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The parliamentary crisis of 1341 had been a severe blow to Edward III, and for a short while it put a stop to his controversial foreign policies. Yet in the months and years that followed, the king staged one of the most remarkable political recoveries ever witnessed in medieval England.1 On 1 October 1341 Edward announced that he had annulled the statute passed earlier that year on the grounds that it was contrary to the law of the realm and had been forced on him against his will. He was using a prerogative exercised by several of his predecessors, and most recently by Edward II in 1322: namely, the right to dispense with any legislation which the king believed to have compromised his authority. Even if concerted resistance continued, there was very little that the political community could do to challenge this principle. The renunciation of the statute demonstrated vividly that the medieval monarchy almost always had right on its side.
It also exposed the weaknesses in the political opposition. Edward quickly dismantled the temporary coalition that had gathered under Stratford’s leadership. He showed no sign of restoring the archbishop or his followers to their positions in the government departments, and for the moment filled the offices of state with laymen who would be answerable for their actions before the royal courts. He also won over a sufficient number of the magnates to be able to claim that he had renounced the statute with their consent. Within weeks of this declaration, Stratford acknowledged his political isolation and made his final peace with the king. Two years elapsed before another parliament met in April 1343, and this assembly formally accepted the abolition of the earlier legislation. Although the commons expressed their annoyance at the king’s actions, they could achieve little without the support of the great lay and ecclesiastical lords. The remaining opposition to the crown had therefore lost its effective bargaining position. In the decade that followed, the commons too were eventually won over to a working compromise with the crown. The scale of Edward’s achievement in the middle years of his reign has not always been fully appreciated, because it has often been felt that he merely sought popularity at the expense of power. But such arguments give little consideration either to the seriousness of the conflicts that had divided political society for three decades before 1341 or to the enduring qualities of the new dispensation, which prevented any further confrontation for another generation. The period from the Stratford crisis to the treaty of Brétigny of 1360 witnessed one of the greatest royal success stories of the later Middle Ages.
The single most important reason for Edward’s political recovery after 1341 was the lucky change in his military fortunes. At first, the situation looked depressing. The allies in the Low Countries fell away and Edward was deprived of his imperial vicariate. The return of David Bruce to Scotland in 1341 meant a renewal of cross-border raids, and forced the English king to undertake a northern campaign in the winter of 1341–2. But in 1341 new and more promising prospects emerged in France when the duchy of Brittany fell vacant. Edward decided to support the claim of John de Montfort against the French-backed Charles of Blois in the Breton war of succession. Thus emerged his so-called ‘provincial strategy’,2 a technique already attempted in Flanders and soon to be extended into many other areas of France. The idea was simple, but effective. The English king sought to intervene in private disputes between the Valois and their feudal vassals, thus creating new allies, challenging Philip VI’s rights as suzerain, and dissipating French military resources. Edward’s claim to the throne of France was an essential part of this strategy, since it could be used to create alternative feudal relationships with the dukes and counts. Indeed, it was not long before the military situation encouraged Edward to believe that his somewhat empty dynastic claim might one day become a reality.
After an inconclusive campaign in Brittany in 1342, the king decided to launch a major continental offensive involving simultaneous attacks on several different fronts. In 1345 Henry of Grosmont and the Earl of Northampton were sent with expeditionary forces to Aquitaine and Brittany, and the king himself led a short campaign in Flanders. In the following year a Norman baron, Geoffrey de Harcourt, appealed for Edward III’s assistance in his private dispute with the Valois regime. The king immediately sailed for Normandy with a substantial army of 15,000 men. After marching into the Ile de France, he turned north to Ponthieu and met the French in pitched battle at Crécy on 26 August 1346. Philip VI’s forces were roundly defeated by the English mixed formation. Meanwhile David Bruce, encouraged by Edward’s absence and prompted by his French ally, had invaded the north of England. In October his army met an English force led by the northern lords, and suffered a devastating defeat at Neville’s Cross near Durham, where David himself was taken prisoner. His home defences thus secure, Edward III collected a huge army of 32,000 men – the largest English force ever raised during the Hundred Years War – and laid siege to the town of Calais, which eventually fell in the summer of 1347. Heavy with honours, Edward returned home to indulge his vanity and celebrate the valour of his warriors in a great series of feasts and tournaments.
