CHAPTER II

The England of Edward III

In 1327, when Edward III came to the throne, England and France were nations growing apart. The Norman conquest and the century of aristocratic immigration which followed it had impressed England with the stamp of French manners and French institutions and had given it a governing class which was as much at home in France as in England. The barons who told King John in 1204 that their hearts were with him even if their bodies were beyond the Channel with his enemies had put their finger on an important truth: most Anglo-French wars before the middle of the thirteenth century had something of the character of civil wars.¹ A hundred years later, this was no longer true. The last important wave of French immigrants had been the contemporaries of Simon de Montfort, a minor nobleman from the forest of Rambouillet who died in 1265 fighting in an English civil war. Some Englishmen still had important interests in France in the following century. Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, took his name from the city on the Rhône, held extensive lands in central France and twice married into the families of important French noblemen. In the last decade of his life he visited France at least ten times. A few French laymen and a larger number of French monasteries still owned significant estates in England. It was the pattern of the past age.

A strong sense of national identity already existed when Edward began to rule. The sons of great noble families received English Christian names like Edward, Humphrey and Thomas, and protested when Edward II proposed to call his heir Louis after his French uncle. The English did not like foreigners, and a crude insularity united most classes of men. There was periodic agitation against alien advisers of the King, alien merchants trading in English towns, alien clergymen provided by the Pope to English benefices, and alien priories whose members were thought to be preparing themselves to assist an invasion. Edward I adopted English national myths as official history, opening up the tomb of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere at Glastonbury in 1278 and reinterring their bones before the high altar. To the Pope, who had ventured to suggest that he had no claim to Scotland, Edward addressed a short history of Britain beginning with its occupation by refugees of Troy in the time of the prophets Eli and Samuel. Much of this was wartime propaganda, but myths are propagated because the audience is believed to be receptive. Edward must have thought that he was striking a responsive note when in 1295 he accused the French King of planning to eradicate the English language. He was almost certainly right.²

Language was an important symbol. According to Froissart it was a well-known trick of English diplomats to evade embarrassing questions by pretending not to understand them.³ But how far was this pretence, and how far was it the undiplomatic reality? Earlier generations of the nobility and higher clergy would have spoken French as a matter of course. However, surviving handbooks of French grammar suggest that, even among the well-born, French was an acquired language in England by the end of the thirteenth century. Although it remained the language of public affairs for another half-century it was already, long before Chaucer, spoken after the school of Stratford-at-Bow. English had become the language of prayer, of business, of light reading and polite conversation.

It was not a uniform English, any more than the French of France was a uniform French. That firm patriot Ranulph Higden held it ‘a marvel that the proper language of Englishmen should be made so diverse in one little isle in pronunciation’. The accent of Yorkshire and Northumberland was ‘so sharp, slitting and frotting and unshaped that we southern men may that language [hardly] understand.’⁴ Nevertheless, England was a small country and by continental standards a remarkably homogeneous one. Provincial differences and regional loyalties, although they undoubtedly existed, did so at a relatively superficial level: accent, dress, tenure. England’s political institutions operated uniformly over almost all the country, and her politicians and administrators thought of themselves as belonging to one community. Their sense of identity was intensified by the consciousness of enemies without. The sea defined the frontiers of the kingdom on the south and east and separated it from its most powerful rivals. On the west and north it was bounded by alien societies still largely pastoral and tribal, only intermittently at peace and the object of crude contempt and venomous detestation.

It was an overwhelmingly rural society, even by comparison with France. A population of perhaps five or six million people was concentrated in the east and south Midlands, East Anglia, and in the south-east from Hampshire to Kent, regions of fertile lowland, intensively farmed. Towns were numerous but small. Even London, which was by far the largest of them and the only English town to stand comparison with the cities of continental Europe, probably had less than 50,000 inhabitants. Extensive disafforestation, a favourable climate and expert land management had brought high yields and enabled a population denser than that of France and less evenly distributed to be fed throughout the thirteenth century.

To foreigners, England sometimes seemed a land of wealth and plenty. The chronicler Jean le Bel, camping with the English army near York in 1327, ‘never ceased to wonder at such abundance’, a continual flow of cheap victuals from the villages around, washed down with wine brought in by sea from Gascony and the Rhine.⁵ But he was fortunate and his curiosity superficial. There were great and visible fortunes. But they reflected not so much the wealth of the kingdom as its uneven distribution, which was even more marked in England than it was in France. The proprietors of the major agricultural estates had prospered mightily in the boom of the thirteenth century. They had the acreage and the capital as well as the foresight to take advantage of a revolution of landmanagement. Their manors were surveyed and valued, increased and rounded out by judicious purchases, their rights recorded and systematically enforced, their production targets assessed and their accounts prepared and audited with minute exactness by the corps of professionals which sprang up to meet the demand from these great agricultural businesses. But the general level of prosperity was probably rather lower than it was in most parts of France. Overpopulation and intense demand for fertile land had progressivelyreduced the size of the smallholdings by which most Englishmen lived. In central and southern England, where the mass of the population consisted of unfree peasants, more than half of them had only the minimum acreage necessary for subsistence, or less. They survived on the uncertain chances of earning wages or by selling off small parcels of their land. The free landowners and minor gentry had fewer burdens and more land, but even they were excessively vulnerable to harvest failure, natural disaster and economic depression. Their fortunes were always delicately balanced between profit and loss.

During the first three decades of the fourteenth century the balance often failed. In 1315 and 1316 the first of a series of rural catastrophes brought famine, unemployment and epidemic disease among men and animals. A run of terrible harvests continued well into the 1320s. Stocks of sheep, cattle and plough-beasts did not recover in some areas until twenty years later. Agricultural yields began to fall. Prices and rents declined. Marginal land went out of cultivation. There were unmistakable signs of soil exhaustion. In these respects, the economic history of England mirrored that of France. Both countries entered the war with fragile economies which the opening blows shattered.

There were no great industries in England to absorb the impoverished population of the countryside as those of Flanders and northern France to some extent did. There were important deposits of coal and of metal (iron, lead and tin), but production methods were inefficient and technically backward, and the scale of operations was small. Salt-making generated a modest export trade and sea fishing supported a large number of harbours along the east and south coasts. Cloth-making, the major industrial activity carried on in England, had a bright past and future but was probably at its nadir in this period: under-capitalized, dispersed and inefficient, and driven from much of its home market by the competition of the great industrial cities of Flanders.

England’s principal economic asset was wool. The country was Europe’s main producer of high-grade wool. A large part of the Italian cloth industry and substantially the whole of the industries of the French and German Low Countries depended on it. The barons who told Edward I in 1297 that wool accounted for half the nation’s wealth were making a political point and they were exaggerating. But it undoubtedly had a special place in English life. Sheep-farming suffered its share of misfortunes, but it sustained a large number of people, from Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, who owned 13,400 sheep in 1303, to Chaucer’s ‘powre widowe somdel stope in age’ with just one, as well as the army of middlemen, merchants and shipowners who organized the trade. Its politicalimportance was even greater than its economic value. Of all the diverse components of the English national income, the profits of the wool trade were the most easily diverted in the government’s interest. Wool was a bulky commodity which was collected for export in a small number of ports. Its immediate destination could be controlled so as to cut out the King’s enemies. Licences to export it could be sold for cash grants or loans on favourable terms. Without an excessively large bureaucracy it could be exorbitantly taxed, or compulsorily purchased and exported for the King’s account. For a short period in the 1290s and again after 1337, English foreign policy was to be substantially financed by one and sometimes all of these devices.

