The history of England, from the accession of Henry III. to the death of Edward III. (1216-1377)

by T. F. Tout

[1] Vision of Piers Plowman, i.,220, ed. Skeat.

[2] Ibid., i., 222.

Even the universities were growing more national, for the war prevented Oxford students from seeking, after their English graduation, a wider career at Paris. William of Ockham, the last of the great English schoolmen that won fame in the European rather than in the English world, died about 1349 in the service of the Bavarian emperor. In the same year the plague swept away Thomas Bradwardine, the "profound doctor," at the moment of his elevation to the throne of Canterbury. Bradwardine, though a scholar of universal reputation, won his fame at Oxford without the supplementary course at Paris, and lived all his career in his native land. As an English university career became more self-sufficient, Oxford became the school of the politician and the man of affairs as much as of the pure student. The new tendency is illustrated by the careers of the brothers Stratford, both Oxford scholars, yet famous not for their writings but for lives devoted to the service of the State, though rewarded by the highest offices of the Church. His conspicuous position as a teacher of scholastic philosophy first brought John Wycliffe into academic prominence. But he soon won a wider fame as a preacher in London, an adviser of the court, an opponent of the "possessioner" monks, and of the forsworn friars, who, deserting apostolic poverty, vied with the monks in covetousness. His attacks on practical abuses in the Church marked him out as a politician as well as a philosopher. His earlier career ended in 1374, the year in which he first became the king's ambassador, not long after proceeding to the degree of doctor of divinity.[1] His later struggles must be considered in the light of the political history of the concluding episodes of Edward's reign. In a few years we shall find the Oxford champion abandoning the Latin language of universal culture, and appealing to the people in homely English. With Wycliffe's entry upon his wider career, it is hardly too much to say that Oxford ceased to be merely a part of the cosmopolitan training ground of the schoolmen, and became in some fashion a national institution. Cambridge, too young and obscure in earlier ages to have rivalled Oxford, first began to enjoy an increasing reputation.

[1] This was before Dec. 26, 1373. See Twemlow in Engl. Hist. Review, xv, (1900), 529-530.

Hitherto culture had been not only cosmopolitan but clerical. Every university student and nearly every professional man was a clerk. But education was becoming possible for laymen, and there were already lay professions outside the clerical caste. The wide cultivation and the vigorous literary output of laymen of letters like Chaucer and Cower are sufficient evidence of this. But the best proof is the complete differentiation of the common lawyers from the clergy. The inns of court of London became virtually a legal university, where highly trained men studied a juristic system, which was not the less purely English in spirit because its practitioners used the French tongue as their technical instrument. There were no longer lawyers in England who, like Bracton, strove to base the law of the land on the forms and methods of Roman jurisprudence. There were no longer kings, like Edward I., with Italian trained civilians at their court ready to translate the law of England into imperialist forms. The canonist still studied at Oxford or Cambridge, but his career was increasingly clerical, and the Church, unlike the State, was unable to nationalise itself, though the whole career of Wycliffe and the strenuous efforts of the kings and statesmen who passed the statutes of Provisors and Praemunire, showed that some of the English clergy, and many of the English laity, were willing to make the effort. English law, in divorcing itself from the universities and the clergy, became national as well as lay. There were no longer any Weylands who concealed their clerical beginnings, and hid away the subdeacon under the married knight and justice, the founder of a landowning family. The lawyers of Edward's reign were frankly laymen, marrying and giving in marriage, establishing new families that became as noble as any of the decaying baronial houses, and yet cherishing a corporate ideal and common spirit as lively and real as those of any monastery or clerical association.

In enumerating the many convergent tendencies which worked together in strengthening the national life, we must not forget the growing importance of commerce. Merchant princes like the Poles could rival the financial operations of Lombard or Tuscan, and climb into the baronial class. The proud and mutinous temper of the Londoners was largely due to their ever-increasing wealth. We are on the threshold of the careers of commercial magnates, like the Philpots and the Whittingtons. Even when Edward III. was still on the throne, a London mayor of no special note, John Pyel, could set up in his native Northamptonshire village of Irthlingborough a college and church of remarkable stateliness and dignity. The growth of the wool trade, and its gradual transfer to English hands, the development of the staple system, the rise of an English seaman class that knew all the havens of Europe, the beginnings of the English cloth manufacture, all indicate that English commerce was not only becoming more extensive, but was gradually emancipating itself from dependence on the foreigner. Thus before the end of Edward's reign England was an intensely national state, proudly conscious of itself, and haughtily contemptuous of the foreigner, with its own language, literature, style in art, law, universities, and even the beginnings of a movement towards the nationalisation of the Church. The cosmopolitanism of the earlier Middle Ages was everywhere on the wane. A modern nation had arisen out of the old world-state and world-spirit. In the England of Edward III., Chaucer, and Wycliffe, we have reached the consummation of the movement whose first beginnings we have traced in the early storms of the reign of Henry III. It is in the development of this tendency that the period from 1216 to 1377 possesses such unity as it has.

