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For most of the fourteenth century the realm of England was subdivided into thirty-eight shires or counties. The city of London had shire status, and the same privilege was extended to Bristol in 1373. But the other thirty-seven units, although including cities and towns, were basically rural; and for the present we shall look at the landed classes and village communities of these regions, leaving urban society for separate treatment in the next chapter. There has been considerable debate about the influence of the ‘county communities’ in later medieval England, and some historians are now prepared to argue that it was the shire, rather than the kingdom, that provided the essential focus for the political aspirations of provincial society. It has already been remarked in several places that Edward III’s reign witnessed the devolution of administrative and political influence to the provinces; and the king’s relations with the shires are therefore of crucial importance in helping to characterize his regime.
We have already met several individuals and groups who might be regarded as part of ‘county society’ in the later Middle Ages. The magnates, with their vast landed estates, and the parish clergy, with their responsibility for the spiritual welfare of the rural community, obviously had important roles to play in provincial life. Most of this chapter will be devoted to the middling landholders or ‘gentry’. To begin with, however, it may be instructive to ask whether the lesser members of rural society contributed anything to the development of the fourteenth-century polity.
THE PEASANTRY
The role of the peasantry in politics was inevitably extremely limited. The peasant’s world was a narrow one, and he often had little knowledge of conditions in other parts of his own shire, let alone at opposite ends of the country. For this and many other reasons, concerted political action by the peasantry was most unlikely. On the other hand, the rural population certainly had no shortage of grievances.1 The real problem was to find channels for legitimate and effective protest.
The ability to seek redress largely depended on the legal status of the complainant. Free tenants were at liberty to petition their lords, and often used this right to make accusations against unscrupulous estate managers.2 Tenants on the royal demesne had a special advantage in this respect, for their appeals went straight to the king. Thus in 1328, and again in the 1340s, Edward III’s tenants at Boothby Graffoe (Lincolnshire) protested in parliament about the unjust seizure of their common pastures by the constable of Somerton Castle.3 When free peasant communities had grievances which fell outside the scope of the manorial court, they were also at liberty to register petitions in parliament. The great majority of such petitions surviving from Edward III’s reign deal, predictably enough, with taxation: abuses by the collectors, the unfairness of the quotas, and the failure of absentee lords and tenants to pay their due share. In the parliaments of January and March 1348, for instance, we find complaints on these and other related matters from the nine poor tenants of Hardwick (Oxfordshire), the men of Broadway (Somerset), the tenants of Hungerford (Berkshire), the community of Skeldale in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and many others.4 But the mere presentation of a petition was no guarantee of redress. The evasive responses made by the crown and the perennial problem of regulating local administrators made it highly unlikely that many communities got real satisfaction. The crown’s response to petitions was all too often conditioned by the social status of the petitioner, and peasants simply did not have the clout to guarantee preferential treatment.
For the unfree, there was not even the hope of satisfaction through such channels. Villeins were subject only to their lords: they were not recognized by the royal courts, and could not appeal to the king. Their only chance was to claim the privilege of ancient demesne: that is, to assert that their manors had once been part of the crown estate and that they, like the king’s villeins, should have access to royal justice.5 In 1335 the men of Macclesfield Forest claimed this privilege in order to appeal against the bailiffs of the Earl of Chester.6 During the 1330s the tenants of Darnhall and Over took a similar course, protesting to the king and to parliament against the villein services being imposed on them by their lord, the Abbot of Vale Royal. They got no satisfaction, and were ultimately subjected to a humiliating penance by the victorious abbot.7 Not all appeals ended thus, for some villeins found friends in surprisingly high places. In 1334 the Archbishop of Canterbury accused Richard Ward, sheriff of Buckinghamshire, of assisting the villein tenants of Prince’s Risborough in their claim to the privilege of ancient demesne.8 And in 1364 the king himself upheld the rights of the tenants of Crondall (Hampshire) in a similar dispute with the Prior of Winchester.9 On the whole, however, the balance of justice weighed heavily against the unfree peasantry. They had identified a means of gaining access to the crown, only to find the way repeatedly barred.
Claims to the privilege of ancient demesne are interesting in a more general sense, for they provide a useful index of peasant grievances. The escalation in the number of such appeals during the later fourteenth century has often been taken as a sign of the increasingly harsh and intrusive lordship which characterized the period after the Black Death.10 There are occasional signs of tension even before 1350. In 1344, for instance, the men of Tuxford (Nottinghamshire) protested to the king about certain customary dues newly imposed by the lord of the manor, Sir Thomas Beckering. 11 Nevertheless, the plague undoubtedly heralded a new era. Parliament and government now gave official backing to the efforts being made by landholders to revive villein tenancies and services, and deliberately restricted the means by which unfree peasants might gain access to royal justice. In 1348 the crown reformed the procedure on the writ exceptio villenagi (‘exception of villeinage’) in order to make it easier for lords to challenge presumptuous serfs impleading them in the courts.12 And in 1352, at the instigation of the commons, the king severely restricted the use of the writ de libertate probanda (‘proof of liberty’), thus eliminating the means by which a former villein might prove his freedom and escape repossession.13 The resulting frustration felt by unfree peasant communities can be measured by the remarkable number of appeals of ancient demesne registered in the later 1370s. Between the autumn of 1376 and the spring of 1378, no fewer than forty villages, most of them in Surrey, Hampshire and Wiltshire, made petitions of this kind to the crown. 14 The failure of so many of these appeals may well have persuaded peasants in other parts of the country that the crown had effectively turned its back on the majority of its subjects, and that the only effective means of protest now left was insurrection. The peasantry, who formed anything up to 90 per cent of the total population, had been effectively barred from legitimate political action.
THE GENTRY
It is no surprise to find that local politics in the fourteenth century was dominated by the landholders. Problems only arise when we try to define the different ranks of landholding society. Historians have identified a group below the nobility to whom they have applied the anachronistic label ‘gentry’. The members of this class demonstrated their gentility by bearing coats of arms, by exercising some form of lordship over dependent tenants, and by participating in the administration of the shires. Within this group, however, there was considerable diversity. The upper levels were dominated by the knights. According to the crown, everyone with a landed income of over £40 a year ought to be a knight, and although there were some evasions and exceptions, the great majority of the more substantial landholders in Edward III’s reign continued to conform to this rule.15 Below the knights was a larger group of middling and minor gentry generally described in the mid-fourteenth century as armigeri or valletti. By 1400 more precision had crept in, and two discernible classes had emerged: the ‘esquires’, holding estates valued between £20 and £40 a year; and the ‘gentlemen’ with annual incomes of £10–£20.16 Looking at the situation in the mid-fourteenth century, when the terminology was still vague, it is difficult to establish a minimum qualification for membership of the gentry. When royal officials were called upon to draw up lists of important county landholders, they not infrequently included those with incomes as small as £5 a year.17 But the influence of these lesser men was obviously extremely limited, and they have left very little trace in royal records. The following discussion will therefore concentrate on the more substantial members of the class, often referred to as the ‘county gentry’.
