A School History of England/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
THE THREE EDWARDS, 1272–1377
Edward I, II and III (notice the grand old Saxon name; we are all one people now) may be called Edward the Lawgiver, Edward the Poltroon, Edward the Knight. The greatest of these was Edward I.
Edward I, 1272–1307.He ranks with the half-dozen greatest ‘makers of England’, with Alfred, William the Conqueror, Henry II, Henry VIII, Elizabeth and Victoria the Great. I should, indeed, say ‘makers of Britain’, for it was Edward who planned, and almost carried out, the union of the whole island under one crown. It was he who gave the abiding shape to our Parliament, who dealt the first successful blow to the pretensions of the Pope, and who first armed his soldiers with the all-conquering long-bow. His care for our coast defences was an example to his descendants. His legal reforms were hardiy less than those of Henry Il, and, at the end of his reign, the law of England and the law courts of England had taken the shape that they bore down to the nineteenth century.
His character,Edward I was a brave, truthful, honourable man, of rather narrow sympathies, and could be very cruel to his foes. He had learned much from his father's muddled reign; he would engage in no rash foreign adventures to please the Pope or any one else. and his task.Of course, he must defend his one foreign possession, Gascony; and he fortified it very strongly. Occasionally he was obliged to fight King Philip IV of France, but that was because that cunning gentleman was trying to swallow not only Gascony but also little Flanders, which ,_p.84.jpg)
Attempt to conquer Scotland, 1294-1307.With Scotland Edward just failed, and his failure brought a terrible retribution on both countries. For nearly a century before this time Scotland had been at peace with England, and its southern half had been growing richer and happier. Prosperity of Scotland before Edward I’s wars.Many Norman and English barons owned lands on both sides of the border and so were ‘vassals’ of the Kings of both countries. Even the Scottish King held a small English earldom, and for that he was, of course, the ‘vassal’ of King Edward. But the crown of Scotland he held from God alone, as Edward held the crown of England.
Contest for the Scottish crown, 1290.King Alexander III of Scotland died in 1286, leaving an infant grand-daughter known as the ‘Maid of Norway’. Edward at once proposed to marry her to his eldest son. Nothing could have been better for both kingdoms, and all reasonable Scots would have welcomed a union. But in 1290 the baby queen died, and at once there was a dispute for the crown between several great Scottish barons. They appealed to Edward, and in their appeal acknowledged him to be ‘overlord’ of Scotland. He gave his decision in favour of John Balliol, who was duly crowned at Scone as King of Scotland.
Edward’s attack on Scotland, 1294.Then, in his new capacity as overlord, Edward began to bully Balliol and to treat Scotland as if it were already a part of England. Balliol was a weak creature, and threw himself into the arms of Philip of France, who saw a splendid opportunity of diverting Edward from Flanders and Gascony by aiding the Scots. So was founded the great alliance between France and Scotland which was to last for over two hundred years. Edward thereon declared Balliol deposed and sent men to conquer Scotland. He only succeeded in rousing every Scottish heart to desperate resistance. William Wallace.Of this resistance a small landowner, called William Wallace, was the first hero. Edward, with his mailed knights and his terrible archers, gave Wallace and the Scots a severe thrashing at Falkirk (1298), but he could not hunt down a whole nation in that wild hill country. During the nine years between the battle of Falkirk and Edward’s death it became a war to the knife between the two nations, which ten years before had been ready to lie down like lambs together.
The ‘Border’ and the Border-wars, 1300–1550.The result was that, for fifty miles on each side of the Border, the land became a desert, through which swept, almost yearly, fierce raids from either country; and this state of things continued far into the sixteenth century. Every Scot whom Edward caught he would hang as a traitor (Wallace was hanged in 1305), which was quite a new practice in foreign or even in civil war, wherein there had been a great deal of ‘live and let live’ on either side. Like other narrow and upright men, Edward failed to see that those who resisted him could be as upright as himself. Yet he was such a good soldier and so patient that he had very nearly finished off the conquest of all Southern Scotland when he died on his last campaign in 1307. ‘Carry my bones into battle against them,’ were his last instructions, ‘and on my tomb carve “Edward, the hammer of the Scots”.’ Robert Bruce, King of Scotland, 1306.But it was too late; Scotland had just found a deliverer in Robert Bruce, a baron of Norman descent, who was crowned at Scone in 1306 as King Robert I.
