A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  On 11 June that council meeting was convened in Oxford. Its deliberations were so momentous for the long-term future of English politics that 1258 ought to be one of the dates engraved on the national memory as having far more immediate significance than 1215. The town had been chosen as the mustering place for an army destined for a fresh campaign in Wales, where Henry’s recent efforts had met with abject failure. Because of the crowd of men in arms, the leaders of the reform movement knew that in Oxford they could call on representatives from a broad cross-section of the aggrieved: knights of the shire, sick of being put upon by sheriffs who knew nothing of their county; barons who hated the Lusignans and wanted them out of English castles; and clerics and scholars, who had, from the beginning, been the brains and the soul of the campaign for reform. The fact that the Oxford assembly took place against a backdrop of terrible distress in the country only heightened the sense of urgency. The harvest of 1257 had been a disaster, and by the following summer much of the country was suffering from near-famine conditions. Matthew Paris wrote that: ‘owing to the shortage of food an innumerable multitude of poor people died and dead bodies were found everywhere, swollen through famine and livid lying by fives and sixes in pigsties and dunghills in the muddy streets.’

  The barons would not be able to fill those empty bellies, but they certainly fulfilled expectations of a radical change in the government of the country. Essentially, they abolished the absolute monarchy of the Anglo-Norman state. The council of twenty-four was now replaced by a council of fifteen, with the royal delegation reduced to three. It was appointed for an indefinite period and was charged to deal ‘with the common business of the realm and of the king’. What had happened at a stroke was the transfer of sovereign powers from the Crown to a standing committee elected by the barons and the Church. That committee, rather than the king, was to have the final say in the Crown’s choice of ministers and councillors and also, evidently, in proposing and disposing of funds to make war or peace. No less radical was the devolution of power to the counties, where four knights in each shire, elected by an elaborate process, were to be made responsible for collecting complaints and grievances and delivering them to the justiciar. There had been no justiciar for several generations in England, but under the Angevins he had been the king’s chief legal officer. Now the role was transformed into something like an ombudsman for the nation. Sheriffs, who had for so long been the bane of local landholders, were henceforth to be recruited exclusively from the county community and were to be salaried and appointed for one year only at a time. The Lusignans and other foreign undesirables (de Montfort excluded, of course) were to be expelled forthwith from their castles and, indeed, from the kingdom. ‘You will either lose your castles or your heads,’ the implacable Simon told his arch-enemy, William de Valence, Earl of Pembroke.

  The climax of this startling revolution took the form of a collective swearing of an oath to observe these ‘Provisions of Oxford’. When they were finalized the following October, the documents were written, for the first time, not only in Latin and French but also in Middle English, the native tongue. As such, the Provisions became something akin to a political canon and a touchstone of allegiance for all those professing disinterested concern for the good government of the realm. England may not have become a republic, but it was no longer an autocracy.

  The king, doubtless roiling in impotent chagrin, took the oath, holding a burning taper along with rest, as the Archbishop of Canterbury threatened damnation on the heads of all those who violated the Provisions.

  The impulse to reform had come so far, so fast, that it inevitably overtook some of its original promoters, who, once the complaints that the Provisions had invited began to pour in, took fright at their own creation. The precarious unity of the reformers came to grief over questions of whether or not plaintiffs were entitled to pursue grievances against them and their own manorial regimes. It was one thing to bring the king and his men to book; quite another to have some jumped-up villein with a little book learning grousing about the ills he had suffered at the hands of the manorial bailiff or reeve. Predictably, de Montfort thought this was absolutely right; equally predictably, the great earls, especially the Earl of Gloucester, were much cooler. When Gloucester balked at the ‘Ordinance of the Magnates’, which had been drawn up by de Montfort, who vowed to put his own class under the same restraints as the king, Simon barked: ‘I do not want to live or have dealings with men who are so fickle and deceitful.’

