appointed Anselm of Bec, one of the great scholars of his time (1093). Anselm did homage for his temporalities, but whether or not he was ever invested with the symbols of spiritual office by the king is not clear. Papal confirmation was complicated by the fact that there were two claimants to the papal throne. Anselm refused to accept a decision made by the king’s supporters and insisted on receiving his pallium from Urban II, a reform pope in the tradition of Gregory VII, rather than from the imperial nominee, Clement III. Conflict between king and archbishop flared up again in 1097 over what William considered to be an inadequate Canterbury contingent for his Welsh war. The upshot was that Anselm went into exile until William’s death. At Rome he heard new papal decrees against lay investiture.

Anselm supported Henry’s bid for the throne and returned from exile in 1100. Almost immediately he quarreled with Henry when the king asked him to do homage and to receive his archbishopric from his hands. After various ineffective appeals to Rome, Anselm again went into exile. A compromise was finally arranged in 1107, when it was agreed that the king would surrender investiture with the symbols of spiritual office in return for an agreement that he should supervise the election of the archbishop and take homage for the temporalities before investiture with the spiritual symbols took place. It was said that the concession cost the king “a little, perhaps, of his royal dignity, but nothing of his power to enthrone anyone he pleased.”

Henry continued and extended the administrative work of his father. His frequent absences from England prompted the development of a system that could operate effectively in his absence, under the guidance of such men as Roger, bishop of Salisbury. The exchequer was developed as a department of government dealing with royal revenues, and the first record of the sheriffs’ regular accounting at the exchequer, or Pipe Roll, to survive is that of 1129–30. Justices with wide-ranging commissions were sent out into the shires to reinforce local administration and to inquire into crown pleas, royal revenues, and other matters of interest and profit for the king. Henry’s government was highly efficient, but it was also harsh and demanding.

During the last 15 years of his reign the succession was a major issue. William, Henry’s only legitimate son, was drowned in 1120, leaving Henry’s daughter Matilda, wife of the German emperor Henry V, as heir. When Henry V died in 1125, Matilda returned to England. Henry I persuaded his barons to swear an oath in her support but did not consult them over her second marriage to Geoffrey of Anjou, who at 14 was 11 years her junior. Within a year Geoffrey repudiated Matilda, but during a temporary reconciliation, Matilda and Geoffrey had three children.

Henry was a skilled politician, adept at using the levers of patronage. Men such as Geoffrey de Clinton, the royal chamberlain, owed much to the favours they received from the king, and they served him well in return. There was tension between the established nobility and the “new men” raised to high office by the king, but Henry maintained control with great effect and distributed favours evenhandedly. In England his rule, particularly when seen in retrospect, was characterized by peace, order, and justice. He died, probably of a heart attack, on Dec. 1, 1135. The period of anarchy (1135–54) Matilda and Stephen

Henry I’s death precipitated a 20-year crisis whose immediate cause was a succession dispute. But there has been much debate among historians as to whether the problems of these years were the result of some deeper malaise.

No one was enthusiastic about accepting Matilda as queen, especially as her husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, was actually at war with Henry at the time of his death. Robert, Earl of Gloucester, one of Henry’s many illegitimate sons, was an impressive candidate for the throne, as were Henry’s nephews, Theobald and Stephen of Blois. The outcome of the struggle in 1135 was unexpected: while Theobald, the elder brother, was receiving the homage of continental vassals for Normandy, Stephen took ship for England and claimed the throne. Having secured the treasury at Winchester, he was crowned on December 22.

Stephen had been quick and resolute in securing the crown. But after the first flush of victory he made concessions that, instead of winning him support, served to expose his weakness. One such concession was to King David of Scotland, who was also the Earl of Huntingdon in England. When David learned of Stephen’s succession, he crossed the border by force. He was effectively bought off by Stephen’s agreeing that David’s son Henry should receive Carlisle, Doncaster, and the honour of Huntingdon. Stephen obtained the support of Robert of Gloucester by a lavish charter. He also granted a charter to the church forbidding simony and confirmed the rights of church courts to all jurisdiction over clerics. Stephen’s lavish appointment of new earls (19 in the course of the reign) was intended in part as a way of undermining the power of the sheriffs and constituted a shift of power away from the centre. Expenditure in Stephen’s early years was heavy and achievements few.

Stephen soon alienated the church. Much power in central government had been concentrated in the hands of Roger, bishop of Salisbury, and his family. One of Roger’s nephews was bishop of Ely, and another was bishop of Lincoln. This was resented by the Beaumont family, headed by the Earl of Leicester, and their allies, who formed a powerful court faction. They planned the downfall of the bishops, and, when a council meeting was held at Oxford in June 1139, they seized on the opportunity provided by a brawl in which some of Roger’s men were involved. Rumours of treason were spread, and Stephen demanded that the bishops should make satisfaction. When they did not do so, he ordered their arrest. Thenceforth Stephen was in disfavour with the clergy; he had already forfeited the support of his brother Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester, by failing to make him archbishop of Canterbury in 1137. As papal legate, Henry was to be the most influential member of the clergy in the realm. Civil war

Matilda did not land in England until 1139. She and her half brother Robert of Gloucester established themselves in the southwest; Stephen’s main strength lay in the east. In 1141 Stephen was defeated and taken prisoner at the battle of Lincoln, but Matilda alienated the Londoners and lost support. When Stephen was exchanged for Robert of Gloucester, who was captured at Winchester, Matilda’s fortunes waned. The Angevin cause, however, prospered in Normandy. Although Matilda’s son, Henry, mounted an unsuccessful invasion from Normandy in 1147, in 1153 he carried out a vigorous and effective campaign. Stephen, saddened by the death of his elder son Eustace, agreed to a compromise peace. He was to remain king, but he recognized Henry as his heir.

One chronicler said, “In this king’s time there was nothing but disturbance and wickedness and robbery.” Though this was an exaggeration, it is clear that disorder was widespread, with a great many adulterine castles built (that is, unlicensed castles). It was possible for the earls of Chester and Leicester to make a treaty without any reference to royal authority. Stephen’s government lost control of much of England, and power was fragmented and decentralized.

There has been much debate as to why men fought in the civil war. It was much more than a simple succession dispute and can be seen as a natural reaction both to the strong, centralized government of Henry I and to the weak rule of Stephen. The aim of many magnates was to recover lands and offices to which they considered they had hereditary rights: much land had changed hands under Henry I. Men such as Ranulf de Gernons, 4th Earl of Chester, and Geoffrey de Mandeville, 1st Earl of Essex, changed sides frequently, obtaining fresh grants each time. Essex wanted to recover the lands and positions his grandfather had held. Most men, however, probably did not want to demolish royal government but rather wished to control and profit from it. The institutions of government did not disappear altogether. The period of the “anarchy” strengthened feudal principles of succession to land, but such offices as those of sheriff and castellan did not become hereditary. England in the Norman period

Despite, or perhaps in part because of, the political strains of this period, these were constructive years. The economy, for which Domesday Book is a magnificent source, was essentially agrarian, the main unit being the manor, where the lord’s land (or demesne) was worked by unfree peasants who held their land in return for performing labour services. Towns, notably London, flourished, and many received new privileges based on continental practice. The church benefited from closer connections with the Continent in many ways. One such benefit was the arrival of new religious orders: the first Cluniac house was established at Lewes in 1077, and the Cistercians came to England in 1129. A great many Augustinian houses were founded in the first part of the 12th century. Imposing buildings such as Durham Cathedral and the Tower of London give eloquent testimony to the architectural achievement of the Normans, while the illuminated Winchester Bible and Psalter, made for Henry of Blois, bear witness to the artistic excellence of the age. The early Plantagenets Henry II (1154–89)

Matilda’s son Henry Plantagenet, the first and greatest of three Angevin kings of England, succeeded Stephen in 1154. Aged 21, he already possessed a reputation for restless energy and decisive action. He was to inherit vast lands. As heir to his mother and to Stephen he held England and Normandy; as heir to his father he held Anjou (hence Angevin), Maine, and Touraine; as heir to his brother Geoffrey he obtained Brittany; as husband of Eleanor, the divorced wife of Louis VII of France, he held Aquitaine, the major part of southwestern France. Altogether his holdings in France were far larger than those of the French king. They have become known as the Angevin empire, although Henry never in fact claimed any imperial rights or used the title of emperor. From the beginning Henry showed himself determined to assert and maintain his rights in all his lands. In England this meant reasserting the centralized power of his grandfather, Henry I. His success in these aims is the measure of his greatness. Government of England

In the first decade of his reign Henry was largely concerned with continental affairs, though he made sure that the adulterine castles in England were destroyed. Many of the earldoms created in the anarchy of Stephen’s reign were allowed to lapse. Major change in England began in the mid-1160s. The Assize of Clarendon of 1166, and that of Northampton 10 years later, promoted public order. Juries were used to provide evidence of what crimes had been committed and to bring accusations. New forms of legal action were introduced, notably the so-called possessory assizes, which determined who had the right to immediate possession of land, not who had the best fundamental right. That could be decided by the grand assize, by means of which a jury of 12 knights would decide the case. The use of standardized forms of writ greatly simplified judicial administration. “Returnable” writs, which had to be sent back by the sheriffs to the central administration, enabled the crown to check that its instructions were obeyed. An increasing number of cases came before royal courts rather than private feudal courts. Henry I’s practice of sending out itinerant justices was extended and systematized. In 1170 a major inquiry into local administration, the Inquest of Sheriffs, was held, and many sheriffs were dismissed.

There were important changes to the military system. In 1166 the tenants in chief were commanded to disclose the number of knights enfeoffed on their lands so that Henry could take proper financial advantage of changes that had taken place since his grandfather’s day. Scutage (money payment in lieu of military service) was an important source of funds, and Henry preferred scutage to service because mercenaries were more efficient than feudal contingents. In the Assize of Arms of 1181 Henry determined the arms and equipment appropriate to every free man, based on his income from land. This measure, which could be seen as a revival of the principles of the Anglo-Saxon fyrd, was intended to provide for a local militia, which could be used against invasion, rebellion, or for peacekeeping. Struggle with Thomas Becket

Henry attempted to restore the close relationship between church and state that had existed under the Norman kings. His first move was the appointment in 1162 of Thomas Becket as archbishop of Canterbury. Henry assumed that Becket, who had served efficiently as chancellor since 1155 and been a close companion to him, would continue to do so as archbishop. Becket, however, disappointed him. Once appointed archbishop, he became a militant defender of the church against royal encroachment and a champion of the papal ideology of ecclesiastical supremacy over the lay world. The struggle between Henry and Becket reached a crisis at the Council of Clarendon in 1164. In the Constitutions of Clarendon Henry tried to set down in writing the ancient customs of the land. The most controversial issue proved to be that of jurisdiction over “criminous clerks” (clerics who had committed crimes); the king demanded that such men should, after trial in church courts, be sent for punishment in royal courts.

Becket initially accepted the Constitutions but would not set his seal to them. Shortly thereafter, however, he suspended himself from office for the sin of yielding to the royal will in the matter. Although he failed to obtain full papal support at this stage, Alexander III ultimately came to his aid over the Constitutions. Later in 1164 Becket was charged with peculation of royal funds when chancellor. After Becket had taken flight for France, the king confiscated the revenues of his province, exiled his friends, and confiscated their revenues. In 1170 Henry had his eldest son crowned king by the archbishop of York, not Canterbury, as was traditional. Becket, in exile, appealed to Rome and excommunicated the clergy who had taken part in the ceremony. A reconciliation between Becket and Henry at the end of the same year settled none of the points at issue. When Becket returned to England, he took further measures against the clergy who had taken part in the coronation. In Normandy the enraged king, hearing the news, burst out with the fateful words that incited four of his knights to take ship for England and murder the archbishop in Canterbury Cathedral.

Almost overnight the martyred Thomas became a saint in the eyes of the people. Henry repudiated responsibility for the murder and reconciled himself with the church. But despite various royal promises to abolish customs injurious to the church, royal control of the church was little affected. Henceforth criminous clerks were to be tried in church courts, save for offenses against the forest laws. Disputes over ecclesiastical patronage and church lands that were held on the same terms as lay estates were, however, to come under royal jurisdiction. Finally Henry did penance at Canterbury, allowing the monks to scourge him. But with Becket out of the way, it proved possible to negotiate most of the points at issue between church and state. The martyred archbishop, however, was to prove a potent example for future prelates. Rebellion of Henry’s sons and Eleanor of Aquitaine

Henry’s sons, urged on by their mother and by a coalition of his enemies, raised a rebellion throughout his domains in 1173. King William I the Lion of Scotland joined the rebel coalition and invaded the north of England. Lack of cooperation among the rebels, however, enabled Henry to defeat them one at a time with a mercenary army. The Scottish king was taken prisoner at Alnwick. Queen Eleanor was retired to polite imprisonment for the rest of Henry’s life. The king’s sons and the baronial rebels were treated with leniency, but many baronial castles were destroyed following the rising. A brief period of amity between Henry and Louis of France followed, and the years between 1175 and 1182 marked the zenith of Henry’s prestige and power. In 1183 the younger Henry again tried to organize opposition to his father, but he died in June of that year. Henry spent the last years of his life locked in combat with the new French king, Philip II Augustus, with whom his son Richard had entered into an alliance. Even his youngest son, John, deserted him at the end. Richard I (1189–99)

Henry II died in 1189, an embittered old man. He was succeeded by his son Richard I, nicknamed the Lionheart. Richard, a renowned and skillful warrior, was mainly interested in the Crusade to recover Jerusalem and in the struggle to maintain his French holdings against Philip Augustus. He spent only about six months of his 10-year reign in England. During his frequent absences he left a committee in charge of the realm. The chancellor, William Longchamp, bishop of Ely, dominated the early part of the reign until forced into exile by baronial rebellion in 1191. Walter of Coutances, archbishop of Rouen, succeeded Longchamp, but the most important and able of Richard’s ministers was Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury, justiciar from 1193 to 1198, and chancellor from 1199 to 1205. With the king’s mother, Eleanor, he put down a revolt by Richard’s brother John in 1193 with strong and effective measures. But when Richard returned from abroad, he forgave John and promised him the succession.

