Table of Contents The Fall of Britain Introduction to Britain The Roman Withdrawal Independent Britain The Founding of England

The Invaders Early English Society The Conversion of Britain The Age of Bede Eighth-Century Kingdoms The Vikings and the Rise of Wessex The Appearance of the Vikings Alfred England After Alfred Wessex Conquers England King Edgar and Church Reform The Eleventh-Century Invasions Aethelred The Unready Canute and His Sons The Confessor and His Earls 1066 England under the Normans Domesday England The Norman Settlement The Conqueror and His Sons England, Wales, and Scotland The Church under the Normans Government under Henry I Stephen and Matilda Henry II and His Sons Henry, Eleanor and their Empire Law and Administration under Henry II Becket and Other Foes William the Marshal as an Example of Twelfth-Century Chivalry Richard and the Crusade King John and the Fall of Normandy Magna Carta The Thirteenth Century and the First Two Edwards Economy and Society up to the 13th Century Robert Grosseteste The Thirteenth Century Civil War Edward I: The Early Years Edward I: Later Difficulties The Deposition of Edward II The Era of the Hundred Years War Origins of the 100 Years' War Later Years of Edward III Religious Conflict in Fourteenth Century England Economic Change and Social Tension in the Late 14th Century The Reign Of Richard II Henry IV The End of the French Adventure The Wars of the Roses The Beginning of the Wars of the Roses Economy and Society in the 15th Century York and Tudor Religion in the 15th Century

1.The Fall Of Britain Introduction to Britain Let's begin with some basic terminology. Many names we use in the course are deceptively familiar. Just as it is d ifficult to understand British English without practice (British "subway" = our "underpass"), British geography and ethnography -- the names of the peoples who live or have lived there -- takes some getting use to.

Britain, the Britons The Romans called the biggest of the two islands NW of Gaul -- the country we know as France -- Brittania. The people who lived in the Roman ruled part of the island were called Britons (by the Romans!). This was a general name, beca use the Britons were divided up into a number of peoples and tribes. Confusion i s possible because the name of Britain is applied to the modern United Kingdom o f Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the citizens of that country are often called Britons. Scotland, the Scots To the north of Roman-ruled Britain was a country called Caledonia, roughl y equivalent to modern Scotland. At this time there were no Scots in Scotland. T hey still lived in Ireland (then called Scotia or Hibernia). Caledonia was inhab ited by the Picts. During and after the fifth century A.D., a number of Scots cr ossed to the west coast of Caledonia and settled there. After a number of centur ies the King of the Scots became King of the Picts as well. By about 1000, the l and ruled by the king of the Scots (Caledonia) became known as Scotland (Scotia) , and later, all those who lived there, whatever their ancestry, became known as Scots. The English What about the English? The English of the early middle ages were a group quite distinct from the ancient Britons. After the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the fifth century, migrants from the Continen set up their own kingdoms in B ritain and conquered much of the south and east of the island. These people call ed themselves various names: Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; they may have included F risians and Franks. They spoke similar languages, which were related to modern G erman. By the year 880 these languages were being considered a single language c alled English. There was a single king of the English people soon afterwards. Th e English were sometimes called Saxons, or by learned men Anglo-Saxons (to disti nguish them from the Saxons still living in Northern Germany). Modern scholars o ften call the English who lived before 1066 Anglo-Saxons. I will usually call th em the English, and their language English, because that's what they usually cal led themselves. The English eventually conquered most but not all of what had be en Roman Britain. That area became known as England. What happened to the ancient Britons? Beginning in the fifth century, some went to a part of Gaul called Armoric a. There they became the dominant culture, and that area has long been known as Brittany. The name Great Britain (in French, Grand Bretagne), meaning the island of Britain, was invented to distinguish it from little Britain (Brittany, Fr. B retagne), where some of the descendants of the ancient Britons still live. Other Britons stayed home. The majority were conquered and absorbed by the English. In the western part of the island, some Britons remained independent o f the English. They were concentrated in three areas: Cornwall, Strathclyde, and the area we call Wales. The last name comes from the term the English used for the Britons, Welsh, which means foreigners. The Welsh called themselves Cymri. E ventually Cornwall was absorbed into England, and Strathclyde was split between England and Scotland. Wales was conquered too, but has retained a separate ident ity. The Celts In ancient times there was a people, or group of peoples, that the Greeks called "Keltoi." In modern times the linguistic term Celtic, has been attached t

o an entire branch of the Indo-European language family, which includes the anci ent British, Gallic, Irish, Scottish, Breton, and Cornish languages. It is curre ntly fashionable to think that you or your nation descended from the Celts of ol d, just as it was once the thing to be a remnant of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israe l. The problem with using the term Celts in regard to the Middle Ages is that no one at that time considered himself to be a Celt. So I will avoid the term. Why study medieval England instead of medieval Scotland, or Wales, or Brit ain as a whole? England and the English, or at least their rulers, have been the dominant power in the British isles for a long time. We recognize this every time we use the phrase "Queen of England." There is no title "Queen of England" today -- Eli zabeth is Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But England has absorbed the other cultures of the British islands, and the mix of institutions, language, and ideas we call British has a predominant English elem ent. If we want to understand the British heritage in the English-speaking count ries of the world, we must understand England first. Another reason to study medieval England: it gives us an opportunity to study some of the developments of the European Middle Ages within the limits of a single country. England is not a "typical" European country -- which one is? -- but is an important one. If you understand how the Middle Ages affected it , you have a good start to understanding the Middle Ages in Europe as a whole.