  At the height of the reforming campaign, the position of Henry’s oldest son, the ‘Lord Edward’, was anything but clear. For a time in 1259–60 the spell cast by de Montfort and the popularity of their anti-foreigner programme inclined him towards the reformers. He, too, was impatient to be free of his father’s control and saw the crisis as an opportunity to promote his own claim to come into possession of castles. There was something about Simon that simply mesmerized people, even someone as self-assured as Edward. But the prince’s dalliance with the barons had its suspicious aspects. A breakfast negotiation with the Earl of Gloucester and his brother turned sinister when William de Clare died the next day with excruciating abdominal pains, while the earl awoke to discover that his hair, fingernails and toenails had fallen out. Edward was, in fact, discreetly building up a third party, composed of vavasours (young bachelor knights), free of the odium associated with Henry’s court, but still independent of baronial control. Ultimately, though, Edward knew that the fate of the monarchy as an institution was at stake. So once the detested Lusignans had been got rid of and the struggle became polarized between the Crown and its challengers, Edward not only threw in his lot unequivocally with his father but was often all there was between the king and ignominious defeat. While de Montfort was away in France Henry had taken advantage of the crumbling unity of the opposition to restore his fortunes, largely financed by the king of France and at the price of renouncing all further claims to Normandy and Anjou and accepting that Gascony would be a fiefdom of France. Reinforced by mercenaries, the king gradually recovered many of his strategic castles, and by late 1261 he had renounced the Provisions and had secured a special papal bull absolving him from his Oxford oath.

  But in 1263 Simon belatedly returned, to discover that the reform movement was in perilous disarray. It took him no time at all to conclude that it must now fight or perish and that to prevail would require unswerving and resolute leadership, namely by himself. He also knew that he was coming back to a country in the throes of an immense upheaval that had gone well beyond Westminster and the castles of the mighty and had rippled out into the remote shires and hundreds. For the first time since the Conquest the political fate of England was completely fluid, its eventual outcome uncertain. The royalist restoration had thrown out the locally appointed sheriffs and replaced them with dependable court men, but that had engendered a backlash among the knights and gentry of the counties. While Simon’s harsh fierceness and loftiness had alienated some of the great nobles who had been part of the reforming party in 1258, he was now so intoxicated with the righteous certainty of his cause that he could appeal over the heads of the magnates to the citizens of London (to whom he addressed public ‘letters’), the Church (which for the most part saw him as a loyal son), and even to the free peasantry: in short, to all those who constituted, as he thought, the true, just and honest people of England. It did not escape notice that while he voiced these lofty sentiments, he was also busy building up a family empire from the seized lands of his enemies. When Simon rode, he rode with a train of 160 knights, far more numerous than either the king or his son. But despite this Caesar-like grandeur, in his own mind – and in the minds of those who were devoted to him – Simon de Montfort was, indeed, a crusader for England. ‘He loves right and hates wrong,’ said one typical panegyric. If he was not quite God, he certainly seemed to have a direct line to Providence.

  It seems pointless to debate which was the ‘real’ Simon – the vainglorious adventurer or t
he messianic reformer – for he himself was incapable of disentangling the two roles. Few charismatic leaders have ever amounted to anything without a streak (at least) of selfish ambition and vanity. And Simon certainly had his share. But equally there is no doubt that he believed that what was good for the de Montforts was good for England. For a while, at least, he had a significant part of both the nobles and commons believing it too.

  In the summer of 1263 the situation became critical. De Montfort and his allies had captured most of southeastern England. Henry had retreated in fright to the Tower of London, doubtless relieved that he had added those new walls to its defences. To raise money to pay the mercenary troops in the royal army the queen had pawned her jewels to the Templars. On the pretext of inspecting or possibly redeeming them, Edward talked his way into the New Temple, where he proceeded to stage a bank robbery, smashing the treasure chests and relieving the Templars of their gold and silver. It was a classic Edwardian stunt, but its effect was to convert the mayor and burgesses of London from cool sceptics of the Montfortians into unreserved allies. What, after all, was the point of supporting the forces of order if they were themselves the leading criminals? Taken off their leash, the citizenry expressed its displeasure against the royalists in the usual ways. The fact that the queen was not only the patroness of the hated ‘foreigners’ but also enjoyed the proceeds from several prime tolls in the city made her an especially choice target. Fearing the worst, Eleanor attempted to break out of London by river and get to Edward’s army at Windsor. But her boat was recognized and pelted with stones and ordure from the crowds standing on London Bridge, the site of her most lucrative toll stations. Mortified by the humiliation, she was forced to take refuge in St Paul’s. It was an affront that neither she nor Edward would ever forget or forgive.