This reign saw some important innovations in taxation and military organization. Warfare was expensive, and in addition Richard was captured on his return from the Crusade by Leopold V of Austria and held for a high ransom of 150,000 marks. Various methods of raising money were tried: an aid, or scutage; a carucage, or tax on plow lands; a general tax of a fourth of revenues and chattels (this was a development of the so-called Saladin Tithe raised earlier for the Crusade); and a seizure of the wool crop of Cistercian and Gilbertine houses. The ransom, although never paid in full, caused Richard’s government to become highly unpopular. Richard also faced some unwillingness on the part of his English subjects to serve in France. A plan to raise a force of 300 knights who would serve for a whole year met with opposition led by the bishops of Lincoln and Salisbury. Richard was, however, remarkably successful in mustering the resources, financial and human, of his kingdom in support of his wars. It can also be argued that his demands on England weakened the realm unduly and that Richard left his successor a very difficult legacy. John (1199–1216)

Richard, mortally wounded at a siege in France in 1199, was succeeded by his brother John, one of the most detested of English kings. John’s reign was characterized by failure. Yet while he must bear a heavy responsibility for his misfortunes, it is only fair to recognize that he inherited the resentment that had built up against his brother and father. Also, while his reign ended in disaster, some of his financial and military measures anticipated positive developments in Edward I’s reign. Loss of French possessions

John had nothing like the military ability or reputation of his brother. He could win a battle in a fit of energy, only to lose his advantage in a spell of indolence. After repudiating his first wife, Isabella of Gloucester, John married the fiancée of Hugh IX the Brown of the Lusignan family, one of his vassals in Poitou. For this offense he was summoned to answer to Philip II, his feudal overlord for his holdings in France. When John refused to attend, his lands in France were declared forfeit. In the subsequent war he succeeded in capturing his nephew Arthur of Brittany, whom many in Anjou and elsewhere regarded as Richard I’s rightful heir. Arthur died in mysterious and suspicious circumstances. But once the great castle of Château Gaillard, Richard I’s pride and joy, had fallen in March 1204, the collapse of Normandy followed swiftly. By 1206 all that was left of the inheritance of the Norman kings was the Channel Islands. John, however, was determined to recover his losses. Struggle with the papacy

Upon his return to England John became involved in a conflict with Pope Innocent III over the choice of an archbishop. At Hubert Walter’s death in 1205 the monks at Canterbury had secretly elected their subprior and sent him to Rome to receive the pallium from the pope. The secret got out, however, and John forced the election of one of his confidants, John de Grey, bishop of Norwich, who then was also sent to Rome. Innocent III was not a man to miss such a good opportunity to demonstrate the plenitude of papal power. He quashed both elections and engineered the election of the learned and talented cardinal Stephen Langton. John, however, refused to receive Stephen and seized the revenues of Canterbury. Since John had already quarreled with his half brother the archbishop of York, who had fled abroad, England was without either archbishop. In 1208 Innocent imposed an interdict on England, forbidding the administration of the sacraments and certain church rites. In the following year he excommunicated John. The bishops of Winchester and Norwich remained the sole support of John’s power in the church. John made the most of the opportunity to collect the revenues of the sees vacated by bishops who had gone into exile.

In theory John’s excommunication freed his vassals from their oaths of fealty to him, but there was no immediate rebellion. John was able to conduct highly successful expeditions to Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and it was not until 1212 that a plot, involving Robert Fitzwalter and Eustace de Vesci, was first hatched against the king. John’s brilliant solution to the problem of multiple threats was to effect a reconciliation with the papacy. He agreed to accept Stephen Langton as archbishop, to reinstate the exiled clergy, and to compensate the church for his exactions. In addition he surrendered his kingdom to the pope, receiving it back as a fief from the pope. He now had an able ally at no great cost in terms of concessions on his part. Revolt of the barons and Magna Carta

Ever since the loss of Normandy John had been building up a coalition of rulers in Germany and the Low Countries to assist him against the French king. His chief ally was Otto IV, king of Germany and Holy Roman emperor. Plans for a campaign in Poitou proved very unpopular in England, especially with the northern barons. In 1214 John’s allies were defeated at Bouvines, and the king’s own campaign in Poitou disintegrated. John had to withdraw and return home to face his disgruntled barons.

John’s efforts had been very costly, and measures such as the tax of a 13th in 1207 (which raised about £60,000) were highly unpopular. In addition John levied massive reliefs (inheritance duties) on some barons: Nicholas de Stuteville, for example, was charged 10,000 marks (about £6,666) to inherit his brother’s lands in 1205. The fact alone that John, unlike his predecessors on the throne, spent most of his time in England made his rule more oppressive. Resistance sprang chiefly from the northern barons who had opposed service in Poitou, but by the spring of 1215 many others had joined them in protest against John’s abuse or disregard of law and custom.

On June 15, 1215, the rebellious barons met John at Runnymede on the Thames. The king was presented with a document known as the Articles of the Barons, on the basis of which Magna Carta was drawn up. For a document hallowed in history during more than 750 years and frequently cited as a forerunner of the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Magna Carta is a singularly undramatic document. It is thorny with problems of feudal law and custom that are largely untranslatable into modern idiom. Still, it was remarkable in many ways, not least because it was not written in a purely baronial interest but aimed to provide protection for all freemen. It was an attempt to provide guarantees against the sort of arbitrary disregard of feudal right that the three Angevin kings had made familiar. The level of reliefs, for example, was set at £100 for a barony. Some clauses derived from concessions already offered by the king in efforts to divide opposition. The celebrated clause 39, which promised judgment by peers or by the law of the land to all freemen, had its origins in a letter sent by Innocent III to the king. The barons, however, were not attempting to dismantle royal government; in fact, many of the legal reforms of Henry II’s day were reinforced. Nor did they seek to legitimate rebellion but rather they tried to ensure that the king was beneath rather than above the law. In immediate terms Magna Carta was a failure, for it was no more than a stage in ineffective negotiations to prevent civil war. John was released by the pope from his obligations under it. The document was, however, reissued with some changes under John’s son, with papal approval, and so it became, in its 1225 version, a part of the permanent law of the land. John himself died in October 1216, with the civil war still at an inconclusive stage. Economy and society

From about 1180 the pace of economic change quickened, with a shift to what is known as “high farming.” The direct management of estates began to replace a rentier system. There was a marked price and wage inflation. Daily wages for a knight rose from eight pence a day early in Henry II’s day to two shillings under John. Landlords who relied upon fixed rents found times difficult, but most responded by taking manors into their own hands and by profiting from direct sales of demesne produce at market. A new class of professional estate managers, or stewards, began to appear. Towns continued to prosper, and many bought privileges of self-government from Richard I and John. The weaving industry was important, and England was noted as a producer of very high quality woolen cloth.

England, notably under Henry II, participated in the cosmopolitan movement that has come to be called the “12th-century Renaissance.” Scholars frequented the court, and works on law and administration, especially the Dialogue of the Exchequer and the law book attributed to Ranulf de Glanville, show how modern ideas were being applied to the arts of government. In ecclesiastical architecture new methods of vaulting gave builders greater freedom, as may be seen, for example, in the construction of the choir at Canterbury, rebuilt after a fire in 1174 by William of Sens. In military architecture, the traditional rectangular plan was abandoned in keeps such as those at Orford and Conisborough. It was a self-confident, innovative, and assertive age. The 13th century

The 13th century saw England develop a much clearer identity. The loss of continental possessions under King John focused the attention of the monarchy on England in a way that had not happened since 1066. Not only did the concept of the community of the realm develop—used both by the crown and its opponents—but the period was also notable in constitutional terms, seeing the beginning of Parliament.

The notion that the realm was a community and that it should be governed by representatives of that community perhaps found its first practical expression in the period following the issue of Magna Carta in which a council of regency ruled on behalf of a child king not yet able to govern in his own right. The phrase “community of the land” initially meant little more than the totality of the baronage. But the need to obtain a wider degree of consent to taxation, and perhaps also the impact of new ideas derived from Roman law, led to change. In addition the county communities exerted some pressure. Knights were being asked to play an increasingly important part in local government, and soon they made their voice heard at a national level. In the conflict that broke out between Henry III and the barons in the latter part of that king’s reign, political terms acquired some sophistication, and under Edward I the concept of representation was further developed. Henry III (1216–72) Minority

The years until his death in 1219 were dominated by William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke. As regent in all but name he achieved success in the civil war and, assisted by the papal legate Guala, did much to restore royal government in its aftermath. After Marshal’s death there was a struggle for political power between Hubert de Burgh, the justiciar, and Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester. Despite factional disputes, by the time Henry III declared himself to be of age in 1227, the minority government had achieved much. To have retained control of royal castles was a notable achievement, while the seizure of Bedford Castle from Fawkes de Breauté, a former protégé of King John, was a spectacular triumph. Early reign

Henry came under increasing foreign dominance. His marriage in 1236 to Eleanor of Provence was followed by an influx of her Savoyard relations, while the other significant group of foreigners was headed by the king’s half brothers, the Lusignans (children of his mother, Isabella, by her second marriage). Attempts to recover the lost lands in France with expeditions in 1230 and 1242 were unsuccessful. Only in Wales did he achieve limited military success. In the 1250s plans, backed by the papacy, were made to place Henry’s second son Edmund on the Sicilian throne; by 1258 these plans had involved the crown in an impossibly heavy financial commitment of 135,000 marks. A lenient policy toward the magnates did not yield much support for the king, and after 1237 it proved impossible to negotiate the grant of direct taxes with unwilling subjects.

Henry, moreover, faced a series of political crises. A baronial revolt in 1233, led by Richard, son of William Marshal, ended in tragedy. Richard was killed in Ireland, to the king’s great grief: there were allegations that the king had been tricked into agreeing to the earl’s destruction. Further political crises in 1238 and 1244 did nothing to resolve tensions. In 1238 the king’s brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, rebelled, and leading advisers such as William of Savoy left the royal council. In 1244 Henry III faced opposition in Parliament from both lay and ecclesiastical magnates. A draft proposal suggested a complex system for adding four men to the council, who were to be “conservators of liberties” as well as overseers of royal finance. The king was able, however, to exploit the differences between his opponents, and their campaign achieved little. Henry was naive; he was, on the one hand, overly trustful and, on the other, bitter against those who betrayed his trust. There was growing discontent at a local level with the conduct of royal government. The county communities

The society of the period should not be seen solely in terms of the feudal hierarchy. There are indications that the community of the county, dominated by local knights and the stewards of the magnates, was of growing importance in this period. Although the crown could and did rely extensively on the knights in local government and administration, the knights were resentful of any intrusion of royal officers from outside and determined to defend local rights and privileges. Incidents such as that in Lincolnshire in 1226, when the county community protested against innovations in the holding of the county court and appealed to Magna Carta, show a new political awareness at a local level. The localities resented the increased burdens placed on them by Henry III’s government, and tension between court and country was evident. Simon de Montfort and the Barons’ War

The main crisis of the reign came in 1258 and was brought on by a cluster of causes. The Savoyard and Lusignan court factions were divided; there were reverses in Wales; the costs of the Sicilian affair were mounting; and there was perceived to be a crisis in local government. In May 1258 the king was compelled to agree to a meeting of Parliament and to the appointment of a joint committee of dissident barons and his own supporters, 12 from each side, which was to recommend measures for the reform of the kingdom. In the Provisions of Oxford, drawn up in June, a scheme was set out for the creation of a council of 15 to supervise royal government. Parliament was to be held three times a year, at which the 15 would meet with 12 barons representing “the community” (le commun in the original French). The office of justiciar was to be revived, and he, with the chancellor and treasurer, was to account annually before the council. The new justiciar was to hear complaints throughout the country against royal officials. Sheriffs were to be local men, appointed for one year. The households of the king and queen were to be reformed. The drafting of further measures took time. In October 1259 a group calling itself the Community of Bachelors, which seems to have claimed to represent the lesser vassals and knights, petitioned for the fulfillment of the promises of the magnates and king to remedy its grievances. As a result the Provisions of Westminster were duly published, comprising detailed legal measures that in many cases were in the interests of the knightly class.

The Provisions of Oxford led to two years in which the king was under tutelage; he was less even than the first among equals because he was not free to choose his own councillors. The Oxford settlement, however, began to break down in 1260. There were divisions among the king’s opponents, notably between the Earl of Gloucester and the ambitious Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, Henry’s brother-in-law. The king’s eldest son, Edward, at first backed the unpopular Lusignans, whose exile had been demanded, but then came to an agreement with Simon de Montfort before being reconciled to his father. In 1261, when a papal bull released Henry from his oath to support the Provisions of Oxford, he dismissed the baronial sheriffs, castellans, and other officials imposed on him. Simon de Montfort, by now the undisputed leader of the opposition, raised rebellion, but an agreement was reached to submit the dispute to the arbitration of Louis IX of France. The verdict of the Mise of Amiens in 1264, however, was so favourable to Henry III that Simon de Montfort could not accept it.

Civil war was inevitable. In May 1264 Simon won a resounding victory at Lewes, and a new form of government was set up. Representatives of the boroughs were summoned to Parliament for the first time early in 1265, along with knights of the shire. Simon’s motive for summoning Parliament was undoubtedly political: he needed support from many elements of society. In May 1265 the young Edward, held hostage since 1264 to ensure fulfillment of the terms of the peace of Lewes, escaped and rallied the royalist forces, notably the Welsh marcher lords who played a decisive part throughout these conflicts. In August, Simon was defeated and slain at Evesham. Later reign

Henry spent the remainder of his reign settling the problems created by the rebellion. He deprived Simon’s supporters of their lands, but “the Disinherited” fought back from redoubts in forests or fens. The garrison of Kenilworth Castle carried on a notable resistance. Terms were set in 1266 for former rebels to buy back their lands, and with the issue of the Statute of Marlborough, which renewed some of the reform measures of the Provisions of Westminster, the process of reconstruction began. By 1270 the country was sufficiently settled for Edward to be able to set off on crusade, from which he did not return until two years after his father’s death. By then the community of the realm was ready to begin working with, not against, the crown. Edward I (1272–1307)

Edward was in many ways the ideal medieval king. He went through a difficult apprenticeship, was a good fighter, and was a man who enjoyed both war and statecraft. His crusading reputation gave him prestige, and his chivalric qualities were admired. Although he had a gift for leadership, he lacked sympathy for others and had an obstinacy that led to inflexibility. Law and government

In the 13th century the development of law became a dominant concern, as is shown by the great treatise On the Laws and Customs of England, attributed to the royal judge Bracton but probably put together in the 1220s and ’30s under one of his predecessors on the King’s Bench. Soon after Edward’s return to England in 1274, a major inquiry into government in the localities took place that yielded the so-called Hundred Rolls, a heterogeneous group of records, and brought home the need for changes in the law. In 1275 the First Statute of Westminster was issued. A succession of other statutes followed in later years, providing a kind of supplement to the common law. Some measures protected the king’s rights; others remedied the grievances of his subjects. In the quo warranto proceedings set up under the Statute of Gloucester of 1278 the magnates were asked by what warrant they claimed rights of jurisdiction and other franchises. This created much argument, which was resolved in the Statute of Quo Warranto of 1290. By the Statute of Mortmain of 1279 it was provided that no more land was to be given to the church without royal license. The Statute of Quia Emptores of 1290 had the effect of preventing further subinfeudation of land. In the first and second statutes of Westminster, of 1275 and 1285, many deficiencies in the law were corrected, such as those concerning the relationship between lords and tenants and the way in which the system of distraint was operated. Merchants benefited from the Statute of Acton Burnell of 1283 and the Statute of Merchants of 1285, which facilitated debt collection. Problems of law and order were tackled in the Statute of Winchester of 1285. Finance

Edward began his reign with heavy debts incurred on crusade, and his various wars also were costly. In 1275 Edward gained a secure financial basis when he negotiated a grant of export duties on wool, woolfells, and hides that brought in an average of £10,000 a year. He borrowed extensively from Italian bankers on the security of these customs revenues. The system of levying taxes on an assessment of the value of movable goods was also of great value. Successive profitable taxes were granted, mostly in Parliament. It was partly in return for one such tax, in 1290, that Edward expelled the Jews from England. Their moneylending activities had made them unpopular, and royal exploitation had so impoverished the Jews that there was no longer an advantage for Edward in keeping them in England. The growth of Parliament

Edward fostered the concept of the community of the realm and the practice of calling representative knights of the shire and burgesses from the towns to Parliament. Representatives were needed to give consent to taxation, as well as to enhance communication between the king and his subjects. The process of petitioning the king and his council in Parliament was greatly encouraged. Historians have argued much about the nature of Edward’s Parliament, some seeing the dispensation of justice as the central element, others emphasizing the multifaceted character of an increasingly complex institution. Some see Edward as responding to the dictates of Roman law, while others interpret the development of Parliament in terms of the practical solution of financial and political problems. Historians used to refer to the 1295 assembly as the Model Parliament because it contained all the elements later associated with the word parliament, but in fact these can all be found earlier. The writs to the sheriffs asking them to call knights and burgesses did, however, reach a more or less final form in 1295. They were to be summoned “with full and sufficient authority on behalf of themselves and the community . . . to do whatever shall be ordained by common counsel.” Representatives of the lower clergy were also summoned. This Parliament was fully representative of local communities and of the whole community of the realm, but many Parliaments were attended solely by the magnates with no representatives present. Edward’s wars

In the first half of his reign Edward was thoroughly successful in Wales. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Gwynedd, had taken advantage of the Barons’ War to try to expand his authority throughout Wales. He refused to do homage to Edward, and in 1277 the English king conducted a short and methodical campaign against him. Using a partly feudal, partly paid army, the core of which was provided by the royal household knights, and a fleet from the Cinque Ports, Edward won a quick victory and exacted from Llywelyn the Treaty of Conway. Llywelyn agreed to perform fealty and homage, to pay a large indemnity (from which he was soon excused), and to surrender certain districts of North Wales. There was considerable Welsh resentment after 1277 at the manner in which Edward imposed his jurisdiction in Wales.

