3

Medieval Britain

THE NORMAN KINGS: CONFLICTED ALLEGIANCES

AND COMPETING CLAIMS
The consecration of William (1066–1087), a ceremony signifying his
position as both secular and divine leader, took place amid chaos. His
Norman guards, alarmed by the shouts of his supporters, set fire to
the houses near Westminster Abbey to deter William’s enemies. The
resultant disaster nearly cut short the ceremony before the holy oils
could be applied. Was this a message that William’s hold on England
was in jeopardy?
William certainly acted to consolidate his power as quickly as pos-
sible, doing so at the expense of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. The first
five years of his reign witnessed continual rebellion and opposition,
put down by force. Lands confiscated by the new king were given to
the Norman aristocracy in exchange for money, military service, and
attestations of loyalty. The system of feudal relations that had begun
under the Anglo-Saxon kings and the range of feudal dues paid by
vassals to their overlords were strengthened and enlarged through a
sophisticated bureaucratic apparatus designed to ensure that money
and power remained under the new king’s control. An army of
26 The History of Great Britain

educated priests—clerics—continued to fill the positions of clerks in

the royal household, also acting in many instances as the king’s advi-
sors and superintending many of the bureaucratic functions of the
kingdom. The innovations of feudalism revolved around male power,
with women’s roles becoming more sharply defined and frequently,
especially for noble women, more constrained. The emergence of
courtly literature that glorified chivalric codes reinforced notions of
ideal womanhood among the elite, although the reality of women’s
lives even in the noble class was often harsh and even brutal.
The feudal organization of society, with military service, feudal
dues, and loyalty moving upward from vassal to crown and honors
and protection moving downward from crown to vassal, rested on the
organization of the land itself into a system referred to as manorialism.
The organization of land into parcels called manors, which had begun
in the Anglo-Saxon period, gradually became the norm, both in law
and in practice: the crown granted manors to his vassals, who in turn
could subdivide them and lease them to tenants through a variety of
methods, ranging from freehold (inheritable in perpetuity) and copy-
hold (held and inherited for a space of time measured by the lives of
the tenants, with three lives becoming the most common) to leasehold
(held through a lease granted for a term of years). Much of this was
organized under the umbrella of primogeniture, the practice of leav-
ing estates to the eldest male heir in order to make sure they remained
whole and therefore powerful. Peasants were required to work for the
lord of the manor in a system that was legally codified into serfdom,
wherein they were bound to the land; serfs were not slaves, in that
they could not be bought and sold, but they were the unfree labor on
which the manorial system rested. Serfdom persisted through the 15th
century in England and Wales, although it was obsolete in Scotland at
least a century earlier. All of these innovations and more were recorded
in what is perhaps the most famous artifact of William’s bureaucracy,
the Domesday survey, commissioned in 1086. The survey resulted in
the Great and Little Domesday books, in which such information as
acreage, titles, rents, livestock, and labor were recorded for each estate
and manor in England. Not only did this survey provide a snapshot
of England in the late 11th century, but it also served as an important
resource for generations to come for setting levels of taxation, collect-
ing feudal dues, and settling land disputes.
Within a generation of William’s accession, England had become a
virtual extension of Normandy, with Norman nobility and French lan-
guage and culture joined by a continental contempt for the “barbaric”
Celtic cultures of the Welsh and Scots, whose lands remained outside
Medieval Britain27

