The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms waged a constant struggle against one another for predominance over the country. From time to time some stronger state seized the land of the neighbouring kingdoms and made them pay tribute, or even ruled them directly. The number of kingdoms was always changing; so were their boundaries.
The greatest and most important kingdoms were Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. For a time Northumbria gained supremacy. Mercia was the next kingdom to take the lead. The struggle for predominance continued and at last at the beginning of the 9th century Wessex became the strongest state. In 829 Egbert[5], King of Wessex, was acknowledged by Kent, Mercia and Northumbria. This was really the beginning of the united kingdom of England, for Wessex never again lost its supremacy and King Egbert became the first king of England. Under his rule all the small Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were united to form one kingdom which was called England from that time on[6].
The clergy, royal warriors and officials supported the king's power. It was the king who granted them land and the right to collect dues from the peasants and to hold judgement over them. In this way the royal power helped them to deprive the peasants of their land and to turn them into serfs.
The political unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was sped up by the urgent task of defending the country against the dangerous raids of the new enemies. From the end of the 8th century and during the 9th and the 10th centuries Western Europe was troubled by a new wave of barbarian attacks. These barbarians came from the North from Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and were called Northmen. In different countries the Northmen were known by many other names, as the Vikings, the Normans, the Danes. They came to Britain from Norway and Denmark.
A viking sword handle of the 9th century
But more often the British Isles were raided from Denmark, and the invaders came to be known in English history as the Danes.
TERROR OF THE NORSEMEN
The first Viking raids, from around 790, were no more than that, hit-and-run attacks by seaborne pirates finding rich and undefended targets close to shore, such as the monastery of Lindisfarne. Their paganism added a sinister aspect to what even by the standards of the time was appalling brutality. With little space in their ships to take slaves, they killed males indiscriminately but carried off girls and women. Within a very few years it was obvious that a profoundly unsettling new element had entered into the world of Anglo-Saxons, Britons, Picts and Scots. Perceived at first as nothing more than a harassment, the Norsemen became a very serious threat to all the established kingdoms of the British Isles. Early in the ninth century they were ceasing to be sporadic external raiders, and forming a new, strong and enduring element in the regional power-structure. There is a hard historical irony in their resemblance to the Angles and Saxons themselves of a few generations back. Like these, the Vikings were pagan. They came from the same part of northern Europe. Their language and their customs were in many ways similar to those of the Anglo-Saxons. But the Vikings were harsher, more extreme in their idolisa-tion of violence and their warrior cult. There is ample evidence that they were found to be utterly terrifying.
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The Danish raids were successful because the kingdom of England had neither a regular army nor a fleet in the North Sea to meet them. There were no coastguards to watch the coast of the island and this made it possible for the raiders to appear quite unexpectedly. Besides, there were
very few roads, and large parts of the country were covered with pathless forests or swamps. It took several weeks sometimes before anyone could reach a settlement from where a messenger could be sent to the king, or to the nearest great and powerful noble, to ask for help. Help was a long time in coming. It would take the king or the noble another few weeks to get his fighting men together and go and fight against the enemy.
Northumbria and East Anglia suffered most from the Danish raids. The Danes seized the ancient city of York and then all of Yorkshire. Here is what a chronicler wrote about the conquest of Northumbria: "The army raided here and there and filled every place with bloodshed and sorrow. Far and wide it destroyed the churches and monasteries with the fire and sword. When it departed from a place, it left nothing standing but roofless walls. So great was the destruction that at the present day one can hardly see anything left of those places, nor any sign of their former greatness." Soon after, the Danes conquered East Anglia and slew King Edmund. (The Christians considered him a martyr, and a monastery was built where he was buried and the town still bears his name Bury St. Edmunds.) Then large organized bands of Danes swept right over to the midlands. At last all England north of the Thames, that is, Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia, was in their hands.
Only Wessex was left to face the enemy. Before the Danes conquered the North, they had made an attack on Wessex, but in 835 King Egbert defeated them. In the reign of Egbert's son the Danes sailed up the Thames and captured London. Thus the Danes came into conflict with the strongest of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Wessex.
The West Saxons found the lately conquered Cornish allying with Norsemen to reclaim their territory, and Egbert defeated them at Hingston Down, near Plymouth, in 838. Other Norse groups raided into Mercia and Northumbria. Nowhere in England was very far from the sea, or from a navigable river, and nowhere could feel safe from a sudden devastating raid. Local resistance was often strong, including a naval battle, the first to be recorded in English history, off Sandwich in Kent, when a fleet of raiders was beaten back in 851. Larger-scale resistance was rare or non-existent, and the overlordship of the Wessex kings was a meaningless dignity when Wessex could not even defend itself against the marauders. In 864 they stormed and burned down its capital, Winchester. So far, the Viking raids had been opportunistic, led by many war-chiefs who owed allegiance to no one. Around 865, their campaigning took a different turn, and it became clear that they were fighting to gain and hold the land. Under two leaders of high rank, Ivar 'the Boneless' and his brother, Halfdan, an army landed in East Anglia. Over the next ten years, a vast extent of eastern England was brought under Norse rule. Northumbria was first to be subjugated, and its old Roman-British-Saxon capital became the Viking town of Jorvik. Eastern Mercia was overrun, and in 869 East Anglia and Essex were added. The pious Anglian king, Edmund, killed by the victors, was buried by his people where Bury St Edmunds now stands. The Norsemen now turned inland and forced their way up the line of the Thames and along the Downs. The conquest of Mercia was completed.
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ALFRED THE GREAT
In 871, the fourth and youngest son of Aethelwulf, Alfred, had become King of Wessex, a much-assailed and reduced kingdom. He bribed the Norsemen to stop their further advance westward; instead they swept north. By 876, they returned. Under Alfred, the West Saxons put up a fierce resistance but they were gradually driven back until, at the lowest point of his fortunes, Alfred took refuge at Athelney in the Somerset marshes in the spring of 878. From here he rallied his forces to defeat the Danish leader, Guthrum, at the battle of Edington in May of that year. This was followed up by Guthrum's surrender and promise to adopt Christianity, set out in the Treaty of Wedmore.
