A HISTORY OF BRITAIN: A HISTORY OF BRITAIN II 1154

THE MIDDLE AGES BETWEEN 1154 - 1485

Life in the Middle Ages

The life of all the classes was dominated by the feudal system – feudalism. Life in a manor and the Lord of the Manor during the Middle Ages. The life of women during the Middle Ages - peasants, lords, princess and Kings. The jobs and occupations dictated the quality of life during the Middle Ages and the medicine, entertainment and guilds of the Middle ages. Life in the Middle Ages also includes an entertainment section providing the History, Facts and Information about the sports and games played during the time of Middle Ages. These subjects covered include Entertainment, Games, Gaming and Gambling, Bear & Bull Baiting, Hunting and Hawking during the period of Middle Ages.

Social Structure

The Peasants

Although medieval men and women did not use modern terminology in describing social classes, they were familiar with the concept of order and degree. Medieval society was clearly stratiﬁed, with the king at the top, then feudal magnates or members of the nobility, followed by lords of manors, merchants, and clergy, all resting on the large, solid base of the peasantry. The interlocking relationships between these groups were ratiﬁed by the feudal concept of homage and fealty, by the manorial custom of villeinage, and by the church, which preached the importance of each member of society performing the appropriate services so that the whole body politic might ﬂourish.

Historians have often used the pyramid as a symbol or model of medieval society, mainly because its tapering form emphasizes the large number of laborers at the bottom and the fact that each higher group was smaller than the one below it, until ﬁnally the monarch occupied the highest pinnacle in solitary eminence. Another useful image is that of the Great Chain of Being, in which everything in the universe is arranged in a vertical, hierarchical line or chain with God at the top, followed by the angels and saints, humankind, animals, plants, and rocks. The human category was divided into the Three Orders, or Estates. As medieval society viewed it, the First Estate was “those who pray” (the clergy), the Second Estate “those who ﬁght” (the nobility), and the Third Estate “those who work” (the peasants). As town life developed in the twelfth century and thereafter, these simple categories began to break down with the addition of merchants, guildsmen, scholars, and so forth. But the image of the chain endured—each link necessary but unchanging in its hierarchical relationship to the others.

The agricultural workers who formed the bulk of English society were legally separated into two groups, the free and the unfree. Those who were unfree were not slaves, but as villeins or serfs they were bound to remain on the manors where they had been born, performing compulsory labor services in exchange for modest housing and minimal amounts of land. They needed their lord’s permission to marry and to educate their children. Unless he agreed, they could not move to cities or other manors or enter religious orders. They were not legally free to buy, sell, or bequeath land or other property. Indeed they had no legal rights in the royal system of Common Law; disputes were to be settled by the lord of the manor. Free peasants did have access to the law. They were able to move, buy and sell land, and manage their own affairs largely as they chose, but their economic conditions were not necessarily much better than those of the villeins. The Domesday Book suggests that most manors had both free and unfree tenants, but there was some regional variation, and not all estates ﬁt a single pattern.

During the later Middle Ages the status of the peasants became more complex; a great variety of speciﬁ c conditions applied in individual cases. In particular, it became more common for villeins to “buy out” their disabilities, so that in exchange for a money payment they were permitted to move, alienate land, or send sons away to school or to monasteries. The blurring of the line separating villeins and the freeborn is emphasized by the frequency of intermarriage between the two groups.

Peasant families were generally nuclear units composed only of a husband, wife, and unmarried children; it was rare for extended families including several generations to live together. It used to be believed that marriage was generally delayed until the couple had an assured livelihood, most often through inheritance ofland following the death of parents. Recent studies, however, suggest that this was not the case, at least in the later Middle Ages. Couples most often married in their early twenties, or even (following the Black Death, which opened up new opportunities) in their late teens.

As many as 94 percent of the peasant farmers were married. Their households were small, usually including between one and three children. Although some form of birth control may have been practiced, infant mortality probably played a more signiﬁ cant role in keeping down the size of families. The average life expectancy was no more than thirty- three years, and (in contrast to the situation in the early twenty- ﬁrst century) only 10 percent of the population was over ﬁfty, although some people did live into their eighties or nineties. Because of their short life spans, most medieval men and women spent the majority of their lives unwed, either single or widowed; the average marriage lasted little longer than a dozen years. A recent writer has described these marriages as economic and emotional partnershipsn—ﬂexible institutions that worked to the beneﬁt of both husband and wife - . It was during the Middle Ages that the use of family names became common in England. Many surnames were derived from occupations. Examples, which tell us a good deal about the major medieval crafts and trades, are Miller, Baker, Brewer,

Butcher, Shepherd, Carpenter, Thatcher, Smith, Taylor, Weaver, Wheeler, Franklin (a freeman), and Fuller (one who “fulls” cloth, to improve its texture following weaving).

The Aristocracy and Middling Groups

The upper groups in society—we may term them the aristocracy—became more clearly differentiated in the fourteenth and ﬁ fteenth centuries. Earlier, the feudal concepts of tenants- in- chief and more generally of feudal magnates set aside an upper class. With the rise of Parliament came the notion of parliamentary peerage, carrying with it the right of noblemen to be summoned to meetings of what developed into the House of Lords. We have already noted the origins of the earls and barons. Additional ranks of nobility were recognized by the end of the Middle Ages, producing the honoriﬁc structure that still applies today.The highest title of nobility was that of duke. There were only a few dukes; originally most of them were related to the royal family. Then came the orders of marquess, earl, viscount, and baron. In fact there were never very many marquesses or viscounts, perhaps because the titles were originally French and thus suspect in England. Dukes, marquesses, and earls used territorial names for their titles as, for instance, the Duke of York or Earl of Cambridge. The wife of a duke was a duchess; an earl’s wife was called a countess, because earls were at the same level of society as counts in France or Germany. Barons, the most numerous group of noblemen, were often merely called “lord,” like Lord Dacre or Lord Mountjoy. Almost all the noblemen were very rich and owned vast landed estates with hundreds of tenants and retainers. In general the members of each group were richer than those in the group below it; a duke was likely to have a larger estate than an earl, and he certainly enjoyed greater prestige.Ranking just below the noblemen in wealth and status were the gentlemen— landlords who were not prominent enough to be ennobled but not poor enough to have to work the soil with their own hands. Collectively known as the gentry, they formed a group that soon came to be the most important element in English society. Although not noble, they are sometimes regarded as members of the landed aristocracy, clearly set apart from those below them in society.

Some members of the gentry could claim the title “knight.” During the ﬁrst century or so after the Conquest, knighthoods were conferred, often on the battleﬁeld, when the monarch wished to recognize outstanding military service. Later, knighthoods were given to those who had aided the government in other ways, or simply as recognition of the wealth and social status of the richer gentlemen. Knights could be elected to the House of Commons in Parliament but were not automatically summoned, as were the peers. Knights were identiﬁ ed by the title “sir” preceding their own Christian name; their wives were called “dame,” or sometimes merely “lady,” a title that could be confusing because the wife of a baron was also a “lady.” Knighthood was not hereditary, although it was not unusual for a knight’s heir to be knighted in his own right. Peerages, on the other hand, did descend to the oldest surviving son of the nobleman.Several middling groups (it is premature to view them as a single modern middle class) can be identiﬁ ed in medieval English society. Yeomen (the next group below the gentry) might be deﬁ ned as working landlords; they owned land and cultivated it themselves, perhaps with the assistance of a few peasant tenants. Medieval writers sometimes idealized the yeomen and their wives, emphasizing their industry and sturdy independence.

Among urban dwellers, merchants grew increasingly important in the later Middle Ages. Some of them, especially those involved in foreign trade or in selling luxury articles, amassed considerable wealth. Many merchants dreamed of buying land and acquiring the social status that went with it, and a few succeeded in doing so. Lawyers already formed an important professional group by the ﬁ fteenth century. As today, the practice of law wasa means by which clever young men could rise in society. They often hoped to enter the ranks of the gentry if they prospered.

Churchmen ﬁtted into the social scheme at all levels. The bishops and archbishops were as aristocratic as the peers; they held landed estates and were summoned to Parliament as Lords Spiritual. Parish priests were supported by the tithes of their parishioners: as rectors, the clergy were legally entitled to a tenth of the produce of agricultural estates and to an equivalent share in the income of urban dwellers (though this was more difﬁ cult to collect). Some parish priests were well- off and lived comfortably, like minor gentry, whereas others were closer to the status of the yeomen or peasants to whom they ministered. Like the bishops, the heads of the larger monasteries were summoned to Parliament as Lords Spiritual and enjoyed substantial incomes from their estates. Even ordinary monks generally had better food and housing than the peasant households from which most of them came. The church, like trade and the law, offered an opportunity for intelligent, enterprising young men to rise in society; it was largely staffed by those whose parents had been common people, rural laborers or urban artisans.