Edward I’s Parliaments.Great as a warrior and imperialist, Edward was even greater as a lawgiver and organizer. All his laws obtained the full sanction of the now regularly constituted ‘House of Lords’. The House of Commons generally met at the same time, and was made up of over two hundred borough-members and seventy-four knights of the shire. It had, at first, no share in the law-making, but it constantly petitioned in favour of particular laws. The clergy, after a short struggle, preferred not to be represented in Parliament except by their bishops and great abbots, who sat with the Lords; but Edward allowed them to keep two assemblies called ‘Convocations’, one in the Archbishopric of Canterbury and one in that of York. These bodies voted taxes for the clergy to pay, just as Lords and Commons voted them for the laymen to pay.
His Law-giving.The House of Lords also became the chief law court to which you could ‘appeal’ from all the three ‘common’ law courts, which were now fixed at Westminster with a separate staff of judges for each. In some cases, if you couldn't get justice anywhere else, you might go to the King himself, who would order his Chancellor to look into your case; and that was the beginning of the ‘Court of Chancery’. The Chancellor was the greatest official in the Kingdom and kept the King’s ‘Great Seal’, with which all legal documents must be sealed. One of the most useful laws which Edward made was called ‘Mortmain’, forbidding people to leave more lands to the Church, which was growing a little too powerful. Another was the ‘Statute of Winchester’, a great measure for compelling all men to help in keeping the peace; it created ‘police-constables’ (with whom, as friends or foes, most boys are still familiar) in every town and village. Another was a law allowing the free sale and division of great estates of land. His heavy taxes.In all his laws, as in all his wars, we may say that Edward, like Henry Il, took his people into his confidence, which is the secret of good government. It was expensive, as all good government must be; and, as no one likes paying taxes, there was once a sort of outbreak, both of barons and clergy, against the expense of it. Edward was very angry, but he gave way and confirmed Magna Charta, with the additional promise added that he would take no new taxes without consent of his full Parliament.
Riches of England; growth of wool.He kept his promise. ‘Pactum serva’ (Keep troth) was his motto. Indeed the country was now able to bear heavy taxes. Early in the twelfth century an order of monks called ‘Cistercians’ had begun to devote themselves to breeding sheep on a great scale, in order to sell wool; and England at the end of the thirteenth century was the greatest wool-growing country in the world. We did not yet know how to weave fine cloth, The wool trade with Flanders.so our wool was all exported to Flanders, and Parliament said that every sack that was sent there should pay the King 6s. 8d. The ‘Flemings’ (men of Flanders) wove the cloth and sent it all over Europe. This trade made it more important than ever for our kings to keep the sea clear of pirates, and Edward worked hard at this task. There were other rich trades, such as that in wine with Bordeaux, and in furs and leather with North Germany; foreign merchants had to pay the King something for leave to come to sell and buy, for as yet there were very few English merchant-ships.
Edward quarrels with the Pope, 1296.Edward I’s quarrel with the clergy was a very short Edward and simple affair. The English Church had been long growing more and more a part of the nation and less and less dependent on the Pope. But still the Pope was the head of all European churches, and had to be obeyed if possible. In 1296 Pope Boniface VIII startled the whole of Europe by absolutely forbidding any clergyman to pay any taxes to any king. It was only a few years since Edward had got his regular system of taxing the clergy comfortably arranged. He and the King of France rose in wrath against this absurd suggestion. Edward simply told his clergy that he would put them ‘out of law’ (i.e. withdraw all legal protection from them) if they obeyed the Pope; and he seized all their wool by way of precaution. They very soon gave way. The King of France went much further; The decay of the popes, 1300–1500.he sent men to Italy who maltreated the haughty Pope, and the Pope died, perhaps in consequence of the rough handling he got. He put a creature of his own on the Papal throne, and compelled him to come and live in, or close to France. For seventy years this ‘Captivity’ of popes lasted (1305–78), and, as England was at war with France for much of that time, the respect of Englishmen for a French Pope was naturally slight. After the ‘Captivity’ came the ‘Schism’ (division) (1378–1445), during which there were two and sometimes three persons, each calling himself Pope. In fact the old Church of the Middle Ages was fast going downhill.
