17 results in The Age of Edward III
1 - Edward III and the Coup of 1330
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Summary
Formal announcement of the success of the palace coup which brought Edward III's minority to an end was made to the sheriffs on 20 October 1330 in the following terms:
Whereas the king's affairs and the affairs of the realm have been directed until now to the damage and dishonour of him and his realm and to the impoverishment of his people, as he has well perceived and as the facts prove, wherefore he has, of his own knowledge and will, caused certain persons to be arrested, to wit the Earl of La Marche, Sir Oliver Ingham, and Sir Simon de Bereford, who have been principal movers of the said affairs, and he wills that all men shall know that he will henceforth govern his people according to right and reason, as befits his royal dignity, and that the affairs that concern him and the estate of the realm shall be directed by the common counsel of the magnates of the realm and in no otherwise: he therefore enjoins the sheriff to cause this his intention to be published through his bailiwick, so that all people may fully understand it.1
The writs were confirmation of the success of a hasty, though not altogether unprepared, plot conceived by the king and his closest friends to overthrow the regents, the queen mother, Isabelle, and her ally, Roger Mortimer. While the events themselves are well known, other aspects are not. The identity of six high-profile participants has long been established, yet many more conspirators were involved and their names have only recently come to light.
Under the tutelage of Mortimer and Isabelle, Edward III had suffered a series of indignities between 1326 and 1330 well chronicled at the time. In almost every way possible, Mortimer had compromised and humiliated the king. Edward had been crowned in unique and difficult circumstances in January 1327, following the deposition of his father. Henry of Lancaster, the king's cousin, was appointed head of the regency council, but within a few months, Mortimer was bypassing the council, and quickly became the driving force behind Isabelle's policies. The situation in Scotland, in particular, was an utter humiliation. The king's only foray across the border in 1327 ended in disaster when the Scots surrounded the English camp, and took large numbers of English and Hainault soldiers prisoner.
Frontmatter
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Introduction
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The conference at which the eleven papers included in this volume were delivered, which was organized by Dr James Bothwell and Professor Mark Ormrod, and held in July 1999 at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, was a very good conference - and for no-one more so than for the man upon whom its proceedings were focused, namely, King Edward III. For, although the subjects covered by these papers vary widely, on one point at least the contributors exhibit virtual unanimity: namely, that Edward's style of kingship, whatever the epithets by which one might choose to characterize it, was successful kingship, and that the man himself, whatever quibbles or reservations might be allowed in relation to specific policies or actions, deserves the praise which, for the most part, his contemporaries heaped upon him. This is, of course, in many ways far from surprising: Edward's reputation has been rising steadily during the second half of the twentieth century, and the evidence presented here will do nothing to reverse that trend. Not that there is any lack of revisionism in this volume - indeed several of the papers included here quite explicitly challenge ideas put forward by earlier historians - but it is revisionism of the kind that results, not in our questioning of Edward's abilities, but in a readjustment of our perception of the ways in which his success was achieved. Several of the contributors, for example, emphasize the king's bent for what we now call spin-doctoring, while others stress his concern for the maintenance of law and order - an often overlooked, and sometimes frankly discountenanced, facet of his kingship. Yet there is an unmistakable impression that, above all, for Edward III, everything came back to the war, and it is war, therefore, accompanied as ever by its faithful shadow, diplomacy, which underlies many of these papers.
Of those contributors who take Edward's wars as their principal theme, the one who addresses the subject most directly is Andrew Ayton. His subject, or at any rate his starting-point, is the military career of Sir Thomas Ughtred, who fought at Bannockburn, acted as sub-marshal of the English army at Cre'cy, and, shortly before his death in 1365, was admitted to the Order of the Garter.