  Now styling himself ‘Steward of England’, Simon de Montfort was virtually sole and supreme governor of the country. But none of his titles could do anything to prevent England from spinning into civil war.

  The issue was decided in two great battles. The first took place near Lewes on the Sussex South Downs in May 1264. De Montfort had broken his leg in a riding accident and was forced to travel to the battlefield in a cart, but this seemed to have no effect on his decisive generalship. Although his side was badly outnumbered, especially in cavalry, it had seized the high ground above Lewes through a daring night march. Before the battle Simon spoke to his troops, some of them untested Londoners, pledging that he and they were fighting for the kingdom of England, for the honour of God and for the blessed Virgin Mary, the saints and the Holy Church. The soldiers – knights, archers, foot soldiers – prostrated themselves on the ground, their faces pressed into the wet spring meadows, their arms stretched out, praying for victory. Then they got up, absolved by the bishops of Winchester and Chichester, and put on their armour with the white crosses of crusaders. Many were there, of course, because whoever was above them in the social pecking order commanded their presence, but there must have been some who truly believed that Simon de Montfort, for all his solemn piety and irascibility, was indeed a kind of political messiah. In a Canterbury manuscript he is even described as ‘Simon Bar-jona’, the name given by Jesus in Matthew 16:17 to St Peter, the keeper of the keys of heaven. No wonder his soldiers called themselves the ‘Army of God’.

  At first, God did not seem to be on their side at all. Encouraged by the greater numbers of the royalist side, including a substantial number of Anglo-Irish and Scots knights – among them Robert Bruce (1210–95) – Edward launched a full-tilt charge at the opposing troops, who were mostly from London, and when they broke, he pursued them, cutting them down. Assuming that the royal army had won the day, Edward made his way back to the battlefield to look for his father. A rout was, indeed, in progress, but it was the reverse of what Edward had supposed. The commanders of the royal side had been killed or captured, the Earl of Cornwall was hiding in a windmill, and the king had fled to a priory in the town of Lewes. Although his victory was incomplete without the capture of the king and the prince – which would have meant sacking the priory (not a good move for the Army of God) – de Montfort laid down terms, which included Edward’s becoming a hostage for the good conduct of the king’s forces.

  The eighteen months that followed were a brief but extraordinary episode in the history of the political nation and the closest that England came to being a republic before the seventeenth century. In July 1264, when there was a serious threat of invasion from France, de Montfort’s government sent sealed writs (a particular source of fury to the king, whose prerogative this was) to each shire, ‘to bishops, abbots, earls, knights and freemen’, asking them to provide ‘men, lances, bows, arrows, axes and crossbows’ – in short, a people’s army. The response was extraordinary. A huge throng of all ranks and classes gathered at Barham Downs between Dover and Canterbury to repel the invasion, which, needless to say, never came. But Pandora’s box had most definitely been opened. In the populist euphoria, the mayor of London could summon the audacity to speak to Henry III like a schoolmaster dressing down a naughty child – ‘Lord, as long as you will be a good lord we will be your faithful and devoted men’ – with the implication that if not, well not. On 8 August 1265, four days after the battle of Evesham, a royalist esquire, Peter de Nevile, was apprehended by the villagers of Peatling Magna (who evidently did not know that the king had won) and accused of ‘treason and other heinous offences because he was against the community of the realm’. Some of the popular emotions and prejudices unleashed by the civil war were unappetizing and violent. The category of ‘undesirable foreigner’ provided de Montfort with a useful whipping boy to drum up anger, and he was certainly prepared (if not eager) to use it against the Jews, whom he had expelled from Leicester in 1231, much to the delight of the Church. During 1264–5 Jewish communities in many of the commercial towns of the country suffered horribly from violent attacks on their property and persons.

  Nineteenth-century historians, celebrating the epic of English parliamentary liberalism, imagined de Montfort’s assemblies as calmly deliberative institutions – the Victorian reform acts in medieval dress – but in fact Simon’s revolution took place amid immense social uproar, which, as the crisis deepened, threatened to get completely out of control. It was true, however, that the parliaments of 1265 were utterly unlike the old royal councils, both in their composition and the topics they deemed proper to debate. Not only barons and churchmen deliberated on the business of the kingdom, but also knights of the shire, elected by assemblies of their peers, and even burgesses from the towns. So a cloth merchant or a Suffolk knight with a few acres now got to judge the terms on which the son of the king might safely be released from captivity! This was not yet anything like a House of Commons, but it certainly represented an enlargement of the political community that, by the standards of feudal and absolutist Europe, was breathtakingly radical. Without any question it changed England. It inaugurated the union between patriotism and insubordination.

