England in the Age of Chivalry . . . And Awful Diseases

The Hundred Years' War and Black Death

Ed West

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781510719880
• eBook ISBN: 9781510719934
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

A revealing glimpse into the tumultuous history of England's medieval period, full of knights in shining armor and terrible peasant suffering.
Covering the violent and disease-ridden period between 1272 to 1399, England in the Age of Chivalry... And Awful Diseases covers the events, personages and ideas most commonly known as "medieval". This includes Geoffrey Chaucer, the Peasants revolt, the Scottish wars of independence, the Great Famine of 1315, the Black Death and the 100 Years War. Central to this time is King Edward III, who started the 100 Years War and defined the concept of chivalry, including England's order of the garter. His legacy continues to shape our view of England's history and is crucial in understanding the development of Europe.

CHAPTER ONE

Long Live the King

Edward II had not had the easiest childhood, being the youngest of sixteen children to Eleanor of Castile and the violent maniac Edward Longshanks, confusingly called Edward I even though he was the fourth king of England to be named that.1

The first Edward, standing at six foot three, was a domineering, terrifying figure also nicknamed ‘the Hammer of the Scots’ as well as ‘the Leopard,’ after a then-common belief that the animal could change its spots, as he had a habit of going back on his word. He was also known as ‘the Lawgiver’ or ‘the English Justinian,’ after the Roman emperor, as he introduced laws firmly establishing Parliament, and in particular created the House of Commons, although without really meaning to.2

Edward had become king in 1272 after the long reign of his simpleminded father Henry III. Longshanks’s grandfather King John had been such a disaster that, after alienating everyone through his lechery, drunken violence, and cowardice, his barons had forced on him a peace treaty that later became known as Magna Carta, which he immediately ignored.3 Following a year of subsequent civil war, John died of dysentery in late 1216, having gorged himself to death on food and alcohol, and left his nine-year-old son in charge, so broke he could not even afford a crown for his coronation and with his enemies in control of the majority of the country. But, thanks to the heroic elderly knight William Marshal who led the loyalist forces into battle despite being in his seventies, young Henry survived to become one of the longest reigning monarchs in English history.

The essential cause of the conflict had been how much the barons could restrain the king, and who paid for what, and after the First Barons’ War of 1215–17 the same problems arose again in the 1250s. The rebel leader this time was a mildly psychotic French knight called Simon de Montfort who led on a platform of low-self-awareness populist xenophobia despite living a fantastically luxurious lifestyle and having only arrived in England in his twenties without speaking a word of English. He was also married to King Henry’s sister, and the king was terrified of him.

Henry’s eldest son Edward had grown up during this difficult period. Apart from sharing a lazy eye, father and son were nothing alike. Henry was an absentminded simpleton who managed to get lost in the one battle he took part in; his eldest son, named after the eleventh-century saint Edward the Confessor, was a bloodthirsty maniac whose lifelong ambition was to go on a Crusade and bring Jerusalem back to Christianity in an orgy of violence.

Like most young aristocrats, Edward was trained for war through ‘tourneys,’ or jousts, which had begun in western France in the eleventh century as sort of toleration zones for violence. Although we have in our minds an idea of tournaments as colorful events where men got to show off to women waving handkerchiefs, they were incredibly violent affairs that often ended in multiple fatalities; in 1240 during a tourney outside Dusseldorf, sixty knights were killed in one event. But neither this nor Church condemnation made the slightest bit of difference to the endless supply of aristocratic yobs who loved these events. In June 1256, around the time of his seventeenth birthday, Edward took part in his first tourney at Blyth in Nottinghamshire, at which a number of jousters died from their wounds.

During the early stages of de Montfort’s protests, Edward had sided with his uncle, but as it became more violent he returned to his father, and it was Edward who won the war at the battle of Evesham in 1265. It didn’t end well for de Montfort: before the battle, Edward assembled a hit squad of a dozen men, the ‘strongest and most intrepid at arms’ to kill his uncle, who ended up being chopped into a number of parts, and his testicles hung around his nose. (Edward’s ally Roger Mortimer struck the killer blow and so his wife got to keep de Montfort’s head.)