Gilds

Guilds were important institutions in medieval towns and cities. They were originally established for religious and social purposes: guild members, sometimes including women, made small annual payments in exchange for which they received prayers offered by a guild chaplain in the local parish church, or in a special chapel at a cathedral. Their funerals would be handled by the guild, whose members would attend, and ﬁ nancial assistance might be provided for survivors. (Medieval funerals were often costly, and the expense might be a great burden for those who did not belong to guilds.) Such a guild is known to have existed at Canterbury as early as the ninth century. A London guild founded in the tenth century had the additional purpose of maintaining the peace.

Merchant or craft guilds came slightly later. They arose when guilds dominated by merchants, like the Trinity Guild of Coventry, began to regulate conditions of manufacture and trade. In this case the cloth trade came under the control of the Trinity Guild, and one of its members was routinely chosen mayor. In London, guilds were organized to represent such groups as the mercers, ﬁ shmongers, goldsmiths, and tallow chandlers (candle makers). In the fourteenth century a number of guilds were incorporated; because of their special insignia, they came to be called livery companies. Some still survive, though they are now merely honorary social organizations, and their halls are frequently used for civic ceremonies.

Church

Christianity was a more powerful force in medieval society than it is today. Throughout western Europe, until the Reformation of the sixteenth century, there was a single church, acknowledging the headship of the pope but managing many of its affairs on a national basis. Earlier chapters have described the quarrels between kings and popes that were such a common feature of the Middle Ages in England.Medieval men and women were born members of the church, just as they were born subjects of the monarchy. They had no choice of denominations, and they were not free to decide where to attend services, since parishes were geographical units and men and women were expected to worship regularly in their own parish church unless they were traveling. As we have seen, they were required to pay tithes for the support of their parish priest—these were legally established payments rather than voluntary contributions. They often made bequests to the church in their wills, ensuring the continuity of prayers for the dead and sometimes providing for educational and social services as well.Despite continued acknowledgment of papal authority, however, the Englishness of the church was becoming increasingly evident. In practice, kings rather than popes named the English bishops, who sat in Parliament and were among the monarch’s chief advisers and administrators. Members of the nobility and gentry often took an active interest in the cathedrals and parish churches; elaborate tombs and monuments mark the place of their burial. Particularly during the fourteenth century, when England was ﬁ ghting France at a time when the popes had left Rome for the French city of Avignon, efforts were made to limit the jurisdiction of the papacy. In the 1350s Parliament passed the Statute of Provisors, which held that papal provisions— appointments to positions in the English church—were generally not valid, and the Statute of Praemunire, later to be utilized by Henry VIII at the time of the Reformation, which said that English court cases could not be appealed to the pope if the king objected.The period between 1066 and 1530 was the great age of church building in Britain. Most of the villages in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland have parish churches that were erected during these years, and the great cathedrals that survive throughout England date to the later Middle Ages as well. The Normans were great builders. They had constructed sophisticated churches in Normandy before the Conquest, and they were dissatisﬁ ed with the small, rude buildings they found in England. As a result they frequently demolished Anglo-Saxon churches and replaced them with more substantial ediﬁ ces. The Norman style in architecture is easily recognizable, for it is characterized by small windows and doorways that terminate in round- headed rather than pointed arches. Walls were massive, giving a great sense of stability and permanence. The roofs of parish churches were constructed of wood, but because wood roofs were liable to catch ﬁre, the Normans contrived a method of providing stone vaults for some of their cathedrals. This involved the use of diagonal stone ribs strong enough to carry the weight of lighter masonry that was used as inﬁ lling. All of these features, together with enormous circular pillars decorated with various ornamental patterns, may be seen in the Norman cathedral at Durham, which is one of the world´s greatest ecclesiastical structures.

On the Continent the Norman style is referred to as Romanesque. About 1200 it was superseded by the Gothic architecture in which the great French cathedrals were built. Gothic buildings can most easily be identiﬁ ed by their use of pointed arches in windows, doorways, and arcades. The thirteenth century is often regarded as the ﬁ nest period for ecclesiastical architecture. In England the style of this age is called Early English, since it exhibits certain features that are unique to the country. Salisbury Cathedral is perhaps the best example of an Early English cathedral, since it was constructed during a relatively short span of time and exhibits few features from any other period. It has large numbers of tall, narrow windows, called lancets because they resemble a surgeon’s instrument. Flying buttresses were used to help carry the weight of the stone vaults down to the ground. The buttresses made it possible to have thinner exterior walls, with more space given over to windows. The great spire of Salisbury, visible for miles around, was not part of the original plan but was added in the fourteenth century. Its weight created structural difﬁculties that still present problems, but few would deny its exceptional beauty or its importance as a symbol of the cathedral’s presence. The cathedral at Wells, in southwest England, is notable for the three hundred magniﬁ cent statues carved in the thirteenth century to adorn its facade. Much of Westminster Abbey was rebuilt in the Early English style during the reign of Henry III. Lincoln Cathedral is another great edifice of this era.

The earlier part of the fourteenth century saw the introduction of the Decorated style. Buildings of this age, like Exeter Cathedral and the choir of Wells, display larger windows with elaborate, fanciful patterns of stone tracery. More elaborate vaulting patterns were also developed, with subsidiary stone ribs called liernes added simply to create elegant designs, without regard to their structural function.

The ﬁnal phase of medieval church building witnessed the introduction of the perpendicular style, a form that is unique to the British Isles. The architects of this age (about 1350– 1530) possessed very advanced engineering skills that permitted them to open up vast areas of wall space for windows. They were able to construct lofty buildings with supremely elegant fan vaults, so called because they resembled the shape of a lady’s fan. Hundreds of Perpendicular parish churches dot the English landscape. It was the responsibility of parishioners to build and maintain the naves of these churches, and the clergy were held responsible for the choir or east end. Some of the great Perpendicular churches are called “wool churches” because the wealth created by the wool trade made their erection possible; a contemporary couplet ran, “I thank the Lord and always shall, it is the sheep has paid for all.” The churches at Lavenham in Suffolk and Northleach in the Cotswolds are spectacular instances of such buildings.

Many cathedrals were partially rebuilt in the Perpendicular style. The great nave of Canterbury is an outstanding example. The ﬁnest of all the perpendicular buildings is the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, the result of Henry VI’s inspiration and Henry VIII’s continuing interest and ﬁ nancial support. Although it is sometimes asserted that medieval architects were anonymous that is untrue.

Their names are often known. The greatest builders were perhaps William of Sens, a Frenchman who worked at Canterbury in the twelfth century and was seriously injured when he fell from scaffolding there, and John Wastell, a native Englishman who designed much of King´s College Chapel.

Most of the medieval churches contain stained glass windows, which on sunny days ﬂood the buildings with color as well as light. Thirteenth- century glass is surpassingly lovely; the gemlike brilliance of its reds and blues has never been equaled.

But the larger windows created in the fourteenth and ﬁ fteenth centuries have their own special merits. Unfortunately, much medieval stained glass was destroyed in later centuries, some of it by pious but misguided persons who regarded all pictorial art as blasphemous or superstitious, but enough remains, especially at Canterbury and York, for one to appreciate its quality. Pictorial windows were useful as teaching devices in the Middle Ages, when most people were illiterate and could not read the Bible itself. The large biblical scenes incorporated in Perpendicular- style windows were obviously ideal for this didactic purpose.

Outside England, styles were similar but churches were built on a smaller scale.

In Scotland, large cathedrals were erected at St. Andrew’s and Glasgow, with more humble churches sufﬁcing for the bishops of Aberdeen, Dunkeld, Dunblane, and Moray. The ﬁne Gothic church of St. Giles in Edinburgh did not attain cathedral status until the seventeenth century. By the end of the Middle Ages there were four cathedrals in Wales. St. David’s was (and is) an exceptional structure, but the others were no larger than English parish churches. Among the ﬁnest churches in Ireland are a handful of Norman buildings put up in the early twelfth century; the ruined Cathedral of Ardfert shows thirteenth-century lancets used in Ireland as well as in England.

