As the history of the justices of the peace demonstrates, a second theme of the political history of this period was a broadening of participation in government and politics. Once again war, through the crown’s drive to gain political and material support for its military ambitions, was the primary engine behind this expansion, but it was not the only force working to increase public participation in administration and debate. Communities themselves sought a broader role in order to promote their own goals as well as to help them maintain local order.
England was loosely organized into a hierarchy of self-governing communities, stretching from villages through hundreds, boroughs and counties to the kingdom as a whole. Each had a rich political life of its own, and the substantial body of moralistic and protest poetry that survives from this century shows that there was a lively popular debate about topical issues such as war, taxation, law and order, wealth and poverty, and status and privilege. The literature ranges from popular entertainment such as the Robin Hood ballads to the compositions of Langland and Gower, but all of it displays a keen awareness of politics and ideology, informed by both Christian values and secular principles growing out of the long tradition of political reform in England. Local affairs, moreover, could ignite disputes and conflicts that required the attention of royal officials or even the king. The interchange between local and national communities was therefore of deep political importance, and it increased significantly after 1272.
One of the most notable features of the political history of England under the three Edwards is the development of parliament, which became the customary site for such interchange. The baronial reformers in the mid-thirteenth century had called for meetings of parliament with representatives from the counties as a means of exercising control over the monarchy and gaining consent to critical issues such as legal change and taxation. The term ‘parliament’ at that time did not have a precise, institutional meaning but was used to refer to a variety of gatherings. As in other ways, Edward I acted on the baronial precedent and began summoning parliament on a regular basis in 1275, after which the term gained greater specificity.
Parliament met only when the king ordered, and the king summoned parliament first and foremost to conduct his own business. That business could be highly varied: justice, diplomacy, war, taxation or governance in general. In assembling parliament the king sought a public venue for gathering advice about difficult issues, hearing complaints, gaining compliance to pressing issues such as taxation or war, and broadly publicizing decisions. Parliament also provided an opportunity to conduct his subjects’ business, especially by hearing private petitions. Beginning in 1275, the crown invited individuals and communities to present petitions in parliament, giving a wide cross-section of the population an opportunity to bring issues before the king and lords in a public forum. Petitions arose out of legal problems that could not be addressed through the routine system of writs and courts or from complaints about the conduct of royal and private officials, which may have been one of Edward I’s objectives in making the invitation. Petitions brought to the crown’s attention issues that could be corrected through legislation, so that the formulation and enactment of statutes became another accepted feature of parliamentary business and one of the most important accomplishments of the century.
The forms, functions and personnel of parliament gained definition slowly, under the pressure of events. In the early years petitions played a more significant part in parliament’s business than taxation, which only began to take on real importance in the 1290s when war in Scotland and France forced Edward to look for extraordinary means of financing his campaigns. But not all taxes were agreed to in parliament, and not all parliaments contained representatives from boroughs and counties. During the early years of Edward Ill’s reign, many features of parliament became institutionalized. The deposition of Edward II in 1327, though planned by a small cohort of nobles around Edward’s wife and son, was carried out in parliament with the participation and consent of the lords and the Commons to ensure that the act had the support of the entire political community. Edward III, therefore, came to the throne in circumstances in which it was assumed that parliament was to be the prime occasion for debating and determining questions of national importance. Rather than seeing that situation as a liability or resisting it, Edward seized the opportunity and worked through parliament to gain his own ends. Parliament met regularly and was routinely composed of officials, lords and Commons. A parliamentary peerage, composed of the greater lay lords whom the king summoned individually to sit in parliament, began to take shape, and the summons eventually became a hereditary right. At first, the names of those so summoned fluctuated from parliament to parliament and included a few knight bannerets along with titled nobles, but by 1377 the list had stabilized to form a political elite of some seventy families entitled to participate in parliament. Along with the peerage, the spiritual lords, comprising the archbishops, bishops and select abbots and priors, received summonses to parliament. These peers formed the core of the king’s council, or House of Lords. The Commons likewise stabilized into a distinct body, composed of the knights of the shire, two members from each county, and representatives from particular boroughs. As the century wore on, they gained greater confidence at speaking out on crucial issues affecting their communities. Representatives of the parish clergy had been summoned to parliament in its early stages, but after the 1330s they ceased to attend regularly and instead sat in Convocation, a clerical assembly parallel to parliament.
