CHAPTER THREE
“Penalty for Their Betters”
1298–1307
In the opening scene of King Lear, the title character displays the flaw at the heart of feudalism.
Know that we have divided
In three our kingdom: and ’tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age;
Conferring them on younger strengths, while we
Unburthen’d crawl toward death.
Having offered each of his daughters a third of his kingdom, Lear expects the traditional feudal bargain: the lord grants land; the vassal pays with loyalty and obedience. But the bargain works only as long as the lord remains more powerful than the vassal. When the king is “unburthen’d” to the point that his only claim on his subjects is their love for him (Cordelia: “I love your majesty according to my bond, neither more nor less”) the system collapses. Madness, blindness, and death follow.
Shakespeare, writing in 1606, was looking back at a regime that had been dead for at least a century. It had been a long time dying. As the thirteenth century turned into the fourteenth, the structure that had evolved to organize both the productive and destructive resources of European societies—feudal manorialism—wasn’t yet in full retreat. But decline it did, for the next two centuries.
The reasons for its decline had little to do with the ones behind its ascent. It’s an exaggeration to say that the manorial system was entirely caused by the four centuries of long summers and mild winters that marked the Medieval Warm Period. But neither is it a simple correlation. Europe’s distinctive system of military obligation and land tenure would have looked very different had the region never experienced the population explosion of the MWP. On the other hand, it is a coincidence that feudal manorialism started to disappear at the same time as the MWP. Feudalism wasn’t ended by a change in the climate, but the emergence of nations. England had a head start on that particular development (though France wasn’t far behind) because of William of Normandy’s transformation of his conquest from a patchwork of clans and petty kingdoms into a hierarchical feudal pyramid with himself at the top: legally the landlord of all England.
The pyramid outlasted its feudal roots; the monarchs at its top recognized that to delegate power to vassals was to risk ending up like Lear. English monarchs mostly managed to avoid that particular mistake, steadily increasing their own authority at the expense of their barons. When Edward Longshanks attempted to expand that authority over all Britain, he was doing so as a national sovereign, against a nation without one. No matter the charismatic leadership of William Wallace, Scotland needed a proper king if it was to survive.
Even before war with England gave a new urgency to the subject, the path to the Scottish throne had been a tangled maze, a game that demanded a mastery of legal forms, both secular and canonical; knowledge of half a dozen different family trees; and a willingness to resolve disputes with edged weapons. Dynastic conflict in fourteenth-century Scotland was as complicated, and as bloody, as anything in Macbeth. Small wonder, then, that the route of Robert le Brus was as straightforward as the shell of a nautilus.
The fallout from the Falkirk disaster wasn’t long in arriving. By fall of 1298, Wallace resigned as Guardian, and his movements over the next seven years are almost impossible to document. Robert Bruce and John Comyn of Badenoch, were, in his absence, named the new Guardians of Scotland, both of them theoretically guarding the realm on behalf of John Balliol. In Badenoch’s case, this was a triumph of hope over experience, as he had not only been soundly defeated by the earl of Surrey the year before, but in his earlier stint as Guardian had agreed to invite Edward Longshanks to decide the fate of Scotland. Edward, meanwhile, returned to Carlisle, in England, to find his own nobles in passive rebellion, refusing to support a new tax—the term of the day was “subsidy”—needed to reprovision his army for another Scottish invasion.
Even without an English army to fight, Scotland continued the conflict. In July 1299, a raid on the English garrison at Roxburgh failed, revealing not only deficiencies in the nation’s military capabilities with Wallace gone, but also severe strains in its political leadership. The insurgents were torn between fighting outside threats or internal rivals, and this time the inside game pitted supporters of Comyn against Bruce loyalists. At a meeting immediately following the failed raid, Comyn and Bruce came to blows—“John Comyn leapt at the Earl of Carrick and seized him by the throat”—and were restrained only by the intervention of James Stewart and the bishop of St. Andrews, William Lamberton.
By summer of 1300, after nearly a year of factional conflict, Bruce resigned as Guardian. A few months later Edward invaded the southwest of Scotland again, and was again met by what had become Scottish strategic doctrine: avoid direct battle, retreat, and destroy all the provisions in the invader’s path—a tactic that forced the rural peasantry on both sides of the border to bear the cost of the war. The only real defense of the scorched-earth response was that it worked. In August, having never lost a battle—he barely fought one—but increasingly unable to supply his army and handicapped by the feudal convention that allowed his barons to refuse service for longer than eight weeks, Edward withdrew, offering Scotland a six-months’ truce.
The Scottish leadership put the time to practical use. At the end of the year 1300, Comyn had, like Bruce, resigned his Guardianship. To replace them, a new Guardian was appointed: John de Soulis, a compromise candidate, related to the Comyns, son-in-law to the High Steward, a neighbor of the Bruces, and an undoubted patriot (and supporter of Balliol). He was also, unlike his predecessors, more diplomat than soldier, and he immediately opened a new front in the war with England.
