A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Extending beyond the immediate needs of education, the idea of the college, served by a body of clergy celebrating the liturgy in honour of their founder, often with elaborate choir schools or professional musicians attached, itself became one of the most characteristic phenomena of the late medieval English Church, inspiring the actions of Edward III himself in his foundation of the colleges of St George at Windsor and St Stephen’s at Westminster, within the shadow of the monastic abbey and royal palace. Music, that great accomplishment and delight of the English, appears as an especially royal art from the 1350s onwards, associated with the collegiate foundations of Edward III, as later of William of Wykeham or King Henry VI. Those who tune in to the service of nine lessons and carols from King’s College Cambridge at Christmas each year are probably aware that this particular service is a Victorian pastiche. The basic idea, however, of a college, with a royal or distinguished founder and with religious songs to accompany the good and godly learning of its fellows is at least seven centuries old.

  Like Walter de Merton and other college founders, Wykeham, both at Winchester and New College, laid particular stress upon the obligation of his foundations to support and educate his own kinsmen. Even now, the names Balliol or Wykeham have a resonance, thanks to their educational foundations, that others, just as famous in their day now lack. Wykeham was in some ways a less competent or significant administrator than his predecessor as bishop of Winchester, William Eddington, yet, thanks to his school and his college, it is Wykeham not Eddington whose memory has survived. Founders’ kin were still being admitted to Oxford, on preferential terms, as late as the 1850s, resulting in a lucrative though shadowy trade in false pedigrees intended to demonstrate kinship to long dead bishops. In particular, kinship to Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, founder of All Souls College Oxford, could guarantee a handsome lifelong stipend in a college which had no undergraduates but only fellows whose original purpose had been to pray for the dead of the Hundred Years War. It is sometimes asserted that medieval monasticism was swept away in England by the Reformation of the sixteenth century. In practice, a large number of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges retain identities that are essentially medieval and monastic, the arrangement of their buildings, and the election, dining and self-government of their ‘fellows’ (or teachers) being conducted according to procedures remarkably similar to those practised by medieval monks. Even monastic celibacy persisted long after the Reformation. The majority of the fellows of the Oxford colleges were not permitted to marry until as recently as 1881.

  The fourteenth century marked a high point for the universities, especially for Oxford where a rich tradition of theological speculation emerged, associated with such names as Duns Scotus (perhaps trained at Oxford, though owing his fame to his teachings at Paris), William of Ockham (trained at Oxford, but for most of his life an exile from England), and John Wycliffe (one time master of Balliol College, who we will encounter again in due course, and who throughout the 1360s and 70s was the most distinguished theologian permanently resident in Oxford, albeit later denounced as a heretic). Even these representatives of the highest of high learning nonetheless had their feet firmly on the ground of politics and the day-to-day management of the Church.

  Ockham wrote in support of the legitimacy of royal or imperial authority judged against that of the Pope. Wycliffe stood on the fringes of the circle around Edward III’s son, John of Gaunt, employed as a tame intellectual to bait the advocates of the Avignon papacy and to deny the Church’s claims to temporal as well as spiritual rule. All of these scholars, and in particular Scotus, played with the Latin language and invented their own terms of reference in ways that, on occasion, rival the most baffling of the statements of Wittgenstein or the modern philosophers of language. Nonetheless, grammar and the correct apprehension of terms and meanings remained at the heart of academic discourse. The outcome in the late medieval schools was perhaps a growing divorce between the worlds of thought and action, the relegation of much academic discourse to that bickering over abstractions that later critics would decry as ‘mere scholasticism’. Even so, the most famous question said to have been debated in the late medieval schools – ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’, probably invented by critics – was nothing like so absurd as it might appear. Behind it lay debates over mathematical infinity, the nature of corporeal bodies and abstract entities, the mechanics of space, time and movement that would still engage university students in the lecture rooms of Oxford or Harvard today.