Interestingly, in the later years of Edward’s reign as parliament became more of an institution, it actually met less frequently and private petitions played much less of a role in its business than they had at the beginning of the century. The common petition, formulated and put forward by the Commons, became the principal vehicle for expressing local grievances and the basis for legislation. If in 1347 the Commons diffidently begged off when Edward asked their advice about how to prosecute the war in France, by the Good Parliament of 1376 it had grown bold enough to attack the corruption of the king’s mistress and courtiers, impeach them and purge the government of what the Commons regarded as their baleful influence. This moment also marked the point at which the speaker of the Commons emerged out of obscurity and became an accepted figure of parliamentary proceedings.
The Commons’ attack on royal courtiers and ministers in 1376 dramatized a perennial source of tension between the crown and communities and shows how the broadening of political participation affected political debate in England. Throughout the century the government came under intense criticism from individuals and communities angered by corrupt justices and officials, who could be swayed by bribes and influence to profit themselves or bend the law and administration for the benefit of their friends, lords or benefactors. The crown worried that misconduct could lead to social unrest and also distrusted its agents, blaming them for the breakdown in law and order or for its inability to raise sufficient resources to fight its wars. Accordingly, Edward I launched an investigation of his officials in 1298; Edward III ordered a sweeping inquiry into the conduct of local administrators in 1339 and asked people to bring stories of wrongdoing to his personal attention; and Richard II commissioned similar inquests following the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
Many complaints against officials were channelled through parliament. The Commons frequently expressed dissatisfaction with the king’s officials and pressed the king to reform his administration in ways that suited their self-interest. They wanted an end to corruption and maintenance. They chafed at having outsiders imposed on them and insisted that county offices be filled with men drawn from ranks of county society and therefore accountable to them. They wanted governmental functions, especially law and order, managed within the counties. This dialogue underscores the increasing presence of the Commons in political discussions to the point that they, rather than the barons, came to be regarded as representing and voicing the interests of the ‘community of the realm’ as a whole. Yet, while local government could be a source of tension between the king and parliament, it was also a subject on which they shared common beliefs, such as the importance of maintaining social order and developing a corps of efficient and responsible local officials.
While political participation broadened under the three Edwards, the greater lords remained the dominant figures in society and politics, and their relationship with the king was most often the critical factor in determining the contours of the political landscape. ‘The substance and nature of the Crown is principally in the person of the king as head, and in the peers of the realm as members, who hold of him by a certain homage, and especially the prelates, such that one thing cannot be severed from the Crown without dividing the kingdom.’1 Bishop Grandisson’s words of 1336 were echoed throughout the century in different forms, all of which expressed the same idea that the stability of the kingdom depended primarily on solidarity between the king and nobility. They were mutually dependent on one another: the crown on the nobility for resources and support, and the nobility on the crown for patronage, judgement and leadership. While they expected this relationship to be stable, it was subject to numerous shocks, which could create distrust and even enmity between the king and some or all of the nobles.
The politically influential segment of English society was fairly compact. At the top stood the peerage, which included titled nobles, earls and dukes and comprised about seventy families. Just below them were the larger class of what historians have called the gentry, ranging from wealthy knights and squires at the upper end down to gentlemen at the bottom, where the class merged with the peasantry. These men ran the county courts, became royal officials such as justices of the peace, and represented their communities in parliament. Many of them were also bound to greater lords through tenure, contracts or office-holding, wore their livery, and served as members of their retinues or affinities. Historians have produced various estimates of the size of this class, but there were probably 2,500 politically significant families, or about fifty to sixty per county. As Grandisson pointed out, alongside these lay families stood the clerical lords, the archbishops, bishops, abbots and priors of the greater houses, who not only exercised considerable power within the church but sat in parliament, served in royal government, and were wealthy landlords as well. They shared many of the same concerns as their lay counterparts and had the added responsibility of defending the church’s liberties and independence.