How many gentry families were there in mid-fourteenth-century England? There are a number of ways of calculating this, though any such exercise is bound to contain a degree of guesswork. The ratio of knights to non-knights altered considerably in the later Middle Ages, as it became acceptable for men of quite substantial means to remain mere esquires. This to some extent accounts for the drop in the total number of knights, from as many as 2,000 in the thirteenth century to well under 1,000 in the early fifteenth century.18 But the esquires did not increase sufficiently to compensate for this: the total number of knights and non-knights valued between £20 and £100 in the taxation returns of 1436 was still under 2,000.19 In Gloucestershire at least, this reduction in numbers was already evident by the last quarter of the fourteenth century.20 Working from the available evidence, it would seem that there were about 1,500 knights or potential knights valued in excess of £40, and about the same number of lesser men valued at £20–£40, in the first half of Edward III’s reign. But the Black Death and the subsequent redistribution of incomes seem to have had a significant effect, and by the end of our period it is possible that the number of county gentry had fallen by as much as a third to a total of only about 2,000 men.21 The main point to emerge from these very rough statistics is that the gentry never formed more than a tiny proportion of the entire population of medieval England. In extending our analysis of political society into the shires, and referring somewhat glibly to the wider political community represented in the parliamentary commons, we should clearly not be deluded into the idea that Edwardian England was some form of democracy.
THE GENTRY IN ARMS
The primary function of the landed classes was the profession of arms. The gentry were the direct successors of the knights, the elite mounted force in the feudal armies of the Norman kings. By the mid-fourteenth century the feudal host had given way to contract armies, and new methods of fighting had tended to reduce the importance of heavily armed cavalry officers. But it is quite wrong to suppose that the knights simply renounced their traditional function and allowed royal armies to pass under the control of professional mercenaries. Edward III’s adventures in Scotland and France offered considerable potential for fame and fortune, and a high proportion of the gentry eagerly took up their place on the battlefields of Europe.
The cavalry forces in Edward’s armies were usually divided into four ranks: earls, bannerets, knights and men-at-arms (not to be confused with the ‘armed men’ who made up the infantry). Not all the knights were English, and not all the men-at-arms were established members of landed society. Indeed, Edward III’s reign witnessed the emergence of a new class of professional captains, men such as Hugh Calveley, Robert Knollys, Walter Huet, John Norbury, David Hulgreve and Gregory Sais, who came of relatively humble stock and who used the war as a means of social advancement.22 Nevertheless, the records we have suggest that a considerable proportion of the gentry must have been involved in the armies of the mid-fourteenth century.23 In 1335 the royal forces in Scotland included 450 knights and some 2,250 men-at-arms. In 1341, when Edward III planned a major expedition to Brittany, he budgeted for 489 knights and over 2,000 men-at-arms.24 The army actually collected in 1342 was somewhat smaller, but still had 330 knights and 1,470 men-at-arms. Over 900 knights apparently served at Crécy and Calais, though this figure was unusually large as a result of the virtual conscription of English knights and the mass dubbings carried out by the king in the course of the campaign.25Even so, the royal expedition to France in 1359–60 still included 870 knights, of whom no fewer than 680 were English. These examples represent some of the largest armies mobilized in the whole of the Hundred Years War. Inevitably, many of the contract armies led by members of the nobility were somewhat smaller: Henry of Grosmont’s force of 2,000 men for the campaign in Aquitaine in 1345, for instance, included just ninety-two knights and 150 esquires. John of Gaunt’s French expeditionary force of 1373, on the other hand, contained no fewer than 248 knights and 1,766 men-at-arms. When we remember that England was fighting on several different fronts for much of this period, and that crown and nobility had only a restricted number of cavalrymen on whom to draw, then the extent of gentry involvement in the wars is indeed remarkable.
There were many practical reasons why so many members of provincial landholding families took up arms in defence of Edward III’s claims in Scotland and France. While they were on active service, bannerets normally received wages of 4s a day, knights 2s, and ordinary men-at-arms 1s. On their own, however, these wages were probably insufficient to draw many voluntary recruits: indeed, during Edward’s uneventful and increasingly unpopular campaign in the Low Countries in 1338–40, the cavalry forces had to be paid precisely twice the normal rates.26 It was considerably more lucrative to act as a recruiting agent for the king or the nobility and negotiate a premium for each soldier thus found: Sir John Strother of Kirknewton (Northumberland), for instance, made at least £255 out of such a deal with the Earl of March in 1374.27 As with the nobility, however, it was probably the prospect of ransoms and plunder that really proved attractive. An excellent example of a fortune made on the basis of a single lucky break in war is provided by John Coupland. This obscure northerner was fortunate enough to capture David II at the battle of Neville’s Cross, and was awarded the rank of knight banneret and an annuity of £500 by a grateful Edward III. His career was thus transformed, and he rapidly emerged as a leading member of the northern gentry, building up a large landed estate in Northumberland and Westmorland, and getting himself appointed sheriff and justice of the peace, warden of the march and keeper of Berwick upon Tweed.28 His sudden rise may have offended some members of the Northumberland gentry, for in 1363 Coupland was murdered at Bolton Moor by a gang led by Sir John Clifford.29 But in spite of such hazards, there were many others who followed Coupland’s example. Even in the less favourable conditions of the 1370s and 1380s, a good number of lesser landholders seem to have continued to prosper in the wars: the castles erected by Sir John de la Mare at Nunney (Somerset) and by Sir Edward Dallingridge at Bodiam (Sussex) during this period are striking testimony to the very tangible benefits of the military life. 30
There were other incentives, too, and not all of them wholly honourable. Some members of the gentry took advantage of the general pardons granted in return for military service to immunize themselves from prosecution in the courts. Sir Thomas Beckering, whom we have already met, got off a major inquiry into his conduct as sheriff and purveyor of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in 1347 as a result of a pardon obtained at Calais.31 Others used their time in the army to secure writs halting judicial proceedings in which they were involved at home. It was common form for the crown to adjourn assizes until defendants returned from the war;32 and in 1375 it was discovered that Sir John Roucliff, currently serving at Berwick, had maliciously used such a device to block an action being taken against him by the cathedral chapter of York.33 Those on military service were also exempt from the king’s attempts in 1344–6 to raise soldiers on the basis of landed wealth, and from the periodic fines levied to support troops arrayed in the shires.34 In the late 1350s the commissioners in Leicestershire reported that no fewer than sixty-seven of the magnates and gentry holding land in that county were claiming immunity from array because they were currently serving in the wars.35 Finally, those with little inclination to serve in local government sometimes found the war a useful excuse. In 1374, John Berkeley was discharged from the office of sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire because he had already contracted to serve in the war with Lord Berkeley. 36Sometimes it was less of a liability to take up arms than to stay at home.
There is little evidence, however, to suggest that the war created a shortage of manpower in the administration of the shires. It was perfectly possible to combine a military and a civilian career: Thomas Wake of Blisworth, for example, who went abroad with the king in 1340, managed to keep his post as sheriff of Northamptonshire while serving on the continent.37 Moreover, many of the cavalry officers in Edward III’s armies were probably the sons of county landholders, doing their time in the military before succeeding to the family estates and the family responsibilities in local government. In this respect it may be significant that Sir John Hardreshull, who rose to prominence during the Breton civil war of the 1340s, retired from active service at precisely the time when his son William first appeared on the battlefields of France.38 Finally, a good number of the men-at-arms seem in any case to have been younger sons of minor landed families. A good example is Sir Ralph Ferrers, the second son of William Ferrers of Groby (Leicestershire), who rose through military service in France, Scotland and Ireland to become keeper of the Channel Islands (1373) and a royal councillor (1377).39 In fine, the wars of Edward III provided an outlet and an opportunity for a large section of gentry society. In discussing the political attitudes of the knights and esquires, we will do well to remember that they, like the nobility, were the king’s companions in arms and partners in glory.