of William’s control. Even continental architecture supplanted Anglo-

Saxon in the churches and cathedrals that were built and rebuilt after
the conquest. But strong ties to Normandy would ultimately cause
long-term issues of conflicted allegiance for William’s heirs. William
himself, as both king of England and Duke of Normandy, owed
homage only to the king of France. His Norman nobility, for their
part, owed fealty to him both as Duke of Normandy and as king of
England. When those roles were separated, as they soon would be,
the aristocracy with ties to both England and the continent would face
challenges to its loyalty.
This problem emerged almost immediately after William’s conse-
cration and even more strongly after his death, as the ducal title of
Normandy and the conquered crown of England were inherited by
two sons, Robert (Duke of Normandy) and William Rufus (king of
England, 1087–1100). Tensions were temporarily resolved when in
1096 Robert gave the duchy over to the custody of William Rufus while
he himself joined the Crusades, in exchange for a large payment from
his brother. William Rufus now held both titles, simplifying the ques-
tions of allegiance among his aristocracy. As king of England, William
Rufus was a marked contrast to the pious ruler his father had been. He
tended to delay filling empty positions in the church hierarchy as long
as possible—he waited years to fill the vacant archbishopric of Canter-
bury, for instance—preferring to enjoy these incomes for himself. At
the same time, on the continent, the pope was asserting new authority
over prelates in every kingdom, and many English ecclesiasts found
it simplest to place loyalty to the pope well above loyalty to a worldly
and licentious king who refused even to marry and fulfill his duty to
secure a peaceful succession.
When William Rufus died in 1100 in a hunting accident, he left no
heir. Robert, returning from the Crusades, was expected to claim not
only his own duchy but also his brother’s English holdings. But a
third brother, Henry, was more nimble, claiming the English crown as
Henry I (1100–1135) just before Robert’s return. The renewed problem
of conflicting allegiances for those with lands in both England and
Normandy was once again temporarily resolved on a practical level
when Robert was captured by Henry’s men in 1106 and imprisoned
until his death in 1134.

FAMILY QUARRELS AND CIVIL WAR

Despite Henry’s efforts at forging alliances, both to secure his
English throne and to protect his duchy of Normandy, he was unable
28 The History of Great Britain

to arrange a peaceful succession. After the death of his son in 1120, he

married a second wife but within a few years was forced to face the
fact that there would be no legitimate male heirs. In 1125, therefore,
he called a meeting of his nobles, directing them to formally acknowl-
edge his daughter Matilda, his only remaining legitimate child, as
his rightful heir. Matilda, the young widow of Holy Roman Emperor
Henry V, was rapidly married off to Geoffrey Plantagenet, the heir to
the powerful duchy of Anjou, in order to link both Normandy and
England to Anjou. Henry soon quarreled with Matilda and Geoffrey,
however, forcing his nobles to choose between loyalty to England and
loyalty to the Angevins. When Henry died in 1135, the two factions
were pitted against one another. Henry’s supporters transferred their
allegiance to his nephew Stephen (1135–1154), who beat his cousins
to London and was crowned and anointed king just before Christmas
in 1135; he secured the loyalty of those who had promised to support
Matilda by arguing that the 1125 oath had been sworn under duress.
Powerful Norman magnates, who had estates on both sides of the
channel, generally agreed that supporting Stephen was the best way
to protect their own extensive interests. Matilda, who used the title
Dowager Empress, and Geoffrey established a rival court, but Stephen
was able to maintain his hold on power until his capture by opposition
forces in 1141.
Now the throne was claimed both by Stephen’s cousin, Empress
Matilda (sometimes referred to as Maud), and by his wife, Queen
Matilda, who eventually secured Stephen’s release. A low-level civil
war ensued, definitively ending in 1153 only when Stephen was able
to secure a negotiated peace with Henry, the son and heir of Empress
Matilda and Geoffrey. Henry had inherited both Anjou and Nor-
mandy on his father’s death in 1151 and gained the province of Aqui-
taine through his marriage in 1152 to Eleanor, the ex-wife of French
king Louis VII, making him a formidable opponent or an equally for-
midable ally. Stephen adopted Henry as his heir in 1153 and died the
following year, making way for what would eventually be labeled
the Plantagenet dynasty, so called after Geoffrey’s habit of wearing a
sprig of broom shrub (Latin name planta genista) in his hat.
Henry II’s (1154–1189) empire was enormous. He continued to owe
allegiance to the king of France, but his riches far exceeded those of
his overlord. England was merely one piece of a much larger pie that
included Anjou, Maine, Normandy, Aquitaine, Nantes, and Brittany
on the continent, and it was in no way the most pressing of Henry’s
priorities. Within the Isles, he regained certain portions of northern
England that had been taken over by the Scots king, negotiated a
Medieval Britain29