Only one English king has ever been dubbed 'the Great'. Though he never ruled more than Wessex, Kent and part of Mercia, Alfred earned this description not only through his prowess and steadfastness as a military leader but also by his statesmanship, scholarship and care for his nation. Unlike previous kings such as Offa, he was a man of culture who thought deeply about moral issues. The national tradition of England stems from his success, for otherwise, whatever country ultimately emerged from Viking conquest, it would have had another name and perhaps its destiny set on other paths. His arrest of the Norsemen's progress made it possible for his successors to regain for the Anglo-Saxons what had been lost to the invaders. Although it is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the history of national events founded by Alfred himself, that says so, there is no reason to doubt its comment that: 'all the English people submitted to Alfred except those who were under the power of the Danes.' To those who feared conquest, and to those already conquered, the King of Wessex offered the only real hope.
While he had peace, Alfred prepared for war, renewing his army and creating a fleet to guard the coasts, and building fortifications round his main towns. War duly recurred in 886 and 892, with new Danish invasions, and the Danish kingdoms of eastern England coming to their support. Between 892 and 896, there was again open warfare as a further effort was made to make England a wholly Viking country; it was a bitter campaign and in the end the raiders turned away to find easier pickings in northern Europe. England was left a divided country. North of a line from London to Chester were kingdoms of the Norsemen, East Anglia, the land of the 'Five Boroughs' of Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Leicester and Stamford, ruled by independent earls, and the kingdom of Jorvik more than half of the country in overall extent. This was the Danelaw, a great swathe of the country where the Norse imprint would remain for centuries to come, long after the establishment of a unified state. Place names, local dialect words, even regional accents, reveal the long period of occupation and colonization and the slow commingling of the Norse and Anglo-Saxon populations.
ALFRED'S SUCCESSORS
The frontier was not a natural one and was inevitably transgressed. The Anglo-Saxons did not remain united. When Alfred's son, Edward, succeeded him in 899, a disaffected cousin joined the Danes and invaded Wessex, causing three years of warfare. Inheritance was always likely to cause trouble in cases like this, where the grown sons of Alfred's elder brother had at least as much claim to the kingship as the son of Alfred. The right of a king's eldest son to inherit was still far from being accepted practice. Western Mercia had been under a sub-king, whose widow was Edward's sister, Aethelflaed, Lady of Mercia; and brother and sister operated a co-ordinated policy, responding to incursions from the Danelaw by attacking and annexing territory. The last Danish King of East Anglia was killed in battle in 921. By Edward's death in 924, the realm he had inherited had been greatly enlarged to encompass all th country south of the Humber. His son, Athelstan, first secured York as a sub-kingdom and then took it over. This was empire-building on a scale not seen before. The princes and chiefs of Wales also acknowledged his power by the payment of a large annual tribute. Cornwall, whose British population was again restive under English rule, was invaded and forcibly pacified. For the first time since Britannia was a single Roman province, one man could claim to be master of all England, and Athelstan s prestige was such that his numerous sisters were sought as brides by great European potentates, even Emperor Otto I. It was in support of one of his European alliances that Athelstan sent the first English force to intervene in continental power politics, in 939. Within Great Britain, Athelstan had made the Kings of Strathclyde and of the Scots acknowledge his supremacy in 927. Ten years later, they combined with Irish Vikings to attack him. But at the unidentified site of Brunanburh, Athelstan soundly defeated them. His assemblage of kingdoms and statelets barely lasted for his lifetime, however. By 939 the Vikings under Olaf Guthfrithson had retaken York and in the following year re-established a Viking kingdom around it. Though Athelstan's successors, Edmund and Eadred, fought to regain the English hold, a further Viking revival took place in 947 under Erik Bloodaxe, expelled as the King of Norway, but accepted as king at York. It was not a straightforward business. The Dublin and York Viking kingdoms fought one another, and there was much changing of sides.
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THE POWER OF THE CHURCH
By the mid-tenth century, the church was a formidable power in the land, the wealthiest single institution, though its riches were divided among many abbeys and the bishoprics. Kings and magnates continued to make endowments. It was not as yet organized into parishes but its activities were centred on large churches or minsters, their name preserved in many place names, from where a small corps of itinerant priests served a wide area. In many places, an open-air cross served as the meeting place for religious observance.
ROUGH JUSTICE
Strongly religious as the Anglo-Saxons were by now, theirs was not a society which brought Christianity far into the practices of daily life. Violence was endemic. Free men carried weapons and were prepared to use them. Although fines and compensation payments were the most common judgements, many crimes were punishable by violent means. Floggings, branding, the slitting of noses and cropping of ears were routine minor punishments. Moneyers whose coins were of adulterated metal had a hand cut off. Hangings were frequent, drownings and beheadings were also resorted to. Imprisonment was rare and probably only employed in the case of high-ranking persons. Where a defendant's guilt was disputable, the judgement of God' was resorted to, in one of three forms. In the ordeal by water, if he floated, he was guilty (swimming was an unusual skill). Inside the church, he might be required to carry a pound weight of glowing iron for nine feet, or to take a stone out of boiling water. If the resultant injuries had not healed within three days, he was guilty. There are some signs of a more humanitarian attitude. Archbishop Wulfstan of York, drawing up laws in the time of King Cnut, wrote: 'Christian men shall not be condemned to death for all too little; but one shall determine lenient punishment for the benefit of the people, and not destroy for a little matter God's own handiwork.' King Athelstan raised the age at which a young thief might be hanged from twelve to fifteen. One social institution which the church long struggled to control was that of marriage. In the earlier centuries of the Anglo-Saxons, divorce and remarriage were easy to arrange. An early Kentish law states: 'If a freeman lie with the wife of a freeman, he shall pay... wergild, and get another wife with his own money and bring her to the other man's home.' Such a law does not appear to set a high or independent status on the woman, but in Anglo-Saxon society a woman had greater freedom than was to be the case after the Norman Conquest. She could hold land in her own right and dispose of it as she pleased. She could appear as a compurgator (oath-taker) in court, and an eleventh-century law states that: 'No woman or maiden shall ever be forced to marry one whom she dislikes, nor be sold for money' (This of course relates only to free-born women). In fact the practice of arranged marriages, at least in property-owning families, would continue for several hundred years,
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PAYING OFF THE DANE
From the early tenth century the Norsemen had established an independent state in the north of France, with its capital at Rouen. Still conscious of their Nordic origins, the Normans allowed their ports to be used by the raiders into England. This caused deep resentment and hostility in England, and in 990-91, the Pope felt compelled to mediate. The diplomatic settlement did not affect the raids, which became heavier, and Aethelred's treasury was depleted by vast sums paid to buy them off. In 1009 a new onslaught came, of Danes and Norsemen from the great war-camp at Jomsburg at the mouth of the Vistula. In 1011 they took Canterbury and Archbishop Aelfheah (St Alphege), refusing to sanction a separate ransom for himself, was killed by their troops in 1012. The Council found £48,000 from a country sliding fast towards economic ruin to pay off the invaders once more. Nine hundred years later Rudyard Kipling made the point in 'What Dane-geld Means':
... we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld,
You never get rid of the Dane.
