The History of England from the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) England During The Latter Years Of Edward III byTout, T.F. (M.A.)
Never was Edward's glory so high as in the years immediately succeeding
the treaty of Calais. The unspeakable misery of France heightened his
magnificence by the strength of the contrast. At eight-and-forty he
retained the vigour and energy of his younger days, though surrounded
by a band of grown-up sons. In 1362 the king celebrated his jubilee, or
his fiftieth birthday, amidst feasts of unexampled splendour. Not less
magnificent were the festivities that attended the visits of the three
kings, of France, Cyprus, and Scotland, in 1364.
Of the glories of these years we have detailed accounts from an
eye-witness a writer competent, above all other men of his time, to set
down in courtly and happy phrase the wonders that delighted his eyes.
In 1361, John Froissart, an adventurous young clerk from Valenciennes,
sought out a career for himself in the household of his countrywoman,
Queen Philippa, bearing with him as his credentials a draft of a verse
chronicle which was his first attempt at historical composition. He
came to England at the right moment. The older generation of historians
had laid down their pens towards the conclusion of the great war, and
had left no worthy successors. The new-comer was soon to surpass them,
not in precision and sobriety, but in wealth of detail, in literary
charm, and in genial appreciation of the externals of his age. He
recorded with an eye-witness's precision of colour, though with utter
indifference to exactness, the tournaments and fetes, the banquets and
the largesses of the noble lords and ladies of the most brilliant
court in Christendom. He celebrated the courtesy of the knightly class,
their devotion to their word of honour, the liberality with which
captive foreigners was allowed to share in their sports and pleasures,
and the implicit loyalty with which nearly all the many captive knights
repaid the trust placed on their word. To him Edward was the most
glorious of kings, and Philippa, his patroness, the most beautiful,
liberal, pious, and charitable of queens. For nine years he enjoyed the
queen's bounty, and described with loyal partiality the exploits of
English knights. With the death of his patroness and the beginning of
England's misfortunes, the light-minded adventurer sought another
master in the French-loving Wenceslaus of Brabant. The first edition of
his chronicle, compiled when under the spell of the English court,
contrasts strongly with the second version written at Brussels at the
instigation of the Luxemburg duke of Brabant.
Even Froissart saw that all was not well in England. The common people
seemed to him proud, cruel, disloyal, and suspicious. Their delight was
in battle and slaughter, and they hated the foreigner with a fierce
hatred which had no counterpart in the cosmopolitan knightly class.
They were the terror of their lords and delighted in keeping their
kings under restraint. The Londoners were the most mighty of the
English and could do more than all the rest of England. Other writers
tell the same tale. The same fierce patriotism that Froissart notes
glows through the rude battle songs in which Lawrence Minot sang the
early victories of Edward from Halidon Hill to the taking of Guînes,
and inspired Geoffrey le Baker to repeat with absolute confidence every
malicious story which gossip told to the discredit of the French king
and his people. It was under the influence of this spirit that the
steps were taken, which we have already recorded, to extend the use of
English, notably in the law courts. Yet the old bilingual habit clave
long to the English. Despite the statute of 1362, the lawyers continued
to employ the French tongue, until it crystallised into the jargon of
the later Year Books or of Littleton's Tenures. Under Edward III,
however, French remained the living speech of many Englishmen. John
Gower wrote in French the earliest of his long poems. But he is a
thorough Englishman for all that. He writes in French, but, as he says,
he writes for England.1
1 "O gentile Engleterre, a toi j'escrits," Mirour de
l'Omme, in John Gower's Works, i., 378, ed. G.C. MaCaulay,
to whom belongs the credit of recovering this long lost work.
It was characteristic of the patriotic movement of the reign of Edward
III, that a new courtly literature in the English language rivalled the
French vernacular literature which as yet had by no means ceased to
produce fruit. The new type begins with the anonymous poems, "Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight," and the "Pearl". While Froissart was the
chief literary figure at the English court during the ten years after
the treaty of Calais, his place was occupied in the concluding decade
of the reign by Geoffrey Chaucer, the first great poet of the English
literary revival. The son of a substantial London vintner, Chaucer
spent his youth as a page in the household of Lionel of Antwerp, from
which he was transferred to the service of Edward himself. He took part
in more than one of Edward's French campaigns, and served in diplomatic
missions to Italy, Flanders, and elsewhere. His early poems reflect the
modes and metres of the current French tradition in an English dress,
and only reach sustained importance in his lament on the death of the
Duchess Blanche of Lancaster, written about 1370. It is significant
that the favourite poet of the king's declining years was no clerk but
a layman, and that the Tuscan mission of 1373, which perhaps first
introduced him to the treasures of Italian poetry, was undertaken in
the king's service. Thorough Englishman as Chaucer was, he had his eyes
open to every movement of European culture. His higher and later style
begins with his study of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Though he
wrote for Englishmen in their own tongue, his fame was celebrated by
the French poet, Eustace Deschamps, as the "great translator" who had
sown the flowers of French poesy in the realm of Aeneas and Brut the
Trojan. His broad geniality stood in strong contrast to the savage
patriotism of Minot. In becoming national, English vernacular art did
not become insular. Chaucer wrote in the tongue of the southern
midlands, the region wherein were situated his native London, the two
universities, the habitual residences of the court, the chief seats of
parliaments and councils, and the most frequented marts of commerce.
For the first time a standard English language came into being, largely
displacing for literary purposes the local dialects which had hitherto
been the natural vehicles of writing in their respective districts. The
Yorkshireman, Wycliffe, the westcountryman, Langland, adopted before
the end of the reign the tongue of the capital for their literary
language in preference to the speech of their native shires. The
language of the extreme south, the descendant of the tongue of the West
Saxon court, became the dialect of peasants and artisans. That a
continuous life was reserved for the idiom of the north country, was
due to its becoming the speech of a free Scotland, the language in
which Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, commemorated for the court of
the first Stewart king the exploits of Robert Bruce and the Scottish
war of independence. The unity of England thus found another notable
expression in the oneness of the popular speech. And the evolution of
the northern dialect into the "Scottish" of a separate kingdom showed
that, if England were united, English-speaking Britain remained
divided.
