TWELVE
IN 1350 EDWARD’S confidence could not have been higher. He had been victorious in every battle he had fought. He had survived the plague, had restored the prestige of the royal family, had solved his financial problems, was respected and applauded by his people and held in awe by his knightly contemporaries. He had constantly tried new ideas and techniques, and personally he had inspired and demanded innovations which had resulted in new ways of fighting, governing, raising money and trading. The loyalty and courage of his men had been repeatedly tested to the limit and never found lacking. With such support he had done what no English king – not even his renowned grandfather, Edward I – had done before. He had utterly humiliated the French king, captured the Scottish king, and swept aside the political machinations of the pope, plunging the schemes of all those who opposed him into disarray.
But despite these successes and such high confidence, Edward himself was changing. Even though he had survived the plague, the experience had deeply affected him. It had shown him the limits of his power, and was a horrific reminder to all kings of their weakness against natural disasters. It had affected him as a man too, through the tragic loss of his daughter and the deaths of friends brave enough to join him at Windsor in April 1349, at the height of the epidemic. Above all else it had shown him how transitory his achievements might prove. Had he died in the plague, that would have been the enduring image of him, covered in black pustules and reeking of decay. He had risked his life at the battle of Winchelsea and almost lost his boat and drowned; and all for what? Seventeen galleys? In his own high opinion of himself, it would have been a tragedy if he had died for so little gain. It may have been the plague, or it may have been his age – he was now thirty-seven – or perhaps both, but it is at this point that Edward began to draw back from martial activities and to create more lasting structures. Winchelsea was to be the last time he drew his sword and personally risked his life in the front line of a battle.
Edward had probably begun to think in terms of permanent creations even before Winchelsea. In the Order of the Garter he had created a means to perpetuate a knightly reputation long after an individual was no longer capable of fighting at the highest level. As soon as it was founded, the fame of the Order spread across Europe. In France the newly crowned King John was thinking about founding his own order, the Order of the Star, and other princes and kings were doing likewise. A whole host of orders was in the planning, all based on knightly accoutrements: swords, buckles, collars, even a knot.1 But there was no doubt which order every knight in Europe aspired to join. When historians write that these orders of chivalry were distinguished by lavish ceremonial and ornate dress regulations they are missing an important point. The distinguishing mark of the Order of the Garter was that it was a select band of just twenty-six knights chosen by the man who was widely recognised to be the greatest warrior-king in Christendom and the epitome of chivalric honour. So great was its reputation that when in 1350 Thomas de la Marche, bastard son of the French king had agreed to fight a duel with a Cypriot knight, John Visconti, they chose to do so not before King Philip but in front of Edward, even though the English king was de la Marche’s enemy.2
It was with the Order of the Garter in mind that Edward set about his largest and most impressive architectural creation, at Windsor Castle. This was where he had been born; this was where the Garter tournament had taken place, and this, he decided, would be where the heart of the Order would remain. Already he had established the collegiate chapel of St George in the lower bailey. From now on, all Knights of the Garter were to attend the service at Windsor on St George’s Day every year. Even if they could not – if, for example, they were overseas – they should celebrate as if they were at Windsor, being a travelling advertisement for the glory and dignity of Edward’s chivalric order. For his part, Edward would enhance the Order’s reputation, building the largest, grandest and most opulent palace in Northern Europe.
Today Windsor Castle has the appearance of a modernised medieval castle, a great symbol easily recognisable from the motorway or on the television as the monarch’s home. But in the fourteenth century it was nothing short of a Versailles Palace: the court of the Sun King. Edward’s work there amounted to the most expensive building in Britain by a single monarch throughout the whole of the middle ages. To put it in proportion, we often think of Edward I’s eight Welsh castles, built between 1277 and 1304, as one of the most significant building programmes undertaken by a medieval king. The entire cost of all eight was £95,000.3 Edward III spent more than £50,000 on Windsor Castle alone.