BASTARD FEUDALISM
The contracts of military service made between commanders and cavalry officers are of particular interest to our study since they sometimes represented more permanent associations. The network of contacts built up between magnates and gentry in the later Middle Ages created that phenomenon which historians have chosen to call ‘bastard feudalism’. This form of lordship manifested itself in three ways: the indenture of retinue, a formal contract specifying the nature of the service demanded and the rewards offered; the payment of annuities; and the granting of liveries. 40 The essential difference between bastard feudalism and the ‘legitimate’ feudalism that it replaced was therefore the cash nexus: the bond between patron and client was symbolized not by the grant of a piece of land (a fief) but by a regular payment in money (a fee) or in kind (robes and badges). Such arrangements had been known in the thirteenth century, but the reign of Edward III is often seen as the period when their more sinister implications first became evident. The development of contract armies during the 1340s supposedly encouraged magnates to take on larger numbers of permanent retainers, and the king’s apparent deference to the nobility allowed lords to use their client networks as a means of infiltrating local government, of intimidating rivals, and of securing favourable judgments in the courts. It has already been pointed out, however, that the parliament rolls of the mid-fourteenth century are remarkably silent on the abuse of aristocratic power; and specific complaints about the evil consequences of lordship were not made until after Edward III’s death.41 We need to take a fresh look at the available evidence before assuming that the fourteenth-century gentry were mere pawns in the baronial power game.
The absence of noble archives makes it very difficult to assess what proportion of the gentry were active members of magnate affinities in this period. The evidence we have, derived mainly from the indentures of war, inevitably tends to exaggerate the numbers. It would be quite unrealistic to suggest that the twenty-five bannerets, 119 knights and 1,117 men-at-arms who accompanied the Earl of Stafford to Aquitaine in 1352 were all life annuitants of this new and modestly endowed nobleman.42 It has been calculated that Thomas of Lancaster’s retinue in 1314 numbered as many as 150 knights and esquires, while John of Gaunt’s permanent following in 1386 probably included some 169 knights and esquires.43 Both these cases, however, are quite exceptional, not only because they refer to the wealthiest noble house in England, but also because they concern periods when the Lancastrian affinity itself was unusually large. In fact, in the settled political circumstances of Edward III’s reign, few noblemen seem to have had more than about twenty knights and perhaps twice as many esquires on their books at any one time.44 The image of a society dominated by indentures of retainer is therefore palpably false.
Inevitably, there were geographical variations to this general pattern. In those shires where power was concentrated in the hands of a single powerful lord, the majority of the local gentry would naturally seek his fees and favours. The Black Prince, for instance, enjoyed a virtual monopoly of patronage in Cornwall and Cheshire. Even in the palatinates, however, bastard feudalism did not rule supreme. A detailed study of Lancashire society in the late fourteenth century has shown that only just over half the major office-holders in the county were members of John of Gaunt’s affinity, and only a handful of the minor gentry had any Lancastrian connection at all.45 In certain other counties, the absence of resident lords or the division of authority between several magnates clearly fostered a strong tradition of independence among the lesser landholders. In Bedfordshire, for instance, there was no substantial aristocratic influence for the greater part of the fourteenth century, and politics was dominated by the major gentry families such as the Braybrooks and the Birminghams. The same was true in many parts of the midlands, including Lincolnshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire.46 In the present state of our knowledge, it is difficult to tell whether any one of these cases can really be regarded as ‘typical’. What is clear is that a proportion – perhaps a significant proportion – of the gentry remained outside the formal ties of bastard feudalism in the mid-fourteenth century.
It is interesting to speculate about this situation. The unscrupulous actions of the nobility during the 1320s and 1330s may well have dissuaded some men from seeking noble patronage: lordship, after all, was only attractive if it was ‘good’ lordship. To associate oneself with a magnate had been particularly hazardous during the unstable 1320s: witness the desertions from Thomas of Lancaster’s retinue in the months preceding the battle of Boroughbridge.47 Those who survived the successive revolutions of this decade must have been highly cautious about aligning themselves with particular factions. After the 1340s the aristocracy’s political reputation improved. But just at this point the Black Death intervened; and the economic conditions following the plague may well have put constraints on noble budgets and prevented the rapid growth of peacetime affinities during the second half of Edward III’s reign.
The most important reason for bastard feudalism's failure to establish itself as the prime force in English politics during this period, however, was probably the crown’s willingness to accept that the gentry ought to be actively and directly involved both in local government and in central politics. With the knightly classes securing so much through their own representatives in the commons, they simply did not need to seek the support of noble patrons. Indeed, the actions of the gentry sometimes showed them to be sharply at variance with the magnates. In 1339–40, for instance, a striking difference of opinion arose in parliament over the king’s demands for more taxes, with the lords offering to pay a tenth of their agricultural produce and the commons holding out against any further fiscal exactions.48 Similar conflicts sometimes arose at the local level. For example, when John of Gaunt tried to impose new and controversial services on his estates in Sussex during the 1370s, he encountered considerable opposition from local landholders led by Sir Edward Dallingridge.49 The ‘horizontal’ links within gentry society were evidently just as important as the ‘vertical’ links created by bastard feudalism.
Having registered these qualifications, we must also point out that membership of a baronial retinue undoubtedly offered the best hope of advancement for many members of the gentry. Examples of relatively obscure men rising to distinction through aristocratic service abound in the mid-fourteenth century. John Cokayn of Ashbourne in Derbyshire, for instance, came to prominence as Henry of Grosmont’s undersheriff of Lancashire, had a busy career in Lancastrian and royal service until his death in the 1360s, and founded a longlasting dynasty of gentlemen-lawyers.50 In 1339 the Earl of Warwick appointed one of his retainers, Walter Shakenhurst, as undersheriff of Worcestershire, and continued to sponsor the latter’s career as a local justice and member of parliament during the 1340s and 1350s.51 Even well-established members of the gentry appreciated the benefits of aristocratic service. For example, Sir Ralph Bocking, a distinguished Suffolk landholder, acted as steward to Edward III’s uncle, the Earl of Norfolk, in the 1330s.52Bastard feudalism was popular precisely because it created a reciprocal relationship: it was the client, just as much as the patron, who benefited from the arrangement.