  As in nineteenth-century England, where an intense grounding in the ancient languages of Latin and Greek was assumed to be the best training for those who would go on to rule nation and empire, so in medieval Oxford, there was an intensely practical side to a lot of tuition. ‘Business’ or ‘Management’ studies were already a feature of the Oxford curriculum in the fourteenth century, long before the twentieth-century mania for capitalist efficiency led to the endowment of some of the most hideous structures in a city famed for the ugliness of much of its modern building. Students were taught about angels, but also how to draft a letter, how to read a budget, how to conceal or disclose meanings from linguistic statements. From the debates of Ockham to the running of a diocese or service as a King’s clerk was only a short step. It was civil servants, not philosophers, that the universities were chiefly intended to produce.

  The Civil Service

  The civil service of Edward III was awash with such men. Government itself grew at a pace unparalleled since the twelfth century. By the 1350s, the royal chancery was issuing at least a hundred, and sometimes as many as two or three hundred routine legal writs on any day of its business, besides the longer or more significant of chancery letters that were then copied and enrolled in the chancery archives. The chancery was just one small part of government, and already stood apart from the business conducted under the King’s privy seal, itself now the focus of a bureaucracy of its own, or subsequently of the King’s signet with which the most personal of royal letters were sealed. All of this work, to which we must add that of the law courts and the massive efforts of the Exchequer to extract the revenues with which to fuel this bureaucracy, required the labours of several hundred clerks.

  Westminster Hall was the focus of these activities, partitioned into a series of spaces rather like those of the vaster ‘open plan’ offices of the twentieth-first century, with various other parts of the old palace of Westminster given over to the Exchequer or the annual three- or four-week-long meetings of Parliament, all of these institutions and occasions crammed in almost as afterthoughts to the domestic needs of the King, his household and family. The construction of houses, many of them on a lavish scale, up Whitehall and along the banks of the Thames, was intended to accommodate the greater men in attendance on the court. Long before Downing Street became the home of a prime minister, the surrounding properties were given over to courtiers and counsellors, direct antecedents to the ministers and chief secretaries of the modern departments of state.

  This state building was itself the product of pressures placed upon English government by the needs of war. Through the reigns of the first two Edwards, credit arrangements had been put in place to employ the future revenues of customs on wool and baronial taxation to raise loans from Italian bankers. Into the footsteps of the Riccardi of Lucca, bankrupted in the 1290s, stepped firms such as the Frescobaldi, the Bardi and the Peruzzi of Florence, who had continued to prop up royal finance into the 1330s. Quite why such firms were willing to undertake this work remains unclear, since all of them were eventually bankrupted when the crown, as was inevitable, defaulted on its debts. Perhaps they found themselves only slowly sucked into an arrangement from which it was then impossible to extricate themselves. Perhaps, like modern bankers, they had their eyes too firmly on future profits to remark the more imminent signals of apocalypse. From the 1330s, however, the King had somehow to raise cash himself, without mortgaging future revenues in return for injections
of foreign capital. Far from this reducing Edward III’s appetite for war, the 1330s were to prove the decade in which, after fifty years of being a regular though by no means annual business, warfare and the taxes to pay for it became a more or less permanent feature of royal government.

  Military Campaigns

  To distance himself from the catastrophes of his father’s reign, to divert the violent impulses of the aristocracy into foreign rather than domestic strife, to satisfy his love of chivalry and daring deeds, to associate himself with the glories of his family’s past (Henry II, Richard I and Edward I), Edward III embarked on a series of military campaigns that involved English armies in warfare in Scotland, France, the Low Countries and Spain, and at sea from the Firth of Forth to the Bay of Biscay. Intense military activity, against Scotland in the 1330s, immediately after Edward’s seizure of personal power, and against France from 1337 onwards, with the outbreak of the Hundred Years War, was punctuated by periods of truce, both with the Scots and the French. Even here, however, there was no permanent peace but a series of near annual raids and ‘chevauchées’ (mounted ravagings of the French or Scottish countryside).