In the thirteenth century England’s foreign trade had been almost entirely controlled by foreigners. The wool trade had been dominated by the great Flemish merchants and the bankers of Lucca and Florence, who alone had the capital to finance the export of large cargoes and their distribution on the continent. But by the end of the century, Edward I’s numerous trade wars in Flanders had more or less squeezed out the Flemings. The Italians survived but in conditions which were increasingly unfavourable to them. At the time of Edward III’s accession, the business was gradually being gathered into the hands of privileged companies of English merchant capitalists who flourished as never before in an age when the King’s licence was the basic instrument of commerce. Their rise to fortune is chronicled in the customs records. The accounts of the customs of Hull for 1275–6, an isolated survival, showed that less than 4 per cent of what left England from this important wool port had been exported by Englishmen; but between 1304 and 1311 the average proportion was more than 14 per cent, and between 1329 and 1336 it was nearly 90 per cent. It was at this place and in these years that William Pole, ‘second to no merchant in England and first citizen of Hull’ accumulated the fortune that made him one of Edward III’s foremost bankers and war contractors and his descendants earls of Suffolk until 1504, the oldest English noble house to have been built on mercantile wealth.⁶

The takeover of English commercial life by native businessmen was a general phenomenon of the early fourteenth century marked out in the case of wool only by the speed and completeness with which it happened. It was part of the process by which against a dismal economic background industrial and commercial wealth was progressively concentrated in fewer hands, just as for quite different reasons the profits of agriculture had been for more than a century. John Pulteney, draper, wool trader, urban landlord, four times Mayor of London, and sometime war financier, had begun life as the son of an obscure Sussex squire, but when he died in 1349 he owned twenty-three manors in five counties. He built Penshurst Place in Kent and owned two palaces in London, one of which was subsequently the city residence of the Prince of Wales. Pulteney’s loans to Edward III more than justified the knighthood and royal pension conferred on him in 1337. Men like him had an important place in the financial manipulation which was becoming a normal part of the financing of war.

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The English constitution already revealed its characteristic division between form and substance. ‘The best-governed land in the world’ was what Froissart said about England.⁷ The institutions of the English state were outwardly impressive. The country had been governed as one territorial unit since the eleventh century. There was a highly developed notion of public authority, the right of the state as such being acknowledged in theory long before it received any measure of recognition by public opinion in France. In dealing with rebels, spies and traitors the English kings resorted to the state trial and the horrible penalties of treason long before these became regular spectacles in France. Their authority was not limited to the King’s domain or to his own immediate tenants, but in principle extended to all places and men. The common law was common to all England. The King’s courts at Westminster and those of his itinerant justices in the counties were open to all free men, and some matters were reserved to them exclusively. These included civil litigation about the possession of freehold land, by far the commonest source of civil dispute and disorder, and most prosecutions for crimes of violence.

The principal organs of the state were the Chancery and the Exchequer. They had existed in a recognizable form for two centuries when Edward III came to the throne and had reached a high degree of bureaucratic perfection. The Chancery, in England as in France, acted as the secretariat for most operations of government. Its executive staff consisted of a body of long-serving clergymen with a strong professional esprit de corps, many of whom were protégés of a particular chancellor, living in his house and receiving robes, board and lodging from him. Individual Chancery clerks developed specialized functions and expertise, for example in the field of diplomacy. A few achieved positions of much inconspicuous influence. The Exchequer was the audit department of the state to which all spending and collecting officials were eventually called to account. Neither of these great offices was concerned with what might be called politics. They never achieved the pervasive, autonomous influence or the remarkable sense of direction of the French bureaucracy. Their strength was that they were meticulous and accurate and no more cumbersome than they had to be in an age of slow communications.

Like the principal departments of the French government they had become larger and more immobile. When the Exchequer was moved to York during the Scotch wars of the 1330s, fifty carts were needed to bring it back again. The exercise was not repeated. A mile from London across open country, suburban gardens and a few grand mansions, a capital was forming within the walled enclosures of the abbey and palace of Westminster. In William Rufus’s Great Hall clerks transacted the administrative business of the Chancery around a long marble table, the noise competing with that of the King’s Bench and the court of Common Pleas a few yards away. In two small buildings off, the Exchequer made up its accounts on the great checkered tablecloth that gave the department its name. Outside, a spreading suburb housed the ephemeral population of lawyers, suitors, litigants and officials.

The political functions of the government were concentrated in the royal household, a mobile city of constantly changing population which lodged wherever the King was. In the Council the King had a small body of personal advisers: the Chancellor, the principal household officers, the more influential of the King’s retained knights and confidential clerks, all of them men who owed their position to his friendship. Their numbers were swollen as the occasion required by experts from lower down the bureaucratic hierarchy and by bishops and nobleman from outside it whose opinion was valued or feared. These last became distinctly more numerous and influential during the reign of Edward III, who attached more importance than his father and grandfather had done to involving the great of the land in his affairs. Even in his reign, however, government was conducted on an intimate scale, dependent on the King’s personality and on his energy. The King’s private office, the Wardrobe, was the pivot of the administration. It saw to the issue of warrants under the privy seal which set in motion the distant and formal procedures of the Chancery and the Exchequer, enabling the King to govern from his tent. In periods of crisis and war, the Wardrobe became the main spending department, collecting money directly from customs posts, royal manors, collectors of the Parliamentary subsidies, or wherever else it could be found, and dispensing it under the immediate control of the King.

The main strength and weakness of the English state lay in the provinces, where most of its measures had perforce to be applied, where taxes were raised and soldiers recruited. England had an ancient system of local government, more elaborate than that of France and penetrating further into the recesses of provincial life; but it was not wholly under the King’s control. In the twelfth century the kings of England had enjoyed through the sheriffs a degree of control over the affairs of each county which although imperfect was far in advance of anything to be found on the continent. Upon the sheriffs and their staff of deputies, bailiffs, jailers and clerks huddled in a wing of the royal castle by the county town, fell all the humdrum concerns of the central government in the shires: the collection of royal revenues, the execution of numberless writs, the custody of castles, the recruitment of troops, the maintenance of public order. An ordinance of 1326, inaugurating the latest unsuccessful measure of reform, recited without exaggeration that the orderly conduct of the King’s government depended on the proper performance of these unglamorous functions.⁸ But by now this was wishful thinking. The sheriff’s grip had loosened during the thirteenth century. Many large landowners had acquired by obscure means the right to perform the sheriff’s functions through their own officials within defined enclaves (‘liberties’). Many towns including almost all large ones had acquired by royal grant rights of self-government which effectively removed them from the jurisdiction of the county officials. Power was fragmented. Even in the territory which was left to him, the sheriff was no longer the formidable representative of the central government which he had once been. Concessions had been made under the pressure of local opinion and recurrent political crisis. The typical sheriff of the early fourteenth century was not an experienced administrator in the confidence of the King’s ministers but a local landowner with interests of his own in the county which would outlive his term of office and did not necessarily coincide with those of the government. He received no salary from the Crown but drew his remuneration from traditional fees and exactions, and he often held office reluctantly. In deference to his reluctance, and to the unpopularity of any sheriff who was hardened by too much experience of office, he was soon relieved and replaced by another. Similar developments affected other local officials. They were all local men serving for short periods. Behind them stood the landowning community of the county, men linked by elaborate ties of residence, kinship and interest and by bonds of patronage. They gathered at periodic meetings of the county court to transact the judicial business of the county, and see to the election of coroners and Parliamentary knights, the swearing in of local officials, the reading out of statutes and royal proclamations, the assessment of contributions to the county’s expenses and increasingly the airing of collective opinions and grievances. They were a political community.

None of this meant that local government was free of central control, but it did mean that that control was spasmodic. All local officials with financial responsibilities had to account regularly at the Exchequer and were relentlessly pursued for their deficiencies. Their more serious misdeeds and omissions could be investigated and punished by a variety of judicial commissions. At best these procedures discouraged abuses. They did not promote enthusiasm. English local officials could hardly have been less like the overburdened but zealously loyal provincial officers of the French monarchy. The difference, however, was not necessarily a disadvantage. The English King’s government was heavily dependent on the support of the local communities, it is true. Their power of obstruction was enormous. But so was the support which they could bring to a government of whose enterprises they approved. At the height of their powers, Edward I and Edward III were able to draw more from their subjects than any French government of the fourteenth century. On the other hand Edward II at the nadir of his prestige could do almost nothing.