Nor was the king averse to using the same techniques as his great men. It was not until the 1390s that the English crown apparently made any conscious attempt to build up an independent following among the gentry by granting fees to provincial landholders.53But it is worth noting that a number of the minor peerage and greater gentry were at some time or other employed in Edward III’s household. Apart from the elite corps of bannerets and knights, there was also a large group of esquires retained by the royal household and listed in the accounts of the king’s wardrobe. During the early years of the reign there were about a hundred such esquires at any one time, though after the 1340s the number dropped to around seventy.54 Many of these men were obscure figures; others had distinguished military and political careers and worked their way up into the minor aristocracy. Nigel Loring, for instance, who was one of the founder members of the Order of the Garter, had served as an esquire of the household in the 1330s.55 Similarly, the list of esquires in the household accounts for 1353–4 includes a number of men who would later rise to prominence as knights of the king’s chamber – Guy Warr, Oliver Brocas, Richard Stury, Roger Elmrugge, John Foxley and John Beauchamp of Holt. 56 Most interesting from our present point of view, however, is the appearance in these same lists of men drawn from several of the leading baronial and gentry families: the Uffords, Beauchamps, Zouches, Umfravilles, Fitzwalters, Chandoses, Swynnertons, and so on. These were apparently young apprentice knights attached to the royal household to learn the arts of war and pick up some of the culture of the court. They presumably acted as important channels of communication between king and country; and the sense of loyalty bred into them and their like may well have helped to sustain Edward’s regime in the provinces during his last declining years. Nevertheless, it is significant that Edward III never attempted to turn this amorphous group of king’s friends into a recognizable political party. Astute and popular rulers preferred to draw on the baronial retinues and the more general tradition of service in order to build up a broad base of support among the gentry in the shires. Edward III’s ability to work with, rather than against, the forces of bastard feudalism demonstrates not only his political realism but also his sheer popularity in both noble and gentry society.
THE GENTRY AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT
The goodwill of the gentry was particularly important since it was they who provided the manpower and skills needed to run local government. Administrative and judicial posts in the shires fell into two broad categories. The greater gentry dominated the offices of sheriff, escheator, justice of the peace, and chief collector of taxes, while the minor gentry filled the less important or less popular offices of undersheriff, hundred bailiff, coroner, verderer, commissioner of array, sub-collector of taxes and purveyor. Some officials were elected locally (coroners and verderers, for instance, were chosen by the county courts); but in most cases the king retained the right to appoint his own representatives in the shires. It was only in 1338, when Edward III was absent from the country, that the ‘good people’ of the shires were empowered to choose their own sheriffs and other officials. In fact, this experiment proved unpopular, since the county communities feared that they would incur liability for the actions and debts of their nominees, and the government rapidly returned to the system of central appointments.57 Thereafter, local officials were selected on the advice of the chancellor, treasurer, and other senior ministers, or on the basis of personal recommendations received from magnates and prelates. It was only in exceptional circumstances that members of the gentry were consulted, as in 1369 when three Essex men were summoned before the council to decide which of them should be appointed sheriff.58 This is not to say, however, that the lesser landholders were indifferent to the question of local appointments. Indeed, their demands for better-qualified officials, and their particular concern to win greater participation in the work of the peace commissions, created a considerable political challenge for the government of Edward III.
In the first half of the fourteenth century a candidate for local office was simply expected to be of good reputation and to hold ‘sufficient’ property in the relevant shire.59 How much was deemed sufficient was actually far from clear. When Treasurer Zouche advised the removal of collectors of scutage in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in 1338–40, he merely stated that they should be replaced by two ‘more sufficient’ men.60 In 1337 the Earl of Lancaster did the same thing in suggesting a new collector of lay subsidies in Staffordshire, though in this case we know that the new commissioner, Maketon Wasteneys, held land to the value of £20 in that county.61 In 1349 John Chastillon was considered suitable for the sheriffdom of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire because he was worth £100 a year;62 but this was well in excess of the average income even of the more prosperous sections of gentry society. The situation was so vague that even the county communities sometimes made mistakes. In 1346 a report came in that Robert Savage, recently elected as coroner in Derbyshire, had been discovered to hold no land in that county.63 It was to resolve these problems and ambiguities that the commons in parliament began to campaign for a formal system of qualifications, and the government eventually fixed a minimum property requirement of £20 for escheators in 1368, and possibly also for sheriffs in 1371.64 After 1371 the crown also agreed to observe another of the commons’ longstanding demands, namely that sheriffs should not be allowed to serve for long periods but should be replaced annually.65 The most sustained campaign, however, revolved around the personnel of the peace commissions. In their concern to ensure that local men were appointed to keep the peace in the shires, the commons frequently asked that the names of the justices be submitted to parliament for approval, and it is possible that this was done in 1351, 1361, 1362 and 1363.66 Such concessions, limited though they were, signified that the workings of local government were the rightful concern of the parliamentary commons, and provided an important guarantee that the landed interest would prevail in the administration of the shires.
The response of those individuals actually selected for royal service varied considerably. A post in the shire administration was an honour. But it was also an obligation, and occasionally a hazard. Those working as justices of labourers in the period after the Black Death not infrequently faced intimidation and violence, and arrayers in particular often tried to wriggle out of their responsibilities when they realized the level of hostility towards them.67 Tax collectors were another obvious target for abuse. In 1354 Richard Marclesham, a collector of the lay subsidy in Essex, reported that no less a figure than the Abbot of Colchester had mounted an armed attack on him.68 Nor did the problems cease when men left office. Those charged to account at the exchequer were held personally responsible for all their outstanding debts. Sir Peter Mallory of Litchborough, for instance, who enjoyed brief favour with the government after his distinguished performance at Crécy in 1346, had good reason to regret his brief period as sheriff and escheator of Northamptonshire in 1351. Unable to meet the county farm in full, he was detained several times in the Fleet prison and never really recovered his former prominence in local society. 69 Given such liabilities, it is not surprising that some members of the gentry preferred to seek royal letters patent exempting them from public office.70
For the most part, however, the advantages of service outweighed the penalties. Apart from the obvious prestige, for instance, there was often the potential for considerable financial gain. In a formal sense the local officials of the crown did not get paid. The only major exceptions to this rule were special judicial commissioners, such as the justices of weights and measures acting between 1340 and 1344 and the justices of labourers working in the decade after the Black Death, who were permitted to take a quarter of the profits from their sessions as wages.71 Knights of the shire also qualified for expenses of 4s a day while they were away from home on the king’s business – twice what they could expect to earn for military service. This financial incentive must surely explain in part why Nicholas Stivichall, sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in 1356–60 and 1361–71, secured his own return to no fewer than eight parliaments. 72 Sheriffs themselves received no formal emoluments, but made their own rewards by a mixture of fair and foul practice.73 Since they farmed their shires for fixed sums payable at the exchequer, they were free to take any excess profits for themselves. Some sheriffs also made considerable gains from fees and bribes paid by towns, religious houses and magnates. The authorities in Oxford, for instance, made regular gifts of money, food and wine to the sheriffs, escheators and royal judges visiting the town; and in 1346–7 the burgesses of Cambridge gave the considerable sum of £3 to the sheriff as thanks for exempting them from the recent round of purveyance.74 William Trussell, escheator of the counties south of the Trent (1327, 1331–2, 1335–40), received a regular annuity of ten marks (£6 13s 4d) from the Knights Hospitallers.75 Finally, in 1366 it was revealed that the sheriff of Yorkshire, Thomas Musgrave, had received £5 from Sir Thomas Ughtred in order to guarantee a favourable judgment in the local assize sessions.76 These opportunities for personal gain clearly explain why, despite the financial problems experienced by an increasing number of sheriffs after the Black Death, the office continued to be much sought after for the rest of the fourteenth century. In the late 1370s Sir John Basings argued that he ought to have the farm of the county of Rutland because it had been granted to his great-great-great-grandfather Ralph Normanville in 1202.77 Anyone who could take the trouble of carrying out the genealogical research necessary to back up such a claim obviously regarded the office of sheriff as well worth having.
