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The nine years following the treaty of Brétigny marked by far the longest period of uninterrupted peace since the opening of hostilities between England and France in 1337. Edward III’s enemies quickly seized this opportunity to settle domestic problems and prepare for possible future military action. When John II died in 1364 he was succeeded by his son, Charles V, a man of considerable vision and talent, who in the course of the next few years effected a remarkable change in his wretched kingdom. Gathering around him a group of able administrators, Charles ‘the Wise’ greatly improved the financial resources of the French crown; and with the help of his outstanding lieutenant Bertrand du Guesclin he transformed his inadequate army into a formidable fighting force. Ironically, Edward III failed to follow the French lead. He became increasingly complacent during the years of peace, and was poorly prepared when war broke out again. The military reversals and the political tensions of the 1370s made a disappointing and undignified end to an otherwise remarkable reign. Edward III outlived his own generation and his own usefulness, and became a considerable liability to the throne during his last years.
The treaty of Brétigny was intended to provide a permanent settlement to the Anglo-French dispute, but its specifications were never fully implemented. In fact, it seems that neither side had any real intention of honouring the agreement, and they simply used it as a welcome respite before the inevitable renewal of war. Both were eager to withdraw from the main treaty the special clauses requiring Edward’s repudiation of the French royal title and the handing over by the Valois of those territories now to be recognized as English possessions. This allowed the two sides to maintain a truce but to delay the final implementation of the peace. At first, Edward III may have had honourable intentions, and he stopped using the title of King of France. But within a short time new issues had arisen which made it evident that the renunciation clauses would never be put into effect. The picture of the 1360s as a time of peace and stability is therefore rather misleading. In fact, the decade witnessed a series of protracted and often tense negotiations which at any time might have dissolved into full-scale war.
One of the principal reasons for the failure of the treaty of Brétigny was Edward III’s continued intervention in the French principalities. But this policy, which had earlier been so effective against Philip VI, now proved positively damaging to English interests. Edward’s only success came in Brittany. He gave his daughter in marriage to John de Montfort, son of his earlier ally, and helped him defeat Charles of Blois at Auray in 1364. Elsewhere, however, Edward found little comfort. He may have hoped to re-establish links with Charles of Navarre, who had carried on his own quarrel with the Valois on the border between Normandy and the Ile de France after the withdrawal of English troops. But in 1364 Charles was defeated by du Guesclin, and eventually came to terms with the French king in 1371. An even bigger diplomatic setback occurred in Flanders. Louis de Mâle spent the 1360s negotiating the marriage of his daughter and heiress, Margaret. Edward hoped to secure this valuable match for his fourth son, Edmund of Langley. But in 1369 Margaret was betrothed to Philip of Burgundy, brother of Charles V. Although Louis himself remained theoretically bound to an earlier agreement with England, the prospects of any long-term support from Flanders were dashed. By the end of the 1360s, Edward’s influence in the principalities had been severely compromised.
Ironically, however, the greatest threat to English security came from Edward’s own continental possessions. The failure of the French to cede all the territories agreed at Brétigny meant that the much enlarged duchy of Aquitaine planned in 1360 never became a complete reality. But in 1363 Edward acted as though the renunciations had already taken place, and bestowed on his eldest son the title of Prince of Aquitaine. Dispatched to Bordeaux to take up duties as a resident lord, the Black Prince soon found that many of his new subjects were at best indifferent and at worst positively hostile to the new regime. He made matters worse by trying to improve the efficiency of local administration and to increase his revenues. The independent lords of Aquitaine resented this threat to their traditional privileges, and troublesome characters such as Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix, began to intrigue with Charles V. Others followed the example of the Count of Armagnac, accepting the prince as their token suzerain but refusing to allow his tax collectors into their own lordships. The Black Prince’s attempts to copy his father’s achievement in England and to set up a strong, centralized regime indicated a complete misunderstanding of local political traditions and ultimately brought about the collapse of English rule in southern France.