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The limits of the state’s power, in England as in France, depended ultimately on money. The ordinary revenues of the kings of England consisted only of those which, like any nobleman, the King received as a landowner and feudal lord, and those which he derived from the operations of government such as fines and fees and the uncertain profits of the royal mints. In the 1330s these were producing between £15,000 and £20,000 a year, which was rather less than a sixth of the revenues which the kings of France drew from the same sources. They had remained more or less stable at this level since the 1280s. To some small extent the King’s ordinary revenues could be increased by legal but irregular devices. The English kings did not, as the French kings did, manipulate the coinage. But they taxed the manors and towns of their demesne; they compulsorily purchased goods for their households at a low price, paid late (‘purveyance’); they took money for not insisting on the more irksome obligations of their subjects. The revenues which such measures produced were uncertain and the political cost was high. As Sir John Fortescue observed in the following century, ‘the greatest harm that cometh of a King’s poverty is that he shall by necessity be [forced] to find exquisite means of getting goods.’⁹ None of these means, however exquisite, was equal to the burden of financing an ambitious foreign policy.

What differentiated the English public finances from the French was the existence of a reasonably effective system of national taxation. The most important element of the English government’s tax revenues was the customs, which were the only permanent tax levied in either realm. The so-called ‘Great and Ancient Custom’ was an export duty on wool, skins and hides, the major part of England’s exports, which had been devised by Edward I’s officials in 1275 and approved by an assembly of the merchants in the same year. A supplementary duty was levied on foreign merchants after 1303. This extended to goods of every description and to imports as well as exports. The yield of the customs varied with the state of the wool crop and the prosperity of the trade. But it was substantial and regular. In the early years of Edward III’s reign the customs brought in an average of about £13,000 a year. This could be increased by supplementary grants to high levels. The normal rate was 6s. 8d. per sack, but rates exceeding £3 had been levied in the crisis of the 1290s and well over £2 was to be charged in the early part of the Hundred Years War.

In the result there was just enough to cover the ordinary peacetime operations of government. A particularly parsimonious king like Edward II in his last years could even accumulate a surplus. But there was not enough to pay for largesse on any scale nor for significant capital expenditure (for example on fortresses or ships). Faced with onerous and occasionally urgent commitments abroad and only a modest income arriving at measured intervals at home, the English kings from Edward I onwards resorted to heavy borrowing not only from their own subjects but from the nascent banking systems of Flanders, the Rhineland and above all Italy. The scale of Edward I’s financial operations and the systematic way in which they were administered and secured was something new among European governments of the middle ages, foreshadowing the juggling with public credit of Renaissance and post-Renaissance states. Edward I’s conquest of Wales was paid for in the first instance almost entirely by his bankers. Between 1272 and 1294 the chief of them, the Riccardi partnership of Lucca, lent him £392,000, part of which came from their own deposits and part from syndicates of lenders great and small which they organized. Of this sum nearly £19,000 was still outstanding in 1294 when the King quarrelled with them.¹⁰ The Riccardi were the first of a succession of Italian bankers to be ruined by tying their fortunes too closely to a north European government. There were plenty of others to take their place. The Frescobaldi of Florence lent some£150,000 to Edward I and Edward II before they too were ruined in the baronial revolution of 1311.¹¹ They were succeeded by a Genoese, Antonio Pessagno, whose loans pound for year exceeded those of any previous creditor of the Crown. Pessagno financed the Bannockburn campaign of 1314, whose ignominious failure was certainly not due to lack of money. The Bardi of Florence, who gradually took over in the 1320s, where so closely associated with Edward II that their London headquarters was sacked by the mob in the revolution of 1326. But they were also significant creditors of his enemies, and were eventually to break themselves by their loans to his successor.

Credit operations, however sophisticated, were not a substitute for tax revenues. They were no more than a means of anticipating them. They enabled the English government to raise money faster than the French could, and they spared it the debilitating problem which successive French kings found in paying for war expenditure at a time when war taxes had still to come in. The bankers usually had to be secured by an assignment of specific revenues. The revenues of the customs were regularly assigned to the King’s major creditors and their actual management and collection was on several occasions handed over to them. In the last resort, however, extraordinary expenditure could only be paid from general taxation levied on the population of England.

The machinery of assessing and collecting general taxes was orderly by the imperfect standards of the middle ages, and certainly compared well with the unpredictable and heterogeneous methods of taxation used in France. Taxes were levied as a proportion of value of each taxpayer’s movable property, usually a tenth in the towns and a fifteenth in the counties. It was an arbitrary measure, but made for ease of assessment. During the early part of the Hundred Years War collection was based on a particularly careful assessment which had been carried out in 1334 by high-ranking clergymen and permanent officials, in place of the corruptible local men who had traditionally acted as assessors. The principle was to fix a sum as the King’s due from each community, leaving local men to apportion the burden among themselves, a method which for all its vices in other directions had the advantage of producing a reasonably predictable yield. There were few exemptions: the Cinque Ports, which did naval service in lieu; the palatine counties of Chester and Durham, which were taxed by their proprietors; the spiritual endowments of the clergy, which were separately taxed by the authority of the Pope or the Convocations of the two ecclesiastical provinces.

General taxation could not be levied at will in England any more than it could in France. It was an emergency measure for which it was necessary to obtain the consent of the community of the realm. The twelfth article of Magna Carta provided: ‘No tax is to be levied in our realm except by the common counsel of our realm.’ It is true that it was the duty of subjects to assist the King once he had demonstrated (in the time-honoured phrase) the ‘evident and urgent necessity’ of their doing so. However, what was necessary was a matter on which opinions could and did differ. Taxation was refused for more than twenty years in the reign of Henry III until the King’s government was bankrupt. In 1297 the attempt of Edward I to collect a tax with nothing more than the support of his Council provoked one of the seminal constitutional crises of the late middle ages. ‘Some people of our kingdom’, Edward declared when he capitulated to the opposition in October 1297, ‘are fearful that the aid and taxes which they had paid to us out of liberality and goodwill, and because of our wars and other needs, may in future become a servile obligation for them and their heirs.’¹² That was indeed the fear, and it was what was ultimately to happen in France, but the events of 1297 showed that it was unlikely to happen in England.

The difference was that the precocious development of Parliament enabled the English kings to obtain the consent of their subjects to taxation in a form which was recognized as universally binding, and dispensed them from the need to haggle for help with one community after another as the crisis unfolded behind them. The reign of Edward I was the decisive stage in this development as it was in so much else that decided the fortunes of fourteenth-century England. At the time of his accession in 1272 Parliament had been a predominantly official body, a solemn meeting of the King’s Council augmented by judges and senior civil servants and by the principal lay and ecclesiastical magnates. Its composition and most of its functions were in many respects similar to those of theParlement of Paris. It was the pressure of Edward I’s wars, the great volume of legislation and controversial public business which his abrasive government generated, and the King’s insatiable need for taxes, which made it a more overtly political assembly. The dominant role was played by the Lords: some sixty earls and Parliamentary barons, twenty-one diocesan bishops and about thirty abbots (all of whom received personal summonses to attend), together with a fluctuating body of permanent councillors, generally about a dozen strong. They were the only members of Parliament whose advice was sought on matters of state. The Commons comprised the knights, usually two for each of the thirty-seven shires, and the representatives of more than seventy Parliamentary boroughs. They were a great deal less influential. They were summoned to the earliest Parliaments as mere silent witnesses of what the Lords decided on behalf of the realm and their role remained a subordinate one throughout the fourteenth century. But there was one area in which the Commons had a central role. That was the granting of taxes. By the beginning of the fourteenth century it had become recognized constitutional principle that no general subsidy could be imposed without their consent, which might be dependent on the King’s willingness to grant their petitions. Their petitions, which occupied a large part of the proceedings, included not only local gripes and pleas for special interests, but complaints about royal officials, about the general condition of the realm and occasionally about the King’s misgovernment of it.

In spite of the vigour of some of these complaints Edward III and his contemporaries did not look upon Parliament as a natural source of opposition. They regarded it as a source of strength, with good reason. At the end of the thirteenth century the disgruntled author of a radical tract, the Mirror of Justices, declared that the powers of Parliament in matters of taxation had made it a tool of oppression ‘called by the King’s order to enable him to exact taxes and hoard money’.¹³ What this man had perceived was that Parliament was primarily an instrument of the King’s will, a means of extending the power of the government from the centre to the periphery at the cost of some limitations on its freedom of action. How severe these limitations were depended on the personality of the King and on his skills as a propagandist and political manager. Edward I inaugurated a tradition of high taxation which persisted in England throughout the middle ages. He raised more than half a million pounds from Parliamentary subsidies for his wars in Wales, Scotland and Gascony. A third of this sum was voted during the crisis years between 1294 and 1297, a burden of taxation which was quite unprecedented and could not have been achieved without Parliamentary authority. By comparison Philip the Fair was having to finance the war from his side largely from the uncertain profits of coinage devaluations.

