Within only a few years of Stirling Bridge, at Courtrai in 1302 where the Flemish town militias of Bruges, Ghent and Ypres inflicted a crushing defeat upon a mounted French army, and at Morgarten in 1315, when a small army of Swiss infantry inflicted total defeat upon the cavalry of Duke Leopold of Austria, the powerlessness of cavalry in the face of spearmen and archers, and the essential futility of much that passed for chivalric valour, were more than amply demonstrated. Scotland, Flanders and Switzerland were each born from the actions of small ‘primitive’ armies faced with what should have been overwhelmingly more ‘sophisticated’ opponents. Brawn triumphed over boasted birth and courtesy just as surely as the peasants of Indochina or the tribesmen of Afghanistan have triumphed over the helicopter or the smart bombs of our own ever more sophisticated and murderous age.
Christendom in Crisis
It is ironic that those things which Edward I himself might have supposed to be the crowning achievements of his reign – the expulsion of the Jews, the recognition of Edward’s client John Balliol as King of Scots and the crushing of Welsh independence came at almost precisely the same moment that the wheel of fortune elsewhere in Christendom began to revolve from hubris towards nemesis. On 18 May 1291 the great sea port of Acre, last bastion of the crusader states, fell to a siege by an Egyptian army. From here onwards, Christendom itself was placed on the defensive, with Saracens ruling in Jerusalem, a Mongol hoard threatening the outposts of Christian Russia and, within a century, Turkish armies on the loose in Serbia, threatening to lay siege to Prague.
Less than a year after the fall of Acre, in April 1292, the death of Pope Nicholas IV ushered in a period of crisis for the western Church, from which emerged an Italian pope, Boniface VIII, so at odds with the kings of the West that in 1303, at much the same time that Edward I was garrisoning Inverness, a French army surprised the Pope at Anagni, just south of Rome, and beat him so badly that within a month he was dead of injury and shame. The outcome was the election of a French pope, Clement V, and the removal of the papacy from Rome to Avignon in southern France. For seventy years or more the Avignon popes were more concerned with taxation and meeting the costs of their own bureaucracy than ever they were with the right order of Christendom. Finally, to add to this catalogue of man-made disasters, nature itself began to rebel.
Climate Change and Famine
The European peasant economy depended upon agricultural surpluses to supply a population that had more than doubled over the previous century and a half. A series of hot, wet summers now left crops rotting in the fields. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in Iceland, sun spots, some other great yet mysterious terrestrial or solar cataclysm, or simply the slow revolution of the climate from a ‘medieval warm period’ to a ‘little ice age’, have all been proposed as ecological explanations for the impending catastrophe. Radiocarbon data suggests a sudden increase in the size and spread of the Alpine glaciers at Aletsch after 1230, at Grindelwald from 1280. Pastures where trees had grown and the local inhabitants grazed their cattle, were now, for the first time since the eighth century, covered in ice. None of the explanations for these phenomena is entirely convincing, though, like modern dogmas on climate change, each tends to attract its own small band of fanatics. Although after 1066 vines were cultivated as far north as Gloucester or Norwich, implying a climate in the twelfth century warmer than we might expect, winters were sufficiently cold in London in the 1150s for William fitz Stephen to describe skating on the Essex marshes, and the Thames is reported regularly to have frozen throughout the Middle Ages.
Whatever the underlying climatic changes, by 1300 the demographic expansion that had characterized the period since 1066 had reached what seems to have marked a natural ceiling. The food supply was the key factor here. The yield of cereal crops such as wheat or barley remained pathetically low, promising even on prime agricultural land and in years of relative abundance no more than ten times the weight of seed-corn sown, and in years of famine less than a doubling of the seed. As a modern comparison, and even before the introduction of techniques of seed selection and fertilization, nineteenth-century farmers expected a yield nearer to thirty times the quantity of seed sown. The clearance and cultivation of new acreage, although conducted on a massive scale throughout the thirteenth century, tended to bring land under the plough that was at best marginal, such as the Cotswold uplands or the Norfolk Breckland, and often of little use for anything save the poorest of sheep or livestock farming.
