Authors: Thomas B. Costain
Douglas, overconfident, having learned little or nothing from Good King Robert’s Testament, led his men down over marshy lands to attack the English. Edward had benefited from experience sufficiently to put his reliance in his archers and foot soldiers. The English army was drawn up in four battles, with the bowmen on the flanks; everyone afoot, even the young king himself, who stood in the van. Flushed with his victory at Annan, the brave Douglas charged across marshy land to strike the English all along the line. The Scots ran into a rain of arrows from the English longbows which decimated their ranks. Their losses were so heavy, in fact, that they fell back in a complete rout. The Scottish nobles had led then-clans into the battle. Many of them fell victims to the deadly fruit of the English yew, and it was said afterward that no leader was left to recruit or lead a body of men.
Berwick surrendered at once. Such of the nobility as were still alive gave
in their submissions. David, the boy king, had to flee, reaching France ultimately, where he was welcomed by King Philip. In the treaty which resulted all of Scotland south of the Firth of Forth was ceded to England, the counties of Roxburgh, Peebles, Dumfries, and Edinburgh—the whole, in fact, of ancient Lothian. Baliol came back to climb on the throne for the second time.
At the age of twenty-two Edward III had completed the work of his grandfather.
Edward de Baliol must have been the original Humpty-Dumpty, for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put him back permanently on the throne from which he kept tumbling.
The second disruption of his inglorious reign occurred when Andrew Moray, who had been with Wallace in the first days of Scottish resistance, emerged from semi-retirement and took over command of the northern forces. Moray marched through the Highlands and drove far enough south to raid Cumberland, sweeping the inept Baliol before him. It became so difficult to gather up the pieces, stick them together, and take this puppet king back for seating again on this difficult throne that finally the English king despaired. Baliol then agreed to surrender the kingdom into Edward’s hands by delivering to the English monarch a portion of its soil along with the golden crown. In return for this abject betrayal of his country he received a payment of five thousand marks and a pension of two thousand pounds a year for the balance of his life. This weak son of an ineffectual father lived until 1367 on estates granted to him near Wheatly in England. He left no issue, which may be considered a fortunate thing for Scotland, as the old dynastic dispute thus came to an end. It is recorded that he devoted his declining years to the pleasures of hunting.
T
HERE was a man in Bristol in these days, a citizen of modest consequence, having no title and no great wealth and no trace whatever of noble blood in his veins, who nevertheless was destined to have his name more widely remembered down the centuries than all the Plantagenets combined, with all their chancellors, statesmen, generals, and bishops thrown in for good measure. This was because his name had been applied to a most useful article that he manufactured. His name was Thomas Blanket.
This circumstance is recalled because it is part of the story of an emergence which was taking place in England and equally in all parts of what was called the civilized world. It was not long, a mere matter of a century or two, since men had shaken off the ignorance and lethargy of the dark ages and had begun to look into their inner selves, to paint, to compose, to sing, to inquire into the first elements of science and to demand political rights, above all else to build; to raise high into the sky the most magnificent of cathedrals with the tall spires which seemed a symbol of their desire to reach the truth. Now this emergence was taking a new form. The ways of living were changing and beginning to bear a traceable resemblance to modern conditions. This had started with an expansion of trade and the acquirement of wealth among those who had never known the meaning of ease, the men of business and their workers.
Some historians are disposed to give much of the credit to Edward III, calling him the father of English commerce. This is allowing him too much praise. Edward, if the truth must be told, took little interest in such menial matters. He was a soldier king, holding fast to feudal rights and feudal wealth, which came from ownership of the land. This new wealth he did not understand, and approved only so far as it provided him with new sources of crown revenue.
It is possible his marriage to Philippa had something to do with it. It had brought England into closer contact with the lands from which she came, where the stout burghers taught the world a lesson, defending themselves and their walled cities and their weaving machines from the armies, first of France and later of Spain. Edward began to see the need for England to share more fully in the profits of trade; but of real concern for the prosperity of the common people, he had little or none.
Consider first where commerce stood in the first stages of Edward’s reign. England’s exports were almost exclusively of raw materials and her imports entirely of manufactured goods, which put her in the inferior position of an agricultural nation. Statistics of 1354 place the exports at £212,338s 5d and imports at £38,383 16s 10d. Wool represented thirteen fourteenths of the export total, and the share collected by the crown was £81,846s 12d, or nearly 40 per cent. It was no wonder that the term “woolsack” was applied in course of time to the seat occupied by the chancellor in the House of Lords.
It was fortunate for England that she produced so much wool and of such superior quality. Only Spain had anything to offer of a corresponding excellence, and it may have been because of the merino sheep brought to England by Eleanor, the Castilian queen of Edward I, that English sheep now carried such fine wool on their broad backs; that, and the rich grazing lands that the island kingdom had for them. Another reason undoubtedly was the existence of one hundred Cistercian monasteries throughout the country. The Cistercians had broken away from the Benedictines when they saw that the members of the older order were getting lax in their devotions and too hearty at their meals. The Cistercian monk divided his time between his devotions and working in the fields. They were great sheep raisers, and it seems certain that they studied breeding and grading and gradually raised the standards in England. They probably were the first to cross the English breeds with the Spanish merinos. Although they were against the accumulation of property and refused to accept rents or tithes, wealth nevertheless began to reward their industry, as witness the beautiful monasteries they built at Fountains, Rievaulx, Tintern, and Furness. In the larger English monasteries the monks used lay brothers to help in the field work, sometimes as many as three hundred. The lay member was never ordained but lived beside the choir monks, without taking part in the canonical offices.