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The bonds that joined Englishmen together in one community were, by contemporary European standards, very strong. Yet, in spite of these advantages, what struck foreigners most forcibly was the country’s chronic political instability. The English deposed four of their kings in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, one of them twice. By comparison, in France the deposition of a king seems never to have been seriously contemplated, even in the case of the captive John II and the cretinous Charles VI. England was famous for the brutality and turbulence of its political life. There was no place, Froissart wrote, where the mass of men were so ‘fickle, dangerous, arrogant and rebellious’. There were plenty of Englishmen who recognized this portrait as just, and some who took a perverse pride in it. ‘It is not poverty that keepeth Frenchmen from rising,’ thought the fifteenth-century Chief Justice Sir John Fortescue, ‘but it is cowardice and lack of heart and courage, which no Frenchman hath like unto an Englishman.’¹⁴

Froissart, like others of his contemporaries writing at the end of the fourteenth century under the shadow of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, attributed this to the mutual antagonisms and class hatreds of Englishmen, the first of countless foreigners over the centuries to diagnose class divisions as the source of English debility. The real problem, however, was the wide distribution of power and the divisions within the political community which exercised it. Power in England was uneasily shared between the Crown and the higher nobility of the realm, two forces which did not always work in harmony. It was the higher nobility, whose influence in Parliament was paramount, on whom the Crown depended for its ability to raise armies and levy taxation. It was on them and on their clients and allies in the shires that the Crown depended for the enforcement of its orders on the mass of the population.

The English nobility was still, in the early fourteenth century, a fluid group whose boundaries were marked by few formal distinctions. Earldoms, of which there were nine in 1331, were the only hereditary dignities until 1337, when Edward III created the first English duke. The Parliamentary peerage comprised another forty or fifty laymen who received personal writs of summons. But these summonses reflected the personal qualities of the individuals who received them and, although the list of those called became increasingly standard in the course of the century, a man called to one Parliament could not yet count on being called to the next and his heir might not be called at all. Beyond the Parliamentary baronage the nobility shaded imperceptibly into the lesser baronage and the gentry of the shires. Among this large and differentiated class of men, perhaps 150 or 200 families were identifiable, for all the difficulties of formal definition, as ‘magnates’ entitled to a place in the political affairs of the nation. Men used the term according to their subjective impressions, based on the three cardinal virtues of medieval nobility: ancestry, royal favour and money.

The greatest of these was money. The great lay magnates of England stood at the zenith of their economic power in the opening decades of the fourteenth century. They had been the main beneficiaries (after the Church) of the agricultural boom of the past century, and of the concentration of wealth that had gone with it. Primogeniture, still generally applied in England, had conserved their gains to a degree unthinkable in most parts of France. The minimum income necessary to support a knight was conventionally reckoned at£40 per year. By comparison the pensions which Edward III conferred on the new earls whom he created in 1337 suggested that £1,000 per annum was thought to be the least that was necessary to maintain their dignity. Most earls and a substantial number of magnates who were not earls were much richer. Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, who was certainly the richest subject of Edward II, enjoyed an annual income from land of about £11,000. ‘By the size of his patrimony you may gauge his influence’ was what a contemporary said about him.¹⁵

The household of a great nobleman was a miniature of the King’s: an administrative organization directed at the centre by a tight council consisting not only of bureaucrats and professional advisers but also of those men of substance whose advice and influence were thought to be valuable. In place of the strictly feudal relationship between a great lord and his tenants (a system never perfectly in force and long since obsolete) there had grown up a network of more personal bonds based on contract and mutual self-interest, pervading the fabric of provincial life. A nobleman’s contract retinue was not only, or even mainly, a private army corps, the means by which he satisfied his military obligations to the King. It was first and foremost an instrument of local government and, occasionally, of the pervasion of local government for powerful private interests. Justices of the Peace, bailiffs of liberties, members of Parliament for the shires, freeholders of the county court, commissioners for the countless occasional concerns of the Crown were all likely to be associated with an aristocratic household greater than their own. They saw to their lord’s interest in their localities, and he for his part offered them the support of his other retainers in the same district as well as his own influence at court, benefits worth far more than the liveries and modest fees mentioned in the formal agreements. After the fall of Mortimer in 1330 the Gloucestershire magnate Sir Thomas Berkeley was accused by a distant cousin of stealing his cattle. There was no justice to be had in Gloucestershire, this man said, because Sir Thomas had too many friends in the county and the ear of the great minister at court. He ‘would not allow the sheriff or his bailiff or other ministers to do justice, they being his retainers holding his fees and livery and being of his household’. In this sentence is summed up what mattered to contemporaries about retinues. Sir Thomas retained twelve local knights for terms of years, each of whom contracted to serve with his squires and a page, not to speak of the host of cooks, clerks, grooms, messengers and heavies. ‘I am confident’, declared the seventeenth-century steward who wrote the family’s history from its documents, ‘that the mouths of his standing house each day fed were three hundred at least.’¹⁶

One peculiarity of the English nobility, at least by comparison with the French, was noted by Froissart with surprise after his travels in England in the 1360s. ‘The lands and revenues of the barons [he said] are scattered about from place to place.’¹⁷ There were few exceptions. The most significant of them were the earls of Lancaster, who were the descendants of Edmund Crouchback, the youngest son of Henry III. During the half-century after Edmund’s original endowment in the 1260s he and his descendants built up by purchase, exchange, inheritance and marriage a formidable block of territory in the Midlands and north-west of England and in north Wales. On account of their birth and wealth they occupied a unique place in English political life, the natural leaders of the higher nobility, and the patrons of a remarkable number of clients and protégés not only among the baronage and gentry of the provinces but in the central administration of the Crown. The earls of Lancaster, however, were in a class of their own. The only other consolidated territorial lordships of any importance were the lordships of the March of Wales whose possessors had held the border since the end of the eleventh century and who continued to enjoy a degree of political autonomy even after the conquest of Wales by Edward I had removed their original raison d’être, Edward II’s favourite Hugh Despenser the Younger, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, who governed England during the minority of Edward III, and Edward III’s friend and contemporary Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, all passed their careers in building up powerful territorial interests in eastern and southern Wales to serve as a power-base for political activity in England. But this kind of regional empire-building was exceptional and its results usually short-lived. England had few territorial magnates after the French model. The ordinary pattern was represented by Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, who died in 1324 owning land in nineteen English counties from Northumberland to Kent, as well as in Ireland and five regions of Wales. Pembrokeshire accounted for less than a tenth of the value of his land.¹⁸ The assets and influence of a great nobleman were likely to be distributed over a large area and in every region where he had friends so, in all probability, did his enemies.

The ablest and richest of these men were more significant forces in national politics than their counterparts would have been in France. It was not an accidental difference. The organic development of the French nation by the gradual coalescence of ancient provinces with disparate traditions had no parallel in England, where the Norman conquest had created a more or less unitary state with an alien aristocracy. The higher nobility of England could hardly ever identify their interests with those of any one region, but were bound to defend them by their influence at the centre of affairs. They readily thought in terms of national politics. So did the lesser men who, although their assets were more concentrated and their horizons closer, were bound to the political fortunes of the great. In Wales and much later on the march of Scotland distinctly regional interests did emerge and occasionally generated unrest and rebellion. But in general the political vision of the nobility, although often partial and self-serving, was not limited by provincial particularism of the kind which had destroyed the aristocratic rebellions of 1314 in France and was later to divide the French in the face of foreign invasion.

