A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Edward’s Personality

  Edward III’s personality mattered. Indeed, Edward’s is perhaps the first English royal face whose appearance has been preserved to us in a real portrait rather than via some generic image of kingship. His wooden funeral effigy, perhaps carved from a death mask, suggests a twisted expression and hence, perhaps, that it was a stroke that killed this King, the first even remotely plausible diagnosis that we have for the cause of death of any medieval English king save for those, like Harold, killed in battle. Before he declined into senility or chronic ill health, Edward stamped his authority on most government initiatives: the arrest of Mortimer in 1330, the equally dramatic coup in which, almost exactly a decade later, the King returned secretly to England from war in France, to arrest and impeach those ministers he blamed for the shortage of funds for his troops. It was Edward in person who commanded the English forces against the Scots at Halidon Hill in 1333, against the French at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, and against French, Genoese and Castilian forces in the maritime encounters known as the battles of Sluys in 1340 and Les Espagnols ten years later. It was Edward’s personal claims, as son of a King of England and grandson of a King of France, that provoked the Hundred Years War. It was Edward’s own devotion to chivalric and knightly pursuits, his love of tournaments and round tables, his determination to outdo the mythical King Arthur and to supply England with an order of knighthood fit to rival the greatest knights in France that led, after Crécy, to his establishment of the Order of the Garter, in many ways his most personal creation, established with its own chapel dedicated to St George at the heart of Windsor Castle, the King’s birthplace, itself redesigned as a pleasure palace and public display of royal splendour, very much at Edward’s own command.

  At Windsor and in the royal residences at Westminster and King’s Langley in Hertfordshire, hot water was for the first time piped into the King’s baths, and mechanical clocks make their earliest appearance as royal rather than as exclusively ecclesiastical luxuries. Devotion to chivalric principles explains a number of Edward’s political actions: his horseback dash, forty miles in a single day, to Lochindorb, south of Inverness, in 1336, to relieve the widowed Countess of Atholl besieged in the castle; the mercy he showed to the burghers of Calais in 1347 whom he had intended to hang but instead pardoned after intercessions on their behalf by his Queen, Philippa of Hainault; his determination in the 1350s to prosecute the bishop of Ely, Thomas Lisle, in the face of concerted opposition from Lisle’s fellow bishops, for attacks said to have been made by Lisle’s men upon the King’s cousin, Lady Wake, sister of the Duke of Lancaster. Like a lot of gallant gentlemen, Edward perhaps behaved less politely in private than the perfection of manners that he affected in public might lead us to suppose. Accusations that he raped the Countess of Salisbury were almost certainly untrue – French propaganda copied from the ancient Roman legend of the rape of Lucretia. Even so, there was certainly a seamier side to his relationship, late in life, with Alice Perrers, royal mistress, accused of corruption and scandal in the handling of government finance.

  Edward’s Administration

  As this dependence on his mistress suggests, Edward was a ruler, perhaps the first since Richard I in the 1190s, whose ministers enjoyed a higher profile in day-to-day government than the King himself. It was upon officers such as his chancellor, Robert Stratford, bishop of Chichester, and his treasurer, Roger Northburgh, bishop of Coventry, that Edward pinned both the credit and blame for the financial exactions of 1340. Later, it was another chancellor, William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, overseer and presiding genius of Edward’s work at Windsor, who headed the King’s administration. Removed from office after clashing with the King’s son, John of Gaunt, Wykeham was nonetheless still sufficiently powerful to play a leading role in the constitutional crisis at the end of the reign and to survive as a major political force into the reigns of Edward’s grandsons, Richard II and Henry IV. Many of the King’s ministers were clerks, subsequently promoted as bishops. They can appear on occasion a self-serving but monotone bunch. The worst of the fourteenth-century bishops could barely begin to match the crimes attributed to their eleventh-century predecessors such as Stigand or Ranulf Flambard. Even so, there had been an undoubted shift after 1250 or so, from the saints and scholars of the twelfth century to the competent ‘all-rounders’ of the later Middle Ages. The Franciscan friar, John Pecham (archbishop 1279–92) was the last intellectual of truly European stature to serve as archbishop of Canterbury before the Reformation of the 1530s, though the mathematician and theologian Thomas Bradwardine might have revived this tradition had he not died only thirty-eight days after obtaining the archbishopric in 1349.

  Saints and Sinners

  The period from 1170 to the 1260s had witnessed a remarkable flourishing of saints’ cults in England, associated principally with English bishops famed for their devotion to the liberty and reform of the Church: Thomas Becket (d.1170, canonized 1173), St Wulfstan of Worcester (d.1095, canonized 1203), St Hugh of Lincoln (d.1200, canonized 1220), St Edmund of Canterbury (d.1240, canonized 1246), St Richard Wyche of Chichester (d.1253, canonized 1262) fell within this category, as did the bids, unsuccessful though they proved, to obtain the canonizations of Stephen Langton (Archbishop of Canterbury d.1228), Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln (d.1253) and even, most improbably, King Henry III’s half-brother Aymer de Valence of Winchester (d.1260), and Henry’s uncle Boniface of Savoy (Archbishop of Canterbury, d.1270). Boniface was rumoured to have worn chain mail under his clerical habit and to have once delivered a distinctly un-archiepiscopal punch to the jaw of the prior of St Bartholomew’s Smithfield. He was nonetheless a conscientious visitor of monasteries, an issuer of reformist legislation for the English Church and even, in the 1250s and 60s, an upholder of the rights of the community of the realm to better government than had previously been supplied by his royal nephew’s incompetent favouritism. In Italy and southern Europe, saints in the thirteenth century were almost exclusively holy men set apart from the mainstream of ecclesiastical administration or secular politics. In England, with its well-regulated Church matching the state’s increasing obsession with law-making and legality, it was bishops who achieved sainthood and a role as intercessors for their local communities from beyond the grave.