The earnest and hard-working Cistercians were called the Gray Monks, and wherever they established themselves the hillsides soon became dotted with the backs of cropping sheep. They were allowed few opportunities to speak among themselves, but there must have been evenings after their one meal of the day (a pound of bread apiece, a dish of beans, and sometimes a piece of cheese) when they gathered in the chapter
houses and earnestly debated the proper care of the flocks. The records show that in 1280 the Abbey of Meaux alone had 11,000 sheep. The figures fluctuated, of course. A low year was 1310 when Meaux had no more than 5,406.
That so much of the wool thus raised could be sold was due to the needs of the cities of Flanders. The Flemish people manufactured the finest textiles in Europe and they had little wool of their own. They depended almost exclusively on England. At certain periods when English kings experimented with costly changes in trade relations, the Flemish looms would be silent. What would have happened to England if the weavers of Ghent and Bruges had found a substitute for wool? A dire speculation, indeed.
Credit is due Edward III on two counts. He encouraged the bringing over of weavers from Flanders (one detects here the hand of the fair Philippa) to teach the English how to make cloth. Some of them settled around Norwich and some went to points in the west. Master Thomas Blanket started his business in Bristol with a staff of foreign workers. Edward remained rather consistently on the side of the Policy of Plenty, as free trade was called, as against the Policy of Power, or protection.
But this had to do with the purely national side of the subject. The emergence, referred to above, was a matter of world-wide change. It was the result in large part of vast developments in international trade and commerce.
On the exact spot in London where the Cannon Street station stands, there was a very large building with an extensive courtyard and a most handsome hall which was known as the Steelyard. It was a busy spot, tenanted by heavy, sober-eyed men of North German extraction who were acting as representatives of the Hanseatic League. The name of the establishment came from the fact that a steel bar was kept for the weighing of goods. The Hanseatic League was a spectacular development of the theory of union in trade which had begun with the guilds. It was made up of the trading ports on the Baltic Sea and affiliated cities, including Lübeck, Hamburg, Rostock, Riga, and Danzig, as well as Thorn and Krakow in the east, Wisby and Reval in the north, and Göttingen in the south. Despite the fact that each member city was within the domain of one of the northern nations, the league did not recognize national considerations. It had been organized to control the trade of the Baltic, and this it succeeded in doing for centuries, in spite of attempts at interference by kings, princes, and grand dukes. The wealth of the league was enormous, its power absolute.
The feudal system would die hard. Forced upon England by the Normans, it was so profitable and gratifying to the nobility that they fought against any change. Although some of the kings strove to reduce the strength of the baronage, it was not in the interests of the commonality, but to gather more power into their own hands. To king and noble alike the feudal system was the bulwark, the unscalable wall about the citadel of privilege.
A few of the kings who would follow this constellation of the Edwards were brilliant rulers. Many, however, were unable to lead and too stubborn to follow. Some would be cruel, some sly, some dull. Even the best of them, with perhaps one exception, were unwilling to relinquish a jot of what they considered their privileges. A few would even proclaim the divinity of these rights.
But to return to Edward. He was a king of contradictions, consistent only in the grandiose scale of his ambitions. He was more than extravagant, he was lavish: lavish in his personal life, in his court; lavish to his friends and his mistresses. Above all else, he was lavish in the diplomacy with which he sought to gain his ends. He would go to Flanders and Germany with a bounty granted by a complaisant Parliament and would spend it all in reckless subsidies to the rulers of the Low Country states to join him against France. The diversity of Flemish interests broke up his first attempts to unite them in a firm alliance. After each rebuff he would come back to Parliament with empty pockets and no constructive gains to report. Apparently he was a good advocate, for Parliament would always advance him what he wanted, generally a tenth of all revenue. Once he asked for a ninth and got it. This meant a ninth of church revenues, of baronial income, of the stock of merchants; and one horse in nine, one cow, one sheep, and a green bough stuck in one sheaf in nine in every harvest field, which the king’s tax collector would come and take away.
Like all strong-willed kings with unenlightened ministers, he often did arbitrary and ill-considered things about the trade of the country. He laid restrictions on the Cistercians which led to a curtailment of their valuable activities. He put restrictions also on trade which had no purpose but to increase the state revenue and which had to be repealed when the disastrous results became apparent. He confiscated to the crown all cloth that his
aulnagers
found to be deficient in measurements. He interfered with the system of fairs, even granting them to towns, which compelled the merchants of London to close their shops and use temporary booths at the
seat of activities. If Edward was the father of English commerce, he was an inconsiderate and careless parent.
The subsidies that Parliament granted the lavish king, the untying of the national moneybags, the planting of green boughs in so many sheaves of grain did not suffice for his ambitious schemes. He borrowed money in many quarters and in huge amounts.
If he had paused to reflect, Edward would have been resentful of the thoroughness with which his French grandfather, Philip the Unfair of France, had demolished the order of the Knights Templar. The knights had been sound bankers, and it had been customary for the kings of England to visit the huge headquarters of the order on the banks of the Thames when they needed loans. But now, thanks to Philip, the bearded knights had dropped from sight, the buildings had passed into other hands, the
beauséant
no longer waved in the breeze. So Edward, who never knew the day when he did not need money, had to look elsewhere. He went, of course, to the Italian bankers, the Society of the Bardi of Florence, and the Peruzzi family of the same city, which had opened branches in England to take the place of the Templars. Even with the vast sums they loaned him, he was not content. He borrowed also from the leading figures in trade in England, most of all from a remarkable man of whom much will be told later, one William de la Pole.
The Peruzzi family loaned the king in 1337 the sum of £11,732 for the war with Scotland. This was just the beginning, for in the following year Edward acknowledged an indebtedness to them of £28,000. Later this total was advanced to £35,000, some of which had been advanced “for urgent matters and for the king’s secret business beyond the seas.”