A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Plus ça change

  In the meantime, significantly, little changed, even at the King’s court. Far from the pestilence putting an end to the more ambitious schemes of King and nobles, between 1349 and 1357 Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster and the King’s cousin, spent nearly £35,000 rebuilding and decorating his Savoy Palace in the Strand. In July 1349, glaziers moved in to complete the windows in Edward III’s own chapel of St Stephen at Westminster, more than twenty of them working there, with glass brought from Shropshire, London and the Kentish Weald, at a total cost of nearly £4,000 on glass, painting, altars and statuary. Death and disease did nothing to curb the King’s or the court’s appetite for luxury and display, particularly in costume: the £500 spent on a single dress for the Queen to attend Edward’s great annual celebrations on St George’s Day, for example, or the £200 paid by the Black Prince in 1362 for jewelled buttons for his wife, a price equivalent to more than ten years of the wages of a master craftsman or esquire. The war with France dragged on throughout the 1350s, with sufficient money raised and armies recruited to produce the great victory at Poitiers in 1356. What we see here perhaps is the extraordinary resilience of mankind. Amidst the plague pits of the 1340s, as 600 years later amidst the horrors of man-made genocide, humanity has proved itself more resilient even than the bacteria that threaten its continued existence.

  The Plague Becomes Endemic

  The real effects of the pestilence were not felt in its immediate aftermath. Instead, the Black Death of 1348–9 (a term invented much later) was merely the harbinger of a more insidious, endemic pestilence that was to hover on the nightmare edge of society for centuries to come. The high mortality rate of the 1340s could fairly easily be repaired. Where the young and the old had died, the survivors, many of them in the prime of life, could marry and produce children. It was only when plague returned to claim this next crop of humanity that the real demographic effects began to be felt. A falling birth rate, rather than a rising rate of adult mortality, is most likely to lead to a real decline in population.

  Plague was reported across Europe again in 1361–2, and this time hit lords as well as commoners: nearly one in four of the English parliamentary peerage died in the course of a single year. A third epidemic erupted in 1369. Both outbreaks resulted in a mortality rate in England perhaps as high as one in ten of the population. Thereafter, its return became cyclical, in 1375, in 1379 to northern England, to the Midlands in 1381–2, to East Anglia and Kent in 1383 and 1387, on a national scale again in 1390, 1399–1400 and 1405–6, and so on throughout the fifteenth century. The effects upon a population already stricken by the initial great mortality were beyond doubt to reduce the human population of England to a level perhaps half of that at which it had stood in 1348, possibly 6 or 7 million, reduced by 1450 to nearer 3 million.

  Economic and Social Consequences

  The yield of mankind itself fell below even the pathetic levels recorded for sown wheat. Large amounts of land went out of cultivation. The cost of labour and wages rocketed. Food, by contrast, became if not cheaper then more readily obtainable. Green vegetables, fruit and above all meat, beyond the dreams of those who had eked out an existence before the Black Death, were now within the reach of peasant families themselves now able to break free from the restrictions and forced labour services that had previously defined them as ‘villeins’ or unfree. From the 1350s onwards, bondsmen broke their bonds and the age-old shadow of villeinage melted away from the land. The farm labourers of the nineteenth century portrayed by Thomas Hardy might have lived in squalor or ignorance, but they were free to come and go as they pleased. This would not have been the case for the peasants of the generation before 1340. As in Ireland before and after the famine of the 1840s, a human tragedy left behind survivors whose own living standards and expectations were far greater than those that had gone before.