peace of sorts with the dynastic families of Wales, and in 1169 began
his project of conquering Ireland. The Irish invasion was funded in
part by the pope, who saw Henry as a necessary tool in the reform of
the Irish church, where the practices of Catholicism continued to differ
significantly from the orthodoxy dictated by Rome. It took more than
a century, but by the 1290s, much of Ireland had been brought tem-
porarily under direct English control, with English institutions of law
and commerce joined to, and often swamping, those of the Irish kings.
But business on the continent was always more immediate for
Henry than business in the Isles, and he was generally content to leave
the day-to-day oversight of his English kingdom to his bureaucracy,
spending some two-thirds of his own time in his French holdings.
England gained his personal attention only rarely, as, for instance,
when his friend Thomas Becket, whom he had elevated to the arch-
bishopric of Canterbury, defied the king in the matter of criminal
behavior by priestly clerks. Henry demanded that all felons, including
these clerks, be tried in the king’s courts; Becket argued that such men
continue to be tried in ecclesiastical courts, which ran on an entirely
separate track independent from the secular system, and where erring
clerics were often spared any punishment. Becket fled to France in
1164 after being convicted of contempt and malfeasance but returned
in 1170 and was murdered by Henry’s men in the sanctuary of his
own cathedral, after a casual remark by an enraged king. This episode,
although securing Becket’s canonization, had little effect on Henry’s
reputation as king, and he continued to enjoy tremendous power.
Henry was not so lucky in his family of four sons, who were early at
one another’s throats as each sought the largest part of Henry’s broad
dominions. Henry parceled out the land but retained the real power
for himself, and rebellion was a chronic accompaniment to the king’s
later years. Two of his sons died, and his preference for his youngest
and least-able son John led Richard, the other survivor, to seek the
help of the king of France to secure his own inheritance. Richard was
successful; on Henry’s death in 1189, he inherited not only England
as Richard I “The Lionheart” (1189–1199) but also Anjou, Normandy,
and Aquitaine. Ireland went to John and Brittany to a grandson. This
enormous realm required enormous bureaucracies. The household of
the king had increased dramatically under Henry, and under Richard
these administrators were even more necessary: Richard left on a Cru-
sade to Jerusalem in 1190 and lay captive for months, even as his men
thwarted a rebellion by his brother John. Like his father, Richard spent
most of his time on the continent, regarding England as a lesser part
of his kingdom.
30 The History of Great Britain

Richard died in 1199 without heirs, and both Normandy and

England went to his brother John, the Lord of Ireland. For four years
John (1199–1216) spent most of his time on the continent, offending
almost everyone and losing many of his continental holdings through
his shabby treatment of his vassal lords. By the end of 1203 he was
forced to retreat back across the Channel, where he focused his atten-
tion on quarreling with his English nobles and his English church and
enforcing unprecedentedly high levels of taxation. Rebellion in 1214–
1215 forced John to accept a statement of liberties and a clarification
of the mutual obligations and duties within the feudal system, which
became known as the Magna Carta, or Great Charter.
John had no intention of adhering to the charter, however; it was a
delaying tactic while he gathered forces to fight in the civil war that
broke out in earnest in September 1215. When John died, 13 months
later, the two sides were at odds over the heir to the throne: should it
be John’s young son, Henry, whose minority would guarantee a rul-
ing council and could well open the doors to corruption and disaster,
or should it be Louis, a princeling of France, whose ties to the king-
dom were thin at best? A series of battles led to a treaty under which
Louis gave up his claims to the throne, and nine-year-old Henry was
proclaimed Henry III (1216–1272). He ruled on his own only after
1232, but the council ruling in his behalf carefully avoided many of
the pitfalls of minority kingships, and when Henry began to wield
power independently, he did so in a setting where the king’s conti-
nental holdings were considered increasingly less important than his
kingdom of England. English king and lords were English first, Nor-
man second. After 1259, this reorientation was reinforced as Henry’s
French holdings were reduced by treaty to a tiny proportion of those
lands once held by his grandfathers.