CORRUPTION AND LAW-KEEPING
The mixture of motives that drove men to seek public office obviously raises worrying questions as to whether the gentry could be trusted to regulate their own affairs. Medieval England was no paradise, and its system of local government inevitably contained a corrupt element. Examples of sharp practice abound in all the shire posts during Edward III’s reign. In 1330 Agnes Yetlington accused Sir John Lilburn of unjustly arresting her, and protested to the king that so long as Lilburn remained sheriff of Northumberland she would stand no chance of obtaining justice.78 Philip Deneys, the member of a special judicial commission in Suffolk, was discovered in 1368 to have colluded with a certain William Dirland to pervert the course of justice by empanelling men of low birth and intimidating juries.79 Tax collectors understandably had a particularly bad reputation. In 1348 it was reported that Sir John Inge, chief collector in Somerset, had arbitrarily increased the levy charged on the people of Widcombe from 14s 10d to an outrageous £3 17s 8d; and in 1362 it was alleged that excess money raised towards the special lay subsidy of 1360, which ought to have been paid back to the taxpayers, had in fact been appropriated by John Lanum, one of the collectors in Nottinghamshire.80 The officials with the worst record, however, were undoubtedly the purveyors. Early in the reign, the keepers of the royal stud in Bedfordshire were accused of extorting supplies from the locals and squandering their money in brothels, to the scandal of all concerned.81 Among the many charges levelled against Sir Peter Mallory in 1352 were several accusations that in his role as purveyor he had used false weights and made excessive levies, to the great detriment of the people of Northamptonshire.82 At the same time it was said that the purveyors in neighbouring Leicestershire had taken ransoms from towns and individuals, had sold many of the goods, and had carried off all the profits for themselves.83 In 1376 the commons of Norfolk complained that no one had yet been paid for the large amounts of food taken in the shire over the previous two years;84 and in the same year there were grumbles from a number of counties on the south coast about soldiers who seized crops and other goods, leaving letters of obligation which the king’s purveyors then refused to honour.85
The scandalous record of the shire officials was a reflection of the general level of crime and corruption among the gentry. Again, the records of Edward III’s reign furnish many examples of landholders involved in extortion, violence, intimidation and murder. Comparatively few members of this class were professional criminals. For example, there is nothing to suggest that the band of Warwickshire knights, including Fulk Birmingham and John Ryvel, who were accused of attacking and robbing Sir Ralph Basset of Drayton in 1355 were regular partners in crime.86 On the other hand at least two gentry families, the Folvilles and the Coterels, organized reigns of terror in the midlands during the 1330s, and were often employed by other landholders to harass or even murder their rivals.87 Other members of the same class lived virtually double lives, fluctuating between thuggery and respectability. The criminal career of Richard Alberd of Yaxley, for instance, spanned thirty years, and included a robbery perpetrated against Queen Isabella. Yet Alberd also enjoyed a prominent place in Huntingdonshire society, acting as knight of the shire, commissioner of array, and justice of the peace throughout the 1350s and 1360s.88 A disruptive and undesirable element was of course to be found at every level in society. What made the criminal proclivities of the gentry so alarming was that they were also the class that demanded, and ultimately achieved, substantial control over local peace-keeping.
Already in the early years of Edward III’s reign it was obvious to many politically active men that the only hope of improving law and order lay in a general overhaul of the legal administration. A limited amount was achieved by the brief revival of the eyre in 1329–30 and by the appointment of comprehensive commissions of oyer and terminer in 1340.89 One result of these inquiries, indeed, was to expose a considerable number of gentlemencriminals. 90 John Lestrange of Myddle (Shropshire), for instance, who had been the king’s bailiff errant in Norfolk and Suffolk for a number of years, was hauled up before the commissioners in East Anglia in 1341 and fined £3 for numerous extortions and oppressions.91 This and similar cases may well have persuaded the government that it was inadvisable to grant comprehensive judicial authority to local landholders. But the inquiries also tended to offend the more law-abiding members of provincial society. The appointment of judges drawn from outside the locality was regarded as a major infringement of the county’s right of self-government; and in 1341 a number of the shires actually offered hefty fines, amounting in most cases to twice their current assessments for a fifteenth and tenth, in order to immunize themselves from judicial proceedings.92The shires certainly wanted justice: there is no shortage of petitions from the county communities requesting more frequent assize and gaol delivery sessions93 or demanding the building and repair of local prisons for the secure custody of offenders.94 But they wanted justice on their own terms, and by the 1350s it was clear that this meant nothing less than local control of the commissions of the peace.
Consequently, it was only in the second half of Edward III’s reign, when the justices of the peace assumed responsibility for the operation of criminal law, that the landed classes became more satisfied with the king’s record on law-keeping. Whether this was accompanied by any real improvement in standards may be doubted. Banditry does seem to have declined after the 1340s,95 but the presence of friends and neighbours on the bench may simply have made it easier for members of the landed classes to cover up their own criminal activities. Nor should we exaggerate the effectiveness of the peace sessions.96 Despite the stipulation that the justices should sit four times a year,97 there are indications of considerable laxity and delay. A petition dating from the later fourteenth century claimed that there had been no peace sessions in Kent for at least eleven years, and in Gloucestershire it seems that the justices of the peace met only once, or at most twice, a year.98 One reason for this apparent slackness was the fact that, unlike the justices of labourers working in the 1350s and the royal judges serving in the central courts and the assizes, the new commissioners of the peace received no salaries. In 1376, indeed, the commons specifically asked that justices of the peace be paid, ‘since without wages they do not bother to hold their sessions’.99 The fact that the government ignored such pleas until 1388 may indeed suggest that the commissions of the peace were still at an experimental stage when Edward III died, and had yet to prove themselves as an essential element of the judicial administration.100
This last point may also help to set in context the supposed political implications of the local peace commissions. For to argue that Edward III effectively renounced his control over law-keeping in the shires is fundamentally to misinterpret the issue.101 Since 1250 there had been an enormous increase in the number of petty crimes (‘trespasses’) recognized as breaches of the king’s peace, and this had put an unprecedented strain on the existing judicial machinery. The justices of the peace were simply the most practical answer to the considerable problem of accommodating all this new business. In a sense, then, the delegation of authority represented a return to that tradition of ‘self-government at the king’s command’ temporarily upset by the intrusive Plantagenet regime of the later thirteenth century.102 Even so, this was no return to zero. Except for one short period in 1361–4, as we have seen, the commissions of the peace were placed under the general supervision of the professional assize judges, who were required to be in attendance when serious crimes (‘felonies’) were brought to trial.103 Consequently, the justices of the peace were not some local mafia operating their own private system of law, but were an integrated part of a much greater whole: they were the king’s judges, upholding the king’s law in the king’s courts. It may be too much to suggest that the development of the peace commissions bred a greater degree of integrity into those who administered the shires.104 But it did undoubtedly create a new sense of respect, trust and mutual support between king and gentry. Above all, it gave county society a greater sense of its status within the wider community of the realm. To appreciate the significance of this development, we need to examine the political pressure which the gentry were able to exert both at the local level in the county court and at national level in parliament.