David, Llywelyn’s younger brother, was responsible for a renewal of war in 1282. He was soon joined by Llywelyn, who was killed in battle late in the year. David was captured and executed as a traitor in 1283. This second Welsh war proved much longer, more costly, and more difficult for the English than the first. In the succeeding peace North Wales was organized into counties, and law was revised along English lines. Major castles, notably Flint and Rhuddlan, had been built after the first Welsh war; now Conway, Caernarvon, and Harlech were started, designed by a Savoyard expert, Master James of St. George. Merchant settlements, colonized with English craftsmen and merchants, were founded. Archbishop Pecham reorganized the Welsh church and brought it more fully under the sway of Canterbury. A brief revolt in 1287 was soon quelled, but Edward faced a major rebellion in 1294–95, after which he founded the last of his Welsh castles, Beaumaris in Anglesey.

Edward devoted much attention to Gascony, the land he held in southwestern France. He went there prior to returning to England at the start of the reign and spent the period 1286–89 there. In 1294 he had to undertake a costly defense of his French lands, when war began with Philip IV, king of France. Open hostilities lasted until 1297. In this case the French were the aggressors. Following private naval warfare between Gascon and Norman sailors, Philip summoned Edward (who, as Duke of Aquitaine, was his vassal) to his court and, having deceived English negotiators, decreed Gascony confiscate. Edward built up a grand alliance against the French, but the war proved costly and inconclusive.

Edward intervened in Scotland in 1291, when he claimed jurisdiction over a complex succession dispute. King Alexander III had been killed when his horse fell one stormy night in 1286. His heiress was his three-year-old granddaughter, Margaret, the Maid of Norway. Arrangements were made for her to marry Edward’s son Edward, but these plans were thwarted by Margaret’s death in 1290. There were 13 claimants to the Scottish throne, the two main candidates being John de Balliol and Robert de Bruce, both descendants of David, 8th Earl of Huntingdon, brother of William I the Lion. Balliol was the grandson of David’s eldest daughter, and Bruce was the son of his second daughter. A court of 104 auditors, of whom 40 were chosen by Balliol and 40 by Bruce, was set up. Balliol was designated king and performed fealty and homage to Edward.

Edward did all he could to emphasize his own claims to feudal suzerainty over Scotland, and his efforts to put these into effect provoked Scottish resistance. In 1295 the Scots, having imposed a baronial council on Balliol, made a treaty with the French. War was inevitable, and in a swift and successful campaign Edward defeated Balliol in 1296, forcing him to abdicate. The victory, however, had been too easy. Revolt against the inept officials Edward had appointed to rule in Scotland came in 1297, headed by William Wallace and Andrew Moray. Victory for Edward at the battle of Falkirk in 1298, however, did not win the war. A lengthy series of costly campaigns appeared to have brought success by 1304, and in the next year Edward set up a scheme for governing Scotland, by now termed by the English a land, not a kingdom. But in 1306 Robert de Bruce, grandson of the earlier claimant to the throne, a man who had fought on both sides in the war, seized the Scottish throne and reopened the conflict, which continued into the reign of Edward II, who succeeded his father in 1307.

It has been claimed that during his wars Edward I transformed the traditional feudal host into an efficient, paid army. In fact, feudal summonses continued throughout his reign, though only providing a proportion of the army. The paid forces of the royal household were a very important element, but it is clear that the magnates also provided substantial unpaid forces for campaigns of which they approved. The scale of infantry recruitment increased notably, enabling Edward to muster armies up to 30,000 strong. The king’s military successes were primarily due to the skill of his government in mobilizing resources, in terms of men, money, and supplies, on an unprecedented scale. Domestic difficulties

The wars in the 1290s against the Welsh, French, and Scots imposed an immense burden on England. The character of the king’s rule changed as the preoccupation with war put an end to further reform of government and law. Edward’s subjects resented the heavy taxation, large-scale recruitment, and seizures of food supplies and wool crops. Pope Boniface VIII forbade the clergy to pay taxes to the king. A political crisis ensued in 1297, which was only partly resolved by the reissue of Magna Carta and some additional concessions. Argument continued for much of the rest of the reign, while the king’s debts mounted. The Riccardi, Edward’s bankers in the first part of the reign, were effectively bankrupted in 1294, and their eventual successors, the Frescobaldi, were unable to give the king the same level of support as their predecessors. Social, economic, and cultural change

The population expanded rapidly in the 13th century, reaching a level of about five million. Great landlords prospered with the system of high farming, but the average size of small peasant holdings fell, with no compensating rise in productivity. There has been debate about the fate of the knightly class: some historians have argued that lesser landowners suffered a decline in wealth and numbers, while others have pointed to their increased political importance as evidence of their prosperity. Although there were probably both gainers and losers, the overall number of knights in England almost certainly fell to less than 2,000. Ties between magnates and their feudal tenants slackened as the relationship became increasingly a legal rather than a personal one. Lords began to adopt new methods of recruiting their retinues, using contracts demanding service either for life or for a short term, in exchange for fees, robes, and wages. Towns continued to grow, with many new ones being founded, but the weaving industry suffered a decline, in part because of competition from rural areas and in part as a result of restrictive guild practices. In trade, England became increasingly dependent on exports of raw wool.

The advent of the friars introduced a new element to the church. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge were developing rapidly, and in Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, England produced two major, if somewhat eccentric, intellectual figures. Ecclesiastical architecture flourished, showing a strong French influence: Henry III’s patronage of the new Westminster Abbey was particularly notable. Edward I’s castles in North Wales rank high among the finest examples of medieval military architecture. The 14th century

The 14th century, despite some gains, was a bleak age. At its beginning and close were kings whose reigns ended in failure. In between, however, came the 50-year reign of the popular and successful Edward III. During the century the importance of the Commons in Parliament continued to grow. But dominant factors of the age were war and plague. The increased scale, cost, and frequency of wars from the 1290s onward imposed heavy burdens on state and society. Conflicts between England and France continued intermittently throughout the century, those from 1337 onward being called the Hundred Years’ War. The Black Death struck in 1348–49; it became endemic, recurring several times in the second half of the century, and brought with it profound economic and social change. Edward II (1307–27)

Edward II’s reign was an almost unmitigated disaster. He inherited some of his problems from his father, the most significant being a treasury deficit of some £200,000, and the Scottish war. He inherited none of his father’s strengths. He was a good horseman but did not enjoy swordplay or tournaments, preferring swimming, ditch digging, thatching, and theatricals. Although surrounded by a ruling class strongly tied to his family by blood and service, Edward rejected the company of his peers, preferring that of Piers Gaveston, son of a Gascon knight, with whom he probably had a homosexual relationship. Edward’s father had exiled Gaveston in an attempt to quash the friendship. Edward the son recalled him and conferred on him the highest honours he had to bestow: the earldom of Cornwall and marriage to his niece Margaret de Clare, sister of the Earl of Gloucester. Edward also recalled Archbishop Winchelsey and Bishop Bek of Durham, both of whom had gone into exile under Edward I. He dismissed and put on trial one of his father’s most trusted servants, the treasurer, Walter Langton.

Historians used to emphasize the constitutional struggle that took place in this reign, seeing a conflict between a baronial ideal of government conducted with the advice of the magnates and based on the great offices of state, the Chancery and the Exchequer, on the one hand, and a royal policy of reliance upon the departments of the royal household, notably the wardrobe and chamber, on the other. More recent interpretations have shifted the emphasis to personal rivalries and ambitions.

Opposition to Edward began to build as early as January 1308. At the coronation in February a new clause was added to the king’s oath that obligated him to promise that he would keep such laws “as the community of the realm shall have chosen.” In April the barons came armed to Parliament and warned the king that “homage and the oath of allegiance are stronger and bind more by reason of the crown than by reason of the person of the king.” The first phase of the reign culminated in the production of the Ordinances in 1311. They were in part directed against Gaveston—who was again to be exiled—and other royal favourites, but much of the document looked back to the grievances of Edward I’s later years, echoing concessions made by the king in 1300. Hostility was expressed to the practice of prise (compulsory purchase of foodstuffs for royal armies). Baronial consent was required for foreign war (possibly in remembrance of Edward I’s Flanders campaign of 1297). The privy seal was not to be used to interfere in justice. A long list of officials were to be chosen with the advice and consent of the barons in Parliament. All revenues were to be paid into the Exchequer. The king’s bankers, the Frescobaldi, who had also served Edward I, were to be expelled from the realm. Royal grants of land made since the appointment of the Ordainers in 1310 were annulled. It is noteworthy that the first clear statement that consent should be given in Parliament is to be found in the Ordinances. No explicit role, however, was given to the Commons, the representative element in Parliament.

The middle years of Edward’s reign were dominated by the enigmatic figure of Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster, the king’s cousin and chief opponent, whose surly inactivity for long periods blocked effective political initiatives. His political program never amounted to much more than enforcement of the Ordinances. He supervised the capture and execution of Gaveston in 1312 and came to dominance after the disastrous defeat of a royal army at the hands of the Scottish pikemen and bowmen at Bannockburn in 1314. At the Lincoln Parliament of 1316 he was named chief councillor, but he soon withdrew from active government.

A conciliar regime was set up with the Treaty of Leake of 1318. This was once thought to have been the work of a “middle party,” but the political alliances of this period cannot be categorized in such a manner. New royal favourites emerged, and in 1321 the peace was broken when the Welsh marcher lords moved against two of them, a father and son, both called Hugh Despenser. When Parliament met, the two were exiled, but they soon returned. In this brief civil war, which ended in 1322, Edward was victorious. He had Lancaster executed for treason after his ignominious defeat at Boroughbridge in 1322. In death Lancaster attracted a popular sympathy he had rarely received in life, with many rumours of miracles at his tomb. Edward had many of Lancaster’s followers executed in a horrific bloodbath. In the same year the Ordinances were repealed in Parliament at York, and in the Statute of York the intention of returning to the constitutional practices of the past was announced. But in specifying that the “consent of the prelates, earls, and barons, and of the community of the realm” was required for legislation, the Statute of York provided much scope for historical argument; some historians have made claims for a narrow baronial interpretation of what is meant by “community of the realm,” while others have seen the terminology as giving the representative element in Parliament a new role. A tract written in this period, the Modus tenendi parliamentum, certainly placed a new emphasis on the representatives of shire, borough, and lower clergy. In terms of practical politics, however, the Statute of York permitted the fullest resumption of royal authority.

The final period of the reign saw the Despensers restored to power. They carried out various administrative reforms, ably assisted by the treasurer, Walter Stapledon. For the first time in many years, a substantial treasury of about £60,000 was built up. At the same time, crude blackmail and blatant corruption characterized this regime. A brief war against the French was unsuccessful. The reign ended with the invasion of Edward’s estranged queen, Isabella, assisted by Roger Mortimer, soon to be Earl of March. With the support above all of the Londoners, the government was overthrown, the Despensers executed, and the king imprisoned. Parliament was called in his name, and he was simultaneously deposed and persuaded to abdicate in favour of his son, Edward III. After two conspiracies to release him, he was almost certainly killed in Berkeley Castle. Edward III (1327–77) The Hundred Years’ War, to 1360

Edward III achieved personal power when he overthrew his mother’s and Mortimer’s dominance in 1330 at the age of 17. Their regime had been just as corrupt as that of the Despensers but less constructive. The young king had been sadly disappointed by an unsuccessful campaign against the Scots in 1327; in 1333 the tide turned when he achieved victory at Halidon Hill. Edward gave his support to Edward Balliol as claimant to the Scottish throne, rather than to Robert I’s son David II. But as long as the Scots had the support of the French king Philip VI, final success proved impossible, and this was one of the causes for the outbreak of the French war in 1337. Another was the long-standing friction over Gascony, chronic since 1294 and stemming ultimately from the Treaty of Paris of 1259. By establishing that the kings of England owed homage to the kings of France for Gascony the treaty had created an awkward relationship. The building of bastides (fortified towns) by each side contributed to friction, as did piracy by English and French sailors. The English resented any appeals to the French court by Gascons. English-French rivalry also extended into the Netherlands, which was dependent on English wool for industrial prosperity but some of whose states, including Flanders, were subject to French claims of suzerainty. Finally, there was the matter of the French throne itself. Edward, through his mother, was closer in blood to the last ruler of the Capetian dynasty than was the Valois Philip VI. The claim was of great propaganda value to Edward, for it meant that he did not appear as simply a rebellious vassal of the French king. His allies could fight for him without dishonour.

The initial phase of the war was inconclusive. Edward won a naval victory at Sluys in 1340, but he lacked the resources to follow it up. Although intervention in a succession dispute in Brittany saw the English register successes, stalemate came in 1343. The first great triumph came with the invasion of Normandy in 1346. As Edward was retreating northward, he defeated the French at Crécy and then settled to the siege of Calais, which fell in 1347. The French allies, the Scots, were also defeated in 1346 at Neville’s Cross, where their king, David II, was taken prisoner. The focus of the war moved south in 1355, when the king’s son, the Black Prince, was sent to Gascony. He launched a successful raid in 1355 and another in 1356, and at Poitiers he defeated and captured the French king John, for whom a heavy ransom was charged. As at Crécy, English archery proved decisive. A major campaign in 1359–60, planned as the decisive blow, proved unsatisfactory to the English. Rheims did not open its gates to Edward as he had hoped, and a storm caused severe damage to the army and its baggage in April 1360. Negotiations led to a truce at Brétigny, and in the subsequent negotiations Edward agreed to drop his claim to the French throne. In return, English possessions in France would be held in full sovereignty. The terms, particularly those involving the exchange of territory, were not carried out in full, but neither side wished to reopen the war immediately. War was costly, and Edward III’s armies were no longer recruited by feudal means. Most were formed by contract, and all who fought received wages as well as a share of the profits of campaigning. These could be substantial if wealthy nobles were captured and ransomed. Domestic achievements

The war, and the need to finance it, dominated domestic affairs under Edward III. The king faced a crisis in 1340–41 because he found himself disastrously indebted by 1339, even though he had received generous grants from Parliament since 1336. It was estimated that he owed £300,000. He had seized wool exports and had borrowed recklessly from Italian, English, and Flemish bankers and merchants. A grant in 1340 of a ninth of all produce failed to yield the expected financial return. In the autumn of 1340 Edward returned from abroad and charged John Stratford, archbishop of Canterbury, the man who had been in charge in his absence, with working against him. He also engaged in a widespread purge of royal ministers. Stratford whipped up opposition to the king, and in Parliament in 1341 statutes were passed that were reminiscent of the kind of restraints put on earlier and less popular kings. Officers of state and of the king’s household were to be appointed and sworn in Parliament. Commissioners were to be sworn in Parliament to audit the royal accounts. Peers were to be entitled to trial before their peers in Parliament. Breaches of the Charters were to be reported in Parliament. Charges were brought against Stratford, only to be dropped. But in 1343 Edward III was able to repudiate the statutes. The crisis had little permanent effect, though it did demonstrate the king’s dependence on Parliament, and within it on the Commons, for supply.

