Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (32 page)

A large element of self-righteousness existed in de Montfort’s nature that may have helped to conceal, even from himself, his true purpose. Like the rest of his family he wanted to extend his power and lordship. That was where proper honour lay. He preferred strong rule as a moral and theoretical imperative, but surely it would be all the stronger if it were wielded by him? Further questions arose. If he were able to gain the victory, would he allow the king to resume his rule under baronial restraint? Or would he himself take on the role of sovereign?

The members of both parties engaged in intermittent conflict after his arrival in England. They were also involved in what would now be called a propaganda war, with open letters to the shire courts and sermons in the churchyards. The political ballad also emerges in this period. In the early months of 1264 the struggle turned into open and intensive warfare, on a scale not seen in England since the battles of King John with his barons. The peace that the king craved was snatched from him. He had an uneasy relationship with his elder son, Edward, since Edward had the stronger and more valiant character. At his instigation the king marched on the rebel town of Northampton, bearing the royal standard of a red dragon with fiery tongue; this bloody flag was a sign that no quarter would be given to those who surrendered. The king took the town. Edward then pillaged rebel lands in Staffordshire and Derbyshire. De Montfort himself was using London, where the citizens had turned decidedly against the king, as the centre of operations. Here he was impregnable. But Henry had the larger army.

A decisive confrontation could not be avoided. Otherwise the administration of the country would perish with a thousand cuts.
On 11 May Henry and his entourage arrived at the Cluniac priory of Lewes in Sussex. The baronial army took up its position 10 miles (16 kilometres) to the north. Two days passed in inconclusive negotiations, but then de Montfort moved forward to the high downs overlooking Lewes. The armies faced one another and, as battle began, Edward led a furious attack upon the contingent of Londoners; he broke them, and pursued the scattered bands for several hours. That was the mistake. By the time he returned the rebels had won a signal victory, with the king himself immured in the priory. De Montfort had not flown the red dragon on his standard, so an armistice was quickly arranged. The Lord Edward, as he was known, was confined in Dover Castle as a hostage for the king’s good intent.

A Latin poem of 968 lines, entitled
The Song of Lewes
, was written soon after the event. Its intent was to celebrate what de Montfort had called ‘the common enterprise’, and it justified the armed rebellion of the barons as the only means of ensuring that they played their proper role in the administration of the country. ‘Commonly it is said, as the king wishes, so goes the law; the truth is quite otherwise, for the law stands, though the king falls.’ It would not be wholly fanciful to suggest the presence of something like a communal sentiment of the realm in the face of manifest injustice. Strong evidence also exists that the working population of the countryside took matters into their own hands and sided with the barons. Some Leicestershire villagers, for example, surrounded a captain and his men who were fighting in the king’s army; they attempted to arrest them on the grounds that they were ‘against the welfare of the community of the realm and against the barons’. These were not idle or theoretical concepts; they were part of living reality.

Many hundreds of villagers were also fighting as foot soldiers beside the mounted knights. The poorest of them had knives and scythes, the more prosperous were obliged by law to possess an iron cap and a lance. They were fighting against the king’s exactions. At the beginning of the nineteenth century three pits were uncovered in Lewes; each one contained approximately 500 bodies. They had just been piled one on top of another, the unmourned and unremembered casualties of war. They are described by one chronicle
as ordinary people bred ‘
de vulgo
’, from the masses. Very few knights were killed in the battle.

Henry III was returned to London after his defeat, where he was placed for safekeeping in St Paul’s Cathedral. A small body of nine barons, under the leadership of de Montfort, assumed power while all the departments of state continued to operate in the name of the king. But it was only a name. De Montfort was now the strong man of the state. It is the first instance in English history of a subject seizing rule from an anointed sovereign. He confiscated the lands of eighteen barons who had fought on the wrong side, and took the lion’s share of ransom money. He even turned on his fellow barons, and consigned one of them to prison; another fled the realm. De Montfort was becoming a tyrant. That is what happens within oligarchies; one climbs over the others. As a result his support was soon fatally weakened. Who would not prefer a king to a tyrant?