THE COUNTY COURTS
The county courts were of ancient origin, and were originally the principal judicial tribunals in the shires.105 By the fourteenth century their legal powers were negligible, but they continued to have important political functions. They met every four or six weeks, usually in the royal castles of the county towns. The local tenants-in-chief of the crown and their own immediate tenants were theoretically obliged to attend, along with the sheriff, undersheriff, coroners and bailiffs. A majority of the substantial free landholders in the shire could also be expected to turn up. In practice, the attendance figures probably fluctuated widely, depending on the size and social structure of the shire and the nature of the business being transacted. In the mid-fourteenth century the ‘commons’ of Northumberland put in a complaint about the successive adjourning of assize sessions in the county, to which nineteen named individuals and ‘many others’ appended their seals.106 Yet some years later, in 1388, no fewer than 330 of the ‘better born and more worthy’ men of Lincolnshire attended the shire court to take oaths of allegiance to the Lords Appellant.107 On average, it has been suggested that there might have been about 150 notables, officials, litigants and onlookers present at a typical meeting of the county court in the fourteenth century.108 It was therefore an occasion of major social consequence, and an obvious forum for political debate among the gentry.
The administrative duties imposed on the county court were considerable. It was here, for instance, that the government launched its periodic attempts to force all those with land valued over a certain figure (normally £40) to take up knighthood.109 The county courts were also occasionally used to negotiate taxes. In 1337 a series of meetings was held with knights and landholders in the shires in order to extract promises of aid for the impending war. Some 104 men attended the Staffordshire assembly.110 The experiment was a failure, and was superseded by a tax granted in great council. Later, however, in 1360, representatives of the county courts were again summoned to regional meetings which voted subsidies for the defence of their communities.111 These assemblies were anomalous, half-way between the county court and the national parliament, and the tax they granted was unique in being administered locally and kept outside the control of the exchequer. But it says much for the importance and vitality of provincial politics that during a state of national emergency Edward III’s government found it necessary to treat with the shires for their own defence.
The negotiations of 1360 can indeed be seen as the natural culmination of a policy pursued by the crown throughout the first phase of the Hundred Years War. The county courts, like parliament, needed to be persuaded of the justice and feasibility of the king’s schemes, and coaxed into giving more active support for his military enterprises. The first and rather hesitant stages of this public information programme were not particularly successful. In 1339–40, when the war was going badly and taxation was particularly oppressive, the regency administration sent commissioners into Norfolk to raise loans from the clergy and other notables. The envoys were instructed to report the recent destruction of naval forces and the need for money to raise a new fleet, but they seem to have returned to Westminster with nothing but refusals and excuses.112 In 1344, the sheriff of Cumberland was so worried about local hostility to the collection of arrears on the wool tax of 1341–2 that he called a special meeting of the county court to be addressed by the king’s envoy, Lambert Hautpierre.113 Gradually, however, the shires became rather more impressed with the king’s record. The achievements of parliament had a particularly important influence in this respect. It was a longstanding tradition that statutes, ordinances, and other major administrative measures should be proclaimed by the sheriffs in the county courts. Copies of the statutes and of taxation schedules were also given to the knights of the shire on a regular basis after 1340, and were delivered back to the constituencies for discussion.114 The government’s considerable legislative output in the 1350s probably did much to mollify the leaders of provincial society, and made the continuing burden of direct and indirect taxation rather more acceptable, at least to the landholding classes.
Propaganda was also inclined to create higher expectations. Any failure by the crown to live up to its promises of good governance was liable to be seen as a betrayal of trust. By the mid-fourteenth century there was an increasing tendency for private petitioners to cite the statutes back at the government and to criticize it for failing to enforce its own legislation.115 The county courts rapidly followed suit. A considerable number of petitions entered during Edward III’s reign were made in the name of the ‘commons’, the ‘liege men’ or the ‘poor men’ of the shires, and there is little doubt that the majority of these were drawn up as a result of discussion in the county courts.116 They fell into four main categories. First, there were the inevitable complaints about the corrupt practices of the crown’s local agents: tax collectors, purveyors, peace commissioners, forest officials, and so on.117 Second, there were expressions of concern about the impact of war and the special requirements of local defence.118 Third, and most frequent, were the demands for relief from fiscal exactions. Particularly prominent in this group were complaints about the burden of the shrieval farms.119 The twin counties of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire and of Surrey and Sussex argued consistently that the granting away of hundreds and other franchises ought to be accompanied by a reassessment of the county farm,120 and late in the reign of Edward III the people of Essex and Hertfordshire began to demand a formal reduction of £100 on their farm as a result of economic problems encountered since the plague.121
Finally, the most interesting group of petitions from the shire communities were those accusing the nobility or the crown of attempts to override local privileges. In 1337 the people of Cornwall complained to the king about a new court that had been set up by the officials of the late earl, John of Eltham, at Launceston; and in 1376 the men of Sussex expressed their anger at the excessive profits being taken in a prerogative court held by the Earl of Arundel.122 Royal intrusions sometimes met with the same response. In the late 1330s the commissioners of array in Warwickshire found that the community would not consent to paying the costs of archers; and in 1341 the county court of Shropshire put up concerted opposition to the new tax in wool.123 The government’s attempt to use the king’s bench as a roving commission of trailbaston in the late 1340s and early 1350s met with widespread opposition because it threatened the gentry’s preference for self-regulation within the shires.124 About the same time the men of Norfolk and Suffolk expressed their anger at being summoned outside their county boundaries to attend special inquiries into the evasion of customs duties.125 The high-handed actions of the nobility and the crown were clearly perceived as a direct threat to local liberties, and helped to create greater solidarity within the shires. The sheer number of communal petitions surviving from Edward III’s reign indicates that the county court had now become not simply an agency of royal government but also an important channel through which the localities could articulate their political grievances.