The power of this small community of nobles, both lay and clerical, rested on its wealth and privileges, on the public and private authority it exercised, and on the force that it commanded through retinues. All lords of whatever stature had some kind of following, whether it consisted only of a few household servants and squires or, as in the case of great lords such as the earls and dukes of Lancaster, hundreds of servants, lawyers, officials, knights and squires. They were bound to their lord through various instruments including the traditional ties of homage and tenure, simple annuities or sophisticated contracts known as indentures that specified the terms of service and reward. This system of contractual retaining, or ‘bastard feudalism’ as it has been named by historians, was a fundamental feature of English society, and so too of
English politics. The retinue provided a lord with service to run his household and estate, to fight in war and to demonstrate publicly his power. Retainers represented their lords’ interests in myriad ways, sometimes by overawing local officials and juries, while they in turn expected their lord to use his power and authority to support them in their own causes. In times of political tension lords assembled their affinities for a show of force against their opponents. By the end of the century, therefore, retaining was becoming a critical political issue because the Commons saw it as a primary cause of disorder in the countryside, even though many of the gentry, from whom the Commons was largely derived, themselves belonged to noble affinities.
Despite the power that these lords deployed, they depended on the crown to secure their titles and inheritance. Nobles and gentry derived their wealth from land, rents, courts and markets. Their estates varied greatly in size and could be depleted or fragmented through indebtedness, a failure of heirs, division among heiresses or forfeiture. Because few inheritances descended intact over many generations, landowners looked to the king to help them by enacting laws (e. g. De Donis Con-ditionalibus, 1285), by providing for the descent of lands and by arranging marriages, which could help consolidate landed wealth. Furthermore, royal patronage, whether in the form of titles, offices, privileges, money, wardships, marriages or other favours, was an important source of status and income, especially for newcomers or those at the lower end of the elite. Since only kings could create titled nobles or summon an individual to parliament, entry into the very highest ranks of society depended entirely on the king’s favour. Furthermore, because titles passed only in the male line they were subject to the accidents of birth and death and so would have eventually died out without the creation of new nobles by royal grants. Edward I gave out few titles, and in 1307 there were eleven earls. Edward II created five new earls during his reign, but politics and death took an extraordinary toll, so that there were only eight earls in 1327. In 1337 Edward III took an unprecedented step in making six new earls. Altogether, he gave eighteen men, six of them in his own family, new titles, adding ‘duke’ to the repertoire. Edward rewarded men loyal to him, binding them into a tight community, and also honoured his many sons. Nevertheless, when he died in 1377 there were still only ten titled nobility.
Aristocrats also expected the king to provide strong leadership and effective governance to maintain the social order on which they depended for their wealth and pre-eminence and a stable framework within which estates, markets and trade could flourish. Like the Commons, they had a keen interest in maintaining law and order and in making sure that royal officials performed their functions properly, as long as they did not interfere with the nobles’ interests and authority.
