Foundation

by Peter Ackroyd

  It is certain only that the young king preferred the company of Gaveston to that of his new bride. He had married the twelve-year-old Isabella, daughter of the king of France, on the orders of his father intent upon creating yet another grand and prosperous territorial alliance. The wedding had taken place in France a month before the coronation and, in his absence, Edward had appointed Gaveston as the keeper of the realm. This in itself was enough to arouse the envy and wrath of the English magnates. One of Edward’s first acts as king was then to honour Gaveston with the earldom of Cornwall, a title generally kept within the royal family. This was a serious blow to courtly protocol, and was more than a problem of etiquette. It was a question of land and money as well as title; if they were not properly distributed by the king, was then anyone safe? It was even believed that Gaveston himself had been given charge of patronage at court, granting goods and benefits without consultation with the barons. There could be no more important office in the fourteenth-century royal court, and it raised immediate problems about the king’s judgment.

  Gaveston did not help matters with a waspish wit and a strong sense of his own importance. He was reported to be ‘haughty and arrogant’ with a pride ‘intolerable to the barons’. He invented nicknames for the leading magnates, such as ‘black dog’ for the earl of Warwick and ‘burst belly’ for the earl of Lincoln. He revelled in the king’s grace.

  A parliament was held in the spring of 1308, at which the earl of Lincoln invoked the new provision of the coronation oath and demanded that Gaveston be dismissed from court. Edward refused but two months later, cowed by the presence of the magnates with their armed knights, he agreed to exile his favourite to Ireland. He wrote to the pope admitting that there had been ‘disturbance and dissension’ and that he had not yet ‘fully enforced unity’. This was the period, too, when his cousin abruptly left the court. Thomas of Lancaster was another grandson of Henry III, and was perhaps the richest as well as the best-connected noble in the land. He had also become disaffected, with fatal consequences for Piers Gaveston.

  A year after his exile in Ireland, the favourite was back. The king had recalled him for assistance in his campaign against Robert Bruce. The Scots refused a set battle, however, and so the king was reduced to a number of sorties and skirmishes that still left the northern part of his kingdom unprotected against attack. Unlike his father, he had not kept the peace.

  He had not kept his promises, either. The likely shape of his reign had already become clear. He was considered by the magnates to be weak and ineffectual. He slept late. He prevaricated. None of this would necessarily disqualify a modern monarch but, in fourteenth-century England, it was inexcusable. A king was supposed to embody the prowess and vigour of the country. The failure of the Scottish campaign was a specific sign of the king’s general incapacity. It was further stated that he had so badly managed his resources that his entire household was in decay; as a result he had extorted money unfairly. Numerous complaints were also made concerning specific infringements of Magna Carta, such as the unjust seizure of lands and the misuse of writs.

  The parliament of 1311 issued a set of twenty-four ordinances by which the king was supposed to govern. It was declared that the country was on the point of open revolt ‘on account of oppressions, prises and destructions’; ‘prises’ were the confiscations made by royal officials. One contemporary chronicler wrote that the threat of deposition was made against Edward if he failed to comply; if that is correct, then the forces against the king rivalled those against King John a hundred years before. The rebel lords called themselves ‘the community of the realm’ but they were no abstract or objective force; they were not a constitutional ‘party’. It was a world in which the force of individual personality was the cause and spring of action; personal rivalries and affections made up the politics of the period.

  The ordinances themselves were designed to produce what might be called baronial rule. The king was not permitted to make war, or leave the kingdom, without the consent of the barons; the king’s justice and the king’s treasury must come under their supervision. A parliament, naturally under their control, would meet once a year. One other stipulation was made. Gaveston, once more, had to go. He was to be banished from the realm before All Saints’ Day, 1 November.

  The king refused to countenance these demands and prepared himself for civil war. Gaveston did sail from Dover, two days after the stipulated date, but he returned a month later. Edward and his favourite then moved to the north, and began recruiting an army. It was at this point that the king’s cousin, Thomas of Lancaster, became his most prominent challenger; Lancaster wrote to the queen, promising to rid the court of Piers Gaveston forever. And this was what he proceeded to do. Gaveston was taken at Scarborough, when the forces of the barons besieged the castle there, and a month later he was beheaded in the presence of Lancaster. Two sayings of the period have survived as an apt accompaniment to these events. ‘There is no one who is sorry for me,’ the king is supposed to have complained, ‘no one fights for my rights against the barons.’ The other is a more generalized statement: ‘The love of magnates is as a game of dice, and the desires of the rich like feathers.’

  The execution of Gaveston was according to precedent unlawful, since as earl of Cornwall he should have been judged by his peers, but it had the effect of bringing to a summary end the threat of civil war. The gratuitousness of the deed seems to have surprised everyone. Some of the rebel barons returned to the king. If there were a civil war, only the Scots would benefit. The prospect of further hostilities, and the threat of an enemy on the border, concentrated the minds of the lords. Negotiations, in and out of parliament, took place for the best part of two years. In October 1313 the rebel lords made a public apology in Westminster Hall, and the king resumed his powers very little affected by the ordinances of 1311. He had won a marginal, and provisional, victory that was compounded by the birth of a son that guaranteed the continuation of his dynasty. His hatred, for the murderers of his ‘minion’, smouldered.