And yet few people today connect Windsor Castle with Edward III. People immediately associate the Tower of London with William the Conqueror, and Hampton Court with Henry VIII, just as they do Versailles with Louis XIV of France. But Edward has, once again, slipped through the net of national self-awareness. One reason is the dampening effect of his reputation throughout the nineteenth century, so that his achievements were obscured by writers eager to focus on his failings. But there are two other, simpler reasons as well. One is that Edward’s principal works at Windsor are not open to the public; they are very private, as the royal family still lives in them. The other is that they are mostly internal buildings: living and ceremonial quarters, which have been repeatedly adapted to suit the tastes of each monarch since Edward, unlike the stern curtain walls, which retain their militaristic solidity. What the public sees today from outside the castle is largely restored twelfth- and thirteenth-century stonework. It was inside this impressive chivalric shell – the largest residential castle in the world – that Edward created the stone epitome of his vision of kingship and knighthood.4
The internal reconstruction of Windsor Castle as the greatest medieval palace in England took about eighteen years. Practically every major artist and craftsman in the country was at some time or other employed on the fabric. A striking mark of the importance which Edward gave to his projected works at Windsor from the outset was his donation of the Neith Cross (a portion of the True Cross and his most precious relic) to the chapel of St George. Actual structural work may be said to have begun with the appointment of the first of a series of clerks of works in April 1350, the first anniversary of the Garter tournament.5 The earliest works were the buildings for the College of St George in the lower bailey. He removed the huge, unfinished Round Table building he had begun six years earlier and replaced it with a series of half-timbered houses for the canons, clerks and choristers around a series of cloisters. At the same time the chapel was re-roofed and equipped with new choir stalls and windows. A new chapter house was built with a warden’s lodge above it. A new treasury was added, a new vestry, and a belfry. The construction and decoration of the collegiate buildings took until 1357 to complete, and cost about £6,000.
It was the king’s palatial accommodation in the upper bailey which captured the attention of contemporaries. These works were intended from the outset to be truly impressive. Beginning in 1358 under the direction of a promising royal clerk, William of Wykeham, Edward ordered the rebuilding of the entire upper bailey, beginning at the north-west and proceeding in a clockwise direction. By the early 1360s his expenditure on the castle was running in excess of £5,000 per year. There was a new hall and kitchen, the old hall being converted into a chamber for the personal use of the king. This room alone had twenty windows.6 He also had a painted chamber, and five other chambers, including one – the Rose Chamber – coloured with blue, green and vermilion paint and large quantities of gold leaf. Philippa had four chambers, including one hung entirely with mirrors, and another decorated as a dancing chamber. Stone was brought from all over the country, including Somerset, Surrey, Berkshire, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, to give variety and character to the walls.7 Although Edward had lost his master mason, William Ramsey, in the plague, he was followed by a whole host of successors, including Henry Yevele, arguably the most important of all medieval English architects. In 1360 alone no fewer than five hundred and sixty-eight masons were employed from thirteen counties. The following year – which saw expenditure on the castle top the £6,000 mark – more than twice this number were employed, drawn from seventeen counties. One chronicler remarked that ‘almost all the masons and carpenters throughout England were brought to that building, so that hardly anyone could have any good mason or carpenter’.8 The chronicler perhaps exaggerated a little, but in one respect he was absolutely correct: all the very best craftsmen worked at Windsor. One of the master carpenters at work on the collegiate buildings was William Hurley, the man responsible for Hugh Despenser’s great roof in the hall of Caerphilly Castle, built before 1326 (still extant) and many other great buildings of Edward’s reign. Edward used all the country had to offer in terms of numbers, skill and experience. At the end of the process he had constructed a palace which was worthy not only of him as the victor of Halidon Hill, Sluys, Crécy, Calais and Winchelsea, but of the English people, who had fought for him at those battles, and won.
*
Edward’s huge rebuilding programme at Windsor was by no means his sole cultural contribution. However, the rest have not lasted so well. It is one of the great ironies of Edward’s life that the structures and art works which he commissioned from 1350 to be a permanent commemoration of his achievements have not proved as lasting as the memory of those achievements themselves. As mentioned above, few people today associate Windsor Castle with him; but most people have heard of the Order of the Garter. Not a single stone remains from his great vision of military power, Queenborough Castle, on the Isle of Sheppey, but most of us remember the result of the battle of Crécy. Likewise, although most historians today first think of the establishment of parliamentary representation as one of Edward III’s major achievements, the great paintings of St Stephen’s Chapel, which stood near the current Houses of Parliament at Westminster, have long since vanished.
St Stephen’s Chapel, the principal place of royal worship within the Palace of Westminster, was ordered to be completely rebuilt by Edward I in 1292. Over the next sixty years, progress became a barometer of royal authority. When the king was strong, building rushed ahead; when his policies were challenged, building stopped. Thus it is not surprising that work had progressed very slowly through the last years of the reign of Edward I and through most of Edward II’s reign. It was only in the 1320s that the old walls, which had been protected by thatching since 1309 were cleaned off and the slow, scrupulous work of constructing ‘the most splendid chapel in England’ began again.9 Little progress had been made by the time Mortimer and Isabella invaded, and brought the work once more to a halt. Building only resumed after Edward III took charge of the country, in 1331. Over the next three years the east end was finished. A lull in construction followed in 1334, while the king was away in Scotland, and facing his first financial crisis in the wage bill from that campaign, but it was not long before work began again, in 1337. This time there was no stopping. William Hurley, the king’s master carpenter, and William Ramsey, Surveyor of the King’s Works, were put in charge. By 1348 the exquisite chapel – ninety feet long by thirty feet wide – was complete, with a gallery leading directly from the king’s chamber into the upper part. At the same time, Edward established a college of canons to celebrate mass there. All that needed to be done now was to glaze, paint and furnish the chapel.