  Like many quasi-revolutionary bodies, however, the parliaments of 1265 were more emergency war councils than permanent institutions. The neutralizing of Edward’s political and military influence was on everyone’s mind, and Edward himself was very likely aware that his value as a hostage was limited by the fact that de Montfort would probably not dare lay hands on him (although with Montfort’s blazing temper no one could be quite sure). Once he had done the necessary by pledging allegiance to the Provisions of Oxford, had submitted to the expropriation of a large part of his estates (and their transfer to the de Montfort family) and had even agreed that the council might judge the acceptability of his own followers, Edward was formally released. But although he was out of prison, he was still, together with his father, kept in a kind of travelling custody, along with Simon’s own moving train. Because so many of de Montfort’s erstwhile supporters were now deserting him, angry at the apparent greed and rapacity of his family, and because Edward had never quite been identifie
d with the follies of the king, some of these men were conveying intelligence to the prince about the movements of potential supporters, including the powerful Marcher earls, like Roger Mortimer, among Simon’s bitterest foes. From some of his friends, whom de Montfort had rashly allowed to travel to the prince under safe-conduct, Edward was in a position to know that Mortimer’s troops were just 40 miles away and closing. On 28 May, while outside the gates of Hereford and pretending to examine the quality of a batch of horses brought for his inspection, he rode all of them save one into the ground. At the right moment he dug his spurs hard into the flank of what was now the only fresh mount and at a furious gallop easily outdistanced his pursuers. News of the prince’s daring escape was electrifying. At liberty, he instantly became a magnet for all those who felt that the sanctimoniousness of the de Montforts had become just a pretext for a naked seizure of power.

  Simon was now as much hated as he was adored and feared. The Marcher lords of Wales hated him for making an agreement with Llewellyn, the prince of Gwynedd; the Anglo-Irish Normans hated him for his presumptuousness. And many of those earls and barons who had felt that he had indeed spoken for England in 1258 and even in 1263 now began to look on Simon as a somewhat suspicious oddity, as, in fact, a foreigner, passing himself off as the salt of the English earth. In a month or two Edward ran a dazzling campaign, seizing Gloucester along with a good part of the Montfortian army and cutting off Simon’s own forces, which were divided by the Severn from his son Simon’s garrison at Kenilworth. A surprise raid on Kenilworth caught many of the garrison actually lodged in town, doubtless taking their ease in baths and stews, and forcing Simon junior to escape (naked, some chronicles said) by swimming across the castle lake. Following the disastrous failure to join with his son’s army, it was with a badly depleted force that de Montfort had to engage Edward’s army at Evesham. Watching from the tower of the abbey, his herald at first believed that the advancing troops he saw carrying the Montfort colours (another Edwardian ruse) were those of Simon’s long-awaited son. But when their true identity was discovered, de Montfort spoke prophetically: ‘God have mercy on our souls for our bodies are theirs.’ He was right. The battle was a slaughter. Told that his son Henry had been killed, Simon replied, ‘then it is time to die’ and charged into the fray. Many of his oldest and most devoted knights, men from his home patria of Leicestershire and Warwickshire, went down with him. Simon was unhorsed and died fighting on his feet. ‘Thank God’, were said to be his last words. In the fury of his vindication, Edward was not interested in obeying the conventions of war. While he went to rescue his wounded and confused father, Simon’s hands, feet and testicles were cut off, the genitals hung around his nose. Thirty of his knights were killed by stab wounds as they lay wounded and helpless. Anyone personally associated with de Montfort was mercilessly hunted down, and his great castle at Kenilworth was subjected to a five-month siege – it yielded only after a tremendous pounding, when the defenders were perishing of famine and cold. When the royal army finally got inside what had been the greatest and grandest of all English castles, they climbed over stinking corpses, gagging at the foulness.