A history of England

by Charles Oman

The expedition to Guienne.

The king thought that Scotland was tamed even as Wales had been, forgetting that the Scots had hardly tried their strength against him, and had yielded so easily mainly because their craven king had deserted them. Dismissing northern affairs from his mind, he now turned to the long-deferred expedition to Guienne. The greater part of that duchy was still in King Philip's greedy hands, and only Bayonne and a few other towns were holding out against him. Edward determined to land in Flanders himself, and there to stir up his German allies against France, but to send the great bulk of the English levies to Gascony, under the Marshal, Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk.

Illegal taxation.—Conflict with the Church.

But the expedition was not to take place without much preliminary trouble and difficulty. Edward was in grave need of money to furnish forth his great army, and tried to levy new taxes without any formal grants from Parliament. This at once brought him into conflict with the clergy and the baronage. The arrogant Pope Boniface VIII. had just published a bull named Clericis Laicos, from its opening words. It forbade the clergy to pay any taxes to the crown from their ecclesiastical revenues. Archbishop Winchelsey thought himself bound to carry out the Pope's command, and refused, in the name of all his order, to assent to any portion of the national taxation falling on Church land. The king, who was in no mood to stand objections, was moved to great wrath at this unreasonable claim. He copied the behaviour of his grandfather, King John, in a similar crisis, and by his behest the judges proclaimed that no cleric should have law in the king's courts till the refusal to pay taxes was rescinded. Edward himself sequestrated the lands of the see of Canterbury, and intimated to all tenants on the estates of the clergy that nothing should be done against them if they refused to pay their rents. Many ecclesiastics thereupon withdrew their refusal to contribute to the national expenses; but the archbishop held out, and the quarrel ran on for some time. At last Boniface VIII. was induced to so far modify his bull as to admit that the Church might make voluntary grants for the purpose of national defence. Winchelsey therefore promised the king that he would endeavour to induce the clergy to make large contributions of their own free will, if Edward on his side would confirm the Great Charter, and swear to take no further measures against Church property. To this offer Edward could not refuse his consent; he was in urgent need of money, and, although it was a bad precedent to allow the clergy to assess their own taxation outside Parliament, and on a different scale from the contributions of the rest of the realm, he accepted Winchelsey's compromise.

Conflict with Parliament.—Confirmatio Cartarum.

But this struggle of the king and the Church was but one important episode of a contention between the king and the whole nation, which filled the years 1296-7. Edward had provoked the barons and the merchants of England no less than the clergy—the former by bidding them sail for Gascony in the winter, and pay him a heavy tax; the latter by seizing all their wool—England's greatest export—as it lay in harbour, and forcing them to pay a heavy fine, the mal-tolt, or evil tax, as it was called, before he would let it be sent over-sea. All this had been done without the consent of Parliament. The barons, headed by Roger Bigod, who had been told off to head the expedition to Guienne, refused to go abroad unless the king himself should lead them, urging that their feudal duty was only to defend the kingdom, and not to wage wars beyond it. Bigod flatly refused to set out unless the king went with him. "By God, Sir Earl, thou shalt either go or hang!" exclaimed Edward, irritated at the contumacy of one who, as Marshal of England, was bound to hold the most responsible post in the army that he was striving to raise. "And by God, Sir King, I will neither go nor hang!" shouted the equally enraged Earl Marshal. He flung himself out of the king's presence, and with the aid of his friend Bohun, the Earl of Hereford, gathered a great host, and prepared to withstand the king, if he should persist in endeavouring to carry out his design. Edward, however, sailed himself for the continent without forcing the barons to follow him. When he was gone, a Parliament met. Archbishop Winchelsey and the Earls of Norfolk and Hereford took the lead in protesting against the king's late arbitrary action, and by their council a recapitulation of the Great Charter was drawn up, with certain articles added at the end which expressly stipulated that the king should never raise any tax or impost without the consent of lords and commons in Parliament assembled—so that such an exaction as the late mal-tolt would be in future illegal. The document, which is generally known as the Confirmatio Cartarum, was sent over-sea to the king. He received it at Ghent, and after much doubting signed it, for he always wished to have the good-will of the nation, and knew that a persistence in the exercise of his royal prerogative would bring on a rebellion such as that which had overturned his father in 1263. From this moment dates the first practical control of the Parliament over the royal revenue, for the clause in Magna Carta which stipulates for such a right had been so often violated both by Henry III. and his son, that it required to be fully vindicated by the Confirmatio Cartarum before it was recognized as binding both by king and people.

Meanwhile Edward got little aid in Flanders from his German allies, and found that he had small chance of punishing King Philip by their arms. He saw Bruges and Lille taken by the French, and finally returned foiled to England, called thither by evil news from the north.

Rising of the Scots.—William Wallace.

Scotland was once more up in arms. Though the Anglo-Norman lords who formed the bulk of the baronage had readily done homage to the English monarch, the mass of the nation were far less satisfied with the new condition of affairs. They felt that their king and nobles had betrayed them to the foreigner—for to many of them, notably the Highlanders, the Galloway men, and the Welsh of Strathclyde, the Englishman still seemed foreign. Edward had not made a very wise choice in the ministers whom he left behind in Scotland; Ormesby, the chief justice, and Cressingham, the treasurer, both made themselves hated by their harsh and unbending persistence in endeavouring to introduce English laws and English taxes. In the spring of 1297 an insurrection broke out in the West Lowlands, headed by a Strathclyde knight, named William Wallace (or le Walleys, i.e. the Welshman). He had been wronged by the Sheriff of Lanark, took to the hills, and was outlawed. His small band of followers soon swelled to a multitude, and the regent, John de Warenne, was obliged to march against him in person. Despising the tumultuary array of the rebels, who got no real help from the self-seeking barons of Scotland, the earl marched carelessly out of Stirling to attack Wallace, who lay on the hill across the river, beyond Cambuskenneth bridge. Instead of waiting to be attacked, Wallace charged when a third of the English host had crossed the stream. This vanguard was overwhelmed and driven into the Forth, while de Warenne could not bring up his reserves across the crowded bridge. He withdrew into Stirling, leaving several thousand dead on the field, among them the hated treasurer Cressingham, out of whose skin the victorious Scots are said to have cut straps and belts.

This unexpected victory caused a general rising: some of the barons and many of the gentry joined the insurgents. Wallace, Andrew Murray, and the Seneschal of Scotland, were proclaimed wardens of the realm in behalf of the absent John Balliol, and their authority was generally acknowledged. Warenne could do nothing against them, and prayed his master to come over-sea to his help. Meanwhile, Wallace crossed the Tweed at the head of a great band of marauders, and harried Northumberland with a wanton cruelty which was to lead to bitter reprisals later on.