It is, of course, a sad loss for us that the chapel was pulled down after the fire of 1834, which destroyed most of the Palace of Westminster. But what is especially sad is that the decoration was almost entirely lost in that fire. For at St Stephen’s Edward commissioned what is generally recognised as the most magnificent English painting programme of the fourteenth century.10 It is tempting to say that England had not seen painting like this before, for many of the techniques are exclusively connected with painting of the Italian Renaissance: the use of perspective, for example. But, surprisingly, the painters themselves seem to have been English. In March 1350 the master painter Hugh of St Albans was directed to search out the best men of his craft in Kent, Middlesex, Essex, Surrey and Sussex and to bring them to Westminster to work on the painting.11 Other painters were ordered to do the same in the Midlands and East Anglia. Edward was doing at Westminster with painting what he was doing at Windsor with stonework: conscripting the very best artists his kingdom had to offer. No expense was spared. Paper (still a relatively rare commodity) was purchased for the designs, and peacocks’ feathers, swans’ feathers, pigs’ bristles and squirrels’ tails for the brushes, as well as rich paints and gold leaf for the decoration. Every part of the chapel walls was painted. The spaces below the windows were adorned with religious subjects; the corners of the windows were painted or gilded, the walls themselves were covered with angels with extended wings, and doves, eagles, elephants and castles. Beneath the great east window there were painted figures of St George, King Edward, Queen Philippa and ten of their sons and daughters. Only some incomplete sketches made of these images now survive: the originals were destroyed in the fire. A few small fragments of the paintings were rescued, and these are now in the British Museum. Otherwise everything was lost.
Edward did not stop at employing the best painters at St Stephen’s: he also employed the best carpenters, glaziers and carvers of stone and wood. Heading up the list of carpenters was, unsurprisingly, William Hurley, the foremost carpenter of his day. They worked on the stalls and the reredos. In 1351–52, twenty to thirty glaziers worked to the orders of the master glazier, John of Chester. The best woodcarver in the kingdom was initially thought to be Robert Burwell, whom Edward had employed at Windsor in 1350; but after a few years it was found that in Nottinghamshire there was an even more skilled man, Master Edmund of St Andrew, a canon of Newstead Abbey. Master Edmund was accordingly brought all the way to Westminster in 1355. He became just the latest of the scores of artists whom Edward drew together from all over the realm. As for stone sculpture, Edward was the first important patron of the fine school of English alabaster carving (his father’s effigy at Gloucester being the earliest extant masterpiece), and alabaster sculptures were installed at Windsor and probably also at St Stephen’s.12 The alabaster reredos he commissioned for the high altar of St George’s was a particularly large piece: it required ten carts and eighty horses to transport it from Nottingham to Windsor.13
By 1355 Edward was the patron of most of the best artists in England. Had all medieval kings acted in a similar way, medieval provincial art may well have been poorer but English royal buildings would have rivalled many of the structural masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. This may sound like a wild statement, in view of the destruction of the royal chapel and the unique cultural status accorded to the Renaissance, but consider how closely Edward was in touch with the Italians. His extended family links with southern European families (such as the counts of Savoy and Provence, the Fieschi and the Visconti) had, over the years, made him as familiar with Italian culture as his forefathers. For years, through royal gift-giving and gift-receiving, Edward had seen the best that Italian craftsmen had to offer, and had offered back in return priceless works from English goldsmiths’ workshops. The banking families of the Peruzzi and the Bardi had practically dwelt at his palaces for several years, and in 1340 the head of the Peruzzi died in London, after spending a year with Edward. His constant embassies to Avignon meant that his high-status ambassadors and low-status messengers were regularly exposed to the culture of the Mediterranean. Some of his doctors were Italian, some of his clerks, and some of his armourers. He purchased paintings and armour from Italy. As a result it would be wrong not to regard Edward III as a Renaissance ruler.