Contents
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Abbreviations
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8 - Edward III and the Plantagenet Claim to the French Throne
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- By Craig Taylor
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The title of King of France was one of England's stage properties … No one dreamed of justifying it: it was part of the succession. (Edouard Perroy)
In 1340, Edward III officially laid claim to the French throne and thereby transformed his struggle with Philip VI, the Valois king of France, from a feudal squabble between liege lord and vassal into a war between two contenders for the royal succession. In practice, this claim to the throne remained a secondary goal for the English during the Hundred Years War, at core a bargaining tool in their negotiations for an expansion of their continental empire and an end to French sovereignty over those lands. Moreover it enabled Edward III to defend alliances with enemies of the French crown such as Lewis of Bavaria and the Flemings, who were in turn able to pose as supporters of the true king of France against the Valois usurpers: the Flemings informed Benedict XII that they could not be excom- municated for breaking their oaths to the crown because Edward was the rightful king of France. This Machiavellian manipulation of Edward's claim to the French throne for ulterior ends has led many historians to dismiss the
actual legal foundations of that title, influenced also by the pervasive notion that the Salic Law confined the royal succession in France to males in direct line and hence barred Edward from inheriting a claim through his mother, Isabelle. This myth was firmly established by the anonymous French treatise Pour ce que plusieurs (1464) when it was published in conjunction with Claude de Seyssel's La grande monarchie de France in 1507, 1541 and 1557: the anonymous author even claimed that Edward III had publicly accepted that Philip of Valois was rightful heir to the French throne because of the Salic Law. Yet in reality this was an otiose Frankish law concerning private inheritance that could have no direct bearing on the royal succession; more- over, it is clear that the Salic Law was not used by official Valois writers until around 1413, when Jean de Montreuil added a marginal note to a text that he had originally composed in 1406.
10 - The Anglo-French Peace Negotiations of 1354-1360 Reconsidered
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According to the terms of the Treaty of Bre'tigny, which was sealed on 8 May 1360, Edward III was to be given full, sovereign rule over Guienne, Saintonge, the Angoumois, Poitou, the Limousin, Pe'rigord, the Agenais, Rouergue, Guare, Bigorre and Quercy, as well as Calais, Gu� nes, and the surrounding areas, and on top of these lands he was to receive the almost unimaginably huge sum of 3,000,000 gold écus, or £500,000. The French, furthermore, agreed to abandon their troublesome old alliance with the Scots. In exchange, Edward was to cancel his own alliance with the Flemings, abandon his claim to the French throne, and agree to a perpetual peace and alliance with Valois France. Surprisingly enough, the current orthodoxy holds that these terms represented a major defeat for Edward III, one which he accepted only because of the threat of imminent military disaster. It seems to me, however, that this interpretation, put forward most elaborately by John Le Patourel but also found in the works of Kenneth Fowler, Edouard Perroy, Philippe Contamine and others, is wrong on both counts: the treaty was in fact a triumph for King Edward rather than a surrender, and the campaign of 1359- 1360 was hardly the military failure often described.
To decide whether the terms of the Treaty of Bre'tigny represent a strategic success or a strategic failure, it is necessary to review the history of English war-aims and peace negotiations over the preceding quarter century. One reason for the misinterpretation of the peace of 1360 is a number of misreadings of the terms of earlier, unimplemented agreements. Let us begin with the English objectives. Edward III began his war with France with three basic aims: to end French interference in his subjugation of Scotland; to end the meddling of the Valois royal administration in his government of his French territories, especially Guienne, by persuading the
French to acknowledge that he held them as allods (that is, in sovereignty, not as a vassal's fiefs); and to regain the lands occupied by Charles of Valois in 1324 which by the treaties of 1326 and 1329 were supposed to be returned to the Plantagenets but which, by the outbreak of the war in 1337, it had become clear that the French did not intend to hand over.
Index
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2 - Edward III, The English Peerage, and the 1337 Earls: Estate Redistribution in Fourteenth-CenturyEngland
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The period between 1326 and 1330 had many important implications for fourteenth-century history, not the least of which was its impact upon the pattern of noble landholding in the realm. Due to the run of events in these years, substantial amounts of land were in - or had returned to - the king's possession upon Edward III's assumption of independent power in late October 1330.1 These properties can be divided into two main groups.Firstly, there were those connected with the events surrounding the downfall of Edward II in 1327. These lands were brought in during late 1326 and early 1327, resulting primarily from the summary execution of Hugh Despenser the elder at Bristol and of Hugh the younger at Hereford - who had themselves amassed considerable estates after the defeat of the ‘Contrariants’ at Borough- bridge in 1322.2 Such properties had two fates under the minority regime: either they were re-granted by Mortimer and Isabelle, under the aegis of the young Edward III, to themselves, their friends and supporters;3 or, somewhat less often, they were kept under the control of the crown - in effect being placed in a ‘temporary royal demesne'.4 Secondly, there were the estates returned into the king's hands resulting from the coup at Nottingham Castle in October 1330.Of the central players in the minority regime of 1327-30, Roger Mortimer, the earl of March, was executed and declared forfeit, and Queen Isabelle pardoned - though forced to give up many of the lands she held.5 With their demise came in not only large portions of the above-mentioned
Despenser estates but also lands which they held of their own right, either the result of inheritance or independent acquisition - whether through purchase or other means. These properties, as well as those of the supporters of the minority regime such as Simon Bereford and John Maltravers, were to play a crucial role in Edward III's re-assertion of monarchical position and power with respect to the nobility in the decade after the Nottingham coup, culminating in the earldom creations of 1337.