Several points in their relationship with the king and his government were highly sensitive, with the potential to create friction. The nobility did not a priori oppose the expansion of royal government, and often enthusiastically supported royal ambitions. They favoured war against Scotland and France when they were partners in military leadership, and so did not necessarily object to the demands made on the country to fight those wars. If the king, however, demanded too much of them, as in 1296 when Edward I ordered them to perform extraordinary military service in Flanders, they reacted swiftly and angrily. The influence of financiers and officials close to the king, resulting from the massive increase in governmental activity associated with war, made nobles uneasy because it showed how little of government routine was subject to their control and how much power royal officials exercised on their own. Nobles also grew nervous whenever the scale of royal demands weighed so heavily on local communities and individuals that they threatened to rebel or could not meet their landlords’ obligations. In 1296-7, 1301, 1311, 1339-40 and the 1360s they expressed what were probably genuine worries that the king’s taxation, purveyances and other fiscal burdens were leading to impoverishment, disorder or rebellion. For the same reasons, they also took an interest in the conduct of the king’s officials, whether in central or local government, and were responsive to calls for the correction of misconduct. Their uneasiness about the impact of royal demands dovetailed with their apprehensions about patronage and influence at court. The distribution of favours bore directly on their economic and social interests, so they watched closely whom the king rewarded and became restive if the king did not distribute his patronage evenhandedly. The danger was at once social, fiscal and political. From the nobles’ viewpoint, unworthy men might rise in wealth and status through royal favour, the king might deplete his resources through immoderate gifts, and mere officials might displace nobles from their proper place as the king’s natural counsellors and unduly influence royal policy. In other words, while the nobility and gentry ordinarily saw themselves as allies of the king and his government and willingly collaborated with his policies, they were wary of the king’s power, and even a small divergence in intentions, personality or perceptions could spark opposition.
As in the past, concerns about royal policies and behaviour spurred the barons to exercise their presumed right of counsel and consent. They measured the king’s policies against a set of simple but very powerful ideals about the proper functions and goals of royal government and about their place in the political and social order. Yet, while they expressed a desire to be involved in decision making, they were neither bureaucrats nor constitutional experts and had no intention of attending continually to the daily business of government. They did not always attend parliament, in fact some seldom attended, although the right of attendance was one of the few privileges that defined them as a group. Because of the potential impact of royal policies on their interests, they wanted to exert influence over decision making without having to devote all their time to it.
In keeping with other developments during the century, parliament became the primary instrument for exercising institutional influence over king, court and administration. The best example of this change is the Ordinances of 1311, the most significant expression of political reform between 1272 and the actions of the Good Parliament in 1376. The Ordainers, a group of twenty-one nobles, clerics and officials, called for far-reaching reforms to curtail the influence of financiers and courtiers, improve royal finances and limit the personal, household government that had developed as a result of Edward I’s wars. They declared that parliament was to convene at least once or twice a year in order to treat difficult judicial cases and that controversial issues, such as the declaration of war, the king’s leaving the country, gifts of royal land, the appointment of the king’s chief officials and complaints against royal officials could be settled only by consent of the baronage and that their consent was to be given in parliament. Edward II deeply resented the limitations that the Ordinances imposed on him and drove the country into civil war resisting them. In 1340-1, parliament once again asserted control over the appointment and supervision of the king’s chief ministers and counsellors, but Edward III was able to revoke the statute without dividing the country because, unlike his father, he had the support of most of the nobility. These experiments laid the foundation for the dramatic attack by the Commons on the king’s ministers and favourites in the Good Parliament of 1376 and resulted in the creation of parliamentary impeachment, by which parliament punished and removed royal officials from office. Throughout the middle ages, kings fiercely resisted baronial attempts to restrict their choice of ministers, while the barons saw such efforts as essential to maintaining their influence in policy making, limiting arbitrary governance and protecting their interests. What was new in the fourteenth century was the prominent role of parliament in these disputes.
The growth of parliament and the expansion of the political community that resulted therefore suited the interests of the lords. While the Commons in parliament gradually took over from the nobility their role as the representatives of the community of the realm, members of the landed elite were still considered the king’s natural counsellors and those with the leading voice in both council and parliament. Parliament offered an opportunity to address issues of common concern to that community and to communicate among and across elites in towns, counties and kingdom. It represented, in sum, an institutional expression of the potential for collaboration among the king, the nobility and the representatives of the community of the realm, with the king and lords occupying a privileged position at the centre of deliberations. This broad representation of the political community gave parliamentary policies and enactments tremendous force and potentially buttressed the power of these elites. A good illustration of this principle was the social and economic legislation enacted by parliament in the wake of the Black Death in 1348-9. The sudden drop in population and the resulting decline in rents and rise in wages, along with a steep rise in prices, seriously compromised the wealth and authority of landlords and employers alike. The landed community reacted by enacting legislation, such as the Statute of Labourers (1351), sumptuary legislation (1363), price regulation and laws against vagrancy that aimed at turning back the clock to enforce the favourable conditions that they had enjoyed prior to the outbreak of plague. In the long term, this cohesion may have had the most striking consequences for the gentry, who, through their service as justices of the peace, significantly broadened their role as agents of the crown and became even more oriented to royal service than they had been in the past, but in the short run it served the economic interests of the nobility, who used the power of the state to bolster their faltering seigniorial authority in the face of demographic change and its economic consequences.