No panel paintings belonging to Edward exist now, but documentary evidence shows us that he himself commissioned some and even appointed a royal painter. In 1353 this was ‘John, a canon of St Catherine’s, the king’s picture painter’.14 Five years later Queen Isabella possessed at least six and perhaps ten Italian paintings, the largest being of seven leaves.15 This is not a small collection, and her owning such large constructions as six-leaf and seven-leaf paintings suggests that these were being brought to England as a result of a known demand for them, if only in royal circles. Edward similarly used Italian panel paintings in his favourite residences.16 Most striking of all, Edward was probably the first English king who sat for his portrait, for in 1380 the king of France owned a painted likeness of Edward.17 We cannot look at this development as being accidental; rather it appears to be another example of Edward’s own artistic patronage and links with Italian Renaissance culture.
Much more could be said about St Stephen’s chapel, and many books have been written on the subject of the medieval Palace of Westminster, but perhaps one last point is particularly suitable for inclusion in a biography of Edward III. It must be noted that he himself did not begin the chapel, his grandfather did. This may be taken simply as a sign of a continuation of his grandfather’s ambitions, but is also indicative of his will to complete his predecessors’ foundations. He had already endowed and founded the King’s Hall at Cambridge in line with his father’s promises. Similarly in 1346 he had founded a convent of nuns at Dartford dependent on the Dominican friars, a unique establishment which was the original idea of his father and grandmother.18 In these foundations, brought to splendid completion under Edward III, we may detect a sense of triumph, or, more particularly, of a determination to complete what his predecessors had been unable to finish. Edward was keen to tie up the loose ends of the last two generations and eliminate the evidence that the English royal family occasionally failed to live up to its promises. To return to the idea of Edward trying to be ‘the perfect king’, it is arguable that in 1350 his ambition had gone one stage further, to turn his whole family into a ‘perfect dynasty’. If we are right in reading the evidence in this way, then it is surely a remarkable ambition. It was only twenty years since Edward had assented to the execution of his own uncle.
*
Almost nothing now remains of Edward’s other great building enterprises. In 1350 he founded the Cistercian Abbey of St Mary Graces beside the Tower, in order to celebrate yet another safe delivery from a storm at sea.19 This was swept away in the Reformation. So too was the nunnery at Dartford. His palaces at Eltham, Sheen, King’s Langley, Queenborough and Moor End (Northamptonshire) and his extensions of Nottingham Castle have disappeared without trace.20 Of his house at Rotherhithe, only the foundations are visible. Hadleigh Castle is just rubble and jagged ruins.
His work rebuilding Eltham Palace, begun in 1350, lasted for ten years and cost over £2,237. His work there included new lodgings for the royal family, and passages between the king’s great chamber and the queen’s. He rebuilt the encircling wall, repaired the halls (plural), king’s chapel and gatehouses, added a new drawbridge, kitchen, roasting house, saucery, larder and oratory.21 He restocked and repaired the garden and improved the vineyard. This is an interesting reference to the cultivation of vines in fourteenth-century England which is mirrored in similar payments at the gardens and vineyard at Windsor Castle, from which wine continued to be produced good enough for royal consumption until the end of the reign.
After 1350, Edward began building on a scale which, if not unprecedented, certainly equalled anything previously seen in Britain. In 1351 he acquired Henley from John Molyns and started rebuilding the royal residence there. Having paid £550 for it, he then spent £785 under the watchful eye of William of Wykeham on the principal dwellings.22 Two years later he commenced work at Rotherhithe, on the south bank of the River Thames. There he spent £1,064 over the next three years on a fine house with a wharf, gardens and vineyards, this to be a convenient stopping-off point on his journeys into Kent. The foundations of this house are still extant, but that is all. The accounts for the garden have survived much better, including the list of seeds, plants and compost purchased.23 In 1354 he began to rebuild substantial parts of the manor of Woodstock, where his eldest son and daughter had been born. It was particularly with his wife and eldest daughter in mind that he rebuilt a new chamber for the queen and a balcony outside Isabella’s suite of rooms so that she might have a view of the park.24 A few years later he spent more than £500 reconstructing part of Rosamund’s Bower, the legendary trysting place of Henry II and his favourite mistress at Woodstock.
The above building programme is remarkable for the fact that it took place alongside the expenditure of more than £5,000 every year at Windsor, and about £1,000 each year at Westminster. In addition there were repairs to all the other royal buildings. In his determination to create a clean, ordered image for his dynasty, Edward spent large amounts of money just maintaining his predecessors’ castles and palaces. Quite apart from all the major works he undertook, in the course of his reign he carried out extensive repairs to the castles of Cambridge, Carisbrooke, Carlisle, Corfe, Dover, Gloucester, Guildford, Leeds, the Tower of London (including the construction of the Cradle Tower and the wharf), Ludgershall, Odiham, Porchester, Rochester, Rockingham, Scarborough, Somerton, Wallingford and Winchester.25 Houses built by his grandfather Edward I, such as Clarendon Palace and Havering, were also extensively repaired.26 And the most significant and original constructions were yet to come.