Norman England
THE IMPOSITION OF NORMAN RULE
The closest parallel in history to William's invasion was that of the Romans a thousand years before: a small group imposing government on a much larger one. But much had changed in that time. His army was smaller, but he was familiar with the people, the southern part of the country, and its methods of government. His aims and his methods were quite different. The Romans needed no justification or sanction for their assumption of control; William had already secured the support of the Pope and hastened to have himself formally crowned and consecrated with the Anglo-Saxon ceremonial. Edward the Confessor's promise and Harold's oath-breaking were vital elements in Norman propaganda. The new king had no ancestral claim, and was not of any royal descent himself. His rule might have been a transient thing, lasting only his own lifetime, or less. Anglo-Saxon England became, irreversibly, Norman England.
This was made possible by a combination of policy, advanced military skill, and the social system evolved by the Normans. The policy was for the king to establish his own men at all strategic places in the country. Land and wealth was what they had supported him for, and they seized their chance readily. Without delay they built castles for themselves, at first only timber structures on artificial or natural mounds, with a wooden outer fence. In time, stone castles, such as Colchester above, would replace them on an ever-more substantial scale.
The remains of Colchester Castle as they appeared in the nineteenth century. The largest Norman castle in Europe, Colchester Castle was constructed over the massive vaults of the ruined Roman Temple of Claudius.
The castle was scarcely known in England until the advent of the Normans, and such as already existed were probably built by Normans invited in by Edward the Confessor. English magnates had lived in relatively unprotected halls. From the castle, the new lord could dominate his tract of land, with his own detachment of mounted soldiers and archers to ensure his security. Like the Romans before him, William, finding the north a restive and dangerous province, carried out a campaign of devastation and terror in 1069. Even the Danelaw, always ready to acknowledge a Scandinavian overlord, did not welcome the Normans, whose speech was now Old French rather than Old Norse. The form of social organization which underlay Norman government was what later generations called the 'feudal system'. Already the structure of English society had been moving towards the concentrated power of landowners and regional magnates at the expense of the free ceorls and the lower ranks of thegns.
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THE FEUDAL SYSTEM
The introduction of feudalism nevertheless made fundamental changes to English life. Up till now ownership, service, legal rights and duties had formed a confused, varied and widely overlapping pattern, reflecting local and regional traditions, obligations and arrangements that went back to the first Anglo-Saxon settlements. One writer refers to the Norman aristocracy as a 'kleptocracy', a ruling class of thieves: twenty years on from the Conquest they had emerged as owners of virtually all the land. The principles of land tenure were made clear and universal. All land was held of the king. Thus from William 1 on, the king was always the King of England, rather than (as the Anglo-Saxon monarchs had in effect been) King of the English. Under him were some six hundred tenants-in-chief. They owed the king specific military service; even if they were bishops or abbots, their own vassals would include a specified number of knights. Under them was a broadening structure of tenants and subtenants, bound in a structure of mutual obligation.
It was never a fixed and definitive system, but like all human arrangements, was adapted to individual circumstances and tended through time towards a greater complexity which ultimately began to break up through its own rigidity and the problems caused by rivals claiming the kingship. Although it worked as an economic system, with the manor and the market as the sources of production and exchange, its origin was as a military hierarchy, with a moral element firmly cemented into it.
MAINTAINING THE GRIP ON POWER
A further consequence of Norman rule was the beginning of the long involvement of England with the dynastic disputes and territorial wars fought out in France, Burgundy and the Low Countries. Later in his reign William I set the pattern of an absentee king, struggling to maintain or extend his holdings in France. After two hundred years of engagement with the Nordic powers, the crucial relationships of the Anglo-Norman state and its successors were now with the shifting power-bases and rich fiefdoms in the lands across the Channel.
The insecurity of a self-imposed monarchy, the distractions of possessions outside England, and the extreme energy and rapacity of some of his barons, like William's own half-brother Odo of Bayeux, were among the pressures that began a centralization of royal power and a series of measures that increased the king's control over events which an Anglo-Saxon king might have left to the shire-reeve or the ealdorman. Only on the outer fringes, to north and west, where they acted as defenders against Welsh and Scots, were the Norman barons set no boundaries for expansion and freed to an extent from royal control, creating the 'Marcher earldoms' and leading to the 'March law' of later centuries. Overruling all other considerations of feudal loyalty was fealty to the king. Through the royally appointed sheriffs, a solemn oath of loyalty to the king was made by the entire adult male population, twice a year.
The Great Seal of William the Conqueror William the Conqueror
HEROES AND HISTORIANS
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a golden age for the 'chroniclers' part historians, part story-tellers, part propagandists who, with access to many ancient documents now lost, and drawing on spoken accounts passed on in the oral tradition, wrote a wide range of histories, biographies, genealogies and accounts of great deeds. Ignoring the scholarly example of Bede, they were often credulous and inventive. But their concept of history was as something to show the reader a moral, or to glorify the present state by linking it to past greatness or the opposite: to show how things had sunk down. The medieval English looked backwards with a remarkably inclusive view. The Normans had no history; but there were the great Anglo-Saxon exemplars like Athelstan and Alfred the Great. And before the Anglo-Saxons? Geoffrey of Monmouth (c.1100-55), a churchman, based for a considerable part of his life in Oxford, has been described as 'the inventor of British history. He wrote the Historia Regum Britanniae, 'History of the Kings of Britain'; claiming to have taken information from a 'very ancient book written in the British [Welsh] language'. Geoffrey gave a major role to a figure who would otherwise scarcely rate a footnote in history, King Arthur, the great hero of Britain, with his wizard-counsellor Merlin. His book marks the start of a torrent of Arthurian literature, and gives European literature (and pre-Raphaelite English painting) one of its greatest themes. He also enlarged on the myth that Britain was founded by one Brutus, a Trojan hero, escaping from the sack of Troy. Thus the English could look back with satisfaction on a splendidly heroic past going right back to the Greek epics, even though the precise connections with these early phases and figures might be shrouded in mystery.