If the king, barons and parliament tended generally to work together towards a common interest, why did the political community fragment and become so disordered at times? The long period of unrest in the generation between 1297 and the 1330s shows how political relations could degenerate into violent confrontation. Trouble began when nobles balked at the scale of Edward I’s extraordinary levels for taxation and military service to sustain his wars. In the Confirmation of the Charters (1297) and again in the Articuli super cartas (1300), they extracted promises from Edward to limit and obtain consent for his exactions and to reform governmental abuses, but these solutions proved to be only temporary. Edward was intransigent. In his last years he pressed futile warfare against the Scots, levied burdensome taxes and still fell deeper into debt.
By 1307, therefore, the barons had grown wary of royal policies and evasions and so compelled Edward II to swear in his coronation oath to uphold the laws agreed to by the community of the realm. The nobles were also suspicious of Edward himself. He was out of step with the noble society he was expected to lead, for although he appeared to be a handsome warrior, he had little taste for war, placed too much faith in a few favourites and was too extravagant in his gifts to courtiers, such as Piers Gaveston, whom the nobles despised. Edward’s profligacy seemed to them dangerous, at a time when his finances were precarious and the threat from Scotland had not subsided. The Ordinances of 1311 summed up the critical political concerns: ‘through evil and deceptive counsel our lord the king and all his subjects are dishonoured in all lands and in addition the Crown is in many respects reduced and dismembered, and his lands of Gascony, Ireland and Scotland on the point of being lost. . ., and his kingdom of England on the point of rebelling because of oppressions, prises and molestations.’2 They took practical steps to correct these problems and curtail the king’s wilfulness, by remedying abuses, banishing favourites such as Gaveston and controlling the appointment of officials. But in doing so, they affronted Edward’s honour and he dug in his heels.
The failure of the barons between 1297 and 1311 to secure lasting policies they deemed acceptable underscores the fundamental weaknesses of the medieval constitution. There was no institutional or legal device for vetoing a royal policy or for forcing the king to adhere to a policy the barons devised. They could threaten to use force against the king, in hopes of persuading him to accept their demands voluntarily and give them the force of law. If he refused, then they either had to abandon their programme or take up arms, as they had against John and Henry III. Furthermore, powerful emotional forces within the political community, such as personality, ambition, competition and honour, could exacerbate political differences, drive individuals apart, encourage intransigence and ignite violence. Edward II’s manifest unsuitability as king, his inability to forge camaraderie with his nobles and his stubborn refusal to accept any reforms thus created a volatile political situation.
Civil war had almost erupted in 1297, and it did break out in 1321-2. The capture and execution of Gaveston in 1312, after his unauthorized return to England, destroyed relations between Edward and some of the nobility, especially his cousin Thomas of Lancaster. Edward deeply resented Gaveston’s murder and waited for the opportunity to take revenge. Meetings of parliament provided occasions to display military might. Magnates appeared with armed retinues, and violence sometimes flared between rival factions. Thomas of Lancaster refused to attend parliament in 1316, claiming that he feared his enemies conspired to kill him. A vicious cycle of political instability began all over again: Edward favoured new men, the Despensers, the barons banished them, and this time, when the favourites returned, the barons waged civil war. Edward seized the opportunity to execute Lancaster and many of his adherents. Despite his triumph, Edward was not secure precisely because his personality and policies did not change. He only managed to deepen antipathy to himself and his favourites. His estranged wife Isabella and a company of exiled nobles and foreigners easily toppled the government in 1326 and executed Edward Il’s favourites and supporters. Edward III came to the throne in January 1327, and his father was murdered soon after. Most people, eager for peace and prosperity, welcomed the change, but Isabella and her lover Mortimer, who controlled the young king, dashed such hopes by manipulating the government for selfish motives just as Edward and his courtiers had done. In 1328 Henry of Lancaster came to parliament at Salisbury with an armed force threatening to overthrow Mortimer and Isabella, but they survived the challenge only to fall in a palace coup in 1330.