At Nottingham Castle in 1358 a major programme of remodelling and repair began, costing more than a thousand pounds. The most obvious result was the construction of Romylow’s Tower, the rebuilding and reglazing of the chapels, the rebuilding of the king’s kitchen, the queen’s hall, the constable’s hall and the great kitchen. All of this work was destroyed in the early seventeenth century.27 In the same year he began work at his great palace of Sheen, near Richmond, at which William of Wykeham administered more than £2,000 on an exquisite new royal house, with fishponds, gardens, tiled courtyards, and chambers with large fireplaces, glazing in the windows, and another one of Edward’s favourite additions to any residence: a ‘roasting house’, somewhere for his meat to be spit-roasted.28 Edward’s work at Sheen was probably entirely destroyed by Richard II after his wife died there in 1394.29 Anything left standing was destroyed by fire in 1499.
In February 1359, Edward started work on remodelling his father’s favourite house at King’s Langley. There he spent more than three thousand pounds, including the rebuilding of the bath house. Bathing was a high priority of Edward’s, as with other medieval kings. The water supply to the bathroom in the Palace of Westminster had been controlled by bronze taps in the shape of leopards, probably attached to metal cisterns, since at least 1275.30 Edward II had had the bathroom tiled. But hot water itself in these places had had to be heated in earthenware pots in a furnace, and then poured into a cistern in the bathroom. At Westminster in 1351 Edward made a breakthrough, introducing what was probably the first English bathroom with hot and cold running water, with one bronze tap for hot and another for cold.31 This was the system he seems to have replicated at King’s Langley, where the accounts record a payment for a ‘large square lead for heating water’. This hot water would then have been piped – several of his accounts record payments for pipes – into the bathroom, and, having ‘turned the water on’ (by giving the order for the furnace near the cistern to be lit), he could then control the flow of hot and cold water into his bath as he desired.32 Sadly Edward’s bath house and all the splendid buildings which he, his father and grandfather had built at King’s Langley were allowed to fall down by the Tudors. Henry VIII’s wives were each granted the manor but spent nothing on it, and what remained was demolished in the seventeenth century.
It was also in 1359 that Edward began work on Hadleigh Castle. Parts of this do survive – a few jagged pieces of tower masonry – but nothing of the great royal apartments which were the focus of Edward’s attention. Over the next ten years he spent more than £2,300 on the castle, creating an Essex shoreline residence to balance his planned Kentish shore residence on the Isle of Sheppey.33 By this stage Edward was beginning to link all his multi-thousand pound residences along the water of the Thames. From Windsor, his chivalric palace, he could travel by royal barge to Isleworth (which he repaired) and Sheen (which he was rebuilding) to Westminster, the Tower of London, and Rotherhithe, a short ride from Eltham.34 It only required him to add his Isle of Sheppey residence and Gravesend manor for him to have a whole suite of royal palaces and castles which he could reach swiftly. These he began in the early 1360s. In 1362 he acquired the manor of Gravesend from the earl of Suffolk and began yet another lavish building, spending more than £1,350 over the next five years on improving the royal chambers and facilities and decorating the buildings he retained.35
If any loss is to be lamented as much as St Stephen’s Chapel, it is Queenborough Castle. It was the only new royal castle of the later middle ages and it is remarkable in that it was the last truly military English royal residence. Edward himself took a key role in overseeing the works.36 This in itself was nothing new: he always had involved himself personally with his acts of patronage, from laying the foundation stone of William Montagu’s priory at Bisham (a foundation plaque for which still survives) to overseeing the rebuilding of Roxburgh, Eltham and Windsor.37 What is interesting about Queenborough is that it seems to have been Edward’s own statement in stone about his ideas of defensive building. It was, in some senses, an amusement, almost to show off that he could design a building which was as militarily strong as his grandfather’s castles in North Wales or Richard the Lionheart’s Château Gaillard (none of which Edward had seen for himself, incidentally).
