St George: New English Saint
To this list of his family’s heavenly protectors, Edward III added the Cappadocian warrior St George, already commemorated as the particular patron of crusaders, now granted his own chapel and cult centre within the precincts of Edward III’s castle at Windsor. England itself had previously been a flagless nation, or at best one that marched under the Plantagenet leopards or the dragon standard of Kings Richard and John, itself perhaps a ‘Draco Normannicus’ (a ‘Norman Dragon’), adopted after 1066 from the dragon banner which Harold’s standard-bearer is shown as holding in the climactic scene of the Bayeux Tapestry, and related to the triumphs of St Michael over the dragon-beasts of Mont-St-Michel or to the dragon tamed by St Romain, semi-mythical patron saint of Rouen, the capital of ducal Normandy. The King’s dragon standard was still being carried into battle by Edward III at Crécy in 1346, albeit by now quartered with the heraldic symbols of Edward III, with leopards and with the French fleur-de-lys. These French, Norman or Plantagenet devices were now replaced by something distinctively royal, martial and chivalric: St George’s banner, the red cross on a white background, first adopted for Edward’s new order of chivalry, the Order of the Garter, in the aftermath of the battle of Crécy. England’s new flag is first recorded as being carried into battle a decade later, by Edward, the Black Prince, during his great victory at Poitiers in 1356. St George was henceforth intended to triumph, in heraldic flagwaving as in legend, over all dragons, Saxon, French or Norman as the case might be. This device, formerly worn by crusaders fighting God’s wars, would lend a new patriotic dynamic to English warfare, no longer viewed as a polite chivalric encounter between cousins in arms but as a stark confrontation between Englishmen and the forces of evil.
The English Language
If English nationhood and English kingship triumphed in the reigns of the three Edwards, then so too did the English language. There were still those in the thirteenth century who looked to France as the true cradle of civilization. Multilingualism remained a feature of upper-class society into the fourteenth century, as indeed into the twenty-first. English pronunciation of French might be mocked in France, never more effectively than in the thirteenth-century fable The Two Englishmen and the Donkey, in which the inability of a pair of English merchants to distinguish between the words ‘agnel’ (‘lamb’) and ‘anel’ (‘donkey’) leads to one of them being fed donkey-meat rather than lamb. The mistake is only discovered when the men resort to animal noises (‘This isn’t baa-baa, but hee-haw, hee-haw’). As the donkey story illustrates, nonetheless, England was already a land of merchants who had a need to communicate, however inadequate their linguistic means. Moreover, after 1300, the English language itself began to penetrate elite society in a way not encountered since 1066.
In the county courts, as early as the 1250s, Magna Carta and the documents associated with Henry III’s reforms were being recited and occasionally even written in English as well as in Latin and French. Parliament’s business was from the start discussed and from 1331 recorded in French. From the fourteenth century through to the present day, the clerk pronounced the royal assent in French rather than English: ‘Le Roi le veut’ (‘The King wishes it’, with direct and no doubt deliberate echoes of the crusader cry ‘Deus le volt’, ‘God wishes it’). Nonetheless, by royal command from 1362, all pleas in the law courts and, from 1363, the majority of discussions in the Commons had to be conducted in English: one might speculate here on a bilingual Parliament in which, for a time at least, the Commons spoke mostly in English, the Lords mostly in French. Between the two choices, it was clear that English was already beginning to win out. As early as the 1290s, Edward I, himself a French-speaker, had already threatened that a French invasion might wipe not just England but ‘the English language’ from the face of the earth. The Cursor Mundi, a massive poetic description of world history written in English, suggested ‘That we give each country its own language’, explicitly identifying English nationhood with the English language.
By the time of the death of Edward III in 1377, Geoffrey Chaucer was already retained as a royal pensioner, a veteran of Edward III’s wars in France. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales of the 1390s commemorated not just the birth of the new Middle English language, smoothed out from the diversity and barbarity of regional accents into something courtly and polite, but the very saint, Thomas of Canterbury, identified by many as the chief patron of English nationhood. Chaucer’s English, like the vernacular of Anglo-Saxon royal government before 1066, was in many ways an artificial, literary language, far removed from the realities of day-to-day speech. Three of the individual stories that go to make up his Canterbury Tales are set in Italy, two in Flanders and one each in France, Athens or Tartary. Nonetheless, the posterity of Chaucer’s ‘Middle English’ was to prove even more remarkable than that of the now moribund ‘Old English’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ of Beowulf or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. By 1400, English students of Latin, a no less artificial literary language, were being taught their basic grammar directly from the English vernacular rather than via the medium of French.
The English Nation
From the disasters and defeats of the 1060s, and from their Babylonian captivity under the Normans, the English themselves had re-emerged as a nation no longer ashamed of Englishness be it in dress, laws, sainthood, symbols or speech. In the process, they had also acquired an empire. In Ireland, Wales and Scotland, by the death of Edward I, England’s kings boasted an authority that stretched from Galway to Norfolk and from Land’s End as far north as the Firth of Forth. By 1350, at Ramsey Abbey in Cambridgeshire, a map attached to Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, the most popular of fourteenth-century chronicles, itself intended to demonstrate a peculiarly English role in world history, showed Britain as an island on the margins of Europe, now coloured red from north to south, the same colour as the Red Sea and as Jerusalem, itself the very epicentre of the Christian world.