Many considered Edward’s behavior after the battle, when he executed a number of de Montfort supporters, to be murder, but this ruthlessness was characteristic. As a young man, he once ordered his attendants to put out the eyes and crop the ears of an adolescent who angered him. The gossipy monk Matthew Paris tells a story about Longshanks being out with his followers one day when he gratuitously orders the mutilation of one man, just for larks. Such was his reputation that the Archbishop of York had an interview with the king, and afterwards was so shaken he took to his bed and simply died. Another cleric, sent by his fellow priests to complain to the king about taxation, fell down dead on the spot.

Then there was an incident in 1303, when Edward’s treasury was burgled and crown jewels stolen; after the culprits were caught, he had the thieves’ skin nailed to the treasury door. The royal account book of 1297 includes the cost of repairing his daughter Elizabeth’s coronet, which Edward had thrown into the fire in a rage. And, like any great psychotic medieval despot, he was an enthusiastic persecutor of Jews.

Still, Edward was very loving to his pet falcon, and he even used to visit the shrine of Thomas Beckett to offer prayers for his bird, and made a wax image of the sick animal—so not entirely a bad person.

Before becoming king of England, he had been put in charge of Gascony, the region of southwest France still ruled by the English monarch. On one occasion, Edward was dealing with Gascon rebels who had holed up in a church in La Reole, and ordered it destroyed only for his father to overrule him (Henry loved churches). Gascony formed part of the Duchy of Aquitaine, which had become part of the English crown after the ill-fated marriage of Henry II and its heiress Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152 (it wasn’t very happy—he imprisoned her for fifteen years). After their son John had lost most of his French territory in 1204, Gascony remained the last part of the continent attached to the English crown, but the French claimed it. Still, it does produce very good wine so we can see their point, and at the time, Gascony sold five million gallons of the stuff to England every year—some twenty-five million bottles, a large amount when it was very expensive to import.

With England at peace, beginning in1269 Edward took up the gap year of his day, the Crusades. He wanted to do what every young rich kid did: take a year off, experience new cultures, see some really interesting countries, kill all the inhabitants, then go home and bore everyone senseless talking about it. Strangely enough, he brought his wife Eleanor of Castile with him, even though they already had two kids.

The couple had been married since 1254, when they were both children, and were devoted to each other. While on Crusade, Eleanor gave her husband Concerning Matters Military,4 or De Re Militari, a book on war by the late Roman writer Vegetius. It was sort of the How to Win Friends and Influence People of its time and read by everyone who mattered. The couple had an enduring romantic attachment unusual for the age, and unlike most medieval kings, Edward had no mistresses.5

The plan had been to go on joint Crusade with his cousin, King Louis of France. However, the whole adventure was ruined when, after decades of planning, the French at the last minute chose to head to North Africa instead, where Louis soon died (later becoming Saint Louis on rather dubious grounds). Edward ended up first in Tunis and later in Palestine where he fought Sultan Baibars, a Turkish leader who occasionally skinned prisoners alive, according to one chronicler.

However, by the time Edward arrived in the Holy Land, the Crusades were as good as lost and, in 1272, he made preparations to return home; before he left, though, he was almost killed in Haifa, in modern-day Israel, at the hands of the Assassins, an Islamic cult led by an enigmatic figure called ‘the old man in the mountain’ who trained young fanatics to become suicide-killers. An assassin, after securing a private audience with Edward, took out his dagger and stabbed him before Edward overpowered and killed the man; however, the knife was poisoned, and Edward’s life was only saved when his wife sucked out the poison. This part of the story sounds slightly unlikely, but its popularity reflected the genuine love match that existed between the two.6

This was just one of many amazing scrapes the adventurous king survived, on top of storms at sea, two battles in which he came out unscathed, and a miraculous escape after his horse slipped at Winchelsea, which should have crushed him. Edward was once playing chess and then got up to stretch his legs for no reason, ‘only to have a stone crash down from the vaulting in the place where he had been seated,’ crushing his chair ‘to matchwood.’7 After this, he became devoted to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham in Norfolk, the holiest place in England, convinced that someone up there was looking out for him.