Despite some scepticism even at the time the first copies were circulated, it was not until the sixteenth century that the facts of Geoffrey's account were seriously questioned. Polydore Vergil, an Italian humanist commissioned by Henry VII to write a history of England, which was published in 1534, caused outrage by dismissing the Brutus legend. But even two hundred years later the historical existence of Brutus and Arthur still influenced wishful thinkers.
THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR.
Magna Carta and the decline of feudalism.
The beginning of Parliament. The development of towns.
Watt Tylers revolt. Chivalry and medieval culture. Wars of the Roses. Chaucer and William Caxtons first printing press.)
The Renaissance period (The Tudors. The break with the church of Rome. The English Reformation. The Protestant-Catholic struggle. Elizabeth and Shakespeares age. Civil war and the Interregnum.
Oliver Cromwell and republicanism. The Restoration.
Constitutional monarchy. Union with Wales and the conquest of Ireland.).
KING JOHN AND MAGNA CARTA
Richard, beguiled by the glamour and prizes of Crusade, departed for Palestine, and on his return was intercepted in Austria and held to ransom by the emperor, Henry VI. Despite a rebellion by his brother, John, the ransom was paid and he returned, only to leave again for Normandy to campaign for his French possessions.
King John
In 1213, John suddenly overturned his own policy, and that of Henry II, by agreeing that England should be a papal fief, its king owing his throne to the Pope. His aim was to obtain Innocent's support in a war against his old enemy Philip Augustus. But his war on France was a disastrous failure and the English barons rose against him, supported by the citizens of London. Magna Carta, their charter of grievance and reform, sixty-two clauses long, was sealed by an unwilling and unrepentant king on 17 June 1215. The barons' subsequent attempt to enforce it led to a split in their own ranks, and warfare followed between those who sided with the king and those who, standing four-square for the Charter, declared John deposed, and invited Louis, son John deposed, and invited Louis, son of Philip Augustus, to assume the throne of England.
John's death in 1216, while on campaign in East Anglia, rescued the country from a civil war that was complicated by the invasion of Louis. His French troops and John's foreign mercenaries ravaged much of the south. In this critical juncture the country rallied round John's nine-year-old son, who became Henry III.
THE REIGN OF HENRY III
During the half-century of his personal rule, Western Europe experienced, on the whole, a state of peace compared with times before and times to come.
French was still the official language of court and law in England. Latin was the international language of learning, diplomacy and liturgy. The English language had no official status. A resident of England, asked to define his identity at this time, would have done so in terms of who his lord was, or perhaps, in terms of his parish or village. Fully three-quarters of the English people were still of the villein class, in a state of semi-servitude, their opportunities and movements restricted to the places where they had been born and by the dictates of the lord of the manor. The change in thinking was brought about by a number of separate elements, which did not have much to do with one another. In England the sea barrier round so much of the country helped to promote a sense of separateness. The emergence of a university at Oxford, first founded in 1167 by scholars who had come from Paris, followed by that of Cambridge in 1209, among Europe's earliest, helped to create a social group of 'clerks', educated men who were greatly influenced by the part-secular, part-religious communities in which their formative years were spent (the student community of Oxford numbered around 1,300 in the 1330s a considerable figure).
THE DUTIES OF THE KING
AND THE POWER OF THE LAW
The two great formative forces in the emergence of a distinctively English nation were the kingship and the law. A king was expected to rule and govern, to levy specific tolls and taxes, to wage war, to ensure that justice was done, to keep civil peace, to reward his servants, and to be seen to do all these things, as well as to maintain the splendid lifestyle that went with such supremacy and responsibility. A king who failed in these respects might eventually be challenged, as John had been and Henry III was to be, without any urge to destroy or replace kingship itself. To achieve this, without appearing to be merely rebellious and disloyal, it was vital to show in what respects the king had failed, and in what respects he should act differently This was the importance of Magna Carta and such later agreements as the Provisions of Oxford, enforced on Henry III by Simon de Montfort and other barons in 1258. They made it possible to judge the king by his performance.
A State Built on Wool
WELSH ANNEXATION AND SCOTTISH
RESISTANCE
Under pressure from certain barons, chief among them the energetic and unbending Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, however, Henry died and another lengthy reign began, of a very different stamp, under his son Edward I. He was first to take over the title of Prince of Wales for his eldest son.
A heavy reverse came with the French invasion of Edward's duchy of Aquitaine in 1294. The costs of war in France meant a severe extra tax burden for the English people. Edward also strove to promote a union of England and Scotland through the marriage of his son and the girl heir to the Scottish crown; when she died in 1290, he set out to impose himself as overlord of the Scottish realm, with considerable success until the Scots found a leader in William Wallace, and after Wallace's capture and execution in London, the guerrilla-style campaigns of Robert Bruce gradually won the country back. It was on yet another expedition to subdue the Scots that Edward died in 1307.
The reverse of the Great Seal of Edward I
AN EMERGING PARLIAMENT
The emergence of the parliament of England as a power in the land is generally traced back to Edward's reign. The enormous cost of his war campaigns, and the need to justify them to the taxpayers, made him call numerous parliaments, with representatives from shires and boroughs to supplement the lords. He was not the first to call a parliament; it grew out of the Great Council from 1265, when Simon de Montfort was first to call on the chief towns each to send two representatives in addition to two knights from each shire. This was because de Montfort could rely on towns for support, and for a long time to come parliament was in effect a tool of the king, or the king's government, summoned when it was needed, expected to assent to requests for funds and taxes, and dissolved when its assent was given.