Other arts indicate the same tendency. Even in the thirteenth century
English Gothic architecture differentiated itself pretty completely from
its models in the Isle de France. The early fourteenth century, the age
of the so-called "decorated style," suggests in some ways a falling back
to the French types, though the prosperity of England and the desolation
of France make the English examples of fourteenth century building the
more numerous and splendid. The occasional tendency of the later
"flowing" decorated towards "flamboyant" forms, to be seen in some of
the churches of Northamptonshire, marks the culminating point of this
fresh approximation of French and English architecture. But the division
between the two countries brought about by war was illustrated before
the end of the reign in the growth of the most local of our medieval
architectural types, that "perpendicular" style which is so strikingly
different from the "flamboyant" art of the neighbouring kingdom. This
specially English style begins early in the reign of Edward III, when
the cult of the murdered Edward of Carnarvon gave to the monks of St.
Peter's, Gloucester, the means to recast the massive columns and gloomy
arcades of the eastern portions of their romanesque abbey church after
the lighter and brighter patterns in which Gloucester set the fashion to
all southern Britain. In the buildings of the later years of Edward's
reign the old "flowing decorated" and the newer and stiffer
"perpendicular" grew up side by side. If the two seem almost combined in
the church of Edington, in Wiltshire, the foundation dedicated in 1361
for his native village by Edward's chancellor, Bishop Edington of
Winchester, the triumph of the perpendicular is assured in the new choir
which Archbishop Thoresby began for York Minster, and in the
reconstruction of the Norman cathedral of Winchester begun by Bishop
Edington, and completed when his greater successor, William of Wykeham,
carried out in a more drastic way the device already adopted at
Gloucester of recasing the ancient structure so as to suit modern
tastes. The full triumph of the new style is apparent in Wykeham's twin
foundations at Winchester and Oxford. The separation of feeling between
England and Scotland is now seen in architecture as well as in language.
When the perpendicular fashion was carrying all before it in the
southern realm, the Scottish builders erected their churches after the
flamboyant type of their French allies. Thus while the twelfth and
thirteenth century structures of the northern and southern kingdoms are
practically indistinguishable, the differences between the two nations,
which had arisen from the Edwardian policy of conquest, expressed
themselves ultimately in the striking contrast between the flamboyant of
Melrose or St. Giles' and the perpendicular of Winchester or Windsor.
English patriotism, which had asserted itself in the literature and art
of the people long before it dominated courtly circles, continued to
express itself in more popular forms than even those of the poems of
Chaucer. The older fashions of instructing the people were still in
vogue in the early part of Edward's reign. Richard Rolle, the hermit of
Hampole, whose Prick of Conscience and vernacular paraphrases of
the Bible illustrate the older didactic literature, was carried off in
his Yorkshire cell in the year of the Black Death. The cycles of
miracle plays, which edified and amused the townsfolk of Chester and
York, crystallised into a permanent shape early in this reign, and were
set forth with ever-increasing elaborateness by an age bent on
pageantry and amusement. The vernacular sermons and popular manuals of
devotion increased in numbers and copiousness. In this the time of the
Black Death is, as in other aspects of our story, a deep dividing line.
The note of increasing strain and stress is fully expressed in the
earlier forms of The Vision of Piers Plowman, which were composed
before the death of Edward III. Its author, William Langland, a clerk in
minor orders, debarred by marriage from a clerical career, came from the
Mortimer estates in the march of Wales: but his life was mainly spent in
London, and he wrote in the tongue of the city of his adoption. The
first form of the poem is dated 1362, the year of the second visitation
of the Black Death, while the troubles of the end of the reign perhaps
inspired the fuller edition which saw the light in 1377. It is a
commonplace to contrast the gloomy pictures drawn by Langland with the
highly coloured pictures of contemporary society for which Chaucer was
gathering his materials. Yet this contrast may be pressed too far.
Though Langland had a keen eye to those miseries of the poor which are
always with us, the impression of the time gathered from his writings is
not so much one of material suffering, as of social unrest and
discontent. The poor ploughman, who cannot get meat, still has his
cheese, curds, and cream, his loaf of beans and bran, his leeks and
cabbage, his cow, calf, and cart mare.1 The very beggar demanded
"bread of clean wheat" and "beer of the best and brownest," while the
landless labourer despised "night-old cabbage," "penny-ale," and bacon,
and asked for fresh meat and fish freshly fried.2 There is plenty of
rough comfort and coarse enjoyment in the England through which "Long
Will" stalked moodily, idle, hopeless, and in himself exemplifying many
of the evils which he condemned. The England of Langland is bitter,
discontented, and sullen. It is the popular answer to the class
prejudice and reckless greed of the lords and gentry. Langland's own
attitude towards the more comfortable classes is much that of the
self-assertive and mutinous Londoner whom Froissart looked upon with
such bitter prejudice. He boasts that he was loath to do reverence to
lords and ladies, or to those clad in furs with pendants of silver, and
refuses to greet "sergeants" with a "God save you". Every class of
society is flagellated in his scathing criticisms. He is no
revolutionist with a new gospel of reform, but, though content to accept
the old traditions, he is the ruthless denouncer of abuses, and is
thoroughly filled with the spirit which, four years after the second
recension of his book, found expression in the Peasants Revolt of 1381.
With all the archaism of his diction and metre, Langland, even more than
Chaucer, reflects the modernity of his age.
1Vision of Piers Plowman, i.,220, ed. Skeat.
2Ibid., i., 222.