The Roman Withdrawal In A.D. 400, the southern, more fertile part of Britain was securely part of the Christian Roman Empire as the province (or rather diocese) of Britannia. In A.D. 600, most of Britain was ruled by peoples from modern day North Ge rmany and Denmark, who spoke Germanic languages and were almost entirely pagan. The Britons who had inhabited south Britain before the Romans and thrived under Roman rule had lost control of most of their ancestral homeland; they ruled only on the western fringe. How did the change take place? Was Romano-British society destroyed? Or we re there important elements of continuity was there between Roman Britain and Ea rly Medieval England? During the two centuries in which the great change took place we have almo st no sources that tell us how it happened. We have archaeological remains, but no documents that allow us to date them and help us interpret their significanc e. The gap has been filled in legend by the figure of King Arthur. In fact there is almost no evidence that a man named Arthur even lived in this period, and ne xt to none that he was a key person. The familiar stories about him come from th e 12th century. The fact that the legends of a great king has been placed in this unknown period is indicative of how little is known and can be known about it. Neverthel ess we must try to understand this era Though Julius Caesar claimed to have landed in Britain twice about 55 and 54 B.C., the history of Roman Britain really begins about a century later when the emperor Claudius ordered the conquest of the country. The victory was relatively easy, and the Romans set out to build a provinc ial society in their own image, as they had done in many other places. The Roman method of ruling their empire was to co-opt native ruling classes in the provin

ces into the Roman system. This meant convincing the established aristocracy to adopt Roman culture and to participate in the machinery of government. Roman gov ernment was based on the idea that cities were the center of political and cultu ral life, and that those who ruled in the cities would rule in the countryside a round them. In some provinces like Britain, there were no cities, and so the Rom ans had to teach rural aristocrats that city life was desirable. The Britons, like the Gauls and others, took to urbanization and its atten dant pleasures in a big way. Britain in Roman times was divided into districts t hat roughly corresponded to the independent tribal states of old. Each one had a Roman style city as its capital and metropolis. During the prosperous 2nd centu ry, the cities of Roman Britain flourished. They seem to have been bigger than t he towns of medieval England, even late medieval England, and their facilities w ere impressive. The richest members of the upper class built magnificent villas in the cou ntry. The country as a whole seems to have done well. The use of money was commo nplace, and commercial links with the rest of the Empire can be seen in the arch eological remains. The Romanization of Britain does not mean that everybody in the country co nsidered themselves to be Romans. Classical urban culture was the culture of a s mall minority in every province. Ten percent of the people, at the most, lived i n towns and cities where they came into contact with the Latin language and Roma n culture and learning. Even most of these city people were very poor. Latin was not the language of the countryside in Britain, any more than it was in Gaul or most of Spain. Rather, we must visualize British society then as being much like the soci ety of British India in the late 19th century. Foreign soldiers and administrato rs came from other parts of the empire to rule the country. The native upper cla sses imitated and then adopted many elements of the culture of the sahibs. Whet her the majority considered themselves Roman or not is a good question. Keeping a secure hold on Britain involved a substantial investment in mili tary power. The empire kept a major garrison in Britain, perhaps as many as 50,0 00 soldiers. This was an immense force by later standards: No English king befor e 1500 could have supported a permanent force of even 5,000. The impressive Roma n walls fortifications works and the force that manned them were subsidized by t he imperial government. Events in the fifth century led to the removal of the imperial umbrella ov er Roman Britain. Before we get into that subject, however, I want to say a few words about the state of Britain in the fourth century A.D. Despite at least one serious incursion by so-called barbarians during that century, Roman Britain appears to have been a very prosperous place. The prosp erity may have stemmed from the barbarian threat to the Rhine frontier. The larg e armies there seem to have been fed by British provisions, which made British a griculture quite profitable. Furthermore, Britain provided at least one prominen t intellectual to the empire at large. In earlier centuries we here nothing of a ny cultural contribution from Britain. But about 380, a would-be lawyer named Pe lagius went to Rome, where he ended up as a Christian monk and intellectual. His views on religion were very influential for a few years, until Augustine and so me other African bishops got Pelagius condemned as a heretic. Pelagius' particul ar contribution as a leading theologian shows the sophistication of British soci ety (at least in its upper ranks), and is a reminder that Britain, like the rest of the Roman empire, was officially Christian. It is now time to look at the fall of the Roman imperial system in the wes

t and how it affected Britain. Without going into too much detail, we can say th at the constant Roman problem was balancing the need for border defense with pol itical stability. Because the big armies were on the frontier, revolts against the imperial court usually started on the borders. This was particularly likel y to happen if the generals thought the court was ignoring their own stretch of frontier. But setting up a rival emperor meant civil war, which usually opened u p the provinces to barbarian raids or even invasions. Britain had an important role in this political situation. Britain was a d istant province with a big army, and a likely source of trouble. In 383, for ins tance, a general named Magnus Maximus was declared emperor by the British army a nd crossed to Gaul. He fought several wars with his former masters before being defeated. The loss of the troops Maximus took with him may have permanently weak ened the British garrison. But the island remained part of the empire, ruled by an emperor based in Italy, until the next big blow-up. The crisis that separated Britain from the empire had nothing much to do w ith Britain itself. On the last day of the year 406, an army of Vandals, Alans, and Sueves crossed the Rhine river and started making trouble in Gaul. The Briti sh commanders, apparently disgusted by the incompetence of the Italian court hea ded by the emperor Honorius, took matters into their own hands. They elected an emperor of their own, named Constantine who took the army to Gaul to fight the b arbarians. Eventually it became clear that Constantine was a loser, and the British p rovinces abandoned their allegiance to him and set messengers to Honorius protes ting their loyalty to him. Honorius told the Britons that he had his hands full -- which he did -- and told them that they would have to look after their own de fense. The Britons were left to their own devices. This may have been a temporar y expedient, but this decision was never reversed. The empire was now weak enough that it was turning over large parts of its western territories, officially or unofficially, to barbarian allies, who slow ly formed independent kingdoms. In this situation, a restoration of Roman author ity in Britain, in anything more than name, was out of the question. Indeed, the majority of publicly minded Romans simply forgot about Britain entirely. Does this mean that Roman Britain simply collapsed? Nothing of the sort. T he Britons had been told to defend themselves, and they did. An independent Brit ain maintained its independence for a long time. If you include the last part of Wales to fall to the English, it lasted until 1282. In the next lecture we will investigate the fascinating and unique phenomenon of an abandoned Roman provinc e defending itself against foreign intruders.