Nor was Prince Edward content with his considerable responsibilities in Aquitaine. In 1362 Edward III made a treaty with Peter I of Castile and offered to support him against the pretender to his throne, the French-backed Henry of Trastamara. When Peter was deposed in 1365, the Black Prince eagerly seized the opportunity to escape the boredom of administration and to reestablish his military reputation. In the short term, the Spanish war was very successful. The great victory at Nájera in 1367 put Peter I back on his throne and provided the English with a valuable new ally. But the involvement in Castile ultimately weakened Edward III’s position in a number of ways. By 1369 Henry of Trastamara had murdered Peter I and resumed control of the kingdom. The Black Prince had also contracted a disease in Spain which was to remove him from military and political leadership. Most seriously of all, the war had to be paid for by the inhabitants of Aquitaine, who bitterly resented the unprecedented financial charges made by their prince. The oppressive fouages (hearth taxes) imposed on their tenants provided certain of the lords of Aquitaine with the opportunity they had long sought to challenge English lordship. It was this dispute that ultimately led to the renewal of hostilities between England and France.
There were difficulties, too, in the British Isles. David II’s subjects refused to pay any further instalments of his ransom between 1360 and 1366. Although they were forced in 1365 to raise the promised total from £66,666 13s 4d to £100,000, they had still paid only a small proportion of this sum by the time the Anglo-French war broke out again in 1369. The absence of any reference to the Franco-Scottish alliance in the treaty of Berwick was also to create problems for Edward after 1369, and forced the English government to divert considerable resources to the defence of the northern march. Up to 1369, however, Edward III’s major problem was Ireland. In the first half of his reign he had been content to leave the lordship in the hands of the great Anglo-Irish families. But in 1361 he appointed his second son, Lionel of Antwerp, as royal lieutenant in Ireland, and attempted to subdue the magnates by a large and expensive show of force. Edward rather arrogantly considered that he could sort out his Irish subjects as he had done his French enemies. The only result, however, was to increase the long-standing animosity towards the king’s representatives in the lordship. From the end of the decade, when Lionel’s place was taken by William of Windsor, the crown’s controversial Irish policy threatened to become a major issue in English politics. Such developments indicate that, despite the Anglo-French truce, Edward III’s government was still inevitably preoccupied with the possibility, and sometimes the reality, of war.
Against this uneasy background, it is not surprising that the king achieved comparatively little at home. Edward celebrated his fiftieth birthday in 1362, and was already, by contemporary standards, an old man. By the end of the decade, not one of the six earls created in 1337 was still alive. And as the older generation died off, Edward failed to fill up the comital ranks with new supporters. The only new creations of the 1360s were in favour of his children and their spouses. By 1370 the court was dominated by the Earl of Pembroke, a former royal ward who had been married briefly to the king’s daughter, Margaret, and by Edward’s third son John of Gaunt, whose marriage to the joint-heiress of Henry of Grosmont had brought him the title of Duke of Lancaster in 1362. While England was at peace, it mattered little that the king’s following was so small. But in the early 1370s, when Gaunt and Pembroke spent much time away on campaigns, the removal of the new generation of magnates from the immediate royal circle was to prove a serious political weakness for the crown.
The 1360s also saw significant changes in the government offices. Thoresby had resigned the chancellorship in 1357, and Edington retired from royal service in 1363. Thereafter, administrative power passed increasingly into the hands of the king’s new favourite, William Wykeham. Wykeham’s first important job had been as clerk of the works at Windsor in 1356. This appointment coincided with a major new building programme designed to make Windsor the greatest castle in the realm. Inevitably, the clerk attracted royal attention, and Wykeham was soon being styled ‘chief keeper and surveyor’ of the king’s works, with control over all the major royal residences. By 1361 he was the king’s secretary, or keeper of the secret seal. In 1363 he became keeper of the privy seal, and in 1367 he was made chancellor. Ecclesiastical preferment followed fast. By 1366 he was the wealthiest pluralist in England, and in 1367 he was appointed to succeed Edington as Bishop of Winchester.