TAXATION, REPRESENTATION, AND RELIGION

The maintenance of a kingdom on two continents was costly, and the
early medieval kings proved remarkably resourceful at finding new
ways to raise money from their subjects. In addition to the potentially
extravagant income that could be realized through the use of patron-
age and the manipulation of feudal dues—something that Edward
I and II would take to an extreme level—these kings began to experi-
ment with direct taxes based on moveable goods as well as land. Cus-
toms duties also became a fixed part of the Crown income during this
period. The English church was supported as well through a new
body of taxes, many of which were first levied to pay for the Crusades
Medieval Britain31

but which were quickly made a regular part of church finance. Papal
authority demanded these taxes, but the popes also clearly saw that
the judicious assignment of this income directly to the English church
would strengthen the ties between Rome and England.
All of these new taxes had to be collected. Collection of land and
property taxes required the direct cooperation of the landowning
nobility, the magnates; collection of customs duties required the coop-
eration of the merchants of the towns. Thus it was that kings began to
summon the men of the shires, chosen by their peers to represent them
in these important matters, to parlay—to discuss the nature of taxes
and the reasons for new levies. These discussions, or parliaments,
inaugurated the necessary relationship between consultation with the
substantial men of the kingdom, on the one hand, and the collection
of taxes, on the other. The great nobility had always had access to the
king’s ear. It was the need to include lesser men in this conversation
that began the move to an established and formal parliament with two
separate houses. Thus, the knights who had formerly been completely
attached to their overlord’s households were given new responsibili-
ties beyond their traditional military functions. By the 1100s, knights
were becoming landed gentry, beginning the transformation into a
class that would bear the responsibility for ensuring that the king’s
laws were enforced even far away from the king himself. The dispen-
sation of justice in turn more and more relied on jury trials presided
over by traveling circuit judges, rather than on the traditional trial by
sword, for nobility, and trial by ordeal of fire or water, for others less
fortunate.
The medieval English church remained firmly tied to the church at
Rome, even with the development of church taxes that were levied
almost solely for the use of the English church. In 1066, there were
approximately 50 religious houses in England; 150 years later, there
were 700, including orders for women. Joining the traditional orders
of monks and nuns were mendicant friars, who crossed parish bound-
aries to minister to men and women across the land, administering
sacraments especially in the new towns that sprang up as population
pressures increased. Pilgrimages to religious sites became a common
practice, and even the smallest churches claimed significance through
the variety of relics they preserved. (Nineteenth-century American
author Mark Twain would say of his own European tours that he had
seen enough splinters of the True Cross to shingle a barn.) England’s
few Jews would be formally expelled in 1290 under Edward I, not
to return until the 1650s. They had already been subject to increas-
ing persecution: herded into Jewries and forced to wear identifying
32 The History of Great Britain

badges, accused of ritual murder of children, and slaughtered in large

numbers in York and London.

EDWARD I AND II: RELATIONS WITH WALES,

SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND
Like his father Henry, Edward I (1272–1307) spent a great deal of time
in his French lands, especially the profitable wine-making region of
Gascony, after his succession. Within Britain, however, his attention
was focused on Wales, where the conquest of the Welsh kings proved
relatively rapid for one of Edward’s wealth. Wales had been the haven
of Anglo-Saxons fleeing the Norman invasion, just as it had been a
retreat for the Celtic tribes menaced by Anglo-Saxons. After 1066,
Welsh princes had, in theory, gradually acknowledged the overlord-
ship of the English king, but in practice they had continued to rule
their lands as though the Norman kings were far distant neighbors.
In 1267 Henry III had granted Llywelyn ap Gruffydd the hereditary
title of Prince of Wales, formally recognizing him as the leader of all
the Welsh dynasties in the newly created principality of Wales. But his
son Edward I, with many fewer continental distractions consuming
his time and his money, was determined to conquer Wales for his own
use. Llywelyn ap Gruffydd was ambushed in 1282, and by 1284 the
conquest of the principality was complete. The territory was divided
into four shires, modeled after English shires. Edward allowed the
continuation of some Welsh laws and customs but only when they did
not significantly clash with the common law of England. Administra-
tion of the marches, the borderlands between England and Wales, was
given into the hands of large lordships known as the Marcher lord-
ships. These Marcher Lords, members of powerful Norman families,
ruled according to their own laws rather than the laws of the king and
established administrative bureaucracies and castles to rival those of
the English crown. This autonomy would end only under the reign of
Henry VIII, with the passage of two Laws in Wales Acts in 1535 and
1542.
Edward was also hungry to consolidate control over the lands
to his north. But Scotland had a single and remarkably stable royal
family, blessed with a series of exceptionally long-lived kings in the
House of Dunkeld, and an independent Scottish church recognized
as such by the pope. Indeed, Scotland occasionally ventured south
to acquire its own new territory: Northumbria lay in Scottish hands
for two decades, and the Scottish kings forged strong relationships
with other kingdoms on the European continent, especially France.
Medieval Britain33