Independent Britain In 410, the people of Britain were told by the emperor Honorius that they would have to look after their own defense. From this date, Britain effectively ceased to be part of the empire. The people of Britain were forced to defend an d rule themselves without the military or financial support of Rome. Many questi ons about this period are effectively unanswered and probably unanswerable. Who specifically ruled this independent Britain? Was there a central government, and if so, how was it organized? How well did it hold fifth-century Britain against invasion? We can make some educated guesses about political control. It is probable that in parts of Britain, the city councils, long used to some degree of self-go vernment, stepped into the breach. Whether these civic councils cooperated on a regular basis we don't know.

The councils may have had rivals as well. It was a common Roman practice t o establish client rulers on the borders of the provinces and to give them some of the responsibility for defending them. Such warlords may have exercised grea t influence in independent Britain. Some later Welsh dynasties claimed descent f rom native rulers of the fifth century, which means these minor warlords must ha ve been successful enough to gain lasting prestige. No prince is anxious to clai m descent from losers. It seems that for about a generation, Britain avoided catastrophe. Gallic churchmen remembered that in the first half of the fifth century, the followers of Pelagius, the condemned British theologian I mentioned last time, had a grea t influence in the British church. Bishop Germanus of Auxerre, a city in south c entral Gaul, crossed to Britain at least once and possibly twice to preach the t rue religion. According to his biographer, he was very successful in winning ove r the Britons. He also is supposed to have won a miraculous victory over invadin g Saxons and Picts. Despite the warlike activity, the impression this brief stor y gives is of a Romanized country in which the life of the church continues on i n much the same way it did on the continent. Disaster seems to have struck in the 440s. We have no direct witnesses to what happened. One Gallic chronicler, a good distance away but a near contempora ry, wrote: "Britain, which had up to this time suffered various defeats and cata strophes, was reduced to Saxon rule." To get any more than that, we have to go to archaeology, or to two later writers. The archaeology of 5th and 6th century Britain is very difficult and hard to date. It seems to indicate that without the close links to the empire, and t he subsidies provided by the Roman government and military, urban and rural life in the Roman style seems to have collapsed. There may even have been a dramat ic fall in population (despite English migrations). For any details of this process, we have to turn to the historians. One i s Bede, an Englishman writing almost 300 years later. His story is an adaptation of one told by an earlier British writer named Gildas. Gildas is the prime witness to independent Britain. Gildas, according to l ater Welsh and Breton legend, was a monk. He seems to have flourished around the year 550; in other words, about a century after the English invasion recorded b y the Gallic chronicler. The only work we have of his is called "The destruction and conquest of Britain." Aha! you say, this is exactly what we need. But, unfo rtunately, Gildas's piece is not a history except in passing. It is a sermon. According to Gildas the Britons of his time are great sinners and have alr eady suffered terribly in the past. To demonstrate this, he tells them a bit abo ut their past history. The period after the Roman withdrawal, he says, was a per iod of prosperity, which the Britons wasted in debauchery. During that time, Bri tain was ruled by an unnamed "proud tyrant," who made the fatal error of invitin g Saxon mercenaries to settle in Britain. They were meant to defend the island a gainst the Picts and other Saxons. The mercenaries eventually revolted, devastat ing the island. It was only through the long efforts of Ambrosius Aurelianus, a man of royal blood, and other unnamed leaders that the Saxons were beaten back. Since that time, which seems to be about two more generations, the Britons have lived in peace. But they have learned nothing, and have wasted this blessing in renewed sinfulness. It is obvious that Gildas did not know a lot about the past. Anyway, he wa s trying to make a moral point, not depict accurate history. But what he says fi

ts with other things we know. For instance, the invitation to the Saxon mercenar ies is a typical defensive tactic of the later Roman empire. The introduction o f the Saxons into Britain, if it indeed took place as Gildas says, was a normal military expedient of the time. It is worth remarking that the Scots settled in the western isles of Scotland at about the same time, and scholars speculate tha t the Britons encouraged this move to distract the Picts. The archaeology of early Anglo-Saxon graves suggests that a good number of separate Anglo-Saxon settlements were made in Britain in the early fifth centur y. Although Bede's version associates the first appearance with the Saxons with the settlement of Kent in SE England, the archaeology shows traces of the Englis h all up and down the east coast of Britain. Bede is the first to mention Hengis t, Horsa, and Kent in connection with the coming of the Saxons, and the name Vor tigern for the British king -- so we cannot be sure of the authenticity of these elements. Gildas's story of a great war, probably in the mid-fifth century, is confi rmed by evidence from Gaul. Groups of Saxons were attacking and settling in Gaul in the 460s. Britons and Saxons seem to have been fighting on both sides of th e English Channel simultaneously. This is the period that Britons were leaving t heir island and settling in Armorica, turning it into Brittany. Certainly some o f these exiles were refugees from Saxon attacks at home, but there were probably adventurers and conquerors among them. Enough organized Britons went to Armori ca from Cornwall and Devon, that they renamed districts in which they settled af ter their old homelands. Scholars usually guess that the wars in Britain ended about A.D. 500. Gild as mentions a series of British victories, the last at an unidentified Mount Bad on, won by an unnamed general. If there ever was an age of Arthur, this was it. And we know next to nothing about it. What Gildas's sermon does tell us about is his own time, which we think wa s around the 550s. Some of the best information is indirectly conveyed. Gildas h imself is the Briton we know most about, and he is a very interesting figure. He wrote in Latin. A recent scholar argues that Gildas's vocabulary shows traces o f legal training in the Roman tradition. His language taken as a whole is very c onvolute and overblown, but this was all the rage in the mid-sixth century. This is how all the learned men wrote in Italy at the same period, and it is a style can only be written by someone with an expensive education. In other words, Gil das was the product of a culture where important Roman traditions not only survi ved but flourished. Independent Britain in the mid-sixth century retained some l inks to the imperial past. Gildas also tells us roughly how big independent Britain was and how it wa s ruled. The last part of his sermon is a detailed if sometimes vague denunciati on of British kings of his own time. The areas that Gildas mentions are all in t he West. Much of the south and east (the most prosperous and urban part under th e Romans) seems to have been permanently lost to the Anglo-Saxons. As for the kings themselves, let me quote briefly from Gildas: "Britain ha s kings, but they are tyrants; she has judges, but unrighteous ones; generally e ngaged in plunder and rapine, but always preying on the innocent;...they make wa r, but their wars are against their countrymen, and are unjust ones; they rigoro usly prosecute thieves throughout their country, but those who sit at table with them are robbers, and they not only cherish but reward them." These are warlord s, men whose closest associates are warriors, men whose power depends on ruthles sness and their ability to keep their armed gangs happy. They are reminiscent of the unruly Frankish kings who ruled in Gaul at about the same time. Like the Fr ankish kings, the British ones were technically Christians, but poor ones. Gilda s tells stories of their adulteries, the murder of enemies before the altars of

