John of Gaunt

The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe

Anthony Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317894797
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

John of Gaunt (1340 -99), Duke of Lancaster and pretender to the throne of Castile, was son to Edward III, uncle to the ill-starred Richard III and father to Henry IV and the Lancastrian line. The richest and most powerful subject in England, a key actor on the international stage, patron of Wycliffe and Chaucer, he was deeply involved in the Peasant's revolt and the Hundred Years War. He is also one of the most hated men of his time. This splendid study, the first since 1904, vividly portrays the political life of the age, with the controversial figure of Gaunt at the heart of it.

Chapter One

The Inheritance of Edward III and Richard II

Edward III (reigned 1327–77) was, for several centuries, as David Morgan has pointed out, regarded as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of England's medieval kings. Recent works have gone some way to resuscitating this high reputation.¹ Edward's achievements and failures need to be put in the context of his family's (the Plantagenets) rule and their aims, methods and problems back to the later twelfth century. Like the other English kings of the fourteenth century, Edward was a direct descendant of Henry Plantagenet (d.1189), who, already count of Anjou and duke of both Normandy and Aquitaine, inherited the kingdom of England in 1154. Henry II notably extended royal power in the British Isles. He received oaths of homage from Welsh princes (not unprecedently), as well as the customary ones from Norman lords whose rule was established in the Marches of Wales. Invading Ireland in 1171, he compelled Irish kings, and the Anglo-Norman lords who had recently carved out lordships, to acknowledge his overlordship. He also reserved areas for direct royal rule. In 1174 William the Lion, king of Scots, captured in battle, assented to Henry's feudal superiority over himself and his kingdom. Henry's lordships and claims to overlordship made up the most powerful entity in Christendom, ‘the Angevin empire’, including principalities stretching from the Cheviot Hills to the Pyrenees over which Henry tried to impose his own rule.

In this ‘empire’ England occupied a crucial role, if not, in some respects, the central role. Though it gave Henry his most exalted title, England was one among several of his great principalities. Normandy was geographically the centre of empire: the speech and lifestyle of his court and barons were predominantly Norman; they and the higher clergy shared the religious and secular culture of northern France. Henry and his sons were often to be found in France.

However, the kingdom of England was the hinge on which the Plantagenet family's hegemony in the British Isles turned. Its resources sustained their rule in France. Rapidly expanding English agrarian wealth was augmented by the production of high-grade wool, large amounts of which were exported to the looms of Flanders: a situation which in turn served to stimulate the rise of commercial native cloth production. These developments were factors in the growing dominance of a wealthy London mercantile elite and in the growth of London, whose population of 30,000–40,000 by 1300 far outstripped that of any of the burgeoning urban centres in the British Isles.

The first Plantagenet kings, Henry and his sons Richard I (d.1199) and John (d. 1216) elaborated ways of tapping the wealth of England on the foundations laid by their Anglo-Saxon and Norman predecessors. There was the vast royal demesne, scattered through England, which William the Conqueror had gained. There were ways of exploiting financially the feudal superiority which William had imposed on the persons and estates of a newly constituted baronage and Church hierarchy. There were profits to be made from the development of royal justice to a pitch with which no baronial jurisdiction could compete, and from the grant of privileges to subjects, for example, corporative governing rights to urban elites.

Kings of England were able to carry out such exploitation since their powers had been exalted from before the Norman Conquest. They were sacred persons, possessed of a specific miraculous healing power, lauded and propped up by a normally subservient and immensely wealthy Church hierarchy. Subjects generally accepted public obligations to submit to royal justice, and to render military service and pay taxes in national emergencies. Royal rights were enforced by the king's officers in the shires and in many of their subdivisions, the hundreds or wapentakes. Some forms of public obligation withered after the Conquest, partly because of the rise of baronial jurisdictions and the prevalence of the concept of personal obligations mutually owed by kings and tenants-in-chief. Henry II, in particular, tried to ensure that such jurisdictions did not generally absorb or overshadow the shire system. Lesser nobles (predecessors of the gentry) were obliged to cooperate with sheriffs and the king's judges in operating the expanding system of royal administration. The knightly fee-holder, beholden to his baronial overlord, might also be the sheriff or a royal commissioner, an agent of the Crown. Through much of England, the magnate (bishop and abbot, earl and baron) had to compete with the Crown for the service of gentlefolk, whose goodwill he needed to safeguard his property rights. The need for magnates to develop patronage systems was increased by the decline of hereditary feudal bonds from the later thirteenth century onwards, which facilitated the luring away of ‘their’ knights by rival noble patrons. In order to maintain their hereditary power-bases and to consolidate dominance over local societies, magnates needed the supplements of royal goodwill and favour. Their stock among neighbouring gentlefolk depended not only on the benefits they could dispense from their own resources, but on the additional access they could provide to the king's personal benevolence. For the magnate's maintenance of his family's interest and honour, a harmonious, familial personal relationship with the king was crucial.