  The last of these saint bishops, Thomas Cantiloupe of Hereford (d.1282), was canonized in 1320 having been so at odds with his archbishop, John Pecham, that he spent the final months of his life as an excommunicate exile in the court of Rome. Thereafter, the electrical matter of sanctity seems to have passed underground, no longer channelled through an episcopal hierarchy increasingly reserved for civil servants and royal diplomats. Virtually every archbishop of Canterbury after 1300 had seen previous service as King’s clerk or ambassador, and several of them continued, even after their promotion as archbishop, to hold office as chancellor or treasurer to the crown. It was not that Pecham’s successors lacked either courage or competence. Even the supine civil servant Archbishop Walter Reynolds had broken with Edward II in the 1320s and assisted the court coup which brought Edward III to the throne, preaching on the ancient proverb ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God.’ Most of these men were well schooled. Archbishop Reynolds owned an impressive library, although he was perhaps more familiar with the covers than the contents of his books.

  With the exception of William Courtenay, son of the Earl of Devon and great-grandson of Edward I (the first archbishop of Canterbury to have been of direct royal lineage, succeeded by Archbishop Thomas Arundel, a great-great-grandson of King Henry III), most of these men emerged from precisely that stratum of the lower gentry or upper levels of freeholder that had produced the Thomas Beckets or Stephen Langtons of the past. William of Wykeham’s father was a man with the far from aristocratic name John Long, a yeoman freeholder, married above his station to the granddaughter of a minor local knight. Compared with their predecessors, nonetheless, the bishops of the fourteenth century can only be
regarded as second-raters. They included the first English bishop ever to be tried for incitement to homicide (Thomas Lisle of Ely, a Dominican friar, accused of leading a gang of fenland brigands) and the only two bishops ever to have been beheaded by the London mob: Walter Stapeldon, bishop of Exeter, treasurer of the deposed Edward II, decapitated in Cheapside with a breadknife in 1326, and Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, killed during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, his head displayed on London Bridge with an episcopal cap nailed to the skull. Both Stapledon and Sudbury were ‘building’ bishops, Sudbury as principal benefactor of the new nave at Canterbury Cathedral, Stapeldon as the second founder of the cathedral church of Exeter. Yet in neither case was there even a token suggestion that these agents of royal government be acknowledged as martyrs or workers of miracles.

  Many but not all of these bishops were learned men. Louis de Beaumont, a cousin of Edward I’s Queen, was accused in 1318 of floundering through the Latin of his consecration service and of muttering, after one particularly troublesome polysyllable, ‘By St Louis, he was no gentleman who wrote that word!’ Beaumont was amongst the first of the English bishops to plaster his episcopal seal with his own heraldic arms. From the time of his successor, Thomas Hatfield, the bishops of Durham, as ‘palatinate’ lords of their county, employed a double-sided seal, on one side showing them enthroned, on the other as a mounted warrior, with sword and crested helmet barely concealed beneath their episcopal mitre. Not since Odo of Bayeux in the eleventh century had an English bishop been portrayed in this way on his seal, riding into battle. Meanwhile, rather like star conductors or musicians of the twentieth century, the bishops of fourteenth-century England were capable of a virtuoso performance using the materials already at their disposal, but were not themselves able to rewrite the music, let alone to compose new tunes.

  Monks

  This lack of charisma was all the more significant because the Church, as an undying institution, its lands guarantied against division or alienation, in theory growing richer year by year, was perhaps the only force in England that might have held in check the violence that was increasingly the hallmark both of relations within the English political elite and of England’s dealings with its neighbours. In the past, it had been English monks who had supplied the intellectual and moral example of good government. By the fourteenth century, however, even the more ascetic orders of the twelfth century had become ossified, sometimes almost literally so, under a weight of tradition and oligarchic self-interest. In the richer Benedictine communities, such as Westminster Abbey, the monks are estimated to have been served, on a daily basis, at least a pound’s weight of fish or two pounds of meat, a loaf of bread weighing a further two pounds, half a dozen eggs, large quantities of cheese and milk and at least eight pints of beer. No wonder that the Benedictines were depicted in contemporary satire as overweight gluttons, or that modern archaeological investigation has suggested that, in the richer of their communities, they suffered from a variety of bone diseases associated with excessive eating.