The lords, the church, the towns these were the three estates which combined to form parliament, for the reason that they controlled the country's wealth. From the lords and the church also came the members of the king's immediate Council and the royal household. The king's Council was the origin of what would later be the House of Lords. Under the feudal system, a lordship was not a hereditary benefit, but reverted to the king on the holder's death; by the fourteenth century it was becoming more common for an eldest son to inherit an earldom or baronage, just as it was by now accepted that the eldest son of the king should succeed to the throne. But in England, unlike the countries of Europe, the concept and social distinctions of 'nobility' did not apply to the children of a lord, but only to the lord himself. By the time of Edward I's death, the country knights and the town burgesses were already identified as the 'Community', whose interests were not necessarily identical to those of lords and church. In the reign of Edward II, which afforded plenty of opportunity for discontent and concern for the national welfare, they formed the custom of meeting together during the course of a parliament, to discuss their own concerns. By the middle of the fourteenth century this gathering had become sufficiently formal to have its own clerk to record proceedings and its 'speaker' to report its views and present its claims to the full parliament. In this way, without formal statute or charter, the House of Commons began its emergence as a separate if still junior chamber to the House of Lords.
FRIENDS, FAVOURITES AND MURDER
In 1322, with a new and stronger right- hand man, Hugh Despenser, Edward reasserted royal control over a country which was slipping into baronial anarchy, but Scottish raids, a French invasion of Gascony, and the barons' resentment against Despenser's personal empire-building, wrecked everything. His queen, Isabella, sister of the King of France, went to Paris to negotiate a peace, but once there; she stayed, and became the mistress of Roger Mortimer, an exiled magnate of the Welsh marches and bitter opponent of Despenser. Isabella and Mortimer landed in England with an army of Dutch mercenaries in 1326 and Edward II, deserted by everyone, became their prisoner. He was compelled to abdicate in favour of his fourteen-year-old son Edward HI, and in 1327 he was murdered in Berkeley Castle.
For three years, Roger Mortimer, his status confirmed as Earl of March, was the de facto ruler of England. He acquired vast estates in the Marches and south Wales, made inglorious peace treaties with Scotland and France and for a time held off opposition until in 1330 the eighteen-year-old king finally shook off his mother's control and with the aid of the Earl of Lancaster arrested Mortimer and had him hanged at Tyburn like a common thief.
EDWARD III: A MILITARY KING
Edward III was determined to be a military king who would restore the Plantagenet prestige and fortunes. Scotland was to be subjugated as a vassal state; Gascony was to be reclaimed and, as grandson of King Philip the Fair of France, he aspired to the French throne. Allied to the Netherlands and the Austro-German 'Holy Roman Empire', he embarked on the war with France which would continue, with intermissions, as the 'Hundred Years War', and which, despite some famous English victories, would end in the complete eradication of English rule in France with the
The Great Seal of Edward III
sole exception of the town of Calais, and would in turn precipitate the internal upheavals of the Wars of the Roses.
THE BLACK DEATH
But from 1348, for a time the true ruler not only of England but of all Britain and Western Europe was a bacillus, later known as Pasteurella pestis, spread by the flea-infested black rat. The interwoven diseases caused by this tiny organism, bubonic plague, pneumonic plague and septicaemic plague, collectively known as the Black Death, advanced inexorably across the country from ports on the south coast during the summer of that year. Its cause undetectable, its symptoms untreatable, it was the greatest natural disaster ever to befall England/ The human tolls of floods, storms and wars were far less than the death-count of this silent and irresistible invasion. Town and country were equally at risk. In London, with some seventy thousand inhabitants, around a third of the population perished; and this was probably the case with the rest of the country. In a population generally supposed to be around four million persons in 1348, something like 1.300.000 perished by 1350. A second outbreak, in 1361, decimated, or more than decimated, the reduced population, and there would be four lesser epidemics before the end of the century.
Our modern view of the fourteenth century as a time of universal, if often naive religious belief, might presuppose a collapse of national morale in the face of what could only be considered a divinely ordained catastrophe. But there is little evidence of this, and, on the contrary, the resilience of European communities in the face of the Black Death was as strong as it was in both earlier and later disasters on a less vast scale. Perhaps the main victim of popular opinion was the church, which, as intermediary between the people and God, had totally failed to predict or prevent the onset of God's wrath. During the plague outbreaks, many people sought protection in the remedies of quack doctors or country superstition rather than in prayer. The church itself lost a high proportion, between a third and a half, of its priests. In his history of these events, The Black Death, Philip Ziegler notes that: 'The villagers observed with interest that the parish priest was just as likely, indeed more likely, to die of the plague than his parishioners'. As with a tidal wave or volcanic eruption, those who survived were more likely to congratulate themselves and dedicate themselves to the business of living (and procreation) than to spend time in considering the spiritual implications of what had happened.
THE CHANGING FACE OF ENGLAND
Historians are agreed that the estimated four million of 1348 constituted 'overpopulation' in the sense that the working population was greater than required for the available amount of work, as generated by the economic and social system. There was surplus labour available, wages fell, and there was privation and hunger where too-large family groups had use of too-small plots of land within the manor. The consequence of the plague was to reverse this situation. Many manors were untenanted, fields were left to revert to wilderness, and the wages of rural workers rose sharply as they found their services in demand, while agricultural prices fell and the cost of manufactured articles rose sharply. Larger estates were often rented off in small units. Struggling to oppose a sense of universal social upheaval, government with its limited resources found it impossible to cope; a cloth industry arose in many parts of the country, from Westmorland to Somerset, and from Yorkshire to the Cotswolds. The interdependence of weaver and sheep farmer did much to develop the internal economy and to foster a sense of national cohesion. A class of middlemen and wholesalers managed the trade, so that the activities of small farmers and cottage-based weavers culminated in a substantial industry which not only catered for the home market but quickly became a large export trade, which in turn benefited the seaports and the shipbuilding industry.
CHAUCERS ENGLAND
This was the age of Chaucer's England the first era in which we gain a picture of English life written in the English language. Geoffrey Chaucer, London wine merchant, member of parliament, royal diplomat, for even his own generation above all a poet 'first finder of our fair language', said his younger contemporary Thomas Hoccleve was the leading light in the first great age of English literature. Among his works, The Canterbury Tales has always enjoyed the greatest popular acclaim, but this collection of verse stories and linking passages, veering from high literary modes to crude folk humour, shot through with sardonic and satirical vision, is not intended as a realistic or complete portrayal of English life.