In the following years the country was well governed, with William Edington and John Thoresby serving the king loyally and well. Edward’s compliance toward the requests of the Commons made it relatively easy for him to obtain the grants he needed. Discontent in 1346–47 was overcome by the good news from France. Much of the legislation passed at this time was in the popular interest. In 1352 the king agreed that no one should be bound to find soldiers for the war save by common consent in Parliament, and demands for purveyance were moderated. The Statute of Provisors of 1351 set up statutory procedures against the unpopular papal practice of making appointments to church benefices in England, and the Statute of Praemunire two years later forbade appeals to Rome in patronage disputes. The crown in practice had sufficient weapons available to it to deal with these matters, but Edward was ready to accept the views of his subjects, even though he did little about them later. Much attention was given to the organization of the wool trade because it was intimately bound up with the finance of war. In 1363 the Calais staple was set up, under which all English exports of raw wool were channeled through Calais. The currency was reformed very effectively with the introduction in the 1340s of a gold coinage alongside the traditional silver pennies. Law and order

The maintenance of law and order, a prime duty for a medieval king, had reached a point of crisis by the end of Edward I’s reign when special commissions, known as commissions of trailbaston, were set up to try to deal with the problem. Matters became worse under Edward II, from whose reign there is much evidence of gang warfare, often involving men of knightly status. Maintaining law and order was also an urgent issue in Edward III’s reign. In the early years there was conflict between the magnates, who wanted to be given full authority in the localities, and the county knights and gentry, who favoured locally appointed keepers of the peace. A possible solution, favoured by the chief justice, Geoffrey Scrope, was to extend the jurisdiction of the king’s bench into the localities. There was a major crime wave in 1346 and 1347, intensified by the activities of soldiers returning from France. The justices reacted by greatly extending the use of accusations of treason, but the Commons protested against procedures they claimed did little to promote order and much to impoverish the people. In 1352 the crown gave way, producing in the Statute of Treason a narrow definition of great treason that made it impossible to threaten common criminals with the harsh penalties which followed conviction for treason. The concern of the Commons had been that in cases of treason goods and land forfeited by those found guilty went to the crown, not to the overlord. In 1361 the position of justice of the peace was established by statute, marking another success for the Commons. The crises of Edward’s later years

The war with France was reopened in 1369 and went badly. The king was in his dotage and, since the death of Queen Philippa in 1369, in the clutches of his unscrupulous mistress Alice Perrers. The heir to the throne, Edward the Black Prince, was ill and died in 1376. Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence, the next son, had died in 1368, and John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the third surviving son, was largely occupied with his claims to Castile, his inheritance through his second wife, Constance. Edmund of Langley, the fourth surviving son, was a nonentity, and the youngest, Thomas of Woodstock, was not yet of age. In 1371 Parliament demanded the dismissal of William of Wykeham, the chancellor, and the appointment of laymen to state offices. The new government, dominated by men such as William Latimer, the chamberlain, proved unpopular and ineffective. When the so-called Good Parliament met in 1376, grievances had accumulated and needed to be dealt with. As in previous crises, a committee consisting of four bishops, four earls, and four barons was set up to take responsibility for the reforms. Then, under the leadership of Peter de la Mare, who may be termed the first Speaker, the Commons impeached Latimer, Alice Perrers, and a number of ministers and officials, some of whom had profited personally from the administration of the royal finances. The Commons took the role of prosecutors before the Lords in what amounted to a new procedure.

John of Gaunt, an unpopular figure at this time, had, as a result of the king’s illness, presided uncomfortably over the Good Parliament. He ensured that the achievement of Peter de la Mare and his colleagues was ephemeral, taking charge of the government at the end of the reign. De la Mare was jailed in Nottingham. William of Wykeham was attacked for alleged peculation as chancellor, and Alice Perrers was restored to court. The Parliament of 1377 reversed all important acts of the Good Parliament. There were rumours in London that Gaunt aimed at the throne. But the Black Prince’s widow made peace between Gaunt and the Londoners, and Wykeham’s temporalities were restored. The reign ended in truce, if not peace. Richard II (1377–99)

Richard II’s reign was fraught with crises—economic, social, political, and constitutional. He was 10 years old when his grandfather died, and the first problem the country faced was having to deal with his minority. A “continual council” was set up to “govern the king and his kingdom.” Although John of Gaunt was still the dominant figure in the royal family, neither he nor his brothers were included. The Peasants’ Revolt (1381)

Financing the increasingly expensive and unsuccessful war with France was a major preoccupation. At the end of Edward III’s reign a new device, a poll tax of four pence a head, had been introduced. A similar but graduated tax followed in 1379, and in 1380 another set at one shilling a head was granted. It proved inequitable and impractical, and, when the government tried to speed up collection in the spring of 1381, a popular rebellion—the Peasants’ Revolt—ensued. Although the poll tax was the spark that set it off, there were also deeper causes related to changes in the economy and to political developments. The government, in particular, engendered hostility to the legal system by its policies of expanding the powers of the justices of the peace at the expense of local and manorial courts. In addition, popular poor preachers spread subversive ideas with slogans such as: “When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman?” The Peasants’ Revolt began in Essex and Kent. Widespread outbreaks occurred through the southeast of England, taking the form of assaults on tax collectors, attacks on landlords and their manor houses, destruction of documentary evidence of villein status, and attacks on lawyers. Attacks on religious houses, such as that at St. Albans, were particularly severe, perhaps because they had been among the most conservative of landlords in commuting labour services.

The men of Essex and Kent moved on London to attack the king’s councillors. Admitted to the city by sympathizers, they attacked John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy as well as the Fleet prison. On June 14 the young king made them various promises at Mile End; on the same day they broke into the Tower and killed Sudbury, the chancellor, Hales, the treasurer, and other officials. On the next day Richard met the rebels again at Smithfield, and their main leader, Wat Tyler, presented their demands. But during the negotiations Tyler was attacked and slain by the mayor of London. The young king rode forward and reassured the rebels, asking them to follow him to Clerkenwell. This proved to be a turning point, and the rebels, their supplies exhausted, began to make their way home. Richard went back on the promises he had made, saying, “Villeins ye are and villeins ye shall remain.” In October Parliament confirmed the king’s revocation of charters but demanded amnesty save for a few special offenders.

The events of the Peasants’ Revolt may have given Richard an exalted idea of his own powers and prerogative as a result of his success at Smithfield, but for the rebels the gains of the rising amounted to no more than the abolition of the poll taxes. Improvements in the social position of the peasantry did occur, but not so much as a consequence of the revolt as of changes in the economy that would have occurred anyhow. John Wycliffe

Religious unrest was another subversive factor under Richard II. England had been virtually free from heresy until John Wycliffe, a priest and an Oxford scholar, began his career as a religious reformer with two treatises in 1375–76. He argued that the exercise of lordship depended on grace and that, therefore, a sinful man had no right to authority. Priests and even the pope himself, Wycliffe went on to argue, might not necessarily be in a state of grace and thus would lack authority. Such doctrines appealed to anticlerical sentiments and brought Wycliffe into direct conflict with the church hierarchy, although he received protection from John of Gaunt. The beginning of the Great Schism in 1378 gave Wycliffe fresh opportunities to attack the papacy, and in a treatise of 1379 on the Eucharist he openly denied the doctrine of transubstantiation. He was ordered before a church court at Lambeth in 1378. In 1380 his views were condemned by a commission of theologians at Oxford, and he was forced to leave the university. At Lutterworth he continued to write voluminously until his death in 1384. The movement he inspired was known as Lollardy. Two of his followers translated the Bible into English, and others went out to spread Wycliffe’s doctrines, which soon became debased and popularized. The movement continued to expand despite the death of its founder and the government’s attempts to destroy it. Political struggles and Richard’s deposition

Soon after putting down the Peasants’ Revolt, Richard began to build up a court party, partly in opposition to Gaunt. A crisis was precipitated in 1386 when the king asked Parliament for a grant to meet the French threat. Parliament responded by demanding the dismissal of the king’s favourites, but Richard insisted that he would not dismiss so much as a scullion in his kitchen at the request of Parliament. In the end he was forced by the impeachment of the chancellor, Michael de la Pole, to agree to the appointment of a reforming commission. Richard withdrew from London and went on a “gyration” of the country. He called the judges before him at Shrewsbury and asked them to pronounce the actions of Parliament illegal. An engagement at Radcot Bridge, at which Richard’s favourite, Robert de Vere, 9th Earl of Oxford, was defeated, settled the matter of ascendancy. In the Merciless Parliament of 1388 five lords accused the king’s friends of treason under an expansive definition of the crime.

Richard was chastened, but he began to recover his authority as early as the autumn of 1388 at the Cambridge Parliament. Declaring himself to be of age in 1389, Richard announced that he was taking over the government. He pardoned the Lords Appellant and ruled with some moderation until 1394, when his queen, Anne of Bohemia, died. After putting down a rebellion in Ireland, he was, for a time, almost popular. He began to implement his personal policy once more and rebuilt a royal party with the help of a group of young nobles. He made a 28-year truce with France and married the French king’s seven-year-old daughter. He built up a household of faithful servants, including the notorious Sir John Bushy, Sir William Bagot, and Sir Henry Green. He enlisted household troops and built a wide network of “king’s knights” in the counties, distributing to them his personal badge, the White Hart.

The first sign of renewed crisis emerged in January 1397, when complaints were put forward in Parliament and their author, Thomas Haxey, was adjudged a traitor. Richard’s rule, based on fear rather than consent, became increasingly tyrannical. Three of the Lords Appellant of 1388 were arrested in July and tried in Parliament. The Earl of Arundel was executed and Warwick exiled. Gloucester, whose death was reported to Parliament, had probably been murdered. The acts of the 1388 Parliament were repealed. Richard was granted the customs revenues for life, and the powers of Parliament were delegated to a committee after the assembly was dissolved. Richard also built up a power base in Cheshire.

Events leading to Richard’s downfall followed quickly. The Duke of Norfolk and Henry Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt’s son, accused each other of treason and were banished, the former for life, the latter for 10 years. When Gaunt himself died early in 1399, Richard confiscated his estates instead of allowing his son to claim them. Richard, seemingly secure, went off to Ireland. Henry, however, landed at Ravenspur in Yorkshire to claim, as he said, his father’s estates and the hereditary stewardship. The Percys, the chief lords in the north, welcomed him. Popular support was widespread, and when Richard returned from Ireland his cause was lost.

The precise course of events is hard to reconstruct, in view of subsequent alterations to the records. A Parliament was called in Richard’s name, but before it was fully assembled at the end of September, its members were presented with Richard’s alleged abdication and Henry’s claim to the throne as legitimate descendant of Henry III as well as by right of conquest. Thirty-three articles of deposition were set forth against Richard, and his abdication and deposition were duly accepted. Richard died at Pontefract Castle, either of self-starvation or by smothering. Thus ended the last attempt of a medieval king to exercise arbitrary power. Whether or not Richard had been motivated by new theories about the nature of monarchy, as some have claimed, he had failed in the practical measures necessary to sustain his power. He had tried to rule through fear and mistrust in his final years, but he had neither gained sufficient support among the magnates by means of patronage nor created a popular basis of support in the shires. Economic crisis and cultural change

Although the outbreak of the Black Death in 1348 dominated the economy of the 14th century, a number of adversities had already occurred in the preceding decades. Severe rains in 1315 and 1316 caused famine, which led to the spread of disease. Animal epidemics in succeeding years added to the problems, as did an increasing shortage of currency in the 1330s. Economic expansion, which had been characteristic of the 13th century, had slowed to a halt. The Black Death, possibly a combination of bubonic and pneumonic plagues, carried off from one-third to one-half of the population. In some respects it took time for its effects to become detrimental to the economy, but with subsequent outbreaks, as in 1361 and 1369, the population declined further, causing a severe labour shortage. By the 1370s wages had risen dramatically and prices of foodstuffs fallen. Hired labourers, being fewer, asked for higher wages and better food, and peasant tenants, also fewer, asked for better conditions of tenure when they took up land. Some landlords responded by trying to reassert labour services where they had been commuted. The Ordinance (1349) and Statute (1351) of Labourers tried to set maximum wages at the levels of the pre-Black Death years, but strict enforcement proved impossible. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was one result of the social tension caused by the adjustments needed after the epidemic. Great landlords saw their revenues fall as a result of the Black Death, although probably by only about 10 percent, whereas for the lower orders of society real wages rose sharply by the last quarter of the 14th century because of low grain prices and high wages.

Edward III ruined the major Italian banking companies in England by failing to repay loans early in the Hundred Years’ War. This provided openings for English merchants, who were given monopolies of wool exports by the crown in return for their support. The most notable was William de la Pole of Hull, whose family rose to noble status. Heavy taxation of wool exports was one reason for the growth of the cloth industry and cloth exports in the 14th century. The wine trade from Gascony was also important. In contrast to the 13th century, no new towns were founded, but London in particular continued to prosper despite the ravages of plague.

In cultural terms, a striking change in the 14th century was the increasing use of English. Although an attempt to make the use of English mandatory in the law courts failed because lawyers claimed that they could not plead accurately in the language, the vernacular began to creep into public documents and records. Henry of Lancaster even used English when he claimed the throne in 1399. Chaucer wrote in both French and English, but his important poetry is in the latter. The early 14th century was an impressive age for manuscript illumination in England, with the so-called East Anglian school, of which the celebrated Luttrell Psalter represents a late example. In ecclesiastical architecture the development of the Perpendicular style, largely in the second half of the 14th century, was particularly notable.

Plowing with oxen, illustration from the Luttrell Psalter, 14th century.The British Library/Robana/REX/Shutterstock.com Lancaster and York

Recent scholarship has done much to transform the view that the 15th century was a period dominated by a factious nobility, when constructive achievements were few. In particular, the character of the nobility has been reconceived, and the century has emerged in a more positive light. It appears that even in politics and administration much was done that anticipated the achievements of the Tudors, while in the economy the foundations for future growth and prosperity were laid. Henry IV (1399–1413)

Henry of Lancaster gave promise of being able to develop a better rapport with his people than his predecessor, Richard II. He was a warrior of great renown who had traveled to Jerusalem and had fought in Prussia against infidels. He also had a reputation for affability and for statesmanlike self-control, and he had won his crown with the support of “the estates of the realm.” It did not matter much whether that meant Parliament or something more vague and symbolic. Henry, however, intended to rule as a true king, with the prerogatives of the crown unimpaired, whereas his Parliaments, from the first, expected him to govern with the advice and consent of his council, and to listen to Parliament regarding requests for money. Thus although Archbishop Arundel stressed in 1399 that Henry wished to be properly advised and that he intended to be governed by common advice and counsel, some argument and conflict was inevitable. The rebellions

Henry’s immediate task after his accession was to put down a rebellion threatening to restore Richard. The earls of Rutland, Kent, and Huntingdon, supported by the bishop of Carlisle, conspired against the king. The rising was unexpected, but Henry won support in London and defeated the rebels near Cirencester. More significant was the revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr that broke out in 1399 and became serious in 1402. Glyn Dwr sought a French alliance and captured Edmund Mortimer, uncle of the Earl of March, Richard II’s legitimate heir. Mortimer was persuaded to join the rebellion, which now aimed to make March king. In 1403 the Welsh rebels joined the Percys of Northumberland in a powerful coalition. The younger Percy, “Hotspur,” was killed at Shrewsbury in 1403. The elder was pardoned, only to rebel once more in 1405, again in conjunction with Glyn Dwr. Henry broke the alliance with a victory at Shipton Moor. Percy was finally killed in 1408, but Glyn Dwr, driven into the mountains of North Wales, was never captured. Henry and Parliament

Henry’s relations with his Parliaments were uneasy. The main problem, of course, was money. Henry, as Duke of Lancaster, was a wealthy man, but as king he had forfeited some of his income by repudiating Richard II’s tactics, though he also avoided Richard’s extravagance. His needs were still great, threatened as he was by rebellion in England and war in France. A central issue was Parliament’s demand, as in 1404, that the king take back all royal land that had been granted and leased out since 1366. This was so that he might “live of his own.” The king could hardly adopt a measure that would cause much upheaval. Arguments in 1406 were so protracted that the Parliament met for 159 days, becoming the longest Parliament of the medieval period. On several occasions the Commons insisted on taxes being spent in the way that they wished, primarily on the defense of the realm.