Wykeham’s influence was enormous: as the chronicler Jean Froissart later commented, ‘everything was done by him, and nothing was done without him’.1 His political ambition, however, put a strain on the government offices. Wykeham had little time for bureaucratic minutiae, and administrative practice inevitably became somewhat lax. Accusations of bribery broke out in the exchequer of receipt in 1365, and the chief baron of the exchequer and the chief justice of king’s bench were both dismissed from office on unspecified charges. In 1368 the steward of the royal household, Sir John Lee, was imprisoned after protests over the abuse of his special legal powers.2 Corruption, inefficiency and maladministration were nothing new; but the frequency and seriousness of such scandals in the 1360s can have done little to improve the reputation of the government.
One of the major problems that Wykeham and his colleagues had to face was the recurrence of the plague. Both the exchequer and the central courts were forced to close down in May 1361 when a second epidemic broke out, and by July Archbishop Thoresby of York was ordering prayers for safe delivery from this pestilence. 3 It has generally been assumed that the second plague was much less serious than the first: one of the few sets of comparative figures, for the clergy of the diocese of York, indicates a mortality rate of only 14 per cent in 1361–2, as against 39 per cent in 1348–9.4 Nevertheless, this attack, and further outbreaks in 1369, 1371 and 1374–5, ruined any remaining chances of a return to the economic conditions prevailing before 1348. Agricultural wages continued to rise. On the estates of the Bishop of Winchester, for instance, there was a particularly sudden increase in the going rate for casual labour at harvest time after 1362.5 It is interesting to notice that the fees paid to the senior exchequer officials were increased in the mid-1360s, presumably to keep up with this inflationary spiral.6 During the 1360s prices remained high; but in 1375 they fell, and began the downward trend which was to last for the rest of the fourteenth century and beyond.
Landholders were forced to take stock of this threat to their profits. Some decided to commute the old labour services demanded of their tenants, to give up the direct farming of their demesnes, and to lease out their lands for fixed rents. In 1369 all labour services on the royal manor of Windsor were abandoned;7 and by the 1370s a substantial number of great estate holders had begun to change over to leases in an attempt to forestall any further drop in revenue. Not surprisingly, the employers also brought increasing pressure on the government to reinforce the labour legislation. The Ordinance and Statute of Labourers were reintroduced in 1361–2, and after 1368 the justices of the peace were given permanent responsibility for their enforcement.8 The landed classes were indeed becoming obsessed with maintaining social distinctions. An extraordinary act of 1363, ‘for the outrageous and excessive apparel of divers people, contrary to their estate and degree’, even tried to regulate the clothing and food allowed to different ranks of society.9By the 1370s such fanciful measures were giving way to real and ominous tensions. There were frequent complaints in parliament about the presumptuous attitude of the lower classes; and those landholders who were still farming some of their demesnes chose to revive or increase the services and dues owed by their unfree tenants. This ‘feudal reaction’ of the 1370s explains many of the grievances and fears aired during the Peasants’ Revolt of 13 81. It also created dissatisfaction and disillusionment among the political community, and contributed to the general malaise of Edward III’s last years.
In the light of this evidence, it is possible to argue that many of the political problems of the 1370s arose out of the diplomatic setbacks, administrative blunders and economic misfortunes suffered in the previous decade. During the 1360s it became apparent that the crown could only maintain its popularity at home by making larger and increasingly ominous compromises with the political community. The change in the commissions of the peace is a case in point.10 Between 1361 and 1364 the government dropped its earlier policy of including professional assize judges on the commissions, and handed over total responsibility for local law enforcement to the county gentry. The crown actually judged this a mistake and in 1368 returned to its old policy, insisting that the assize judges should be present when cases of felony were brought to trial. By this stage, however, the justices of the peace had won so much control over petty crime that the qualification was of comparatively little significance. So far as the landholding classes were concerned, the privilege of maintaining the peace in the shires was now very largely their own.