Yet in the search for support he summoned two parliaments, at one of which the representatives of the towns as well as the knights and lords were present. From a period of authoritarian rule emerged an instrument of liberty; it can be said that the growing identity of the nation itself was shaped in opposition to the king. Out of contrast comes growth; out of opposition emerge principles. The exploitations of Richard and John had helped to foster a sense of
communitas
in towns and villages; the weakness of Henry now led to a more general recognition of the ‘community of the realm’.

The growth and development of parliament were part of the same process. There had always been parliaments of a kind. The structure itself existed before the moment it reached self-consciousness, thereby acquiring an identity. We cannot look back into the darkness of prehistory, but we can be sure that the tribal leaders had their own councils of wise or noble men. The Saxon invaders had brought with them the idea of the witan, which means literally ‘the knowing’, or witenagemot (the word itself is not recorded before 1035); this was an assembly, made up of bishops and nobles, that met once or twice a year. They were consulted by the king, and deliberated upon the making of new laws or the raising of new taxes. They may have had the power of electing, and even deposing, a king.

The Norman council, established after the successful invasion of England, was a smaller body of perhaps thirty-five ecclesiastical and secular lords. In 1095 William Rufus called together a larger assembly, comprising all the abbots, bishops and
principes
or chief men of the land. This became the template for the councils of later reigns; with the absence of the Norman and Angevin kings in France and elsewhere, the assembly of magnates learned how to act collectively to enforce its will. They also assumed a collective identity. In the reign of Henry II the abbot of Battle declared that the king could not change the laws of the country without ‘the counsel and consent’ of the barons. That was still debatable.

The first parliamentary summons came from King John who, in the summer of 1212, demanded that the sheriff of each county should come to him with ‘six of the more lawful and discreet knights who are to do what we shall tell them’. The knights were not present to advise the king. They were there to communicate the royal will to their regions. Yet the provisions of the Magna Carta, three years later, were designed to curtail the powers of the king; in particular it was ordained that no monarch could levy extraordinary taxation without the ‘common counsel’ of the realm. The realm, at this juncture, of course meant only the barons and the bishops.

In 1236 Henry III called a parliament at Westminster. This represents the first official use of the term, but the actual assembly consisted only of lay magnates and bishops. There were no representatives from the shires or the towns. But the king needed money from various and different sources. He could no longer rely on the feudal tax paid by his barons, or on taxes collected from their tenants. So in 1254 the sheriffs were ordered to send two knights from each county chosen by the county court. The lower clergy were also graciously admitted to the parliamentary assembly.

Simon de Montfort, after his victory, summoned two representatives from each town. Knights and the leaders of the towns, known as burgesses, then became as much part of parliament as the bishops and lords. We have here the rudimentary beginnings of the House of Commons. No one seems to have noticed this at the time, however, and there is no extant commentary upon the change. It was not in any case a great exercise in democracy. De
Montfort’s immediate purpose was simply to have more supporters in place against the great lords who were antagonistic to him; a large gathering would also help to disguise the enforced absence of his enemies. So he brought in the knights and the townsmen.

Unintended and unforeseen consequences followed the appearance of the parliament. Its growing importance, for example, elevated the role of knights as well as the richer townsmen. A knight can be defined as one who possessed one or several manors and who was generally involved in the government of his local area in such posts as sheriff or forest official. He took on the royal work of his shire, administrative and judicial.

The knights were known as
buzones
or ‘big men’. They were approximately 1,100 or 1,200 in number. They are the men whose images are seen, in wood and stone, in the old churches of England. They wear body armour, and some of them are about to draw the sword; some carry shields; others are shown with their hands folded in prayer; they are often cross-legged; double images of husband and wife are sometimes preferred. This was the period when coats of arms were recorded, and the science of heraldry emerged in all its fancifulness. Early in the fourteenth century, knights’ burials were commemorated with full-figure brasses.

