The Third Horseman

by William Rosen

  Stratford, John, 235

  sunspots, 10n, 137

  Switzerland, 227–29, 230

  taxes, 108, 138, 139

  Tell, William, 228

  textiles, 68, 197

  wool, 42n, 82, 181, 197–99, 221

  Third Horseman, 259

  Thorvaldsson, Erik, 13–16, 17, 19, 224

  Tiptoft, Pain, 111

  Tostig Godwinson, 23, 24

  Tour de Nesle, La (Dumas), 172

  Tour de Nesle affair, 170–72, 181

  tournaments, 85–86

  at Wallingford, 89, 90

  Tower of London, 48, 91, 101, 196, 243

  towns and cities, 200–202, 204

  trade, 54, 221–24, 257

  Tragedy of Macbeth, The (Shakespeare), 29, 60

  traitor’s death, 74–75, 84–85, 244

  Treaty of Birgham, 42

  Treaty of Edinburgh/Northampton, 251, 254

  Treaty of Leake, 183, 187, 194

  Treaty of Salisbury, 42

  trees, 125

  deforestation, 18–19, 34, 68, 97–100

  rings on, 11, 196

  Trionfo della Morte, 256–57

  Trokelowe, Johannes de, 135–36, 142, 159

  Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward II, King of England, The (Marlowe), 71

  Tuchman, Barbara, 77, 256

  Tweng, Marmaduke, 111

  Unlaw, 35

  Urban II, Pope, 63, 168

  van Gulik, Willem, 69, 70

  Vikings, 6–8, 13, 18–21, 29

  conquests and trading posts of (map), 22

  villages, 81–84, 113–14, 126, 147–49, 201, 237

  manorial, map of, 148

  villas, 30–31, 82

  villeins, 33, 82, 126, 127, 149

  Virgil, 184

  Vita Edwardi Secundi, 79, 89, 93, 111, 114, 119, 122, 129, 140, 178, 179, 189, 236

  vitamin-deficiency disorders, 158–59

  volcanic eruptions, 10n, 131–32, 136–37

  Voltaire, 213

  Wales, 29, 128, 178–78, 243

  Wallace, William, 4, 49–58, 60, 61, 64–66, 71, 84, 86, 101, 255

  Bruce and, 76

  death of, 75

  Edward I and, 74–75

  Wallingford, Richard, 142

  Walsingham, Thomas, 179

  Walter de Henley, 146

  Walter of Guisborough, 51n, 88, 89, 106

  Warenne, John de, 48–49, 51, 93

  weather, 9, 136, 138, 258, 259

  Welsh Marches, 178–79

  White Battle, 189–90

  William II, Count of Hainaut, Holland, and Zeeland, 161–62, 241

  William of Orange, 255

  William the Conqueror (William II of Normandy), 21, 23, 25–28, 29, 31–33, 35, 46, 60, 87, 91, 193, 218, 227

  wine, 152–53, 154, 155

  winters, 123, 128, 196–97

  Wishart, Andrew, 78, 104

  Wishart, Robert, 39, 51, 119

  Wittfogel, Karl, 30

  wool, 42n, 82, 181, 197–99, 221

  Yolande of Dreux, 36

  Zannekin, Nicolaas, 236–37

  Zelopehad, 43n

  *For more on the medieval papacy, and its stormy relationship with the Holy Roman Empire that dates, more or less, from the coronation of Charlemagne in 800, see chapter 10.

  *It’s a common trope, in England and elsewhere. Beginning in 1539, Edward’s several-times successor, Henry VIII, used his final break with Rome as a justification to confiscate the wealth and income of every monastery, priory, and convent in England and Wales.

  *In 1296, Boniface issued a papal bull entitled Clericos Laicos, which forbade any priest or monk from paying any tax to any secular authority. Philip ignored it.

  *For more about the consequences of the partition of Charlemagne’s brief empire, see chapter 10.

  *In the Northern Hemisphere, anyway; in the Southern Hemisphere, counterclockwise.

  *Their neighbors to the north, in Holland, had an even more dramatic problem; there storm floods made the drained land so vulnerable that it sank more than twenty feet, essentially turning the region into a group of barrier islands until the great dikes of the sixteenth century were finally built to keep the North Sea at bay.

  *Goedendag means “good day” in Dutch, a language with an unappreciated gift for irony.

  *The spurs were retaken by the French two years later after the battle of Mons-en-Pévèle. However humiliating the defeat at Courtrai, to France, with a population fifteen times larger than Flanders, it was just a battle in what would be a very long war . . . as we shall see.

  *Despite the legends that Edward I had promised his recently conquered Welsh subjects a “native-born king,” the investiture of the young Edward as Prince of Wales didn’t occur until 1301.

  *Unsatisfyingly, he doesn’t say what amount of sodomy would be less than “too much.”

  *Earldoms, in England, remained titles in the gift of the king, who could create them as needed, since they were unconnected with any particular lands; the previous earl of Cornwall, Edmund, had died seven years earlier, and the title had been vacant ever since.