Schools and Universities
The growth of education was one of the most signiﬁ cant phenomena of the later Middle Ages in Britain. Although most peasants remained illiterate, those involved in trade, government, and the professions needed to be able to read and write. Churchmen had to know at least a smattering of Latin. It has been estimated that as many as 40 percent of the male householders in late medieval London could read some Latin; the number who could read English would of course have been substantially higher. But these ﬁgures are extraordinary rather than typical. In outlying areas, among women, and among lesser working people, literacy rates were much lower.

The most important schools of medieval England were the grammar schools, intended to teach Latin grammar to boys who were destined for careers in the church or, perhaps, in government. (Many medieval government ofﬁcials were men in holy orders; the words clerk and cleric have a common root.) The most prestigious grammar schools were Winchester, founded in 1382 by William of Wykeham, the bishop of Winchester, and Eton, nestled in the shadow of Windsor Castle, established by King Henry VI in 1440. (They survive as two of the great “public schools” of England, so called because, although private, they made some places available to poor scholars.) The ability to dispute in Latin was highly prized. Boys also spent time in games, including football, tennis, and cockﬁ ghting.

Some boys were able to proceed from the grammar schools to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. These great centers of higher learning grew up gradually, almost spontaneously, in the twelfth century. It is often said that Oxford was founded by scholars from Paris who had experienced difﬁ culties with the authorities there and that Cambridge began when unruly Oxford students were expelled and forced to move elsewhere. Although these tales may have some basis in fact, the actual origins of the universities were less dramatic. Initially, groups of scholars congregated in favorable environments—Oxford may have seemed desirable because of the existence of several large religious houses there—and groups of students came, at ﬁrst individually and informally, to study with them. In the next stage of development, hostels or halls were established to provide housing for students; some of these were then transformed into colleges, which undertook responsibility for supervising the students’ studies as well as providing room and board. The actual universities themselves were at ﬁ rst no more than collections of colleges. Their chief role in the Middle Ages was to administer examinations and award degrees.

Three of the Oxford colleges (Balliol, University, and Merton) trace their origins to the thirteenth century. William of Wykeham established New College, Oxford, in the fourteenth century. Its link with his school at Winchester remains important even today. King’s College, Cambridge, was founded by Henry VI and enjoyed a special tie to Eton. Peterhouse, founded in 1284, is the oldest college at Cambridge.

A number of additional colleges were established at both universities during the fourteenth and ﬁ fteenth centuries.

The curriculum of the grammar schools and universities was based on the seven liberal arts of classical antiquity. These were the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and logic, subjects that would be pursued in school—and the more advanced studies of the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (here considered as a theoretical, mathematical exercise, not in terms of actual performance). Medieval students might go up to the universities when they were still quite young. Normally they spent six years mastering the liberal arts (the master of arts degree was intended to certify their proﬁ ciency and was evidence that its holders were qualiﬁed to teach). Higher degrees were available in theology, medicine, and law. Cambridge, for instance, had a graduate faculty in theology as early as 1250.

The theology studied at the great medieval universities of England and France is often referred to as scholasticism (literally, the theology of the schools). Anselm, the Franco - Italian scholar who became archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, was an important ﬁgure in the early development of scholasticism. In his writings, human reason was brought to bear in deﬁ ning the teachings of the church, especially the doctrine of the Incarnation.

The so - called Renaissance of the twelfth century, which included a fresh interest in the Latin classics and the writings of Aristotle, helped shape the progress of scholastic thought, in particular the movement to annex philosophy to theological study. During the thirteenth century the chief exponents of scholasticism were Thomas Aquinas, probably the most inﬂ uential theologian in the history of Christianity, and Peter Lombard, whose Sentences applied reﬁned logical arguments to theological debate. Both Aquinas and Lombard worked on the Continent, not in England, but their ideas permeated instruction at Oxford and Cambridge for centuries. Two British thinkers, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, did dominate scholastic thought during its ﬁnal ﬂourishing in the fourteenth century. Often criticized as an arid intellectual exercise with scant relationship to real life, scholasticism at its best did stretch the horizons of the human mind and provide a tightly reasoned intellectual framework for Christian belief. Legal studies also became institutionalized during the later Middle Ages, not in the universities but in the Inns of Court. These foundations sprang up in London, near the royal courts of justice, during the late fourteenth and early ﬁfteenth centuries. Practicing lawyers had chambers in the four great Inns (Gray’s Inn, the Inner and Middle Temples, and Lincoln’s Inn). Students were able to take meals with them, attend lectures, and assist barristers in their work. By the end of the Middle Ages the Inns of Court really constituted a third, specialized university. Like Oxford and Cambridge they retain many of their early traditions even today. The three ancient universities of Scotland—St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen—were founded during the ﬁ fteenth century. A few Scottish students were also drawn to Balliol College, Oxford (as the college’s name suggests). Wales had no university, though a number of Welshmen went to Oxford. Surprisingly, Ireland had no university until Trinity College, Dublin, was established in 1592. There had been an attempt to found a university in Dublin during the early fourteenth century, but it came to nothing.

Magna Carta

Magna Carta is the great charter of liberties that placed the English king under the law.

King John’s barons forced him to grant Magna Carta in 1215 at Runnymede meadow and confirmed in definitive form by Henry III in 1225, is a crucial document for England’s history, likely the best known of all documents surviving from medieval England. Its attempt to impose the law’s limitations on a ruler is summarised in Chapter 39:

"No free man shall be taken or imprisoned, or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land."

Less familiar is the role of Magna Carta in the centuries after 1225, when it was taken up periodically as the banner of discontented subjects rallying against their monarch, and their programmes for political reform included calls for its reconfirmation.

Following John’s death in 1216, the Great Charter’s fate was in doubt, with a nine-year-old boy as the new king Henry III. Yet the Charter took root and was quickly reissued, again in 1217, and in its definitive 1225 version. When in 1258 the great men of the kingdom had grown impatient with Henry’s incompetent rule, baronial reformers sought to revive the 1215 Charter’s provision for a committee of barons to supervise the king. Among their reform proposals was a demand that Henry ‘faithfully keep and observe the charter of the liberties of England’. The rebellion failed, but the royalist victory in 1265 did not end Magna Carta’s prominent position in England’s political life, for part of the peace settlement was the King’s renewed promise to observe it.

In Edward I’s reign (1272-1307), his subjects turned to the Charter as a focus for discontent over his burdensome financial exactions; and in 1297 with his Confirmation of the Charters (plural because the 1225 Charter of the Forest was also confirmed), he acknowledged that Magna Carta bound him. When dissatisfaction mounted once more in 1300, Parliament sought additional concessions from Edward, set forth in the Articles upon the Charters. A century after Runnymede, a precedent was set for parliaments to seek reconfirmation of the Charter and clarification of its meaning.

In the fourteenth century, two parallel movements were under way to enforce Magna Carta’s curbs on arbitrary royal authority. One was a revival under Edward II (r.1307-27) and again under Richard II (r.1377-99) of baronial committees to supervise royal government, reminiscent of the mid-thirteenth-century reform movement. Another was Parliament’s appearance as a permanent political institution, acting as the protector and interpreter of the Great Charter. With a representative assembly in place, it substituted for periodic baronial commissions as the favoured mechanism for subjecting the king to the law. Fourteenth-century parliaments sought royal confirmations of the Great Charter and drafted statutes reinforcing its promises. Often the first item of parliamentary business was a public reading and reaffirmation of the Charter, and as in the previous century, parliaments often exacted confirmation of it from the monarch, resulting in over forty reconfirmations by the early fifteenth century.

Magna Carta was seen as sacrosanct, and statutes conflicting with it were ruled invalid; a statute enacted under Edward III in 1369 declared, ‘If any Statute be made to the contrary, that shall be holden for none.’ Other statutes re-interpreted and expanded the Charter’s provisions. Noteworthy are measures enacted under Edward III (r.1327-77), known to seventeenth- century critics of Stuart absolutism as the ‘six statutes’, which spelled out precisely the Charter’s promise of what was coming to be called ‘due process of law’. The third of these statutes is significant for expanding the numbers protected by Chapter 39, replacing ‘no free man’ with more inclusive language, ‘no man, of whatever estate or condition he may be’; and promising that no one was to be dispossessed, imprisoned, or put to death without ‘due process of law’, the first use of that phrase in the statutes.