churches, perjury, treachery and the like. Even the moral critic of his times, Gildas, does not deny that independent Britain enjoyed a certain level of peace and prosperity after the first great w ar with the Anglo-Saxon invaders. It is likely that this period lasted about two generations. There seems to have been something of an uneasy peace, or a cold w ar, between the English settlers in the east and the Britons of the west. The tw o groups, one Christian, one pagan, did not mix. Bede bitterly remembers that th e Britons made no effort to convert his own ancestors. Sometime after Gildas wrote, the balance of power shifted. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was written well after this event, shows new offensives in the west: Gloucester and Bath were conquered around 577, which cut off Cornwall's B ritons from the rest of their countrymen. In the north, too, Anglo-Saxon dynasti es made new gains, extending the area under their rule. Some of the British king doms under that existed in Gildas's time hardly made it into the seventh century . By 600 it was fairly clear that the time of the English was at hand. The post-Roman culture that produced Gildas was eroded last half of the sixth century, and Welsh culture that owed past but religion was developing. It was a culture that was orially peripheral, as the lowland zone was lost entirely to rather, the descendents of the invaders. or destroyed in the little to the Roman doomed to be territ the invaders -- or

Next, the story of the pagan English, almost as obscure as the story of in dependent Britain, needs to be told.

The Founding Of England The Invaders Steve Muhlberger We saw in our last lecture that the story of Britain in the last half of t he fifth century and the whole of the sixth was one of hot or cold war between t he native British and the Saxon immigrants. We've looke dat the British side of the confrontation, now for the other. Our best written sources are Bede (who wrote in A.D. 731). Bede was a tal ented and conscientious historian, and even he knew almost nothing of the activi ties of his own ancestors until the arrival of the Roman missionaries in 596. He mentions the names of Hengist and Horsa, and recounts their ancestry from Woden . He knows or guesses that the English arrived in Britain about 150 years before the missionary Augustine landed in Kent. Otherwise almost all his material come s from Gildas. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle supplies much more material about the origins of royal dynasties in southern kingdoms of Wessex, Sussex and Kent are nicely set out. The material is dated year by year, and seems to give a picture of the foun dation of the English kingdoms. But is this material worth anything? The A-S Ch ronicle gives the impression of a contemporary recording events year by year, an impression that gives credibility to its annals. In actuality, the chronicle's account for the fifth and sixth century is a reconstruction. The chronicle was b egun in the late 800s, over 150 years after Bede wrote. Much of the detail that the Chronicle records which is not in Bede is probably legendary. The only thing that keeps the origin of the English from being hopelessly obscure is the archaeology of the invaders, which can here and there be checked

against the written records. The various tribes that arrived in Britain from nor thern Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries were still pagans. Their burial cu stoms were of two types: cremation, with the ashes buried in pots; and burial of the body accompanied by grave goods. Both the pots and the grave goods can be u sed to give a rough chronology. The styles of potteries, brooches and jewelry ca n be compared across northern Europe, and easily datable graves allows us to gue ss at the dates of others that are similar. The most interesting conclusion that modern archaeology has made is that B ede's account in Book I, c. 15, of where the English came from is essentially ac curate. Here he speaks of three founding peoples: The Angles, the Saxons, and th e Jutes. The Jutes came from the peninsula of Jutland, the main island mass of D enmark today. The Angles came from a little farther south on Jutland and from va rious islands of the area. West along the North Sea coast were the Saxons. Bede also knew where the founding peoples landed. What brought these people to Britain? I referred before to the Roman habit of hiring their enemies as mercenarie s to protect them from other enemies. This practice created a military sub-cultu re all along the Roman frontier. Groups organized for war dominated political li fe. Soldiers fighting for or against Rome, if not both, were the rulers. Archaeo logically this situation is reflected in the use of jewelry, belt-buckles, broac hes, and other gear that was modeled after Roman army equipment, much as modern guerrilas, freedom fighters and terrorists use similar equipment and clothing al l around the world. The use of such mercenaries encouraged the so-called barbari an peoples to penetrate the Roman world. When the empire was strong, the process could be controlled by the imperial court and military authorities. When it bec ame weak, the process was less controlled. English archaeology shows that the earliest identifiable Anglo-Saxons were people wearing this Romanized gear. We suspect that they were brought in to ser ve as defenders of the coast. After the revolt referred to by Gildas, the mercen aries set up as independent rulers. Our sources say the former mercenaries invit ed their friends and relatives to join them in Britain, and these people seem to have responded in considerable numbers. One of the most astonishing discoveries of British archaeology, the Sutton Hoo treasure, has revealed that the dynasty that conquered East Anglia, was not Anglian, not Saxon, but Swedish, from the area around Uppsala and Stockholm: th e east coast of Sweden, facing Finland and the Baltic states of Estonia and Latv ia. The ancestor of the East Anglian kings came a long way to find his new realm . One of the most difficult questions about the Anglo-Saxon invasions is wha t happened to the British in the territories they took? Three things suggest that the Britons fled or were wiped out. First, there is the lack of British archaeology, datable towns or graveyar ds, in the eastern territories where English remains are common. Second, there is the fact that a language from the Germanic family rather than the Celtic family took over the entire lowland zone of Britain, and eventua lly more. Third, there is the fact that a pagan religion with connections to the Sca ndinavian and Germanic religions was established in Britian, a country that had been already converted to Christianity, at least officially. The English had to be converted by missionaries from the outside.