  Scotland

  In Scotland, Edward III to some extent rebuilt the position that Edward I had enjoyed in the first decade of the fourteenth century, before the disaster of Bannockburn had led to the Scots overrunning of northern England. Edward Balliol, son of the humiliated King John de Balliol, was supported as an English pretender to the Scots throne, against the claims of King David II, son of Robert Bruce. At Dupplin Moor, in 1332, Balliol’s army inflicted a significant defeat upon the Scots, which was followed by a full-scale English invasion that was to last for most of the 1330s, leading to the transfer of Edward’s Parliament, Exchequer and chancery to York, to the successful siege and recapture of Berwick upon Tweed and, at Halidon Hill in July 1333, to a major English victory in battle. The English army won the day by mimicking precisely those techniques that the Scots had previously used to defeat English cavalry charges at Stirling Bridge and Bannockburn, adopting a defensive position and using mixed formations of archers and dismounted men-at-arms to see off the Scots’ attack. Henceforth, archers, many of them recruited from Wales or the Welsh borders, and the mounted infantry, riding to the battlefield but fighting on foot, were to become the hallmarks of English warfare.

  Military Techniques

  Just as after Hastings in 1066 the Normans had adopted the Anglo-Saxon technique of riding to war but fighting on foot, so, after a brief flirtation in the thirteenth century with mounted warfare and the magnificence of the cavalry charge, Edward III and his successors put aside such chivalric but potentially disastrous techniques in order to win their battles by patient defence and endurance. It was by precisely these means that Edward III won the Battle of Crécy in 1346, Henry V the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, or indeed the Duke of Wellington the Battle of Waterloo a full 400 years later. The English ‘square’ was first introduced to the King’s army at Halidon Hill, in direct and deliberate imitation of the Scots ‘schiltroms’ that William Wallace had commanded at Stirling. The techniques of Welsh archers and Scots spearmen, regarded in chivalric circles as mere barbarians, were now deliberately copied by what was intended to be the most chivalric fighting force in Christendom.

  France and the Hundred Years War

  Edward III’s Scottish campaign was arguably already grinding to a stalemate by 1337 when a far more ambitious prospect of war presented itself. Ever since 1328 and the death of King Charles IV of France without an heir, there had been a prospect that Edward III, son of Isabella of France and therefore the eldest living grandson of Philip IV of France, might be regarded as right claimant to the French throne, in preference to Philip of Valois, Charles IV’s cousin, who in 1328 had stepped in as King Philip VI, the first of the Valois kings. Edward’s claims had passed through the female line, but the so-called ‘Salic’ law, forbidding inheritance by women, was not cited in Valois propaganda until 1413, as part of a later attempt to revive defunct early-medieval law codes to justify the exclusion of Isabella and Edward from the French royal line. Even so, the English claim to the throne of France was not nearly so strong as might be supposed. Women claimants, even those themselves the daughters of kings, had been excluded both in 1316, following the death of the six-day-old King Jean I ‘the posthumous’ (the first time that the Capetian bloodline had failed in more than 300 years), and again on at least three occasions, following the deaths of the last of the Capetian kings in 1322 and 1328. Both in 1325 and in 1329 to Philip VI, Edward had performed homage for his lands in France, which by this stage included not only Gascony and the southernmost remnant of the old Angevin empire of Henry II, but the county of Ponthieu, on the mouth of the river Somme, acquired as part of the dower of Edward I’s wife, Eleanor of Castile.

  It had been as a result of his landing in Ponthieu, in 1066, that Harold had been taken captive and handed over to the Normans, a scene famously illustrated in the Bayeux Tapestry. It was from the port of St-Valery, within sight of Ponthieu, that the Norman fleet had embarked for England in 1066. Now, in 1337, it was because of Ponthieu and his own connections, by blood to the Capetian throne of France, and by marriage to Philippa, daughter of the Count of Hainault (in modern-day Belgium), that an English king for the first time contemplated a reverse restaging of the Norman Conquest, leading an English army across the Channel for what was intended as a full-scale ‘conquest’ of France. Like William I in 1066, Edward possessed a claim to the French throne that was very far from secure. Like William, he had to rely on propagandists to boost his cause, upon foreign allies to sustain him in hostile territory, and ultimately upon the fortunes of war controlled by God to determine the justice of his claim.