For the first couple of months after the coup, Edward III was relatively cautious in the way in which he dealt with these estates. When he did re- grant these lands,6 he tended to distribute them piecemeal to less contro- versial members of the established nobility.
3 - Politics and Service with Edward the Black Prince
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The Black Prince was born to a military inheritance. There were few, if any, aspects of his life which were not shaped by the Anglo-French conflict, and the administration of his estates and the complement of his retinue were governed by such concerns. The life story of the man who died on Trinity Sunday (the feast-day for which he had particular reverence) in 1376 is well known. On that day, in the midst of the political crisis of the Good Parliament,theprincewaslaudedandmourneddespitehis(partial) responsibility for the loss of the principality of Aquitaine and much of the territoryacquired bythe English from the opening of hostilities in 1337 to the treatyof Bre'tigny(1360). This was the man who, as a boyof sixteen, had won his spurs fighting in the vanguard at Cre'cy. Ten years later his reputation reached its height when, outside Poitiers, he captured the king of France in battle. The consequence of that victory, despite the failure of the Reims expedition to enforce the demands of the treaties of London, was a prin- cipality for Edward of Woodstock. It was from there that the Black Prince launched his last campaign when he became involved in the Castilian civil war. Disaster followed victory at Na'jera (1367) and the prince returned to Bordeaux, bankrupt and broken with the illness that would eventually claim his life. The Gascon rebellion, probably engendered by Charles V and Louis of Anjou, as much as by the haughtiness of the prince and his predominately English officers, was further encouraged, perhaps even excused, by the 1367 fouage and war soon followed.1 It was to be a war in which the prince could play almost no part.
The military aspects of the prince's career are well known and their ramifications influenced every other facet of his life, but such matters were not his only concern and this was demonstrated in the composition of his household and retinue. Men were drawn to the prince's service because of the potential financial rewards and his military reputation. Furthermore, he was the heir apparent and as such, his influence at court was considerable and could be used to bring his servants and retainers to the attention of that greatest of all patrons, the king - an office and dignitythat would, in time, be held by Edward of Woodstock.
9 - Some Reflections on Edward III's Use of Propaganda
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- By A.K. Mchardy
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'Edward III, like Mrs Thatcher, needed a good war.' Edward, of course, ended up fighting more wars than he really needed, but the assertion focuses on a basic element in his kingship whose aim was the restoration of royal authority and prestige. In this policy, public relations and image-building were central tools, and they have attracted a large literature.
Yet although this reign was an important one in the history of public relations, image-making and political point-scoring, Edward's record as a propagandist was mixed. It is true that the king's military achievements were publicized by the use of newsletters, some of which have survived embedded in chronicles. Edward also became skilled at manipulating both parliament and the convocation of Canterbury province. In the case of the latter there were occasions when he sent war heroes to address the assembly when seeking exceptional tax grants. Thus, in 1356, he dispatched Sir Walter
Manny to argue in favour of a sexennial tenth, though this resulted in the grant only of a biennial tenth; the grant of the triennial tenth in 1371 was achieved only by the personal intervention of the Black Prince after per- suasion by Gaunt and others had failed.
On the other hand, aspects of his propaganda effort appear haphazard and amateurish when contrasted with some continental kings. Unlike the kings of Aragon he neither preached to meetings of parliament nor wrote chronicles himself; and unlike his French rivals he did not sponsor the writing of an official chronicle. Though, as we shall see, some of the documents he sponsored were sophisticated, he never achieved the levels of subtlety and insidiousness generated by some of the Valois propaganda. Even some of his information dissemination made less impact than we would have supposed. When in 1337, for example, Edward issued a manifesto explaining the cause of the French war, this was copied into the register of the Archbishop of York, William Melton, but otherwise made no impact on ecclesiastical records (though who knows what the lost register of archbishop Stratford contained).9 The other point at which we might have expected precise information and opinion-forming to be evident was in publicising the reasons for Edward's claim to the French throne.