The later Parliaments of Henry’s reign brought no new problems, but the king became less active in government as he was more and more incapacitated by illness. From 1408 to 1411 the government was dominated first by Archbishop Arundel and then by the king’s son Henry, who, with the support of the Beaufort brothers, sons of John of Gaunt by Katherine Swynford, attempted to win control over the council. There was much argument over the best political strategy to adopt in France, where civil war was raging; young Henry wanted to resume the war in France, but the king favoured peace. In 1411 the king recovered his authority, and the Prince of Wales was dismissed from the council. Uneasy relations between the prince and his father lasted until Henry IV’s death in 1413. Henry V (1413–22)

Henry V’s brief reign is important mainly for the glorious victories in France, which visited on his infant son the enormous and not-so-glorious burden of governing both France and England. Two rebellions undermined the security of the realm in the first two years of the reign. The first was organized by Sir John Oldcastle, a Lollard and former confidant of the king. Though Oldcastle was not arrested until 1417, little came of his rising. Another plot gathered around Richard, 5th Earl of Cambridge, a younger brother of the Duke of York. The aim was to place the Earl of March on the throne, but March himself gave the plot away, and the leading conspirators were tried and executed on the eve of the king’s departure for France. The French war

Henry invaded France in 1415 with a small army of some 9,000 men. The siege of Harfleur was followed by a march toward Calais. At Agincourt the English were forced to fight because their route onward was blocked; they won an astonishing victory. Between 1417 and 1419 Henry followed up this success with the conquest of Normandy and the grant of Norman lands to English nobles and lesser men. This was a new strategy for the English to adopt, replacing the plundering raids of the past. In 1420 in the Treaty of Troyes it was agreed that Henry would marry Catherine, Charles VI’s daughter. He was to be heir to the French throne, and that throne was to descend to his heirs in perpetuity. But Charles VI’s son, the Dauphin, was not a party to the treaty, and so the war continued. Henry, still wanting money but reluctant to ask for subsidies at a time when he needed all the support he could get for the treaty, obtained forced loans. There were increasing indications of unease in England. In 1422 Henry contracted dysentery and died at the siege of Meaux in August, leaving as his heir a son less than a year old. Domestic affairs

England was competently governed under Henry V. Problems of law and order were dealt with by reviving the use of the King’s Bench as a traveling court; central and local administration operated smoothly. Henry proved adept at persuading men to serve him energetically for limited rewards. Parliament, well-satisfied with the course of events in France, gave the king all the support he needed. War finance was efficiently managed, and although Henry died in debt, the level was a manageable one. His was a most successful reign. Henry VI (1422–61 and 1470–71)

Henry VI was a pious and generous man, but he lacked the attributes needed for effective kingship. Above all he lacked political sense and was no judge of men. Until 1437 he was a child, under the regency of a council of nobles dominated by his uncles and his Beaufort kin. When he was declared of age, the Beauforts were the real rulers of England. In 1445, through the initiative of the Earl (later Duke) of Suffolk, he married Margaret of Anjou, who with Suffolk dominated the king. Finally, in the period from 1450 to 1461 he suffered two bouts of mental illness. During these crises Richard, 3rd Duke of York, ruled the kingdom as protector. Domestic rivalries and the loss of France

In the first period of the reign John, Duke of Bedford, proved to be as able a commander in the French war as had his brother Henry V. But in 1429 Joan of Arc stepped forth and rallied French resistance. Bedford died in 1435, and the Congress of Arras, an effort at a general peace settlement, failed. When Philip of Burgundy deserted the English alliance and came to terms with Charles VII, the conflict became a war of attrition. By 1453 the English had lost all their overseas possessions save Calais.

Despite the factional nature of politics, there was no breakdown at home. The country was ruled by a magnate council with the increasingly reluctant financial support of Parliament. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester (cardinal from 1426), were the dominant figures. The main problem was financing the war. The bishop had great wealth, which he increased by lending to the crown, receiving repayment out of the customs. Divisions in the council became more acute after 1435, with Gloucester advocating an aggressive war policy. He was, however, discredited when his wife was accused of witchcraft in 1441.

In 1447 both Cardinal Beaufort and Gloucester died, the latter in suspicious circumstances. The Duke of Suffolk was in the ascendant; he had negotiated a peace with France in 1444 and arranged the king’s marriage to Margaret of Anjou in 1445. When war was renewed in 1446, the English position in Normandy collapsed. Becoming the scapegoat for the English failure, Suffolk was impeached in the Parliament of March 1450. As he was fleeing into exile, he was slain by English sailors from a ship called the Nicholas of the Tower. Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset, succeeded him as leader of the court party. Cade’s rebellion

Less than three months later Jack Cade, a man of obscure origins, led a popular rebellion in southeastern England. In contrast to the rising of 1381, this was not a peasant movement; Cade’s followers included many gentry, whose complaints were mainly about lack of government rather than economic repression. Thus the remedies they proposed were political, such as the resumption of royal estates that had been granted out, the removal of corrupt councillors, and improved methods of collecting taxes. The rebels demanded that the king accept the counsel of Henry’s rival, the Duke of York. They executed Lord Saye and Sele, the treasurer, and the sheriff of Kent, but the rising was soon put down. The beginning of the Wars of the Roses

The so-called Wars of the Roses was the struggle between the Yorkist and Lancastrian descendants of Edward III for control of the throne and of local government. The origins of the conflict have been the subject of much debate. It can be seen as brought about as a result of Henry VI’s inadequacy and the opposition of his dynastic rival Richard, Duke of York, but local feuds between magnates added a further dimension. Because of the crown’s failure to control these disputes, they acquired national significance. Attempts have been made to link these civil conflicts to what is known as “bastard feudalism,” the system that allowed magnates to retain men in their service by granting them fees and livery and made possible the recruiting of private armies. Yet this system can be seen as promoting stability in periods of strong rule as well as undermining weak rule such as that of Henry VI. Many nobles sought good government, rather than being factious, and were only forced into war by the king’s incompetence. The outbreak of civil war in England was indirectly linked to the failure in France, for Henry VI’s government had suffered a disastrous loss of prestige and, with it, authority.

The Duke of York had a claim to the throne in two lines of descent. One was through his mother, great-granddaughter of Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence, second surviving son of Edward III, and the other was through his father, son of Edmund of Langley, 1st Duke of York, fourth surviving son of Edward III. According to feudal principles he had a better hereditary right than anyone of the Lancastrian line. He had been sent as royal lieutenant to Ireland in 1446, but he returned from there with 4,000 men in 1450 to reassert his right to participate in the king’s council and to counter Somerset’s machinations. In 1454 York was made protector of the king, who had become insane in 1453, even though the queen and court party had tried to disguise the king’s illness. Early in 1455 Henry recovered his wits. During his spell of insanity his queen had a son, Edward, which changed the balance of politics. York was no longer the heir apparent, and the country was faced with the prospect, should the king die, of another lengthy minority.

In 1455 York gathered forces in the north, alleging that he could not safely attend a council called to meet at Leicester without the support of his troops. He met the king at St. Albans. Negotiations were unsuccessful, and in the ensuing battle York’s forces, larger than the king’s, won a decisive victory. Somerset was slain and the king captured. A Yorkist regime was set up, with York as constable and the Earl of Warwick, emerging as the strong support of the Yorkist cause, as captain of Calais. The king fell ill again in the autumn of 1455, and York was again protector for a brief period; the king, however, recovered early in 1456.

Hostilities were renewed in 1459. The Yorkists fled without fighting before a royal force at Ludford Bridge, but the Lancastrians failed to make the most of the opportunity. Demands for money, purveyances, and commissions of array increased the burdens but not the benefits of Lancastrian rule. The earls of Warwick and Salisbury, with York’s son Edward, used Calais as a base from which to invade England, landing at Sandwich in 1460. A brief battle at Northampton in July went overwhelmingly for the Yorkists, and the king was captured. At Parliament the Duke of York claimed the throne as heir to Richard II. The Commons and judges refused to consider a matter so high, leaving it to the Lords’ decision. During the fortnight of debate the Lancastrians regrouped, and when Richard met them at Wakefield, he was defeated and killed. Warwick, somewhat later, was defeated at St. Albans.

The Yorkist cause would have been lost if it had not been for Richard’s son, Edward, Earl of March, who defeated the Lancastrians first at Mortimer’s Cross and then at Towton Moor early in 1461. He was crowned king on June 28, but dated his reign from March 4, the day the London citizens and soldiers recognized his right as king. Edward IV (1461–70 and 1471–83)

During the early years of his reign, from 1461 to 1470, Edward was chiefly concerned with putting down opposition to his rule. Lancastrian resistance in the northeast and in Wales caused problems. France and Burgundy were also of concern because Margaret of Anjou’s chief hope of recovering Lancastrian fortunes lay in French support; but Louis XI was miserly in his aid. Edward’s main internal problem lay in his relations with Warwick, who had been his chief supporter in 1461. Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, called “the Kingmaker,” was cousin to the king and related to much of the English nobility. Edward, however, refused to be dominated by him, particularly with respect to his marriage. When the crucial moment came in Warwick’s negotiations for the king to marry the French king’s sister-in-law, Edward disclosed his secret marriage in 1464 to a commoner, Elizabeth Woodville. The marriage of the king’s sister to Charles the Bold of Burgundy was a success for the Woodvilles, for Warwick was not involved in the negotiations. Warwick allied himself to Edward’s younger brother George, Duke of Clarence, and ultimately, through the machinations of Louis XI, joined forces with Margaret of Anjou, deposed Edward in 1470, and brought back Henry VI. The old king, dressed in worn and unregal clothing, was from time to time exhibited to the London citizens, while Warwick conducted the government. Edward IV went into brief exile in the Netherlands. But with the help of his brother-in-law, Charles the Bold, he recovered his throne in the spring of 1471 after a rapid campaign with successes at Barnet and Tewkesbury. Henry VI was put to death in the Tower, and his son was killed in battle.

The second half of Edward’s reign, 1471–83, was a period of relative order, peace, and security. The one event reminiscent of the politics of the early reign was the trial of the Duke of Clarence, who was attainted in Parliament in 1478 and put to death, reputedly by drowning in a butt of Malmsey wine. But Edward was popular. Because his personal resources from the duchy of York were considerable and because he agreed early in his reign to acts of resumption whereby former royal estates were taken back into royal hands, Edward had a large personal income and was less in need of parliamentary grants than his predecessors had been. Thus he levied few subsidies and called Parliament only six times. Among the few subsidies Edward did levy were benevolences, supposedly voluntary gifts, from his subjects primarily to defray the expenses of war. In 1475 Edward took an army to France but accepted a pension from the French king for not fighting, thereby increasing his financial independence still further. Councils were set up to govern in the Marches of Wales and in the north, where Edward’s brother Richard presided efficiently. Edward’s rule was characterized by the use of his household, its servants, and its departments, such as the chamber. He was a pragmatic ruler, whose greatest achievement was to restore the prestige of the monarchy. Where he failed was to make proper provision for the succession after his death.

Edward died in 1483, at age 40, worn out, it was said, by sexual excesses and by debauchery. He left two sons, Edward and Richard, to the protection of his brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester. After skirmishes with the queen’s party Richard placed both of the boys in the Tower of London, then a royal residence as well as a prison. He proceeded to eliminate those who opposed his function as protector and defender of the realm and guardian to the young Edward V. Even Lord Hastings, who had sent word to Richard of Edward IV’s death and who had warned him against the queen’s party, was accused of treachery and was executed. On the day after the date originally set for Edward V’s coronation the Lords and Commons summoned to Parliament unanimously adopted a petition requesting Richard to take over the throne. He accepted and was duly crowned king on July 6, taking the oath in English. Richard III (1483–85)

Richard was readily accepted no doubt because of his reputed ability and because people feared the insecurity of a long minority. The tide began to turn against him in October 1483, when it began to be rumoured that he had murdered or connived at the murder of his nephews. Whether this was true or not matters less than the fact that it was thought to be true and that it obscured the king’s able government during his brief reign. Legislation against benevolences and protection for English merchants and craftsmen did little to counteract his reputation as a treacherous friend and a wicked uncle. Rebellion failed in 1483. But in the summer of 1485, when Henry Tudor, sole male claimant to Lancastrian ancestry and the throne, landed at Milford Haven, Richard’s supporters widely deserted him, and he was defeated and killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field.

Richard IIIRichard III, king of England.iStockphoto/Thinkstock England in the 15th century

Central to all social change in the 15th century was change in the economy. Although plague remained endemic in England, there was little change in the level of population. Villein labour service largely disappeared, to be replaced by copyhold tenure (tenure by copy of the record of the manorial court). The period has been considered a golden age for the English labourer, but individual prosperity varied widely. There was a well-developed land market among peasants, some of whom managed to rise above their neighbours and began to constitute a class called yeomen. Large landlords entirely abandoned direct management of their estates in favour of a leasehold system. In many cases they faced growing arrears of rent and found it difficult to maintain their income levels. Because many landholders solved the problem of labour shortage by converting their holdings to sheep pasture, much land enclosure took place. As a result a great many villages were abandoned by their inhabitants.

Though England remained a predominantly agrarian society, significant development and change occurred in the towns. London continued to grow, dominating the southeast. Elsewhere the development of the woolen industry brought major changes. Halifax and Leeds grew at the expense of York, and the West Riding at the expense of the eastern part of Yorkshire. Suffolk and the Cotswold region became important in the national economy. As the cloth trade grew in importance, so did the association of the Merchant Adventurers. The merchants of the Staple, who had a monopoly on the export of raw wool, did less well. Italian merchants prospered in 15th-century England, and important privileges were accorded to the German Hanseatic merchants by Edward IV.

Culturally the 15th century was a period of sterility. Monastic chronicles came to an end, and the writing of history declined. Thomas Walsingham (d. c. 1422) was the last of a distinguished line of St. Albans chroniclers. Although there were some chronicles written by citizens of London as well as two lives of Henry V, distinguished works of history did not come until later. Neither were there any superior works of philosophy or theology. Reginald Pecock, an arid Scholastic philosopher, wrote an English treatise against the Lollards and various other works emphasizing the rational element in the Christian faith; he was judged guilty of heresy for his pains. No noteworthy poets succeeded Chaucer, though a considerable quantity of English poetry was written in this period. John Lydgate produced much verse in the Lancastrian interest. The printer William Caxton set up his press in 1476 to publish English works for the growing reading public. The first great collections of family correspondence, those of the Pastons, Stonors, and Celys, survive from this period.