Put this way, there seems to be a strong case for the replacement of one p eople by another -- a national conquest, comparable to the Jewish conquest of Pa lestine, or the English conquest of the eastern seaboard of North America. But t his may not be the right answer. I have already referred to the archaeological problems. The absence of Bri tish archaeology only shows us that we can't identify British sites - - it doesn 't mean that there were no Britons. Even in the areas we know were British we wo uld have a hard time proving their existence archaeology. The language question is equally slippery. The chronology of the establish ment of the English language is unknown. We can only be certain that the later population spoke the language of the winners. What the genetic makeup of that po pulation was, how many of their ancestors spoke British or even Latin, is imposs ible to tell. In regard to religion, we are a little better informed. The ruling warlord s were pagans until the end of the sixth century. Many of their followers must h ave been, too. The English had established many pagan temples, and the names of some of these places survive in the English landscape, and even in the names of the days of the week. All of this linguistic evidence points to a widespread po pular paganism. On the other hand, just as some of the subjects of Anglo-Saxon kings may h ave spoken British, some may have been Christians. Actually the continuation of Christianity in English territory seems pretty certain. The cult of the Roman sa int Alban at the town now called St. Albans after him survived the invasions han dily. My own feeling is that there were many Britons under Anglo-Saxon rule, and that many of them continued to worship as Christians. The sixth century must have seen a Britain divided into two competing cult ural spheres. In one you have the independent British, who remained Christian an d preserved some elements of Roman culture and learning. On the other side of th e divide, you have a warrior aristocracy from across the sea clinging to its anc estral religion, ruling over a diverse population, some British, some immigrant. Put this way, the culture divide sounds very wide, and certainly it seemed very important to those who were there at the time. Ask the Welsh about the Eng lish today, for that matter. But there are important resemblences between the sp heres, and important elements of continuity on the English side. The most noteworthy resemblance is the fact that both English and British society were ruled by warlords. Both societies were shaped by the conflict betwe en them -- not to forget the internal conflict of Briton against Briton reported by Gildas, or English against English that we know a great deal about from Bede and others. Central authority had collapsed, and warrior bands ruled. Equally worth noting are the important elements of continuity in English B ritain. There is institutional evidence that the basic style of local government of the English was inherited from the British past. In northern England, wester n England, even in Kent in the south eastern corner, royal taxation or tribute w as collected in very similar ways. This is the best evidence we have that the A nglo-Saxons did not step into an empty country, where everything had been destro yed by warfare. The second element of continuity is, again, Christianity. The Anglo-Saxon

rulers may have refused to adopt the religion of s hard to imagine that they ignored it entirely. esistance of some nobles, went over quite easily resented to them by a well-organized mission. I a disorganized Christian community had affected

the conquered country, but it i The Anglo-Saxons, despite the r to the new faith, once it was p conclude that contact even with them.

In the sixth-century competition between warlords, British, Anglian, Swedi sh, Saxon, it was the dynasties of the newcomers that won out. By the time the l ight of historical recordkeeping is cast on the scene, the British are restricte d to Cornwall, Wales, and Strathclyde. English kingdoms, a large number of them, have taken the best parts of the island. A late development, perhaps, but the c onquest was permanent; for most of Britain, the language of the future would be English, the language of the victorious warlords.

Early English Society I am once again in the position of talking about a subject about which the re is little direct reliable information. The subject this time is English socie ty in the 6th and 7th century, the period when the English were still pagan or o nly newly converted to Christianity. It is a period when almost all of the Engli sh were illiterate; the few who were literate were churchmen, and may not have b een typical. There is some poetry written in Old English that may preserve a non- eccle siastical viewpoint, and which we can use to reconstruct what early English soci ety was like outside the monasteries. The longest English poem, and the most i nteresting, is Beowulf. It is an epic treatment of what is usually called early Germanic society -- the pagan warrior society supposedly common to all of northe rn Europe. But can we actually take Beowulf as a straight picture of that societ y? Its date is uncertain (perhaps as late as the manuscript (around A.D. 1000) ?) and it was composed as "historical fiction" about a far-away place -- Denmark . Nonetheless, we are far better off with Beowulf than we are without it. Let's start with a basic fact about the 6th and 7th centuries. Early Engli sh kings, like Frankish kings and others of the period, were warlords, men whose ability to inspire fear in their enemies was the basis of their claim to rule. They made a second claim as well -- they were men of royal, maybe even divine, d escent. The claim of hereditary right had little practical meaning unless the ki ng could maintain himself in a very fluid and competitive political environment. None of the English kingdoms around 600 were well-established communities. They did not have impregnable natural boundaries. They did not have long histor ies behind them. Nor did they represent clear-cut ethnic identities, despite the ir names. England around 600 was made up of about eleven kingdoms, some of them no b igger than the average county in Southern Ontario. They were areas that some rul er in the past had seized through conquest and passed on to his descendants. At this stage, if the ruling family was displaced or wiped out by another one, the kingdom would simply disappear. If you were a king in this period, it was necessary to fight to keep your power. The ability to attract and keep a following of warriors was a necessary a ttribute of power. Kings did this in the simplest of ways. They cultivated a rep