Their pre-eminence led to a general stratification in the various ranks and classes below them. By the middle of the fourteenth century, at the latest, there had emerged the outlines of what has become known as the gentry, including knights, esquires and gentlemen. An esquire was a prosperous landowner who for various reasons had surrendered the status of knighthood. A gentleman was of lower standing, simply the head of a landed family. By 1400 this difference was stated in monetary terms. An esquire earned between £20 and £40 a year, while a gentleman would earn between £10 and £20. Knights and esquires might serve as sheriffs or as Justices of the Peace, while gentlemen took on such lesser roles as undersheriffs and coroners. Gentlemen were often parish gentry, while knights were always county gentry. It is a matter of some interest that this social structure survived, with modifications, until the latter part of the nineteenth century. It held together the country for more than 500 years.

Wherever we look in the thirteenth century, we see evidence of
greater formality and control. In the towns of England an oligarchy of the richer merchants was strictly organized, in consort with royal officialdom; the crafts and merchants were now gathered into guilds and trade associations. The bureaucracy of the king’s court was becoming ever more complex and methodical. Administrative historians have noticed the huge proliferation of documents in the reign of Henry III. Even the crusaders setting out from England to the Holy Land were given written contracts that stipulated certain common terms of service. Every right, or verdict, was defined in writing. A royal bailiff, approaching a small farmer for taxes, tells him that ‘thou art writen yn my writ’. It is a paradox, perhaps, that in the reign of a weak or indecisive king the apparatus of the Crown had never been more efficient or adaptable. But how else are we to explain the fact that, despite the disasters of his government, Henry III continued to rule for so long? By degrees the nation was fixed and rendered stable, despite the manifest tempests upon its surface.

One of the tempests gathered at the end of May 1265. The Lord Edward, still in custody, was allowed to go riding; he was a prince of the royal blood, after all. But on this spring morning he tried one horse after another, going further and further out; then he chose one particular horse and, on the signal of a gentleman rider in the distance, he galloped off. Before long, he reached the safety of Ludlow Castle. Edward was at liberty. He was free to raise his father’s standard against de Montfort and the other rebels.

The threat was immediate, and the result not long in coming. The two armies met on 4 August at Evesham in Worcestershire. When de Montfort saw the royalist forces approaching him in well-ordered array he remarked that ‘they learned how to do that from me’. At their head was the Lord Edward; now, at twenty-six years old, he was de facto leader of the realm. De Montfort had taken Henry with him as hostage and, as the battle grew more fierce, he and his knights fought in a circle around the king; one of the royalists, Roger Leyburn, managed to rescue Henry from the mêlée. Edward had already appointed twelve men in what might be called a death squad, whose only task was to kill de Montfort. They were successful. His head was cut off, and his testicles dangled on each side of his nose; the trophy was then sent to the wife of
the man who had beheaded him. A general slaughter ensued, the first of its kind in medieval England where lords and knights were ordinarily spared for ransom or for the sake of honour. Edward would not be the same kind of king as his father.

Simon de Montfort’s body was given to the monks of Evesham, in whose abbey it was buried. His tomb lies now in the ruins, beneath the high altar, marked by a granite cross. In his death he was by some considered to be a martyr and his burial place became an object of pilgrimage. Here was the grave of a rebel in the cause of righteousness, and failure only added lustre to his reputation. Rumours spread of miracles in the abbey.

But they were not enough to save his supporters. Those who were not slaughtered on the field at Evesham were scattered. Some fled to Kenilworth, the castle of the de Montforts, while others took refuge in the Isle of Ely. Some escaped to the wild woods, and it is possible that the saga of Robin Hood emerged from the life of one such wandering lord. They were known as the ‘disinherited’, and they only found their way back into the king’s grace with massive payments.