The Perfect King

by Ian Mortimer

  To understand this, we must review the events described above. As the crisis grew over the course of 1348, Edward held parliaments and a number of tournaments, doing what he did best: pushing himself forward not only as the kingdom's leader but also as its champion. Then his daughter died. In August he established the collegiate chapel of St George at Windsor, and may have meant to found an order along the lines of the Garter soon after, but in September the death of a second child cruelly destroyed any such chivalric dream. Then the country was wholly plunged into despondency with the arrival of the plague. In October, Edward publicly proclaimed he was going to France, where most of the country believed (rightly) that the disease was already raging. It was an act of defiance: a 'publicity stunt'. He then returned to England, and did not attempt to avoid London, where the plague was spreading, but then, perhaps acting on the advice of his physicians, he withdrew and held his games and celebrations at slightly quieter spots, Otford and Merton. And he was probably wise to accept his physicians' advice, for then the true horror of the plague in southern England became apparent. He was forced to cancel parliament. At the same time the most dire rains began to fall, the cattie murrain took hold, and the deflationary cycle started. Against these problems even Edward faltered. But at the very height of the plague, when two hundred men, women and children were being buried in London every single day, and lords and ladies were hiding in their isolated manors up and down the country, when sheep and cattle were dying in their thousands, and the social order seemed to be falling apart, he threw aside the advice of his physicians. His people needed leadership, and he was the king of the English, chosen by God. He could do nothing to halt the plague, but he could demonstrate effective leadership in spite of it. His founding of a chivalric order at this point in time was a second act of defiance against the disease, a second 'publicity stunt'. Edward demonstrated that it was business as usual in England in the only way he knew: a high-profile tournament. It demonstrated to his subjects that their king was not hiding in some out-of-the-way manor, waiting for the all-clear, in contrast to almost every lord and bishop in England.

  In this reading of the evidence the key factor influencing the foundation of the Order is the timing of the tournament, at the very height of the plague. This implies that no garters, mottoes or any other objects or phrases associated with the Order were its direct cause. This is not surprising: the idea of founding a chivalric order had probably been in Edward's mind since returning from France in 1347, if not since giving up the Round Table plans in 1344. But it is patently obvious that the emblem of the garter itself has nothing to do with the disease. Likewise, it is highly doubtful that the motto honi soit qui mal y pense (evil to him who thinks it evil) was connected with the calamity. So, why this emblem and this motto? What else was going on in Edward's mind at this time?

  We could say that, because the garter and motto had been in frequent use at tournaments in the period 1346-48, they were simply adopted because they happened to be there when the Order was formally constituted. But Edward had been planning the Order for at least a year, so it is unlikely that the regalia of the Order were merely incidental. In addition, there is no doubt that a Companionship of the Garter - of twenty-four knights, one of whom was almost certainly the prince - was in existence by the end of 1348. Edward seems to have borrowed this idea, and used it as the basis for his more distinguished and formal Order in April 1349. But this still does not explain where the emblem of the garter comes from. Nor the motto.

  A number of modern writers have tried to associate the adoption of the garter and motto with Edward's claim on the throne of France. Although this suggestion is superficially attractive, given the recent conquests in France, it does not stand up to detailed scrutiny. For a start, it is very difficult to see how a garter can be symbolic of Edward's dominance over Philip's kingdom: a man's garter is hardly a fearsome article of clothing. Because of this, it has been suggested that the garter is meant to represent a sword belt. This too is difficult to accept: not least for the common-sense reason that the Order would then have been called the Order of the Sword Belt. We might also object that a sword belt is a far less powerful symbol for an order of chivalry than other knightly accoutrements (a sword, for example). As for the motto, the language in which it was written — French - has often been seen as good evidence that it relates to Edward's claims on the French throne, as Edward's other known mottoes were all in English. Indeed, scholars have repeated this particular argument so many times that it is now said to be a widely accepted 'fact'. But it is a huge assumption, without any evidence to support it. The wording has no political or military overtones at all, and the two contemporary English literary references have nothing to do with the political struggle against France. We should also remember that all Edward's other adopted mottoes were personal, not international statements. 'It is as it is', as we have seen, was probably a tacit announcement of the death of his father, aimed at those in the know. Similarly the apparently love-related motto he used the previous Christmas - 'Hay, Hay the White Swan, by God's Soul I am thy Man' - was anything but international propaganda, requiring either familiarity with the English poem or song from which it came (if literary) or the identity of Edward's 'white swan'.