utation for generosity. In Beowulf, the poet harps on the importance of gifts of gold. Hrothgar, t he Danish king whom Beowulf came to serve, was "the best of earthly kings" becau se "he was the best of those who bestowed gold." A bad king was one who "[began] to hoard his treasure," who "never [parted] with gold rings." [Campbell, 54] Th e tie between warlord and retainer was two-way. The warrior followed the king in expectation of victory; and once victory was won, he expected the king to fairl y and generously distribute the fruits of victory. Through generosity the king kept a group of crack warriors about him const antly, men who were professionals in war and correspondingly valuable to their l ords. The kings expected much from their closest followers, who in early times w ere called gesiths and later, thegns. Warriors were to follow their lords to the death, and even beyond death. To keep such men loyal to him, a king of this period had to possess great wealth. He had to be able to give gifts freely, yet to always have more ready to give. The king had two ways to acquire the necessary treasures: through looting , and through the levying of tribute. Loot was the most important reason for wag ing war. Wars were not fought for national defense, because there was no nation, nor for any other highly theoretical reasons. War was the premier method of red istributing the wealth. One of the most important forms of loot, by the way, was human beings. Early English kings took slaves, and either used them, gave them to their followers, or sold them overseas. Tribute is much like loot: you can think of it as looting made routine, we alth extracted by threat of war instead as the result of actual fighting, by ext ortion rather than by murder and robbery. Early English kings had two sources of tribute. The more powerful ones could extract tribute from other rulers. Second , even underdog kings could take tribute from the people of their own kingdoms. Tribute from a king's own subjects: Our information seems to indicate th at scattered around these early kingdoms were royal vills, in other words, royal estates, at which people paid tribute or taxes to a royal representative. The d istricts that supplied tribute were roughly assessed, it seems, by their ability to feed the king and his retinue. There were estates that collected enough in a year to support the king and court for one night, others that collected enough to support him for more, etc. There was also a unit called a hide. In one sense , a hide was 120 acres; in another, it was an area sufficient to support one fam ily. Mainly, however, a hide was a unit of assessment. The obscure details do no t matter. What does matter is that kings were probably more organized than a lac k of surviving records would indicate. Kings also extracted service from their peoples. In theory, the king could demand military service from all free men. Anyone who was not enslaved by anoth er master was a king's man, and liable to be called up to fight in his wars. The nobles were brought up as warriors and no doubt were quite willing to fight most of the time. It seems likely that poorer freemen performed only loca l service, or provided such services as carrying food for the army. In some circ umstances, however, the kings were actually able to manage mass mobilizations fo r military purposes. There are several large earthworks surviving from this peri od. These frontier fortifications, or "dykes" as the English call them, run for miles, and are evidence for the power of the kings of this time. They could plan major projects and get large numbers of peasants out with their spades to do th e work. Tribute from other kings: As I mentioned before, kings took tribute from each other. Perhaps conquest and elimination of one's enemies was the ultimate g

oal of a warrior king. But complete victory was not often possible, so just like nations today, kings competed for lesser advantages -- they sought to get tribu te from kings they had defeated or overawed. The earliest English records, Bede and the ASC, talk about a series of overlord-kings who ruled over lesser monarch s. The Chronicle calls these kings Bretwaldas, which probably means "rulers of B ritain." The rewards of Bretwaldaship may have been rich while they lasted (no one could be sure how long that might be). We have a document from after 700 A.D. wh ich looks like the tribute list of a Mercian king at the height of Mercia's powe r. The document, called the Tribal Hidage, names the districts or tribes within Mercia, and their fiscal obligations reckoned in hides. It likewise assigns obli gations to the neighboring kingdoms of Wessex, Sussex, Essex, Kent, and East Ang lia. Archaeology gives us an idea of the wealth of 7th century kings. A royal v ill or estate named Yeavering of the kingdom of Bernicia has been recovered sinc e the Second World War. Yeavering was a royal fortress and residence in the time of King Edwin, the first Christian Northumbrian king and a Bretwalda or overlor d of Britain. Bishop Paulinus baptized there for 36 days in 627 A.D. Aerial photography done in 1949 inspired a dig which found the remains of a huge fortified cattle corral and a number of royal halls made of wood. From th e post holes, we know that Edwin's wooden hall was 80 feet by 40 feet, made of p lanks 5 1/2 inches thick. The posts that supported the building were sunk up to eight feet deep, which gives us the idea that it must have been impressively hig h. Inside the walls were plastered, and maybe painted as well. The size and bulk of this hall matches most Roman buildings, and though the Romans built in longe r-lasting stone, Edwin's hall is no less impressive for being made of wood. Then there is theSutton Hoo treasure, rediscovered just before the Second World War. A ninety-foot-long ship was dragged up to the top of a hundred-foot b luff in Suffolk, a dead king and some of his treasure was placed in it, and the whole thing was buried under a mound. Many of the artifacts had rotted away in w hole or part by the 20th century, but enough remains to show fantastic workmansh ip. We can't be sure whose burial this was, but it probably is that of King Redw ald of the East Angles, another Bretwalda. What we have found impresses us, at the very least, with the ability of th e kings to extract surplus wealth from their subjects, and to have that wealth t urned into beautiful or impressive objects, whether halls or cloak clasps or hel mets. If the kings were great in riches, they ruled in a way not familiar to us, and over a country much different from either Roman Britain or Later Medieval E ngland. For one thing, they ruled a rural country without a commercial economy. Many Roman cities and towns continued as settlements, but no longer supported a urban style of life distinct from the life of the country. They were too small in population to do so. Power was centered not in towns, but in the estates of k ings and other lords. If we were transported back to England in this time we would probably thin k it was the most primitive place imaginable, simply because there were no great centers of population. Trade was correspondingly less important as a method of exchange. People d id exchange goods, there were merchants and marketplaces, and money was known, a lthough it was not omnipresent as it is today. But much of the exchange was simi lar to the giving of gifts and of tribute that we have examined in connection wi th the power of kings. Lesser people gave gifts - - or tribute -- to the more po