De Soulis’s strategic objective was to secure political support from Pope Boniface VIII, who remained, at least nominally, the sovereign of what was still widely referred to as Christendom; loosely speaking, the community of European Christians owing allegiance to the bishop of Rome.* The evolution of the papacy, from religious authority over only one of Christianity’s important sees—from the fourth century to at least the seventh, the bishops of Alexandria, Antioch, and especially Constantinople frequently regarded themselves as independent of papal authority—was, like the Viking Age, armored knights, and vassalage, an unlikely consequence of the impact of the Medieval Warm Period on Europe.
Europe’s only realistic structure for the control of its territories was feudalism; and, with the population explosion of the Medieval Warm Period, the only system for working that land was manorialism. The combination produced Europe’s distinctive caste system, with wealthy and powerful nobles and sovereigns at the top; nowhere more than in Rome itself, where a half-dozen families played the feudal game of thrones in microcosm, with the throne of Saint Peter as the prize. By the eleventh century, it was a rich prize indeed, as the popes had more, and richer, feudal vassals than any secular ruler. The Cluniac order—so named for its home monastery in the Burgundian village of Cluny—had more than twelve hundred manors throughout Europe; and despite their notional adherence to the prayer-poverty-and-penance regimen described in the sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict, their priors were as wealthy as any count or duke in France. The Cistercians, a defiant spinoff from the Cluniacs, administered more than eight hundred of their own monasteries from the Danube to the Derwent, including the most innovative factories and the most productive farms in Europe. Moreover, unlike secular fiefs, ecclesiastical ones never had to worry about the death of a lord, and subsequent squabbling over inheritance. Abbeys, monasteries, and priories were, like the Church itself, immortal, and the wealth produced by their vassals’ productive labors, therefore, accumulated like an estate that could pass from generation to generation untaxed and undivided.
The ownership of real estate by legal entities that are theoretically immortal is known, formally, as mortmain, a portmanteau Latin word meaning “dead hand.” The term suggests, correctly,
how the practice was viewed by medieval jurists and kings. Bad enough that huge tracts of productive land were immune from the royal taxes due on the death of their owners; even worse that secular owners frequently bequeathed estates to the Church in order to avoid both tax collectors and feudal levies. Edward I hated the latter practice so much that he enacted two statutes, in 1279 and 1290, forbidding it without royal permission.*
Bequests of land were only one source by which the medieval Church enriched itself. Enormous donations were frequently made by European sinners in fear of the torments of hell. In an age of largely unquestioned faith, only the priests, bishops, and archbishops who were the vassals of the pope could offer or deny the sacraments that meant salvation. And they weren’t especially shy about using their particular power. In 1095, Pope Urban II had mobilized the armies of Europe to retake the holy places of Jerusalem, in what became the first of the Crusades. Alexander II authorized and blessed the Norman invasion of England. Gregory VII excommunicated the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV—twice—in a dispute over which of them had the right to nominate and invest bishops.
By its very nature, papal power increased with the expansion of feudal manorialism, because such a large number of feudal lords were bishops, priors, and the like, by custom and canonical law subject to the authority of the pope. And, of course, that’s how it declined as well. All things come to an end, whether anomalously good climate, feudalism, or papal authority, each of which was on its last legs by the end of the thirteenth century.
It was not a coincidence. As national sovereigns consolidated their own authority, the power and independence of their vassals declined. Kings could raise armies of their own, police their own territory, and—most important—tax their subjects. Popes couldn’t, not without the consent of the secular rulers themselves. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the ability of the bishop of Rome to control events was therefore in irreversible decline, but that didn’t mean he was completely powerless. And if Boniface, who became pope in 1294, could no longer dictate to powerful monarchs like Edward I of England or Philip IV of France, he was far from impotent: Boniface’s ability to influence events was greatest when two other parties were in conflict.* And so, John de Soulis, Scotland’s new Guardian, turned his attention to Boniface early in 1300.
The battle for Boniface’s support, fought out in salons and across dinner tables, with weapons like legal precedent and casuistry, lacked the cinematic character—cloth-yard arrows flying through the air; spears disemboweling warhorses—of the battles of Stirling Bridge or Falkirk. But it didn’t want for drama. Ever since 1299, William Lamberton, named the new bishop of St. Andrews as one of Wallace’s first acts as Guardian, had been Scotland’s chief advocate in Rome, and while he had thus far failed to achieve victory, he had at least forestalled any sort of defeat. In 1300, he was joined by an even better-known defender of the cause of Scottish independence: William Wallace himself.