Despite his reputation as “the hammer of the north,” Edward’s hunger

for northern expansion remained unsated. His efforts instead helped
touch off the Anglo-Scottish Wars, also known as the Scottish Wars
of Independence (1296–1357). War began after King John of Scotland
(crowned 1296; abdicated 1296) declared allegiance to Edward but
simultaneously conducted secret negotiations with France, leading
Edward to invade. Edward was gradually able to assert control and to
gain the allegiance of many Scottish lords but met with strong resist-
ance under the leadership of the famous William Wallace, who eluded
English control until his capture and execution for treason in 1305.
After Wallace’s death, Scottish lord Robert the Bruce rescinded his
own allegiance to Edward and instead claimed the throne as Robert
I in 1306, consolidating his power and defeating rivals to the Scottish
crown.
Edward himself died in 1307, to be succeeded by his son, Edward II
(1307–1327). This succession was a gift to Robert, for while the young
Edward continued to avidly collect the feudal dues known as purvey-
ance that were earmarked for the provisioning of troops, using them
instead to enrich his own household, he showed little interest in beat-
ing back the near constant waves of Scottish attacks in the north of
England. Robert’s decisive victory in 1314 against the English forces at
Bannockburn secured his own kingship, and the defeat of the remain-
ing English armies at Berwick in 1318 confirmed Scottish independ-
ence. However, despite his lack of interest in financing or waging
war, Edward refused to renounce his powers over Scotland, and the
Scottish lords eventually appealed to the pope for formal recognition
of Scotland’s independence. Edward remained recalcitrant, and the
fighting continued until he was forced off the throne by his wife Isa-
bella (regent 1327–1330), “the She-Wolf of France.”
The coup was supported by English nobles who had long objected to
Edward’s failure to effectively prosecute the northern wars, his high-
handed use of purveyance and other feudal powers, and his elevation
of a commoner as his favorite. These magnates had formally presented
their grievances to Edward in 1311, in the form of a 41-article docu-
ment delineating limits on the power of the crown and affirming the
importance of Parliament and the nobles. These so-called ordinances
were accepted by Edward only under great pressure, but by 1320 he
had ceased to honor them altogether. Noble anger was accompanied
by generalized wrath over high taxes and expensive wars. This unrest
was worsened by the Great Famine of 1315–1317, which put a hard stop
to the unprecedented population growth of the previous three centu-
ries and led to devastating years of disease and crime, contributing
34 The History of Great Britain