Chaucer was a member of the 'establishment' of his time, and though he recognized many of the ills of society, from brigandage to the decline in faith and holiness of the clergy, he was not a reformer in social or religious matters.
Many events still to come would test or question that moderation and tolerance. Violence was endemic at all levels of society. Henry IV would approve of the burning of heretics. Englishmen in positions of power could be as grasping, harsh and relentless as any Italian condottiere or iron-fisted Teutonic knight. An English army could wreck and raze and commit rape and looting in a captured foreign city as readily as any other. But the roots of a more measured and self-disciplined approach went very deep. They lay above all in respect for the law and in the feeling that the law was everyone's possession. It was a remedy for those who were offended against, and a warning to those who offended. The king, as ever, was its guarantor, but if the king went beyond the law, he could be made to retract, or he could be removed.
FRANCE GAINED AND LOST
In 1413 Henry IV long suffering from ill health, died and his son became Henry V. His tavern-haunting youth as Prince l was the stuff of later legend. He was a pious, militant and ambitious figure whose impatience to rule was apparent from 1410. He invaded France in 1415, pursuing his claim to the French crown. The capture of Harfleur and the lucky but decisive victory of Agincourt on 25 October 1415 heralded a chain of victories which once again brought English international prestige to a high point. As master of Normandy and most of northern France, Henry was accepted as heir by King Charles VI, and in 1420 he married Catherine of Valois, Charles's daughter.
It was clear from the beginning that Henry VI's kingship of France was not to be taken for granted. The son of Charles VI intended to become Charles VII. Until 1429, the English, in alliance with the Duke of Burgundy, maintained their hold, consolidated by the crushing defeat of a French-Scottish army at Verneuil in 1424. In 1428 the siege of Orleans, held for Charles, began. Against all apparent odds, the siege was raised by a French army led and inspired by an illiterate peasant girl, Joan of Arc. She swept on through English-occupied territory to take Reims and witness the coronation of Charles VII in its cathedral. Her failure to take Paris, her capture, her trial as a witch, and her burning at Rouen in 1431 under the auspices of Norman clerics and the English army, did not put an end to Joan's achievement or her legend. The French were firmly in the ascendant. In 1431, Henry VI was brought to Paris to be crowned, but few were impressed; warfare went on with intermittent fruitless peace negotiations. Burgundy dropped its alliance. In 1437 Henry VI was deemed to have come of age, but was to remain very much under the influence of his Beaufort relations (descendants of John of Gaunt) and a dominating French wife, Queen Margaret. The 'royal saint', in John Milton's words, who founded King's College, Cambridge, and Eton College, and preferred reading to hunting, has also been castigated by historians as the king who lost the French lands. After the battle of Castillon in 1453, England was left holding only Calais.
THE WARS OF THE ROSES
Always more of a dynastic power struggle than a real civil war, the 'Wars of the Roses' as they were later named were partly a result of the loss of the French lands, which was seen by all classes in England as a national humiliation and caused intense controversy. There were no more French campaigns, or Crusades, to divert military energy. But the seeds of these wars lay in the contested claims to the throne which had existed since 1400. Even if Henry VI had been strong enough to have the Duke of York killed, the existence of divided loyalties and the opportunities for bold men to profit from a change of ruler would still have promoted conflict. The Earl of Warwick, 'Kingmaker' to later historians, was a prime example. Having assisted Edward IV to the throne, he turned against the king when in 1469 Edward announced his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, widow of a Lancastrian stalwart, with two children, five brothers and seven sisters all eager to benefit from their sudden social elevation. The furor was so great that Edward briefly fled the country in late 1470, but returned, buttressed by Burgundian forces, and first by diplomacy, then by force of arms, retrieved his position. Warwick, having gone full circle and pledged his loyalty to Henry VI, whom he released from the Tower of London, was defeated and killed at the battle of Barnet on Easter Sunday, 1471. A further battle at Tewkesbury, in which Henry VIs son Edward was killed, confirmed the re-establishment of Edward IV Edward had learned the lesson that Henry VI had shunned; on 24 April that year, Henry was murdered. Until his sudden death in April 1483, Edward IV reigned unchallenged. His elder son, aged thirteen, was duly proclaimed as Edward V.
Tudor England
THE HOUSE OF TUDOR
Among the Lancastrian nobility was Henry, Earl of Richmond, son of Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and of Margaret Beaufort. His grandfather was a Welshman from a prominent Anglesey family, Owen Tudor, who had come to London and eventually obtained the post of wardrobe master in the household of Henry V's widow, Catherine of Valois. Later he secretly married the dowager queen, and they had two sons, whom Henry VI accepted as members of the nobility. Henry Tudor's was not the strongest of claims, but no Lancastrian had a better one. After an abortive attempt to invade England in December 1483, he landed at Milford Haven, in Wales, in 1485. In Wales his Tudor ancestry helped him to increase his army, and in the battle of Bosworth, 22 August 1485, he defeated Richard 111, who was killed. With Henry VII, the House of Tudor assumed the monarchy of England.
Provident, generous in spirit though careful with the royal funds, Henry VII did much to foster a sense of national renewal after the fractured decades that had gone before. His personal style was domestic rather than grandiose and he did not greatly impress his subjects. The rule of law was gradually reimposed on a country which had grown used to the retinues of great men fighting out their disputes, and where brigandage was rife. Gaps in the system remained; corruption and bribery of officials were still common.
The great Seal of henry VII Henry VII
Henry's eldest son, Arthur, died before him and it was his second son who succeeded, uncontested, as Henry VIII in 1509. At the start of his reign he married Catherine, daughter of the King of Aragon, the widow of his brother Arthur. Only one child of the union survived the future Queen Mary.
RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND
In the course of Henry's thirty-eight-year reign, England was to experience profound changes. In previous generations, revolutionary change had meant little more than a change of person at the very top, and a consequent redistribution of power among the magnates. The nature of the institutions of the country the royal household, parliament, church, law were not greatly affected by such changes. They followed their own paths of progress or decline. The nature of the kingship itself had altered little from feudal times. It took more than the abounding self-confidence, undoubted intelligence, and ruthless ambition of one man to achieve radical changes within one generation. But imperceptibly, through the later decades of the fifteenth century, there had grown a change of attitude within the educated community of Europe and of England. If a date could be assigned to it, it might be the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, after which a flood of refugee scholars and clerics streamed into western Europe, bringing in their luggage a host of manuscripts and commentaries which generated not only a revival of interest in the literature and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome but also a new wave of interest in mysticism, magic and the occult.
The Great Seal of Henry VIII Henry VIII
For a time, until the conquest of Moorish Granada in 1492, European Christendom was hemmed in by Islam to east and west. Crusades were proposed, but the papacy, by this time a territorial power as well as a religious one, was embroiled in the power politics of Italy and Europe and had lost the spiritual authority of the great medieval popes. The rediscovery of pagan Latin and Greek writers, the emergence of a challenging intellectual attitude to the church, the realisation that there was a vast unknown world to explore beyond the oceans, all combined to foster a spirit of enquiry different to what had existed before. It was centred on the individual, the man or woman who could bring knowledge and experience to bear on any question, and resolve it. England, on the north-west periphery, was not immune to this change in intellectual life.
Erasmus, the leading scholar of the Renaissance
in north-west Europe
Universities and their scholars were still an international community based on teaching in Latin. The German invention of printing with movable type in 1455 was brought to England by William Caxton in 1476. From then, reading could not be confined to the monastery or college: books could be read at home, and hidden away, if they were on forbidden topics. The English had no great monuments of antiquity to contemplate and emulate as had the Italians, the French and the Spanish; their language had evolved from a barbarian speech, not from a classical tongue; they had no line of descent to trace back to Virgil, Aristotle or Homer. But the spirit which led to the Renaissance and the Reformation empowered them just as it empowered men like Michelangelo in Italy, Erasmus in Holland, and Martin Luther in Germany.
It brought Sir Thomas More to write his Utopia, in 1516, an exploration of how classical humanist ideals, lacking divine revelation, could be reconciled with the divinely inspired but degenerate Christianity of his day In Utopia, gold was used to make chamber pots, and military glory was contemptible.
DEFENDER OF THE FAITH AND DESTROYER OF THE MONASTERIES
Henry VIII, supreme individualist, made his own pattern out of the traditional and novel elements of his world. Patron of new music, new art, new architecture, he also relished hunting and horsemanship. Far from averse to military glory, he launched several wars against France. He was at first a strenuous defender of Catholic orthodoxy and wrote a book against the teachings of Luther; the Pope rewarded him with the title 'Defender of the Faith'. His alienation from the papacy began in 1527, when he began to seek a divorce from Catherine. Thomas Cromwell, became his chief agent in procuring parliamentary support. A series of acts of parliament traces his steps to the final Act of Supremacy in 1534. More and Bishop Fisher of Canterbury were beheaded for their refusal to accept either this or the legitimacy of Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn, already pregnant with his second daughter, the future Elizabeth I.
In 1536 Anne Boleyn was executed and Henry married Jane Seymour, who bore "him a son and died a few days afterwards. She was succeeded by a diplomatic marriage to Anne, daughter of the Duke of Cleves in Flanders; this was a failure in all respects and was annulled in 1540. A brief marriage to Catherine Howard followed before she was executed for adultery (an activity Henry permitted only to himself), and the king's sixth wife, Catherine Parr, survived her tempestuous husband.
Despite his increasing megalomania and despotic tendencies, Henry VIII was not a tyrant. In an address to parliament in 1543, he said: 'we at no time stand so high in our estate royal as in the time of Parliament, when we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together in one body politic.
MARY I AND CATHOLIC RESURGENCE
Mary had never renounced her Catholicism. The half-Spanish Mary, with many friends, advisers and relatives from her mother's country, set out on a policy which was as bold as her father's but far more foolhardy. Until Mary's death, England was an instrument of Spanish foreign policy. This led directly to the loss of Calais, in the course of a Spanish-led war with France: it had been England's last small foothold on the European continent.
The Great Seal of Mary I
CONCORD AND COMPROMISE
Elizabeth, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of Anne Boleyn, was very different in her own way. Her mother's family too had inclined towards religious reform. Henry VIII's will prevailed without question and though in the eyes of traditional Catholics she was a bastard and so debarred from the throne, her accession was uncontested and greeted with general relief. It was hardly to be expected that she would continue Mary's policy.
The two crucial aspects of English society. One was veneration of the idea of monarchy. Linked to this was the belief that the monarch should be free to pursue his and, more lately, her own course of policy. Such a course would not necessarily be accepted tamely, or by everyone. Parliament petitioned Mary against her Spanish marriage. Wyatt led an armed revolt against it. Up and down the country, Protestants quietly ignored Mary's ban, and Catholics ignored Elizabeth's wherever they were strong enough in numbers. But the principle and the practice are both generally clear. The other vital aspect was the acceptance that the law checked, and in some respects governed, the monarch. The ultimate expression of that law lay with parliament.
NO WEAK AND FEEBLE WOMAN
The reign of Elizabeth 1 shows, not quite for the first time - her grandfather Henry VII had shown the way - but in a manner which made a deep impression on the English people, how these two ideas, in combination, could result in the monarch and her counsellors on the one hand, and parliament on the other, working together in the interest of the survival and prosperity of the nation as a whole. The queen's vanity, played up to by courtiers and sycophants, her avoidance of difficult decisions, her highly successful 'Gloriana' mythology screening her failures and lackings, has led to a campaign of detraction by some modern historians. But there is every reason to consider her one of the country's most successful, as well as remarkable, monarchs, in the execution over many years of a job which was fraught from beginning to end with difficult choices, dangerous decisions and intense pressures from many conflicting quarters.