It would clearly be a mistake to exaggerate the degree of political pressure applied on the crown during the 1360s. There were only six parliaments held in the period of peace, and the amount of business done in them was fairly limited. In many ways, the king’s relations with his subjects were better than ever before. Direct taxation had ceased: indeed, the years from 1360 to 1371 marked the longest respite from such charges since the time of Henry III. The wool subsidy continued to be collected, but at a reduced rate. The king himself was little worried by the resulting loss of revenue, for he was already amassing a considerable personal fortune from the ransom of John II. Consequently, both sides were well satisfied with the politics of peace. In 1363, the commons thanked God for giving them ‘a lord and governor who has delivered them from servitude to other lands and from the charges sustained by them in times past’.11 But this statement also summed up the potential problem. If war began again, proved expensive and failed to get results, the king might well find that the power enjoyed by the political community could be turned against him. That possibility became a painful reality in Edward’s last years.
In the late 1360s certain of the Black Prince’s subjects in Aquitaine decided to challenge his right to levy taxes, and presented their case to the French king in the parlement of Paris. Charles V quickly seized this opportunity to challenge English power in the south of France. Ignoring the terms of the Brétigny agreement, he claimed feudal suzerainty over Aquitaine and summoned the prince to answer for his actions in 1369. The latter refused, was pronounced a contumacious vassal, and had all his lands in France declared forfeit. When these events were reported to the English parliament in June 1369, the lords and commons agreed to support Edward III’s resumption of the French royal title and granted a generous wool subsidy to pay for the now inevitable war. But Edward and his subjects were quite mistaken if they expected another round of easy victories. The English commanders dispatched to the continent after 1369 continued to use the old strategy of the 1340s and 1350s, intervening in Brittany and Normandy and launching raids into the heartlands of the French kingdom. This was intended to divert Charles V’s attention away from the south. But in practice it simply divided and weakened Edward’s military resources. England was also diplomatically isolated. Flanders and Castile counted for nothing, and the Valois king had won over Scotland and Navarre. In 1371 John of Gaunt married the daughter of Edward III’s old ally Peter I, and through her was to claim the Castilian throne. But this revival of English interests south of the Pyrenees simply provided a further military distraction and left Aquitaine open to attack.
Even without these difficulties, the English would have faced a considerable challenge from the armies of Charles V. Under the direction of the ubiquitous du Guesclin, the French had learned the tactical mistakes of Crécy and Poitiers, and refused to be drawn into pitched battles where they might be defeated by the English mixed formation. England also lost the initiative at sea after Pembroke’s humiliating naval defeat off La Rochelle in 1372. To some extent Edward’s lieutenants were the victims of circumstance, ill equipped for a defensive war and caught unawares by the revival of Valois power. But this was not how the king’s subjects interpreted the dismal revers-als of the 1370s. Ineffective leadership, bad advice, the absence of a coordinated strategy, and wanton dissipation of resources: these were the causes of English defeat according to the parliaments of the period. It became increasingly obvious that continued failure abroad would result in a major political upheaval at home.
The greatest of all the military problems of the 1370s was provided by Aquitaine. Not only did the English have to defend the principality from outside attack, but they also had to cope with the increasing animosity of its inhabitants. The only answer they could find to the latter problem was repression. In 1370 the Black Prince led a force against Limoges, which had formed part of the English territories in 1360 but had now fallen under the control of Charles V. He proceeded to destroy any last vestige of English sympathy by plundering the city. His reputation tarnished and his health severely impaired, the prince then returned to England, never to fight again. Those left to carry on the struggle found that they could not even depend on Gascony, the very heart of the English possessions in the south of France. Arnaud Amanieu, Sire d’Albret, one of the most powerful Gascon lords, renounced his allegiance to Edward III in 1369 and threw in his lot with Charles V. Such desertions left Edward’s commanders in an untenable position. In 1372, French forces took over much of the northern part of Aquitaine, and within a short while English control was confined to a narrow strip of coastline between Bordeaux and Bayonne. The only substantial counter-measure attempted by the English was the large expedition led by John of Gaunt through France in 1373, which achieved no military advantage and simply ran up enormous debts for the already embarrassed exchequer. In the same year Edward’s principal ally, the Duke of Brittany, found his duchy overrun by Charles V’s troops. There was nothing for it but to buy time, and an Anglo-French truce was concluded at Bruges in 1375. This amounted to a public declaration of defeat for the English. Everything that Edward III had won by conquest and negotiation up to 1360 had vanished in the space of six short years.