11 - Isabelle of France, Anglo-French Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange in the Late 1350s
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In the middle decades of the fourteenth century, England occupied centre stage in international diplomacy and culture. The English victories of the 1340s held the promise of a new golden age for Britain. Edward III, the new Arthur, celebrated his triumph with a magnificent series of feasts and tournaments and the founding of a new chivalric order, the Order of the Garter. The ravages of the Black Death must have cast a pall over the celebrations, but the victory at Poitiers in 1356 appeared to reaffirm the inauguration of a new Britain. King Jean of France and many other noblemen were made captive and brought as prisoners to England, where King David of Scotland, captured at Neville's Cross a decade earlier, still remained in captivity. From 1357 to 1360, England was thus not only the focus of international diplomacy, but also very much thecentreofinternational court culture. The festivities between autumn 1357 and spring 1358 were especially splendid. The cycle began with a tournament at Smithfield which was attended by the kings of England, France and Scotland as well as by noblemen and knights from all three kingdoms. There was a great feast at Marlborough at Christmas before the court moved on for a courtly and chivalric extravaganza at Bristol at Epiphany. They were merely the prelude, though, to the festivities held around St George's Day at Windsor. They certainly impressed King Jean of France who reputedly observed, all too aware that his ransom provided the English king an almost inexhaustible source of credit, that he had never seen such expenditure without payment of gold and silver. He also noted in a letter to the townsmen of Nimes the attendance of three queens: Edward III's wife Queen Philippa, Edward's sister the queen of Scotland and - a ghost from the past - Edward's mother Isabelle of France.
The presence of Isabelle of France, the queen mother, is especially worthy of note. In a number of sources and histories it is assumed that after the coup of 1330 she was in disgrace, or at least rusticated, at Castle Rising in Norfolk. A close analysis of the sources does reveal, however, that in the 1340s she remained in contact with her son, and appeared at a number of court functions.
5 - Edward III's Enforcers: The King's Sergeants-at-Arms in the Localities
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The king's sergeants-at-arms have, by and large, been overlooked by late medieval English historians; what attention they have attracted has focused firstly on their function as the king's bodyguard, and secondly on the infamous role they played in the reign of Richard II. So far as the former is concerned, the Household Ordinance of 1318 prescribed that there should be thirty sergeants, each one armed, equipped with three horses and resident at court. Four of them were to sleep outside the king's chamber at night, and the remainder within earshot in the hall; when the king travelled, all were to precede him on horseback. It is clear from their actions during Richard's reign, however, that in practice their fulfilment of these stipulated duties was compromised by their being sent away from the king into the localities on various commissions. It is their performance of these local commissions that has really brought them to the notice of historians, for it was this that gave rise to their infamy. The deeply unpopular sergeants John Legg and Richard de Imworth, the former a tax-collector and the latter the governor of the Marshalsea prison, were both targets of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. In 1387 the king used his sergeants in a vain attempt to raise forces against the Appellants, and one of them, Thomas Usk, was consequently executed by the Merciless Parliament. In 1390, 1394 and 1397, Parliament complained that the sergeants, more numerous than hitherto and allegedly extorting money by colour of their office, were oppressing the shires, and during Richard's tyranny from 1397 the sergeants were, according to Tout, ‘ubiquitous’ in the localities as agents of the closest royal control, collecting money, requisition- ing ships and men, serving on local commissions, ‘and in all sorts of ways … [interfering] with the course of local administration and justice'. Given- Wilson has shown that in the period before the tyranny one of them at least, Richard de Markly, routinely performed similar functions in the shires.
But without the lure of infamy to draw historians, the sergeants-at-arms’ local activities have remained otherwise hidden; in short, where they pro- voked little complaint we have overlooked them. This essay will make a start at redressing that omission by exploring the role the sergeants played in the rule of Edward III in the counties.
7 - A Problem of Precedence: Edward III, the Double Monarchy, and the Royal Style
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- By W. M. Ormrod
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Edward III's formal assumption on 26 January 1340 of the title of king of France represented surely the most momentous decision of his long and eventful reign. Historians have long recognized that the claim marked a sea- change in Anglo-French relations, transforming the basis on which Edward sought to resolve the long-standing dispute over Plantagenet sovereignty in Aquitaine. Much attention has also been paid to the juristic aspects of the French claim and to its use in English propaganda during the Hundred Years War. The present study aims not to engage directly with the validity of the claim or with the way in which it was deployed in English diplomacy, but to establish how it evolved and was represented in the new royal style (the formal statement of the king's titles) adopted in the wake of the announce- ment of the double monarchy in 1340, and to explore some of the implications of the French royal title for mid-fourteenth-century English domestic politics.