The 15th century, however, was an important age in the foundation of schools and colleges. Some schools were set up as adjuncts to chantries, some by guilds, and some by collegiate churches. Henry VI founded Eton College in 1440 and King’s College, Cambridge, in 1441. Other colleges at Oxford and Cambridge were also founded in this period. The Inns of Court expanded their membership and systematized their teaching of law. Many gentlemen’s sons became members of the Inns, though not necessarily lawyers: they needed the rudiments of law to be able to defend and extend their estates. The influence of the Italian Renaissance in learning and culture was very limited before 1485, although there were some notable patrons, such as Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who collected books and supported scholars interested in the new learning.

Only in architecture did England show great originality. Large churches were built in English Perpendicular style, especially in regions made rich by the woolen industry. The tomb of Richard Beauchamp at Warwick and King’s College Chapel in Cambridge show the quality of English architecture and sculpture in the period. Margaret Hastings Michael Charles Prestwich England under the Tudors Henry VII (1485–1509)

When Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, seized the throne on August 22, 1485, leaving the Yorkist Richard III dead upon the field of battle, few Englishmen would have predicted that 118 years of Tudor rule had begun. Six sovereigns had come and gone, and at least 15 major battles had been fought between rival contenders to the throne since that moment in 1399 when the divinity that “doth hedge a king” was violated and Richard II was forced to abdicate. Simple arithmetic forecast that Henry VII would last no more than a decade and that the Battle of Bosworth Field was nothing more than another of the erratic swings of the military pendulum in the struggle between the house of York and the house of Lancaster. What gave Henry Tudor victory in 1485 was not so much personal charisma as the fact that key noblemen deserted Richard III at the moment of his greatest need, that Thomas Stanley (2nd Baron Stanley) and his brother Sir William stood aside during most of the battle in order to be on the winning team, and that Louis XI of France supplied the Lancastrian forces with 1,000 mercenary troops.

The desperateness of the new monarch’s gamble was equalled only by the doubtfulness of his claim. Henry VII’s Lancastrian blood was tainted by illegitimacy twice over. He was descended on his mother’s side from the Beaufort family, the offspring of John of Gaunt and his mistress Katherine Swynford, and, though their children had been legitimized by act of Parliament, they had been specifically barred from the succession. His father’s genealogy was equally suspect: Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, was born to Catherine of Valois, widowed queen of Henry V, by her clerk of the wardrobe, Owen Tudor, and the precise marital status of their relationship has never been established. Had quality of Plantagenet blood, not military conquest, been the essential condition of monarchy, Edward, earl of Warwick, the 10-year-old nephew of Edward IV, would have sat upon the throne. Might, not soiled right, had won out on the high ground at Bosworth Field, and Henry VII claimed his title by conquest. The new king wisely sought to fortify his doubtful genealogical pretension, however, first by parliamentary acclamation and then by royal marriage. The Parliament of November 1485 did not confer regal power on the first Tudor monarch—victory in war had already done that—but it did acknowledge Henry as “our new sovereign lord.” Then, on January 18, 1486, Henry VII married Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of Edward IV, thereby uniting “the white rose and the red” and launching England upon a century of “smooth-fac’d peace with smiling plenty.”

“God’s fair ordinance,” which Shakespeare and later generations so clearly observed in the events of 1485–86, was not limited to military victory, parliamentary sanction, and a fruitful marriage; the hidden hand of economic, social, and intellectual change was also on Henry’s side. The day was coming when the successful prince would be more praised than the heroic monarch and the solvent sovereign more admired than the pious one. Henry Tudor was probably no better or worse than the first Lancastrian, Henry IV; they both worked diligently at their royal craft and had to fight hard to keep their crowns, but the seventh Henry achieved what the fourth had not—a secure and permanent dynasty—because England in 1485 was moving into a period of unprecedented economic growth and social change. Economy and society

By 1485 the kingdom had begun to recover from the demographic catastrophe of the Black Death and the agricultural depression of the late 14th century. As the 15th century came to a close, the rate of population growth began to increase and continued to rise throughout the following century. The population, which in 1400 may have dropped as low as 2.5 million, had by 1600 grown to about 4 million. More people meant more mouths to feed, more backs to cover, and more vanity to satisfy. In response, yeoman farmers, gentleman sheep growers, urban cloth manufacturers, and merchant adventurers produced a social and economic revolution. With extraordinary speed, the export of raw wool gave way to the export of woolen cloth manufactured at home, and the wool clothier or entrepreneur was soon buying fleece from sheep raisers, transporting the wool to cottagers for spinning and weaving, paying the farmer’s wife and children by the piece, and collecting the finished article for shipment to Bristol, London, and eventually Europe. By the time Henry VII seized the throne, the Merchant Adventurers, an association of London cloth exporters, were controlling the London-Antwerp market. By 1496 they were a chartered organization with a legal monopoly of the woolen cloth trade, and, largely as a consequence of their political and international importance, Henry successfully negotiated the Intercursus Magnus, a highly favourable commercial treaty between England and the Low Countries.

As landlords increased the size of their flocks to the point that ruminants outnumbered human beings 3 to 1 and as clothiers grew rich on the wool trade, inflation injected new life into the economy. England was caught up in a vast European spiral of rising prices, declining real wages, and cheap money. Between 1500 and 1540, prices in England doubled, and they doubled again in the next generation. In 1450 the cost of wheat was what it had been in 1300; by 1550 it had tripled. Contemporaries blamed inflation on human greed and only slowly began to perceive that rising prices were the result of inflationary pressures brought on by the increase in population, international war, and the flood of gold and silver arriving from the New World.

Inflation and the wool trade together created an economic and social upheaval. A surfeit of land, a labour shortage, low rents, and high wages, which had prevailed throughout the early 15th century as a consequence of economic depression and reduced population, were replaced by a land shortage, a labour surplus, high rents, and declining wages. The landlord, who a century before could find neither tenants nor labourers for his land and had left his fields fallow, could now convert his meadows into sheep runs. His rents and profits soared; his need for labour declined, for one shepherd and his dog could do the work of half a dozen men who had previously tilled the same field. Slowly the medieval system of land tenure and communal farming broke down. The common land of the manor was divided up and fenced in, and the peasant farmer who held his tenure either by copy (a document recorded in the manor court) or by unwritten custom was evicted.

The total extent of enclosure and eviction is difficult to assess, but, between 1455 and 1607, in 34 counties more than 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares), or about 2.75 percent of the total, were enclosed, and some 50,000 persons were forced off the land. Statistics, however, are deceptive regarding both the emotional impact and the extent of change. The most disturbing aspect of the land revolution was not the emergence of a vagrant and unemployable labour force for whom society felt no social responsibility but an unprecedented increase in what men feared most—change. Farming techniques were transformed, the gap between rich and poor increased, the timeless quality of village life was upset, and, on all levels of society, old families were being replaced by new.

The beneficiaries of change, as always, were the most grasping, the most ruthless, and the best educated segments of the population: the landed country gentlemen and their socially inferior cousins, the merchants and lawyers. By 1500 the essential economic basis for the landed country gentleman’s future political and social ascendancy was being formed: the 15th-century knight of the shire was changing from a desperate and irresponsible land proprietor, ready to support the baronial feuding of the Wars of the Roses, into a respectable landowner desiring strong, practical government and the rule of law. The gentry did not care whether Henry VII’s royal pedigree could bear close inspection; their own lineage was not above suspicion, and they were willing to serve the prince “in parliament, in council, in commission and other offices of the commonwealth.” Dynastic threats

It is no longer fashionable to call Henry VII a “new monarch,” and, indeed, if the first Tudor had a model for reconstructing the monarchy, it was the example of the great medieval kings. Newness, however, should not be totally denied Henry Tudor; his royal blood was very “new,” and the extraordinary efficiency of his regime introduced a spirit into government that had rarely been present in the medieval past. It was, in fact, “newness” that governed the early policy of the reign, for the Tudor dynasty had to be secured and all those with a better or older claim to the throne liquidated. Elizabeth of York was deftly handled by marriage; the sons of Edward IV had already been removed from the list, presumably murdered by their uncle Richard III; and Richard’s nephew Edward Plantagenet, the young earl of Warwick, was promptly imprisoned. But the descendants of Edward IV’s sister and daughters remained a threat to the new government. Equally dangerous was the persistent myth that the younger of the two princes murdered in the Tower of London had escaped his assassin and that the earl of Warwick had escaped his jailers.

The existence of pretenders acted as a catalyst for further baronial discontent and Yorkist aspirations, and in 1487 John de la Pole, a nephew of Edward IV by his sister Elizabeth, with the support of 2,000 mercenary troops paid for with Burgundian gold, landed in England to support the pretensions of Lambert Simnel, who passed himself off as the authentic earl of Warwick. Again Henry Tudor was triumphant in war; at the Battle of Stoke, de la Pole was killed and Simnel captured and demoted to a scullery boy in the royal kitchen. Ten years later Henry had to do it all over again, this time with a handsome Flemish lad named Perkin Warbeck, who for six years was accepted in Yorkist circles in Europe as the real Richard IV, brother of the murdered Edward V. Warbeck tried to take advantage of Cornish anger against heavy royal taxation and increased government efficiency and sought to lead a Cornish army of social malcontents against the Tudor throne. It was a measure of the new vigour and popularity of the Tudor monarchy, as well as the support of the gentry, that social revolution and further dynastic war were total failures, and Warbeck found himself in the Tower along with the earl of Warwick. In the end both men proved too dangerous to live, even in captivity, and in 1499 they were executed.

The policy of dynastic extermination did not cease with the new century. Under Henry VIII, the duke of Buckingham (who was descended from the youngest son of Edward III) was killed in 1521; the earl of Warwick’s sister, the countess of Salisbury, was beheaded in 1541 and her descendants harried out of the land; and in January 1547 the poet Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, the grandson of Buckingham, was put to death. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign, the job had been so well done that the curse of Edward III’s fecundity had been replaced by the opposite problem: the Tudor line proved to be infertile when it came to producing healthy male heirs. Henry VII sired Arthur, who died in 1502, and Henry VIII in turn produced only one legitimate son, Edward VI, who died at the age of 16, thereby ending the direct male descent. Financial policy

It was not enough for Henry VII to secure his dynasty; he also had to reestablish the financial credit of his crown and reassert the authority of royal law. Medieval kings had traditionally lived off four sources of nonparliamentary income: rents from the royal estates, revenues from import and export taxes, fees from the administration of justice, and feudal moneys extracted on the basis of a vassal’s duty to his overlord. The first Tudor was no different from his Yorkist or medieval predecessors; he was simply more ruthless and successful in demanding every penny that was owed him. Henry’s first move was to confiscate all the estates of Yorkist adherents and to restore all property over which the crown had lost control since 1455 (in some cases as far back as 1377). To these essentially statutory steps he added efficiency of rent collection. In 1485 income from crown lands had totalled £29,000; by 1509 annual land revenues had risen to £42,000, and the profits from the duchy of Lancaster had jumped from £650 to £6,500. At the same time, the Tudors profited from the growing economic prosperity of the realm, and annual customs receipts rose from more than £20,000 to an average of £40,000 by the time Henry died.

The increase in customs and land revenues was applauded, for it meant fewer parliamentary subsidies and fit the medieval formula that kings should live on their own, not parliamentary, income. But the collection of revenues from feudal and prerogative sources and from the administration of justice caused great discontent and earned Henry his reputation as a miser and extortionist. Generally, Henry demanded no more than his due as the highest feudal overlord, and, a year after he became sovereign, he established a commission to look into land tenure to discover who held property by knight’s fee—that is, by obligation to perform military services. Occasionally he overstepped the bounds of feudal decency and abused his rights. In 1504, for instance, he levied a feudal aid (tax) to pay for the knighting of his son—who had been knighted 15 years before and had been dead for two. Henry VIII continued his father’s policy of fiscal feudalism, forcing through Parliament in 1536 the Statute of Uses—to prevent any landowner from escaping “relief” and wardship (feudal inheritance taxes) by settling the ownership of his lands in a trustee for the sole benefit (“use”) of himself—and establishing the Court of Wards and Liveries in 1540 to handle the profits of feudal wardship. The howl of protest was so great that in 1540 Henry VIII had to compromise, and by the Statute of Wills a subject who held his property by knight’s fee was permitted to bequeath two-thirds of his land without feudal obligation.

To fiscal feudalism Henry VII added rigorous administration of justice. As law became more effective, it also became more profitable, and the policy of levying heavy fines as punishment upon those who dared break the king’s peace proved to be a useful whip over the mighty magnate and a welcome addition to the king’s exchequer. Even war and diplomacy were sources of revenue; one of the major reasons Henry VII wanted his second son, Henry, to marry his brother’s widow was that the king was reluctant to return the dowry of 200,000 crowns that Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain had given for the marriage of their daughter Catherine of Aragon. Generally, Henry believed in a good-neighbour policy—apparent in his alliance with Spain by the marriage of Arthur and Catherine in 1501 and peace with Scotland by the marriage of his daughter Margaret to James IV in 1503—on the grounds that peace was cheap and trade profitable. In 1489, however, he was faced with the threat of the union of the duchy of Brittany with the French crown; and England, Spain, the empire, and Burgundy went to war to stop it. Nevertheless, as soon as it became clear that nothing could prevent France from absorbing the duchy, Henry negotiated the unheroic but financially rewarding Treaty of Étaples in 1492, whereby he disclaimed all historic rights to French territory (except Calais) in return for an indemnity of £159,000. By fair means or foul, when the first Tudor died, his total nonparliamentary annual income had risen at least twofold and stood in the neighbourhood of £113,000 (some estimates put it as high as £142,000). From land alone the king received £42,000, while the greatest landlord in the realm had to make do with less than £5,000; economically speaking, there were no longer any overmighty magnates. The administration of justice

Money could buy power, but respect could only be won by law enforcement. The problem for Henry VII was not to replace an old system of government with a new one—no Tudor was consciously a revolutionary—but to make the ancient system work tolerably well. He had to tame but not destroy the nobility, develop organs of administration directly under his control, and wipe out provincialism and privilege wherever they appeared. In the task of curbing the old nobility, the king was immeasurably helped by the high aristocratic death rate during the Wars of the Roses; but where war left off, policy took over. Commissions of Array composed of local notables were appointed by the crown for each county in order to make use of the power of the aristocracy in raising troops but to prevent them from maintaining private armies (livery) with which to intimidate justice (maintenance) or threaten the throne.

Previous monarchs had sought to enforce the laws against livery and maintenance, but the first two Tudors, though they never totally abolished such evils, built up a reasonably efficient machine for enforcing the law, based on the historic premise that the king in the midst of his council was the fountain of justice. Traditionally, the royal council had heard all sorts of cases, and its members rapidly began to specialize. The Court of Chancery had for years dealt with civil offenses, and the Court of Star Chamber evolved to handle alleged corruption of justice (intimidation of witnesses and jurors, bribing of judges, etc.), the Court of Requests poor men’s suits, and the High Court of Admiralty piracy. The process by which the conciliar courts developed was largely accidental, and the Court of Star Chamber acquired its name from the star-painted ceiling of the room in which the councillors sat, not from the statute of 1487 that recognized its existence. Conciliar justice was popular because the ordinary courts where common law prevailed were slow, cumbersome, and more costly; favoured the rich and mighty; and tended to break down when asked to deal with riot, maintenance, livery, perjury, and fraud. The same search for efficiency applied to matters of finance. The traditional fiscal agency of the crown, the exchequer, was burdened with archaic procedures and restrictions, and Henry VII turned to the more intimate and flexible departments of his personal household—specifically to the treasurer of the chamber, whom he could supervise directly—as the central tax-raising, rent-collecting, and money-disbursing segment of government.