However, the interest of the English in national politics brought them into frequent conflict with the King. The baronial rebellions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were much more than the coalitions of private interests which had been characteristic of the twelfth. Although greed and rancour never lost their power to provoke rebellion, during the later years of the reign of Henry III (1215–72) the leaders of the baronial opposition developed a coherent constitutional doctrine to justify their acts. ‘Lex stat; rex cadit.’ ‘The law holds; the King falls,’ as the author of a famous radical pamphlet pungently put his precocious notion of fundamental law, a body of principle binding as much on the King as on his subjects.¹⁹ Moreover, the nobility were able to draw on a wide body of support outside their own ranks. Simon de Montfort’s propagandists included some influential and articulate churchmen whose opposite numbers in France would not have dreamed of supporting a baronial putsch. The Londoners expelled the King’s forces from their city, and their lead was followed in many other towns and even in quite small villages. After Prince Edward’s victory over Simon de Montfort on the battlefield, the great rebel continued to enjoy a popular following. His grave became the object of a pilgrimage where ‘Vain and fatuous’ stories of his miracles were related.²⁰

This tradition of baronial populism repeatedly returned to plague Henry III’s successors during the following two centuries. Edward I’s skilful combination of ruthlessness and charm enabled him for twenty years to multiply his revenues by a factor of three, and to maintain huge costly and conscripted armies which he kept in the field for long periods far from home. These efforts were accompanied by an onslaught on private liberties and a great expansion of the machinery of government. Yet when it came to the point Edward’s government failed as his father’s had done. There was no revolution. But the war with France which began in 1294 and coincided with crises in Wales and Scotland forced him to make large concessions to a well-organized baronial opposition. Only Edward’s dignity and his political talents saved him from abject humiliation. Even so, the remaining decade of his reign was soured by the resentment and suspicion of much of the nobility as well as by military stalemate in Scotland and mounting public disorder in England. The brunt of the barons’ resentments were left to be borne by his son.

Edward II, who had none of his father’s virtues and lacked his powerful presence, had hardly been crowned before the baronage formally asserted that rebellion was a constitutional right, not a symptom of anarchy. Their reasoning was very similar to that of their forbears in the time of Henry III. The act of allegiance, they said, bound them to the Crown and not to the person of any particular king. ‘So that if, in his conduct of the Crown’s business, the King is not guided by reason, his subjects are bound to guide him back to reason.’ Since the King could not be challenged in his own courts it was proper to challenge him by force. In 1311, three years after this pronouncement, the greater part of the baronage imposed on Edward II by force forty-one ordinances as to the manner in which he should govern his kingdom, including one which required baronial consent for the appointment of all the principal officers of state. There were undoubtedly some who would have liked to see these measures permanently embedded in the constitution. But the unity of purpose which produced them was short-lived. The ultimate outcome in Edward II’s reign was the same as it had been in Henry III’s, a civil war and a royal victory in battle. The Earl of Lancaster, Edward II’s principal antagonist, became a popular miracle-worker after his violent death, as Simon de Montfort had done before him, and guards had to be placed on his tomb to turn away pilgrims.²¹ London did not rise in 1322. as it had done for Simon, but in the closing weeks of 1326 it exploded in a violent revolution which destroyed Edward’s government. Echoes of the ideas which had justified Lancaster’s rebellion and the deposition of Edward II were to be heard in 1341 and again, with refreshed violence and bitterness, during the dotage of Edward III and in the reign of his ill-starred grandson Richard II.

Edward II’s victory over his enemies at the battle of Boroughbridge in 1322 gave him and his friends control over the government, but did nothing to make his power effective at a distance, A government weakened by the confrontations of thirty years could not enforce its will in the counties. An aristocracy divided by politics and the effort of self-preservation could do little to impose order upon anarchy. At the centre the formalities of justice were duly observed and the splendid system of civil and criminal courts still functioned. But mounting disorder made a mockery of them. The embers of civil war still glowed in the counties several years after the armies had dispersed. The Despensers and other favourites of the king protected bands of brigands who hunted down the remnants of the Earl of Lancaster’s party. And these responded by resorting to banditry, attacking the estates of the Despensers and their friends and murdering royal servants such as Sir Roger Belers, the chief baron of the Exchequer, who was cut down by a gang of fifty men near Leicester in January 1326. In the Midlands and the West Country large, well-organized criminal bands led for the most part by dispossessed or impoverished minor gentry, engaged in highway robbery, kidnapping, extortion and murder for political ends or for the interest of anyone who cared to hire them to prosecute their private quarrels. It is some sign of the degree to which violence had tainted a generation of English gentry that of those who represented Bedfordshire in Parliament in the first decade ofEdward III’s reign at least a third had previously been convicted of violent crimes ranging from housebreaking to murder. Bedfordshire was certainly not exceptional. This was the condition of England only ten years before she embarked on a major war with the principal European power.²²

Foreign observers like Jean le Bel and Froissart, both of whom had visited England, found it hard to make sense of these events and even harder to explain how the anarchic England of Edward II became the conqueror of France under Edward III. Their explanation, that it was the chivalrous qualities and high renown of Edward III, sounds superficial. But it is substantially right. Edward III was the first English king for a century and a half to forge a close and durable bond between the Crown and the nobility. The King’s personal qualities had a great deal to do with this.

For far from being a united body of natural rebels, the baronage had divergent interests and jealousies, as any group of intelligent and powerful men is bound to do. Few of them were hungry for political power or wanted to participate in the daily business of the central government. Their main interest in it was as a source of patronage. All of them depended to a greater or lesser degree on the Crown’s rich store of favours: not only for gifts of money, land and revenues, but for privileges and exemptions, wardships, rich marriages, loans on favourable terms and many other valuable benefits. They needed these things not only for themselves but for their retainers, dependants and clients. It made them natural allies of the Crown. They took power out of the King’s hands only when the government had manifestly broken down, as it did in the later years of Henry III; or when they conceived that power had already been taken out of his hands by others who were monopolizing his favours in their own interest, which was the substance of Gaveston’s offence in the reign of Edward II. Edward II was deposed not because he was a tyrant but because, in the words of the articles of accusation against him, he was ‘incompetent to govern in person’. He had been ‘controlled and governed by others’. The higher nobility were remarkably consistent about this. The main source of England’s political instability was not the baronage but the monarchy, which in England more often than in France fell into the hands of men incapable of controlling the elaborate and pervasive machinery of government in a manner which inspired confidence among those who depended on it and, to a substantial extent, operated it in the provinces. Edward III and that other great paradigm of medieval kingship, Henry V, were men with limited power to command who succeeded because they were their own men, and because they learned the limits of their power and knew that beyond those limits government was a matter of friendships and patronage, dependent on the reputation of the King and his skills in persuasion and bluff.

*

The problem for a ruler who knew the business of government was not so much the danger of rebellion as the formidable power of the nobility to resist by sheer inertia any great enterprise of the Crown. ‘The baronage is the chief limb of the monarchy’, an unfriendly contemporary biographer of Edward II wrote; ‘without it the King can do nothing of any importance.’²³ For more than a century the principal weakness of England as a European power had been the nobility’s limited interest in warfare or indeed in any aggressive foreign venture. Almost all of them had lost their own possessions in Normandy and western France in the disasters of King John’s reign and none had significant interests in Gascony. They did not share the attitude of Henry III and Edward I, who had retained the outlook of great continental princes, drawing to their court friends, advisers and protégés from many countries and maintaining as best they could their claim to play a leading role in the political life of France and her neighbours. In 1242 the baronage had refused to contribute to Henry III’s plans for reconquering his lost dominions in France, the last occasion before the mid-fourteenth century when this was seriously contemplated. In the 1250s, when Henry III conceived an absurd scheme for making his son king of Sicily with the assistance of the Pope, the baronage refused to have anything to do with it and twice declined to contribute to its cost.

The constitutional crisis which paralysed Edward I’s efforts to defend his continental dominions in the 1290s was due mainly to the opposition of influential noblemen who declined either to serve in his armies or to support taxation to pay for them. In 1295 several noblemen had to be forced by threat of confiscation to go to Gascony, even though they were being offered wages. Two years later, the Constable and the Marshal, Edward’s most senior military officers, refused to go to either Gascony or Flanders. ‘By God, Earl, you shall go or hang,’ Edward is supposed to have said to the Marshal: ‘By the same oath, King, I shall neither go nor hang,’ he replied.²⁴ The story is ancient but probably apocryphal. Rather later, when the King attempted to collect a tax to finance the expeditions, the two earls appeared armed in the Exchequer Chamber to protest. The reason for this attitude was not simply that the nobility disliked paying taxes or serving in the army, although this certainly weighed with some of them. It was that they were profoundly insular and did not regard an ambitious foreign policy as being of any interest to the English community. Their view was exactly expressed in the ordinances which they forced on Edward’s successor in 1311.