By the mid-fifteenth century, Magna Carta slipped into the shadows of high politics where it remained until the seventeenth century, and the custom of periodic royal confirmations ended early in Henry VI’s reign. The reigns of the Yorkist and Tudor monarchs saw strong reassertions of royal sovereignty, and although people never entirely forgot Magna Carta, they no longer rallied around it. The Charter’s ties to the common law ensured its importance, however, for the land-holding classes looked to it as a key protector of their property. Thousands took part in common law procedures, notably trial by jury, and these inculcated the Charter’s principle of due process of law and the plea rolls and the year books give evidence for litigants’ citations of it. In law books studied by the emerging legal profession, Magna Carta was the first of the statutes; and by the late-fifteenth century, collections of statutes beginning with it were among the earliest books to be printed in England. Appeals to specific provisions appear frequently in late medieval plea rolls, proving wide familiarity with the Great Charter, with lawyers and litigants sometimes twisting its technical provisions for frivolous purposes. Yet by the end of the Middle Ages, it was cited less frequently because statutes spelling out its principles afforded added protection against an arbitrary king, binding him to act ‘according to law’ or by ‘due process’ or ‘process of the law’.

Magna Carta played little part in the great controversy of Henry VIII’s reign (1509-47), his break with the papacy; and he often violated his subjects’ rights in enforcing conformity to his new Church. Only occasionally did his victims, imprisoned without indictment or bail, claim ‘the liberty of an Englishman’, as guaranteed them by the Charter. A few prominent Catholics claimed protection under its first chapter promising freedom for the English Church, but most turned to the theology of universal papal authority for arguments against Henry’s supremacy over the Church of England. By the late Tudor period, though, radical Protestants such as the Puritans presented a greater threat to royal supremacy over the Church of England than did Catholics. They sought the Charter’s protection against persecution by Elizabeth I’s new ecclesiastical tribunal, the Court of High Commission. The High Commission, armed with Roman and canon law procedures, forced dissidents to incriminate themselves, a practice that alarmed common lawyers prejudiced against Roman law. Since many legal professionals were also Puritans, they made common cause with Protestant militants.

Magna Carta took a central role in the seventeenth-century conflict between king and Parliament, as common lawyers and parliamentarians turned to a mythical ‘ancient constitution’ as a defence against Stuart kings’ assertion of the royal prerogative. Historians, common lawyers and Members of Parliament searched medieval manuscripts of early law codes and forgotten royal charters for ammunition against James I and Charles I. They treasured the Charter as a key element of England’s ‘ancient constitution’, a body of laws and customs supposedly surviving from pre-Roman Britain that imposed limits on the king’s power over his subjects.

The champion of the doctrine of the ancient constitution and the revival of Magna Carta was Sir Edward Coke (d. 1634). Coke conceived of the English constitution as a chain of royal confirmations of English law, stretching back to the age of Edward the Confessor and beyond. Because he viewed the Great Charter as a reaffirmation of liberties enjoyed by the English people from time immemorial and still binding because of its many confirmations over the centuries, he urged Parliament to demand a royal reconfirmation. Coke and his companions opposing the early Stuarts construed the Charter anachronistically and uncritically. They were convinced that its clauses reaffirmed such longstanding rights of the English people as trial by jury and the right of habeas corpus, thought to be derived from law-codes and royal charters predating John’s grant.

The civil wars of 1642-48, kindled by Coke’s revival of the Great Charter, had more extreme consequences than the 1215-16 rebellion, as it resulted in military dictatorship, the King’s execution and a decade of experiments in government. But the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, culminating in the deposition of James II and establishment of Parliament’s supremacy, seemed a repetition of the baronial rebellion against King John. The settlement following William and Mary’s accession included a Declaration of Rights, enacted by Parliament as a new Magna Carta.

Sir Edward Coke’s portrayal of England’s past was now fashioned into the ‘Whig interpretation’ of history, with a triumphalist view of liberty’s ceaseless advance. Whig writers ranked the 1688-89 Revolution alongside King John’s 1215 concessions, convinced that it reconfirmed an ancient compact between king and people, restoring fundamental law and limited monarchy. Debate late in Charles II’s reign over excluding his brother, the future James II, from the succession had led royalist propagandists to challenge Coke’s myth of the ancient constitution. Tories turned to the royalist historians’ rediscovery of the ‘feudal law’ and Norman ties of lordship and vassalage that had made the barons dependents of the king, holding their lands in return for services to him. Royalist writers tended to dismiss Magna Carta as a feudal document with little long-term relevance, and in fact royalist historians such as Robert Brady (d.1700) painted a more accurate picture of the medieval past than Coke. Nonetheless, the Whig interpretation triumphed in the eighteenth century. Its victory was symbolised by Brady’s replacement as Keeper of Records at the Tower of London, curator of the kingdom’s historical records, by William Petyt, a historian supporting Coke’s ancient constitution.

Early eighteenth-century Tories, languishing without power under the first two Georges, replaced their faith in unrestrained royal power with defence of the ancient constitution, charging the Whig majority with undermining historic English liberties. Tory support for the ancient constitution drove Whig defenders of their parliamentary leader, Sir Robert Walpole, to stress the superiority of the post-1688 constitution, and to question Magna Carta’s relevance. One Whig writer, repeating earlier royalist arguments, now maintained that the barons alone had gained from the Charter. After George III’s accession in 1760, American colonists and their English sympathisers began to question parliamentary sovereignty, and radical political movements challenged complacency about the glories of the English constitution. Opponents of Parliament’s monopoly on power denounced its political machinations, graft and corruption. The reformers were a diverse group ranging from radicals inspired by the rationalism of the Enlightenment to religious dissenters looking back to a golden age of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan parliaments.

With radical journalists stirring up public opinion against Parliament, freedom of the press came under attack. One radical writer, Arthur Beardmore, arrested for seditious libel in 1762, showed an eye for publicity, arranging to be arrested while teaching Magna Carta to his young son. He became a popular hero, and a print picturing him showing the Charter to the boy circulated widely. Another radical, John Wilkes (d. 1797), imprisoned in the Tower in 1763 for seditious libel, transformed his prosecution into a campaign for the people’s rights against oppression, invoking Magna Carta, ‘that glorious inheritance, that distinguishing characteristic of the Englishmen’. The radical movement proved short-lived, however. After 1789, radical sympathy for the French revolutionaries alienated moderates, and the government took such harsh measures against them that reaction and repression soon became the rule in Britain. A satirical article in a radical newspaper noted that the Habeas Corpus Act (1679) was descended from ‘two notorious traitors of old times, called Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights’, and declared that the Charter was ‘so very old and infirm that he seldom stirs abroad, and when he does he is sure to be insulted, and is very glad to get back to his lodgings again’.

Although hostility kindled by the French Revolution stalled any innovation, agitation for wider representation in the Commons revived after 1815. Nineteenth-century popular movements for parliamentary reform such as Chartism turned to Magna Carta for support. Other tendencies, however, undermined reverence for the Charter and England’s medieval constitutional legacy, especially Bentham’s radical Utilitarian philosophy. Its rational and pragmatic outlook led lawyers and judges to cease to venerate the common law simply because of its antiquity and to view it as a stumbling block to progress. Advocates of legal reform understood that revising the common law was impossible without first reforming the House of Commons, and once this was achieved in 1832, Utilitarians could turn to reform of English law. To them, the triumph of Parliament at the end of the seventeenth century meant the Great Charter had lost its special place as fundamental law standing above statute law; the nation’s legislative assembly had replaced it, however inadequately, as the protector of the people’s liberties.

By the mid-nineteenth century both politicians and the lawyers favoured reorganisation of the law, and striking obsolete legislation from the statute books began in earnest with the first Statute Laws Revision Act of 1856. Two more acts followed in 1861 and 1863, repealing hundreds of old laws; these acts and subsequent legislation abrogated much of Magna Carta. Some in the Commons sought assurances that no statutes considered ‘stones in the edifice of the constitution’ would be abolished, and one MP offered an amendment to preserve Magna Carta and other constitutional landmarks, but this failed. The ease with which abrogation of clauses of the Charter was achieved is surprising, a striking display of parliamentary sovereignty. During Commons debates, the Solicitor-General dismissed the Great Charter’s significance, reminding members that ‘as signed by King John’ it was not a statute and could be consulted only in ancient manuscripts. Stricken from the statute books by the 1863 legislation were seventeen of the 1225 Charter’s chapters, many of them ‘feudal’ clauses that had lost their practical effect two centuries earlier when tenures by knight-service were abolished. By the 1880s, many Britons felt that further pruning of the laws was needed, and still more chapters of the Charter were repealed.