Even the universities were growing more national, for the war prevented
Oxford students from seeking, after their English graduation, a wider
career at Paris. William of Ockham, the last of the great English
schoolmen that won fame in the European rather than in the English
world, died about 1349 in the service of the Bavarian emperor. In the
same year the plague swept away Thomas Bradwardine, the "profound
doctor," at the moment of his elevation to the throne of Canterbury.
Bradwardine, though a scholar of universal reputation, won his fame at
Oxford without the supplementary course at Paris, and lived all his
career in his native land. As an English university career became more
self-sufficient, Oxford became the school of the politician and the man
of affairs as much as of the pure student. The new tendency is
illustrated by the careers of the brothers Stratford, both Oxford
scholars, yet famous not for their writings but for lives devoted to the
service of the State, though rewarded by the highest offices of the
Church. His conspicuous position as a teacher of scholastic philosophy
first brought John Wycliffe into academic prominence. But he soon won a
wider fame as a preacher in London, an adviser of the court, an opponent
of the "possessioner" monks, and of the forsworn friars, who, deserting
apostolic poverty, vied with the monks in covetousness. His attacks on
practical abuses in the Church marked him out as a politician as well as
a philosopher. His earlier career ended in 1374, the year in which he
first became the king's ambassador, not long after proceeding to the
degree of doctor of divinity.1 His later struggles must be considered
in the light of the political history of the concluding episodes of
Edward's reign. In a few years we shall find the Oxford champion
abandoning the Latin language of universal culture, and appealing to the
people in homely English. With Wycliffe's entry upon his wider career,
it is hardly too much to say that Oxford ceased to be merely a part of
the cosmopolitan training ground of the schoolmen, and became in some
fashion a national institution. Cambridge, too young and obscure in
earlier ages to have rivalled Oxford, first began to enjoy an increasing
reputation.
1 This was before Dec. 26, 1373. See Twemlow in Engl. Hist.
Review, xv, (1900), 529-530.
Hitherto culture had been not only cosmopolitan but clerical. Every
university student and nearly every professional man was a clerk. But
education was becoming possible for laymen, and there were already lay
professions outside the clerical caste. The wide cultivation and the
vigorous literary output of laymen of letters like Chaucer and Cower
are sufficient evidence of this. But the best proof is the complete
differentiation of the common lawyers from the clergy. The inns of
court of London became virtually a legal university, where highly
trained men studied a juristic system, which was not the less purely
English in spirit because its practitioners used the French tongue as
their technical instrument. There were no longer lawyers in England
who, like Bracton, strove to base the law of the land on the forms and
methods of Roman jurisprudence. There were no longer kings, like Edward
I., with Italian trained civilians at their court ready to translate
the law of England into imperialist forms. The canonist still studied
at Oxford or Cambridge, but his career was increasingly clerical, and
the Church, unlike the State, was unable to nationalise itself, though
the whole career of Wycliffe and the strenuous efforts of the kings and
statesmen who passed the statutes of Provisors and Praemunire, showed
that some of the English clergy, and many of the English laity, were
willing to make the effort. English law, in divorcing itself from the
universities and the clergy, became national as well as lay. There were
no longer any Weylands who concealed their clerical beginnings, and hid
away the subdeacon under the married knight and justice, the founder of
a landowning family. The lawyers of Edward's reign were frankly laymen,
marrying and giving in marriage, establishing new families that became
as noble as any of the decaying baronial houses, and yet cherishing a
corporate ideal and common spirit as lively and real as those of any
monastery or clerical association.
In enumerating the many convergent tendencies which worked together in
strengthening the national life, we must not forget the growing
importance of commerce. Merchant princes like the Poles could rival the
financial operations of Lombard or Tuscan, and climb into the baronial
class. The proud and mutinous temper of the Londoners was largely due
to their ever-increasing wealth. We are on the threshold of the careers
of commercial magnates, like the Philpots and the Whittingtons. Even
when Edward III. was still on the throne, a London mayor of no special
note, John Pyel, could set up in his native Northamptonshire village of
Irthlingborough a college and church of remarkable stateliness and
dignity. The growth of the wool trade, and its gradual transfer to
English hands, the development of the staple system, the rise of an
English seaman class that knew all the havens of Europe, the beginnings
of the English cloth manufacture, all indicate that English commerce
was not only becoming more extensive, but was gradually emancipating
itself from dependence on the foreigner. Thus before the end of
Edward's reign England was an intensely national state, proudly
conscious of itself, and haughtily contemptuous of the foreigner, with
its own language, literature, style in art, law, universities, and even
the beginnings of a movement towards the nationalisation of the Church.
The cosmopolitanism of the earlier Middle Ages was everywhere on the
wane. A modern nation had arisen out of the old world-state and
world-spirit. In the England of Edward III., Chaucer, and Wycliffe, we
have reached the consummation of the movement whose first beginnings we
have traced in the early storms of the reign of Henry III. It is in the
development of this tendency that the period from 1216 to 1377
possesses such unity as it has.
During the years of peace after the treaty of Calais, Edward III.
completed the scheme for the establishment of his family begun with the
grant of Aquitaine to the Black Prince. The state of the king's
finances made it impossible for him to provide for numerous sons and
daughters from the royal exchequer, and the system of appanages had
seldom been popular or successful in England. Edward found an easier
way of endowing his offspring by politic marriages that transferred to
his sons the endowments and dignities of the great houses, which, in
spite of lavish creations of new earldoms, were steadily dying out in
the male line. Some of his daughters in the same way were married into
baronial families whose attachment to the throne would, it was
believed, be strengthened by intermarriage with the king's kin; while
others, wedded to foreign princes, helped to widen the circle of
continental alliances on which he never ceased to build large hopes.
Collateral branches of the royal family were pressed into the same
system, which was so systematically ordered that it has passed for a
new departure in English history. This is, however, hardly the case.