  One fact which has escaped previous writers' attention is that the garter was a chivalric emblem with a history which predated Edward's victories in France. Edward himself purchased pearl garters in the early 1330s, and by his own admission, Lancaster wore garters in his youth. In particular, Lancaster's phenomenal military success in 1345 may have been the reason why now it became an especially prominent chivalric symbol. It had the advantage that it was highly visible, for it could be worn over the plate armour which knights now habitually wore. So when Prince Edward presented garters to the twenty-four 'Companions of the Garter' in 1348, the recipients were probably members of a company — possibly an unofficial jousting fraternity - formed in honour of a victorious war leader, either Edward or the earl of Lancaster. Furthermore, because the honi soit motto was integral to the garter badge in the very earliest records (before the foundation of the Order), it follows that it was not necessarily Edward's motto, but either that of the Companionship of 1348 or the originator's own. If the originator was Lancaster, this would explain why the language is different to Edward's other mottoes. French was Lancaster's first language, and, although he also spoke English, French was certainly his language of choice: he wrote a whole book in it, and nothing in English or Latin. Moreover, Edward had good reason not to anglicise this motto in 1349, for only a French or Latin tag would have been suitable for an order which marked out with great distinction Hainaulters and Gascons as well as Englishmen. To use an English motto would have alienated all the non-English members of the Order and their companions, and made it an inward-looking, English-only institution, not an outward-looking pan-European one.

  There was one other key element to the inaugural Garter tournament in April 1349, and it is most revealing of the atmosphere at court in the tense months while the plague raged around the country. As probably every reader knows, Edward was once thought to have adopted a garter as the symbol of his Order having picked up the countess of Salisbury's garter at a 'ball' after the fall of Calais, saying honi soit qui mal y pense to those who suspected that he was holding a lady's undergarment for all the wrong reasons. This story is normally dismissed by modern historians, being too romantic, unsupported by contemporary evidence, and contrary to the received wisdom that the Order was conceived purely as a political or military institution. The story was probably devised in the fifteenth century to explain why the premier chivalric order was denoted by a garter (of all things!) and the strange motto. But this level of scepticism has meant that no one has seriously examined it in the light of what we know about the foundation of the Order and its inaugural tournament.

  The story of the countess of Salisbury's garter is essentially another love story - like the story of the visit to Wark - in which Edward wa
s depicted as conscious of his own illicit desire for a young and beautiful noblewoman. The high-profile tournaments of 1348-49 were certainly social occasions at which such love-making could - and did - happen. Thomas Burton noted with horror how Edward summoned many ladies to the jousts of 1348, adding 'there was hardly a lady there assigned to her own husband; they were with other men, by whom they were debauched as the lust took them'. Writing about the Lincoln tournament of 1348, Henry Knighton, an Augustinian canon at Leicester, stated that forty or fifty beautiful women attended, and 'inflicted wanton and foolish lusts on their bodies, according to popular rumour. Nor did they fear God or blush at the stories people told, as they threw off the bonds of marriage. In this light the fifteenth-century story about Edward's flirtation with a married lady who had lost an undergarment seems wholly in keeping.