  The monastic cloister was not a prison but a place in which to open the mind to spiritual enquiry, to the heavenly as opposed to the earthly Jerusalem. Hence the richness of the decoration assigned to the cloister itself, as an aid to meditation and not least to the meditation of the careers and spiritual well-being of the monastery’s donors, whose arms were emblazoned on heraldic shields, as in the cloisters at Westminster or Canterbury or Norwich, placed directly over the heads of the monks as they contemplated the kingdom of heaven. As this juxtaposition of the secular and the sacred should suggest, rather like today’s public school headmasters, or the more superior sort of tradesmen, there were few greater snobs than England’s medieval monks, themselves often of humble background yet thrown into almost daily contact with the noble dead. As the existence of monastic deer parks, none more famous than Westminster’s Hyde Park, should remind us, although monks themselves were not supposed to hunt or engage in blood sports, they did not baulk at associating themselves with the most aristocratic of sports, with venison as a further supplement to the monastic diet. Even the Cistercians on occasion maintained deer parks. As long ago as 1215, the Cistercian abbot of Beaulieu, one-time diplomatic envoy of King John, was accused before the Cistercian General Chapter not only of engaging in public drinking contests, in a game known as ‘garsacil’, but of keeping a greyhound tethered to his bed on a silver chain. These were not the sort of thinkers or moral leaders capable of resisting the trend either towards war or disorder.

  Oxford and Cambridge

  After the 1220s, the friars, followers of St Francis and St Dominic, in theory pledged to lives of poverty like the original disciples of Christ, had settled in many English towns and had brought new insights to their preaching, in particular in their condemnation of materialism and the pleasures which money could buy. Jesus, so they argued, had sent his followers penniless into the world, and it was by abandoning money rather than by fleeing the world that the religious could best pursue their vocation.

  Because of their emphasis upon preaching, generally regarded as a learned pursuit, the friars had established particular connections with the schools, settling in both Oxford and Cambridge almost immediately after their arrival in England. Already by the time of Gerald of Wales in the 1180s, Oxford was emerging as England’s pre-eminent seat of learning. Even earlier, Geoffrey of Monmouth, weaving his fabulous account of English history, claimed to have relied upon a book belonging to the archdeacon of Oxford, just as today’s fantasists and conspiracy theorists might cite anything that lent the approval of Oxford University Press to their own fantastical ideas. Walter Map, court chronicler and wit under Henry II, was himself archdeacon of Oxford.

  Why Oxford? In part because the town was a regular meeting place for ecclesiastical courts, one of the most convenient points close to London in a diocese, the see of Lincoln, which stretched from the Thames as far north as the Humber. It was also, perhaps, a place of cheap rents. With Oxford today boasting some of the highest property prices in England, it is hard to imagine that the city was once awash with tenements, plots and halls where students could be lodged at little expense. In the twelfth century, however, the silting up of the Thames reduced navigation and ensured a glut of cheap property into which teachers and students now moved. It was precisely to guard against the further congestion of the Thames and the Medway navigations that Magna Carta, in 1215, forbade the construction of fish weirs on either of these rivers.

  The self-government of the University of Oxford dates from this same period, with the removal of authority over students and schools from the bishop of Lincoln and their investment in a new officer, the University’s Chancellor. The dominance of the University over the city of Oxford, gown over town, was not finally cemented until the reign of Edward III, following a full-blown riot, provoked by an argument in the Swindlestock Tavern on St Scholastica’s Day 1355 (10 February). In penance for the slaying of a considerable number of students, the mayor and corporation were condemned to pay an annual fine to the University (last paid in the 1820s), and the University henceforth obtained wide-ranging authority over the city’s markets and commerce.

  Cambridge, likewise a port town with a declining trade and navigation, emerged as the location for a much smaller and, during the Middle Ages, less-distinguished university only a few years after Oxford. The precise circumstances here remain unclear, but perhaps, where the presence of the bishop and archdeacon’s courts had been crucial to the emergence of the schools of Oxford, the freedom of Cambridge from supervision by the local bishop, and the fact that, in the 1220s, the archdeacon of Ely was an absentee Italian, more often to be found acting as papal agent in Croatia or Hungary than on the wind-swept banks of the Cam, encouraged the emergence, by 1225, of a university Chancellor apparently ruling the scholars and their schools.

  To begin with, both at Oxford and at Cambridge, scholars and masters were lodged in halls and dormitories, bought and sold as private ent
erprises, with no permanent endowment to ensure their long-term survival. The first of the endowed Cambridge colleges, Peterhouse, was founded in 1284 by a Benedictine monk, Hugh of Balsham, bishop of Ely, whose statutes grafted elements of the Benedictine rule on to decrees already awarded, twenty years earlier, to one of the first of the Oxford colleges, founded by Walter de Merton, chancellor to King Henry III. Another of the early Oxford colleges, Balliol, was founded in the 1260s by the father and mother of the future King of Scotland, John de Balliol. New College at Oxford, was the work of William of Wykeham, chancellor to Edward III, established in 1379 as the Oxford end of an educational network that was intended to channel boys from school at Wykeham’s foundation at Winchester to higher learning at Oxford. All told, of the surviving Oxford and Cambridge colleges, fourteen were founded before 1370, a further eight between 1370 and 1480.