One of the reasons for this dramatic reversal of fortunes was the absence of effective leadership by the king. Queen Philippa’s death apparently prevented Edward III from taking charge of operations in 1369,12 and a further royal expedition planned in 1372 was called off before it ever set sail.13 In the early 1370s the king withdrew increasingly from public life, and became dangerously dependent on a small group of unscrupulous sycophants at court.14 Both the chamberlain, William Latimer, and the steward, Lord Neville, seem to have taken advantage of the elderly and feeble-minded king to advance their personal interests. Latimer also negotiated a series of dubious financial deals with the London financier Richard Lyons. The most influential and remarkable member of this inner circle, however, was the king’s mistress, Alice Perrers. Queen Philippa had been content with childbearing and collecting fine clothes, but her successor in Edward III’s bed was a woman of altogether greater political ambitions.15 By the early 1370s, in fact, Latimer, Neville and Perrers virtually controlled all access to the king. The court had ceased to epitomize the political unity of the realm, and had instead become dominated by a narrow, exclusive and unpopular clique. It was not long before the country began to blame the courtiers for the evils which had now befallen the realm.
Opposition was once again sparked off by the government’s financial demands. Between 1369 and 1375 the crown spent something in excess of £670,000 on the war.16 Neither the wool subsidy of 1369 nor the triennial tenth secured from the Church in 1370 proved sufficient, and in 1371 the laity and clergy were each asked to grant £50,000 towards the war effort. In 1372–3 parliament authorized three fifteenths and tenths; and in 1373 the clergy conceded yet another tenth. It seemed almost incredible that such high taxation could produce so little return, and from 1371 the commons began to voice their suspicions about the misappropriation of subsidies granted for the war effort. More seriously, the parliament of 1371 demanded the dismissals of Chancellor Wykeham and Treasurer Brantingham and their replacement by laymen. Edward was forced to sacrifice his closest advisers in a desperate effort to retain the goodwill of the community. Such actions would have been unthinkable in the 1340s and 1350s, and did not bode well for the future. Even the truce of 1375 was unpopular, for it was seen as an opportunity for Charles V to regroup his forces and prepare for the final onslaught on Gascony. The English government was sufficiently worried about the attitude in the country that it refused to call parliament in 1374 and 1375. When an assembly was eventually summoned in April 1376 it was inevitable that the anger and frustration which had built up over the preceding years would produce an acrimonious debate. But few men on either side can have been ready for the extraordinary course which this political crisis was to take.
The parliament of 1376 was remarkable in many ways. Contemporaries recognized this by identifying it with a special name, the ‘Good Parliament’. It was a record-breaking session, lasting longer than any previous assembly (ten weeks) and producing the largest recorded list of common petitions to date (146 items). It witnessed the first appointment of a speaker to act as the commons’ chairman and representative, and the first use in parliament of the judicial procedure known as impeachment. We know more about this assembly than any other parliament in the fourteenth century, thanks to several valuable chronicle accounts which supplement the official record of proceedings. There is therefore an understandable tendency to exaggerate the significance of the Good Parliament, and it is important to remember that all its achievements had been undone by the time Edward III died in 1377. Nevertheless, the events of 1376 are a natural focus for our study, since they provide a rare and valuable insight into the attitudes of the new political society that had grown up in the course of Edward III’s reign.