THE GENTRY IN PARLIAMENT
The real focus for the political aspirations of the gentry, however, was not the county court but parliament. At the start of Edward III’s reign the commons were still a relatively new phenomenon: even in the mid-1320s it had still been possible for meetings without representatives of the shires and towns to be labelled parliaments.126 But under Edward III the knights and burgesses emerged as a major political force. From 1327 every parliament included two representatives from each English county, with the exception of Cheshire and Durham.127 According to the extant returns, these ‘knights of the shire’ were usually elected ‘in full county court’ with the assent of ‘the whole community of faithful men’.128 In fact, it was not uncommon for the sheriffs, who acted as returning officers, to rig proceedings. In 1338 it was reported that for the previous seven years the sheriffs of Cambridgeshire had returned their friends without any reference to the wishes of the county court; and in 1372, as a result of long-standing complaints by the commons, the government specifically excluded sheriffs and lawyers from election to parliament.129 If noblemen held the sheriffdoms, then it was also relatively easy to ensure the appointment of men amenable to their will. In Lancashire, indeed, there are reasons to believe that elections did not always take place in the county court, and that the knights of the shire were simply nominated by the Earl – later the Duke – of Lancaster.130 In special circumstances, the crown might also intervene in the selection of representatives. In 1354, when parliament was called to confirm legislation put forward in the great council of 1353, the sheriffs were specifically instructed to return those who had sat in the earlier assembly.131 In 1358, the sheriff of Gloucestershire was told by the government that those chosen to represent the shire were unsuitable, and that he should find two ‘wiser and more sufficient’ knights to attend parliament.132 Finally, in 1364, the king actually wrote to the sheriff of London to nominate two men whom he wished to see returned to the forthcoming parliament.133 In general, however, the government seems to have made remarkably few attempts to manipulate elections. The nature of the commons’ activity in parliament during Edward III’s reign certainly does not suggest that the county representatives were the puppets either of the lords or of the king. Indeed, their political aims were often pursued in the face of considerable apathy or hostility on the part of the crown, and found support not among the magnates and ministers, but in the provincial communities from which the commons sprang.
The influence of the knights and burgesses on the work of parliament depended on their special power to vote subsidies which would be binding on all the king’s subjects.134 In formal terms, taxes were granted by the lords as well as the commons.135 But in 1340 it was established that the peers could only impose subsidies on their own number,136 and thereafter the knights and burgesses became the real arbiters of national taxation. The direct subsidies they granted were assessed not on land or income but on ‘movables’: chiefly animals and crops in the countryside, and merchandise and domestic goods in the towns.137 The crown normally claimed a cash payment representing a certain fraction of such wealth. Edward III’s first subsidy, raised in 1327, was levied at the rate of a twentieth. In 1332, however, parliament authorized a tax of a fifteenth on the countryside and a tenth on the towns and the ancient demesne, and these became the standard rates for the rest of the reign. In 1334 it was agreed to abandon the time-consuming practice of reassessing individuals for each successive tax, and instead the collectors negotiated a block payment with each community within their shires. So successful was this experiment that the quotas of 1334 became the basis for all subsequent fifteenths and tenths. No fewer than twenty-one such subsidies were granted by parliamentary assemblies between 1332 and 1373, not to mention the special subsidy authorized by the regional gatherings in 1360. There were also a number of experimental taxes collected in the course of Edward’s reign. On two occasions – in 1338 and in 1341 – the commons agreed to direct taxes paid not in money but in wool, and in 1340 the king secured a special levy of every ninth lamb, fleece and sheaf of corn produced in the realm. In 1371, a subsidy of £5 16s was levied on each parish in England. Finally, in 1377, Edward III’s last parliament granted a poll tax at the standard rate of 4d a head on every man and woman over the age of fourteen.
The potential yield from these taxes was very large (see Appendix 1). The first two lay subsidies of the reign were designed to raise £25,400 and £34,000 respectively. The quotas established for the fifteenth and tenth in 1334 totalled some £37,300; but Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland were not assessed for this tax, and when these counties were incorporated into the national system in 1336 the combined assessments rose to £38,500. Thereafter there were minor adjustments, but the gross value of a fifteenth and tenth at the end of Edward III’s reign was still £37,800. The extraordinary levies were particularly profitable: the quotas of wool charged on the shires in 1338 and 1341–2, when translated into cash terms, amounted to £79,400 and £151,000 respectively. By adding up all the available figures, we can calculate that the total value of the direct taxes levied between 1327 and 1377 was well in excess of £1,260,000.
The net proceeds were inevitably somewhat smaller. The experimental taxes in kind were particularly unpopular, and yielded well below their estimated value. The exemptions, evasions and collection costs of a subsidy on movables, however, accounted for a remarkably small proportion of the total estimated yield, and these taxes normally netted over 90 per cent of their gross value. This is all the more remarkable given the substantial reduction in the potential taxpaying population after 1348. Moreover, the parish subsidy of 1371 brought in over £49,900, making it one of the most successful taxes ever raised in the later Middle Ages. Even on a conservative estimate, then, the profits of lay taxation between 1327 and 1377 amounted to approximately £1,120,000. Clearly, without these subsidies granted in parliament with the consent of the knights and burgesses, Edward III could never have implemented his audacious plans for full-scale war in Scotland and France.
It was the special authority enjoyed by the commons in connection with taxation that gave them such influence in parliament. In theory, as we have seen, the knights and burgesses had no right to decline the king’s request for subsidies during a period of war.138Their decision to attach specific conditions to the loan of wool offered in January 1340 was apparently possible only because the king was away at the time and the triennial fifteenth and tenth granted in 1337 was still being collected.139 It was not until 1376 that parliament flatly rejected a demand for direct taxation, and even then it would seem that the commons were only able to reject the plea of necessity because the truce of Bruges had just been extended for another year.140 Nor had the knights and burgesses the power to force concessions from the crown as a condition for the grant of a tax. What they could do was to threaten the king and his agents with passive resistance in the provinces if the crown refused to acknowledge and redress at least some of their grievances.141 In order to press home this point the commons began, under Edward III, to link their complaints directly to grants of supply. By 1352, indeed, they were including detailed lists of common petitions within the actual schedules of taxation. While theoretically free to do as he pleased, the king was obviously coming under increasing pressure to accept and act upon the demands of his subjects. The inclusion of the common petitions in the official records of parliament on a regular basis after 1343 was indeed a tacit acknowledgment of the commons’ new-found political influence.
The development of the common petition also gave the commons a greater sense of solidarity. At the start of the fourteenth century it is hardly possible to talk of a house of commons at all, since the knights and burgesses often met and acted separately. In some ways, of course, the shire representatives always had more in common with their fellow- landholders in the lords. Sir Otto Grandisson, for example, who sat for Kent on no fewer than eight occasions between 1332 and 1357, had two brothers among the peers – one a baron, the other a bishop.142 However, the political conflicts of the 1320s seem to have driven a wedge between the lords and the majority of the gentry in parliament, and created a new sense of unity between the knights and burgesses. By the 1330s, indeed, the parliament rolls normally referred to the knights and burgesses as la commune or les gentz du commun.143 One important manifestation of this new political alignment was the development of common petitions directed specifically against the aristocracy.144 After the Black Death there was admittedly a change of tone, as the petty landholders allied with the crown and the lords in defence of proprietary interests.145 But even on the central issue of the labour laws it is possible to detect a distinction between the attitudes of the major and minor landholders in parliament. The government’s reluctance to allow the justices of the peace permanent authority over labour cases in the 1360s apparently proved particularly harmful to the ‘middling men’ of the realm. In 1368 the commons claimed that whereas great lords had servile tenants and seigneurial rights to fall back on, lesser landholders were dangerously dependent on paid labour and were therefore suffering much from rising wage demands.146 It may well be, indeed, that the gentry now identified more easily with the problems of urban employers than with the comparative economic security of the aristocracy. Whatever the case, the parliament rolls make it clear that the two representative groups had now definitely emerged as a single political entity: the commons.