In the thirteenth century, though royal control of the realm had been enhanced by the elaboration of a sophisticated bureaucracy, based partly in the royal household and partly in Westminster Palace, kings faced dire crises. The Angevin empire became politically convulsed. It emerged drastically reshaped and transformed into England and its satellites, a collection of proto-colonial fiefdoms attached in various ways to the English Crown. As England became the centre of Plantagenet power, kings placed more emphasis on their sovereign claims over the British Isles. As a corollary to this painful transformation, within England politically involved individuals and communities grew more militant – baronially led protest movements about Crown policy gained in respectability and political sophistication. In 1327 opinion even tolerated or applauded the deposition of Edward II, after an invasion disreputably headed by his foreign queen, Isabella, and her lover, Roger Mortimer, earl of March. Edward was then probably murdered. This precedent of deposition – the first since before the Norman Conquest – added to the problems of Edward's successors.

An examination of certain aspects of changing Plantagenet fortunes in the century or so before 1327, when Edward HI, aged fourteen, succeeded his father in such dismal circumstances, will help to set the fourteenth-century scene, starting with the fate of the Angevin empire. Philip Augustus, a French king with a greatly strengthened power-base, in 1204 wrested Normandy and most of the other former continental possessions of Henry II from King John, whom Philip, as his overlord, had condemned to their forfeiture as a disloyal vassal. The expensive efforts by John and his son Henry III (reigned 1216–72) to regain the lost provinces all ultimately failed. Henry was left only with some slivers of Normandy (the Channel Islands) and the duchy of Gascony (or Guienne), a fragment of Aquitaine. Gascony had become by 1300 a vital English interest, through mutual trading links: it was a lucrative source of customs revenue derived from Anglo-Gascon trade based on the export of wine from Bordeaux and the supply of the duchy with a variety of commodities by English merchants. The royal administration in Gascony, headed by a lieutenant and centred on Bordeaux, had to take care not to encroach on the governmental privileges of communes and seigneurs. In 1254 Henry III declared Gascony to be a lordship annexed permanently to the English Crown, as the lordship of Ireland had been since his father's reign. In 1259 Henry made a peace treaty with Louis IX of France, renouncing Plantagenet claims on the lost provinces and receiving Louis' recognition of his right to Gascony, to be held by him and his successors as a fief of the French Crown. The status accorded to Gascony was to cause prolonged diplomatic wrangling and, eventually, warfare. From the late thirteenth century onwards French attempts to play a judicial role in Gascon affairs came into conflict with English kings' concept of their sovereignty in their dominions. In 1294 Philip IV of France confiscated Gascony from Edward I; in 1324 Philip's son Charles IV confiscated it from Edward I's son Edward II. Edward III, after he had seized power from his mother and the earl of March in 1330, was confronted with a seemingly insoluble Gascon problem, the duchy having once more been restored. The death of Charles IV in 1328, with no direct male heir, had further complicated Edward's relations with the French Crown. His own claim to the succession, as grandson of Philip IV (d.1314), through his mother, had been rejected in favour of a more distant collateral, Philip of Valois (d. 1350), who as Philip VI proved an able and ambitious ruler.

Edward III also inherited confrontational problems in the British Isles, where the imperial ambitions of his recent forbears, frustrated in France, had become concentrated. In Ireland there had developed a royal administration under a lieutenant, with institutions based on English ones radiating from Dublin, directly controlling the ports and their hinterlands. The fact that the Dublin administration came to have a surplus of revenue in the thirteenth century attests its vigour, and the expansion of Irish agriculture and overseas trade, stimulated by Anglo-Norman settlers. A byproduct of the Scottish Wars of Independence was Robert I's brother Edward Bruce's invasion of Ireland in 1315; the Scots campaigned there till 1318, wrecking the English administration. The Anglo-Irish lords were unable to regain the initiative from Irish kings, whose encroachments also threatened the Dublin administration's enclaves. It now lacked an adequate power-base: Edward III inherited a lordship of Ireland in political decay, vulnerable to external threat.