Mortimer’s execution brought the long period of factionalization and war to an end. There were periods of political disagreement between Edward III, the barons and parliament, notably in 1340-1 and in the later 1340s and 1350s when the costs of war again became pressing issues. None of these quarrels, however, matched the danger and acrimony of the crises between 1297 and 1330. Only in the 1370s, when the war in France had turned against England and a court clique controlled royal finances and policies, did the threat of political agitation loom once again. It was then that parliament stepped in and took decisive action in the Good Parliament.
The virulence of politics between 1297 and 1330 raises the question of the extent to which personality or institutions determined political outcomes in this century. There were powerful incentives to maintain a cooperative relationship between the king and nobles. A strong government, an effective legal system, a stable coinage and military security created a robust framework within which landlords could exploit their lands and tenants, trade could flourish and the crown could pursue its military ambitions. Institutions such as the court, royal council and parliament provided a common ground upon which the king and barons could meet and negotiate their interests, while lordship bound them in a common legal and social order. They shared an ideology about the nature of the political order and their respective roles within that order, and could agree that they shared responsibility for maintaining social order.
Despite these centripetal forces, relations between the king and magnates carried the potential for conflict. Nobles and gentry were acquisitive, seeking to amass property and consolidate their holdings, sometimes at the expense of their peers or neighbours. Landed society at court and in the counties could be highly competitive, producing friction and feuds. They jealously guarded whatever wealth and privileges they had and their finely tuned sense of honour could impel them to violence if they believed they had been wronged. They lived in a community organized for war and were accustomed to using force or the threat of force to get their way. Kings, too, valued their personal honour, did not want their sovereignty or prerogatives infringed upon in any way, and would use force when challenged. Thus, much depended on how the king reacted to these conditions, and how his actions were evaluated by the political community: whether he took sides in private disputes, whether he distributed his patronage in a manner that seemed equitable, or whether he asserted his royal authority properly and to the benefit of the nobles and gentry.
The three Edwards were all highly conscious and protective of their royal authority and dignity, though they expressed their regality in different ways according to their personalities. Edward I tended to be austere and imperious, Edward II indulgent and petulant, and Edward III expansive and collegial. Edward I’s stubborn determination to crush the Scots at all costs worsened tensions in 1297, while Edward Il’s manifest incapacity caused exasperation and anger among the nobles. There was an inherent tension within this political order between the king’s will and baronial interests, which could be intensified by personal characteristics. Because the political community was so small, personal differences could get out of hand and seriously jeopardize political order. To dampen conflict and maintain peace among the powerful at court, a king had to appear to be evenhanded and open to advice so that he could adjudicate potentially disruptive contests. Edward III’s largesse, his love of tournaments, celebration and war, and his disinclination to punish aristocratic wrongdoers too harshly appealed to the nobility and laid the basis for a unified court. There was, therefore, considerable interplay between historical forces and personal idiosyncrasies in determining the course of events. It is not the case that the king’s personality alone can explain the extraordinary violence unleashed in the decade between 1320 and 1330, as factions clawed at one another to gain predominance at court, or the remarkable solidarity that allowed England to make dramatic military advances at the expense of the French and Scots in the 1340s and 1350s. English political and social institutions carried the potential for both profound factionalism and cohesion, and the characters of the king and nobles could be instrumental in realizing either.
World History