Because the King ought not to make war against anyone or leave his kingdom without the general assent of his baronage, on account of the many perils that could happen to him and his kingdom, we ordain that henceforth the King shall not leave his kingdom or make war without the general assent of his baronage given in Parliament, and if he does otherwise and has his feudal host summoned for the purpose, then the summons shall be void.²⁵

It is not particularly surprising that, except for a handful of adventurers who made their names elsewhere the English had a low reputation as warriors, which persisted until they began to win striking victories over the French during the 1340s. By comparison successive French kings were able to promote the adventures of the house of Anjou in Italy, and Philip III of France could lead an enormous French army at ruinous expense into Catalonia in 1284 in the hope of making his son king of Aragon, a venture which had much in common with the Sicilian scheme of Henry III. It was enterprises like these, quixotic and unsuccessful as they were, which had earned the French their reputation as the pre-eminent martial race of thirteenth-century Europe.

The transformation of the baronial attitude to warfare and the changes which made the English the most feared soldiers of late-medieval Europe took contemporary observers by surprise because they occurred out of sight as the gradual result of half a century of persistent warfare within the British Isles, against the Welsh and the Scots and against the rival factions of Edward II’s civil wars. There was some truth in the observation of the fifteenth-century Berry Herald that the English had become so good at fighting because they practised so often on each other.²⁶

When, in July 1277, Edward I invaded north Wales to force his will on the most powerful of the Welsh princes, it was the first stage in a process which, rather later, Edward conceived as the unification of Britain under his own rule. Five years later, in March 1282, a second war broke out which lasted for more than a year and resulted in the conquest of the whole of Wales and its permanent occupation by English garrisons, officials and colonists. Wales was a relatively easy prize, weak, economically impoverished and politically fragmented. Nevertheless, these enterprises had called for very large armies. Between 18,000 and 20,000 men served in the Welsh war of 1277. Twenty-four thousand men crushed the short-lived rebellion of south Wales in 1287, and three armies comprising between 35,000 and 40,000 men altogether were sent to deal with the rising of 1294, the last and greatest Welsh rebellion for more than a century. By the standard of the past century these were very large armies, and some of them were raised at remarkably short notice. As feats of military organization the subsequent occupation of Wales and the construction of the great Edwardian castles there were scarcely less impressive. Even so, the effort and expenditure involved was dwarfed by the scale of Edward’s wars in Scotland, which were longer and more expensive and, principally because they failed, had a seminal effect on the course of England’s history in the next two centuries.

Scotland, a land settled, as its leaders proclaimed in the Declaration of Arbroath (1320), ‘at the uttermost ends of the earth’, was a community divided by history and geography. In the lowlands south of the Forth and along the east coast from the Forth to the Moray Firth were concentrated all of Scotland’s significant towns, almost all her cultivable land and the greater part of her population. These regions had been persistently infiltrated since the eleventh century by immigrants from England and northwestern Europe who had brought with them their languages, their law, their ecclesiastical and political institutions, and many economic links with the world from whence they had come. The west and north, and the inhospitable highlands and islands, on the other hand, were inhabited by shifting tribal communities living by sheep farming, largely Gaelic-speaking, one of the most inaccessible regions of Europe. Englishmen, and some Scots, already spoke of the ‘wild’ Scots and the ‘tame’ ones, of ‘governed’ and ‘ungoverned’ Scotland.

The institutions of the Scotch government were modelled on those of England but they operated on a more intimate scale. They depended even more heavily on the personality of the monarch, on a few officers of the royal household and on a very small itinerant civil service. The authority of the Scotch kings within their realm as well as their strength outside it was severely limited: by the small scale of its institutions, by the power of the great territorial lords, and above all by the poverty of a country always sparsely populated, whose soil was either barren highland or heavy undrained valley bottoms. Scotland could never produce the high tax revenues required for sustained and organized warfare or for major campaigns of fortress construction, and although its nobility included some of the great paladins of the age, their country could not afford to mount and arm impressive armies of knights.

Nevertheless the Scots were among the most persistent and effective antagonists of the English throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This venomous hostility was a problem which the English had brought upon themselves. In 1290, when the direct line of the kings of Scotland became extinct, Edward I seized the opportunity to revive an ancient but ill-defined claim of past English kings to the superior lordship of Scotland. There is no reason to doubt Edward’s own explanation of his acts, given to the magnates who accompanied his army into Scotland in the following year: that he intended to absorb Scotland into his realm as he had already absorbed Wales.²⁷ It is consistent with all that subsequently happened. During 1291 Edward occupied the country, took oaths of loyalty from its leading men and from all the claimants to the throne, and set up a tribunal to decide the difficult legal and constitutional question which of them was entitled to be king. In November 1292 the ‘auditors’ of Edward’s tribunal pronounced in favour of John Balliol.

But having once set Balliol up Edward pulled him down. He diminished his stature in Scotland and provoked him into rebellion by openly treating him as a subordinate princeling, hearing appeals from his courts and summoning him to perform military service in English armies. It is hard not to see in these proceedings a cruel parody of the treatment which Edward himself, as Duke of Acquitaine, had received at the hands of Philip the Fair and the Parlement of Paris. In October 1295, after Balliol had defaulted in his defence to one of these appeals, Edward I required him to forfeit three castles, and in the spring of the following year he crossed the Tweed with an army to take them. Balliol tried to resist, but his ill-organized supporters were defeated. He himself surrendered and was ceremonially deposed and sent off into captivity in England. Robert Bruce, lord of Annandale and head of one of the great Anglo-Norman noble houses of Scotland, had been John Balliol’s principal competitor before the tribunal of 1292, and when Balliol quarrelled with the English King the Bruces had declared for Edward. They expected to gain the throne in Balliol’s place. But Edward had other plans. He rudely dismissed them when they came for their reward. The regalia of the kings of Scotland were confiscated. The famous stone of Scone on which they were traditionally enthroned was removed to Westminster.

The expulsion of the English from Scotland occupied more than thirty years. Successive Scotch rebellions, bravely and skilfully led but poorly supported, were brutally put down by the English King between 1297 and 1305. However, in the following year, 1306, Robert Bruce (the grandson of the claimant of 1292) seized the Abbey of Scone with a handful of kinsmen and friends and had himself enthroned on a substitute stone by Isabella, Countess of Buchan. Bruce’s coup must have seemed doomed in its opening weeks. Most of the Scotch nobility were either indifferent or hostile. His men were ill equipped to face the heavily armed horsemen of the English army, and he lacked the great siege engines which were essential for the capture of the stone fortresses of the English. During the summer of 1306 his hastily assembled army was overwhelmed by the English and their Scotch auxiliaries. He himself was driven into hiding while his family fell victims to a venomous reign of terror. Bruce’s cause was saved from extinction by events elsewhere. In July 1307 Edward I died at Burgh-on-Sands on the Solway Firth, leading a fresh army into Scotland. The first and characteristic act of his successor was to march south again after a brief and empty demonstration. As the English turned their energies to constitutional conflict and civil war, Bruce gradually extended his authority over most of Scotland. Between 1307 and 1313 he recovered all the major English fortresses except Berwick, Bothwell and Stirling.

In the autumn of 1313 Bruce besieged Stirling. Its English governor, Sir Philip Mowbray, agreed to surrender it unless he was relieved by midsummer 1314. Edward II rose to the challenge. He raised a new army and entered Scotland in June a few days before the deadline expired. On the last day allowed for the relief of the castle his troops were attacked at Bannockburn while they were still caught in the loops and marshes of the Firth and before they could be drawn up in proper battle array. The English were defeated with terrible slaughter. The battle consolidated Bruce’s hold on his kingdom and brought over to his side most of the prominent Scots who had remained on the sidelines while the issue was uncertain or had even actively assisted the English. What was left of the English position in Scotland quickly collapsed. Stirling surrendered at once and Bothwell soon afterwards. Berwick survived but was betrayed (by an Englishman) in March 1318. The English government could not bring themselves to recognize Bruce’s tenure as permanent, but they recognized their own defeat. In 1323 a truce was made for a period of thirteen years, until June 1336.

