The Great Turning Points of British History (10 page)

Those who experienced the great mortality of 1348–50 were already more than usually conscious of the fragility of their condition. The steady growth in the population over the previous centuries had put tremendous pressure on natural resources. Land already under the plough was farmed more intensively, and marginal land previously used only as pasture was increasingly turned over to the growing of cereals and pulses. In some parts of Britain, there was no further viable land available for arable farming. To maximize their profits from a hungry market, landlords gave up the traditional practice of allowing fields to lie fallow once every few years. In the absence of anything but the most basic of fertilizing techniques, however, the impact was simply to drain the soil of its goodness and, in the longer term, to reduce yields.

To all of these problems was added that most British of concerns, the weather. Around 1300, Europe entered a mini ice age that lasted until the seventeenth century. Longer, harsher winters and shorter, wetter summers impacted seriously on the agricultural economy. Between 1315 and 1322 harvests repeatedly failed, sending grain prices rocketing and leaving the poor with no means to feed themselves. Ten or even fifteen per cent of the population of England may have died from the effects of malnutrition during this period.

These natural disasters were compounded by humanmade ones. Edward I’s military interventions in Wales, Scotland and Ireland created a legacy of warfare that was deeply damaging to the economy. Farmers and merchants, the main taxpaying groups, groaned under the weight of new subsidies, while the Anglo-Scottish border suffered huge disruption as a result of the scorched-earth policies of armies on both sides. It is not surprising that the arrival of the Black Death in 1348 was seen as God’s punishment on a people gone astray. For many, it seemed, quite literally, the end of the world.

This sense of looming disaster is captured most obviously and strikingly in the chronicles of the period. They show the sense of shock that ran through the elite as the plague made its inexorable path across the country. The death of the recently appointed archbishop of Canterbury, John Offord, was a particularly disarming event, demonstrating that not even the highest members of God’s taskforce, the clergy, were immune from risk.

The genuine fright of the agricultural labour force was another preoccupation of monkish chroniclers, who resented the idea that their fields could not be ploughed and sown as normal. There are also hints at the moral issues raised by the plague. A few people followed the continental trend of seeking refuge in ostentatious penance through acts of public flagellation. Much more common in the years immediately after 1350 was the founding and joining of religious guilds as mutual societies designed to support their members’ physical needs in this world and spiritual welfare in the next. Disapproving moralists noted, above all, the way that the peasantry, taking advantage of the low rents and high wages that resulted from a dramatic fall in the population, grew rich, lazy and uppity.

The last word – literally – is reserved for John Clynn, a Franciscan friar from Kilkenny. His chronicle represents the only detailed contemporaneous account of the effects of the Black Death in Ireland. Having recounted what he regarded as the especially severe ravages of the plague in the urban centres of Dublin and Drogheda, Clynn concluded his chronicle with a reflection on his own position, ‘waiting among the dead for death to come’, and offered the idea that he had provided additional unused parchment so that his work might be continued, ‘if anyone is still alive in the future and any son of Adam can escape this pestilence’. Clynn’s self-conscious preparation for the onset of the plague, to which he did indeed apparently succumb, is one of the most vivid memorials of the real terror and tragedy that was the Black Death.

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The plague had a significant impact on the political map of England. The first half of the fourteenth century witnessed huge changes in the political makeup of the British Isles. At the beginning of the period, England’s King Edward I (died 1307) appeared to be close to realizing his vision of a ‘British empire’. He had subdued and assimilated the remaining independent enclaves in Wales, building the great ring of fortresses that survive as testimony to his favoured technique of rule by force.

He had also embarked on a war of conquest in Scotland and had begun to make significant gains there: in 1305 he put to death the Scottish insurgent William Wallace and instituted a new programme for the government of Scotland as an annexe of the English crown. The English lordship of Ireland, established since the twelfth century, apparently held firm. And Edward’s successful defence of his dynastic possessions in the duchy of Aquitaine demonstrated the continued wider reach of Plantagenet rule.

By the end of the period, the picture was very different. Edward’s son (Edward II, king 1307–27) and grandson (Edward III, king 1327–77) maintained a public commitment to English rule in Wales and Ireland. However, after the coronation of Robert the Bruce as an independent king of Scotland in 1306 and the English defeat at Bannockburn in 1314, the idea of direct English rule north of the Tweed became increasingly fantastical. In 1328 Edward III’s government acknowledged Robert’s son, David II, as an independent king, and although Edward extricated himself from this position in the 1330s, his declared aim was not to take over Scotland directly. Rather, he wanted to secure the succession of a new king, Edward Balliol, and revive the feudal lordship over the northern kingdom that had, in fact, been Edward I’s original strategy.

The opening of Edward III’s war with France in 1337, however, fundamentally changed the nature of the Plantagenet regime by drawing attention away from Edward I’s notion of a united British Isles and focusing English ambitions on the revival of the Norman and Plantagenet empires in western and northern France.

The long-term impact can be seen in both practical and cultural ways. Except in the case of the Welsh longbowmen who played such an important part in the French wars, it was largely impossible by Edward III’s reign for the English to move men, money and provisions between the further-flung corners of their British and continental territories.

More significantly still, the elites that ran England’s dependencies no longer felt it necessary to identify with the fashion trends of the Westminster court. Within a generation the ‘English of Ireland’ would be condemned for sporting the dress and music of their adopted land. In Scotland and Wales the revival of ‘native’ customs by the aristocracy and gentry contributed significantly both to the preservation of ancient cultures and to the maintenance of a tradition of independence. Across the British Isles, the imperial strategies of Edward I can themselves be seen to have forged ‘national’ identities that were to challenge the political hegemony of English for centuries to come.