Death of Edward I, 1307.Edward’s death closes the best period of these ‘Middle Ages’. From that time to the Reformation the country, except in material wealth, did not improve. Even the glorious foreign wars of Edward III brought in the long run more harm than good to England.
Edward II, 1307–27.Edward II (‘the Poltroon’) was a most impossible person, heartless, ignorant, extravagant, cruel and weak-minded. His idleness and extravagance.Men rubbed their eyes and said, ‘Is this creature the son of “Pactum serva”?’ He gave up the Scottish war at once, and, when in 1314 he was obliged to take it up again, his enormous army got a most thorough thrashing from the Scottish spearmen at Bannockburn. He hung on the neck of a low-class Gascon favourite, who made fun of the sober English barons till they caught and killed him. The Earl of Lancaster.Edward afterwards took a fearful revenge on such barons as he could catch, especially on his cousin Earl Thomas of Lancaster. Thus began a feud between the Crown and this man's family, which ended in the overthrow of Edward’s great-grandson Richard II and eventually in the civil ‘Wars of the Roses’.
Decay of the baronage, 1300–1500.The barons grew worse as well as the King—for no one class in a country can be bad without the others suffering; they used the meetings of Parliament to carry on their quarrels. Several of them were of royal descent (from younger sons of Henry III and Edward I); these had married great English heiresses, and began to fight each other for lands and earldoms. The King seemed to be at their mercy. Deposition of Edward II, 1327.At last, in 1327 a general rising, headed by the wicked French wife of Edward, swept him away and set up his son, aged thirteen, as Edward Ill. Edward II was a bad king; but his deposition and murder was a bad job, because there had been no one great national grievance, only a lot of private ones of certain great nobles. He had wasted his life, and in the end was deposed for nothing in particular.
Edward III, 1327–77.Edward III (‘the Knight’), by interesting these barons in his French and Scottish wars, where there were lands and money as well as glory to be gained, snuffed out their quarrels for nearly fifty years; but he, too, had several younger sons who quarrelled with each other after his strong hand was gone.
His character and popularity.He was a man of many different sides of character. He loved pageants and splendour, but he also loved hard knocks in hard fights by sea and land. He was merchant-king, sailor-king, soldier-king; and Parliament’s king too, for he added greatly to the power of the House of Commons, which, when he died, had obtained a full share in all law-making, could call the King’s ministers to account if it thought they were misbehaving, and, in fact, was almost as powerful as the House of Lords. It was always ready to vote Edward enormous sums of money. Finally, Edward thoroughly understood the needs of English trade, and he founded English manufactures; for it was he who invited Flemings to come from Flanders and settle in Norwich and teach us how to weave fine cloth.
Yet Edward has a bad name in history because he The great French war called the Hundred Years’ War, 1338–1453.plunged England into that great war with France which lasted off and on for 100 years. In the beginning, I think, he could hardly help fighting. At the best of times England and France were rather like two fierce, well-fed dogs, the doors of whose kennels looked right into each other. Causes of the war.Edward had wisely begun his reign with several serious attempts to conquer Scotland, and had won a great battle at Halidon Hill in Berwickshire, while, all the time, French help was being poured into Scotland. Then, again, the French never ceased their attempts to eat up our old ally, Flanders, now more than ever necessary to English trade. Finally, no English King of any spirit could refuse to defend Gascony, our one foreign possession. The war opened with a great English victory on the seas, at Sluys off the River Scheldt (1340); and, just before this victory, Edward had been persuaded by the Flemings to come to their help on land and to take the title of Edward claims to be King of France, 1340.‘King of France’. By English law his claim to the French crown would have been a good one, because his mother was the daughter of King Philip IV, but French law did not recognize that a man could inherit a kingdom through his mother. However, from this time forward until 1802, all English Kings called themselves ‘Kings of France’ and put the French Lilies beside the English Leopards on their Royal Standard. This was the most expensive piece of gardening on record, but the war gave the English a long experience in hard knocks which stood them in good stead.