A few provisions of Magna Carta remained on the statute books into the twentieth century. In 1965, Parliament created the Law Commission for statute revision, and the commissioners recommended repeal of laws that ‘cannot be shown to perform a useful function’. They proposed a bill repealing over 200 laws, including eight chapters of the Great Charter that they found to be ‘of no practical significance today, being either obsolete or superseded by the modern law on the subject’. Legislation that followed in 1970 left only four chapters of Magna Carta intact: chapters 1, 13 and 39 of King John’s Charter, and 37 of the 1225 version. The first Chapter promised freedom for the English Church, and Chapter 13 (9 in the 1225 version), guaranteed the City of London its ancient liberties and free customs. Chapter 39 (29 in the 1225 Charter) was the key provision in Magna Carta, curbing the crown’s power to pursue individuals beyond the law. Chapter 37, found only in the 1225 Charter, contained a clause important for the perpetuity of Magna Carta’s liberties, ‘and if anything contrary to this [charter] is procured from anyone, it shall avail nothing and be held for nought’.

Despite this legislative assault on Magna Carta, the Whig historical interpretation of its place in British history had become orthodoxy, the semi-official presentation by the Victorian era. For Whig historians, the 1215 baronial rebellion marked a major step in England’s long march toward limited monarchy and parliamentary supremacy; and the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 marked further advance toward the orderly growth of parliamentary democracy, religious toleration and bourgeois values. This interpretation fostered the ‘idea of progress’, presenting history as modernisation, slow but steady evolution toward higher civilisation. It also generated enormous pride among nineteenth-century Britons, convincing them of their island-kingdom’s destiny to be a model for other nations seeking freedom and unity as well as justification for their rule over a colonial empire. By the mid-nineteenth century, a rising scientific and materialist world-view brought with it new notions of the nature of history that challenged this mythic version of the past and heralded drastic changes in the nature of history. The later Victorian age was a time when ‘a truly historical consciousness’ developed, and the discipline of history fell into the hands of professionals and specialists, many of whom were ‘debunkers’ of hallowed historical myths.

The Charter’s importance was seen differently across the Atlantic. As the Great Charter’s relevance receded in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, it remained fundamental for the new nation growing in North America. Today, Magna Carta seems to enjoy greater prestige in the United States than in the United Kingdom. Indicative of this is the monument at Runnymede erected in 1957 by the American Bar Association to commemorate the Charter. Edward Coke and other opponents of the Stuarts had resuscitated it at the very moment that the first English settlements were being founded in the Americas, and the settlers in the thirteen colonies had held themselves to be fully English, possessing all rights guaranteed to their compatriots at home by the Great Charter and the common law. The charter of each colony, beginning with James I’s charter for the Virginia Company in 1606, included protection for colonists’ rights as free English subjects. The colonists held Magna Carta to be fundamental law, standing above both king and Parliament and unalterable by statute. Americans’ dedication to fundamental law increased in the years after 1688, an age when British political thinkers were discarding it in favour of parliamentary sovereignty. Their commitment to such higher law as Magna Carta fortified their inclination toward written constitutions.

The 1225 version of the Great Charter was published in Philadelphia as early as 1687, part of a tract authored by William Penn, founder of the Quaker colony. Sir Edward Coke’s interpretation of the Charter influenced these Americans. Subscribing to Coke’s anachronistic views, they held it to be the guarantor of their ancient English liberties, including rights to trial by jury and the writ of habeas corpus. They saw the seventeenth-century struggle against the Stuart kings as part of their own history, and they accepted the Great Charter as part of the ancient constitution, providing them with the same protections enjoyed by their cousins in the mother country. In the decade before the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, colonial lawyers and pamphleteers turned to Magna Carta for support against the government across the Atlantic. The first Continental Congress adopted a resolution in October 1774 claiming that the colonists were doing ‘as Englishmen their ancestors in like cases have usually done, for asserting and vindicating their rights and liberties’. In 1775, Massachusetts adopted as its state seal an image of an American patriot holding a sword in one hand and Magna Carta in the other.

After the United States won independence, the federal Constitution became the new nation’s fundamental law. The Founding Fathers, faithful to seventeenth-century doctrine placing the Great Charter above statute law, accorded the Constitution a similar lofty position as fundamental law that can be overcome only by a Supreme Court ruling or a constitutional amendment, invulnerable to acts of Congress. By the eighteenth century, with Britons sure of Parliament’s superior place in the government and ideas of fundamental law fading, the British constitution consisted of a series of statutes that parliamentary majorities could abolish or alter, so long as they were supported by public opinion. As the states considered ratifying the federal Constitution, anti-federalists objected to its lack of an enumeration of citizens’ rights, such as Magna Carta or the 1689 Bill of Rights; and to win ratification by the states, the first ten amendments to the federal Constitution were adopted. Among the amendments, ratified in 1791 as the Bill of Rights, was an article promising that no person shall be ‘deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law’, paraphrasing the Charter’s thirty-ninth chapter.

Americans today accord Magna Carta semi-religious veneration, citing it constantly in political debates, judicial opinions and newspaper editorials. The United States Supreme Court first cited the Charter in an 1819 opinion, and American jurists still cannot resist citing it in their decisions. Supreme Court citations of the Charter now number over a hundred. A federal district judge even cited it in Paula Jones’ sexual harassment suit in 1994 against President Clinton. She ruled against delaying the suit during the President’s term of office, stating:

"It is contrary to our form of government, which asserts as did the English in the Magna Carta and the Petition of Right, that even the sovereign is subject to God and the law."

Norman legacy

In December 1154, the young and vigorous Henry II became king of England following the anarchy and civil war of Stephen's reign.

Stephen had acknowledged Henry, grandson of Henry I of England, as his heir-designate. His eldest son, Eustace, had died in 1153, but his younger son, who might have succeeded, lived on as count of Mortain. Primogeniture was not then established in England.

The Britain of Henry II, and of his sons Richard I and John, was experiencing rapid population growth, clearance of forest for fields, establishment of new towns and outward-looking crusading zeal.

The families of Balliol, Bruce and Wallace, dominant in Scottish medieval history, all derived from French origins.

The country also witnessed the cultural feast of the '12th-century renaissance' in the arts, exemplified by the Winchester Bible of c. 1160, created from the skins of over 300 calves and lavishly decorated with lapis lazuli and gold applied by a team of manuscript illuminators from continental Europe.

Legacies of the Norman invasion of 1066 remained. The aristocracy spoke French until after 1350, so saxon 'ox' and 'swine', for example, came to the table as French boeuf and porc.

North of 'sassenach' (Saxon) England, Normanised lowland Scotland (which shared a common vernacular dialect with England North of the Humber) remained distinct from the Highlands where Gaelic flourished.

The families of Balliol, Bruce and Wallace, dominant in Scottish medieval history, all derived from French origins - a minority overlaying the population of Scots.

Ireland was less dominated by Normans. However, much of the regional indigenous culture survived despite Norman monarchy and aristocracy.

A combination of external factors made England more inward-looking and more dissonant after 1200.

Internationally the crusading ideal was weakening. The Battle of Hattin and the recapture of Jerusalem by Muslims in 1187 were considerable blows to western hopes. Richard I's subsequent failure to recapture the city in his campaign against Saladin was discouraging.

Worse still, the crusading ideal was fractured in 1204 with the siege and capture of Christian Constantinople by a crusading force destined for infidel Egypt, and led by Venetians. Crusading never recovered.

John's loss of French lands soon after 1200 also made England more inward-looking and frustrated.

Population continued to rise in the 1200s, primogeniture became more established and there were many younger warrior sons looking for lands and glory.

Henry III (1216 - 1272) was not a soldierly king. His half-hearted campaigns in France were unsuccessful in regaining lands lost by his father, John. By the Treaty of Paris (1259) he admitted failure and secured remote Gascony by giving up claims to lands in northern France, including iconic Normandy.

Henry III's reign witnessed many closer links with France, where Louis IX (St Louis) was his brother-in-law.

French culture was echoed in Britain, especially in Gothic architecture. But despite Frenchness of manners and names, English barons became increasingly conscious of their Englishness, which they declared in anti-foreign attitudes which focused on immigrant courtiers.