The military advances of the 1340s had far-reaching effects on the relationship between the king and the English nobility. The upturn in English fortunes helped dispel earlier misgivings about the king’s abilities as a war leader and encouraged the earls and barons to give active support to a series of great military adventures. Edward very quickly realized the shortcomings of his earlier policies, and worked hard to bridge the dangerous divide between a narrow clique of household advisers and the rest of his great men. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1341 he discussed his new military plans with the magnates. Although few of those who had recently opposed him in parliament played any part in the Scottish campaign of 1341–2, most were prepared to serve or at least to supply troops by the time Edward launched his first expedition to Brittany at the end of 1342.3 The new strategy of the 1340s also gave the magnates the outlet they needed for their energies. Long-term fighting on several different fronts in northern France, Brittany, Aquitaine and Scotland prevented Edward from leading all his armies in person, and necessitated the appointment of lieutenants who would pursue his interests on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. The most important lieutenancies inevitably tended to be reserved for the earls: the king’s cousin Henry of Grosmont was not only the greatest lord in England but also the busiest of all Edward’s commanders, serving throughout the 1340s and 1350s in Aquitaine, Brittany and Normandy. Men such as Arundel and Northampton, who had earlier sat at home and criticized the campaigns of 1338–40, now had ample opportunity to prove their worth, and quickly established themselves as Edward’s loyal and enthusiastic supporters. Indeed, with the exception of the elderly and infirm, all the earls and great lords served on one or other of the military campaigns of 1346–7.
Within five years of the Stratford crisis, Edward had redeemed his reputation with the magnates and made them his companions in arms. The process of reconciliation was facilitated by changes in the ruling elite. The Earl of Salisbury was killed in a tournament in 1344, and the elderly Earls of Lancaster and Surrey died in 1345 and 1347. Their replacements were younger men, less preoccupied with earlier controversies and more disposed by age and outlook to support the policies of Edward III. Royal patronage also began to follow a more consistent and predictable pattern. Outside the king’s family there were very few wholly new titles: Ralph Stratford was the only royal confidant raised to an earldom in this period. Instead, old titles were revived for descendants of former comital families, and lapsed earldoms passed to existing members of the baronage. Thus Roger Mortimer, grandson and namesake of Queen Isabella’s paramour, was created Earl of March in 1354. The real focus of Edward’s patronage was his cousin Henry of Grosmont, who succeeded to the earldom of Lancaster in 1345 and gained the old earldom of Lincoln in 1349. Finally, in 1351, Henry was elevated to the rank of duke and given palatine control over the county of Lancaster. The Lancastrian family, which had led the opposition to the crown during the 1310s and 1320s, had now emerged as the very pillar of Edward III’s monarchy.
Undoubtedly the most important symbol of Edward’s new alliance with the nobility was the Order of the Garter.4 This knightly confraternity was founded in 1348 specifically to celebrate the achievements of the king’s most trusted companions in arms. Honour was the only real criterion for election to the order, and the original twenty-six members included some relatively obscure English and foreign knights such as Sir Walter Paveley and Sir Sanchet d’Abrichecourt. But a certain number of places were inevitably reserved for the greatest men in the realm. The Earls of Derby, Warwick and Salisbury were among the founder members of the order, together with Lords Stafford, Mortimer and Burghersh; and by 1350 they had been joined by the Earls of Suffolk and Northampton. It was a particular sign of Edward’s new astuteness that he was able to play on the chivalric pretensions of the nobility and use membership of the order as a supplement to other more costly forms of patronage.