  Edward III’s Last Years

  It was against this background that the political history of the final years of Edward III was played out: the reopening of Anglo-French hostilities after 1369, the King’s decline into ill health and senility, his virtual retirement from all state affairs save for his attendance, at Windsor each year, at the great junketings associated with the Order of the Garter and the feast of St George. In 1375, after a series of military humiliations and following vast expenditure on diplomatic display, a year-long truce was agreed by which, in farcical circumstances and without any thought for the consequences, the English negotiators forced the abandonment of recent gains in Brittany. The death of the Black Prince in June 1376, after a prolonged period of infirmity, not only deprived government of its most dashing military leader but opened up the question of the succession to the throne. The King’s younger son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster as a result of his marriage to the heiress to Thomas of Lancaster’s once vast estate, now emerged as a potential rival to his nephew Richard of Bordeaux, born in 1367, son of the Black Prince, grandson of Edward III. Unflattering comparisons were drawn between the position of John of Gaunt in the 1370s and that of a previous King John of England, younger son of King Henry II, who in 1199 had seized the throne and accomplished the murder of his nephew, Arthur of Brittany. In 1376, John of Gaunt as effective vice-regent was forced to stand by as the so-called ‘Good Parliament’ took action against the more corrupt ministers of the King, including Edward III’s own mistress, Alice Perrers.

  Good and Bad Parliaments

  For the first time on its own initiative rather than merely as a tool in power struggles within the royal family, Parliament emerged as a political force acting in the common interest against the King’s own government. A ‘Speaker’ was for the first time appointed to represent the Commons. The man chosen for this task, Peter de la Mare, was a member of the affinity of the Earl of March and probably owed his promotion to magnate influence. Even so, the very fact that the Commons elected a spokesman represents their claim to new privileges, independent of the authority of the King or the King’s representative in Parliament, John of Gaunt. Ministers henceforth had to work not just to please the King but under the threat of impeachment by Parliament acting as a high court to discipline the executive. As under Henry III or Edward II, the community of the realm, now voiced through Parliament, threatened to subvert the patronage powers of the crown and hence to attack royal authority at its most vulnerable point.

  The experiment was short-lived, so short-lived indeed that, had it not served as a precedent for far more radical measures in the seventeenth century, this brief experiment might well have been forgotten. The Good Parliament closed its business in July 1376. By October, the disgraced courtiers had all been pardoned. Peter de la Mare, the Commons’ Speaker, was imprisoned at Nottingham Castle. Within six months, John of Gaunt’s ‘Bad Parliament’ of 1377 had revoked virtually all of the measures of 1376. William Langland, in the late 1370s revising his great English prose poem Piers Plowman, itself intended as a howl of protest against the iniquities of society, introduced a fable to his new preface in which a parliament of rats advised by mice debates but then fails to implement a scheme to place a bell upon the neighbourhood cat; the cat (for which perhaps read the King or more likely John of Gaunt and aristocratic privilege) is needed, so the mice suggest (themselves perhaps symbolizing the ‘Bad Parliament’ of 1377), because the community itself can only cohere and survive under the threat of oppression.

  Social, Political and Economic Context

  Set in a broader context, the reign of Edward III can be seen not, as Langland might have viewed it, as a slow decline into tyranny and corruption despite all attempts at reform, but as yet a further stage on the road levelling the playing field not just between King and aristocracy but between aristocracy, gentry and peasantry. In the Black Death or the wars with France and Scotland, knight and ploughman died alike, whatever the trappings of their funerals or tombs. Death did not discriminate between palace and mud hut, and there is nothing so effective as death to emphasize that rich and p
oor share a common destiny, however much the rich may wish otherwise. Even without the great pestilence of the 1340s, Edward’s ambitions in France far overreached the capacity of his Exchequer to finance his campaigns. Just as in the 1290s Edward I had proceeded from hubris in Wales to nemesis in Scotland, so now, once again, the greed for glory and dominion threatened thrombosis to a royal administration starved of the blood supply of tax.