The greater unity and authority enjoyed by the commons in the mid-fourteenth century can best be measured by the considerable impact they made on the statute roll. The success of the knights and burgesses in extracting major legislative concessions from Edward III is well known, and a number of their important victories have already been discussed: the restrictions on purveyance and other prerogative levies, the enforcement of standard weights and measures, the change in the composition and powers of the peace commissions, and so on. It has also been pointed out, however, that the government tended to act on the commons’ demands only when the political situation dictated some concession to public opinion or when the resulting legislation could be used to the advantage of the crown. Even if we assume that most of the statutes of this period arose from discussions in parliament, it is worth noting that the take-up rate was extremely uneven (see Appendix 5).147 The pattern is clearly to be explained in political terms. The considerable legislative output of 1327–31 was the work of two successive regimes – Queen Isabella’s and Edward III’s – each anxious to buy popularity after an uncertain start to the new reign. The statutory concessions of 1335–7 were granted as measures of good faith to a realm that had already committed itself to war in Scotland and was now threatened by major hostilities with France. The great code of 1351–3 was a deliberate attempt to win back public confidence after the economic crisis of the plague and the controversies surrounding the regulation of overseas trade. Finally, the statutes of 1361 –5 can be explained partly as an expression of thanks to the country for the sustained military activity of the previous twenty years, and partly as a means of extracting further indirect taxes to pay off the king’s debts. With the exception of the major statutes of 1340–1, then, most of the parliamentary legislation of Edward III’s reign occurred during periods of relative political calm. In the 1340s, when the knights and burgesses were hostile to the government’s methods of funding the war, and in the 1370s when the majority of the political community turned against the crown, legislation declined to a mere trickle. Any influence the commons enjoyed over the making of the statutes tended to be a measure of the king’s goodwill, and could easily be forgotten if politics turned sour.
Finally, it is important to recognize that matters raised in parliament and taken up by the government were not always resolved according to the precise wishes of the commons. The debate over the money supply is particularly interesting in this respect. Throughout Edward III’s early years there were grumbles in parliament about the state of the coinage, which was much devalued by wear and clipping and by a debasement carried out in 1335.148 The opening of the French war in 1337 meant that the bullion supply dried up, and there was an acute shortage of money in England.149 Finally, in 1343, the government consulted with the prelates, peers and commons, and announced its intention of creating a new gold currency complementing the existing silver one.150 The commons clearly believed that this, together with heavy penalties against counterfeiters and smugglers, would be sufficient to resolve the bullion shortage and allow a return to the former weight and fineness of sterling. This was the burden of numerous petitions presented in the parliaments of 1344–54.151 But the government’s policy was very different. Between 1343 and 1351 the weight of sterling was substantially reduced in order to increase the amount of coin in circulation.152 The commons disliked this measure, claiming that it pushed up prices, and in 1352 they extracted a promise from the king that the ancient standard would be restored ‘as soon as a good way is found’.153 Nothing was done, however; and by the mid-1350s the knights and burgesses were forced to acknowledge that the government’s policy had been a success.154 The currency question provides an interesting example of an issue on which parliament expressed consistent opinions, and could force a somewhat sluggish government into action. But it also demonstrates how the commons and the king’s ministers could come up with sharply different solutions to the same problem. The knights and burgesses were encouraged to believe that they could influence government policy, but the direction of that policy remained firmly in the hands of the experts.
It is therefore possible to argue that a great deal of the political initiative enjoyed by the commons during Edward III’s reign was an illusion. The involvement of the knights and burgesses in diplomacy is particularly relevant here. In July 1338, the king claimed that his unpopular policy of buying alliances in the Low Countries had been sanctioned by the ‘prelates, earls, barons, citizens, burgesses and all the knights of the shires and commons’ – an apparent reference to the earlier debate on the French war held in 1337.155Again, in 1343, 1348 and 1354, the commons were specifically asked their opinion on possible truces with France. But we must be cautious about assuming that they had any real say in diplomatic policy. In 1348 they actually protested their innocence of such matters and refused to give advice. And when they did offer an opinion on proposals for peace it was almost always, as in 1354, a unanimous ‘Yes, yes!’156 This eagerness was not necessarily shared by the king and the lords. In 1369 Edward III was quick to point out that parliament, which had ratified the treaty of Brétigny, should now acknowledge the breakdown of the Anglo-French peace and accept its obligation to fund a new war.157 It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the commons were only allowed a say in high politics so long as their opinions did not threaten the king’s existing policies. It would be interesting to know how many other debates were terminated when the knights and burgesses showed signs of defecting from the official line.
In the 1370s, of course, this informal system of censorship broke down, and the political influence won by the commons during the middle years of the reign began to rebound on the crown. Indeed, the impeachment of the courtiers and the comprehensive indictment of government policy passed in the Good Parliament is often seen as the natural culmination of Edward III’s plan to make the commons participate more fully in political affairs. But the highly exceptional nature of the 1376 crisis makes it difficult to accept such an interpretation. As late as 1373, when the government appealed for money to support an increasingly disastrous war effort, the knights and burgesses simply followed the usual procedures, authorizing a biennial fifteenth and tenth, putting in a list of petitions, and trusting to the government to provide relief.158 And even in the Good Parliament they expressed the hope that their successors would be ‘ready to aid and comfort [the king]… like no other commons of the world’.159 The actions of the commons in 1376 were therefore intended not to overturn the political structures of the realm but to restore the sense of co-operation that had existed during the 1350s and 1360s. The essentially conservative nature of their programme helps to explain why their successors failed to keep up the fight. Once John of Gaunt declared the crown hostile to the deeds of the Good Parliament in 1377, the commons could find no legitimate means of prolonging the dispute.160 The failure of the Good Parliament to extract any statutory concessions from the crown simply highlights the comparative weakness of the opposition’s case. The really lasting gains made by the knights and burgesses in the fourteenth century therefore came not through conflict, but consensus. It was the exclusive control over taxation and the ability to request legislation, not the right to impeach royal favourites, which were to be of lasting importance to the commons in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If the knights and burgesses learned anything from Edward III’s long reign, it was the positive benefit to be derived from political co-operation with the crown.
Our review of the commons’ role in mid-fourteenth-century parliaments has carried us far from the provincial peasants and knights with whom this chapter began. Yet parliament has a rightful and prominent place in the history of the county communities. Unlike the kingdom of France, England was a monolithic polity. Edward III’s military demands and political techniques certainly encouraged a sense of cohesion in provincial society: the shires had to defend themselves not only against the enemy, but also against the king’s own agents. Consequently, it is possible to suggest that the county communities became much more aware of their rights and importance during this period. On the other hand, England was never in danger of breaking down into a series of semi-autonomous political units. The existence of a powerful monarchy and the development of a unitary system of taxation had ensured that public debate would always be focused on a single central institution: parliament. Few provincial societies were sufficiently united in themselves and isolated from others to develop a separate political consciousness, and it is highly unlikely that the gentry, the real leaders of local society, regarded the county boundaries as meaningful political barriers.161 When the lesser landholders found that they were capable of making a real impression through their representatives in the commons, their ambitions were inevitably channelled into parliament. That membership of the commons came to be seen as a privilege rather than a duty in the later Middle Ages is striking testimony to the political influence won by the gentry in the course of Edward III’s reign.