Just as important to the king’s political fortunes were the changes in the central administration.5 The chancellors and treasurers of the 1340s and 1350s were men of very different experience and outlook to those who had controlled the civil service in the previous decade. William Cusance, treasurer from 1341 to 1344, and the successive chancellors John Offord (1345–9) and John Thoresby (1349–56) had all served in Edward’s continental administration of 1338–40 and had been closely identified with the king’s party in the political disputes of 1340–1. The most influential of all these ministers was William Edington, who had first entered royal service as receiver of the much-hated ninth in 1340, and who went on to be keeper of the wardrobe (1341–4), treasurer of the exchequer (1344–56) and chancellor (1356–63). The long and uninterrupted tenure enjoyed by these officials suggests that Edward III had at last found ministers who were agreeable to him and supportive of his policies. The most conspicuous of all their achievements was in the financial sphere. Edington inherited a huge debt from his predecessors in the exchequer, and the king’s demands for cash continued to provide him with numerous problems in the later 1340s. But as campaigns proved less costly and revenues from taxation increased, the situation gradually began to improve. Indeed, by the end of the 1350s Edington had transformed Edward III from an embarrassed bankrupt into a wealthy man. The king’s political recovery clearly owed much to this new generation of capable and loyal ministers.
Changes were also under way in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.6 Two of the older generation of political prelates, Henry Burghersh of Lincoln and Adam Orleton of Winchester, died in the 1340s, closely followed by John Stratford himself. Edward had little trouble in filling the episcopal bench with amenable and obedient men. Indeed, many of the prelates of this period were drawn from the ranks of the civil service: Thomas Hatfield of Durham, John Offord and Simon Islip of Canterbury, John Thoresby of York and Michael Northborough of London had all enjoyed distinguished careers in the king’s government before going on to run the English Church. The promotion of royal administrators to the episcopate was nothing new, and certainly did not prevent the prelates from taking stands against the king. But none of the squabbles that broke out between the crown and the bishops in the 1340s and 1350s bore comparison with the Stratford controversy of 1340–1. Indeed, the victories of Crécy, Neville’s Cross and Poitiers persuaded the higher clergy that the king was fighting a just war, and turned them into enthusiastic supporters of the crown. Rarely had the English Church been so unstinting in its praise of the monarchy and so convinced of the rightness of its cause as in the middle years of Edward III’s reign.
The victories won and honours bestowed during the 1340s and 1350s therefore created a powerful and enduring bond between the crown and the upper ranks of political society. But there were still many men who remained distinctly unimpressed by Edward’s achievements. The campaigns of the 1340s entailed considerable pressures, which were inevitably resented in the country.7 The parliament of 1341 refused to concede the ninth for a second year, but substituted a tax of 30,000 sacks of wool. Meanwhile, traditional forms of taxation became more frequent than ever before. Seven clerical tenths were collected between 1342 and 1353, and nine fifteenths and tenths were imposed on the laity between 1344 and 1354. The extra wartime subsidy on wool exports was fixed at the rate of £2 per sack in 1342, and was maintained at this level for the next twenty years (see Appendix 3). As if this was not enough, the government also stepped up its efforts to levy manpower and provisions. In 1344 it tried to assess all those holding land valued at over £5 a year to contribute troops. The compulsory array of infantry soldiers, which was normally used only for local defence, was greatly extended in 1346–7 in order to fill the ranks of Edward’s continental army. Purveyance continued to be a major charge, especially after 1347 when the new garrison at Calais added considerably to existing pressures for food and other supplies. In its desperate search for funds, the government also imposed a controversial feudal aid in 1346 and a forced loan of 20,000 sacks of wool in 1347. These various exactions affected a wide cross-section of society, and precipitated an angry response from the commons in the parliaments of 1346 and 1348. Twenty years after his accession, and with several major victories to his credit, Edward III had still evidently failed to win the confidence and support of all his subjects.
As if these problems were not enough, the king and the country had also to contend with the first outbreak of the Black Death in 1348–9. This epidemic, usually diagnosed as a combination of bubonic and pneumonic plagues, came as a severe shock to a society and economy already weakened by the famines of the 1320s and the wars of the 1330s and 1340s. We do not know the number of people in England on the eve of the plague: estimates vary at anything between four and six million. But it seems plausible that the pestilence of 1348–9 killed off at least 30 per cent of the population.8 The immediate results were dramatic. A high death rate combined with the sudden panic movement of survivors created an acute shortage of tenants and manpower on estates all across the country, and left many lands almost completely uncultivated. Overseas trade slumped with the drop in wool production and the collapse of foreign markets. Some landholders, like the Bishop of Winchester and the monks of Croyland Abbey, were able to compensate for declining yields by raising large sums in death duties and entry fines. But others found it impossible to prevent a serious reduction in profits: on the estates of the duchy of Cornwall, for instance, revenues fell by 40 per cent between 1347–8 and 1350–1. The sudden demographic change also disrupted market forces. Prices for agricultural produce fell in 1348–50, while wages soared. Some landholders had to take drastic action, and began to lease out their demesnes in the hope that rents might provide a more stable form of income.