The Tudors sought to enforce law in every corner of their kingdom, and step by step the blurred medieval profile of a realm shattered by semiautonomous franchises, in which local law and custom were obeyed more than the king’s law, was transformed into the clear outline of a single state filled with loyal subjects obeying the king’s decrees. By 1500 royal government had been extended into the northern counties and Wales by the creation of the Council of the North and the Council for the Welsh Marches. The Welsh principalities had always been difficult to control, and it was not until 1536 that Henry VIII brought royal law directly into Wales and incorporated the 136 self-governing lordships into a greater England with five new shires.

If the term new monarchy was inappropriate in 1485, the same cannot be said for the year of Henry VII’s death, for when he died in 1509, after 24 years of reign, he bequeathed to his son something quite new in English history: a safe throne, a solvent government, a prosperous land, and a reasonably united kingdom. Only one vital aspect of the past remained untouched, the semi-independent Roman Catholic Church, and it was left to the second Tudor to challenge its authority and plunder its wealth. Henry VIII (1509–47) Cardinal Wolsey

Wolsey, Thomas Cardinal Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, detail of a painting by Sampson Strong, 1526; in Christ Church, Oxford, England.Courtesy of the Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford

An 18-year-old prince inherited his father’s throne, but the son of an Ipswich butcher carried on the first Tudor’s administrative policies. While the young sovereign enjoyed his inheritance, Thomas Wolsey collected titles—archbishop of York in 1514, lord chancellor and cardinal legate in 1515, and papal legate for life in 1524. He exercised a degree of power never before wielded by king or minister, for, as lord chancellor and cardinal legate, he united in his portly person the authority of church and state. He sought to tame both the lords temporal and the lords spiritual—administering to the nobility the “new law of the Star Chamber,” protecting the rights of the underprivileged in the poor men’s Court of Requests, and teaching the abbots and bishops that they were subjects as well as ecclesiastical princes. Long before Henry assumed full power over his subjects’ souls as well as their bodies, his servant had marked the way. The cardinal’s administration, however, was stronger on promise than on performance, and, for all his fine qualities and many talents, he exposed himself to the accusation that he prostituted policy for pecuniary gain and personal pride.

Together, the king and cardinal plunged the kingdom into international politics and war and helped to make England one of the centres of Renaissance learning and brilliance. But the sovereign and his chief servant overestimated England’s international position in the Continental struggle between Francis I of France and the Holy Roman emperor Charles V. Militarily, the kingdom was of the same magnitude as the papacy—the English king had about the same revenues and could field an army about the same size—and, as one contemporary noted, England, with its back door constantly exposed to Scotland and its economy dependent upon the Flanders wool trade, was a mere “morsel among those choppers” of Europe. Nevertheless, Wolsey’s diplomacy was based on the expectation that England could swing the balance of power either to France or to the empire and, by holding that position, could maintain the peace of Europe. The hollowness of the cardinal’s policy was revealed in 1525 when Charles disastrously defeated and captured Francis at the Battle of Pavia. Italy was overrun with the emperor’s troops, the pope became an imperial chaplain, all of Europe bowed before the conqueror, and England sank from being the fulcrum of Continental diplomacy to the level of a second-rate power just at the moment when Henry had decided to rid himself of his wife, the 42-year-old Catherine of Aragon. The king’s “Great Matter”

Anne Boleyn, drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger, c. 1534–35; in the British Museum, London.Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum

It is still a subject of debate whether Henry’s decision to seek an annulment of his marriage and wed Anne Boleyn was a matter of state, of love, or of conscience; quite possibly all three operated. Catherine was fat, seven years her husband’s senior, and incapable of bearing further children. Anne was everything that the queen was not—pretty, vivacious, and fruitful. Catherine had produced only one child that lived past infancy, a girl, Princess Mary (later Mary I); it seemed ironic indeed that the first Tudor should have solved the question of the succession only to expose the kingdom to what was perceived as an even greater peril in the second generation: a female ruler. The need for a male heir was paramount, for the last queen of England, Matilda, in the 12th century, had been a disaster, and there was no reason to believe that another would be any better. Finally, there was the question of the king’s conscience. Henry had married his brother’s widow, and, though the pope had granted a dispensation, the fact of the matter remained that every male child born to Henry and Catherine had died, proof of what was clearly written in the Bible: “If a man takes his brother’s wife, it is impurity; he has uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless” (Leviticus 20:21).

Unfortunately, Henry’s annulment was not destined to stand or fall upon the theological issue of whether a papal dispensation could set aside such a prohibition, for Catherine was not simply the king’s wife; she was also the aunt of the emperor Charles V, the most powerful sovereign in Europe. Both Henry and his cardinal knew that the annulment would never be granted unless the emperor’s power in Italy could be overthrown by an Anglo-French military alliance and the pope rescued from imperial domination, and for three years Wolsey worked desperately to achieve this diplomatic and military end. Caught between an all-powerful emperor and a truculent English king, Pope Clement VII procrastinated and offered all sorts of doubtful solutions short of annulment, including the marriage of Princess Mary and the king’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, duke of Richmond; the legitimizing of all children begotten of Anne Boleyn; and the transfer of Catherine into a nunnery so that the king could be given permission to remarry. Wolsey’s purpose was to have the marriage annulled and the trial held in London. But in 1529, despite the arrival of Lorenzo Cardinal Campeggio to set up the machinery for a hearing, Wolsey’s plans exploded. In July the pope ordered Campeggio to move the case to Rome, where a decision against the king was a foregone conclusion, and in August Francis and the emperor made peace at the Treaty of Cambrai. Wolsey’s policies were a failure, and he was dismissed from office in October 1529. He died on November 29, just in time to escape trial for treason.

Clement VIIClement VII, detail from a portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo; in the National Museum and Galleries of Capodimonte, Naples.Alinari/Art Resource, New York The Reformation background

Henry now began groping for new means to achieve his purpose. At first he contemplated little more than blackmail to frighten the pope into submission. But slowly, reluctantly, and not realizing the full consequences of his actions, he moved step by step to open defiance and a total break with Rome. Wolsey, in his person and his policies, had represented the past. He was the last of the great ecclesiastical statesmen who had been as much at home in the cosmopolitan world of European Christendom, with its spiritual centre in Rome, as in a provincial capital such as London. By the time of Henry’s matrimonial crisis, Christendom was dissolving. Not only were late medieval kingdoms assuming the character of independent nation-states, but the spiritual unity of Christ’s seamless cloak was also being torn apart by heresy. Henry possibly would never have won his annulment had there not existed in England men who desired a break with Rome, not because it was dynastically expedient but because they regarded the pope as the “whore of Babylon.”

The religious life of the people was especially vibrant in the early decades of the 16th century, and, although there were numerous vociferous critics of clerical standards and behaviour, the institutional church was generally in good heart. Only during the extraordinary period in the 12th and 13th centuries, when money was being poured into the creation of parishes and the building of several thousand parish churches and 19 great cathedrals, was more spent on religion than in the decades between the arrival of the Tudors and the Reformation. And now it was not just great landowners but the people in general who poured money into their churches. Perhaps one in three parish churches underwent major refurbishments in this period. Hundreds of elaborate chantry chapels and altars were erected, money invested in parish guilds doubled (for the benefit of the living in the form of pensions and doles and for the benefit of the dead in the form of masses), and the number of those seeking ordination reached a new peak. In Bedfordshire at least charitable giving was highly selective; some religious orders were much more favoured than others. There is also some evidence that the monastic life and the endowment of monasteries were slowing down, but in essence the church was successfully meeting the spiritual needs of huge numbers of people.

Precisely because of the religiosity of the people, there was a growing volume of complaint about clerical absenteeism and pluralism in general and about the unavailability of the bishops in particular. Many prelates served as the top civil servants of the crown rather than as shepherds of Christ’s flock. And as inflation began to take off, so did attempts by clerics to maximize their incomes by a rather ruthless determination to collect everything to which they were entitled—such as the “best beasts” demanded as mortuary fees from grieving and impoverished parents of dead children. Spasmodic persecution had failed to eradicate the Lollard legacy of John Wycliffe in substantial pockets of southern England, and the infiltration of Lutheran books and of printed Bibles opened the eyes of some among the learned and among those who traded with the Baltic states and the Low Countries to the possibility of alternative ways of encountering God. The powerful force of the “Word” took hold of some and made the mumbling of prayers, the billowing of incense, and the selling of indulgences to rescue souls from the due penalty of their sins seem the stuff of idolatry and not of true worship. But in 1532, when Henry VIII began to contemplate a schism from Rome, embracing Protestantism was the last thing on his mind, and very few of his subjects would have wished him to do so. The break with Rome

With Wolsey and his papal authority gone, Henry turned to the authority of the state to obtain his annulment. The so-called Reformation Parliament that first met in November 1529 was unprecedented; it lasted seven years, enacted 137 statutes (32 of which were of vital importance), and legislated in areas that no medieval Parliament had ever dreamed of entering. “King in Parliament” became the revolutionary instrument by which the medieval church was destroyed.

Cranmer, ThomasThomas Cranmer, detail of an oil painting by Gerlach Flicke, 1545; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

The first step was to intimidate the church, and in 1531 the representatives of the clergy who were gathered in Convocation were forced under threat of praemunire (a statute prohibiting the operation of the legal and financial jurisdiction of the pope without royal consent) to grant Henry a gift of £119,000 and to acknowledge him supreme head of the church “as far as the law of Christ allows.” Then the government struck at the papacy, threatening to cut off its revenues; the Annates Statute of 1532 empowered Henry, if he saw fit, to abolish payment to Rome of the first year’s income of all newly installed bishops. The implied threat had little effect on the pope, and time was running out, for by December 1532 Anne Boleyn was pregnant, and on January 25, 1533, she was secretly married to Henry. If the king was to be saved from bigamy and if his child was to be born in holy wedlock, he had less than eight months to get rid of Catherine of Aragon. Archbishop William Warham had conveniently died in August 1532, and in March 1533 a demoralized and frightened pontiff sanctioned the installation of Thomas Cranmer as primate of the English church.

Cranmer was a friend of the annulment, but, before he could oblige his sovereign, the queen’s right of appeal from the archbishop’s court to Rome had to be destroyed; this could be done only by cutting the constitutional cords holding England to the papacy. Consequently, in April 1533 the crucial statute was enacted; the Act of Restraint of Appeals boldly decreed that “this realm of England is an empire.” A month later an obliging archbishop heard the case and adjudged the king’s marriage to be null and void. On June 1 Anne was crowned rightful queen of England, and three months and a week later, on September 7, 1533, the royal child was born. To “the great shame and confusion” of astrologers, it turned out to be Elizabeth Tudor (later Elizabeth I).

Henry was mortified; he had risked his soul and his crown for yet another girl. But Anne had proved her fertility, and it was hoped that a male heir would shortly follow. In the meantime it was necessary to complete the break with Rome and rebuild the Church of England. By the Act of Succession of March 1534, subjects were ordered to accept the king’s marriage to Anne as “undoubted, true, sincere and perfect.” A second Statute “in Restraint of Annates” severed most of the financial ties with Rome, and in November the constitutional revolution was solemnized in the Act of Supremacy, which announced that Henry Tudor was and always had been “Supreme Head of the Church of England”; not even the qualifying phrase “as far as the law of Christ allows” was retained. The consolidation of the Reformation

The medieval tenet that church and state were separate entities with divine law standing higher than human law had been legislated out of existence; the new English church was in effect a department of the Tudor state. The destruction of the Roman Catholic Church led inevitably to the dissolution of the monasteries. As monastic religious fervour and economic resources had already begun to dry up, it was easy enough for the government to build a case that monasteries were centres of vice and corruption. In the end, however, what destroyed them was neither apathy nor abuse but the fact that they were contradictions within a national church, for religious foundations by definition were international, supranational organizations that traditionally supported papal authority.

Though the monasteries bowed to the royal supremacy, the government continued to view them with suspicion, arguing that they had obeyed only out of fear, and their destruction got under way early in 1536. In the name of fiscal reform and efficiency, foundations with endowments of under £200 a year (nearly 400 of them) were dissolved on the grounds that they were too small to do their job effectively. By late 1536 confiscation had become state policy, for the Pilgrimage of Grace, a Roman Catholic-inspired uprising in the north, which appeared to the government to have received significant support from monastic clergy, seemed to be clear evidence that all monasteries were potential nests of traitors. By 1539 the foundations, both great and small, were gone. Moreover, property constituting at least 13 percent of the land of England and Wales was nationalized and incorporated into the crown lands, thereby almost doubling the government’s normal peacetime, nonparliamentary income.

Had those estates remained in the possession of the crown, English history might have been very different, for the kings of England would have been able to rule without calling upon Parliament, and the constitutional authority that evolved out of the crown’s fiscal dependence on Parliament would never have developed. For better or for worse, Henry and his descendants had to sell the profits of the Reformation, and by 1603 three-fourths of the monastic loot had passed into the hands of the landed gentry. The legend of a “golden shower” is false; monastic property was never given away at bargain prices, nor was it consciously presented to the kingdom in order to win the support of the ruling elite. Instead, most—though not all—of the land was sold at its fair market value to pay for Henry’s wars and foreign policy. The effect, however, was crucial: the most powerful elements within Tudor society now had a vested interest in protecting their property against papal Catholicism.

The marriage to Anne, the break with Rome, and even the destruction of the monasteries went through with surprisingly little opposition. It had been foreseen that the royal supremacy might have to be enacted in blood, and the Act of Supremacy (March 1534) and the Act of Treason (December 1534) were designed to root out and liquidate the dissent. The former was a loyalty test requiring subjects to take an oath swearing to accept not only the matrimonial results of the break with Rome but also the principles on which it stood; the latter extended the meaning of treason to include all those who did “maliciously wish, will or desire, by words or writing or by craft imagine” the king’s death or slandered his marriage. Sir Thomas More (who had succeeded Wolsey as lord chancellor), Bishop John Fisher (who almost alone among the episcopate had defended Catherine during her trial), and a handful of monks suffered death for their refusal to accept the concept of a national church. Even the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536–37 was a short-lived eruption. The uprisings in Lincolnshire in October and in Yorkshire during the winter were without doubt religiously motivated, but they were also as much feudal and social rebellions as revolts in support of Rome. Peasants, landed country gentlemen, and barons with traditional values united in defense of the monasteries and the old religion, and for a moment the rebels seemed on the verge of toppling the Tudor state. The nobility were angered that they had been excluded from the king’s government by men of inferior social status, and they resented the encroachment of bureaucracy into the northern shires. The gentry were concerned by rising taxes and the peasants by threatened enclosure. But the three elements had little in common outside religion, and the uprisings fell apart from within. The rebels were soon crushed and their leaders—including Robert Aske, a charismatic Yorkshire country attorney—were brutally executed. The Reformation came to England piecemeal, which goes far to explain the government’s success. Had the drift toward Protestantism, the royal supremacy, and the destruction of the monasteries come as a single religious revolution, it would have produced a violent reaction. As it was, the Roman Catholic opposition could always argue that each step along the way to Reformation would be the last.

More, Sir ThomasSir Thomas More, oil on panel by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1527; in the Frick Collection, New York City.Photos.com/Thinkstock The expansion of the English state

The decade of Reformation led to a transformation in the operations of Tudor government. Not only were new revenue courts created to handle all the wealth of the monasteries, but problems of dynastic and national security required a much more hands-on royal control of provincial affairs. In and through the English Parliament, Henry incorporated the principality of Wales and the marcher lordships (previously independent of the crown’s direct control) into the English legal and administrative system. In the process, he not only shired the whole of Wales, granted seats in the English Parliament to the Welsh shires and boroughs, and extended the jurisdiction of the common-law courts and judges to Wales, but he also insisted that legal processes be conducted in English. The palatinates of the north were similarly incorporated, and all those grants by which royal justice was franchised out to private individuals and groups were revoked. For the first time the king’s writ and the king’s justice were ubiquitous in England.

