The Great Turning Points of British History (9 page)

A spy scare heightened the atmosphere. A royal knight, Thomas Turberville, arrived in England claiming to have escaped from a French prison; in fact, he had been released on condition that he spied for the French. The report he wrote for them on the defenceless condition of the Isle of Wight, on English diplomacy and on preparations to send troops to Gascony was revealed to the king, and Turberville was arrested. After a trial he was drawn to the place of execution on an oxhide and hanged by an iron chain.

Edward’s strategy was to build up a grand alliance in the Low Countries and Germany against the French. The duke of Brabant, Edward’s son-in-law, came to Wales, and in Anglesey reached agreement to serve with 2,000 cavalry. The support of the counts of Guelders and Holland was bought, though in the latter case the count soon turned to the French. Most important was the count of Flanders, who was promised a huge subsidy. The French King Philip IV, however, summoned the count to Paris, and took his daughter hostage, so nullifying any English alliance. There was little hope of launching any expedition against Philip without Flemish support. Nonetheless, Edward had to continue to pay his remaining allies substantial sums.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, power was taken from the king, John Balliol, by his barons, and entrusted to a council. Balliol owed his throne to Edward I, who had supervised the hearings of the succession dispute between Balliol and Robert Bruce. Balliol was distrusted as an English puppet, and the Scots now looked to France for support. The French were anxious to acquire the Scots as allies against the English, and 1295 saw the alliance forged that would lead to war in the following year. In December Edward I issued writs summoning men to muster at Newcastle, ready for yet another war.

What Edward needed to fight his wars was money. Putting down the Welsh rebellion was an unexpected expenditure. The forces in Gascony were expensive to maintain, and the allies were hungry for English silver. The level of financial crisis is suggested by the sudden dismissal of the treasurer, William March, in August. Taxes had been granted in the previous year, but Edward needed a new instalment and Parliament was therefore summoned. It consisted of prelates and magnates, summoned from an established list, and representatives of shires and boroughs, as well as representatives of the clergy. A new formula was developed for the representatives; they were to come with full powers to represent their communities, and to do what was decided by common counsel.

This would remain the standard form of summons for many years, and led historians later to dub this parliament, held at Westminster in November and early December, the Model Parliament. It was not, of course, thought of as such at the time, and did not attract much attention from chroniclers. The tax that was granted would be levied on a valuation of people’s personal property; the standard rate was an eleventh, but the towns and land that either was, or had been in the past, in the king’s possession paid at a rate of a seventh.

While taxation was a major burden, recruitment was another. When Edward requested a group of nineteen magnates to go to Gascony, several, including the earl of Arundel, refused. Angrily, the king ordered the exchequer to collect any debts that they might owe to the crown. The men duly sailed. That was in August. In October orders went for the recruitment of a huge force of 25,000 infantry. The appointed commander of the English infantry was Edmund, earl of Lancaster, the king’s brother. He, however, was in bad health, and departure was long delayed, into the next year.

In Norfolk Hugh Cressingham and William Mortimer arrived to collect troops for Gascony. Men were selected, and their local communities forced to pay for white tunics, swords and knives. Villages in one region produced roughly six men each. Some were sent home from the muster at Newmarket at once, as they were judged inadequate; others stayed four days, until the planned expedition was cancelled. A further burden was the compulsory purchase of foodstuffs by the crown, in support of its military efforts. Payment of money was disliked, but loss of carefully stored grain and other commodities was bitterly resented.

King Edward’s relationship with the Church was difficult. A peace mission by two cardinals achieved nothing. In September a great ceremony took place at Canterbury, with the enthronement of a new archbishop, Robert Winchelsey, in the presence of the king and many nobles. It must have been an awkward occasion, for Edward was insistent that Winchelsey pay a substantial debt to the crown. In parliament, it proved hard to persuade the clergy to grant a tax of a tenth of their income.