There is no castle quite like Queenborough. Moreover, there was nothing quite like it, for today not a single stone survives.38 It is known from one seventeenth-century survey and an Elizabethan plan. Work began in spring 1361, Edward himself being present at the start. It was basically an enormously strong encircling wall, three hundred feet in diameter, with no towers except those overlooking the two gates. These gates, which were opposite one another, led into the castle, but not in a usual way. The main gate led to a passage which gave no access to the central part of the great fortress. Instead it acted as a barbican: anyone breaking through the main gate would have found himself trapped in this area, susceptible to arrows and other objects being thrown at him from above, on all sides. If an attacker had escaped from this he would only have been able to reach the outer court. This circular, outward-looking court, which circled the high central part of the castle and its six great circular towers, was built largely to house the trebuchets and the cannon which guarded the sea approach to London. In 1365 Edward installed two great cannon and nine small ones here, making it one of his three permanent artillery fortifications along with Dover (where there were nine cannon by 1371) and Calais (where there were fifteen).39 The postern gate also was guarded by a barbican, but this one gave way to the inner court of the central stronghold. It was around this inner court that the king’s residence was planned. Thus at Queenborough as nowhere else we have the culmination of the royal castle as a palace, fortification and gun emplacement, an architectural masterpiece which ‘exemplifies the principles of cylindrical and concentric fortification carried to their logical conclusion with perfect symmetry’.40 It cost Edward over twenty-five thousand pounds. He might have thought that such a huge and impressive construction would guarantee its permanence. Alas, its defensive foresight was probably its undoing. Although the mid-seventeenth-century parliamentary commissioners thought its potential as a gun emplacement was small, its concentric self-protection meant that it was too powerful and strategically important to risk letting it fall into enemy hands even at that late date. Parliament ordered it to be pulled down.
*
In the layout of Queenborough and the creation of the naval gun emplacement we can see that a technological mind was at work. In the luxury of the hot and cold running water in the bathrooms at Westminster and King’s Langley, we can see a similar technological approach. If we knew nothing about Edward and his strategies and patronage of guns and his adapting of longbow crossfire as a fighting method, we might wonder whether these developments were not due to his capable advisers. But the point at which all these technological developments meet is Edward himself. And this brings us to Edward’s key area of patronage which has most definitely lasted. The use of the mechanical clock.
The earliest mechanical clock in Europe for which we have clear evidence is often said to be the one put up at Milan in 1335. Earlier attempts to make a mechanical clock, using a weight and ratchet system, were certainly underway in the late thirteenth century, for in 1271 it was recorded that clockmakers were trying to make a wheel which would make exactly one full turn every day.41 Early in his reign (probably in 1332) Edward saw for himself the realisation of such ideas when he stopped by the monastery of St Albans and found the abbot, Richard Wallingford, building his clock.42 Wallingford had succeeded in making a machine which both chimed regular hours and showed the movements of the sun and stars. At the time Edward did not recognise the importance of this, especially as it was apparent that the abbot was neglecting his spiritual duties. But by the early 1350s he realised he had been wrong. In 1352 he paid three Italians – one described as ‘the master of the clock’ – to make him a mechanical timepiece in London. This and a suitable bell on which it would regularly chime the hours were transported from London to Windsor and set up in the great tower there. It had no face but rang the intervals hourly.43
Edward’s first mechanical clock is a very interesting development in itself, but, when one thinks of the social implications of regulating time in this period, it suddenly becomes apparent that Edward was at the forefront of a profound European revolution. Medieval people divided the day into the twelve hours of the night and the twelve hours of the day. The day started with daylight: so each of the twelve ‘hours’ of daylight in summer was approximately twice as long as an ‘hour’ of daylight in winter. Edward, in introducing a regular timepiece, was attempting to standardise time. Moreover he was doing this in his own castle in Berkshire within fifteen years of the introduction of the practice in one of the most advanced cities at the heart of Renaissance Italy. There is something remarkable about this, especially in a war leader. Nor was it just an idle experiment. The clock at Windsor lasted, so that it needed a new bell by 1377 (at which date it was described as being called ‘clokke’, the earliest recorded use of the English word, derived from the French word cloche, meaning ‘bell’). Long before then Edward had purchased additional mechanical bell-striking clocks for his palaces at Westminster and Langley (notably the two palaces with hot and cold running water) and his great castle at Queenborough. At Westminster he built a bell tower to contain a great bell inscribed ‘Edward’. This weighed four tons, rang the hour at Westminster for more than three hundred years, and has been described as the original ‘Big Ben’.44 The implication of all this is that he was regulating his household and his own life not around the traditional long and short hours of the day but with a standard unit of time measurement.
Although none of Edward’s clocks have survived, they nevertheless had an important cultural influence. In the same way, his buildings, paintings and other commissions – even his long-lost plate and costumes – had an influence. Just as Edward’s preference for mechanically regulated hours was soon adopted by others, with mechanical clocks being introduced at Salisbury Cathedral in 1386 and Wells Cathedral in about 1390, and soon after that elsewhere around the country, so too his vanished palaces affected architectural development in later generations. Hence it would be foolish to say that his buildings or costumes are somehow less important because they have not survived to this day.
