*Caerphilly, the Welsh castle that Hugh the Younger had more or less stolen from the estate of the earl of Gloucester, was already the second largest castle in England (after Windsor) before Despenser enlarged it.
*Not completely. See the story of the Dunheveds, below.
*One of the strongest arguments for the widespread belief in a homosexual relationship between Edward and Hugh the Younger is that Orleton had been giving sermons accusing them of sodomy ever since Isabella’s return. However, Orleton’s strong affiliation with Isabella’s rebellion makes him a less than disinterested party.
*It’s less clear that either Edward I, who was just as unsuccessful in pacifying Scotland, or Edward III, who failed just as notably to defeat France, were superior in any strategic sense.
*Or Stuart. The change in spelling probably occurred during the twelve years that James’s mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, spent in France.
*The first, the Justinianic Plague that originated in the sixth century CE, was nearly as destructive: 25 million dead in a population that was only a third as large.
*Though the prayer is apocryphal—that is, no document containing it has ever been found—the sentiment is not.
*Gibbon’s great work begins with the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180, and ends, more or less, with the papal schism of the fourteenth century (about which more later). Something as big as Rome takes a very long time to fall.
*Which is not to say that the Norse were just lucky. Once climate permitted travel past the Arctic pack ice, they were ingenious enough to equip their longships with a so-called sun-compass—a circular sundial with an adjustable gnomon that would hit a particular spot on the circle at noon, indicating the ship’s latitude, and so allowing dead reckoning. And latitude-accurate dead reckoning was sufficient not only to get from Norway to Scotland, but to Iceland, Greenland, and even North America.
*Just to confuse matters, the “calorie” used to measure the amount of energy in food is actually a kilocalorie.
*So, indeed, can sunspots, which cause an even slighter change in the radiation emitted by the sun. Or volcanoes, which can shoot enough dirt into the atmosphere to change the Earth’s albedo—the amount of radiation it reflects back into space—and the amount of heat reaching the surface. In April 1815, the top four thousand feet of Mount Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, erupted into an aerosol dust that gave the world a famous “year without summer” months later.
*Lower pressure can have many causes, including wind direction. Persistent “thermal lows” are caused, in general, by warmer air in the upper atmosphere; warmer air is less dense and therefore has less mass for its volume than colder air.
*Until the discovery of a method for purifying coal into coke in the seventeenth century, all iron manufacture depended on charcoal, because it had so few of the impurities that make iron brittle.
*Modern yields are closer to 300 to 1.
*Cnut the Great, a king with a complicated ancestry—part Polish, part Danish—ruled Denmark, Norway, England, and most of Sweden from 1016 to 1035.
*When the Anglo-Saxon Saint Edward took the throne himself, in 1042, he interrupted a fairly long string of Vikings who had worn the English crown; his mother had married Cnut the Great, king of not only England but Denmark and Norway, and when Cnut’s son and successor, Harthacnut, died, the throne went to Edward, his half-brother.
*The chronicles probably aren’t to be believed. The “quick march” of a modern infantry platoon is 120 strides per minute, at thirty inches a stride, or 3.4 miles per hour. At that pace, they would have to have been marching for nearly fourteen hours each day.
*One reason that civilization first appeared in the great river valleys—the Nile, the Tigris/Euphrates, the Yellow, and the Indus—is that they were where sun and water were most abundantly reliable, and agriculture therefore most productive.
*The pound, as a currency measure, is even older than the Norman Conquest. From the ninth century forward, rulers of England denominated it as 240 silver pennies. This was supposedly equal to a pound of silver, copying the libra used in Charlemagne’s empire; hence the £ symbol. In order to confuse both popular historians and their readers, however, a “pound” of precious metal weighs considerably less than a pound of anything else: about 350 grams, or three-quarters of a “real” pound.
*A rough estimate from several sources suggests that about 12 percent of the non-noble population of eleventh-century England were freemen; a bit more than a third serfs; a bit less than a third cottagers; and the remainder, perhaps one in ten, true slaves. By the fourteenth century, however, true slavery had virtually disappeared.
*The mark—a German word—was widely used throughout medieval Europe, though not especially consistently. In the eastern part of the old Carolingian empire, it was a coin made of about eight ounces of silver (the western part, which was in process of becoming France, used the livre, which, whenever it wasn’t being devalued, was nominally equal to a pound of silver). In post-Conquest England, however, the mark was exclusively used as a unit of account, equal to 160 pence, or two-thirds of a pound sterling.
Just to further complicate matters, the ubiquity of Italian bankers—city-states like Florence were the first places in Europe to mint gold coins since the fall of Rome—made the use of florins or ducats (each about 3.5 ounces of gold), yet another standard.
*This is the origin of the House of Lords.
*Though Scotland did produce, then as now, high-quality wool, which was the most valuable agricultural product in Britain. See chapter 9.
*Edward’s gravestone, with apparently unintentional irony, includes the motto pactum servo: “I Keep My Word.”
*Zelopehad, one of the Israelites on the exodus out of Egypt, died leaving five daughters and no sons. When they appealed to Moses to grant them their father’s inheritance, God supported them . . . and, presumably, therefore, Robert Bruce’s claim to the throne of Scotland through Isobel of Huntington, a descendant of King David I.
*Though Carrick was an earldom, Annandale was actually a far richer fief.
*Readers who think that three characters named Robert Bruce is excessive will probably be less than delighted to learn that there were two John Comyns: the earl of Buchan and his cousin, the lord of Badenoch.
*The knight banneret was one of Edward’s innovations, a way of undermining—or at least evolving—the hierarchy of a feudal levy. Typically, a banneret was a commoner, raised to knighthood (in theory, at least, on the field of battle) and granted the right and obligation to lead other knights and soldiers in battle under his banner—a square or rectangular flag, distinguished from the triangular pennons of other knights. In battle, knights banneret were indistinguishable from England’s lower gentry, leading “banners” of troops, usually a hundred or more men. However, unlike the barons, they had no independent source of income, as they were paid, like the household knights, from the king’s treasury.
*The Stone, which was eventually placed under the Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey, and used for subsequent English (and British) ceremonies, became the subject of several centuries’ worth of rumors about its authenticity, the idea evidently being that at various moments in history, Scottish nationalists somehow substituted a fake for the real thing. In 1950, four Scottish students stole it (breaking it in the process), and it was a year before it was returned, along with still more rumors about another substitution. In 1996, it was finally, and formally returned to Scotland, and there it can be seen, in Edinburgh Castle’s Crown Room. Or, at least, something can be seen. . . .
*The forest of Selkirk, better known today as Ettrick Forest, was the greatest survivor in Britain of the deforestation described in chapter 1. It covered more than one hundred fifty thousand acres (by way of comparison, Sherwood Forest, in England, less than five thousand) and was therefore very nearly perfect for irregular warfare.
*Still, and for the next decade, in Rome. For more on the Avignon papacy, and anothe
r conflict between the loyalty owed king and pope, see chapter 7.
*While this seems like the work of a centuries-later hagiographer, it was recorded by Walter of Guisborough, an Augustinian monk in fourteenth-century Yorkshire.
*For more about the Hanseatic League, see chapter 10.
*From the standpoint of the church, Scotland was, except for some of the islands, a single province, and at the end of the thirteenth century, it was customary for all Scottish bishops to be consecrated by the pope directly.
*The charters in question were the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, the latter forced upon Edward’s father, Henry III in 1217, two years after the English barons did the same to his grandfather, King John. It’s really a single document, the so-called Great Charter of the Liberties of England, and the Liberties of the Forest—still a live statute in England.
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