In 1541 the Irish Parliament, which represented only the area around Dublin known as the Pale, passed an act creating the Kingdom of Ireland and declared it a perpetual appendage of the English crown. Now, for the first time in 300 years, the king set out to make good his claim to jurisdiction over the whole island. English viceroys sought to impose English law, English inheritance customs, English social norms, and the English religious settlement upon all the people there. In an attempt to achieve this in a peaceful and piecemeal way, the Anglo-Irish lords and the heads of Gaelic clans were invited to surrender their lands and titles to the crown on the promise of their regrant on favourable terms. Thus began a century of wheedling and cajoling, of rebellion and confiscation, of accommodation and plantation, that was to be a constant drain on the English Exchequer and a constant source of tragedy for the native people of Ireland.

Henry VIII did not seek to incorporate Scotland into his imperium. Though he tried to keep his nephew James V, then king of Scotland, “on-side” during his feud with Rome and never forgot that on 23 previous occasions Scottish kings had sworn feudal obeisance to kings of England, Henry never laid claim to the Scottish throne. Henry’s last years

Henry was so securely seated upon his throne that the French ambassador announced that he was more an idol to be worshipped than a king to be obeyed. The king successfully survived four more matrimonial experiments, the enmity of every major power in Europe, and an international war. On May 19, 1536, Anne Boleyn’s career was terminated by the executioner’s ax. She had failed in her promise to produce further children to secure the succession. Her enemies poisoned the king’s mind against her with accusations of multiple adulteries. The king’s love turned to hatred, but what sealed the queen’s fate was probably the death of her rival, Catherine of Aragon, on January 8, 1536. From that moment it was clear that, should Henry again marry, whoever was his wife, the children she might bear would be legitimate in the eyes of Roman Catholics and Protestants alike. How much policy, how much revulsion for Anne, and how much attraction for Jane Seymour played in the final tragedy is beyond analysis, but 11 days after Anne’s execution Henry married Jane. Sixteen months later the future Edward VI was born. Jane died as a consequence, but Henry finally had what it had taken a revolution to achieve—a legitimate male heir.

Seymour, JaneJane Seymour, portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1536; in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, ViennaCourtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Henry married thrice more, once for reasons of diplomacy, once for love, and once for peace and quiet. Anne of Cleves, his fourth wife, was the product of Reformation international politics. For a time in 1539 it looked as if Charles V and Francis would come to terms and unite against the schismatic king of England, and the only allies Henry possessed were the Lutheran princes of Germany. In something close to panic he was stampeded into marriage with Anne of Cleves. But the following year, the moment the diplomatic scene changed, he dropped both his wife and the man who had engineered the marriage, his vicar-general in matters spiritual, Thomas Cromwell. Anne was divorced July 12, Cromwell was executed July 28, and Henry married Catherine Howard the same day. The second Catherine did not do as well as her cousin, the first Anne; she lasted only 18 months. Catherine proved to be neither a virgin before her wedding nor a particularly faithful damsel after her marriage. With the execution of his fifth wife, Henry turned into a sick old man, and he took as his last spouse Catherine Parr, who was as much a nursemaid as a wife. During those final years the king’s interests turned to international affairs. Henry’s last wars (1543–46) were fought not to defend his church against resurgent European Catholicism but to renew much older policies of military conquest in France and Scotland. Though he enlarged the English Pale at Calais by seizing the small French port of Boulogne and though his armies crushed the Scots at the Battles of Solway Moss (1542) and Pinkie (1547) and ravaged much of Lowland Scotland during the “Rough Wooing,” the wars had no lasting diplomatic or international effects except to assure that the monastic lands would pass into the hands of the gentry.

Anne of ClevesAnne of Cleves, portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1539; in the Louvre Museum, Paris.© Giraudon/Art Resource, New York

By the time Henry died (January 28, 1547), medievalism had nearly vanished. The crown stood at the pinnacle of its power, able to demand and receive a degree of obedience from both great and small that no medieval monarch had been able to achieve. The measure of that authority was threefold: (1) the extent to which Henry had been able to thrust a very unpopular annulment and supremacy legislation down the throat of Parliament, (2) his success in raising unprecedented sums of money through taxation, and (3) his ability to establish a new church on the ashes of the old. It is difficult to say whether these feats were the work of the king or his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. The will was probably Henry’s and the parliamentary means his minister’s, but, whoever was responsible, by 1547 England had come a long way on the road of Reformation. The crown had assumed the authority of the papacy without as yet fundamentally changing the old creed, but the ancient structure was severely shaken. Throughout England men were arguing that because the pontiff had been proved false, the entire Roman Catholic creed was suspect, and the cry went up to “get rid of the poison with the author.” It was not long before every aspect of Roman Catholicism was under attack—the miracle of the mass whereby the bread and wine are transformed into the glorified body and blood of Christ (see transubstantiation), the doctrine of purgatory, the efficacy of saints and images, the concept of an ordained priesthood with the power to mediate grace through the sacraments, the discipline of priestly celibacy, and so on. The time had come for Parliament and the supreme head to decide what constituted the “true” faith for Englishmen.

Cromwell, ThomasThomas Cromwell, engraving after a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, c. 1537. The Print Collector/Heritage-Images/age fotostock

Henry never worked out a consistent religious policy: the Ten Articles of 1536 and the Bishop’s Book of the following year tended to be somewhat Lutheran in tone; the Six Articles of 1539, or the Act for Abolishing Diversity of Opinion, and the King’s Book of 1543 were mildly Roman Catholic. Whatever the religious colouring, Henry’s ecclesiastical via media was based on obedience to an authoritarian old king and on subjects who were expected to live “soberly, justly and devoutly.” Unfortunately for the religious, social, and political peace of the kingdom, both these conditions disappeared the moment Henry died and a nine-year-old boy sat upon the throne. Edward VI (1547–53)

Henry was succeeded by his nine-year-old son, Edward VI, but real power passed to his brother-in-law, Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, who became duke of Somerset and lord protector shortly after the new reign began. Somerset ruled in loco parentis; the divinity of the crown resided in the boy king, but authority was exercised by an uncle who proved himself to be more merciful than tactful and more idealistic than practical. Sweet reason and tolerance were substituted for the old king’s brutal laws. The treason and heresy acts were repealed or modified, and the result came close to destroying the Tudor state. The moment idle tongues could speak with impunity, the kingdom broke into a chorus of religious and social discord.

Coronation of Edward VI, stained glass, Mansion House, London. E&E Image Library/Heritage Image/age fotostock

To stem religious dissent, the lord protector introduced The Book of Common Prayer in 1549 and an act of uniformity to enforce it. Written primarily by Thomas Cranmer, the first prayer book of Edward VI was a literary masterpiece but a political flop, for it failed in its purpose. It sought to bring into a single Protestant fold all varieties of middle-of-the-road religious beliefs by deliberately obscuring the central issue of the exact nature of the mass—whether it was a miraculous sacrament or a commemorative service. The Book of Common Prayer succeeded only in antagonizing Protestants and Roman Catholics alike.

Somerset is best remembered for these religious reforms, but their effectiveness was much blunted by their association with greed. Henry VIII had plundered and dissolved the monasteries and had mounted a half-successful campaign to accuse the monastic communities of corruption, licentiousness, and putting obedience to a foreign power above their obedience to him. Somerset extended the state’s plunder to the parish churches and to the gold and silver piously and generously given by thousands of layfolk for the adornment of the parish churches. Their descendants watched the desecration with sullen anger. The rhetoric of cleansing parish churches of idolatrous and sacrilegious images sounded hollow as wagonloads of gold and silver objects headed toward the smelter’s shop in the lord protector’s backyard.

All this in turn was linked to what has been called Somerset’s idée fixe, the permanent solution to the problem of the Anglo-Scottish frontier. Every time Henry VIII had tried to assert his claims to French territories, kings of Scotland had taken the opportunity to invade England. On each occasion—and especially in 1513 and 1542—the Scottish armies had been humiliated and a high proportion of the nobility killed or captured (James IV had been killed at the Battle of Flodden, and, when James V heard of the massacre of his nobility and men at Solway Moss, “he turned his face to the wall and died”). In 1543 the captured nobles agreed to a marriage treaty that was intended to see the marriage of Henry’s son and heir, Edward VI, to the infant Mary (Mary, Queen of Scots), with the aim of uniting the thrones of England and Scotland. But the Scots broke their promise and shipped Mary off to France with the intention of marrying her to the heir of the French throne. Foreseeing the permanent annexation of Scotland to France in the same way that the Netherlands had been annexed to Spain, Somerset determined to conquer the Scottish Lowlands and to establish permanent castles and strongholds as a buffer between the kingdoms. It cost him most of the country’s remaining treasure and much of his popularity, and the whole policy proved a failure.

Somerset was no more successful in solving the economic and social difficulties of the reign. Rising prices, debasement of the currency, and the cost of war had produced an inflationary crisis in which prices doubled between 1547 and 1549. A false prosperity ensued in which the wool trade boomed, but so also did enclosures with all their explosive potential. The result was social revolution. Whether Somerset deserved his title of “the good duke” is a matter of opinion. Certainly, the peasants thought that he favoured the element in the House of Commons that was anxious to tax sheep raisers and to curb enclosures and that section of the clergy that was lashing out at economic inequality. In the summer of 1549, the peasantry in Cornwall and Devonshire revolted against the Prayer Book in the name of the good old religious days under Henry VIII, and, almost simultaneously, the humble folk in Norfolk rose up against the economic and social injustices of the century. At the same time that domestic rebellion was stirring, the protector had to face a political and international crisis, and he proved himself to be neither a farsighted statesman nor a shrewd politician. He embroiled the country in a war with Scotland that soon involved France and ended in an inconclusive defeat, and he earned the enmity and disrespect of the members of his own council. In the eyes of the ruling elite, Somerset was responsible for governmental ineptitude and social and religious revolution. The result was inevitable: a palace revolution ensued in October 1549, in which he was arrested and deprived of office, and two and a half years later he was executed on trumped-up charges of treason.

The protector’s successor and the man largely responsible for his fall was John Dudley, earl of Warwick, who became duke of Northumberland. The duke was a man of action who represented most of the acquisitive aspects of the landed elements in society and who allied himself with the extreme section of the Protestant reformers. Under Northumberland, England pulled out of Scotland and in 1550 returned Boulogne to France; social order was ruthlessly reestablished in the countryside, the more conservative of the Henrician bishops were imprisoned, the wealth of the parish churches was systematically looted, and uncompromising Protestantism was officially sanctioned. The Ordinal of 1550 transformed the divinely ordained priest into a preacher and teacher, The Second Prayer Book of Edward VI (1552) was avowedly Protestant, altars were turned into tables, clerical vestments gave way to plain surplices, and religious orthodoxy was enforced by a new and more stringent Act of Uniformity.

How long a kingdom still attached to the outward trappings of Roman Catholicism would have tolerated doctrinal radicalism and the plundering of chantry lands and episcopal revenues under Somerset and Northumberland is difficult to say, but in 1553 the ground upon which Northumberland had built his power crumbled: Edward was dying of consumption. To save the kingdom from Roman Catholicism and himself from Roman Catholic Mary, who was Edward’s successor under the terms of a statute of Henry VIII as well as that king’s will, Northumberland—with the support, perhaps even the encouragement, of the dying king—tried his hand at kingmaking. Together they devised a new order of succession in which Mary and Elizabeth were declared illegitimate and the crown passed to Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister (Mary, duchess of Suffolk) and, incidentally, Northumberland’s daughter-in-law. The gamble failed, for when Edward died on July 6, 1553, the kingdom rallied to the daughter of Catherine of Aragon. Whatever their religious inclinations, Englishmen preferred a Tudor on the throne. In nine days the interlude was over, and Northumberland and his daughter-in-law were in the Tower of London. Mary I (1553–58)

Roman Catholicism was not a lost cause when Mary came to the throne. If she had lived as long as her sister Elizabeth was to live (the womb cancer from which Mary died in 1558 not only brought her Catholic restoration to an end but rendered her childless and heirless), England would probably have been an irrevocably Catholic country. Mary was indeed determined to restore Catholicism, but she was also determined to act in accordance with the law. She worked with and through successive Parliaments to reverse all the statutes that excluded papal jurisdiction from England and to revoke her half-brother’s doctrinal and liturgical reforms; however, she persuaded Rome to allow her to confirm the dissolution of the monasteries and the secularization of church properties. New monasteries were to be created, but the vast wealth of the dissolved ones remained in lay hands. She also gave the married Protestant clergy a straight choice: to remain with their wives and surrender their livings or to surrender their wives and resume their priestly ministry. Her resolute Catholicism was laced with realism. With her principal adviser, Reginald Cardinal Pole, she planned for a long-term improvement in the education and training of the clergy and the sumptuous refurbishment of parish churches. She took her inspiration from the Erasmian humanist reforms long championed by Pole in his Italian exile. But this liberal Catholicism was in the process of being repudiated by the Council of Trent, with its uncompromising policies. Pole was recalled to Rome by a hard-line pope and accused of heresy for his previous attempts to achieve an accommodation with Protestantism. Mary’s plans were torpedoed as much by the internal struggle for control of the Roman church as by the strength of Protestant opposition in England. Most potential leaders of a resistance movement had been encouraged by Mary to emigrate and had done so, but there were scores of underground Protestant cells during her reign. In thousands of parish churches, the restored liturgy and worship were welcomed.

Mary’s decision to marry Prince Philip of Spain (later Philip II), her Habsburg cousin and the son of Charles V, the man who had defended her mother’s marital rights, proved to be unwise. Given her age—she was 32 when she came to the throne—a quick marriage was essential to childbearing, but this one proved to be a failure. Her marriage was without love or children, and, by associating Roman Catholicism in the popular mind with Spanish arrogance, it triggered a rebellion that almost overthrew the Tudor throne. In January 1554, under the leadership of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger, the peasants of Kent rose up against the queen’s Roman Catholic and Spanish policies, and 3,000 men marched on London. The rebellion was crushed, but it revealed to Mary and her chief minister, Cardinal Pole, that the kingdom was filled with disloyal hearts who placed Protestantism and nationalism higher than their obedience to the throne.

The tragedy of Mary’s reign was the belief not only that the old church of her mother’s day could be restored but also that it could be best served by fire and blood. At least 282 men and women were martyred in the Smithfield Fires during the last three years of her reign; compared with events on the Continent, the numbers were not large, but the emotional impact was great. Among the first half-dozen martyrs were the Protestant leaders Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, and John Hooper, who were burned to strike terror into the hearts of lesser men. Their deaths, however, had the opposite effect; their bravery encouraged others to withstand the flames, and the Smithfield Fires continued to burn because nobody could think of what to do with heretics except put them to death. The law required it, the prisons were overflowing, and the martyrs themselves offered the government no way out except to enforce the grisly laws.

Nicholas Ridley, detail of a portrait by an unknown artist, 1555; in the National Portrait Gallery, LondonCourtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

Mary’s reign was a study in failure. Her husband, who was 10 years her junior, remained in England as short a time as possible; the war between France and the Habsburg empire, into which her Spanish marriage had dragged the kingdom, was a disaster and resulted in the loss of England’s last Continental outpost, Calais; her subjects came to call her “Bloody Mary” and greeted the news of her death and the succession of her sister, Elizabeth, on November 17, 1558, with ringing bells and bonfires. Elizabeth I (1558–1603)