as well to military defeats and a civil war that erupted in 1321. Sup-
port for the crown declined even further when Edward entered into
a war against France, during which he seized the lands of his French
wife, Isabella. Edward’s many opponents—and their private armies—
joined forces with Isabella and her lover, Marcher Lord Roger Mor-
timer, on the continent and invaded the kingdom in 1326. Edward
was forced to abdicate in 1327 in favor of his 14-year-old son, Edward
III (1327–1377). Edward II died in custody shortly thereafter, and the
English crown recognized Scottish independence under Robert I in
1328. Robert would be succeeded by his son, David I (1329–1371), who
died childless; the crown was assumed by the Stewart dynasty under
Robert II (1371–1390) and then Robert III (1390–1406).
The situation in Ireland also posed ongoing problems for the
English kings. John I had been appointed Lord of Ireland, a new title,
in 1177; Ireland was technically conquered by the Normans in 1169
for the pope, Adrian IV, who delegated its administration back to the
English crown. When John succeeded to the English throne after the
death of his brother Richard, he retained the title and forced the Irish
lords to accept English law. His son Henry III also maintained the
title of Lord of Ireland, essentially redefining the lordship as a for-
mally recognized component of the English crown. Henry encouraged
the growth of a Norman-Irish aristocracy, members of which would
eventually serve in the Irish parliament that would be established by
Edward I in 1297. But English control over Ireland was challenged by
the hunger of the Scottish Robert I, who dreamt of a “greater Scotia”
that would encompass both Scotland and Ireland. His brother, Edward
Bruce, staged an invasion of Ireland in 1315 and was declared High
King of Ireland in 1316. This signaled a renewed struggle for power
that pitted the Norman-Irish lords against the Scots, on the one hand,
and the Irish clan chiefs, on the other, and resulted in the defeat of
Edward Bruce and the Scots in 1318—a defeat helped along in part
by the Great Famine, which made it nearly impossible to provision
troops. This struggle permanently weakened the hold of the medie-
val English kings over Ireland, and the chronic problems of war with
France soon took precedence over the guerilla warfare with the Irish
clans. English influence in Ireland had contracted by the 1400s to a
narrow area around Dublin, known as the Pale.

WAR, PLAGUE, AND UPRISINGS

England’s 1328 recognition of Scottish independence was temporary.
Within a few years, Scottish magnates who had sided with the English
Medieval Britain35

and thus lost their Scottish territory felt powerful enough to try to
reclaim their forfeited lands, and they invaded in 1332, reigniting a
war that would end only in 1357 with the Treaty of Berwick. France
joined on the side of the Scots in 1337. Edward III, confronted with a
two-front war, preferred to focus on what he believed to be the greater
enemy. He claimed the French crown in 1340, setting off the episodes
that became known, erroneously, as the Hundred Years’ War. It was
war in the plural, punctuated with short intervals of peace, lasting until
1453 and worsened by the global disaster of the Black Death, the wave
of bubonic and pneumonic plague that killed some 30 percent of the
European population between 1348 and 1351. Subsequent waves came
in 1360 and 1375. Edward himself gave up his claims to the French
crown in 1360, although he retained all of his French possessions. This
marked a pause in the war, which erupted again in 1369–1389 and
yet again in 1415–1453, by which time England would be shorn of all
of its French holdings except the port city of Calais, which had been
annexed by Edward III in 1347.
The wars themselves were fought not simply on French soil but
throughout the western regions of the continent and at sea. These
wars, like the ongoing battles against the Scots, were paid for through
new and heavy taxes across the kingdom, including unprecedented
levels of taxation on the clergy. Taxes were met with widespread
resistance, and many of Edward’s parliaments were characterized
by acrimony, culminating in the so-called Good Parliament of 1376.
It was this parliament that adopted impeachment as a tool of parlia-
mentary and therefore public control over bad ministers, with Edward
furiously forced to dismiss a number of his closest advisors.
Edward’s death in the following year placed his 10-year-old grand-
son Richard II (1377–1399) on the throne, introducing all the problems
of a minority rule. Richard’s ruling council had to address serious
uprisings that were a response not only to the ongoing and escalating
expenses of war but also to the massive economic and social disloca-
tions still being played out after the waves of plague, the last of which
ended just before Richard’s ascension. The population loss was dev-
astating, plummeting from 4.8 million in 1348 to just over 2 million in
1400. Ironically, after the first years of shock and grief, many survivors
found their lives considerably improved: many peasants were able to
increase the acreage they leased and worked; wages for both male and
female artisans and other laborers increased; rents decreased. Land-
lords, on the other hand, found their income significantly contracting
because there were so many fewer renters, and the agricultural innova-
tions introduced in the early 1300s were abandoned owing to expense
36 The History of Great Britain