AN AGE OF DISCOVERY
An important early achievement of her government was the reform of the currency, which was completed by 1561, with all the adulterated coins called in and a new silver coinage minted. With a currency that could be trusted, business confidence among the small but economically very important and politically influential merchant class was restored. First revealed to western Europe by Christopher Columbus in 1492, the Americas were by now a source of fabulous wealth in gold, silver and delicious, exotic foodstuffs. If an Englishman could grab some of the plunder by force, then he would. The line between merchant venturers and buccaneers was often too finely drawn to be visible. The population was growing rapidly, with the most informed estimates putting the total at3.01 million in 1551, and 4.1 million in 1601: an increase of a third in two generations. But trade was also growing fast, agriculture was prosperous and becoming more commercial, towns were becoming more populous and city markets were becoming larger, more varied in their goods and commodities and more sophisticated in their forms of dealing. England was still a small country measured against France and Spain, but among the smaller countries of Europe, it was one of the most influential, especially when after 1559, it was confirmed as a Protestant state.
At this time, it maybe noted, no one in England had ever eaten, or even heard of, a potato. No one had chewed or smoked tobacco. Tea and coffee were equally unknown. Oranges were exotic rarities and tropical fruits unseen. Silk was a rare and highly expensive import, as was virtually every other high quality fabric and such luxury items as fine china and glassware. These were accessible only to the wealthiest. The country's main imports were wine, manufactured cloth, timber, pig iron and furs. Its exports were corn, wool, coarse cloth and coal. The 'balance of payments' was probably weighted slightly in favour of imports over exports. For the majority of the population, the large increase in numbers brought a steady drop in living standards. It was a young population; schooling was minimal or non-existent for the majority; and it was expected that a child would work. A larger labour market depressed wages and led to unemployment and a growing drift from the country into the towns, especially London.
MANAGEMENT AND CONTROL
One factor in population growth was immigration. In the Netherlands, the eighty-year-long struggle to free the Dutch provinces from Spanish rule had begun in 1566. In France there was fierce conflict between the Protestants, known as Huguenots, and Catholics. Refugees from these troubles began to make their way into England, and in most cases they brought skills and trades which added to the country's resources, and depleted those of their countries of origin.
Elizabethan England was thus a far from peaceful, prosperous and united country. Internal stresses and external pressures were a permanent aspect of life for the queen and her government. Such a country required a far more intensive pattern of legislation and control than ever before, and a greater prescriptiveness was noticeable in the actions of government. A new law required people to eat fish twice a week. This was not on dietary grounds but to support a growing fishing industry which in turn provided a stream of experienced seamen for the Royal Navy and for merchant shipping. Reaching out to the Newfoundland Banks, the fishing industry also provided a link with the toehold settlements in the north of the New World. In 1563 the Statute of Labourers set out the pattern of work and reward for artisans and craftsmen, enforcing seven-year apprenticeships and giving special advantages to skilled crafts. Wages were to be fixed on a local basis by the justices of the peace, with the Council ready to step in if there was serious complaint. A new Poor Law in 1563 established a uniform parish rate to provide funds for paupers.
Council brought its decisions as proposals to parliament, and parliament usually passed them as laws, in the queen's name. But the Council's activities went further. Political insecurity, and the need to exercise wide control, meant that it employed an extensive network of spies and informants. Catholics had never accepted Elizabeth's rule as legitimate and who found the Act of Supremacy intolerable.
MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS
In 1568 Mary, the deposed Queen of Scots, fled from defeat by her country's Calvinist government to seek safety in England. The Scottish queen was a Catholic, who had been compelled to abdicate in favour of her baby son, James VI. By her descent from Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII and wife of James IV of Scotland, she was Elizabeth's closest living relative. Her French relations had already proclaimed her as Queen of England when Mary 1 died. Mary was nine years younger than Elizabeth, who at thirty-five was nearing the end of her child-bearing potential. The spectre of another Catholic Queen Mary caused great alarm to Elizabeth's Council. The two women never met, and for nineteen years Mary was kept in confinement, nominally on the grounds of implication in the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley. In 1569 the Earls of Westmorland and Northumberland attempted a pro-Catholic rebellion which was speedily put down, but it was the first of a number of plots which eventually would cost Mary her life. In 1570 the Pope proclaimed Elizabeth a heretic and formally deposed her. It was more than a futile gesture, as it enabled her opponents to plan legally, in their terms, for her assassination. The official reaction to this open threat to the queen was the encouragement of the anti-papal, anti-Catholic feeling that would come to run deep in the English population. In 1584-85, an Act of Parliament made any Englishman ordained priest by papal authority after 1559 to be automatically guilty of treason. A hundred and forty-six priests were executed between 1584 and 1603.
THREATS FROM ABROAD AND THREATS AT HOME
Slowly, through a series of minor crises, acts of piracy, sporadic peace negotiations, diplomatic initiatives and failures over a period of fifteen years from 1571, England and Spain moved closer to an ultimate confrontation. If Philip II's desire to eliminate Europe's strongest Protestant haven was his main driving force, the permanent irritation at England's penetration and harassment of his Spanish-Portuguese empire cannot have been far behind. Francis Drake, the most successful of the buccaneer-merchant-explorers, completed his circumnavigation of the globe between 1577 and 1580 and in an act of deliberate provocation to Spain, the queen knighted him in 1581 on the deck of his ship, the Golden Hind. London merchants' money had subsidised his voyage and it triumphantly symbolised the opening of the world to English enterprise. The killing of the Dutch leader, William the Silent, by Spanish agents in 1584, sharpened the anxiety of the English government. In May 1585, the Spanish seized all English shipping in the harbours of Spain and Portugal, and the Earl of Leicester was sent to Holland with an army to support the insurgent Dutch against their Spanish rulers. This military expedition was an ignominious failure and Leicester was recalled, though he did not lose the queen's favour. In 1587 a naval expedition under Drake destroyed the Spanish fleet at Cadiz.
Madrid's invasion plans, already well advanced, had to be put back for a year. In February 1587, in the wake of a further assassination plot against the queen, organised by Anthony Babington, a Derbyshire landowner, Mary of Scotland was beheaded. Only a muted protest came from north of the border, but the act made war with Spain inevitable, which is perhaps why Elizabeth both wished and un-wished it in a way that has always been discreditable to her own reputation.
THE LAST YEARS OF ELIZABETH
England was saved from Spanish conquest, and the struggle in the Netherlands continued, with English subsidies sent to support the Dutch rebels and the French Protestants, and small-scale military expeditions. These were sometimes repaid in kind, as when the Spanish attacked and d