By 1300 there were perhaps ten million acres of land laid to arable in England, a figure not achieved again before the early nineteenth century. Cattle murrain and sheep disease, which accompanied the poor harvests after 1290, reduced the value of marginal land yet further. The expanding human population was vulnerable even to relatively brief periods of dearth since, rather as in nineteenth-century Ireland, an over-abundant population was dependent upon what, even in good years, was a barely sufficient supply of food. Hoarding or long-term food storage, as in the modern Third World, was a luxury that only the wealthier could afford. For the peasantry, the inability to store agricultural produce ensured not only that people starved as a result of poor harvests, but that, when the harvest produced too much rather than too little, goods had to be sent to market at prices unprofitably low. Add to this the ravaging of much of the north of England and lowland Scotland as a result of the Anglo-Scots war after the 1290s, and rural England was already poised on the cusp of disaster even by the final years of the reign of Edward I.
Violence
With famine and disease came despair and ultimately violence. There had been only a light death toll amongst the leaders of baronial rebellion throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Richard Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, had been killed in the midst of his rebellion in 1234, but in Ireland and as a result of treachery rather than publicly stage-managed brutality. The slaying and subsequent mutilation of Simon de Montfort at Evesham in 1265 ushered in a new period of unease in dealings between rebels and kings. Above all, perhaps, Montfort’s brutal end demonstrated that, short of killing a king, there was no way to bind a king to his promises, even if he were as weak and changeable as Henry III. In the meantime, the families of those slain at Evesham continued to dream of vengeance. In 1271, Henry of Almain, Edward I’s cousin and the eldest son and heir of Richard, Earl of Cornwall, King of Germany, stopped at Viterbo in Italy on his way to join Edward I’s crusade. There, hearing Mass at the cathedral’s high altar, he was set upon by two of Simon de Montfort’s sons and brutally murdered in revenge for the killing of their father at Evesham. The deed was so notorious that it earned a place in the seventh circle of Dante’s Inferno. Blood still called to blood, and the royal family found itself now part of a revenge tragedy.
Judicial Violence
This was a violent age, even though ‘popular’ historians are inclined to slaver rather too much over the details and to forget that judicial violence remained a feature of English society for several thousand years. The last woman to be publicly burned in England for petty treason (in this instance for counterfeiting) was executed in 1789. Women were still being publicly hanged as late as 1868, and there was a working gallows at Wandsworth Prison until 1994, tested every six months and still displayed as a museum piece. The death penalty was mandated in the Middle Ages with a frequency that we today might regard as barbaric, even though juries showed a marked reluctance to condemn to the gallows anyone not convicted of homicide. Until increased by a statute of Edward I to a minimum of one shilling, the theft of goods worth no more than four pence was deemed a capital offence, and children as young as fourteen were considered old enough for the rope. In certain localities, local punishments still operated. Thieves in the Scilly Islands were left on a rock to be swept away by the tide. At Dover, they were thrown from the cliffs.
Elsewhere, the general rule was that felons should be hung, though, as early as 1076, the public beheading of Earl Waltheof had suggested that noblemen might expect dist
inction, in death as in life. The lord’s private gallows was as significant a symbol of his lordship as the deer park or the seigneurial mill or dovecote. Hanging itself could prove a messy affair. The gallows might collapse, the rope break or the prisoner make a run for sanctuary. At a time of only poor understanding of the distinction between death and life, the person hanged might be cut down too early, or even recover from the hanging. Like other ‘miraculous’ escapes either from danger or from death, this occurs as a regular theme in miracle stories of the saints. In 1335, the vicar of Cowley in Oxfordshire was charged with burying alive a thief, hanged nearby but not yet dead. In an age without doctors to certify death, the vicar’s offence was perhaps not manslaughter but lack of due professional diligence.