Many previous kings, notably Edward I., carried out a policy based upon
similar lines, and only less conspicuous by reason of the smaller
number of children that they had to provide for. The descendants of
Henry III. and Edward I. in no wise kept true to the monarchical
tradition, but rather gave distinction to the baronial opposition by
ennobling it with royal alliances. But the martial and vigorous policy
of Edward III. had at least the effect of reducing to inactivity the
tradition of constitutional opposition which had been the common
characteristic of successive generations of the royal house of
Lancaster, the chief collateral branch of the royal family. Subsequent
history will show that the Edwardian family settlement was as
unsuccessful as that of his grandfather. The alliances which Edward
built up brought neither solidarity to the royal house, nor strength to
the crown, nor union to the baronage. But the working out of this, as
of so many of the new developments of the later part of Edward's reign,
can only be seen after his death.
Edward's eldest son became, as we have seen, Duke of Cornwall, Prince
of Wales, and Earl of Chester even before he received Aquitaine. He was
the first of the continuous line of English princes of Wales, for
Edward III. never bore that title. The Black Prince's marriage with his
cousin, Joan of Kent, was a love-match, and the estates of his bride
were scarcely an important consideration to the lord of Wales and
Cheshire. Yet the only child of the unlucky Edmund of Woodstock was no
mean heiress, bringing with her the estates of her father's earldom of
Kent, besides the inheritance of her mother's family, the Wakes of
Liddell and Lincolnshire. The estates and earldom afterwards passed to
Joan's son by a former husband, and the Holland earls of Kent formed a
minor family connexion which closely supported the throne of Richard of
Bordeaux. Though their paternal inheritance was that of Lancashire
squires, the Hollands won a leading place in the history of the next
generation.
Edward III.'s second son, William of Hatfield, died in infancy. For his
third son, Lionel of Antwerp, when still in his childhood, Edward found
the greatest heiress of her time, Elizabeth, the only daughter of
William de Burgh, the sixth lord of Connaught and third Earl of Ulster,
the representative of one of the chief Anglo-Norman houses in Ireland.
Even before his marriage, Lionel was made Earl of Ulster, a title sunk
after 1362 in the novel dignity of the duchy of Clarence. This title was
chosen because Elizabeth de Burgh was a grand-daughter of Elizabeth of
Clare, the sister of the last Clare Earl of Gloucester, and a share of
the Gloucester inheritance passed through her to the young duke. His
marriage gave Lionel a special relation to Ireland, where, however, his
two lordships of Ulster and Connaught were largely in the hands of the
native septs, and where the royal authority had never won back the
ground lost during the vigorous onslaught of Edward Bruce on the English
power. In 1342 the estates of Ireland forwarded to Edward a long
statement of the shortcomings of the English administration of the
island.1 No effective steps were taken to remedy those evils until, in
1361, Edward III. sent Lionel as governor to Ireland, declaring "that
our Irish dominions have been reduced to such utter devastation and ruin
that they may be totally lost, if our subjects there are not immediately
succoured". Lionel's most famous achievement was the statute of
Kilkenny. This law prohibited the intermixture of the Anglo-Normans in
Ireland with the native Irish, which was rapidly undermining the basis
of English rule and confounding Celts and Normans in a nation, ever
divided indeed against itself, but united against the English. Lionel
wearied of a task beyond his strength. His wife's early death lessened
the ties which bound him to her land, and he went back to England
declaring that he would never return to Ireland if he could help it. His
succession as governor by a Fitzgerald showed that the plan of ruling
Ireland through England was abandoned by Edward III. in favour of the
cheaper but fatal policy of concealing the weakness of the English power
by combining it with the strength of the strongest of the Anglo-Norman
houses. Under this faulty system, the statute of Kilkenny became
inoperative almost from its enactment.
1 Cal. of Close, Rolls, 1341-43, pp. 508-16.
The widowed Duke of Clarence made a second great marriage. The
Visconti, tyrants of Milan, were willing to pay heavily for the
privilege of intermarriage with the great reigning families of Europe,
and neither Edward III. nor the French king could resist the temptation
of alliance with a family that was able to endow its daughters so
richly. Accordingly, the Duke of Clarence became in 1368 the husband of
Violante Visconti, the daughter of Galeazzo, lord of Pavia, and the
niece of Bernabò, signor of Milan, the bitter foe of the Avignon
papacy. Five months later, Lionel was carried away by a sudden
sickness, and thus the Visconti marriage brought little fruit to
England. Lionel's only child, Philippa, the offspring of his first
marriage, was married, just before her father's death, to Edmund
Mortimer, Earl of March, great-grandson of the traitor earl beheaded in
1330. Lionel's death added to the vast inheritance of the Mortimers and
Joinvilles the lands and claims of Ulster and Clarence, and so Edward
III.'s magnanimity in reviving the earldom of March after the disgrace
of 1330 was rewarded by the devolution of its estates to his
grand-daughter's child. The Earl of March was invested with a new
political importance, for his wife was the nearest representative of
Edward III, save for the dying Black Prince and his sickly son. The
fierce blood and broad estates of the great marcher family continued to
give importance to Philippa's descendants; and finally the house of
Mortimer mounted the throne in the person of Edward IV.
The estates of Lancaster were annexed to the reigning branch of the
royal house by the marriage in 1359 of John of Gaunt, Edward's third
surviving son, with Blanche of Lancaster, the heiress of Duke Henry,
who became, after her sister Maud's death, the sole inheritor of the
duchy of Lancaster. In 1362 John, who had hitherto been Earl of
Richmond, yielded up this dignity to the younger John of Montfort, its
rightful heir, and was created Duke of Lancaster at the same time that
Lionel was made Duke of Clarence. Ten years after her marriage Blanche
died, leaving John a son, Henry of Derby, the future Henry IV., whose
wedding, after his grandfather's death, to one of the Bohun
co-heiresses brought part of the estates of another great house within
the grasp of Edward III.'s descendants. Moreover, the other Bohun
co-heiress became in 1376 the wife of Thomas of Woodstock, the youngest
of Edward's sons, the Gloucester of the next reign. The three Bohun
earldoms of Hereford, Essex, and Northampton were thus absorbed by the
old king's children and grandchildren. John of Gaunt, like Lionel, lost
his wife early and sought a second bride abroad. In 1372 he married
Constance of Castile, a natural daughter of the deceased Peter the
Cruel. Henceforth he was summoned to parliament as King of Castile and
Leon as well as Duke of Lancaster, though it was not until the next
reign that he took any actual steps to assert his claim.