To present the history of England in the century after 1270 as one long upward curve of achievement would be significantly to warp reality. The reigns of the three Edwards witnessed a significant shift in the zeitgeist, but it was for the most part a shift from major to minor, from heroic optimism to pessimistic fatalism. Like ghosts in general, zeitgeists (‘spirits of the age’) tend to have as many people passionately convinced of their existence as there are those who just as passionately deny it. Even so, there seems little doubt that there was a significant shift in both political and cultural norms from around the year 1300.
The two centuries from 1066 had seen violence certainly, but also expansion, discovery and the pursuit of dreams, sometimes on an epic scale. The fall of England to the Normans, the capture of Jerusalem by the First Crusade, the great cathedrals and churches that new wealth now bought, the pushing back of woodland and fen, the increase in the human population, the rediscovery of ancient knowledge and the development of new technologies, all of these suggest an upward curve in human expectation. London’s population is estimated to have increased from 25,000 in 1100 to more than 100,000 by 1300, the population of England as a whole from something like two or three million to five or six million. After 1300, the wheel of fortune turned once more, from fair to increasingly foul. Famine, warfare, endemic disease and ultimately plague brought a significant population decline. God’s vengeance seemed to lie heavy upon the land. The climate itself rebelled against mankind.
Edward I
Ironically, some of these disasters could trace their origins to the reign of Edward I, generally regarded as one of the greatest of English kings. It was under Edward I that the seeds were sown of English domination over Wales and Scotland. It was under Edward that Parliament was nurtured and that English law reached maturity. It was Edward’s diplomacy and foreign marriages that laid the foundations of England’s later claims in France and in particular those claims to the French throne which were to emerge from the 1330s onwards in the Hundred Years War. As if to emphasize his own grea
tness, Edward I lived to the age of 68, longer than any other king in the 500 years after the Norman Conquest. Henry I had reached 67. Henry III, despite the great length of his reign, was a mere 65 at the time of his death, Edward III only 64. For the rest, the vast majority (eleven of the eighteen kings between William I and Richard III) died before reaching 50. Yet his very longevity was to ensure that Edward I outlived the triumphs of his early years, to witness the catalogue of failures and setbacks that marred the second part of his reign. All political careers are said to end in failure. The failures of Edward I were to have consequences that overshadowed the lives of many millions of English men and women as yet unborn.
Young Edward
To appreciate this, we need to begin in the sunnier uplands of the 1260s and 70s. Here, Edward had already shown himself gifted with the sort of military and administrative skills necessary for successful kingship, but which his father, Henry III, had so signally lacked. A wild youth (aged only twenty-one, he and his cronies had smashed all of the windows of the bishop of Winchester’s palace at Southwark, in one of the earliest recorded examples of upper-class, Bullingdon Club-like love of the sound of broken glass), the future King Edward I had proved himself both brave and ruthlessly competent. His escape from imprisonment at Hereford in 1265, having pretended to test a number of horses whilst out riding and then making off on the swiftest of them, and his subsequent defeat of Simon de Montfort, his former military tutor, at Evesham, were merely the springboards from which Edward launched himself upon crusade in the East. He thereby fulfilled crusading vows that had been left unfulfilled by every previous Plantagenet king save for his now legendary ancestor, Richard I.
Not only did Edward acquire kudos merely by embarking on crusade, but his expedition, although marked by no dramatic improvement in the fortunes of the Latin East, garnered legends of its own. Within a century, it was being claimed that Edward’s wife, Eleanor of Castile, had sucked the venom from his wounds when a Moslem assassin stabbed him with a poisoned dagger. Other versions attributed his salvation to one of his household knights, or to a magic stone given by the Master of the Temple, perhaps ground up and used as a purgative. Edward’s career as a successful crusader, the Olympic gold, or Oxbridge blue, of medieval warrior prestige, was in no small part responsible for his later fearsome reputation as king. In one person he seemed to combine the heroism of Richard the Lionheart with the administrative efficiency of Henry II.
Three problems above all had dogged the fortunes of Edward’s father: the lack of financial resources by which the crown could pursue its ambitions beyond the frontiers of England; the longstanding rivalries with England’s neighbours, above all the kings of France, focussed upon the continuing demand that the former Plantagenet lands be restored to English rule; and the difficulty of controlling an English political elite unprepared to meet the costs of the King’s own household or military ambitions. Edward was not slow to master all three problems, employing the lessons that he had learned from his uncle, Simon de Montfort, the kudos that he had secured from his victory over Montfort at Evesham, and his newly won status as a veteran of the crusades to advertise a kingly panache very different from the feckless piety of his father. Success in battle would henceforth be matched to reform of government. Reform in turn would be rewarded with financial subsidies from the English elite sufficient to pay for yet further success in war.