  * For more about the Templars, see chapter 8.

  *It is an obligation of all popular historians, upon mentioning the de Vere family, to say something about the authorship of the plays of William Shakespeare. Consider it said.

  *Thirty-two years later, in 1341, the county and borough representatives would form England’s first true House of Commons when the knights-of-the-shire and the burgesses met for the first time separately from the (equally new) House of Lords.

  *Burning down Europe’s forests actually increased—temporarily—the nitrogen content of the soils left behind, by adding wood ash to it. However, assarting itself had been made possible by a revolution in iron making, beginning in approximately 900, which produced huge numbers of axes, saws, and other tools for felling trees. The same revolution led to the diffusion of the heavy plow, which, perversely, was so good at removing weeds that it also depleted the newly assarted land of potential nitrogen replacements.

  *Pessagno would, between 1313 and 1319, arrange advances to the king of more than £25,000 annually, which meant that a single banker was financing nearly one dollar in ten of all national expenditures.

  *Led by William Francis, a local who had apparently practiced climbing the castle scarp in order to visit his girlfriend in the town below.

  *This was less true when European knights were matched against the more lightly armored and more maneuverable cavalry of the Arabs, Persians, and Kurds they faced while on crusade, but they were a non-issue north of the Pyrenees since the ninth century.

  *This was also the case at the 1315 Battle of Morgarten. See chapter 10.

  *The destruction of food supplies as a deliberate stratagem of war already had a long and dishonorable provenance. As far back as the seventh century, the Strategikon, written by the Byzantine emperor Maurice, gave very specific tactical advice on how to destroy crops, fields, and trees; how to poison wells; and so on.

  *That is, less low pressure over Iceland; less high pressure over the Azores/Gibraltar/Lisbon.

  *Under very wet conditions, the topsoil will turn into peat, itself useful as a fuel, and even more useful when a few million years, and a lot of pressure, turns it into coal.

  *Vetches were ancient grain legumes, resembling red lentils, but so bitter that they are now only consumed by cattle.

  *In the early Latin of the Great Famine, caritas—which would later come to mean “charity”—acquired adjectives like maxima, permaxima, and even intollerabilis.

  *A comparable decrease, which usually follows a year later, is known as La Niña.

  *Though relatively few actually starved to death. For more on hunger-related disease, s
ee chapter 9.

  *Which translates, confusingly, as “the poor ate their children, dogs, cats, and bird dung.” More than likely, the last comes from a mistranslation of a passage in Second Kings describing the siege of Samaria by Ben-Hadad, king of Aram, where “a donkey’s head sold for eighty shekels, and a quarter of dove’s dung for five shekels.” The original Hebrew more likely meant something like “seed pods,” though it is unclear why the Bermondsey writer thought that eating children, cats, and dogs wasn’t repulsive enough.

  *It’s a lesson well worth repeating in the beginning of the twenty-first century, every time someone with a political ax to grind uses either a March blizzard or an August rainstorm to argue for—or against—anthropogenic climate change. It’s true that weather is orders of magnitude more variable than climate; a particularly warm week in February doesn’t argue for global warming any more than a particularly cold week in September.

  *Entire books have been written on the significance of grains to particular civilizations; by the fourteenth century, typical rice yields in east Asia were as much as five times that of Europe’s cereal grains, didn’t deplete the soil (because it’s grown in river-watered terraces), and required little manure and significantly less acreage. However, because of the tending needs of wet-rice farming, they were far more labor-intensive, and, in the minds of some more deterministic historians, a key factor in the growth of authoritarian government.

  *Thus, a village with eighteen hundred acres (like the well-studied village of Elton) would require about twenty plows to feed its 120 or so families . . . which, indeed, was the number it owned.

  *Though it would, soon enough. See chapter 8.

  *The household of Elizabeth de Clare—Piers Gaveston’s onetime sister-in-law—used a bit more than 200 pounds of barley and oats to make approximately 240 gallons of ale weekly . . . twice as much grain as a typical peasant brew.

  *A century later, the Lord Steward, the Comptroller of the Household, and Cofferer of the Household (who was responsible for paying the wages of the royal household staff) would become offices sanctified by time and custom, their occupants members of the king’s privy council, and otherwise powerful bureaucrats. In the early fourteenth century, their hierarchy hadn’t—quite—been set in concrete, but in Isabella’s household, the steward hired the comptroller, who hired the cofferer, who hired everyone else.

  *Among other things, the French accused Boniface of simony, which is the source of the unfortunate pope’s most durable notoriety: Dante Alighieri, who had his own reasons for hostility toward Boniface (he had intervened on the other side of an internal Florentine dispute), wrote him into the Divine Comedy as a future resident in the Inferno’s eighth circle. The charge was repeated by both Boccaccio and Rabelais, a reminder that the power of kings and popes doesn’t outlast the revenge of poets.