The English nation supports him.Edward had in him a good deal of the ‘knight-errant’, the sort of brave, reckless rider who was supposed to go about seeking adventures, rescuing ladies in distress, and cutting the throats of giants. But he had also a rich kingdom at his back and plenty of fighting barons, knights and freeholders, as greedy of adventures as himself. His subjects, in fact, urged him on and gloried in his splendid series of victories.
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Perhaps you are disappointed that I am not going to describe any of his great battles or rides through France; but I had much rather that you learned why a King of England was fighting in France than the dates of the battle of Crecy (1346) or Poitiers (1356). Battles of Crecy, 1346, Poitiers, 1356.In the open field, up to 1361, we were always victorious. This was because the English leaders, including the The Black Prince; his gallant soldiers.King himself, his noble son called the ‘Black Prince’, Chandos, Manny, Knollys, and many others thoroughly understood ‘tactics’—that is to say, they knew how to move their men on the battle-field. The French used to huddle too many heavy-armed knights, whether on horse or foot, into too small a space, and trusted to crushing the English by mere weight of numbers. But it is an old saying that ‘the thicker the hay is, the more easy it is to mow it’. The French light infantry was contemptible and was despised by its own knights; whereas our sturdy yeomen, Use of the long-bow.armed with the long-bow, were the first line of every English force and could pour in such showers of arrows as neither horses nor men could face. Then our cavalry could charge in after the arrows had blinded or frightened whole battalions of the enemy.
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The pestilence of 1348–9.France had been harried from end to end; but so had Northern England by the Scots. And, though our country was gorged with French gold, it was by no means happy. The war had in fact become a war of plunder, which is the worst kind of war. And in 1348 a pestilence, called the Black Death, had swept off more than a third of the population of England, which early in the century had perhaps reached four millions. The exceedingly dirty habits of our ancestors had frequently caused epidemics of various horrible diseases, but never before upon such a scale. Results of the pestilence on life and labour.No doubt this Plague was brought by travellers and goods coming from the East. All Western Europe suffered, but England perhaps worse than any country. The ‘villein’ class was certainly diminished by one half; and so landowners could no longer get their labour-rents, or, indeed, get their land tilled at all. Prices doubled everywhere, and the few villeins that were left demanded enormous wages for a little work. All the ‘feudal’ ties which had bound village life together were snapped. Men began to wander ‘in search of work’ from the old home where they had been born and where their ancestors had lived from earliest Saxon days. Landowners, finding they could get no reapers or threshers, began to sell their land, or take to sheep farming, which wants few hands. Parliament went on saying: ‘Oh ye villeins, you shall work for the old wages; oh ye landowners, you shall not pay higher ones.’ But it was not a bit of good. There was a great deal of work to be done; there were very few men to do it, and those men asked and received higher wages. For a year or two it seemed as if society would come to an end.
Last years of Edward III, 1367–77.Then, slowly, things got a little better, but, as you shall hear, there was a fierce rebellion of the peasants in the next reign. Edward III’s last years were unhappy. The Spanish War, 1367–70.His son, the Black Prince, governed Aquitaine, and was beguiled by a Spanish scoundrel, called King Pedro, to interfere in a Spanish civil war. Wherever the Prince and his archers fought they won, but his army suffered dreadfully from the climate. A new King of France took the opportunity to renew the great war (1369). His captains had been learning tactics from their English foes by the simple process of being beaten till they understood how to hit back, and slowly and patiently began to win back castles and frontier provinces in Aquitaine. Death of the Black Prince, 1376;The Black Prince, sore stricken with fever, turned every now and then, like a dying leopard, and tore his victorious foes, but in vain. He died In 1376; and his father, and of Edward III, 1377.King Edward, worn out with hard battles and also with luxurious living between campaigns, died in the next year. The heir was little Richard, son of the Black Prince, aged eleven. Two greedy and unscrupulous uncles, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, were glaring at the boy and at each other. So the great reign closed in gloom and fear for the future.