Ultimately, however, the decade after the first outbreak of the Black Death was characterized not by far-reaching economic change but by a remarkably swift return to normality. A big increase in the money supply after 1351, together with a series of relatively poor harvests, helped to inflate prices and disguise the decline in profit margins.9 Changes in the customs regulations after 1353 brought a boom in the wool trade and a rapid increase in the production of English cloth for foreign markets. The landholders seem to have had little trouble in filling vacant holdings on their estates and maintaining the traditional labour services demanded from their tenants. Most, like the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury, and the administrators of the great East Anglian honour of Clare, did not find it necessary as yet to give up the old demesne system of farming in favour of leases and rents. While chroniclers and churchmen bemoaned the visitation of the ‘brute beast’ as the judgment of God on a promiscuous people,10 estate managers had set about the formidable task of restoring and maintaining their lords’ proprietary rights.
The government proved a powerful ally in this respect. The king was naturally perturbed by the deaths of his local officials and the difficulties of raising revenues, and he adopted an uncompromising stance admired and emulated by many.11 He generally refused to allow any formal reduction in the fee farms charged on the sheriffs or in the taxes being levied from his lay subjects. He also took full advantage of the deaths of his tenants-in-chief in order to increase the short-term profits of feudalism. This had the effect of identifying the king with other men of property and substance, and proved that the government was determined to uphold the interests of that class. The most important product of this new alliance was the attempt to prevent a further escalation of wage demands. In June 1349 the government issued the Ordinance of Labourers, which set maximum wage limits and required workers to serve out their contracts before seeking employment elsewhere. In the long term, this legislation was bound to be defeated by economic forces. But during the 1350s the special measures taken by the government to enforce the ordinance, and the determined reaction of the landholders against the ‘malice of servants’,12 ensured that wage rates only really kept pace with inflation. The labour legislation convinced a large number of influential men that the king was concerned not simply with his own foreign ambitions, but also with the economic problems of his natural supporters in the country. The political implications were to be far-reaching.
If at first it seemed an unparalleled and unmitigated disaster, the plague therefore proved fortuitous for the crown. In particular, it necessitated a temporary cessation of the war. The pestilence had struck the continent with equal if not greater ferocity, and both sides were thankful for the series of truces patched together between 1347 and 1355. Edward called off a planned campaign late in 1348, and although sporadic fighting continued in Brittany and Aquitaine, the level of military activity was much reduced for several years. The lull saved England from an embarrassing diplomatic situation, for the victories of 1346–7 had done little to change the attitudes of Edward’s opponents. The Scots were reluctant to offer a ransom for David II; and the new Count of Flanders, Louis de Mâle, was proving hostile towards England. An attempted marriage alliance with Castile came to nothing when Edward’s daughter Princess Joan died of the plague on her way to Spain. In 1350 Edward defeated a Castilian merchant fleet off Winchelsea, in an engagement known as Les Espagnols sur Mer. But elsewhere the English achieved little, and for a short while after 1352 Edward gave his French enemies and his own subjects good reason to hope that a permanent peace might soon be arranged.