  If we now examine the fifteenth-century story more closely, we note that it does not name the lady concerned in its earliest versions. That is a sixteenth-century addition. So, on the face of it, even though the countess in 1349 was a young and desirable woman - Joan 'the Fair Maid of Kent' - there would appear to be no grounds for connecting her with the tournament. However, surprising though it may be, there is a strong reason for taking Joan seriously as playing a lead romantic role in the inaugural Garter tournament of 23 April 1349. She was about twenty years of age, a member of the royal family, and undoubtedly very beautiful. She was also in the extraordinary situation of publicly having two husbands at the same time. She claimed that she had first married Sir Thomas Holland, one of the founder Garter knights. But she was officially married to the second earl of Salisbury, another of the founder knights. In May 1348 her supposed first husband - who was now the steward of her second husband - stated to the pope that she had been forced into her marriage with Salisbury. He stated that she had previously agreed to marry him and had slept with him, so he now claimed her as his own wife. She supported this story, obviously preferring the steward to his lord. Her marital status was in question for a full eighteen months, and it was not until November 1349 that the pope ordered her to divorce Salisbury and marry Holland, which she did. The crux of the matter is that on 23 April 1349, while the marital rights to this most famous royal beauty were being argued over, her two husbands were on opposing sides at the Windsor tournament: Holland was on the prince's side, Salisbury on the king's. Therefore there is no doubt that the countess of Salisbury was a focus of romantic attention at the inaugural Garter tournament. She was being fought over - literally - by at least two of those present. She did not drop her garter for Edward (women in 1349 did not wear them), and the motto honi soit probably has nothing to do with her, but the allure of the countess of Salisbury was indeed connected with the inaugural tournament of the Order of the Garter. Later her wedding dress was given to the collegiate chapel of the Order,50 and this — coupled with the French story of Edward's infatuation at Wark - is probably why her name finally crept back into the tale after more than two centuries' absence, transformed into the fictitious woman who lost her garter.

  This allows us to complete the picture of the foundation tournament of the Order of the Garter. In April 1349, Edward brought together his longstanding ambitions for a chivalric order and realised them in an institution which built on a companionship or jousting fraternity formed to celebrate his victories and those of the earl of Lancaster. The despondency of the plague called for a high-profile publicity stunt, and Edward provided one. It was a lasting statement of his chivalric ideas, just as later his great castle at Queenborough would be a lasting statement of his military genius. But it was also timed as an act of defiance against everything that threatened those ideals. It drew him out of his own personal grief and gave him and the country something positive and glorious on which to focus at the height of the worst epidemic the country had ever seen. Those of his companions who braved the pestilence and journeyed to Windsor to take part in that inaugural tournament were rewarded with founder-member status of the most prestigious and exclusive order of knighthood in Europe. And they took part in a tournament which witnessed some of the most famous knights of the day fight over the most beautiful woman in the land. What better distraction from the plague could there have been than to watch twelve men on each claimant's side battle for his comrade's right to make love to the royal countess? No doubt many contemporaries would have agreed with Henry Knighton in saying that all this was foolish and immoral, but it was in keeping with the chivalric values of the time. Most knights experiencing the horrors of the Black Death would far rather have jousted for the kisses of a beautiful and desirable twenty-year-old princess than sat alongside Henry Knighton in his cold abbey at Leicester, solemnly recording the number of dead recently interred in the local plague pits.

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  Successful though Edward's tournament may have been, people were still dying. After a winter of plenty there followed a season of dearth. Prices went up, and wages doubled. To return to Henry Knighton's chronicle: 'In the following autumn no one could get a reaper for less than eight-pence with food, or a mower for less then twelvepence with food. For this reason many crops perished in the fields for lack of harvesters.'