The King’s Finances and Laws
Before the 1270s, England’s kings had relied for their income upon the profits of their own royal estates, worth perhaps £10,000 a year, combined with the profits of royal lordship, justice and the law courts, in a good year worth considerably more. This in itself was just about sufficient to pay for the needs of the royal court and household and for the machinery of royal government, the sheriffs and justices who themselves reaped rich profits from their offices. For anything more ambitious, for campaigns beyond the frontiers of the realm, even for successful warfare against the Welsh or the Scots, the King required subsidies from his subjects. Since no such subsidies were awarded to Henry III after the 1230s, Henry’s administration had lurched from one financial crisis to another, with never enough funds to pay for its schemes. Edward I determined from the outset to avoid these difficulties.
He did so by imposing a tax on wool exports, the principal overseas trade of England and the source, perhaps for several centuries before this, of much of England’s wealth. The tax itself would be paid by the merchants responsible for exporting wool, but they in turn would recoup their losses by reducing the prices they paid to wool growers in England and by increasing the prices they charged to wool buyers overseas. In turn, these new customs duties, of 6s 8d per sack of exported wool, amounting to perhaps £10,000 a year, were linked to the offer of good government for the realm, first broadcast via a county by county investigation of the King’s resources and of abuses of royal authority, instituted almost from the moment of the King’s return to England in 1274 and known as the ‘Hundred Rolls’ enquiry.
In its way as ambitious as the Domesday survey of the 1080s, the ‘Hundred Rolls’ enquiry set the pattern for two subsequent investigations of resources and encroachments upon the King’s rights: an inquest known as Kirby’s Quest, headed by John de Kirkby commissioned in the 1280s to investigate debts to the crown and the King’s local income, and a wholescale impeachment of royal justices and investigation of their crimes that followed the King’s return to England from Gascony in 1289. In each instance, the offer of reform was linked to the crown’s financial needs, with the King demonstrating his willingness to sacrifice his own ministers in order both to buy public support and to advertise his credentials as a virtuous prince. This had been very much the policy of Louis IX, who himself had exercised a significant influence over the methods of Simon de Montfort, King Edward’s own tutor turned bitterest foe.
The virtue of King Edward was itself chiefly broadcast via Parliament, now summoned on a near annual basis as a forum for the display of royal authority, through to the 1290s largely supine in its approach to royalty, yet broad enough as a representative assembly of national opinion to negotiate grants of taxation to the crown. The first such tax, negotiated in 1275, yielded upwards of £80,000, more than enough to repay the King’s outstanding debts. Parliament both granted subsidy and heard petitions from the King’s subjects, once again acting as a safety valve to the grievances of those previously denied access to the King’s grace.
In turn, petitioning and parliamentary debate went hand in hand with the issue of new laws. Between the First Statute of Westminster in 1275 and the first real crisis to engulf his regime, after 1290, Edward’s administration enacted an impressive array of legislation, much of it directly modelled on or indeed simply copied from the reformist legislation of the 1250s and 60s. It was intended to clarify relations between lords and tenants, to prevent the wholescale alienation of property to the Church, to ensure that lords were not deprived of the services that land had formerly rendered, and to regulate such processes as the pursuit of debt or the indictment of crime.
In 1290, this very public advertisement of the King as lawmaker and father of his people was crowned by Edward’s expulsion of the Jewish community from England. Already bled dry after decades of punitive royal taxation, the Jews were in effect used as yet another sacrificial victim to broadcast a carefully controlled image of the King as virtuous Christian prince. Their property and houses supplied Edward with a timely pool of patronage from which to reward his friends and followers. The Jews themselves were shipped across the Channel to France, not officially to return to England until the time of Oliver Cromwell, after 1656. Like various rather more notorious rulers of the twentieth century, Edward was in effect employing the persecution of a minority as a means to advertise his leadership and benevolence to a grateful majority.
Ironically, none of this would have been possible without the assistance of precisely those ‘aliens’ – Frenchmen and foreign merchants – who had previ
ously served as the chief targets of English xenophobia. With his new customs duties, Edward widened the circle of virtue by farming receipts from the wool tax to Italian merchants, most notably the Riccardi family of Lucca, the centre of the Italian silk trade, borrowing large sums of money in the short term, repayable from future customs revenues. The capital from the Mediterranean silk trade was thus invested in English armies financed on the security of future profits from wool. With the resources now at his disposal, and with the immediate situation in France governed by the peace that had been put in place since 1259, Edward could turn his attentions first and foremost to the Welsh, using attacks upon yet another minority group to advertise his glory and invincibility.
The Welsh
Ever since the 1050s, when Harold Godwinson had earned his military reputation as a slayer of Welshmen, the English had sought to expand their authority westwards across the Wye and the Dee into territories ruled by Welsh-speaking princes. The Normans after 1066 had continued this process, seizing most of southern Wales as far west as Pembroke and extending the frontiers of the county of Cheshire in the north. Henry II’s conquest of Ireland in the 1170s had further embedded this English ‘Drang nach westen’ (‘push to the west’), ensuring English control over one side of that Welsh–Irish axis around which had been focussed a great deal of the native Welsh economy and with it the tribute, in silver and cattle, paid to the native Welsh princes.
A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485 Page 30