The parliament opened with an appeal for taxation. The commons met in the chapter house of Westminster Abbey to debate this request, and after much deliberation came to the conclusion that if the king had been better advised, no taxes would now be necessary. They decided to deliver this message to the government, and chose as their spokesman Sir Peter de la Mare, knight of the shire for Herefordshire and steward of the Earl of March. De la Mare treated with John of Gaunt, the king’s representative, and after some delay secured the appointment of a small committee of lords and bishops to join in discussion with the knights and burgesses. The commons subsequently persuaded Gaunt to accept their proposal for a new royal council, which included several members of the earlier consultative committee (Bishop Courtenay of London, the Earls of March and Stafford, Lord Percy, Sir Guy Brian and Sir Roger Beauchamp) together with Archbishop Sudbury, Bishop Wykeham and the new Earl of Arundel. A number of these men had personal grievances against the court, and both March and Wykeham were to make public attacks on the king’s advisers in the course of this parliament. The knowledge that there was a group of peers sympathetic to their cause undoubtedly gave the commons a greater sense of security in their ensuing battle against the courtiers.
On 12 May, Peter de la Mare appeared before John of Gaunt and set forth the principal grievance of the opposition: that the king ‘has with him certain councillors and servants who are not loyal or profitable to him or the kingdom’.17 The attack centred on Latimer, Neville, Alice Perrers and Richard Lyons, though a number of other financiers were also implicated in the ensuing scandal. In presenting his case, de la Mare insisted that he was acting for the commons as a whole, and thus stumbled upon the process of impeachment. This was already a well-established procedure in the common law courts, involving a joint charge by a group of accusers acting in the name of the king. In 1376 it was used for the first time in parliament, where the charges were heard and tried by the lords, presided over by John of Gaunt. The most serious accusations were those against Latimer and Lyons, who were said to have sold licences exempting merchants from the Calais staple and to have organized loans for the crown at extortionate rates of interest. Latimer was also blamed for the loss of the fortresses of St Sauveur and Bécherel during his period as the king’s lieutenant in Brittany. Some of the charges were without foundation, and many others misrepresented or exaggerated the true facts. But when the former treasurer Sir Richard Scrope declared that the loans negotiated by Latimer and Lyons had been made without his knowledge, Gaunt had to accept that the court was defeated. Latimer and Neville were dismissed from office, Richard Lyons was imprisoned, and Alice Perrers was banished from the household. Behind all the complicated details, the basic issue in 1376 was the same as in 1258, 1311 or 1341: namely, the desire of a section of the political community to remove evil counsellors from the king’s side. But there was one great difference which marked the Good Parliament out from earlier disputes, for it was the commons, not the barons, who had now taken the initiative in ousting court favourites and dictating a wiser form of counsel.
It is a measure of the gravity of this crisis that the parliament did not end with these impeachments but continued in session for another month. The commons compiled a long list of grievances, and made it clear that they would not be satisfied until the king had carried out a comprehensive reform of government. They also turned their suspicion on John of Gaunt. After the Black Prince’s death on 8 June there were rumours that the Duke of Lancaster intended to take the throne, and the commons hastily requested that the young Prince Richard be installed as Prince of Wales in order to guarantee the rightful succession. The king’s representatives were prepared to prolong the troublesome session in the hope of gaining taxes, and were eventually rewarded with a grant of the wool subsidy for three years. But the Good Parliament did what no assembly since 1325 had apparently dared to do: it rejected the crown’s requests for direct taxation and refused to the last to authorize a lay subsidy.18 The session therefore ended on 10 July with a massive vote of no confidence in the government. The court, not surprisingly, was in disarray. The king’s two younger sons, Edmund and Thomas, who had dissociated themselves from Gaunt, joined in the celebrations hosted by de la Mare. Edward himself had already retired to Eltham before the end of the parliament, and was soon totally incapacitated by a serious illness from which he never fully recovered.