It was in these circumstances that the king and the commons drew together to resolve some of the long-standing political issues left over from the 1330s. The parliament of 1352 granted a three-year subsidy on the understanding that full-scale hostilities might be necessary to bring the war to a successful conclusion. After eight years of almost continuous direct taxation, the knights and burgesses naturally expected some concessions in return, and they presented the council with a long and varied list of grievances. The king was in generous mood, and a large number of the commons’ petitions were allowed and made up into statutes. Three of the most important clauses of the new legislation settled recent disputes over military levies. The king agreed that in future feudal aids would only be raised with parliamentary consent. He also guaranteed that royal purveyors would abide by the existing legislation regulating the provision of supplies for the king’s armies and household. Finally, he promised to give up his earlier attempts to raise troops on the basis of landed wealth, and guaranteed that none except his own feudal tenants should be required to provide soldiers without the assent of parliament.13 These statutes signified the king’s willingness to give up controversial prerogatives and to depend instead on generous public funding for his campaigns. They also symbolized the re-emergence of parliament as an effective political force, working in co-operation with the crown. The years immediately after the plague therefore witnessed the completion of that alliance between the crown and the political community which was to endure until the 1370s.
Of all the developments in the early 1350s which helped to reconcile the political community to the king’s policies, perhaps the most significant were the changes in the administration of justice. Public order had become a major political issue in the 1320s and 1330s, and Edward III stood little chance of winning support until he answered some of the many demands for judicial reform. The principal problem was to find a satisfactory alternative to the commissions known variously as the eyre, trailbaston and oyer and terminer which had been sent out by the crown in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries to hear civil and criminal cases. These roving courts had always been regarded as a threat to the tradition of self-government in the shires, and because of their irregularity they were ill-fitted to the task of maintaining the peace. The last national eyre was mounted in 1329 by Chief Justice Scrope, but only four shires had actually been visited by the time these extraordinary sessions were called off late in 1330.14 Their place was taken mainly by the assize and gaol delivery sessions, held in theory three times a year in the county towns and larger boroughs, and presided over by royal judges. But these courts also proved inadequate, and there was a serious breakdown of law and order during Edward III’s early campaigns in Scotland and France.15 During one such interlude in the 1330s the county community of Wiltshire complained that the whole area had fallen prey to robbers and thugs, and that no one dared move around the county any more unless he could find safe lodgings in castles and fortified houses.16 The clear impression is of a judicial system, and a whole society, severely threatened by a major deterioration in public order.
The greatest pressure for reform came from the landholders in the shires.17 As keepers of the peace, these men had responsibility for accepting indictments and holding prisoners until the king’s judges arrived to try cases in the relevant shire. By the 1340s at least, the commons were arguing that the law would be better kept if local men were allowed to try and convict offenders. In other words, the landed classes wished to act not simply as keepers, but as justices of the peace. In some ways the Stratford crisis hardened Edward’s resolve not to bow to such pressure, and the following decade witnessed several attempts to revive the older system of central regulation. On his return from the continent late in 1340, the king issued general commissions of oyer and terminer to investigate the misdeeds of his agents and subjects.18 From 1348 the court of king’s bench also began roaming the country hearing assizes, delivering gaols, and using the contentious charge of treason to prosecute petty offenders.19 It seemed to many that the eyre itself was now being reinstated. However, the special machinery created to implement the labour legislation seems finally to have convinced the government of the positive advantages to be derived from the delegation of judicial responsibility. In 1349 the enforcement of the Ordinance of Labourers was entrusted not to the king’s hard-pressed judges but to the landholders in the shires. When the government issued the supplementary Statute of Labourers in 1351, it briefly handed over responsibility for the legislation to the commissioners of the peace, thus extending their powers considerably. In order to counteract suggestions that the king had renounced his judicial authority, the council took care to ensure that each peace commission now included a quorum of royal justices, who were required to be present with the provincial amateurs when serious cases of felony were brought to trial. Nevertheless, the developments of 1349–51 set an important precedent. In future, the administration of criminal justice would lie increasingly with the gentry in the shires. And the political implications were profound. The king and the country had at last come to a satisfactory compromise which allowed greater initiative to Edward’s natural supporters in the shires and at the same time considerably enhanced the popularity of the crown.