werful, to gain their goodwill or pay off social obligations. Rich people gave g ifts to their dependents to demonstrate their power and create the obligations t hat would bind their followers closer to them. We see the same kind of exchange every time an election comes around, when governments in power try to consolidate their support by creating funds or prog rams to benefit some strategic group in society. This kind of exchange was much more obvious in the early medieval world, because most people were not employees in clearly defined jobs with clearly defined salaries; rather, they were depend ent on lords, whose favor they sought and whose demands they had to satisfy. Perhaps the strangest aspect of that society to our eyes is the attitude t oward law. Today, at least in theory, all of us are equal before the law, and mu st all answer to the sovereign state if we break the rules. The rules are writte n down abstractly formulated, so that they apply in the same way everywhere. The y can be changed. The state has a monopoly on enforcement, and paid servants to do the enforcing. None of those things applied in 7th c. England. Under the influence of the church, written laws under the name of the king were appearing. But law was lar gely customary and unwritten. What this means is that law was not unchanging, bu t that the community as a whole was the interpreter of what was right and what w as wrong. The key institution was not abstract rules of law, but a method of resolvi ng disputes between families. That method is usually called the feud. Feud was n ot necessarily private wars between families, although it could come to that. Mo re generally feud was the theory that if a member of a family was injured in som e way by a member of another, the injured family had the right to demand compens ation -- or else. The threat of action motivated the other family to bring its e rrant member into line. The king's role was very limited. He did not have many of the powers we gr ant to government today. What was the king's role? Basically, he had the right t o protect his interests, which were much more extensive than those of an ordinar y individual. Many disturbances of the peace violated the king's rights, and he could step in to a conflict on that basis and judge the rights and wrongs of it. He could also collect fines in such cases. His subjects could also come to him looking for justice if they did not think they could enforce their own rights. F inally, the king could proclaim new laws, or define existing custom more precise ly. The early English kingdoms were small, rural principalities ruled by a war rior kings supported by a warrior aristocracy. Much of the population must have been enslaved, or subject to great men who could protect them in a society where self-help was the main legal rule. It seems like a rough, disorderly society to us. It was also a society that was in the course of the seventh century undergo ing an ideological revolution. Christianity was being preached among the English . The new religion was not only changing English ideas of the afterlife, it was having a great effect on how power was weilded, and the purposes that wealth was applied to.

The Conversion of Britain The classic story of the conversion of the English is the one told by Bede in his 8th century book, the History of the English Church. Bede focuses on the activities of Pope Gregory the Great and the mission o f Augustine (usually called Augustine of Canterbury to distinguish him from the

more famous African Augustine). Augustine came to the Kingdom of Kent, ruled by the Bretwalda Aethelbert, and converted him and his court soon after 597. The mi ssionaries from Rome then fanned out and converted the king of the East Saxons, who controlled London, and the king of Northumbria. This much took a generation, and there were setbacks. After the first Chri stian kings died, their successors went back to paganism, forcing some of the bi shops to flee Britain for a while. Irish reinforcements saved the mission based in Kent: Bede tells us quite a bit about the rebuilding of the church in his own land of Northumbria by the Irish bishop Aidan. But there was a controversy between the Irish missionaries and the success ors of the Roman mission over what customs, should be used: the proper date of E aster was an important point. Fortunately, says Bede, King Oswy of Northumbria s aw the light, opted for the Roman rule, and the rest of the English kingdoms, an d parts of Ireland and Pictland eventually followed suit. This is Bede's story. It is well told and well documented, and there is no reason to think that it is not substantially true. But it tends to isolate the mission to the English from the development of Christianity elsewhere in Britain . I'm going to begin the lecture by putting the conversion of the English in to a wider perspective. You will recall that Roman Britain was officially Christ ian long before the imperial withdrawal and the coming of the English. Gildas n ever accuses them of idolatry. The Britons and their descendents the Welsh were well and truly Christianized. Around A.D. 400, long before Gildas, Britons had already begun to Christia nize their neighbors. Patrick, who waskidnapped from Britain into Irish slavery, felt compelled in later life to return to Ireland and preach the Gospel. Around the same time, a more obscure Briton named Ninian began to convert the southern Picts. The Irish took to Christianity with enthusiasm. Aside from purely religiou s motives, Christianity was the Irish entree to the civilized world, a way of sh aring in Roman culture without submitting to political control. Irish culture ha d a great respect for learning, and Irish scholars soon were absorbing as much C hristian theology and classical literature as they could get their hands on. A v ital Irish church developed in the course of the fifth century. It was character ized not only by its learning but by its heroic monastic idealism. Once the church was well founded in Ireland, the Irish began to preach to others. Indeed, taking on missionary work was seen as the ultimate sacrifice a C hristian could make. It was a challenge that the most dedicated Irish monks too k up. One of the earliest missionaries was St. Columba, who around 565 A.D., mor e than thirty years before Augustine went to Kent, went to the island of Iona of f the west coast of Scotland to found a monastery. It looks remote on the map, b ut it was strategically sited to bring the Gospel to the Scots who were settled in the area and especially to the northern Picts. Columba's monastery became the ecclesiastical center of northern Britain, the mother house of a whole family o f monasteries. A second Irish saint, Columban, set out from Ulster in the 590s to preach not in Scotland, but in France and even Italy. These countries had long been Chr istian of course, but Columban was, like many of the Irish, concerned to spread his heroic and austere style of monasticism whereever he could. Columban's acti vities in France were exactly contemporaneous with Augustine's in Kent. Around the year 600, the English kings were in the eye of a storm-center o