In the three centuries which followed Edward I’s deposition of John Balliol there was no period when Scotland was not a potential enemy at England’s rear, the source of continual friction and violence interrupted by periodic truces and major campaigns, of which the last did not occur until the Flodden campaign of 1513. The change profoundly affected both countries. By the 1320s Scotland had already acquired a degree of cohesion and a strength of national feeling unthinkable thirty years before. ‘For so long as there shall be but a hundred of us left alive,’ the representatives of the Scotch nobility declared at Arbroath in 1320, ‘we shall never consent to be ruled by the English.’ After many years in which Scotland had developed along largely English lines, the two nations grew apart. Cross-holdings of land in England and Scotland virtually disappeared. Scotch clerics graduated abroad at Paris or Orléans instead of Oxford. The law and institutions of Scotland developed in their own way.

In England, a larger country with wider concerns, the impact of the Scotch wars was less resonant, but there were two respects in which the hostility of the Scots was to shackle the conduct of English foreign policy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first was the continual drain of wealth and manpower occasioned by the border wars even in times of formal truce. From 1296 onwards the Scots regularly mounted small-scale raids on the northern counties in addition to the occasional major invasion, crossing the Tweed without warning on their light horses, burning villages, rounding up cattle, plundering the land and buildings of the rich northern churches and towns such as Carlisle, Hexham and Durham. The raiders reached a new peak of effectiveness after the battle of Bannockburn. A highly organized system was instituted for extracting protection money from the towns and churches of the north and despoiling those who would not pay. It generated considerable revenues for the Scots and set in train the secular decline of the economy of the north of England. This was the country which Jean le Bel, travelling with the English army in 1327, had called a ‘savage land full of desolate wastes and great hills, and barren of everything except wild beasts’.²⁸ The north of England contributed little or nothing to the long wars of Edward III against France except to hold the border. The border counties, Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland, had regularly to be excused the payment of taxes on account of their poverty. The progressivedepopulation of the north made it increasingly difficult to recruit soldiers there and virtually impossible to recruit them for service in the south or on the continent. The normal practice in the early years of the Hundred Years War was to recruit no troops for foreign armies north of the River Trent. This meant that in prosecuting its wars against France the English government was deprived of the services of something like a fifth of its population.

The second abiding consequence of the wars of England and Scotland was the ‘auld alliance’ between Scotland and France, which remained the cardinal element of Scotch foreign policy until the end of the sixteenth century and in one sense can be said to have lasted until 1745. The first formal treaty, which was made under the threat of imminent invasion in October 1295, contained all the classic elements. Philip the Fair promised that if Scotland were invaded by the King of England he would ‘give them help by distracting the said King in other places’; while the Scots for their part would invade England ‘as widely and deeply as they can, waging war, besieging towns and wasting the country’ as soon as the King of England embarked for the continent with an army. If Philip the Fair himself was sometimes cavalier in his observance of his obligations to the Scots, his successors took them very seriously. Charles IV formally renewed the alliance by the treaty of Corbeil in April 1326. Philip VI’s refusal to abandon the Scots in the 1330s, even when they appeared to be on the brink of destruction, was one of the principal causes of the great Anglo-French war which began in 1337, a war in which the Scots were to have a prominent part. It is often forgotten that in 1346 the English had to fight a Scotch army in the north as well as a French one at Crécy, and that the Scots fought as private adventurers with the French army at Poitiers (1356) and in organized contingents in French armies of the fifteenth century.

The wars of the English in Scotland and the north had another, equally important result. They created, during the fifty years before the beginning of the Hundred Years War, a military society of a kind which had not existed in England since the twelfth century.

The main difficulty of the English in fielding armies equal to their enemies was a shortage of heavy cavalrymen. There were fewer of them in England than there were in France even in proportion to the country’s population. It was the result of a perceptible shrinking of the number of men who possessed the landed wealth to sustain the status of a knight and the horses, equipment and leisure which cavalry service demanded. The class of men capable of fighting as knights in the early fourteenth century was probably no more than 3,000 strong. This included not only dubbed or ‘belted’ knights but squires, who were usually men of equivalent social status but either unable or unwilling to take on the full burdens of knighthood. It was about half the number which had been available to Henry II in the second half of the twelfth century. Not all of them were able to fight: age, illness and hard times were common excuses. The numbers were made up to some extent by recruiting men of lower condition, sergeants-at-arms and other men-at-arms. Even so, Edward III, who raised larger numbers of heavy cavalry than either his father or grandfather, never succeeded in collecting more than 5,000 in one place and that in an exceptional year. This was about one-sixth of what in optimum conditions the French government could find. Of belted knights there were rarely more than 500 together in one army at any time in the reign of Edward I. Under Edward III, whose reputation and patronage greatly increased enthusiasm for knighthood, there may have been about twice that number. This was in spite of vigorous and frequent measures known as ‘distraint of knighthood’ designed to force men with sufficient wealth and status to become knights on pain of confiscation of their goods.

One consequence of the shortage of knights and other cavalrymen in England was that it was necessary to make particularly heavy use of those that there were, giving them an intensity and continuity of experience which was rare. The other, and in the long run more significant, consequence was that the English government came to rely more heavily on infantry than any other western European monarchy.

To recruit infantry on any scale it was necessary to devise a system of general military conscription more efficient than anything that had existed hitherto. In principle every Englishman aged between sixteen and sixty was liable to do military service for the defence of the realm and for the occasional large-scale police operation. It was his duty to have the weapons appropriate for his wealth and status according to an ancient and elaborate code re-enacted in the reign of Edward I in the statute of Winchester. But this ancient levée en masse was not a practical tool of warfare. From the 1280s onwards the practice was to require a selection of the ‘best and strongest’ for the King’s armies in Wales and Scotland. Later it became usual to specify how many men were required in each category, how many archers, how many pikemen and so forth. The work was carried out by officers known as commissioners of array, local knights appointed in each county as they were required. The men whom they recruited were inspected and listed, then arranged in twenties under the command of a ‘vintenar’ and hundreds under the command of a ‘centenar’ (usually a cavalryman), and marched at the appointed time by their leaders to the assembly point of the army. The system was in practice rather less impressive than the succession of administrative commands which brought it into operation. Arrayers were often corrupt. Villagers conspired to present feeble fellows and armed them poorly or not at all. Experience suggested that only half to two-thirds of the numbers called for could be expected to appear, a factor which was no doubt taken into account in preparing the arrayers’ instructions. Desertion was a serious and perennial problem, both before and after the muster. Nevertheless, the results were impressive by the low standards of medieval governments.

Conscription was taxation in kind. The circumstances in which it should be permitted gave rise to some dispute during the reign of Edward I and to intense controversy under Edward II, who experimented with a variety of unconventional schemes for requiring infantry service without pay. The whole question of compulsory infantry service was considered in detail in the first Parliament of Edward III, in 1327. From the petitions of this assembly and the King’s generally accommodating answers to them, and from trial and error in the following years, a consensus emerged. Conscripted men could not be required to serve without pay except for the defence of the realm against foreign invasion or with the consent of Parliament; but if pay were offered they could be required to serve wherever they were sent. The towns and county communities generally provided them with food, clothing, weapons and horses, and paid them wages until they passed the county boundary (or, in the north, until they reached Newcastle or Carlisle). Thereafter, their pay and expenses were the responsibility of the King. Obviously this informal compromise was subject to the overriding rule of sound government in any medieval community, that the King should not push even his lawful demands too far. No administrative mechanism could prevail over any widespread and deep-seated sense of grievance, and none could raise large armies for an unpopular war. Moreover, popular indifference, even if it could not prevent the recruitment of an army, could significantly delay it. Propaganda was an essential tool of war. Edward I learned this lesson very well, and his grandson better still.