John's next younger brother, Edmund of Langley, Earl of Cambridge in
1368 married Isabella, Constance of Castile's younger sister.
He was the future Duke of York, and as the only one of Edward III.'s
sons who did not marry an English heiress, was the most scantily
endowed of them all. The union of his descendants with those of Lionel
of Clarence gave the house of York a territorial importance which was,
as we have seen, mainly derived from the Mortimer inheritance. Thus the
two lines of descendants of Edward III. which had most future
significance were those which represented through heiresses the rival
houses of Lancaster and March. The history of the next century shows
that the rivalry was only made more formidable by the connexion of both
these lines with the royal family. In this, the most striking triumph
of the Edwardian policy, is also the most signal indication of its
failure. From it arose the factions of York and Lancaster.
The legislation of the years of peace, from 1360 to 1369, is largely
anti-papal and economic, and is so intimately connected with the laws
of the preceding period that it has been dealt with in an earlier
chapter. But however anti-papal, and therefore anti-clerical, some of
Edward's laws were, his government was still mainly controlled by great
ecclesiastical statesmen. Simon Langham, though a Benedictine monk, had
as chancellor demanded in 1366 the opinion of the estates as to the
unlawfulness of the Roman tribute, and the clerical estate, if it did
not help forward the anti-Roman legislation, was content to stand
aside, and let it take effect without protest. Shortly after taking
part in the movement against papal tribute, Langham was removed from
the see of Ely to that of Canterbury in succession to Islip. His
conversion into a purely monastic college of his predecessor's mixed
foundation for seculars and regulars in Canterbury Hall, Oxford, showed
a bias which might have been expected in a former abbot of Westminster,
while his willingness to follow in the footsteps of Kilwardby, and
exchange his archbishopric for the dignity of a cardinal and residence
at Avignon showed that he was a papalist as well as an English patriot.
His successor as primate, appointed in 1369 by papal provision, was
William Whittlesea, a nephew of Archbishop Islip, whose weak health and
colourless character made of little account his five years' tenure of
the metropolitical dignity. With Canterbury in such feeble hands, the
leadership in the Church and primacy in the councils of the crown
passed to stronger men: such as John Thoresby, Archbishop of York till
1373; Thomas Brantingham, treasurer from 1369 to 1371, and Bishop of
Exeter from 1370 to 1394; and above all to Edward's old servant,
William of Wykeham, chancellor from 1367 to 1371, and Bishop of
Winchester, in succession to Edington, from 1367 until 1404. Wykeham
was a strenuous and hard-working servant of the crown, a vigorous and
careful ruler of his diocese, a mighty pluralist, a magnificent
builder, and the most bountiful and original of all the pious founders
of his age. "Everything," says Froissart, "was done through him and
without him nothing was done."1
1 Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Luce, viii., 101.
The year of the breach of the treaty of Calais was also marked by the
third great visitation of the Black Death, and the death of Queen
Philippa. Parliament cordially welcomed the resumption by Edward of the
title of King of France, and made liberal subsidies for the prosecution
of the campaign. Disappointment was all the more bitter when each
campaign ended in disaster, and in the parliament of February, 1371, the
storm burst. The circumstances of the ministerial crisis of 1341 were
almost exactly renewed. As on the previous occasion, the state was in
the hands of great ecclesiastics, whose conservative methods were
thought inadequate for circumstances so perilous. John Hastings, second
Earl of Pembroke of his house, a gallant young warrior and the intended
son-in-law of the king, made himself the spokesman of the anti-clerical
courtiers, probably with the good-will of the king. At Pembroke's
instigation the earls, barons, and commons drew up a petition that,
"inasmuch as the government of the realm has long been in the hands of
the men of Holy Church, who in no case can be brought to account for
their acts, whereby great mischief has happened in times past and may
happen in times to come, may it therefore please the king that laymen of
his own realm be elected to replace them, and that none but laymen
henceforth be chancellor, treasurer, barons of the exchequer, clerk of
privy seal, or other great officers of the realm ".1 Edward fell in
with this request. Wykeham quitted the chancery, and Brantingham the
treasury. Of their lay successors the new chancellor, Sir Robert Thorpe,
chief-justice of the court of common pleas, was a close friend of the
Earl of Pembroke, while the new treasurer, Sir Richard le Scrope of
Bolton, a Yorkshire warrior, represented the interests of John of Gaunt,
whose long absences abroad did not prevent his ultimately becoming a
strong supporter of the lay policy. A subsidy of £50,000 and a statute
that no new tax should be laid on wool without parliamentary assent
concluded the work of this parliament.
1Rot. Pad., ii., 304.
The lay ministers did not prove as efficient as their clerical
predecessors. Want of acquaintance with administrative routine led them
to assess the parliamentary grant so badly that an irregular
reassembling of part of the estates was necessary, when it was found
that the ministers had ludicrously over-estimated the number of
parishes in England among which the grant of £50,000 had been equally
divided. Meanwhile the French war was proceeding worse than before.