In Wales, in the thirteenth century, the position of the Marcher lords and, indeed, the security of adjacent English shires, had been threatened by the hegemony over other Welsh principalities achieved by Llewelyn the Great (d.1240) and his grandson Llewelyn ap Gruffudd (d.1282), princes of Gwynedd. In 1267 Henry III recognised the latter's position and his title to be prince of Wales. The new principality was destroyed by Edward I's campaigns, culminating in the annexation of Gwynedd in 1282–4. Edward founded his own principality of Wales, composed of two separate blocs, Gwynedd, and the older Crown lordships in south Wales. The principality was given a superstructure of English institutions; Gwynedd was ringed by imposing new castles and adjacent boroughs peopled by English folk. Both in the principality and the Marches the Edwardian conquest and settlement inaugurated the era of what Professor Rees Davies has termed ‘colonial Wales’,² whose higher offices in Church and secular administration were mainly filled by Englishmen. The system reflected distrust of the Welsh, and left the aspirations for office, honour and profit of the descendants of the native elites difficult to fulfil.

In Scotland the English Crown had had to come to terms with the parallel rise of a more formidable princely power, also a potential threat to the security of parts of England. By the time of Alexander Ill's death (1286), the Scottish Crown had established itself as the undisputed sovereign over the Scottish mainland. Through its feudal control of the new baronial and burgess elites in lowland regions, the Crown was able to impress its will in ancient earldoms. Awareness of the newly developed wealth and power of the Scottish realm strengthened Edward I's determination to impose recognition of his feudal superiority over it on the competitors for its throne who sought his adjudication in 1290, and his determination to inflict an unprecedentedly meddlesome sovereignty over the successful competitor, John Balliol. Balliol's eventual defiance led to his deposition and Edward's occupation of Scotland (1296). Edward subsequently failed to define Scotland's kingless status, ruling it through Englishmen as a lordship of the English Crown, with its own separate institutions. The aged Edward's death in 1307 and the succession of the unmilitary Edward II enabled the Scottish resistance to destroy English power in Scotland by 1314. The collapse exposed the north of England to devastating raids and ransomings. In 1328 the minor Edward Ill's mother and the earl of March made on his behalf what was regarded in England as a shameful peace with Robert Bruce, recognising his independent kingship. Edward inherited intractable Scottish as well as English problems. The seemingly lack-lustre hegemony over Scotland had been paraded as a jewel of the English Crown; the north of England lacked security. The Scots exposed a structural weakness in the English polity. Dr R. S. Schofield's analysis of the geographical distribution of wealth based on the assessments of movables for the 1334 lay subsidy demonstrates that seven of the nine poorest shires lay north of a line from the Severn to Flamborough Head.³ Richer regions to the east and south had to prop up the defences of geographically vulnerable, sparsely inhabited and unproductive border regions – devastated Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland were all exempted from the 1334 subsidy.

To support their external pretensions, from the later thirteenth century onwards the Plantagenet kings needed to commit the military and financial resources of these richer shires recurrently on a large scale in Scotland and on the continent. For the great royal demesne bequeathed by William the Conqueror had drastically shrunk, scarcely covering the ordinary expenses of government, notably the increasing costs of the royal household. The Crown's feudal rights over the Church and baronage could no longer be exploited by kings with the same zest as in the twelfth century. In 1215 King John, defeated in France, had been compelled to accept Magna Carta, the first attempt of lasting significance to define, in unprecedented detail, the ways in which the king ought to exercise his judicial powers. Magna Carta also contained a clumsy and ephemeral conciliar mechanism for coercing the king if he failed to adhere to its terms – nevertheless, a precedent for a series of baronial protest movements aimed at forcing John's successors to remedy the particular grievances of magnates and sometimes those of a wider political community, and at devising institutional means of making their reforms stick. A tradition of popular support for baronial heroes (however self-serving) is reflected in the unofficial canonisation of Henry Ill's opponent Simon de Montfort, killed in battle against the king's supporters, and of Edward II's cousin and long-term critic, Thomas earl of Lancaster, executed in 1322 after rebelling. Rebels could now become holy, not just kings. A royal commission was appointed in 1323 to enquire into and punish those who had published at Bristol ‘idolatrous tales’ about miracles performed at the place where the bodies of the rebels Henry de Montfort and Henry de Wylyngton were hanged, in order ‘to alienate the affection of the people from the king’.⁴

In this climate of opinion, the development of parliament provided a necessary means for kings to seek consent and cooperation from a lively and quite widely defined ‘community of the realm’. By the start of Edward Ill's reign it was customary for elected ‘knights of the shire’, citizens and burgesses, to be summoned to meetings of parliaments, in which kings sought the counsel of their principal tenants-in-chief and considered petitions. In his reign the shire and urban representatives came to sit as one assembly (the Commons) and he enhanced their status by giving them the leading role in the grant of lay taxation. These developments tended to undercut baronial leadership of protest movements. Moreover, Edward ‘tamed the magnates’ by his sensitivity to their family interests and ambitions, by his chivalrous camaraderie with them and his congenial addiction to warfare.