Into the 1290s, the death penalty in itself had been deemed sufficient punishment for all save a handful of crimes. The very worst of traitors might be humiliated as well as hung, dragged by horses through the public streets on a hurdle or an animal skin, as was the fate of William de Marisco, the Lundy pirate, who in the 1230s had plotted the death of King Henry III, or Peter of Wakefield, a Yorkshire prophet who preached that King John was about to be toppled from his throne and who was drawn and then hung in 1213 when his prophecy failed to come true, his body torn apart between the horses before ever it reached the gallows. But such cases were extraordinary. Only from the 1290s, as Edward I began to grow impatient with the speed of progress in Wales and Scotland, was the full array of judicial violence brought to bear upon his enemies. Thomas de Turberville, convicted in 1295 of treasonable conspiracy with the French, the Scots and the Welsh, was dragged on an ox-hide from Westminster to Cheapside and hung at Smithfield, with six tormentors dressed as devils to attend his final moments. His body was left to rot on the gallows ‘so long as anything of him should remain’.
The punishments meted out by Edward to the leaders of Welsh and Scottish resistance, above all perhaps the deliberate dismemberment of Dafydd of Wales, of the Lord Rhys (leader of the 1287 Welsh rising) and of William Wallace, signalled a new brutality in English dealings with reluctant colonials. None of these ‘traitors’ was of Anglo-French noble birth, even though Dafydd and the Lord Rhys might claim that the blood of King Arthur flowed in their veins. In 1306, however, and in response to Robert Bruce’s final defection, Edward for the first time turned his anger not just against noble prisoners but against women, ordering the execution of John, Earl of Atholl (the first earl to have been executed, rather than killed in battle, since the beheading of Waltheof in 1076) and the imprisonment of Isobel, Countess of Buchan and of Mary, Robert Bruce’s sister, deliberately displayed in cages of wood and iron in the castles of Berwick and Roxburgh. Judicial violence had jumped the species barrier, from foreign enemies to the Anglo-Norman aristocracy. From this to the execution of English earls, the deposition and murder of kings and the killing fields of the civil wars of the fifteenth-century was only a short chronological step.
Edward’s Last Years
The young heir to the throne whose youthful escapades had led to broken glass at Southwark had grown into an elderly king filled with bitterness and cold hatred. We can almost hear King Edward’s foul temper seeping out of a letter to the Earl of Dunbar written in 1304, accusing the earl of excessive caution. The King’s original choice of metaphor (‘Whilst the dog shits, the wolf runs off’) has been scratched out and something superficially more polite but no less sarcastic written in its place (‘Once the war was over, Audigier drew his sword’, Audigier being the hero of a particularly scatological parody of French chivalry). We can sense the mood at court from an account book of 1297, recording the cost of repairing a coronet belonging to the King’s daughter Elizabeth, hurled by Edward into the fire. By the same token, royal kindness (the shilling paid by Edward to a poor Welshman who showed him to his lodgings, his clearly genuine expressions of care for his wife and children), appetite (Edward’s box of stem ginger) and sickness (the cordial of amber, jacinth, musk, pearls, gold and silver, or the sugar rosettes made with pearls and coral, fed to him in his final months), emerge from the records with a vividness that makes our knowledge of modern royalty seem paltry by comparison.
The king’s personality remained a fundamental element, for good or bad, in all late medieval English government. Edward I died in 1307, wracked with dysentery, on his way to what was already proving yet another doomed attempt to impose English authority upon the Scots. Edward was a harsh man. His anger is said, as late as 1304, to have killed the Archbishop of York stone dead.
Edward II
Unlike his bitterness, which he bequeathed to his son and heir, Edward II, the old King’s heroism and competence were not transmitted via the royal DNA. Edward II, although raised for glory, born in imperial Caernarvon, proposed as husband for the Queen of Scots, and crowned as Prince of Wales in 1301 as a symbol of his father’s conquest of the furthest west, proved to be perhaps the medieval King least-well qualified for kingship. A nature-lover, a keen swimmer (as early as 1303, one of his jesters was compensated for an injury sustained ‘through the prince in the water’), a digger of ditches and holes in the road, Edward was a pleasant enough young man, albeit over-passionately attached to his friends.