Thorpe died in 1372, and another lay chief-justice, Sir John Knyvett,
succeeded him in the chancery. Pembroke, as we have seen, was taken
prisoner to Santander within a few weeks of Thorpe's death. Fresh
taxation was made necessary by every fresh defeat, and the clergy, who
looked upon the misfortunes of the anti-clerical earl as God's
punishment for his enmity to Holy Church, had their revenge against
their lawyer supplanters, for the parliament of 1372 petitioned that
lawyers, who used their position in parliament to advance their
clients' affairs, should not be eligible for election as knights of the
shire. Next year, the discontent of the estates came to a head after
the failure of John of Gaunt's march from Calais to Bordeaux. The
commons, by that time definitely organised as an independent house,
answered the demand for fresh supplies by requesting the lords to
appoint a committee of their number to confer with them on the state of
the realm. The composition of the committee was not one that favoured
the existing administration, and, guided by men like William of
Wykeham, it made only a limited and conditional grant, which was
strictly appropriated to the payment of the expenses of the war. The
anti-clerical party was still strong enough to send up denunciations of
papal assumptions, and the anxiety to adjust the relations between the
papacy and the crown led to some abortive negotiations with the legates
of Gregory XI at Bruges in 1374, which were mainly memorable for the
appearance of John Wycliffe as one of the royal commissioners. Disgust
at the attitude of the commons may well have postponed the next
parliament for nearly three years. But the truce of Bruges made
frequent parliaments less necessary.
The truce brought John of Gaunt back to England, and the rivalry
between him and his elder brother, which had begun during their last
joint campaigns in France, crystallised into definite parties the
discordant tendencies that had been well marked since the crisis of
1371. The old king was a mere pawn in the game. His health had been
broken by the debauchery and frivolity to which he had abandoned
himself after the death of Queen Philippa. He was now entirely under
the influence of Alice Perrers, a Hertfordshire squire's daughter,
whose venality, greed, and shamelessness made her the fit tool for the
self-seeking ring of courtiers. John of Gaunt sought her support as the
best means of withdrawing the old king from the influence of the Prince
of Wales, and the lay ministers were glad to maintain themselves in
their tottering power by means of such powerful allies. Prominent among
their party were courtier nobles--such as the chamberlain, Lord
Latimer, and the steward of the household, Lord Neville of Raby,--and
rich London financiers, chief among whom was Richard Lyons, men who
made exorbitant profits out of the necessities of the administration.
Faction sought to appear more respectable by professions of zeal for
reform. The cry against papal encroachments was extended to a
denunciation of the wealth and power of the clergy. John Wycliffe was
called from his Oxford classrooms to expound the close connexion
between dominion and grace, and to teach from London pulpits that the
ungodly bishop or priest has no right to the temporal possessions given
him on trust for the discharge of his high mission.1
1 Until recently all historians have dated the beginning of
Wycliffe's political career from 1366, but J. Loserth has
proved that 1374, the date of the last demand for the Roman
tribute, to be the right year. See his Studien zur
Kirchen-politik Englands im 14ten Jahrhundert, in
Sitzungsberichte der Académie der Wissenschaften in Wien,
philos. histor. classe, cxxxvi., 1897, and, more briefly, in
Engl. Hist. Review, xi. (1896), 319-328.
A vigorous opposition to the dominant faction was formed. At its head
was the Black Prince. Hardly less important and much more active than
the dying hero of Poitiers was Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, the
husband of Philippa of Clarence, and the father of the little Roger
Mortimer whom nothing but the uncertain lives of the Prince of Wales
and the sickly Richard of Bordeaux separated from the English throne.
Hereditary antagonism accentuated incompatibility of personal
interests. The ancient feuds of the houses of Mortimer and Lancaster
still lived on in the hostility of their representatives. The
understanding between the Prince of Wales and the Earl of March seems
to have been complete. They had as their most powerful supporters the
outraged dignitaries of the Church, who saw themselves kept out of
office and threatened in their temporalities by the dominant faction.
William of Wykeham, who had been the guardian of the Earl of March
during his long minority, was the most experienced and wary of the
clerical opposition to the lawyers and courtiers of the Lancaster
faction. He had an eager and enthusiastic backer in the young and
high-born Bishop of London, William Courtenay, the son of the Earl of
Devon, and through his mother, Margaret Bohun, a great-grandson of
Edward I. Office and descent combined to make Bishop Courtenay the
custodian of the constitutional tradition, which was equally strong
among the great baronial houses of ancient descent and such highly
placed ecclesiastics as were zealous for the nation as well as for
their order. His support was the more necessary since Simon of Sudbury,
who in 1375 succeeded Whittlesea on the throne of St. Augustine, was a
weak and time-serving politician.
The storm, which had long been brewing, burst at last in the parliament
of April, 1376. Of the acts of this memorable assembly, famous as the
Good Parliament, and of the other concluding troubles of the reign we
are fortunate in possessing not only copious official records, but a
minute and highly dramatic account from the pen of a St. Alban's monk,
who, alone of the monastic chroniclers of his age, represented the
spirit which, in the days of Matthew Paris, made the great
Hertfordshire abbey so famous a school of historiography.1
1Chron. Angliæ, 1328-88, ed. E.M. Thompson (Rolls Ser.).
Compare Mr. S. Armitage-Smith's John of Gaunt for an
unfavourable estimate of its value.
The Good Parliament showed from the beginning a strong animosity
against the courtiers. The time was not yet come when the commons could
take the initiative, or supply leaders from its own ranks, and even
among the commons capacity was unequally divided. Authority and
influence were exclusively with the knights of the shire, and the
citizens and burgesses were content to allow the country gentry to
speak and act in their name. The knights of the shire demanded that, in
accordance with the precedent of 1373, a committee of magnates should
be associated with them in determining the policy to be adopted. The
lords spiritual and temporal were as eager as the knights to attack the
government, and a committee, of which the leading spirits included the
Earl of March and the Bishop of London, supplied the element of
direction and initiation in which the commons were lacking. The
resolution which prevailed was shown by the estates agreeing to make no
grant until grievances had been redressed, and by the choice of Sir
Peter de la Mare as spokesman of the commons before the king. Sir Peter
was elected, we are told, because he possessed abundant wisdom and
eloquence, and enough boldness to say what was in his mind, regardless
of the good-will of the great. Perhaps a further and more weighty
reason was that he was steward of the Earl of March. He was the first
person to hold an office indistinguishable in all essentials from that
of the later Speaker. Under his guidance the commons worked out an
elaborate policy of revenge and reform. The contempt with which John of
Gaunt and the courtiers had at first regarded their action, gave place
to fear. The duke found it prudent to stand aside, while a clean sweep
of the administration was made.