The Good Parliament witnessed one of the most serious attacks on the English crown in the whole of the later Middle Ages. Had it not been for the residual respect accorded to a once great and now aged ruler, the parliament might indeed have made an all-out attack on Edward III himself. In the event, the king’s power remained intact, and was used by John of Gaunt to avenge the humiliations suffered at the hands of a presumptuous opposition. By October 1376 the displaced courtiers had been pardoned and restored to their titles, lands and influence. De la Mare was arrested and put in Nottingham Castle; the Earl of March was deprived of his title of marshal; and Wykeham, who had dared to speak out against Lord Latimer, was stripped of his estates and brought before the council. Such arbitrary measures inevitably provoked more hostile reaction. In February 1377 Lancaster’s protégé John Wyclif was summoned before Bishop Courtenay to answer charges of seditious preaching. If John of Gaunt intended to abuse the immunities of the Church, then the Church would be forced to take vengeance on one of Gaunt’s own clerical associates. At the same time Gaunt fell foul of the governing elite in London. Rumours spread about his plans to infringe the administrative and judicial privileges of the city. Serious disturbances broke out in the capital and a mob attacked Lancaster’s palace of the Savoy. It must have seemed to many in the autumn of 1376 that the whole fabric of political life was about to be torn apart.
Ironically, however, the new parliament which assembled at Westminster in January 1377 proved astonishingly amenable to Lancaster’s will. It accepted the reversal of the earlier impeachments and granted a direct subsidy in the novel form of a poll tax. Historians used to think that this parliament was packed with John of Gaunt’s supporters and placemen.19 But it seems more likely that the absence or defection of some of the principal actors in the earlier drama severely weakened the remaining opposition, and left the assembly with no alternative but to accept a fait accompli. As in 1341, parliament was forced to acknowledge that the king had the right to renege on political concessions made against his will. In the following months the government also made some concessions to public opinion, giving up its unpopular attack on Wykeham, and stage-managing a reconciliation between Lancaster and the Londoners. By the late spring John of Gaunt’s policy seemed to have paid off, and some degree of normality was restored to political life. It remained to be seen how long this uneasy equilibrium could last.
The principal reason for the hasty compromise patched together in the early months of 1377 was the growing concern about the king’s health, the succession to the throne, and the security of the realm. Edward III was seriously ill by September 1376, and remained inactive for the next five months.20 In the following February, parliament was given encouraging news of his health and notified of a general amnesty to celebrate his jubilee.21 But within a short while the sickness had returned, and the king died of a stroke at Sheen on 21 June 1377.
The gallant and noble King Edward III departed this life to the deep distress of the whole realm of England, for he had been a good king for them. His like had not been seen since the days of King Arthur…So King Edward was embalmed and placed with great pomp and reverence on a bier borne by twenty-four knights dressed in black, his three sons and the duke of Brittany and the earl of March walking behind him, and carried thus at a slow march through the city of London, the face uncovered. To witness and hear the grief of the people, their sobs and screams and lamentations on that day, would have rended anyone’s heart.22
Froissart, like many other chroniclers, took Edward’s death and burial as an opportunity to indulge fond memories of a great and glorious king. In 1377 some may have been less kind in their comments about a rather pathetic old man whose indolence and incapacity had jeopardized the welfare of the realm. But for all his failings, Edward III had provided a sense of stability in English politics, a stability now threatened by rumours of French invasions and the prospect of a minority government. Some years later an English versifier made the obvious but apposite analogy with the ship of state, deprived of its rudder since the death of this ‘noble knight’ and set adrift on a troubled sea.23 It is not surprising that an old man’s weaknesses were soon forgiven, and the cult of Edward III was quickly under way.
It is not easy to sum up the achievements of Edward III. His reign was too long and his fortunes too changeable to allow for any bold generalizations. Had he died in 1340, he would undoubtedly have been judged a failure; had he died in 1360, he would probably have been seen as one of the most successful men ever to sit on the English throne. Edward II’s regime had demonstrated the perils as well as the futility of political conflict, and it must be admitted that the youthful Edward III was somewhat slow to realize the advantages to be derived from conciliation. After 1341, however, the king deliberately made himself more accessible and amenable to a broad cross-section of political society, and enjoyed a degree of popularity virtually unparalleled in the history of the Plantagenet dynasty. This inevitably created a challenge for the monarchy, and both Edward III and his successors often found it difficult to live up to the new expectations placed upon them. But Edward’s ability to accommodate the interests of so many of his subjects for so long a period of time sets him apart from most other medieval kings. To understand the full significance of that achievement we need to look beyond the battles and treaties and examine in detail the structure and the motives of political society in fourteenth-century England.