This draws our attention to those other aspects of Edward’s cultural patronage which have been obscured by destruction. Literature was never thought to be an area in which Edward scored highly except in regard to his employment of Chaucer. So when one modern scholar discovered that Edward kept a library of one hundred and sixty books at the Tower of London, not counting his books kept in other places, and that these were regularly loaned out to members of the court, the view of Edward as anti-scholarly and unbookish was exposed as a presumption based mainly on a lack of evidence.45 Also, among the books borrowed by Isabella in 1327 were a history of the Normans and Vegetius’s De Re Militari, then the best-known and most trusted military guidebook of all. Isabella had no interest in warfare, but her fourteen-year-old son certainly did. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence which suggests that Edward was bookish. In 1335 he gave the huge sum of one hundred marks (£66 13s 4d) to Isabella of Lancaster, a nun at Amesbury, for a book which he kept for his own use.46 He borrowed books too; we know this because he often failed to return them.47 Some lavishly illuminated texts carry the arms of England and Hainault, and can therefore be said to have been commissioned by him or his wife, or presented to them.48 Edward’s wardrobe accounts also mention romances given as occasional gifts, and list many liturgical books (graduals, missals, antiphons, chorals, martyrologies and gospels).49 That three or four of these are psalters accords with the idea that Edward himself only normally commissioned books for routine liturgical use or extravagant display. Texts containing historical information which he wanted he either borrowed or purchased from other magnates or ecclesiastical libraries.
This attitude to the latent power of books – which, incidentally, is not dissimilar to that of his intellectual mentor Richard Bury – is amplified by Edward’s attitude to learning. The borrowing of a book on the history of Normandy mentioned above quite possibly relates to his own research, as he would have had to know something of the history of Normandy in order to spin the lines he did on the Crécy campaign. In 1332 he paid a clerk to sit down and read through all of Domesday Book to work out which towns had once been royal: not because of any sentiment but so he could think about how to tax them.50 History was simply a requirement of a king. But his knowledge went further than just kingly necessaries. His interests extended beyond religion, military strategy and good kingship to history and alchemy (an interest he shared with his mother and the earl of Lancaster).51 His summoning of two alchemists who claimed to have made silver, ‘whether they would come willingly or not’, should not be taken as a sign of pure covetousness. It should be remembered that a major alchemical text was dedicated to him.52 Given Edward’s propensity to give books away, and considering the destruction of most medieval manuscripts in the sixteenth century, the non-existence today of a magnificent library of beautifully illuminated royal texts owned by Edward cannot be taken as evidence that his court was an anti-intellectual one, or that Edward himself was not interested in the extension of knowledge. We only need to reflect on Edward’s foundation of King’s Hall at Cambridge, and Philippa’s foundation of Queen’s Hall at Oxford, to remind ourselves that this was a court which valued learning.
One vivid extension of this interest in the natural world is to be seen in Edward’s collection of wild animals. Edward kept a large menagerie of wild beasts, especially large cats, and even paid for them to be taken with him around the country. In 1333 a payment was recorded ‘to the keeper of the king’s leopards’, and the following year the Italian merchant Dino Forzetti was paid for providing Edward with an additional two lions, three leopards and a mountain cat. In 1334 he took these animals north with him when he moved the royal household to York, and kept them there until he turned his attention to France (at which time they returned to the Tower of London). He also owned a bear, given to him several years earlier by King David of Scotland.53 In later years the royal menagerie was supplemented by gifts of wild leopards and lions, including a gift of live animals from the Black Prince in 1365. Of course, nothing of the royal menagerie remains. But even the idea of Edward III as a collector of rare species has been eclipsed by the knowledge that Henry III had an elephant. That all these beasts were kept at the Tower of London is interesting, as there too was the royal lending library. The Tower of London as a resort of learning is perhaps one of the more unpredictable images to arise from a study of the life and interests of Edward III.