It is no accident that scholars have dubbed the spare, simple Gothic architecture of the 13th century 'Early English', epitomised by Salisbury Cathedral, largely built between 1220 and 1258..

Crusading continued during the 13th century, indeed Edward I (1272 - 1307) was away crusading when his father died in 1272 and did not return for two years.

Such a smooth transition was a tribute to effective government

administration in England. Incredibly, centralised financial record-keeping on the great roll of the exchequer survives unbroken from early in Henry II's reign.

Tributes to growing institutions of English government - and hints of a less dominant monarchy - are prevalent in this period:

Richard I's realm was governed successfully in his absence for almost his entire reign; Henry III inherited from his unpopular father as a child of nine, with a regency lasting almost a decade; and the transition of power from Henry III to Edward I, when the latter was absent for two years.

There was a downside to effective financial organisation. The prosperity arising from peasant agriculture, growing urbanism and burgeoning population growth meant England could focus more directly on its near neighbours Wales, Scotland and to a lesser extent Ireland, in the 13th and early 14th centuries.

Wales was partly subdued by Edward I, who put his government's wealth into building the great castles through which he gained control of north Wales. But expansionism wasn't the sole preserve of England. Scotland regained the Western Isles from Scandinavian colonists following the Battle of Largs in 1263.

An opportunity arose for England to become involved at the centre of Scottish politics with the untimely death of Alexander III, who died in a riding accident in 1289.

Edward I was called upon to judge different claimants to the Scottish throne, which he did, and his pre-eminence is displayed in a contemporary manuscript illumination which shows him with Llywelyn, Prince of Wales, and Alexander, King of Scotland, on his right and left respectively.

In the last quarter of the 13th century, English dominance over Ireland, Scotland and Wales was apparently being achieved. But that famous image of Edward I with Scots and Welsh rulers illustrates a high point of English predominance.

From the last quarter of the 13th century, fundamentals underlying the dynamics of development in Britain and Ireland changed.

Population growth slowed down, inflation began to affect wealth and bloody civil war as a way of managing royal power became tempered by embryonic parliamentary developments.

Henry III's struggle with Simon de Montfort, who the king defeated and killed at Evesham in 1265, exemplifies this.

De Montfort's unofficial 'model parliament' of 1263 and Edward I's official model of 1295 were designed by magnates to curb royal power by increasing representation of counties and boroughs.

Problems with the feudal army also emerged at the 1295 parliament when the earl marshal refused to serve abroad unless the king was present. He was threatened with hanging, but neither served nor was he hanged.

The remainder of the period from 1300 to 1485 is traditionally seen as a disastrous period in English history, which in many ways it was. However, Scotland and Ireland achieved growing independence during this period.

A Scottish highlight in the 'wars of independence' was the victory of Robert the Bruce over Edward II at Bannockburn near Stirling in 1314.

The Avignon papacy recognised an independent anointed Scottish monarchy before Bruce's untimely death in 1329, and the long-term 'auld alliance' with France from 1296 secured Scotland's independence.

Rebellions in Wales, especially that of Owen Glyn Dwr between 1400 and 1409, are testament to some Welshmen's continuing struggle for independence, although their own princes were replaced by English princes of Wales from the time of Edward I.

Famine and Plague

The long view of the period from 1300 to 1485 suggests climate and demographic change were probably key determinants of developments in Britain and Ireland.

Climatic deterioration began from about 1300, with colder winters and wetter summers. These conditions contributed to the Great European Famine of 1315 - 1322, in which millions perished.

Chronic malnourishment weakened the population, perhaps making people more susceptible to the Black Death, the worst disease in recorded history, which arrived in Europe in 1347 and in England the following year.

The disease killed 50% of the population within a year, but the main effect was that it returned with alarming regularity in 1361, 1374 and regularly thereafter until it disappeared from Britain in about 1670.

The population of Britain and Ireland before the Black Death may have been eight million, of which three-quarters lived in England.

Decline continued until about 1450, when the population was perhaps two or three million, the lowest count during the last millennium. By 1485 the population was beginning to rise again.

The war of the roses

Causes of the war of the roses

1) EFFECTS OF THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR (THE FRENCH WARS)

The English had just suffered their final defeat in the Hundred Years' War: Maine was surrendered in 1448, Normandy was lost in 1450, and finally Bordeaux in 1453. Nearly a hundred years and five generations' worth of battling and occupying France, and finally losing was a cause of great upset to the populace. Furthermore, to the landowners who lost their French holdings, the financial loss was considerable.

Every version of the complaints put forward by the rebels in 1450 harps on the losses in France.

2) FINANCIAL PROBLEMS AND SOCIETAL CHANGES

The Black Plague, which had first arrived in England in 1348 and made several returns, had caused enormous losses in population, which in turn caused a dearth of labour force to tend the crops. This caused severe inflation in the prices of labour and agricultural products, and, in years of crop failures, periods of grave famine. Furthermore, the death toll of the plague had caused a great shift in the social order; previously minor landholders grew wealthy and upwardly mobile, taking over lands whose owners had all died. The French Wars also had put a strain on the royal treasury.

"Livery and Maintenance"
Since the fall of feudalism, the "Livery and maintenance" system meant that the great peers of the kingdom could call upon minor lords in their dominions to come fight on their side, under one banner. These, combined with career soldiers turned mercenaries after the French campaigns, meant that the peers could rouse large armies for themselves as easily, and in some cases more easily, than the king. When fighting a common enemy for a century was no longer an option, it was perhaps just a matter of time until the great warriors began to fight each other.

3) DYNASTIC PROBLEM

Richard of York was the only person, save Henry VI, who possessed an unbroken legitimate male descent from King Edward. He was in fact heir

The birth of an heir in 1453 complicated matters—now, if the King were to die or be incapacitated, the kingdom would fall to an infant prince, most likely governed by the loathed Somerset. In 1453 King Henry VI did indeed become incapacitated; he suffered from complete mental derangement to the point of imbecility. He did not even understand that an heir had been born to him. York took over as Protector, but when the King regained his sanity a year later, Somerset was restored to power, and the Yorkists were thrown out. And thus followed the first battle in the Wars of the Roses: The First Battle of St. Albans, 1455.

WARS OF THE ROSES: A name given to a series of civil wars in England during the reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV and Richard III. They were marked by a ferocity and brutality which are practically unknown in the history of English wars before and since.

The honest yeoman of Edward III's time had evolved into a professional soldier of fortune, and had been demoralized by the prolonged and dismal Hundred Years' War, at the close of which many thousands of ruffians, whose occupation had gone, had been let loose in England. At the same time the power of feudalism had become concentrated in the hands of a few great lords, who were wealthy enough and powerful enough to become king-makers. The disbanded mercenaries enlisted indifferently on either side, corrupting the ordinary feudal tenantry with the evil habits of the French wars, and pillaged the countryside, with accompaniments of murder and violence, wherever they went.

It is true that the sympathies of the people at large were to some extent enlisted: London and, generally, the trading towns being Yorkist, the country people, Lancastrian — a division of factions which roughly corresponded to that of the early part of the Great Rebellion, two centuries later, and similarly in a measure indicative of the opposition of hereditary loyalty and desire for sound and effective government. But there was this difference, that in the 15th century the feeling of loyalty was to a great extent focused upon the great lords. Each lord could depend on his own tenantry, and he could, further, pay large bands of retainers. Hence, much as the citizen desired a settlement, the issue was in the hands of the magnates; and as accessions to and defections from one party and the other constantly shifted the balance of power, the war dragged on, becoming more and more brutal with every campaign.

The first campaign, or rather episode, of these wars began with an armed demand of the Yorkist lords for the dismissal of the Lancastrian element in the King's Council, Henry VI himself being incapable of governing. The Lancastrians, and the king with them, marched out of London to meet them, and the two small armies (3000 Yorkists, 2000 Lancastrians) met at St Albans (May 22, 1455). The encounter ended with the dispersion of the weaker force, and the king fell into the hands of the Yorkists. Four years passed before the next important battle, Blore Heath, was fought (Sept. 23, 1459). In this the Earl of Salisbury trapped a Lancastrian army in unfavourable ground near Market Drayton, and destroyed it; but new political combinations rendered the Yorkist victory useless and sent the leaders of the party into exile.