  But his power soon fell apart once more. He took an army into the north, finally to dispose of Robert Bruce, but at Bannockburn he suffered a mighty defeat. The battle was fought in what was called ‘an evil, deep and wet marsh’ wholly unsuited to the English cavalry but more amenable to the Scottish infantry; the earl of Gloucester led a charge into the Scottish ranks, but was cut down. The army of the Scots then attacked the horsemen, crying out ‘On them! On them! On them! They fail!’ The English were massacred, their bodies lying in the marsh or in the river Bannock. The king fled for his life and, with a few followers, sailed to Berwick where he hoped to find safety. He had lost Scotland. The battle of Bannockburn ensured the independence of that country, and was perhaps the worst military disaster of any medieval English king.

  It is difficult for a sovereign to survive the shame of defeat. It implies the forfeiture of his single most important duty, that of protecting his realm. Edward I had been known as ‘the most victorious king’ and ‘the conqueror of lands and the flower of chivalry’. His son bore no such titles. When Edward eventually arrived in York he was in disgrace. Thomas of Lancaster insisted that once again he should be bound to the ordinances of 1311. A contemporary chronicle reports that ‘the king granted their execution, and denied the earls nothing’.

  Lancaster at this juncture took effective control of the kingdom, but he proved no more popular or effective than his cousin; he was considered to be arrogant and overbearing. He stayed on his estates, and was loath to attend councils or parliaments. He did not take advice. It was also rumoured that he was in secret contact with Robert Bruce on the principle that the king’s enemies might become his own friends. The king stirred himself out of his weakness or incapacity, and began to gather his supporters. Two centres of power and of patronage existed, with the retainers of the king and the earl vying for mastery. There cannot be two suns in the sky.

  A weak king seems always to presage, or to represent, a weak c
ountry. In the medieval period there is some strange alchemy between the state of the nation and the state of the monarch. The harvests of three successive years from 1314 failed, as a result of prolonged and torrential rain, and according to one chronicler there ensued misery ‘such as our age has never seen’. It became known as the ‘Great Famine’, and from that period we can date the continual fall in the English population throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the summer of 1315 the archbishop of Canterbury ordered that every parish perform solemn processions; the clergy were to walk barefoot, surrounded by the sound of bells and by chanting, in order to implore mercy from God.

  But God was not listening. The cost of wheat rose from 5 shillings to 40 shillings a quarter (28 pounds or 12.7 kilograms). Often there was no bread to buy. The prices of the basic commodities rose to a level higher than any previously recorded. The cattle and the sheep were destroyed by outbreaks of murrain. The population itself, laid low by starvation, was attacked by various forms of enteric fever that often proved fatal. Rumours of cannibalism abounded, but they were plausible rather than probable. The situation of the English garrison at Berwick, however, is instructive; as the horses began to die the cavalrymen boiled their carcases in order to eat the meat, and then left the bones to the infantry.

  In northern England as a whole the situation was rendered increasingly desperate by the raids of Scottish gangs. The incidence of violent crime also increased, as the hungry and the dispossessed looked for relief. There are records of gangs of ‘vagabonds’ perpetrating robberies and assaults. Reports of ‘corrupted air’, and of strange alterations in the atmosphere, were frequent. Human beings were, as always, powerless in the face of great natural disasters. The bodies of the dead were lying in the streets. According to the Brut chronicle, ‘so miche and so faste folc deiden, that unnethes [scarcely] men might ham bury’. Life for the majority of the English people was nasty, brutish and short.

  Yet this was the period when, for two years, direct taxes were levied upon the people to pay for the Scottish wars and the royal household. Twelve thousand quarters (336,000 pounds or 152,480 kilograms) of corn and malt were needed to feed the armies, further depriving the people of their necessary food. The king and the noble lords were not particularly interested in the sufferings of the English, despite their claims to represent ‘the community of the realm’; they were concerned only with their own wealth and power. The citizens of Bristol rose up in their despair and occupied the castle. It was written that ‘to seek silver for the king, I sold my seed’.

  By 1318 the worst of the famine was over, the spectre of starvation banished by a bountiful harvest. Prices steadied, and then fell. But signs of overall decline were still in evidence, with the spread of disease among cattle and a general contraction of agricultural production. There would be really no sustained recovery for a hundred years.

  The king always relied upon a strong confidant to deal with the business of the realm; he could not of course put his faith in Thomas of Lancaster, because his cousin was implacably opposed to him. So he placed his trust in a new favourite. The successor to Gaveston was Hugh le Despenser who, together with his father of the same name, gained a considerable hold over the irresolute king. Despenser soon acquired lands and castles, particularly in Wales where the family was already strong, and as a result he alienated all the other lords of the principality. His officers assaulted or threatened anyone who stood in their way; they burned down barns, and laid false charges against prominent landowners.