  Demands for ever higher subsidies to pay for the King’s wars merely excited the Commons, the aristocracy and such new phenomena as the self-governing oligarchies of towns or trades to combine in developing means to defy the King. Rhetoric, the writings of John Wycliffe, in which such institutions as the established Church were brought into contempt, was matched to a new willingness by Parliament to take practical steps to control the executive, and it is highly significant that the chief voices calling for restraint both in Church and state, however much they have been orchestrated by courtiers such as John of Gaunt, now came from the lower clergy and from simple laymen. Where we learn most of the evils of the early Plantagenets from monastic chroniclers, from the letters of great churchmen such as Thomas Becket, or from the Bible commentaries of Archbishop Stephen Langton, all of them written in Latin and therefore veiled behind the polite conventions of a learned tongue, by the late fourteenth century we can turn to an entire literature of protest, now expressed in the English vernacular itself distinct from the French of the King’s court.

  Moreover, the subversion of royal authority continued to gather pace, as the King’s dependence upon subsidy and customs duties became habitual. The introduction of customs on wool exports in the 1270s, their raising to unprecedented levels in the 1330s (when the ‘maltote’ of 40s a sack which Edward I had tried but failed to impose in 1297 became not only accepted but standard), the recognition after the 1290s of Parliament’s authority to grant or withhold tax, and the demand, from the 1340s onwards, and again as a result of the French wars, that such taxes be bestowed on a near-annual basis rather than as occasional subsidies to a King in theory expected to live off his own resources in land and the profits of lordship, served initially to gorge the King’s executive with cash. But the cash itself was then squandered on foreign adventures whose essential futility merely excited resistance to further taxation.

  Warfare was to some extent a joint-stock enterprise between King and aristocracy, with large profits for those who supplied the armies, ransomed the more valuable hostages or seized the most valuable prizes. Even so, the costs of fourteenth-century taxation fell ultimately upon the land and upon that class of peasant farmer or labourer whose silver was demanded by their lords in increasing quantities but who themselves gained least from either taxation or warfare. This was an age before old age pensions, before a ‘health service’, before the recognition of any public duty to alleviate the effects of poverty or unemployment. The tax ‘take’ was miniscule compared to that of the modern state, but the profits of taxation were almost exclusively targeted towards the pride, glamour and honour of a King whose subjects gained very little from their sovereign’s glory. As in late Soviet Russia, public display and a massive ‘defence’ budget took priority over all other economic considerations. The ‘state’ in medieval England, save at times of particular crisis or royal incompetence, remained very much the servant of the King.

  By the time of Edward III’s death in 1377, the Plantagenets had precious little profit to show for the past forty years of warfare and profligate expenditure in France. The heavier customs duties charged on wool, the decision (motivated in part by a desire to make the garrisoning of Calais a self-financing operation, in part by the selfish interests of those wool merchants working in close cooperation with the court) to establish the Company of the Staple at Calais to tax English exports of wool but to allow foreign merchants to buy wool at English markets and to export it in their own ships untaxed, had already begun insidiously to undermine the taxable profits of an industry which had traditionally defined England as a land of wool and hence of wealth. The Chancellor of England now sat on a woolsack, yet another new symbol of Englishness and of English pre-eminence destined for a long posterity. Meanwhile, in part as a result of demography and the falling population, in part as a result of economic incompetence, the woollen industry itself went into decline.

  Rather than export wool at the rates now offered by the Staple in Calais, wool growers turned from foreign markets to the domestic production of cloth. The great trading entrepôts of Flanders and northern France themselves faced economic catastrophe as the cloth industry was transformed from a long-distance into an increasingly localized trade. In the process, the King’s profits, both from tax and from customs duties, began themselves to decline. Wool exports fell from an annual average of 32,000 sacks in the decade after 1350 (each sack being measured as twenty-six stones of wool, so comprising a total export of over eleven million pounds of raw wool by weight), to under 24,000 sacks in the 1380s, 14,000 by 1420, sinking thereafter to 9,000 sacks for the thirty years from 1430 to 1460 (just over three million pounds of wool by weight).