They made a fresh attempt in 1460, and, thanks partly to treason in the Lancastrian camp, partly to the generalship of Warwick, won an important success and for the second time seized the King [Henry VI] at Northampton (July 10, 1460). Shortly afterwards, after a period of negotiation and threats, there was a fresh conflict. Richard Duke of York went north to fight the hostile army which gathered at York and consisted of Lancashire and Midland Royalists, while his son Edward, Earl of March [later Edward IV], went into the west. The father was ambushed and killed at Wakefield (Dec. 30, 1460), and the Lancastrians, inspired as always by Queen Margaret of Anjou, moved south on London, defeated Warwick at St Albans (Feb. 17, 1461), and regained possession of the King's person.

But the young Earl of March, now Duke of York [later Edward IV], having raised an army in the west, defeated the Earl of Pembroke (Feb. 2, 1461) at Mortimer's Cross (5 mi. W. of Leominster). This was the first battle of the war which was characterized by the massacre of the common folk and beheading of the captive gentlemen — invariable accompaniments of Edward's victories, and conspicuously absent in Warwick's. Edward then pressed on, joined Warwick, and entered London, the army of Margaret retreating before them. The excesses of the northern Lancastrians in their advance produced bitter fruit on the retreat, for men flocked to Edward's standard.

Marching north in pursuit, the Yorkists brought their enemy to bay at Towton, 3 mi. S. of Tadcaster, and utterly destroyed them (March 29, 1461). For three years after Towton the war consisted merely of desultory local struggles of small bodies of Lancastrians against the inevitable. The Duke of York had become King Edward IV, and had established himself firmly. But in 1464, in the far north of England, the Red Rose [House of Lancaster] was again in the field. Edward acted with his usual decision. His lieutenant Montagu (Warwick's brother) defeated and slew Sir Ralph Percy at Hedgeley Moore, near Wooler (April 25, 1464), and immediately afterwards destroyed another Lancastrian army, with which were both Henry VI and Queen Margaret, at Hexham (May 8, 1464). The massacres and executions which followed effectively crushed the revolt.

For some years thereafter Edward reigned peacefully, but Warwick the king-maker and all the Neville following having turned against him (1470), he was driven into exile. But at a favourable moment he sailed from Flushing with 1500 retainers and Burgundian mercenaries, and eluding the Lancastrian fleet and the coast defence troops, landed at Ravenspur (Spurn Head) in Yorkshire in March 1471. His force was hardly more than a bodyguard; the gates of the towns were shut against him, and the country people fled. But by his personal charm, diplomacy, fair promises and an oath of allegiance to King Henry VI, sworn solemnly at York, he disarmed hostility and, eluding Montagu's army, reached his own estates in the Wakefield district, where many of his old retainers joined him.

As he advanced south, a few Yorkist nobles with their following rallied to him, but it was far more the disunion of the Warwick and the real Lancastrian parties than his own strength which enabled him to meet Warwick's forces in a pitched battle. At Barnet, on Easter Eve, April 14, 1471, the decisive engagement was fought. But in the midst of the battle reinforcements coming up under the Earl of Oxford to join Warwick came into conflict with their own party, the badge of the Vere star being mistaken for Edward's Rose-en-soleil. From that point all the mutually distrustful elements of Warwick's army fell apart, and Warwick himself, with his brother Montagu, was slain.

For the last time the unhappy Henry VI fell into the hands of his enemies. He was relegated to the Tower, and Edward, disbanding his army, reoccupied the throne. But Margaret of Anjou, his untiring opponent, who had been in France while her cause and Warwick's was being lost, had landed in the west shortly after Barnet, and Edward had to take the field at once. Assembling a fresh army at Windsor, whence he could march to interpose between Margaret and her north Welsh allies, or directly bar her road to London, he marched into the west on the 24th of April. On the 29th he was at Cirencester, Margaret, engaged chiefly in recruiting an army, near Bath. Edward hurried on, but Margaret eluded him and marched for Gloucester. At that place the governor refused the Lancastrians admittance, and seeking to cross the Severn out of reach of the Yorkists, they pushed on by forced marches to Tewkesbury. But Edward too knew how to march, and caught them up. The battle of Tewkesbury (May 4, 1471) ended with the destruction of Margaret's force, the captivity of Margaret, the death of her son Edward (who, it is sometimes said, was stabbed by Edward IV himself after the battle) and the execution of sixteen of the principal Lancastrians.

This was Edward's last battle. The rest of his eventful reign was similar in many ways to that of his contemporary Louis XI, being devoted to the consolidation of his power, by fair means and foul, at the expense of the great feudatories. But the Wars of the Roses were not yet at an end. For fourteen years, except for local outbreaks, the land had peace, and then Richard III's crown, struck from his head on Bosworth Field (Aug. 22, 1485), was presented to Henry Earl of Richmond, who, as Henry VII, established the kingship on a secure foundation. A last feeble attempt to renew the war, made by an army gathered to uphold the pretender Lambert Simnel, was crushed by Henry VII at Stoke Field (4 mi S.W. of Newark) on the 16th of June 1487.

The hundred years war

Historical tradition dates the Hundred Years War between England and France as running from 1337 to 1453.

In 1337, Edward III had responded to the confiscation of his duchy of Aquitaine by King Philip VI of France by challenging Philip’s right to the French throne, while in 1453 the English had lost the last of their once wide territories in France, after the defeat of John Talbot’s Anglo-Gascon army at Castillon, near Bordeaux.

The overseas possessions of the English kings were the root cause of the tensions with the kings of France, and the tensions reached right back to 1066. William the Conqueror was already duke of Normandy when he became king of England. His great-grandson Henry II, at his accession in 1154, was already count of Anjou by inheritance from his father and duke of Aquitaine (Gascony and Poitou) in right of his wife Eleanor.

These trans-Channel possessions made the kings of England easily the mightiest of the king of France’s vassals, and the inevitable friction between them repeatedly escalated into open hostilities. The Hundred Years War grew out of these earlier clashes and their consequences.

England's King John lost Normandy and Anjou to France in 1204. His son, Henry III, renounced his claim to those lands in the Treaty of Paris in 1259, but it left him with Gascony as a duchy held under the French crown. The English kings’ ducal rights there continued to be a source of disquiet, and wars broke out in 1294 and 1324.

The 1294 outbreak coincided with Edward l’s first clash with the Scots, and thenceforward the French and Scots were allied in all subsequent confrontations with England. It was indeed French support for David Bruce of Scotland, in the face of Edward III’s intervention there, that triggered the breakdown between England and France and culminated in Philip VI’s confiscation of Aquitaine in 1337 - the event that precipitated the Hundred Years War.

Edward’s 1337 riposte - challenging Philip's right to the French throne - introduced a new issue that distinguished this war from previous confrontations. In 1328, Charles IV of France had died without a male heir. A claim for the succession had been made for Edward, then 15 years old, through the right of his mother Isabella, daughter of Philip IV and Charles IV’s sister. But he was passed over in favour of Philip, the son of Philip IV’s younger brother, Charles of Valois.

Edward now revived his claim, and in 1340 formally assumed the title 'King of France and the French Royal Arms'. Historians argue about whether Edward really believed he might actually attain the French throne. Irrespective, his claim gave him very important leverage in his dealings with Philip.

He could use it to stir up trouble by encouraging French malcontents to recognise him as king instead of Philip. He could also use it as a powerful weapon in negotiation, by offering to renounce his claim against very large territorial concessions, for instance the independence of Aquitaine from France - possibly even the cession of Normandy and Anjou on the same terms.

Edward skilfully played on his claim to the French throne during the 1340s and 1350s to lure discontented French princes and provinces into alliance with him.

Among these were the Flemings, always open to English pressure on account of their commercial links with England; the Montfort claimants to the duchy of Brittany in the succession war that broke out there in 1342; and Charles of Navarre, of the French blood royal and a great Norman vassal and landowner, in the 1350s.

These alliances enabled Edward to render substantial regions of France virtually ungovernable from Paris, and to keep the fighting on French soil going in between occasional English expeditions.

Though intermittent, these expeditions had a very major impact. They took the form of large-scale, swift-moving military raids (chevauchées) deep into France and were intended, through systematic plundering and the burning of crops and buildings, to damage the economy and undermine French civilian morale.

The conquest of territory was not an object, but Edward was quite ready to engage a pursuing French army in open battle if he could do so in advantageous circumstances. He rightly reckoned that economic damage and defeat in the field would force his adversary to the negotiating table.

Edward III’s great chevauchée of 1346 climaxed in his victory at Crécy, and was followed by the successful siege of Calais, securing for England a key maritime port on the French channel coast.