Head of the Regency Council
It is nonetheless symptomatic that his first proper taste of government came in 1297, aged only thirteen, when he was appointed head of the regency council whilst his father campaigned in Flanders. The result was turmoil, the transformation of Parliament from a supine display of royal authority into a forum for anti-royal polemic, and the forced issue of a series of decrees, including a reissue of Magna Carta, as tokens of the regime’s desire to establish harmony with barons and the community of the realm. The 1297 reissue was in effect Magna Carta’s swan song. Although recited at the head of endless collections of statutes thereafter, and granted one final outing in 1300 (reissued under Edward I’s great seal this time, rather than the seal of absence which had been employed in 1297), it was not again officially issued by an English king. Its principles, of binding the King to some sense of right and wrong government, had become deeply ingrained in the English political subconscious. Its precise terms were now superseded by other needs and other quarrels, most notably from the 1290s onwards by disputes over taxation, over the King’s right to take subsidy without the consent of Parliament or his leading subjects, his rights to purveyance (the forced sale of goods to the court, often at well below market values) and prises (his right to seize supplies, most notably wool or foodstuffs for the needs of his armies, repayable at low and often long-delayed terms).
The Ordinances and Piers Gaveston
The first major crisis over these issues came in 1310, when Edward II, less than three years into his reign, was forced to agree to the appointment of a committee of twenty-one ‘ordainers’ to draw up detailed proposals for reform, the so-called ‘Ordinances’, eventually issued in 1311. Behind these disputes lay one fundamental issue: the King’s powers of patronage. Edward II had developed a passionate and, so far as his critics were concerned, unhealthy affection for a Gascon courtier named Piers Gaveston, son of a minor captain in the royal armies. Introduced to Edward’s household as early as 1300, Gaveston was already the subject of controversy before the death of the old King. After his coronation, Edward II’s very first act had been to create Gaveston Earl of Cornwall, previously a royal dignity held by successive members of the ruling royal family. Shortly thereafter, Gaveston was married to Edward’s niece, herself a very considerable heiress. When Edward himself was married, in January 1308, to Isabella, daughter of the King of France, his betrothed bride for the past ten years as part of the guarantees of Anglo-French peace, he is said to have sent his marriage bed to Piers as a love token.
Twentieth-century writers had little doubt what was at stake here, and even in less sexually liberated times, the Victorians were happy to portray Edward and Piers mincing and simpering at one another in a fully Oscar Wildean way. Yet both Edward and Pie
rs fathered children, both in and outside wedlock. Edward, on those occasions when he could be persuaded to rise early enough in the morning, was a not inconsiderable commander of men. Piers met his end with grim stoicism bordering on bravery. If their love was illicit (and there is no doubt that by this date, whatever might have been the case a few centuries earlier, sodomy was considered one of the very worst of sins, close cousin to heresy and the denial of God), then it was probably a very long way from the sort of effeminacy against which the bearded Victorians were inclined to pronounce anathema. It may even have been not sexual love but a sworn blood brotherhood.
The problem here was that it was a pact between two very unequal partners. Only in romantic fiction could princes and paupers be friends. Moreover, like a lot of upstarts, Piers was possessed of a particularly wicked tongue. He had nicknames for all of his rivals at court, none of them polite, including ‘Bust-Belly’ for the Earl of Lincoln and ‘The Black Dog of Arden’ for the Earl of Warwick. The King’s cousin, Thomas of Lancaster, himself a grandson of King Henry III, would not have relished being described as ‘Ham actor’ by a man half his age and without a tenth of his noble ancestry. As early as April 1308, there were demands that Piers be exiled and his earldom confiscated. But, although Piers was sent to Ireland as the King’s lieutenant, and although the Ordinances of 1311 included specific clauses against ‘evil’ or ‘deceptive’ counsellors, Edward was not prepared to dispense with his favourite.
A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485 Page 32