  By the 1440s, cloth exports had overtaken the export trade in wool. All told, the King’s revenues from customs and tax declined from an average £70,000 in the 1360s, to £45,000 by 1400 and less than £30,000 in the decades after 1430. As with the lack of strategic thinking devoted to the wars in France, the central failure to grasp economic realities, or to address the declining revenues of the crown, was to have fateful consequences in the longer term. A government which attacks the basis of its own tax revenues, which fails to protect the industry upon which it relies for its financial survival, which mortgages its future revenues on the international money markets, and which spends the money thus borrowed on futile wars or a display of the state’s largesse is heading very rapidly for economic and social disaster. Aquitaine or the kingdom of Castile, the objects upon which were lavished the proceeds of the Edwardian fiscal state of the 1360s and 70s, were as remote from the interests and perceptions of most Englishmen of the fourteenth century as the Falkland Islands or the mud and dust of the Euphrates or the Oxus from those of English taxpayers of a mere recent era.

  LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

  Having sped so far and so fast along the highway of English kingship, it is time to take pause, to switch off the engine for a while and to attend to the new scenery in which we find ourselves. The century from the accession of Edward I to the death of Edward III had witnessed only a brief minority (the period when a king, in this case Edward III, fifteen years old in 1327, was deemed too young to rule), and the death by violence of only one English ruler (Edward II). The century which followed, by contrast, witnessed three minorities (one of them, involving Henry VI, only nine months old at the time of his accession, lasting for nearly sixteen years) and no less than four murdered kings. It is perhaps no coincidence that it is during this period that charges of madness first begin to be levelled against the English royal family. King John had been bad and King Edward II incompetent without any suggestion that either of them was clinically insane. By contrast, after 1377, five of the six immediate successors to Edward III have, at one time or another, been described as mad: Richard II as manically paranoid, Henry IV as a paranoid depressive, Henry V as a religious fanatic, Richard III as a well-educated psychopath and Henry VI (the only one of these kings definitely to have suffered mental breakdown) as the craziest and most catastrophic of them all.incompetence

  Historians, rather like poachers or policemen, spend a lot of time in stake outs, watching for signs of change at the front doors of history, whilst the real changes are taking place around the back. Traditionally, an explanation for the disasters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has been sought at the top end of society, with the kings, with their ‘madness’ or incompetence, with the balancing out of resources of king, aristocracy and gentry, and with the effects of endemic warfare, first in France and then, as part of a general breakdown in civil order, in England. Medieval intelle
ctuals had been inclined, from a time long before 1066, to divide society between three orders: those who fought, those who toiled and those who prayed (warriors, peasants and clerks). At the head of these three orders stood the King, God’s representative on earth. Lacking any more sophisticated metaphors by which to characterize society, the tendency was always to imagine the various parts of the body politic as representative of the parts of the human body, with the King as the head, the organ of rationality and direction, the warriors and churchmen as the active members discharging the head’s commands, and the peasantry as the more brutish bodily parts, the guts and muscle of society. After 1370 or so, the head part of society is generally supposed to have lost its reason, sending the rest of the body politic into near-fatal convulsions.

  Those who played chess – a game introduced to England from the more distant regions of Persia and India, highly popular amongst aristocrats of both sexes – might imagine a similarly simplified social structure, in which the qualities and the lifestyles of the ‘higher’ pieces, knights and bishops amongst them, were played out in quite another dimension from that of the stolid and ultimately dispensable pawns. Edward III, although he almost certainly did not rape the Countess of Salisbury, quite possibly played chess with her. For those with eyes to see, and no doubt helping to explain why chess itself was so popular amongst an aristocracy never inclined to subservience in its dealings with royalty, the chess King himself was not only outmanoeuvred but frequently outwitted by a much more agile queen. Knights and sometimes even pawns could topple royalty. Like the real kings of late medieval England, the chess-piece king is obliged to move slowly, cautiously and, if he wishes to survive, no longer at the head of his troops but as a venerable figurehead, weighed down by the baggage of administration and tradition.