The two chevauchées that his heir, Edward the 'Black Prince', led out from Bordeaux in 1355 and 1356 were even more glamorously successful in terms of plunder. The second of these culminated in the victory at Poitiers, where John of France, Philip’s successor, was taken prisoner.

Between 1356 and 1360, chaos engulfed the kingless French kingdom, with Charles of Navarre in revolt and temporarily controlling Paris in 1358. There was also a major peasant rising in the same year, in the central provinces (the 'Jacquerie'), and freebooting companies of soldiers on the rampage almost everywhere.

Under these conditions, it is not surprising that in 1359 Edward III’s last chevauchée was aimed at Rheims, in the clear hope of a coronation there. But Rheims did not open its gates and nor did Paris. The abortive expedition ended instead in the opening of negotiations with Charles, the dauphin (heir apparent to the French throne), which led in May 1360 to the sealing of the Treaty of Brétigny.

The principle terms of the treaty were that France should pay three million crowns for King John’s ransom, and that he would cede to Edward an enlarged Aquitaine, wholly independent of the French crown. In return, Edward would renounce his clam to the French throne.

For the next nine years Edward did indeed cease to use the title king of France.

Joan of Arc and English defeat

The regency for Henry VI in France was taken up by his eldest surviving uncle, John, Duke of Bedford, and with it the task of seeking to win acceptance of the Troyes settlement throughout France. Militarily, Bedford needed to carry the war forward successfully into the 'dauphinist' lands south of the Loire.

But before he could push south, Bedford needed to consolidate Anglo-Burgundian authority north of the Loire. In August 1424, his great victory at Verneuil on the borders of Maine and Normandy effectively destroyed the dauphin Charles’s formidable Franco-Scottish army, which in Henry V’s absence had beaten the English at Baugé three years earlier.

By 142S, after some vigorous mopping-up, the position looked sufficiently secure for an offensive southward, and the first English objective was the key bridgehead on the Loire south of Paris, Orléans.

Orléans was invested in September 1428, but the besieging force was too small to attempt an immediate storming. The aim had to be to starve the garrison out. At first it looked as if there was little chance of a relief for the defenders, but in February 1429, Joan of Arc arrived at the dauphin’s court at Chinon with her story of the voices that had given her the mission of ridding France of the English.

Her charisma breathed new confidence into the relieving army that she led to Orléans in May, and it successfully broke the siege. On 12 June at Jargeau and again at Patay on 17 June, she defeated the retreating English. Just a month later, on 16 July, she watched as her ‘gentle dauphin’ was solemnly crowned Charles VII of France in Rheims cathedral.

After Joan’s capture in the following year and her subsequent execution for heresy, the English succeeded in recovering some of the towns they had lost in the wake of her victories and more or less held their own for a while. But in 1435, Philip, Duke of Burgundy, abandoned his English alliance at the Congress at Arras, and recognised Charles VII as his king. This dealt a mortal blow to English hopes of making the Troyes settlement stick.

Paris opened its gates to Charles's general, Arthur, Constable de Richemont, in April 1436, and though the English still controlled most of Normandy and campaigned vigorously along its borders, the prospects for their cause began to look very gloomy indeed.

Negotiations formed a continuous background to the fighting from 1435. They finally bore fruit in 1444 with a general truce agreed at Tours. It was hoped that the arranged marriage there between Henry VI of England and the French princess Margaret of Anjou would help to make the truce a step toward full peace terms.

Then in 1449, an English force sacked and looted Fougères in Brittany. Charles VII, who had used the break in fighting to reorganise his royal army, declared himself no longer bound by the terms of the truce.

His forces rapidly overran Normandy during 1449-1450. In 1451, he repeated this success in Gascony. The veteran English commander John Talbot arrived there the following year with a force from England and retook Bordeaux. But on 17 July 1453, his army was disastrously defeated at Castillon and Talbot himself killed.

Soon after, with Bordeaux once more in French hands, there was nothing left of the former English territories in France, bar Calais. The war was effectively over, even though it would not officially end for many years yet.

Battles, armies and weaponry

The English armies of the Hundred Years War were small by modern standards. Henry V probably had fewer than 7,000 men at Agincourt, Talbot at Castillon maybe 6,000. Forces were raised principally by voluntary recruitment and organised by aristocratic leaders who contracted to serve the crown with a stated number of men-at-arms (knights and esquires) and archers. The terms, recorded in a written indenture, stipulated wages and an agreed length of service, such as six months or a year, with the possibility of extension.

These aristocratic leaders contracted in their turn with those that they recruited into their companies. This method of raising an army ensured an effective command structure much superior to that of the hastily assembled French armies that fought at Crécy and Agincourt). Archers as well as men-at-arms were usually mounted, ensuring a high degree of mobility. Both usually dismounted for battle. The men-at-arms were armed with lance and sword, the archers with the famous longbow.

The longbow played an important part in the English victories in the field. Its special qualities were its accuracy and penetrating power over a long range (approximately 200 metres) and the ease of rapid discharge, which was much faster than the rate of fire of French crossbowmen. The fire of well-positioned longbowmen was decisive against charging French cavalry at Crécy, and at Agincourt against both cavalry in the first attacking wave and the dismounted men-at-arms in the second wave.

Archery contributed to victory again at Poitiers, but in this very hard fought battle, charging Anglo-Gascori cavalry had a decisive impact at a critical juncture. The longbow did not make the English invincible. Archers were always very vulnerable if they could be taken in the flank. At Jargeau, Joan of Arc’s cavalry successfully rode down the English bowmen.

Archers also played an important part in naval warfare. The longbow’s range and rapid rate of fire could be of great advantage as ships were closing to grapple. This was thought to be the key to Edward III’s naval victory at Sluys in 1340. Both he and Henry V well understood the importance of safeguarding the Channel for the transport and supply of English forces in France, as well as for the protection of English overseas commerce.

In the siege-dominated fighting in France post-1417, gunnery became seriously important. Henry V’s great sieges at Rouen (1418-1419) and Meaux (1421-1422) ultimately succeeded only by starving out the defence, as had Edward III’s 1347 siege of Calais. But at Maine (1424-1425), bombardment was a key to English success. There was brisk artillery fire from defenders as well as attackers at Orleans in 1428-1429. The final French victory at Castillon in 1453 was the first major field engagement of the war to be decided by gunfire.

The legacy of war

The shock in England over the loss of its formerly wide overseas empire was very great. Popular rage against the counsellors and commanders deemed responsible had much to do with the outbreak in the mid-1450s of civil war (the 'Wars of the Roses'). The recovery of the lost lands in France long remained a wishful national aspiration, but in material terms the consequences of their loss, for Englishmen living in England at least, was not very great.

Fears that English commerce would suffer now that the Norman Channel harbours were back in French hands proved largely groundless. The only real sufferers from the loss were the professional soldiers and those Englishmen who had sought to settle in France. Their numbers were not seriously significant in social terms.

Although most noblemen and a good many among the gentry saw some war service, among the total population the proportion that fought was decidedly low. Since virtually all the fighting was on French soil, there was no English experience comparable to the devastation and dislocation of economic life in the French countryside. Plagues, recurrent after the 1348 Black Death, had much more significant effects on the conditions and living standards of ordinary working people in town and country than the war ever did.

Where the impact of war was most directly felt by most people was in increased taxation. Campaigning abroad called for high government expenditure, and the only means of raising the necessary funding was through taxes. This required the assent of the Commons in parliament, which meant the war period witnessed a considerable rise in the importance and frequency of parliaments, and in the influence of the Commons. This in turn set in train parliament’s future central constitutional role.

Publicity for the war effort, in which, the church played an important part (with royal encouragement), fostered a patriotic sense of English identity. Prayers were regularly ordered for armies serving overseas, and in thanksgiving for victories. Edward III’s promotion of the cult of St George as England’s warrior patron saint played deliberately to nascent national sentiment.

A proud patriotism, nourished by royal propaganda and pulpit oratory, and also, emphatically, by the euphoria of such dramatic English victories as Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt, was probably the most lasting legacy of the Hundred Years War.

Its origins in national war experience gave that patriotism a chauvinistic edge that continued to colour English popular attitudes to foreigners and especially to the French for a very long time. Francophobia runs as a recurrent thread through the English story from the 15th century down to the start of the 20th, when finally the Germans replaced the French as England’s natural adversaries in the popular eye.

2012/05/16

A HISTORY OF BRITAIN II 1154 - 1485