There were two principal and overlapping ways in which the royal style was officially articulated in later medieval England. First, there was the heraldic representation of monarchy found in the royal coat of arms. This visual statement of the king's claims was found in many different media, whether painted on banners, boards and walls, embroidered on cloth, engraved on gold and silver plate, or cast in the matrices of royal seals and coins. Recently, both Michael Michael and Adrian Ailes have worked on the significance of the new quartered arms of France and England adopted in 1340. They have shown that Edward's French mother Queen Isabelle, and possibly Edward himself, had already quartered the leopards of England with the fleurs de lis of France before that date, but had always given formal precedence to England by placing the leopards in what we read as the left- hand side of the upper level of the quartering (read heraldically, from the reverse, as the dexter) and subordinating the fleurs de lis to the right (the sinister). When Edward assumed the French royal title, however, he immediately altered this order of precedence, putting France in the dexter and England in the sinister. This symbolic ordering of the two monarchies within the royal arms remained unchanged for the rest of the reign, even during the period when Edward ceased to exercise the French title between 1360 and 1369.
6 - Sir Thomas Ughtred and the Edwardian Military Revolution
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- By Andrew Ayton
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Among the men who shared the English triumph at Cre'cy there were few with better cause for satisfaction than the sub-marshal of Edward III's army, Sir Thomas Ughtred. For this Yorkshireman, a man in his fifties, the events of 26 August 1346 represented the high point of a career marked by dramatic fluctuations of fortune. By 1346 Ughtred had borne arms for over thirty years, his career following the ups and downs - mainly downs - of the Scottish wars. He had fought at Bannockburn, when his retinue commander, William, Lord Latimer, was taken prisoner; and he himself suffered the same fate at Byland in 1322, though only after a display of courage and skill with arms, which, as John Barbour recalled half a century later, brought him lasting renown. In 1332 he accompanied Edward Balliol to Scotland and participated in the remarkable victory of the Disinherited at Dupplin Moor. In October of the same year, a heroic stand against the Scots at Roxburgh Bridge added still further to his reputation. Association with Balliol's cause was rewarded by land grants, and ensured that Ughtred would serve in each of the Scottish campaigns from Halidon Hill until his appointment as keeper of the town of Perth in 1337. This was an important independent command, but also a poisoned chalice. Despite his best efforts, Ughtred's spell of duty at Perth was to be the most frustrating and ultimately humiliating experience of his life. It was concluded in August 1339 when he was forced, through shortage of supplies, to surrender the town to the Scots. Suggestions were made that he had come to terms too readily, and in the autumn Ughtred's conduct at Perth was investigated in parliament; but, apparently proving as skilful with words as he had so often been with the sword, he succeeded in clearing his name. Within a few months Ughtred was fighting in France, though it was perhaps characteristic of his career at that time that he missed the battle of Sluys (24 June 1340), only joining the English army in time to take part in Robert of Artois's unsuccessful attack on St Omer in late July.
For several years Ughtred's life was both less eventful and more in keeping with what historians have regarded as the usual style of living of the county gentry.
4 - Second ‘English Justinian’ or Pragmatic Opportunist? A Re-Examination of the Legal Legislation of Edward III's Reign
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The title ‘English Justinian’ was accorded Edward I with the undoubted intention of highlighting the enduring significance of his legislative pro- gramme. The epithet was coined, however, not by a contemporary chronicler, but by the early seventeenth-century judge and scholar, Sir Edward Coke, who marvelled at both the substantive content and the sheer volume of entries in the statute book stemming from Edward's reign. When writing in his Institutes of the Laws of England concerning the first Statute of Westminster (1275), Coke considered:
… all other [of] the statutes made in the reign of this king may be styled by the name of establishments, because they are more constant, standing and durable laws than have been made ever since: so as king E. I … may well be called our Justinian.
If Coke's comment was to some extent an exaggeration, it probably says as much about Coke and his own agenda as it testifies to the merits of Edward I's legislation. The retrospective reference clearly reflected a desire on Coke's part that the English should have a legislative icon in the same way that the sixth-century Roman Emperor Justinian was hailed for the ‘law code’ that became the foundation of Roman civil law. By naming his own work (intended to be a comprehensive guide to the national laws of England) after Justinian's Institutes, Coke essentially wanted to emphasize the sense of past tradition as well as to identify the architect behind his native law: a motive that was endorsed by the nineteenth-century constitutional historian
Bishop William Stubbs and the great lawyer and historian Sir William Holdsworth.
In suggesting that Edward III should be dubbed ‘second English Justinian', there is tacit acknowledgement of the epithet's validity as applied to Edward I within the framework of English legislative initiatives. My main purpose here, though, is not to justify Edward I's posthumous title, nor dispute his legislative achievements, but to ascertain whether Edward III's enactments can be considered as part of a programme of legislation that laid decisive foundations warranting historical acclaim or whether his laws were essen- tially short-termist in character, being driven primarily by political concerns and his own dynastic ambitions.
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