After resigning the Guardianship, Wallace had departed Scotland, leaving his onetime supporters somewhat dismayed that he had evidently given up the fight. They needn’t have worried. Wallace’s destination was France, where he planned to enlist Philip IV as an ally in his courtship of Rome. In this he succeeded, persuading the French king to provide him, on November 7, 1300, with a letter to Pope Boniface that read, in part:
Philip by the grace of God, king of the French, to his beloved and loyal people appointed at the Roman Court, greetings and favour. We command you that you ask the Supreme Pontiff to consider with favour our beloved William le Wallace of Scotland, knight, with regard to those things which concern him that he has to expedite.
The “things” that concerned Wallace boiled down to only one: the pope’s right to intervene in the conflict between Scotland and England—a position just as stubbornly denied by Edward’s representatives, who presented it as a purely domestic matter, involving the rebellion of duly sworn vassals against their overlord. The Scottish strategy was to ask—over and over and over again—for a trial at papal court; the English response was to block, or at least delay, such a trial.
In early 1301, Lamberton and Wallace finally got their trial. The Scots may well have had the better argument, which was that when Edward accepted even a six-months’ truce with an entity speaking in the name of the “community of the realm” of Scotland, he had de facto recognized it. Most likely, they also had the interests of the papacy on their side, since four centuries of papal authority depended on being the final court of appeal for all disputes in Christendom. Either way, in 1301, Boniface ordered Edward “for the love of Mount Zion and Jerusalem,” to withdraw from Scotland, which he declared a fief of the Holy See, or face excommunication.
Edward, to the surprise of no one who had been paying attention during the twenty-eight years since he had been crowned, was not so easily intimidated. In July 1301, the gifted and proud English king is reported to have replied, “I will not keep my peace for Mount Zion nor silence for Jerusalem,” and, for good measure, he invaded Scotland yet again, and with predictably inconclusive results. The truce that ended his brief incursion, to run until spring of 1303, was brokered not by the pope, but by Philip of France, now host to the French-born titular king of Scotland, John Balliol.
Philip’s involvement added substance to the longstanding rumor of Balliol’s return to Scotland at the head of a French army. The two people most concerned with such a prospect were Edward I and Robert Bruce, since the Comyns were almost certainly going to prosper in a Balliol-ruled Scotland; the earl of Buchan, after all, was Balliol’s brother-in-law. On February 16, 1302, the sixty-three-year-old king of England and the twenty-eight-year-old earl of Carrick decided—for the moment, at least—that each had more interests in common than in conflict. Bruce admitted that he had joined Wallace’s rebellion “through evil counsel” and formally submitted to Edward as a direct vassal. The king, in turn, promised that Bruce wouldn’t be disinherited in the event of a Balliol return, and guaranteed that Bruce would keep
life and limb, lands and tenements, and will be free from imprisonment [and] because the kingdom of Scotland may be removed from out of the king’s [i.e., Edward’s] hands . . . and handed over to Sir John Balliol . . . the king grants to Robert that he may pursue his right and the king will hear him fairly and hold him to justice in the king’s court. If, by any chance, it should happen that the right must be adjudicated elsewhere than in the king’s court, then in this case the king promises Robert assistance and counsel as before.
It was naked political cynicism. Bruce had, for the second time (if you count the Capitulation of Irvine) betrayed the Wallace rebellion purely for reasons of self-interest. His calculation here, however, was complicated by more than his desire to keep Balliol from the throne. Bruce had fallen in love with the teenage daughter of one of Edward’s greatest vassals, the earl of Ulster, and in his case, the title referred to actual lands and estates; Richard de Burgh was the leading Norman noble in Ireland.
No record of the first meeting of Elizabeth de Burgh and Robert Bruce survives; though they were married in 1302, both the precise date and place are unknown. Even Elizabeth’s age at the time of her marriage is nothing more than a guess, though she was certainly no more than eighteen. What is known is that she was beautiful, rich, and tremendously well connected (her father possessed huge tracts of land in England and Ireland, and her uncle was none other than James Stewart, the High Steward of Scotland). Moreover, she and the young earl seem to have genuinely loved each other. Their love would be the marriage’s only constant through decades of armed struggle, imprisonment, and enforced separation.
One partnership begun; another about to end. Any reduction in the potential threat France offered to England made Edward, eo ipso, more of a threat to Scotland. Thus, anything that distracted Philip of France made Scotland very nervous indeed. And, at the same time Robert Bruce was marrying Elizabeth de Burgh, just such a distraction appeared on France
’s northeast border.
• • •
France’s troubled history with Flanders began, like just about everything else during Europe’s Medieval Warm Period, with Charlemagne. Or, more accurately, with the division of the Carolingian Empire on the death of his son Louis the Pious in 840.* Four centuries later, the province—much of modern Belgium and northern France, from the Scheldt River to Calais—was nominally ruled by the count of Flanders, though his sovereignty was largely at the pleasure of whoever sat on the French throne.
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