English political history between 1272 and 1377 can be organized around three broad themes: the growth of government; the expansion of political participation; and relations between the king and nobles. It is important to start with the royal government itself. Although the three Edwards did not initiate any bold institutional innovations comparable to those of the preceding centuries, they wrung all that they could out of existing institutions in pursuit of their goals. Government was more intrusive because the crown was more ambitious and activist than it had been since the Angevins. War was the primary expression of this ambition. Beginning in the 1280s under Edward I and continuing under his grandson Edward III, England undertook a series of military conquests in Wales, Scotland and France that had far-reaching political consequences. Rather than simply defending their territory, kings sought actively to expand their holdings at their neighbours’ expense. As a result, the crown needed vast resources in the form of funding, men and materials to wage war and had to construct mechanisms capable of raising and organizing those resources.
War arose out of England’s historic, diplomatic and geographic setting. Though England was only one of several kingdoms and principalities in the British Isles, kings of England aspired to lordship or sovereignty over Scotland, Ireland and Wales. English nobles, moreover, carved lordships of their own out of neighbouring territories. As a result, kings were enmeshed in a complex network of relations and expectations that produced both benefits and liabilities. Despite occasional skirmishes, Henry III for the most part had managed these relations peacefully through alliances with neighbouring princes and kings. Edward I radically changed that policy and aggressively asserted what he considered his rights and authority over Wales and Scotland. Edward’s Welsh wars in the 1280s were initially successful, but his interference in the succession to the Scottish throne after it was thrown into question in 1290 and his goal of forcing the Scots to recognize English political superiority led to a series of inconclusive campaigns at the end of his reign. The Scots staunchly refused to be subdued, vigorously asserting their independence into the reign of Edward III and beyond. Because some marcher lords had a vested interest in protecting or extending their lordships, war within the British Isles had some measure of domestic support from the beginning. Repeated campaigns, propaganda and Scottish incursions, moreover, transformed the Scots into England’s bitter enemies and generated further support for war.
If relations with the Welsh, Irish and Scots were to some extent deemed to be of national importance at the beginning of the century, the king’s lordships in France were not then directly significant to most of the English population. The defence of their French patrimony, which by 1272 had been reduced mainly to Gascony, had embroiled English kings in French politics and wars since 1066. They were in the awkward position of being at once sovereigns and suzerains in England and vassals of the king of France for their French territories. The relationship between the king and his Gascon tenants was another source of instability because the Gascons could take disputes with their lord to the king of France for resolution, a situation that English kings found intolerable. Much as he did within England and the British Isles, Edward I worked hard to shore up his lordship in Gascony in the 1280s, but that did not prevent conflict with France from breaking out in 1294 and again in 1324.
Edward III changed tack in 1340 when he claimed the throne of France for himself by right of inheritance through his mother, Queen Isabella. While his motives have been much debated - whether his intent was simply to improve his bargaining position in Gascony or actually to become king of France - their practical effect was to draw England into a generation of warfare in France between 1338 and 1377. In pursuit of his objectives, Edward worked hard to persuade his subjects that France was not just the king’s rival but, along with the Scots with whom France was allied, England’s arch-enemy, threatening, according to his propaganda, England and even the English language. Under Edward’s leadership, war with France shifted dramatically in scale and purpose. What had formerly been a defensive conflict arising out of the king’s position in France as a feudal lord became a national enterprise, in the sense that Edward fashioned it as a contest for the right to rule the French kingdom and in consequence began recruiting and fielding armies of unprecedented size.
The king’s military policies bore heavily on local communities because the increasing scale of royal ambitions required a heightened mobilization for war. In the early middle ages, wars were fought largely by men owing military service and by mercenaries. Beginning in the 1290s, the crown experimented with different systems of recruitment and mobilization, so that under Edward III English armies included sizeable ranks of infantry, archers and others drawn from local communities, paid by the crown and led by noble commanders who contracted with the king for their service. English armies were composed of a broad cross-section of the English and Welsh population, were funded by taxes on local communities, and were provisioned by goods purveyed or purchased from those communities. In the sixty years between 1290 and 1350, the crown levied direct taxes in twenty-eight years with a total yield of over ?1,000,000. Beginning in 1275, moreover, it levied taxes indirectly through customs on wool exports, and whenever it fell into financial difficulty tried to levy additional imposts on wool that came to be known as the ‘maltote’. Finally, the king also experimented with loans and various taxes in kind, especially in wool but also, in 1339, in a variety of products. Throughout the century, therefore, but particularly in the decades 1290-1315 and 1330-60, war put a constant financial strain on the crown, which in turn squeezed all that it could out of its subjects. In addition, the government kept communities informed of its military and diplomatic enterprises through a barrage of propaganda intended to persuade the country of the threat posed to the realm by the Scots and the French and of the valiant efforts of the king and nobility not merely in staving off their enemies but in triumphing over them. By the end of Edward III’s reign, every community in England had been woven into the fabric of wartime governmental support, held together by officials charged with extracting logistical support for war.
