Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (38 page)

Yet this was the period when, for two years, direct taxes were levied upon the people to pay for the Scottish wars and the royal household. Twelve thousand quarters (336,000 pounds or 152,480 kilograms) of corn and malt were needed to feed the armies, further depriving the people of their necessary food. The king and the noble lords were not particularly interested in the sufferings of the English, despite their claims to represent ‘the community of the realm’; they were concerned only with their own wealth and power. The citizens of Bristol rose up in their despair and occupied the castle. It was written that ‘to seek silver for the king, I sold my seed’.

By 1318 the worst of the famine was over, the spectre of starvation banished by a bountiful harvest. Prices steadied, and then
fell. But signs of overall decline were still in evidence, with the spread of disease among cattle and a general contraction of agricultural production. There would be really no sustained recovery for a hundred years.

The king always relied upon a strong confidant to deal with the business of the realm; he could not of course put his faith in Thomas of Lancaster, because his cousin was implacably opposed to him. So he placed his trust in a new favourite. The successor to Gaveston was Hugh le Despenser who, together with his father of the same name, gained a considerable hold over the irresolute king. Despenser soon acquired lands and castles, particularly in Wales where the family was already strong, and as a result he alienated all the other lords of the principality. His officers assaulted or threatened anyone who stood in their way; they burned down barns, and laid false charges against prominent landowners.

Despenser, as the king’s chamberlain, tried to conceal his thefts and extortions under the guise of constitutional propriety; it was his duty and responsibility to bring order to Wales. But everyone knew that his case was fraudulent. The king’s favourite had once more become arrogant and over-mighty at the expense of the barons. Thomas of Lancaster then stepped forward, and announced that no reliance could be placed in the king or his courtiers. In the spring of 1321 the land and property of the Despensers were attacked by those whom they had disinherited; it was a form of revenge that came perilously close to civil war. One chronicler, Robert of Reading, wrote that now the king’s ‘infamy began to be notorious, his torpor, his cowardice, his indifference to his great inheritance’.

At the beginning of August in the same year the great lords of the north and the west came to London with their armed retinues, and insisted that the Despensers be expelled from the realm. They were accused of ‘encroaching’ upon royal power, and of controlling access to the king’s presence. They had perverted the law and illegally gained custody of lands. Edward, faced with the solid phalanx of their enemies, yielded. The Despensers were banished from England.

Yet this was only the beginning of what turned into a general civil war. The king had decided that it was better to remove his opponents one by one. He besieged Leeds Castle, the home of one malcontent, and executed its garrison. These executions were not part of the chivalric code, and were met with widespread disapproval. They demonstrated, however, that the king was in earnest. He then recalled the Despensers, and began to organize a military campaign to defeat those whom he considered to be rebels against his power. Having mustered his forces at the beginning of March 1322, he defeated Thomas of Lancaster in battle. He had cornered his old enemy at last and, after a summary trial, he executed him. It was the first time that a sentence of death, on the charge of treason, had ever been directed at a member of the royal family. Lancaster had cut off the head of Piers Gaveston; Edward, long meditating his revenge, beheaded Lancaster.

Other members of noble families, who had taken Lancaster’s part, were now at the king’s mercy. ‘Oh calamity,’ the anonymous author of a life of Edward II wrote, ‘to see men recently adorned in purple and fine linen now dressed in rags and imprisoned in chains.’

Many of these lords were hanged on the lands that they had once owned. The king ordered altogether twenty-five executions. No English sovereign had ever punished his enemies among the barons so mercilessly.

A curious sequel to Lancaster’s execution can be recorded. He was conceived by many to be the noble opponent of a vicious enemy. As such, his memory was revered. At the site of his execution, and at his tomb in Pontefract Priory, there grew a sacred cult in which miracles were attested. A drowned child returned to life beside the tomb itself; a blind priest recovered his sight at the place of Lancaster’s death. A servant of Hugh Despenser decided to shit on the same spot, as a gesture of contumely, but a little later his bowels were parted from his body. Another centre of piety was established at St Paul’s Cathedral, in London, when a stone table commemorating Thomas of Lancaster became the site of further miracles. The king issued ordinances to dissuade the people from making pilgrimages to Pontefract or St Paul’s, but he could not thwart the piety of the populace.