This was not an easy year for the economy. Grain prices stood at high levels; poor weather meant a bad harvest. The thirteenth century had been one of expansion, as more and more land was put under the plough, but the boom years lay in the past. The main English export was wool, grown on the backs of some ten million sheep. Heavy customs duties, introduced in the previous year, combined with the war, had a serious effect on the level of exports. Italians had controlled much of the wool trade, but the great company of the Riccardi had been bankrupted in the previous year as a result of the war. They had lent heavily to Edward I, and their depositors in Italy were rightly suspicious, and withdrew their funds. The remaining companies in England were in an uncomfortable position, emphasized when in the autumn of 1295 they were threatened with the confiscation of the wool stocks they held.

This year showed how the English state could respond to the pressures of war. The need to obtain consent to taxation was important in the development of fully representative parliaments. The defeat of the Welsh rebellion marked a significant stage in the political unification of Britain, but events in Scotland pointed in a different direction, toward the Wars of Independence.

1258
The Provisions of Oxford
. There was much discontent, above all directed against Henry III’s foreign favourites and his ambitious plan to obtain the Sicilian throne for his second son Edmund. A reform scheme was set up, which established a council of fifteen to control the king’s actions. This was elected by twelve from the baronial side, and twelve from the royalists. Further important reform measures followed in the next year, with the Provisions of Westminster.

1265
Battle of Evesham
. Simon de Montfort, leader of the baronial opposition, had triumphed in the previous year at Lewes. Now, he was defeated and slain at the hands of an army led by Henry III’s son Edward. This marked the end of the reform movement, though there was some continued resistance, notably from the garrison of Kenilworth. Not all the ideas about reform, particularly of the law, were forgotten; some were to be followed up in Edward I’s legislative programme.

1270
Edward’s crusade
. Edward joined crusading forces in North Africa. From there he went to Sicily, and then on to the Holy Land. Little was achieved in this expedition. Edward escaped assassination; the wound from his attacker’s knife was sucked by his queen Eleanor (or, according to one account, by his friend Otto de Grandson). Edward did not return to England until 1274.

1275
Institution of customs duties
. It was agreed in Parliament that six shillings and eight pence should be paid on each sack of wool exported from England. This provided the crown with a new, permanent financial resource. It was intended in the first instance to provide a means of repaying Italian merchants for the loans they had advanced to make the crusade possible, and was important in providing Edward I with the resources he needed for his wars.

1277
First Welsh war
. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Wales, had consistently refused to come to do homage to Edward I. Edward resorted to force to bring him to heel. The campaign saw the English march along the coast of North Wales, and invade Anglesey. There were no major battles, but Edward’s show of strength was sufficient to make Llywelyn come to terms. Work began on four great new English castles, at Flint, Rhuddlan, Aberystwyth and Builth.

1282
Death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd
. The Welsh rebelled in this year, and Edward embarked on full-scale conquest. He advanced along the coast of North Wales, but Llywelyn broke out of Snowdonia and marched south. At Irfon Bridge he was defeated by an army led by lords of the Welsh March, and was slain in the battle, probably by Stephen Frankton, a squire. Llywelyn was succeeded by his brother Dafydd, who was thus the last native prince of Wales. He was captured in the following year, and was savagely executed at Shrewsbury.

1292
Hearing of the Great Cause
. The Great Cause, the succession dispute in Scotland, concluded. The main rival claimants, on the death of Alexander III’s heiress Margaret in 1290, were John Balliol and Robert Bruce. Edward I was invited to supervise the resolution of the dispute, and it was determined that the throne should go to Balliol. The decision may have been correct in law; it was also the one that suited Edward best.

1296
Invasion of Scotland
. The French looked to the Scots as allies in their war against the English. The Anglo-Scottish war began with a small cross-border raid by the Scots; Edward I launched a major invasion. Berwick was sacked, with appalling scenes of slaughter. The English were then victorious at Dunbar, took Edinburgh, marched north as far as Elgin and deposed John Balliol. Success, however, was little more than superficial.