  *Italy and Germany did not take on their modern borders until the nineteenth century. For more about the HRE, see chapter 10.

  *The island acquired its name not, as some casual historians report, because of the number of Jews executed there, but because it was where one of Paris’s early Jewish families settled. Since the construction of the Pont Neuf in 1607, it’s been connected to the Île de la Cité as the Place Dauphine.

  *The Templar curse, for those who believe in such things, had legs. De Molay had, it was said, predicted that both Pope Clement and King Philip would join him before God by year’s end. Clement barely survived de Molay, dying on April 18, to be succeeded by John XXII, and Philip IV died on November 13, 1314, at the relatively young age of forty-six.

  *Five hundred years or even longer. In 532, two of the sons of the Frankish king Clovis, Childeert and Chlotar, annexed Burgundy to the Frankish kingdom.

  *If so, it worked, sort of. Even though Charles and Philip remarried, both died without male heirs, which encouraged Isabella’s son to claim the throne of France, which ignited what became the Hundred Years’ War.

  *It was an enduring nickname—Bertolt Brecht used it in his Life of Edward II of England, as did Maurice Druon in a 1960 novel—but not a particularly original one. Gray was copying Shakespeare, who’d coined it for Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI.

  * The term “pirate” is anachronistic; though England had admiralty courts from the reign of Richard the Lionheart, none of its laws explicitly prohibited piracy.

  *The earl was also charged with getting a papal dispensation allowing the king to postpone the hasty promise he (and Isabella) had made two years before to go on crusade; and to secure support from the pope against Robert Bruce.

  *Though the torrential downpours of the previous two years had not returned, and planting for 1317 had more or less returned to normal, no one in England—or, for that matter, northern Europe—was likely to relax until the fall harvest.

  *The word “hinterlands” literally refers to the amount of farmland contiguous to a town or city.

  *One thing that happens to uncured hay when it is stored wet is that it rots; so much so that it outgasses methane, which has a distressing habit of spontaneously combusting.

  *For more about Flanders, see chapter 9.

  *As, indeed, was the cat.

  *The actual economic calculus is even more complicated: Horses were valuable when armies were on the march because of the constant need for replenishing mounts. In addition, horses could also be sold when old, their hooves used for glue, their tails and manes for horsehair, though not their flesh for human food, since Pope Gregory III had forbidden the consumption of horsemeat in the eighth century. Plow horses therefore could be sold only for about 5 or 6 shillings, less than half their cost when new. Europe’s agricultural peasantry was poor, but could not afford to be economically unsophisticated, and made such choices daily.

  *The title, formally Lord Chamberlain of the Household (to distinguish it from the Lord Great Chamberlain, a state office held, in 1318, by the earl of Oxford), was still somewhat informal at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

  *The original, sent to the pope at Avignon, has since disappeared; other versions claim up to fifty-one signatures.

  *In order that their presence would be obvious to everyone, the retainers were uniformed in green tunics with one yellow sleeve.

  *A lucky opportunity, that is, for the king. No one would call the retainers killed at Leeds anything but unlucky.

  *By the end of the fourteenth century, England recognized fifty-one different grades of wool, selling for a much as a shilling a pound and as little as two pence. Still, with at least eight million sheep, each producing at least a pound of wool annually, England could count on more than £250,000 every year.

  *The world’s largest fourteenth-century city was Hangzhou, China, with a population of at least 400,000, though some estimates go as high as 1.2 million, perhaps as many as Rome had in the first century BCE.

  *This applies generally to any of the rival claimants to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire; see chapter 10.

  *Just his. Earlier attacks on the Despensers had featured the king’s banners as well, in order to maintain the fiction that the attacks were legal. Marching on Harclay under only his own banners made Lancaster an admitted rebel and traitor.

  *Or at least its western half; the emperor in Constantinople, ruling what modern historians call the Byzantine Empire, was likewise known as the Emperor of Rome.

  *One of the longer-standing consequences was that Dante’s book stayed on the Vatican’s banned list until 1921, three years after the last Hapsburg ruler in Europe had finally been removed from his throne—a lesson in the durability of papal grudges.

  *The term “count palatine” derives from Charlemagne’s paladins, and is a more or less honorary title in Germany; in England, it actually has some more precise meanings, specifically used by a noble who has some of the powers of the king within his domain.

  *In 1988, archaeologists uncovered the original site of the London trading post the Stahlhof, or “Steelyard” underneath the Cannon
Street tube station.

  *Five centuries later, the playwright Friedrich Schiller turned the Rütlischwur into poetry eerily reminiscent of the Declaration of Arbroath, which the Scottish nobles issued in 1319: Wir wollen frei sein, wie die Väter waren, eher den Tod, als in der Knechtschaft leben [We swear we will be free, as were our sires / and die rather than live in slavery].

  *In another part of the William Tell legend, outlaws had offered their services to the Schwyzers, been rebuffed, but determined to fight for their country, started an avalanche at Schafstetten that broke the Austrian advance.