Edward I had recruited huge infantry armies, but had shown no particular skill in using them and on some notable occasions had failed to use them at all. There was a considerable improvement in the time of his son and grandson. By the 1330s the English system of military conscription was producing smaller numbers of troops of much higher quality than the rather haphazard methods used at this stage in France. Moreover, English commanders devised highly effective methods of deploying them, a particular weakness of French military practice for much of the fourteenth century. The great teachers of the English were the Scots. They had wisdom forced on them. Unable to field large cavalry armies of their own, they fought off the massed cavalry of their enemies by drawing up infantry in squares (‘schiltrons’), their pikes embedded in the ground in front of them, pointed outwards towards the approaching horsemen. The suicidal charge of the English cavalry against the Scotch infantry formations at Bannockburn had been an awesome lesson and it provoked much reflection among the English. It was ‘unheard of in our time’, one of them wrote, ‘for such an army to be scattered by infantry, until we remember that the flower of France fell before the Flemings at Courtrai’.²⁹ The English learned from the Scots what the French had failed to learn from the Flemings. Disciplined infantry in well-prepared positions were more than a match for heavy cavalry.

At the battle of Boroughbridge (1322), the principal engagement of the civil wars of Edward II’s reign, the King’s army was commanded by Sir Andrew Harclay, a Cumberland knight who had passed much of his life fighting against the Scots on the western march of Scotland. He ‘sent all the horses to the rear, drew up his knights and some pikemen on foot … and formed up other pikemen in squares after the fashion of the Scots … in order to resist the cavalry in which the enemy was placing all their trust.’ The Earl of Lancaster’s cavalry were massacred. The Earl of Hereford, ‘the flower of solace and comfort and of courtesy’, was hacked to death on the ground by a footsoldier.³⁰ The use of infantry formations stiffened with dismounted cavalry became the hallmark of English battle tactics. Five years later, in 1327, the English government announced at the outset of its campaign against the Scots that even the greatest noblemen of the land would have to be ready to fight on foot.³¹

There was another lesson that the English learned from the Scots. Faced with the problem that infantry armies moved slowly and could rarely seize the initiative, the Scots had adopted the practice of mounting part of their infantry on low-grade horses, the ‘little nags’ observed by Jean le Bel on the border in 1327. Their raiding forces, although they were commonly followed by great hordes of unmounted men, were led by a handful of men-at-arms and a much larger number of fast-moving mounted infantry, covering long distances within a day, dismounting to fight, and swiftly escaping any encounter on unequal terms. The English had already begun to experiment with similar mounted infantrymen (known as ‘hobelars’) in the last years of the thirteenth century. But it was once again Andrew Harclay who was responsible for their regular use. The border army which he commanded on the march of Scotland in the years after Bannockburn was composed of a small troop of knights and a much larger number of lightly armed horsemen. Hobelars were employed in growing numbers in the 1320s not only in the borderlands.³²

At about the same time the English armed their infantry with the six-foot longbow, a weapon peculiar to the British Isles which was to give them the decisive advantage on European battlefields until the middle of the fifteenth century. Archery was an old skill, but for some reason the longbow had not traditionally been used as an infantry weapon on any scale. Like his predecessors, Edward I had begun by using crossbowmen, in spite of their high wages and expensive equipment and although he had had to find most of them abroad. But in the course of his wars in Scotland the longbow gradually displaced the crossbow and during the 1320s and 1330s longbowmen began to displace other infantry troops. In the latter part of this period they tended increasingly to be mounted men, like the hobelars. It is not at all clear why the English woke up so suddenly and so late to the military potential of the longbow, but there is no doubt of the importance of the change once it had occurred. Longbowmen needed great strength and training, and an aptitude which could not be acquired overnight. But they were extremely effective en masse. Volleys loosed in rapid succession into the sky came down over the heads of the opposing army, and on their lightly protected limbs and shoulders, breaking up infantry and cavalry formations, causing carnage in their tightly packed ranks and terror among the horses. The great English victories of the 1330s and 1340s, Dupplin Moor, Halidon Hill, Sluys, Crécy and Neville’s Cross, were all won by archers.

A hobelar was a good deal more than the proletarian thug who was traditionally regarded as the raw material of infantry armies. He needed a horse, a jacket of hardened leather, a steel helmet and throat-piece, and a pair of metal gauntlets as well as his sword, knife and lance. In the 1330s the government reckoned that the typical hobelar would need land worth at least fifteen pounds a year to support him, which was the income of a substantial farmer. A mounted archer, with similar armour, was thought to need the same. Even the humble foot-archer with his sword and knife, his bow and his quiver of two dozen arrows, was reckoned to be a two-pound man, which placed him among the more substantial peasants.³³ Only the Welsh, most of whom fought as unmounted pikemen, were still recruited in the indiscriminate fashion of an earlier age. What had happened was not so much the conscription of the masses as the creation of a larger military class composed of men who, without having the social standing of the knights and squires, acquired something of their discipline and aptitude for war.

Much had changed since Simon de Montfort claimed to have taught the English elementary battle-drill. The changes were part of a revolution of English attitudes to war which extended a long way beyond the recruitment and deployment of armies. The major campaigns of Edward I and Edward II had required a prodigious bureaucratic organization charged with all the mundane tasks needed to maintain men in the field: the requisitioning of transport, the purveyance, storage and distribution of victuals and fodder, the maintenance of field pay and account offices, the carriage of equipment and supplies on carts overland and by ship around the coast, the mass production of arrows and bow-staves, the construction of prefabricated bridges and siege artillery.

‘In my youth’, the poet Petrarch wrote (he was born in 1304), ‘the English were regarded as the most timid of all the uncouth races; but today they are the supreme warriors; they have destroyed the reputation of the French in a succession of startling victories, and men who were once lower even than the wretched Scots have crushed the realm of France with fire and steel.’ The chronicler Jean le Bel, although he was a great deal better informed than this expatriate Italian, and had marched with an English army against the Scots in 1327, was equally astonished. The English ‘did not count’ in the 1320s but had become the most celebrated soldiers in Europe by 1350s. Perception lagged behind reality. Even before the great victories of the 1340s and 1350s Richard of Bury, Bishop of Durham, a loyal Englishman but no flag-waver, had concluded that the days of France’s martial fame were passing.³⁴

NOTES

1 Hist. des ducs de Normandie, ed. Francisque-Michel (1840), 99–100.

2 Louis: Trokelowe, Chron., ed. H. T. Riley (1866), 79. Glastonbury: R. S. Loomis, ‘Edward I, Arthurian Enthusiast’, Speculum, xxviii (1953), 114–27. Pope: RF, i, 932–4. Language: RF, i, 827.

3 Froissart, Chron., i, 306.

4 Higden, Polychron., ed. C. Babington, ii (1869), 157–63.

5 Bel, Chron., i, 47.

6 Lloyd, 64–5,123. Chron. mon. Melsa, iii, 48.

7 Froissart, Chron., i, 215.

8 Red Book of the Exchequer, ed. H. Hall, iii (1896), 960.

9 Fortescue, Governance, 119.

10 Prestwich (1), 206–8.

11 E. B. and N. M. Fryde, 457–8.

12 Documents Illustrating the Crisis of 1297–98, ed. M. Prestwich (1980), 159.

13 Mirror of Justices, ed. W. J. Whittaker (1895), 155.

14 Froissart, Chron., i, 214; Fortescue, Governance, 141.

15 Maddicott (1), 22–3; Vita Edwardi, 29.

16 N. Saul, 69, 266; Smyth, i, 304.

17 Chron., i, 257.

18 Philips, 242–5.

19 Song of Lewes, 1.872, ed. C. L. Kingsford (1890), 28.

20 Statutes, i, 15.

21 Maddicott (1), 329–30.

22 Willard and Morris, i, 102–3; N. Saul, 174–5.

23 Vita Edwardi, 38.

24 Guisborough, Chron., 289–90.

25 Statutes, i, 159.

26 Gilles le Bouvier, Le Livre de description des pays, E.-T. Hamy (1908), 119–20.

27 Ann. Waverley, ed. H. R. Luard, Ann. monastici, ii (1865), 409.

28 Bel, Chron., i, 49.

29 Vita Edwardi, 55–6.

30 Chron. Lanercost, 242–4; Brut, i, 218.

31 RS, i, 208.

32 Morris (5), 77–93; Morris (3).

33 Powicke, 189–94.

34 Petrarch, Le familiari, XXII:14, ed. V. Rossi, iv (1942), 138; Bel, Chron., i, 155–6; Richard of Bury, Philobiblon, ed. M. Maclagan (1960), 106.