1306
Robert ‘the Bruce’ becomes king of Scots
. He launched a major challenge to Edward I of England’s efforts to assimilate the northern kingdom into his ‘British empire’. Having previously made significant inroads into Scotland and defeated and executed the rebel leader William Wallace in 1305, Edward’s apparent invincibility now began to be questioned openly.

1307
Death of Edward I
and accession of Edward II. Edward died at Burgh by Sands in Cumberland on his way to yet another campaign against the Scots. Although his reputation had become somewhat tarnished in his last years, at his death Edward was mythologized as a new Arthur and held up as a model of kingship for his successors. Edward II made an unpromising start to his reign and was soon locked in political dispute with the barons over the influence of his favourite, Piers Gaveston, whom they put to death in 1312.

1314
Battle of Bannockburn
. Edward II’s forces suffered a humiliating defeat by Robert the Bruce. The Scots made effective use of the
shiltrom
, a tightly packed contingent of infantry pikemen; English cavalry forces proved ill-disciplined and many prominent knights were cut down. Edward II’s subsequent withdrawal from Scotland left significant parts of northern England vulnerable to regular and devastating Scottish raids and created much political discontent.

1320
Declaration of Arbroath
. A group of Scotland’s political leaders appealed to the pope for assistance, declaiming – in words that have had resonance ever since – that ‘as long as a hundred of us are left, we will never submit on any condition to English rule’.

1327
Deposition of Edward II
, accession of Edward III. The disastrous and tyrannical regime of Edward II and his cronies, the Despensers, was brought to a violent close in a coup led by his own wife, Isabella, and her lover, Roger Mortimer. Edward, taken prisoner while fleeing through Wales, was forced to abdicate the throne and was imprisoned at Berkeley Castle. A parliament called in the name of his 14-year-old son was summoned to Westminster and the new regime of Edward III began. Edward II was subsequently murdered and buried at Gloucester Abbey (now the cathedral), though some historians suggest that he escaped to the Continent. Isabella and Mortimer ran the country for three years, but in 1330 Edward III launched an attack on Mortimer at Nottingham Castle, put him to trial and execution, and assumed control of his regime.

1328
Treaty of Edinburgh
. The new regime of Edward III acknowledged the independence of Scotland. The following year, Robert the Bruce died, succeeded by his young son David II. Later, in 1333, Edward III reopened the war in support of a rival claimant for the throne, Edward Balliol.

1337
Beginning of the Hundred Years War
. Tensions between the English and French crowns over the Plantagenet possessions in Aquitaine had rumbled on since the Treaty of Paris of 1259, and the English argued that the duchy should be theirs in full sovereignty, not a fief held under the lordship of the king of France. In 1337 Edward III renounced his homage to Philip VI of France for the duchy and set about defending his rights there by force; for the first years of the war, however, diplomatic and military strategy was focused on the Low Countries and northern France. In 1340 Edward announced himself king of France by right of descent, through his mother, from the house of Capet.

1346
Battles of Crécy and Neville’s Cross
. Edward III achieved a major victory over France’s Philip VI at Crécy. His commanders in northern England captured David II of Scotland at Neville’s Cross. These victories transformed Edward’s status, and the reputation of his armies, throughout Europe.

1348
Foundation of the Order of the Garter
. Edward III celebrated his recent military successes by setting up what remains today as England’s oldest and most important order of chivalry.

Throughout the British Isles in the later fourteenth century the standard of living was rising as the population decline brought about by the Black Death of 1347–50 led to an increase in per capita wealth. But in England, in particular, this increased prosperity was eroded by the rising costs of the war with France. Edward III’s early aggressive campaigns onto French soil, which had yielded prestige, booty and ransoms, were now replaced by a more defensive, and expensive, strategy. The French had turned the tables and in the 1370s raided the south coast of England, burning Rye and Winchelsea. In the last decade of his reign, Edward III withdrew from government, his son the Black Prince died in 1376 and his young grandson, Richard II, at the age of 11 succeeded him as king of England in 1377. He inherited a rich country saddled with an unwinnable war.

The personal prosperity produced by the population decline led to increased self-confidence and social unrest. Since the thirteenth century there had been localized protests against the demands by manorial lords for compulsory services (serfdom), but protests had become more frequent since the Black Death had shifted the balance of power away from manorial lords in favour of labourers and craftsmen. These protests were becoming more sophisticated as peasants hired lawyers to argue that their particular manor had once formed part of the royal estate (where all men were free). As a result, the Commons claimed in the Parliament of 1377 that villeins (serfs) had ‘withdrawn the customs and services due to their lords, holding that they are completely discharged of all manner of service due both from their persons and their holdings’.

All over Europe, in Paris in 1358, in Florence and Ghent in 1378, groups of protesters were making their voices heard in armed clamour. There is no single explanation for this volley of protests, since the pressures of population decline, price fluctuations, the imposition of taxation, the spread of literacy and the consequences of warfare affected different groups in different ways. But what was unique about the 1381 rising in England was that it was the only one that was truly national: it was the most widespread and the most coordinated. Crucially, the small size of England and its centralized government provided the protesters with a single objective: the king and his council.

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In June 1381 thousands of men – and some women – from south-east England converged on London in a mass armed protest. The young king, Richard II, was virtually held hostage in the Tower, some of his leading councillors were murdered in the streets of London, and the news of the rising sparked off other localized protests further afield. This mass protest, popularly known as the Peasants’ Revolt, has achieved iconic status in the English political memory, more recently in the protests organized to resist the proposed new community charge (aka the poll tax) in 1990. The revolt was extremely important but not necessarily for the reasons for which it is remembered.