1297
Political crisis
. Edward I faced the opposition of the Church and baronage to his campaign plans, and to the taxes and wool seizures needed for the financing of the expedition. The expedition went ahead, but the king had to concede that he would not impose such burdens again without the consent of the community of the realm.

The Black Death was one of the greatest human tragedies ever experienced in the British Isles. Since the 1920s, historians have compared it to the First World War, so great was its demographic and psychological impact; more recently it has been analysed in relation to the advent of AIDS.

In fact, the scale and effect of the fourteenth-century disaster is still much disputed. How many people died, and how were the survivors affected? Did the Black Death really change the course of British social history, or merely accelerate trends that would have occurred anyway? In particular, historians have recently begun to consider whether it is appropriate to make comparisons with modern First World disasters because medieval people were much more conditioned and resigned to the notion that things have a tendency to fall apart.

The ‘calamity-sensitive’ nature of the medieval economy (a telling phrase) inured people to the prospect of hunger and disease in a way that would be unthinkable in modern Britain – even though it is still, of course, a daily reality in the Third World. Of all the outcomes of the Black Death, then, the one that is most difficult to fathom is probably the relative lack of comment on the disaster: when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his
Canterbury Tales
he made only a single allusion to a phenomenon that contemporary society must surely have held as its greatest fear.

The plague was first reported in continental Europe in 1347 and reached Britain in the summer of 1348; the historical convention is that it entered England via the port of Melcombe Regis in Dorset. The name Black Death came later: at the time, people simply called this new disease the ‘pestilence’. Although many different theories have been put forward, it seems most likely that the Black Death was bubonic plague, which is transmitted by fleas borne by rats; the apparent virulence of the outbreak of 1347–50 is explicable not only in terms of the lack of immunity among the population of Europe but also by the fact that the bubonic form may have been accompanied by outbreaks of pneumonic plague, which is spread by direct contagion between humans and which offered very little chance of survival. The plague raged in England over the second half of 1348 and on into 1349, then extended to Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and subsided during 1350.

Thanks to relatively good documentation, we can track the path of the plague quite closely in some parts of the country. Bishops’ registers, which record the death and replacement of members of the clergy, and manor court rolls, which detail the transfer of tenancies on the deaths of holders, provide particularly detailed and time-specific evidence that has been the stock in trade of all modern historians of the plague. This and other statistical evidence is, inevitably, patchy. We know much more of what went on in England than in other parts of the British Isles.

In any case, one thing that is so difficult about the evidence is its typicality: it is well understood that, even within very particular localities, the impact of plague could vary considerably, ravaging some villages but leaving others untouched. A more general qualification is that in upland areas, which had a much smaller population scattered over isolated farmsteads, plague tended to have a proportionately smaller effect than in the nucleated villages and urban communities that were a feature of lowland Britain. All that said, it is now generally agreed, on the basis of the available statistical models, that the plague of 1348–50 carried off at least a third of the population of the British Isles.

If we ask how many people that proportion actually represents, we immediately get into much more difficult territory. There is no way of calculating precisely how many people lived in Britain in the fourteenth century. England – and more precisely lowland England – was clearly and by far the most populated part of the British Isles: indeed, it appears that some areas, especially in East Anglia and the area around the Wash, were supporting populations comparable with those of the same rural communities in the nineteenth century.

Historical orthodoxy currently has it that the population of England rose from about two million at the time of Domesday Book (1086) to perhaps six million in 1300, tailing off from that point and then plummeting dramatically in 1348–50. When we get to the English poll tax returns of 1377, we can extrapolate a population figure of about 2.75 million. By that point, Britain had experienced at least four visitations of plague – after the initial epidemic, there were other national outbreaks in 1360–1, 1368–9 and 1375. One of the important points about the Black Death, indeed, is the fact that it became endemic in Britain: outbreaks of plague – albeit often more localized – were a regular feature of life down to the Great Plague of London in 1665.