War with Scotland and France had other, less obvious but no less profound, political consequences. The military and political ambitions of warlike kings such as Edward I, Edward III and, later, Henry V outstripped the capacity of the government and nation to realize their goals. Edward I and Edward III scored stunning victories at Berwick (1296), Falkirk (1298), Halidon Hill (1330), Neville’s Cross (1346), Crecy and Calais (1346-7) and Poitiers (1356). Despite these triumphs English armies could not completely overcome their foes, and England could not fully meet the costs of trying to do so. Yet, repeated campaigns over many years made war the status quo for generations of nobles, knights and many others, who profited from the king’s policies, whether through patronage, payments or battlefield rewards, and who therefore had a vested interest in seeing war continue. In addition, through military service, purveyance and taxes most of the country experienced war first - or second-hand. War had generated a momentum that was hard to brake. It created expectations that successors to bellicose kings had difficulty meeting, and military failure helped to sap confidence in leaders who failed to achieve success on the battlefield. Edward II’s defeat at Bannockburn in 1314 and his repeated failure to marshal a successful campaign against the Scots, who did as they pleased along the borders, undermined confidence in him as king. Similarly, the humiliating debacle at
Stanhope Park in 1327, in which Edward III and his army were outwitted by the Scots, and the disastrous Treaty of Northampton of the following year, which was seen as conceding far too much to the Scots, helped to erode support for the regime that replaced Edward II.
War was not the only force driving governmental expansion. On the one hand, from above the king was determined to pursue his rights as sovereign and overlord vis-a-vis his subjects and tenants. After his return in 1274 from crusade, Edward I launched searching inquests to see how his kingdom had been governed, how officials had conducted themselves, and how well his rights and authority were being upheld. The eyres periodically pursued similar inquiries, along with a broad investigation of legal issues, while inquests by local officials later took over from the eyre much of the work of investigating and safeguarding the king’s prerogatives. On the other hand, from below the king’s subjects clamoured for order, redress and remedies, prompting the king to dispatch hundreds of teams of justices, officials and local notables to investigate problems brought to his attention by individuals or communities. For a half-century beginning in the 1290s, moreover, parliamentary petitions, debate in the Commons and popular songs and poetry consistently expressed anxiety about crime, corruption and lawlessness. One of the prime duties of a Christian king was to provide law, justice and order for his subjects, and English kings responded to these popular concerns by designing special legal commissions to address disorder, such as oyer and terminer, gaol delivery and trailbaston. The same spirit of judicial experimentation led to the gradual development of the office of the justices of the peace. The first steps were hesitant, as the crown sometimes commissioned panels of justices to investigate crimes and indict criminals while at other times giving them the power to judge cases. Furthermore, Edward often associated nobles and royal judges with the early commissions of the peace, so that they did not act independently of the royal government. It was only after 1348, and the subsequent enactment of the labour legislation in 1350-1, that the crown consistently gave the justices of the peace power both to indict and judge. It was once argued that the birth of the justices of the peace was a defeat for the crown because Edward III ceded to communities and especially to the gentry of those communities broad judicial authority in return for their consent to taxation so that he could realize his military ambitions. In fact, the royal government had for over a century called on knights and wealthy freemen to staff the county offices of sheriff, escheator, coroner, bailiff or constable, as well as to sit as jurors or suitors in royal and local courts. The establishment of the keepers and justices of the peace was a logical extension of the king’s reliance on local worthies to represent the king locally. Even if the delegation of royal authority enhanced the personal power and prestige of these officials within their communities, the development of the justices of the peace should properly be seen as another aspect of the expanding range of governmental authority in the fourteenth century, building on the precedents of the thirteenth century.
The increasing complexity of the government and the expanding range of its activities demanded continual attention to administrative, financial and legal details, raising the critical question of to whom the king should turn for advice in formulating and executing policy. Responsibility for overseeing the government and advising the king officially fell to the king’s council, which took many forms in this period, from a core of chief ministers and officials to expanded meetings with representatives from groups with interests in the council’s business. Like all areas of government, the council’s work became more formalized in response to the growing amount and scope of the business it transacted. Mobilization for war, however, tended to concentrate authority and decision making in the household offices around the king and in the hands of a few ministers constantly in the king’s company. This tendency was especially marked in the critical area of finance. Because the mechanisms for the assessment and collection of taxes were cumbersome, uncertain and slow, in contrast to war’s immediate and insatiable need for money, the king depended heavily on loans and creditors to keep his armies in the field and on the household to collect and disburse funds. The handful of ministers and financiers responsible for this work, men such as William de Kilsby or William de la Pole, were deeply involved in the financial operations of government and were seen by their opponents as exercising a disproportionate degree of influence over policy. Furthermore, in the confined world of the royal court, there were many opportunities to bend the king’s ear and to exert influence informally, provoking worries about the proper exercise of counsel and consent.
These anxieties were not new. The nobility or ‘barons’ saw themselves as the king’s natural counsellors and as the proper spokesmen on behalf of the ‘community of the realm’, or the country as a whole, a view they asserted with particular vehemence during political crises. When the king’s policies were unobjectionable and government functioned properly, as was often the case under Edward I and Edward III, baronial worries and demands for counsel receded. Yet, whenever the king’s policies seemed to weigh too heavily on the country or the king acted in a manner they deemed prejudicial to their interests or the interests of the community of the realm, the barons reacted by devising forms of counciliar control over the government and the king’s actions. Their intention to restrict the levying of taxes, the expenditure of funds, the appointment of officials, membership on the royal council or other governmental activities raised profound questions about the degree of freedom a monarch should exercise and ultimately about the nature of monarchy. Their efforts always elicited a sharp response from the king. This kind of confrontation occurred in 1296-7, 1311, 1339-41 and again in the closing years of Edward III’s reign.
World History