  Despenser, as the king’s chamberlain, tried to conceal his thefts and extortions under the guise of constitutional propriety; it was his duty and responsibility to bring order to Wales. But everyone knew that his case was fraudulent. The king’s favourite had once more become arrogant and over-mighty at the expense of the barons. Thomas of Lancaster then stepped forward, and announced that no reliance could be placed in the king or his courtiers. In the spring of 1321 the land and property of the Despensers were attacked by those whom they had disinherited; it was a form of revenge that came perilously close to civil war. One chronicler, Robert of Reading, wrote that now the king’s ‘infamy began to be notorious, his torpor, his cowardice, his indifference to his great inheritance’.

  At the beginning of August in the same year the great lords of the north and the west came to London with their armed retinues, and insisted that the Despensers be expelled from the realm. They were accused of ‘encroaching’ upon royal power, and of controlling access to the king’s presence. They had perverted the law and illegally gained custody of lands. Edward, faced with the solid phalanx of their enemies, yielded. The Despensers were banished from England.

  Yet this was only the beginning of what turned into a general civil war. The king had decided that it was better to remove his opponents one by one. He besieged Leeds Castle, the home of one malcontent, and executed its garrison. These executions were not part of the chivalric code, and were met with widespread disapproval. They demonstrated, however, that the king was in earnest. He then recalled the Despensers, and began to organize a military campaign to defeat those whom he considered to be rebels against his power. Having mustered his forces at the beginning of March 1322, he defeated Thomas of Lancaster in battle. He had cornered his old enemy at last and, after a summary trial, he executed him. It was the first time that a sentence of death, on the charge of treason, had ever been directed at a member of the royal family. Lancaster had cut off the head of Piers Gaveston; Edward, long meditating his revenge, beheaded Lancaster.

  Other members of noble families, who had taken Lancaster’s part, were now at the king’s mercy. ‘Oh calamity,’ the anonymous author of a life of Edward II wrote, ‘to see men recently adorned in purple and fine linen now dressed in rags and imprisoned in chains.’

  Many of these lords were hanged on the lands that they had once owned. The king ordered altogether twenty-five executions. No English sovereign had ever punished his enemies among the barons so mercilessly.

  A curious sequel to Lancaster’s execution can be recorded. He was conceived by many to be the noble opponent of a vicious enemy. As such, his memory was revered. At the site of his execution, and at his tomb in Pontefract Priory, there grew a sacred cult in which miracles were attested. A drowned child returned to life beside the tomb itself; a blind priest recovered his sight at the place of Lancaster’s death. A servant of Hugh Despenser decided to shit on the same spot, as a gesture of contumely, but a little later his bowels were parted from his body. Another centre of piety was established at St Paul’s Cathedral, in London, when a stone table commemorating Thomas of Lancaster became the site of further miracles. The king issued ordinances to dissuade the people from making pilgrimages to Pontefract or St Paul’s, but he could not thwart the piety of the populace.

  In this uncertain and disordered period sporadic outbreaks of violence arose throughout the country. In 1326 the chief baron of the exchequer, Robert Belers, was ambushed outside Melton Mowbray and murdered; the gang, led by Eustace de Folville, was well known. Five sons of a lord of the manor, John de Folville, had turned themselves into a criminal fraternity; they terrorized their home county of Leicestershire, with numerous murders and robberies. They hired themselves out as mercenaries, and kidnapped prominent local people in return for large ransoms. They even fought in foreign wars as part of the retinue of lordly patrons.

  One of the brothers, Richard de Folville, had been appointed as rector of Teigh by his eldest brother. It was a convenient cover. When he and his followers were one day pursued by various officers of the peace, they took refuge in his church. From that vantage they shot many arrows, killing at least one of their pursuers. But then the local people took the law, literally, into their own hands; they dragged Richard from the church and beheaded him on the spot. The other brothers managed to escape justice.

  Other criminal bands were to be found in the early decades of the fourteenth century. One leader called himself ‘Lionel, king of t
he rout of raveners’, and he wrote threatening letters from ‘our castle of the wind in the Greenwood Tower’. So violence at the centre rippled through a country already troubled by famine and disease.

  Smaller incidents of disorder are recorded. Robert Sutton insulted Roger of Portland, clerk of the sheriff of London, in open court; he put his thumb to his nose and exclaimed, ‘Tprhurt! Tprhurt!’

  John Ashburnham rode up to the sheriff ’s court, held in the open air, and so threatened the sheriff that he fled; at which point Ashburnham whistled on his fingers, as a signal that his men should rise up in ambush.

  When a writ was served on Agnes Motte, she appealed to her neighbours; with drawn weapons they compelled the servers of the writ to eat it, wax and parchment.

  When the mayor of Lynn tried to change the rules of trade, a crowd of tradesmen, under the leadership of the prior, dragged him from his house, placed him on a stall in the marketplace, and forced him to swear on the host that he would make no changes. It is interesting here that the prior of Lynn led the charge. But other clerics were involved in lawlessness. A gang of six monks from Rufford Priory attacked, and held to ransom, a local gentleman.

  The rector of Manchester invited a local couple, with their daughter, to dinner. The rector’s servants seized the daughter, broke two of her ribs, and then deposited her in the rector’s bed; he had sex with her that night, but the unfortunate girl died from her injuries a month later.