  Knighton's words show us how inflexible medieval society was. When one sector experienced a crisis, the entire community reeled, unable to adapt by assigning tasks to other people. In 1349 many systems simply collapsed. Men who had lost their wives and children could provide a mobile workforce, but only if they broke their feudal bonds and left the manors on which they were bound to work. Faced with starvation, this is what they did in many places. Hence a manorial bailiff, having lost a third or a half of his workforce to plague, now found the remainder threatening to leave unless he paid them double their usual wages. This was threatening the established order. Manorial lords did not normally need to buy food, requisitioning it from their demesne farms. Now, not only had much of their workforce died, and the remainder gone off to work for someone else, their own animals were dying in the fields. They had cows but no one to milk them. They had sheep but no one to shear them. They could not pay their tithes to the church, so the clergy could not function. So many clergymen died that many church benefices remained unfilled. Manors often ceased to exist. No lord, no workforce and no clergy meant no flock in either sense of the word. The unrepaired thatched roofs collapsed in the rains, the cob walls soon were in ruins. One did not need to catch the disease to feel the dire effects of the plague.

  Edward's reaction to this is understandable. It was simple logic: all the economic damage would be minimised if those workers who survived remained on their estates and worked for the same wages as before. The danger was that entire manors would return to waste ground as survivors only worked the most economically viable units. Then taxes - such as the sums levied on personal estates (normally a fifteenth in rural manors) -would be greatly reduced in value. Wool taxes too were clearly going to be greatly reduced. Therefore it was with the idea of trying to maintain the status quo as far as possible that Edward issued a royal ordinance. No lords were to offer higher wages to their workers than before the plague, and no labourers were to seek increased payments.

  The policy was bound to be unsuccessful. When the labour supply was so short, and the currency supply unchanged, wage inflation was inevitable. Nineteenth-century 'whiggish' commentators, convinced that history is one great march of progress towards modern society, tended to regard Edward's actions as backward-looking, and castigated him for trying to stand in the way of progress towards a free-market economy. But in 1349 it was difficult to understand how society was changing, and impossible to see how high wages or large amounts of derelict property could benefit the nation. Rather we should interpret Edward's action in much the same way as his Windsor tournament of April 1349. It was an attempt to advertise to the country that stability could be maintained. With courage, knights could still travel around the country and joust. Labourers could still be forced to remain on their manors. Edward could - and would - remain in contro
l of his kingdom.

  By early September two of the founder knights who had attended the Garter tournament at Windsor in April were dead. Philippa laid gold cloths on the tomb of one of them, Hugh Courtenay, the twenty-two-year-old heir to the earldom of Devon. John Montgomery, governor of Calais, died, and so did his wife. John Offord, the archbishop of Canterbury, died, and so did his successor, Thomas Bradwardine. Sir John Pulteney, four times Lord Mayor of London, died. Most lordly families lost several relations, some noble tides died out. The dowager countess of Salisbury died, so too did Lord Thomas Wake, the bishop of Worcester, the abbot of Westminster, Sir John Fauconberg and the queen of France. Clerks and workmen died in large numbers: the Surveyor of the King's Works, William Ramsey, was one of the most prominent. In Florence, the chronicler Giovanni Villani, hoping to note down the total number of fatalities at the end of the outbreak, became one of them.

  It was after all these deaths that the Flagellants arrived. Their presence was yet another shocking jolt to an already-reeling society. Philip de Valois had thrown them out of France, so horrified was he by their self-immolation. Dressed only in loincloths, this unofficial religious order walked from town to town whipping themselves with a heavy whip which had three leather thongs studded with metal spikes. With a few of the brethren leading the others in a dirge, exhorting them to whip themselves to redeem the world of its sins, the group lashed itself until each member was bleeding down his back. Sometimes they whipped themselves until they bled to death. Such extreme physical punishment in the name of God is perhaps not too distant from chivalric ceremonies such as jousts of war, and it may have been because of Edward's martial reputation that the Flagellants came to England in October 1349. But the Flagellants were not welcome. Soon they were driven out of England as they had been driven out of France. Their rules, which held it a sin to converse or have intercourse of any sort with a woman, were not likely to endear them to a king as fond of female company as Edward.