In this uncertain and disordered period sporadic outbreaks of violence arose throughout the country. In 1326 the chief baron of the exchequer, Robert Belers, was ambushed outside Melton Mowbray and murdered; the gang, led by Eustace de Folville, was well known. Five sons of a lord of the manor, John de Folville, had turned themselves into a criminal fraternity; they terrorized their home county of Leicestershire, with numerous murders and robberies. They hired themselves out as mercenaries, and kidnapped prominent local people in return for large ransoms. They even fought in foreign wars as part of the retinue of lordly patrons.

One of the brothers, Richard de Folville, had been appointed as rector of Teigh by his eldest brother. It was a convenient cover. When he and his followers were one day pursued by various officers of the peace, they took refuge in his church. From that vantage they shot many arrows, killing at least one of their pursuers. But then the local people took the law, literally, into their own hands; they dragged Richard from the church and beheaded him on the spot. The other brothers managed to escape justice.

Other criminal bands were to be found in the early decades of the fourteenth century. One leader called himself ‘Lionel, king of the rout of raveners’, and he wrote threatening letters from ‘our castle of the wind in the Greenwood Tower’. So violence at the centre rippled through a country already troubled by famine and disease.

Smaller incidents of disorder are recorded. Robert Sutton insulted Roger of Portland, clerk of the sheriff of London, in open court; he put his thumb to his nose and exclaimed, ‘Tprhurt! Tprhurt!’

John Ashburnham rode up to the sheriff ’s court, held in the open air, and so threatened the sheriff that he fled; at which point Ashburnham whistled on his fingers, as a signal that his men should rise up in ambush.

When a writ was served on Agnes Motte, she appealed to her neighbours; with drawn weapons they compelled the servers of the writ to eat it, wax and parchment.

When the mayor of Lynn tried to change the rules of trade, a crowd of tradesmen, under the leadership of the prior, dragged him from his house, placed him on a stall in the marketplace, and
forced him to swear on the host that he would make no changes. It is interesting here that the prior of Lynn led the charge. But other clerics were involved in lawlessness. A gang of six monks from Rufford Priory attacked, and held to ransom, a local gentleman.

The rector of Manchester invited a local couple, with their daughter, to dinner. The rector’s servants seized the daughter, broke two of her ribs, and then deposited her in the rector’s bed; he had sex with her that night, but the unfortunate girl died from her injuries a month later.

The king’s court at Westminster was not immune from lawlessness. An attorney was sitting on a table in the great hall – ‘close to the sellers of jewels’ – when the other party to his suit threatened to kill him if he did not abandon it; he was then dragged off the table and struck on the head. Someone else pulled a knife on him. The attorney extricated himself from his attackers and ran to the bar of the court calling for help; the men followed him, their swords drawn, but the officials of the court somehow managed to bar the doors against them. They were then disarmed and taken to the Tower.

In the summer of 1322 the king called a parliament at York, in the course of which a statute was passed that allowed him complete and independent rule. The ordinances of 1311 were once more abandoned. Contemporaries were in no doubt about the situation. The magnates were now too frightened to thwart the will of the king. Parliaments were of no account. Reason had given way to threats and penalties. Whatever pleased Edward, now had the force of law. He sought out the rebels in every shire, confiscating their lands or fining them heavily. His treasury grew and grew on the proceeds. ‘Serve us in such a way that we will become rich’, he wrote to the officials of his exchequer.

He was not to find riches in conquest. He led a campaign in Scotland against Robert Bruce, but achieved nothing except the detention of six Scottish prisoners; with the absence of provisions severely affecting his troops, he marched southwards across the border. But the Scottish army pursued him, and almost caught him
near Bridlington in East Yorkshire; he fled in panic to York, a singularly unfortunate end to a futile expedition. He was forced to sign a treaty with Robert Bruce at the beginning of 1323, the principles of which he broke almost immediately. The king’s bastard son, Adam, was killed in the course of the campaign.