By the mid-1350s the reputation of the English monarchy was higher than at any point since the 1280s. Free from difficulties at home, it was inevitable that Edward III would turn his attention once more to France. For some time in 1352–4 it seemed that the king was prepared to accept his existing gains rather than risk further unproductive fighting. On several occasions he indicated his willingness to give up the claim to the throne of France, and in 1353 he came close to accepting Charles of Blois as the rightful Duke of Brittany in order to placate the French negotiators. But it remains unclear whether Edward’s intentions were honourable or whether he was simply playing for time. There were certainly many arguments in favour of a continuation of hostilities. Philip VI had died in 1350, and although there had been no dispute over the succession of his son John II, other political problems within the kingdom of France may well have persuaded Edward that his own dynastic claims still stood some chance of success. The English king also had the next generation to think of. The Prince of Wales and his three teenage brothers Lionel, John and Edmund were naturally eager to reopen the war, not only to indulge their chivalric fantasies but also to secure foreign titles and territories to which they might one day succeed. In the end, it was Edward’s unscrupulous cousin Charles, King of Navarre, who was responsible for reopening the war. Charles was locked in his own private dispute with John II, and naturally appealed to the English for help. Edward was persuaded to renege on the peace proposals put forward at Guînes in 1354, and to prepare for a great campaign. The Prince of Wales was appointed lieutenant in Aquitaine, and promptly set about a series of plundering expeditions which caused much distress to the already hard-pressed inhabitants of southern France. Consecutive campaigns were then planned for Brittany and Normandy. In the event, Edward was diverted by problems in Scotland, and had to march north in the winter of 1355–6 to recover control of Berwick. The Duke of Lancaster made a successful raid through Normandy in 1356, but failed to meet up with the other English forces. Consequently, the Black Prince had only a small band of 6,000 men when he met John II’s army at Poitiers on 19 September. The ensuing battle was hard-fought, and ended in a disorganized mêlée. Yet out of this chaos the English plucked one of the greatest successes of the Hundred Years War. The victors eagerly helped themselves to booty and snatched up prisoners in the hope of securing ransoms. The greatest captive of all, King John, was delivered to the prince and despatched to England, where he was greeted with due honours by the delighted Edward III.
England now enjoyed by far the most powerful bargaining position since the start of Edward III’s Scottish and French wars. The long-awaited agreement with Scotland came in the treaty of Berwick of October 1357. This left silent the intractable problems of the Scottish succession and the English claims in the Lowlands, but offered a valuable ransom of 100,000 marks (£66,666 13s 4d) for David II. Negotiations with the French also centred on the release of their king, but were complicated by the dispute over English possessions and rights on the continent.20 Edward III tried to take advantage of the weakness of the enemy to press his claims, and arguably overplayed his hand. France was economically exhausted by the plague and the actions of the free-booting mercenary bands which now roamed the continent selling their services to the highest bidder. The absence of John II and disagreements within his regency government created political chaos, and precipitated an uprising in the Ile de France in 1358 known as the Jacquerie. Edward responded with a series of demands more daring than anything previously dreamed up by the English negotiators. The so-called second treaty of London of May 1359 sought to impose an enormous ransom of almost £700,000 for the return of John II. Edward promised to renounce his claim to the French throne, but in return demanded feudal suzerainty over Brittany and full sovereign control of a huge block of territory stretching uninterrupted from Calais to the Pyrenees. This would have created a new Plantagenet dominion reminiscent of the great empire of Henry II. The dauphin and the French estates general obviously could not countenance such a plan, and rejected the proposals outright.
Edward may well have expected such a response, for he quickly set about a further show of force. Late in 1359 he landed at Calais with a large army and headed for Rheims, the traditional coronation place of the French kings. For a while it seemed that his dynastic claim was about to become a reality. But the city did not give him the welcome he had expected, and shut its gates against the English. Abandoning the siege, Edward quickly accepted the dauphin’s request for a negotiated settlement. At Brétigny in May 1360 it was agreed that the English king would give up his claim to the throne of France and be granted full sovereign control over an enlarged duchy of Aquitaine, together with Calais and some other small territories in the north. The ransom of John II was now reduced to £500,000. These new terms, confirmed at Calais in October 1360, were a good deal less generous than the proposals contained in the second treaty of London. But they still amounted to a major diplomatic victory, and offered Edward III everything for which his predecessors had fought since 1259. They also served to vindicate the long war and to reaffirm public pride and confidence in the monarchy. Edward’s return to England was greeted with general rejoicing. The treaty marked the greatest achievement of a great king; and his subjects were duly thankful.21