So what does survive of Edward’s cultural patronage which we can pick up and see for ourselves today? The answer is precious little. Almost no trace remains of the music of his court, only the payments to his minstrels and the odd motet.54 Of all the hundreds of gold and silver enamelled cups and goblets which we read about in the royal records, probably only one example of the type from his reign is still in existence. This belongs to King’s Lynn, and, ironically, is known as the King John cup, as a result of a confusion with the king who granted King’s Lynn its charter.55 Hardly any cloth survives, except some parts of a horse trapper and some ecclesiastical vestments of the period. All the fantastic gold- and silver-embroidered tournament aketons and other chivalric garments have gone. As for jewellery, of all the choice items which are extant, none can be associated personally with Edward. Some texts survive but these do not make light reading. Rather it is in the literary creations encouraged by the successes of his reign that we may find cultural importance, the poetical works of Chaucer, Gower and Langland, the histories of his exploits in the works of le Baker, Froissart, Gray, Murimuth, Avesbury and the author and translator of the longer Brut, and the imaginative works, such as the Travels of Sir John Mandeville of which various copies are known with supposed dedications to Edward.
Certain artistic works do attest to his patronage. The most glittering and untarnished today are the coins of the realm, in particular the gold coins. From 1344 many attempts were made to establish a successful gold coinage, resulting in a number of highly worked designs: variations on the theme of the king in his boat and a geometrical design on the reverse. In 1351 a new attempt to improve the gold and silver coinage resulted in the renewal of the old silver groat of his grandfather and the introduction of an especially fine series of gold nobles. Of course the skills of the artist who constructs a die for a gold coin are not dissimilar from the skills required to create a seal matrix, and Edward’s reign set a new high for that particular art form, not least in his own great seal of the 1360s (the Brétigny seal). To quote the standard work on the subject: ‘this remarkably beautiful seal marks the culminating point of excellence in design and execution in the series of Gothic great seals of England’.56 In the absence of his architectural achievements, his armour, his clothes, his paintings, his music, his jewellery, his ornaments, his books and his clocks, it is perhaps these small items which give us our most unadulterated glimpse of his artistic and cultural patronage.
There is one further opportunity for us to gaze upon the art of Edward III’s kingship. This is his tomb, and the tombs of his wife, brother and eldest son, and to a lesser extent the tombs of his infant children. In some ways it is the most obvious medium to last, and yet in others it is not. Many royal tombs of the period have suffered: those of Queen Isabella and Lionel of Antwerp were lost in the Dissolution of the Monasteries, that of John of Gaunt was lost in the Great Fire of London.57 But the very highest art of Edward’s patronage may be seen in his son’s tomb at Canterbury and the two splendid tombs at Westminster. At Canterbury we may look at the prince’s armour, and see the sculptured relief of his face. We cannot tell how exact the likeness is but, such is the quality of the work, we can believe that we do see a true representation of the man. We may do the same at Warwick, where the tomb of Thomas Beachamp, earl of Warwick, and his wife Catherine survives intact, replete with a full set of weepers, including portrait images of the Black Prince and probably Edward himself.58 At Westminster, looking at Edward’s and Philippa’s faces, we may be sure we look at likenesses. The figure on Edward’s tomb monument was sculpted to be realistic, and only tidied slightly. It was based on a death-mask, which is still extant. 59 Philippa’s stout figure and friendly face were carved in marble by Jean de Liège during her own lifetime: in other words, carved from life. In this way the idealised faces which sculptors had traditionally placed on dead kings’ and queens’ tombs came to be supplanted by the likenesses of real people. Edward and Philippa did not need to portray themselves as icons. They themselves had become iconic.
Edward’s development as a cultural patron can thus be seen to have acquired many new dimensions after 1349, the year of the plague. Up until that year most of his expenditure had been on war and the culture of war (the completion of St Stephen’s Chapel excepted). From 1350, the last time he actually took part in combat, most of his expenditure was on building and artistic projects for the future. With his buildings came his patronage of painters, sculptors and glaziers on a scale not witnessed in England since the reign of Henry III.60 By 1370 Edward had spent a total of more than £130,000 on building work, and had created palaces which would continue for the rest of the middle ages to be potent emblems of his kingship.
The destruction of all this work is hence all the more surprising, and can only really be explained through the misfortune of fire and the damage of neglect, as tastes changed. That we know these buildings existed is a telling case of documents proving more durable than stones. But it is also an indication of how little we should regard what intervening centuries have thought of a dead king. Edward was the greatest English cultural patron of the later middle ages. Those who argued in the twentieth century that his claim on the throne of France was ‘absurd’ would have had difficulty denying that his preference for a clock-regulated hour and his development of the use of cannon show every indication of a logical and far-sighted mind. Those who regarded him in the nineteenth century as a brutal warmonger would probably have baulked at the thought that he also founded a Cambridge college, maintained a library, and patronised the art of the Italian Renaissance. And contemporary readers whose image of a medieval warrior-king is that of an unkempt savage might well have difficulty reconciling this image with a man who had hot and cold running water in his bathrooms.