During the years of peace after the treaty of Calais, Edward III. completed the scheme for the establishment of his family begun with the grant of Aquitaine to the Black Prince. The state of the king's finances made it impossible for him to provide for numerous sons and daughters from the royal exchequer, and the system of appanages had seldom been popular or successful in England. Edward found an easier way of endowing his offspring by politic marriages that transferred to his sons the endowments and dignities of the great houses, which, in spite of lavish creations of new earldoms, were steadily dying out in the male line. Some of his daughters in the same way were married into baronial families whose attachment to the throne would, it was believed, be strengthened by intermarriage with the king's kin; while others, wedded to foreign princes, helped to widen the circle of continental alliances on which he never ceased to build large hopes. Collateral branches of the royal family were pressed into the same system, which was so systematically ordered that it has passed for a new departure in English history. This is, however, hardly the case. Many previous kings, notably Edward I., carried out a policy based upon similar lines, and only less conspicuous by reason of the smaller number of children that they had to provide for. The descendants of Henry III. and Edward I. in no wise kept true to the monarchical tradition, but rather gave distinction to the baronial opposition by ennobling it with royal alliances. But the martial and vigorous policy of Edward III. had at least the effect of reducing to inactivity the tradition of constitutional opposition which had been the common characteristic of successive generations of the royal house of Lancaster, the chief collateral branch of the royal family. Subsequent history will show that the Edwardian family settlement was as unsuccessful as that of his grandfather. The alliances which Edward built up brought neither solidarity to the royal house, nor strength to the crown, nor union to the baronage. But the working out of this, as of so many of the new developments of the later part of Edward's reign, can only be seen after his death.

Edward's eldest son became, as we have seen, Duke of Cornwall, Prince of Wales, and Earl of Chester even before he received Aquitaine. He was the first of the continuous line of English princes of Wales, for Edward III. never bore that title. The Black Prince's marriage with his cousin, Joan of Kent, was a love-match, and the estates of his bride were scarcely an important consideration to the lord of Wales and Cheshire. Yet the only child of the unlucky Edmund of Woodstock was no mean heiress, bringing with her the estates of her father's earldom of Kent, besides the inheritance of her mother's family, the Wakes of Liddell and Lincolnshire. The estates and earldom afterwards passed to Joan's son by a former husband, and the Holland earls of Kent formed a minor family connexion which closely supported the throne of Richard of Bordeaux. Though their paternal inheritance was that of Lancashire squires, the Hollands won a leading place in the history of the next generation.

Edward III.'s second son, William of Hatfield, died in infancy. For his third son, Lionel of Antwerp, when still in his childhood, Edward found the greatest heiress of her time, Elizabeth, the only daughter of William de Burgh, the sixth lord of Connaught and third Earl of Ulster, the representative of one of the chief Anglo-Norman houses in Ireland. Even before his marriage, Lionel was made Earl of Ulster, a title sunk after 1362 in the novel dignity of the duchy of Clarence. This title was chosen because Elizabeth de Burgh was a grand-daughter of Elizabeth of Clare, the sister of the last Clare Earl of Gloucester, and a share of the Gloucester inheritance passed through her to the young duke. His marriage gave Lionel a special relation to Ireland, where, however, his two lordships of Ulster and Connaught were largely in the hands of the native septs, and where the royal authority had never won back the ground lost during the vigorous onslaught of Edward Bruce on the English power. In 1342 the estates of Ireland forwarded to Edward a long statement of the shortcomings of the English administration of the island.[1] No effective steps were taken to remedy those evils until, in 1361, Edward III. sent Lionel as governor to Ireland, declaring "that our Irish dominions have been reduced to such utter devastation and ruin that they may be totally lost, if our subjects there are not immediately succoured". Lionel's most famous achievement was the statute of Kilkenny. This law prohibited the intermixture of the Anglo-Normans in Ireland with the native Irish, which was rapidly undermining the basis of English rule and confounding Celts and Normans in a nation, ever divided indeed against itself, but united against the English. Lionel wearied of a task beyond his strength. His wife's early death lessened the ties which bound him to her land, and he went back to England declaring that he would never return to Ireland if he could help it. His succession as governor by a Fitzgerald showed that the plan of ruling Ireland through England was abandoned by Edward III. in favour of the cheaper but fatal policy of concealing the weakness of the English power by combining it with the strength of the strongest of the Anglo-Norman houses. Under this faulty system, the statute of Kilkenny became inoperative almost from its enactment.

[1] Cal. of Close, Rolls, 1341-43, pp. 508-16.