How did Edward fare in handling the problems of empire? For the most part, he left the lordship of Ireland to decay, though he strongly backed the lieutenancy of his son Lionel duke of Clarence (1361–4). He had created his eldest son Edward – known to posterity as the Black Prince – as prince of Wales. The prince led adventurous Welshmen to seek their fortunes in his military retinues in France. As holder of the royal earldom of Chester, he took off many Cheshiremen too. The earldom was ‘palatine’ – it had a separate government, headed by a justiciar, its status similar to that of the ‘private’ governments of the lordships in the Marches of Wales. In Wales, tensions fostered by ‘colonial’ government erupted only in 1400, with the start of Owain Glyn Dwr's revolt. Fear of Welsh revolt in governing circles in the 1370s is revealed by the king's council's reactions to the activities of Owain Lawgoch, who claimed to be rightful prince of Wales. A professional soldier in France, he switched allegiances and planned invasions of Wales with French and Spanish assistance. Welsh discontents still posed a threat to Plantagenet and Marcher rule there and to the English midlands.

By the 1370s, the north of England was again seriously threatened by the Scots. In 1333 Edward had repudiated the 1328 peace, intervening in Scotland to support the precarious rule of John Balliol's son Edward, who recognised English overlordship. Faced with English occupation, the majority of Scots adhered to the cause of Robert I's infant son David II, but with the start of the Anglo-French war (1337), Edward III switched his main effort to the continent. The capture of David, invading England in 1346, enabled Edward to contain the Scots by occupying Scottish border shires and committing the defence of the English borders to local lords, holding office as wardens of the Marches. This was an expensive policy for the Crown, necessitating its subsidising of garrisons and military retinues on either side of the frontier. After Robert II (the first Stewart king) succeeded David in 1371, the continued English occupation and claims over the Scottish Crown led to deteriorating Anglo-Scottish relations.

Edward's boldest innovations in foreign relations concerned French problems. After Philip VI formally confiscated Gascony in 1337, Edward threw the weight of English resources into its defence, with the ultimate aim of forcing the French Crown to recognise his sovereignty there. In 1340 he assumed the title of king of France. Edward strenuously sought recognition of his title within France and received it for a time from Flemish burgesses, dependent on English wool exports, and from supporters of the claim of the infant John de Montfort to the duchy of Brittany.

Edward had some early success in making alliances against Philip VI with princes in the Low Countries and Rhineland (within the Holy Roman Empire); his marriage in 1328 to Philippa, daughter of the count of Hainault, and future mother of John of Gaunt, was a help here. However, the Empire had a francophile ruler from 1347: Charles IV (d.1378), of the House of Luxembourg, whose rule in the Empire was strengthened by his kingship of Bohemia. Richard II's first queen was to be his daughter Anne. Edward had no hope of a papal alliance. The papacy, resident at Avignon in Provence (then part of the Empire) was occupied by subjects of the French Crown, often suspected in England of pro-French leanings. Popes in fact worked strenuously for an Anglo-French settlement, in order to restore the peace of Christendom, and as the main hope of effectively relaunching the crusade to free Jerusalem. However, papal policy was completely reversed by the outbreak in 1378 of the Great Schism, which lasted till 1419. Gregory IX, who had taken the papal court back to Rome, died soon afterwards; the French cardinals who reluctantly elected an Italian as his successor (Urban VI) fled from Rome, repelled by his reformist zeal and determination to stay there rather than return to Avignon. They denounced the election and elected one of their number, ‘Clement VII’. The king of France recognised him as true pope, as did his Scotti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps and Genealogical Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Dedication
• 1. The Inheritance of Edward III and Richard II
• 2. Gaunt in History
• 3. The Education of a Prince (1340–61)
• 4. Rise to Power (1361–77)
• 5. From Dominance to Exile (1377–81)
• 6. Gaunt and Richard II (1381–6)
• 7. Gaunt and Iberian Affairs
• 8. From Dominance to Crisis (1389–99)
• 9. Gaunt and Christendom
• 10. Gaunt and Warfare
• 11. Gaunt and the Church
• 12. Gaunt and the Secular Peerage
• 13. Lancastrian Residences and Governmental Institutions
• 14. Gaunt's Regional Interests, Estate Administration and Finances
• 15. Gaunt Characterised
• Conclusion
• Calendar of Documents
• Bibliography
• Maps and Genealogical Tables
• Index