The difficulties with France, over the disputed territory of Gascony, had not been resolved. The French had even planted a
bastide
or fortified town in the middle of the duchy. So the king sent his wife, Isabella, to negotiate with the French king, Charles IV; since she was that king’s sister, some hope of success could be conjectured. But there was a problem. Edward did not trust Isabella, and Isabella had no affection for Edward. Once they were separated by the Channel, anything might happen. The king made another fateful decision; he sent his eldest son, Edward, to the French court to do fealty for the land of Gascony. Both wife and son were now in France.

The king did not travel there himself because he was too concerned about the stability of his own kingdom. It was said at the time that the Despensers advised him to stay at home, because they feared the wrath of the other barons descending upon them in his absence. There were reasons to be fearful. Edward’s rule had become a form of covert tyranny. He became according to one chronicler ‘as wood [mad] as a lion’. He disinherited many magnates so that the Despensers could have their lands; as a result, no landowner felt secure. When a king of England disregards the rights to property, he cannot long endure. For four years, however, Edward lavished earldoms and other titles on his favourites; he harried and persecuted all those who opposed his will. It was so arranged that revenue went into the king’s own chamber rather than to the general exchequer, and the king demanded absolute secrecy from his officials. He resembled a later king in his counting-house, counting out his money. In truth his opponents could do nothing. After the execution of Lancaster, and the imprisonment of other prominent nobles, he was pre-eminent.

Yet he still had enemies in exile, particularly in France. One of them, Roger Mortimer, had been part of the rising against the Despensers; he had submitted to the king and had been imprisoned in the Tower of London. From that place, with a little help from
his friends, he managed to escape; it is reported that he drugged his captors and then climbed down from his chamber on a rope. It sounds apocryphal, but it may be accurate. There were very few other paths out of the Tower, except of course by way of the gallows. He sailed to France and offered his services to the French king. It was at Charles IV’s court that he began an intrigue, in every sense, with Queen Isabella. Around the queen there now gathered a cluster of exiled or disaffected barons and bishops. When her son arrived to offer fealty to her brother, she had found the perfect weapon. The king ordered her to return to England, but she refused to do so; she declared that she would come back only if the Despensers were banished. In any case she preferred the more benign atmosphere of the French court.

Throughout 1325 rumours and fears of invasion circulated through the kingdom. It was believed that Isabella would sail with the French king, but she was more immediately concerned to increase her support among the interlinked royal families of northwestern Europe. She travelled north to Hainault (a Flemish province now in south-western Belgium) where the count of that region was amenable to the proposition that his daughter, Philippa, should marry the lord Edward; this young man of fourteen would, in all likelihood, be the next king of England. With Philippa’s dowry Isabella and Mortimer then raised troops for the coming invasion.

Fifteen hundred men took to their ships from the port of Dordrecht in Holland and, having endured storms at sea, landed at the haven of Orwell in Suffolk on 24 September 1326. There had been no attempt to harry or prevent them, and it is likely that Edward still believed that the invading force was to come from Normandy. The commander of the royal fleet along the eastern coast, in any case, allowed her to land without obstruction. He had in the past been an opponent of the king, and once more turned against him. It is also reported that English sailors refused to fight Isabella because of the hatred they felt for the Despensers.

Her progress was swift. Her supporters flocked to her, and the king’s secret enemies now rose in defiance of his rule. The queen moved on to Dunstable, her troops ransacking the lands of the Despensers on their way, where she learned that the king and the Despensers had in their panic fled from London and marched
to the west; it is a measure of their confusion that they left most of their treasure behind. The king’s supporters now changed sides; one who remained loyal, the elder Despenser, the earl of Winchester, was executed in Bristol under the distraint of martial law. His son, Hugh, was captured and awaited trial.