  Confiscation of Aquitaine and Ponthieu

  The catalyst to this English invasion was Philip VI’s formal confiscation of Aquitaine and Ponthieu in 1337, on the pretext that Edward III was harbouring Philip’s cousin and archenemy, Robert, Count of Artois. Like Edward I in the 1290s, Edward III now looked for allies in the Rhineland and the Low Countries, at vast expense (at least £124,000 in 1337 alone). Edward’s ultimate intention, perhaps, was to rebuild the empire of his predecessor Henry II, and at last to repair the humiliation of 1204 when Normandy and the Plantagenet lands north of the Loire had been seized by the French. Not for the first time in English history, nor the last, nostalgia for a lost epoch played a significant role in controlling ‘modern’ events. Edward himself set sail in July 1338, from the estuary of the Orwell in Suffolk, which itself had first entered English history in 1326. It was via the Orwell river that Isabella, Edward’s mother, had disembarked at the start of her campaign against Edward’s father. Just up the Suffolk coast lay the fairytale castle of Orford, built by Henry II, founder of Edward III’s Plantagenet dynasty, the only royal residence in this part of East Anglia, left virtually unaltered and unvisited since Henry had built it in the 1160s. Edward’s choice of embarkation point in 1338 was thus highly symbolic, governed by the practical logistics of shipping an army across to Antwerp, but evocative of the triumphs of Henry II and of Isabella of France, of the greatest of Edward III’s Plantagenet ancestors and the source of his claims in France.

  Opening Campaigns

  Like the world wars of the twentieth century, the Anglo-French conflict generated so vast an archival footprint, in chronicles, contracts for military service, letters and tax returns, that an entire lifetime could be spent in reading the evidence let alone in making sense of it. To summarize, very briefly: from 1338 to 1340, the opening campaign in northern France witnessed Edward himself assume the title ‘King of France’ (in January 1340, largely at the insistence of his Flemish allies who feared that, unless they fought for a titular King of France, they might be accused of breaching their obligations as subjects of the French crown), a major naval victory over the French at Sluys on 24 June 1340 (the exact anniversary of Edward II’s great defeat at Bannockburn in 1314), but also the breakdow
n of his alliances with the German and Flemish princes and above all the inadequacy of ordinary tax receipts to meet the costs of war. By 1340, for all of his boasted titles, the King was more than £400,000 in debt. In 1341, the threat of concerted action between the French and the Scots nonetheless forced the resumption of war, this time focussed upon the King’s support of the claims of John de Montfort to the succession to the duchy of Brittany, itself poised like a great reef in the Atlantic approaches, between the English Channel and Edward’s colonies in Gascony. The Breton succession dispute shifted the focus of war from northern to western France. An expedition, planned to take place via Flanders in 1345, was itself diverted by the murder of one of Edward’s remaining Flemish allies; the King set sail from Portsmouth instead, in July 1346, apparently intending to make for Gascony and the south.

  Caen

  Only when his fleet was blown off course was it decided to make a landing in Normandy, at St-Vaast-la-Hougue, south-east of Cherbourg. From there, Edward marched to the ancient ducal seat at Caen, the enclave from which William of Normandy had planned his invasion of England, 300 years before. Caen was taken on 27 July amidst scenes of slaughter and pillage every bit as terrible as those witnessed in England after William the Conqueror’s victory at Hastings. The bishop of Bayeux, custodian of one of the chief monuments to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the Bayeux Tapestry, was besieged within the castle of Caen. From Caen, Edward’s army moved eastwards, seeking a way back to the coast and thence to England. A campaign of conquest was fast degenerating into yet another raid on the French countryside: a ‘chevauchée’, in which the land itself would be wasted to feed and reward Edward’s troops. Such ‘chevauchées’, grim though they were, had one distinct advantage over French methods of war: they ensured that English armies received regular and invaluable practice in concerted troop movements. They were also, in a sense, one of Scotland’s greatest contributions to European history, since it was surely in imitation of the Scots raids south of the border and the reprisals taken by the families such as the Percys and Nevilles now set to guard the northern Marches, that these murderous affairs were first adopted. Once again, techniques of warfare normally associated with ‘barbarian’ peoples were adopted by the supposed flower of chivalry.