and lack of labor. Despite parliamentary statutes as early as the 1350s

designed to keep labor on the land, the system of serfdom was fatally
injured (although not immediately destroyed) by the plague, and the
reactions by landlords were varied. Some landowners sought to retain
their previous ways of life at any cost and used draconian pressures to
reinforce their economic and social powers. Others began to adopt the
new, more rational land use practices that would become more com-
mon in the 15th and 16th centuries.
The church as an institution suffered a significant decline in pres-
tige as a result of the plague. Priests, serving the stricken, had died
at even higher rates than the general public, and their replacements
often took holy orders as a last resort, with neither the interest nor
the ability to fulfill their duties. Waves of anticlericalism—critiques
of the institution—were accompanied by the emergence of such her-
esies as John Wycliffe’s Lollardism, which emerged in the 1380s to
reject many of the sacraments of the Church. Wycliffe’s theological
innovations replaced transubstantiation (a complete transformation
of the elements in the Eucharist) with consubstantiation (a belief
that bread and wine remained bread and wine while also becom-
ing the body and blood of Christ) and called for the translation of
the Bible into the vernacular. The Lollards’ denunciations of Church
wealth and ungodly rulers threatened both religious and secular
power, and those who escaped prosecution were forced to flee to
the continent.
All of these pressures helped contribute to the social unrest that
under Richard II exploded into rebellion and threatened to become rev-
olution. The most serious of these rebellions was the episode known as
the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. The changes in rural life involved in the
shift from grain to sheep farming, the apparently endless tax increases
to fund war with France, the increased assertiveness of peasants and
artisans no longer so closely bound to traditional social and economic
structures, and dissatisfaction with a church apparently incapable of
fulfilling its duties—all of these contributed to the revolt led by Wat
Tyler and John Ball. The rebels moved from the countryside into Lon-
don to appeal to the new king and attacked many of the traditional
symbols of a repressive old monarchy, throwing open prison doors,
sacking the homes of royal ministers, and kidnapping and killing the
archbishop of Canterbury. The rebellion was put down with force,
its leaders were killed; none of the demands of the rebels were met,
although the hated poll, or head, tax (at a uniform 1s. per head, this
was a particularly difficult burden for the poor) that had sparked the
uprising was abandoned for many years.
Medieval Britain37

Wat Tyler, seen here in a 19th-century engraving of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381,
led marchers into London to protest rising taxes and changes to traditional rural
life. A large crowd, led by Tyler and John Ball, attacked royal ministers and mur-
dered the archbishop of Canterbury before they were subdued. Tyler was killed
by William Walworth, mayor of London. (Ridpath, John Clark, Ridpath's History
of the World, 1901)

Richard himself, at the age of 14, met the appeal of the rebels without
sympathy. Advised but not led by a series of ruling councils, he now
began to assert his own authority. Unfortunately, despite his intelli-
gence, he alienated many of his supporters through his arrogance and
his open promotion of royal favorites. The so-called Merciless Parlia-
ment of 1388 responded by resorting to the still novel tool of impeach-
ment, infuriating Richard but ridding the government of incompetent
ministers, many of whom were exiled or executed. Richard delayed his
revenge for several years, but in 1397 the king made his move against
his magnates. Several nobles were killed or exiled, including the man
who would eventually depose the king, his cousin Henry Boling-
broke, and Richard confiscated their estates. However, the king’s visit
to Ireland provided his enemies with the opportunity they needed to
arrange his forced abdication in 1399. He died in prison in 1400.
38 The History of Great Britain