Edward was nowhere near as religious as his father, or credulous; he could easily spot frauds, of which there were many at the time, such as a knight who claimed to have had his blindness cured at the tomb of Henry III and whom the king dismissed as a liar. Henry had devoted years and vast amounts of money to rebuilding Westminster Abbey, originally constructed by his hero Edward the Confessor, but at the end of Longshank’s thirty-five-year reign almost no work had been done at the still-unfinished church. He did own a huge number of relics, including a nail from the Cross and a saint’s tooth ‘effective against lightning and thunder,’ but these could be seen more as valuables than any great display of faith.

In 1272, Edward was in Sicily when news reached him that his father had died, and also came news of the death of his son, John, aged just five. When the Sicilian king John of Anjou marveled that he mourned just the former, Edward said he could make another son but fathers were irreplaceable. Edward and Eleanor had sixteen children in total, of whom only four outlived him. The king was a very unsympathetic figure, but life was extremely grim for everyone and there was no room for sentiment.

It was another two years before the king arrived home, like any gap-year kid having come back with huge debts,8 and on his way back he was invited to a tournament with one thousand English knights in Chalon-sur-Saone in Burgundy. The event turned out to be so violent that the pope himself condemned it, with many of the French chevaliers clearly trying to kill the king. He never fought in a tourney after that.

It seems strange for any young man to not even bother to return for his father’s funeral, especially when he had inherited the crown of England, but having personally removed the testicles of the last man who had caused trouble, he correctly doubted that anyone else would try their luck. Because the new monarch was so far away, the king’s council started a tradition by declaring that the new reign had begun immediately, rather than how previous reigns began when the crown jewels and armory were seized and any rivals thrown out of the nearest window. It is for this reason that the phrase ‘the king is dead, long live the king’ was invented, and why a half-mast flag was not flown at Buckingham Palace when a royal died again until 1997, when the tradition was changed after the death of Princess Diana.

After the crown was put on Edward’s head, he theatrically took it off and said ‘he would never take it up again until he had recovered the lands given away by his father to the earls, barons, and knights of England, and to aliens.’ This wasn’t going to end well.

CHAPTER TWO

The Round Table

Edward’s coronation was a lavish affair and the feasting lasted two weeks. One hundred Scottish knights who turned up allowed their horses to run free and declared that anyone who caught one could keep it, and because of this act of reckless generosity the English knights felt the need to do the same. Two years earlier England had experienced famine, the first of many over the next half century, but such lavish flaunting of wealth was common because the entire medieval hierarchy was based on the idea that lords had to be able to entertain those below them. This is what caused kings and barons to ruin themselves and encouraged wars where they would get rich on plunder or die trying. The pinnacle of this idea of kingship was the mythical King Arthur, who, when not winning battles or showing his chivalrous qualities with the ladies, was looking after his improbably large entourage with great feasts and a constant supply of goodies. Arthur was Edward’s role model and inspired his desire to become King of Britain, a dream that did much to form the identities of the island’s three nations—England, Scotland, and Wales—although this was the opposite of what he intended.

The whole story of Arthur was basically made up by twelfth-century churchman Geoffrey of Monmouth who passed it off as history, and it became immensely popular across Western Europe. The Arthurian legend also fed into the evolving idea of chivalry, which as the medieval period went on became more like its modern ideal, celebrating knights who were brave and dashing but also compassionate and Christian.