Charges were brought against the leading ministers of state, after a
fashion in which the constitutional historian sees the beginnings of
the process of the removal of great offenders by impeachment. Lord
Latimer was the first victim. He had appropriated the king's money to
his own uses; he had shown remissness and treachery during the last
campaign in Brittany; he had taken bribes; he was, in a word, "useless
to king and kingdom". His fate was promptly shared by Lyons, the London
merchant, the accomplice of his frauds, who had availed himself of his
court influence to make a "corner" in nearly all imported articles, to
the impoverishment of the common people and the disorganisation of
trade. Lord Neville, whose eager partisanship of Latimer had led him to
insult Sir Peter de la Mare, was threatened with similar proceedings.
Even Alice Perrers was attacked, though, says the chronicler, the
natural affection of Englishmen for their king was so great that they
were slow to molest the lady whom the king loved. However, Alice's
unblushing interference with the course of justice, her appearance in
the courts at Westminster, sitting on the judges' bench, clamouring for
the condemnation of her enemies and the acquittal of her friends,
roused the knights of the shire to action. An ordinance against women
being allowed to practise in the law courts was made the pretext for
her removal from court, and Alice, fearful that worse might happen,
took oath that she would have no further dealings with the king.
Meantime Latimer and Lyons were condemned to forfeiture and
imprisonment.
In the midst of these proceedings the knights lost their strongest
support by the death of the Black Prince on June 8. John of Gaunt at
once went down to the house of commons, and boldly suggested that the
English should follow the example of the French and allow no woman to
become heiress of the kingdom. This was a direct assertion of his own
claims to stand next to the throne after Richard of Bordeaux, and
before Roger Mortimer. Alarmed at the blow thus levelled against their
chief remaining champion, the knights courageously held to their
position. "The king," said they, "though old is still healthy, and may
outlive us all. Moreover he has an heir in the ten-year-old prince
Richard. While these are alive there is no need to discuss the question
of the succession." They completed the drawing up of the long list of
petitions, whose grudging and partial acceptance by the crown made the
roll of the parliament of 1376 memorable as asserting principles, if
not as vindicating practical ends. They forced Lancaster to agree to a
council of twelve peers nominated in parliament to act as a standing
committee of advisers, without which the king might do nothing of any
importance. After this revival of the methods of the Mad Parliament and
the lords ordainers, the Good Parliament separated on July 6. It had
sat longer than any previous parliament of which there is record. It
had persevered to the end in the teeth of discouragements of all kinds,
and, even after his brother's death, Duke John dared not lift up his
hand against it so long as the session continued.
When the estates separated Lancaster threw off the mask. The king, sunk
in extreme dotage, was entirely in the hands of his unscrupulous son.
The old man was kept quiet by the return of Alice Perrers to court. She
had sworn on the rood never to see the king again, but the prelates
were "like dumb dogs unable to bark" against her; and no effort was
made to prosecute her for perjury. Latimer and Lyons returned from
their luxurious imprisonment in the Tower to their places at court. The
duke roundly declared that the late parliament was no parliament at
all. No statute was based upon its petitions, the council of twelve was
rudely dissolved, and Sir Peter de la Mare was imprisoned in Nottingham
castle. William of Wykeham was deprived of his temporalities, and the
rumour spread that his disgrace was due to his possession of a state
secret, revealed to him by the dying queen Philippa, that John of Gaunt
was no true son of the royal pair but a changeling. So timid was the
disgraced bishop that he vied with the weak primate in his subserviency
to Alice. The Earl of March, who was marshal of England, was ordered to
inspect the fortresses beyond sea, whereupon, fearing a plot to
assassinate him, he resigned his office, "preferring," says a friend,
"to lose his marshal's staff rather than his life". The powerful
north-country lord, Henry Percy, who had hitherto acted with the
opposition, was bribed by the office of marshal to join the Lancastrian
party.
Grave difficulties still beset the government, and in January, 1377,
John of Gaunt had to face another parliament. Every precaution was taken
to pack the commons with his partisans. Of the knights of the shire of
the Good Parliament only eight were members of its successor,1 while
in the place of the imprisoned De la Mare, Sir Thomas Hungerford,
steward of the Duke of Lancaster, was chosen Speaker, on this occasion
by that very name. A packed committee of lords was assigned to advise
the commons. In these circumstances it was not difficult to procure the
reversal of the acts against Alice Perrers and Latimer, and the grant of
a poll tax of a groat a head. The only measure of conciliation was a
general pardon, a pretext for which was found in the jubilee of the
king's accession. From this William of Wykeham was expressly excepted.
1Return of Members of Parliament, pt. i., 193-97; Chron.
Angliæ, p. 112, understates the case.