CLAIMS TO FRANCE AND THE WARS OF THE ROSES

(1399–1485)
When Henry Bolingbroke became Henry IV (1399–1413), his acces-
sion was based more on raw power than on his relatively weak blood
claims via the house of Lancaster. Not surprisingly, the early years of
Henry IV’s reign were punctuated by rebellion, including an upris-
ing by Owain Glyndŵr that liberated Wales temporarily from English
control in 1405. War with France was renewed despite a truce entered
into by Richard II in 1396, and war with Scotland had continued at
intervals since the Treaty of Berwick in 1357. Ireland entered a brief
period of respite from direct English control while the English king
consolidated his gains and fought his enemies. Within England, ongo-
ing resistance to Henry’s coup was expressed in a variety of ways,
beginning with a series of three failed rebellions led by the noble Percy
family between 1403 and 1408. Other attempts followed, culminating
in a 1413 conspiracy to restore a spurious Richard II, who was claimed
to have survived his abdication. Ill health as well as political resistance
dogged the king, whose death in 1413 led to the succession of his son,
Henry V (1413–1422).
This Henry was not content to be king of England, and he inau-
gurated a new push to regain control of France. An astonishing and
impressive victory at Agincourt resulted in Henry’s marriage to the
daughter of the king of France as well as his elevation as heir to the
French throne in place of the Dauphin. Although Henry died in 1422,
before he could wear the French crown, his infant son Henry VI (1422–
1461) became a dual monarch. It was an elusive and costly victory;
under the inspired leadership of Joan of Arc, the French regained much
of the land claimed by the English kings. Henry VI’s marriage to Mar-
garet of Anjou, the niece of the French king, was an abortive attempt to
iron out a settlement between the kingdoms, but the French continued
their campaign to reconquer their lands, and by the end of 1450 all of
Normandy was once again out of English control. Three years later,
Gascony also was transferred to France, and English holdings on the
continent were limited to Calais. This was a symbolic defeat but also a
very costly blow to English trade, as it completely disrupted the wine
and cloth trades so crucial to the English economy.
Henry reacted to this set of defeats with a complete breakdown, ush-
ering in a protectorate in 1453–1454 and the intense struggle known as
the Wars of the Roses, in which the Lancaster branch of the family
(represented by the badge of the red rose) battled the York branch
(represented by the white rose) for control of the kingdom. After years
Medieval Britain39

of intrigue and costly bloodshed, the Yorkists prevailed on Parliament

to pass the 1460 Act of Accord, which stipulated that Henry’s crown
would pass to the Yorks on his death, bypassing his own son. The
resulting battles ended, with Henry and his French queen Margaret
escaping to Scotland, leaving the throne to be claimed by the York-
ist Edward IV (1461–1483). Henry would be captured by Edward and
imprisoned in London in 1465, to be briefly restored in 1470 before
Edward reclaimed the throne; Henry died in 1471, possibly murdered
by his successor. After 1471, Edward’s successes rested on a careful
extermination of his Lancaster rivals and their supporters (including
his own brother, the Duke of Clarence) and generous rewards to his
friends and allies.
Edward’s restoration focused on stability at home, where he
reinvigorated the offices of the royal household—especially the royal
exchequer—under his motto, “method and order.” He earned a reputa-
tion as a patron of scholars and a collector of illuminated manuscripts.
His foreign policies were less successful, including his failed attempts
to reconquer both France and Scotland. He died in April 1483, leaving
two young sons. Rivalries within the factions of Yorkist supporters
emerged with such force that they threatened to plunge the country
again into civil war. Edward’s only surviving brother, Richard of
Gloucester, secured the throne for himself as Richard III (1483–1485)
and placed his two nephews in the Tower of London, where they
mysteriously disappeared. Historians and amateurs alike have for
centuries debated the personality and behavior of Richard III, some
claiming that he was personally responsible for the deaths of the boys
and others arguing that his reputation for very bad behavior was a
result of the propaganda so skillfully promulgated by Henry Tudor,
the man who would defeat him on the battlefield at Bosworth in 1485,
just two years after Richard’s own usurpation.
Henry Tudor’s victory over Richard ushered in a new dynasty and
a new era, bringing to an end the period of instability that had char-
acterized England in the late Middle Ages. He inherited a kingdom
that was almost wholly English, since the severing of ties to France
meant that the noble families of the kingdom no longer were buf-
feted by the pressures of competing loyalties. Scotland was by 1485
still mired in a long period of intermittent civil war under the Stewart
kings, punctuated by the assassination of James I (1406–1436) and the
accidental death of James II (1436–1460), each of which had resulted in
the ascension of a minor heir and the backbiting and power-brokering
associated with regencies. In Wales, Welsh nobles could be found
on both sides of the Wars of the Roses, and Welsh soldiers had been
40 The History of Great Britain

instrumental in helping the new king secure the throne. In Ireland,

English control remained limited to the Pale. Thus, England by the
accession of the Tudors was not yet part of a “Great Britain,” but it
was almost a nation. Its people were bound together by a common
language, a strong church that despite membership in the Roman
Catholic community was characterized by peculiarly English laws and
customs, and a confidence that England itself was no longer an easy
prize for waves of foreign invaders.