The Arthur myth was based on the obscure wars of the Dark Ages between native Britons and invaders from the continent, the Angles and Saxons, who referred to their enemies as ‘foreigners,’ or Welsh; although by Edward’s time they had come to refer to themselves as Cymru, ‘the people’ (today the Welsh nationalist party is called Plaid Cymru). Relations between the Welsh and English had never been warm, although the border had been stabilized in the eighth century by King Offa of Mercia, who built a dike to mark it.

Then, however, the Normans turned up, and after conquering England they created a series of semi-independent territories on the border, known as the Marcher Lordships (‘march’ means border, from where we get such words as marquis, Mercia, and Denmark). The Marcher lords tended to be the toughest and greediest of the Norman aristocrats, which is saying something, and were often in conflict with the monarch. They had also begun to encroach into Wales, grabbing the low-lying fertile land and settling it with English and Flemish migrants.1 The Welsh, understandably, weren’t entirely pleased, but because of its mountainous geography it was impossible to unite the country under one ruler. However, in the 1260s, a strong leader called Llywelyn ap Gruffydd became the first man to be recognized as Prince of Wales; then he refused to turn up to Edward’s coronation in the confident belief he could snub him—hence his name, ‘Llywelyn the Last.’

Llywelyn was a big fish in a small pond; he had a court large enough to include a bard, a harpist, falconers, and a ‘silentiary,’ whose job it was to keep the rowdiness to an acceptable level. But he was small-fry compared to Edward, and didn’t even control all of Wales, which was divided among him and his three brothers, including Daffyd, who back in 1272 had plotted to assassinate his elder sibling. Forgiven by Llywelyn, he went on to conspire against him on a second occasion, this time with their brother Owain, before a snowstorm forced them to abort and run off to England where Daffyd was sheltered by the king.

As a result, the Welsh prince refused to attend the coronation. Edward demanded he pay his respects, and when Llywelyn again refused, the king of England even traveled up to Chester to save on the Welsh leader’s travel expenses. Again, the prince declined, and in total Edward sent Llywelyn five summons, determined to have his way.

The Welshman sent three replies, explaining that he was waiting until their differences were sorted out, namely that Edward hand over the rebels. To add further insult, the fifty-something Llywelyn then married Eleanor, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of Simon de Montfort and Edward’s aunt, Princess Eleanor, without the king’s permission, and in fact without even having met her. (Strangely, it was possible at the time to marry someone without meeting them so long as an agreed substitute turned up at the wedding). It was this that set off Edward’s slightly crazed mission to conquer all of Britain, using the Arthurian fantasy as his justification.

Wales was, for most Englishmen, still a wild and strange place, its people thought to be ruthless and bloodthirsty. In deepest Wales (pura Wallia), where the Normans had not settled and where Llywelyn’s rule held sway, the old Laws of King Hywel Dda still applied; disputes were settled by blood feuds, and a thief would be pardoned if he had passed ten houses and ‘failed to obtain anything to eat’ before committing his crime. To the Normans, of course, starvation was no excuse for theft and would inevitably result in some important body part being removed.

In 1276, Edward raised an army and the following year invaded Wales, the English troops advancing under the flag of St. George they had brought back from Crusade; Llywelyn soon surrendered but was allowed to retain the title of Prince of Wales, partly as a sort of mockery to rub in how powerless he was. Edward had kidnapped his cousin Eleanor while she was en route to marry the Welsh leader, but now agreed to the match; however, she died in childbirth, and he had her daughter imprisoned almost fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Long Live the King
• Chapter 2 The Round Table
• Chapter 3 Braveheart
• Chapter 4 Famine
• Chapter 5 War
• Chapter 6 Crecy
• Chapter 7 Plague
• Chapter 8 The Black Prince
• Chapter 9 The Peasants’ Revolt
• Chapter 10 Schism
• Chapter 11 This Other Eden
• Chapter 12 Sad Stories of the Death of Kings
• Bibliography
• Endnotes