The convocation of Canterbury proved less accommodating than the
parliament. Under the able leadership of Bishop Courtenay, it took up
the cause of the Bishop of Winchester, refused to join in a grant of
money until he had taken his place in convocation, and, triumphing at
last over the time-serving of Sudbury and the hesitation of Wykeham
himself, persuaded the bishop to join their deliberations. Lancaster met
the opposition of convocation by calling to his aid the Oxford doctor
whom the clergy had already begun to look upon as the enemy of the
privileges of their order. Wycliffe was not as yet under suspicion of
direct dogmatic heresy. He had not yet clothed himself in the armour of
his Balliol predecessor, Fitzralph, to wage war against the mendicant
orders. But he had already formulated his theory that dominion was
founded on grace, had declared that the pope had no right to
excommunicate any one, or if he had that any simple priest could absolve
the culprit from his sentence, and he had shown a hatred so bitter of
clerical worldliness and clerical property that he was looked upon as
the special enemy of the great land-holding prelates and of the
"possessioner" monks, whose lands, he maintained, could be resumed by
the representatives of the donors at their will. The strenuous advocate
for reducing the clergy to apostolic poverty was not likely to find
favour among the prelates. Wycliffe's only clerical supporters at this
stage were the mendicant friars, from whose characteristic opinions as
regards "evangelical poverty" he never at any time swerved.1 He was,
however, eloquent and zealous, and he had a following. Fear either of
Wycliffe or of his mendicant allies forced the bishops to take decisive
action. Even Sudbury awoke, "as from deep sleep".2 The duke's
dangerous supporter was summoned to answer before the bishops at St.
Paul's.
1 Shirley (preface to Fasciculi Zizaniorum, Rolls Ser., p.
xxvi.) thought that Wycliffe was "the sworn foe of the
mendicants" in 1377, and E.M. Thompson's emphatic words
repudiating the contrary statement of the St. Alban's writer,
Chron. Anglice, p. liii., illustrate the view prevalent in
England in 1874. Lechler's Wiclif und die Vorgeschichte der
Reformation, published in 1873 proves that it was not until
Wycliffe denied the doctrine of transubstantiation in 1379 or
1380 that the friars deserted him.
2Chron. Anglice, p. 117.
On February 19, Wycliffe appeared in Courtenay's cathedral. Four
mendicant doctors of divinity, chosen by Lancaster, came with him to
defend him against the "possessioners," while the Duke of Lancaster
himself, and Henry Percy, the new marshal, also accompanied him to
overawe the bishops by their authority. The court was to be held in the
lady chapel at the east end of the cathedral, and Wycliffe and his
friends found some difficulty in making their way through the dense
crowd that filled the spacious nave and aisles. Percy, irritated at the
pressure of the throng, began to force it back in virtue of his office.
Courtenay ordered that the marshal should exercise no authority in his
cathedral. Thereupon Percy in a rage declared that he would act as
marshal in the church, whether the bishop liked it or not. When the
lady chapel was reached, there was further disputing as to whether
Wycliffe should sit or stand, and Lancaster taunted Courtenay for
trusting overmuch to the greatness of his family. When the bishop
replied with equal spirit, John muttered: "I would liefer drag him out
of his church by the hair of his head than put up with such insolence".
The words were overheard, and the Londoners, who hated the duke, broke
into open riot at this insult to their bishop. It was rumoured that the
duke had come to St. Paul's, hot from an attack on the liberties of the
city that very morning in parliament. The court broke up in wild
confusion, and the riot spread from church to city. Next day Percy's
house was pillaged, and John's palace of the Savoy attacked. The duke
and the marshal were forced to seek the protection of their opponent,
the Princess of Wales, at Kennington. The followers of Lancaster could
only escape rough treatment by hiding away their lord's badges. The
citizens cried that the Bishop of Winchester and Peter de la Mare
should have a fair trial. At last the personal authority of Bishop
Courtenay restored his unruly flock to order. The old king performed
his last public act by soothing the spokesmen of the citizens with the
pleasant words and easy grace of which he still was master. The
Princess of Wales used her influence for peace, and matters were
smoothed over.
At some risk of personal humiliation, Lancaster secured a substantial
triumph. Convocation followed the lead of parliament and gave an ample
subsidy. William of Wykeham purchased the restoration of his
temporalities by an unworthy deference to Alice Perrers. Wycliffe
remained powerful, flattered, and consulted, though his enemies had
already drawn up secret articles against him, which they had forwarded
to the papal curia. Perhaps in the rapidly declining health of the
king all parties saw that their real interest lay in the postponement
of a crisis.
In June Edward lay on his deathbed at Sheen. To the last his talk was
all of hawking and hunting, and his mistress carefully kept from him
all knowledge of his desperate condition. When he sank into his last
lethargy, his courtiers deserted him, and Alice Perrers took to flight
after robbing him of the very rings on his fingers. A simple priest,
brought to the bedside by pity, performed for the half-conscious king
the last offices of religion. Edward was just able to kiss the cross
and murmur "Jesus have mercy". On June 21, 1377, he breathed his last.
With Edward's death we break off a narrative whose course is but half
run. John of Gaunt's rule was not over; Wycliffe was advancing from
discontent to revolt; Chaucer was yet to rise for a higher flight;
Langland had not yet put his complaint into its permanent form; the
French war was renewed almost on the day of Edward's death; popular
irritation against bad government, and social and economic repression
were still preparing for the revolt of 1381. With all its defects the
age of Edward is preeminently a strong age. Greedy, self-seeking,
rough, and violent it may be; its passions and rivalries combined to
make futile the exercise of its strength; it sounded the revolutionary
note of all abrupt ages of transition, and it ends in disaster and
demoralisation at home and abroad. But government is not everything,
and least of all in the Middle Ages when what was then thought vigorous
government appears miserably weak to modern notions. The strong rule
decayed with the failure of the king's personal vigour. The ministers
of Edward's dotage could not hold France nor even keep England quiet.
England had grown impatient of the rule of a despot, though she was not
yet able to govern herself after a constitutional fashion. It is in the
incompatibility of the political ideals of royal authority and
constitutional control, not less than in the want of purpose of her
ruler and in the factions of her nobles that the explanation of the
period must be sought. The age of Edward III. has been alternatively
decried and exalted. Both verdicts are true, but neither contains the
whole truth. The explanation of both is to be found in the annals of a
later age.