f Christian activity. As pagan kings in an increasingly Christian world, they we re becoming isolated. One can well imagine that Aethelbert of Kent, for instance , was aware of that isolation. Aethelbert, as Bede tells us but does not emphas ize, had married Bertha, a Christian Frankish princess, who insisted on bringing her pet bishop with her to say mass for her and her attendants. We can imagine Aethelbert feeling just a little bit like a hick among his fellow monarchs in the wider world beyond England. The remarkable thing about the conversion of the English is not that it to ok place, but that Rome had such direct role in it. Rome and Britain were far ap art, and the bishop of Rome had problems much closer to home. The bishop of Rom e, in theory the chief bishop of the world, had his hands full running the city, feeding its population, taking care of refugees from the Lombards, and trying t o hold the Italian church together. So why the interest in far away England? The answer lies in the personalit y of Gregory the Great, bishop of Rome in the 590s. Gregory had become convince d that the world was coming up against an important deadline: the End of Time, when his efforts to do God's will would be reviewed by a stern Judge. As the suc cessor of St. Peter, he felt a special responsibility to convert as many as poss ible before the end. Thus his interest in a far-away pagan people. Gregory is comparable in some ways to Columban, the Irishman who went to Gaul. He was a convinced monk, stirring things up, not content to restrict himse lf to ordinary methods. The measure of his determination was the English mission , the largest mission sent from Rome to anywhere during the Early Middle Ages. Why was Aethelbert receptive, and what motivated him to abandon his ancest ral religion? We do know quite a bit about what Christian missionaries said to pagan kin gs in this period. First there was the promise of eternal life. Then there was the promise that God, the real God who made the universe, n ot empty idols, would aid the king who worshipped him. The church told Aethelber t, as it had told Clovis (the first Christian king of the Franks), as it had tol d Constantine (the first Christian Roman emperor), that it had the real stuff. The monks from Rome were dedicated ascetics; master showmen, with their ri tuals, their vestments, and their holy paraphenalia; and miracle-workers. We may be inclined to scoff at this, but remember that miracles are in the eyes of the beholders, and dedicated religious leaders heal the sick and perform other mira cles every day. The last factor that weighed in Aethelbert's mind is the hickiness factor. Confronted with these impressive missionaries, he probably felt he was being le ft out of a good thing. Christianity was his entree into the big time. The Roman empire may have been diminished in size in the 590s, but it still existed as a very rich empire of the east, and its prestige, and that of its religion, was st ill very high. Once Aethelbert was converted, his influence promoted the spread of Christ ianity. The favor he showed to others who accepted baptism convinced many of his subjects to get on the bandwagon. And because Aethelbert was the overlord of Br itain, his support moved anoher king to follow his lead. Conversion from the top down was the normal early medieval method, but it had its weaknesses. When Aethelbert died his son and the king of the East Saxons went back to paganism. The same thing happened in other newly converted kingdo ms. The Roman mission, which seems to have depended for its vitality almost ent irely on foreigners, was fragile. In the 630s, it was not making any great progr ess.

Fortunately for the church, the second generation apostate rulers were fol lowed by a third generation more interested in Christianity. These new Christian rulers were men who had learned about Christianity when they were exiles in Chr istian courts. Oswald, king of Northumbria, had fled to the Scots when his enemy had threatened him. There he was baptized. He came back to Northumbria using th e cross as his banner, and when he succeeded in taking power, he asked the monks at Iona to send him a bishop. This second wave of conversion had its weaknesses, too. One was the contro versy between the Irish missionaries on one hand and the successors of the Roman missionaries on the other. Augustine had been sent to Britain as archbishop of the whole British area -- not just of the pagan English, but of the already exis ting Christian churches in the island. But the British, Irish, and Pictish chur ches needed much persuasion to accept the overlordship of Canterbury and Rome. T hese ancient churches had their own customs of long-standing, and didn't see why they should abandon them on the say-so of some far-away foreigners. The Roman party, if I can call it that, believed that the Roman customs ha d a special validity because they came from Peter, who held the keys to heaven. Eventually they got their way. The council at Whitby in 667 assured their victor y in Northumbria and eventually all of England. Southern Ireland had already ado pted the Roman Easter, and the Picts would soon after. Another weakness of the English church in the third generation was that it was still too undermanned and disorganized to do more than a superficial job of converting the countryside. This was remedied by several factors. In the third generation, after about 650, we find Christianity catching the imagination of a large number of native born English. At the same time, monasticism really caugh t on in England. Up to this time there had been monasteries in Kent, but elsewhe re there had been only a few isolated bishops to represent the church. When orga nized monastic communities were introduced in the other kingdoms, the church sud denly acquired some substance. These communities did the real work of bringing C hristian belief to the ordinary people: they were the teachers and the examples of Christianity. A final challenge to the church in England was the erection of permanent o ver-all organization. This was the accomplishment of a most unlikely archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus. He was sent to England in the 660s when the E nglish candidate, who had come to Rome for consecration, died there. Theodore wa s from Asia Minor, modern Turkey, a Greek refugee from the Arabs. He was already 66 years old. But Theodore turned out to be a powerhouse of a bishop. With the help of Hadrian, a Roman sent to be abbot of the monastery at Canterbury, He reb uilt the English church, concentrating on defining church laws (very simple ones ) and holding church councils for the whole English church, which among other th ings, showed the church's independence from any one ruler. Theodore and Hadrian were energetic and inspiring teachers, who helped to create an educated clergy to carry on after they were gone. Theodore died in 690, at the age of 88. He left behind him a church of Eng land that was a vigorous, sustainable enterprise. By the end of the 7th century, England was becoming Christian in more than name. Indeed, the introduction of C hristianity to England, like its introduction in Ireland, sparked an amazing cul tural flowering.

The Age of Bede Our subject in this hour is the Christian church in England around the yea r 700, when it had ceased to be a precarious missionary organization and had bec ome an established part of English culture.

I called this lecture the age of Bede because Bede himself is the most acc essible witness to the transformation. Bede, who came to maturity in 687 and die d in 735, was a new kind of Englishman. He could not have existed a century or e ven a generation earlier. He was born of Christian parents and at the age of sev en was sent to be a monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Wearmouth; soon after that he was transferred to the nearby monastery of Jarrow,where he stayed all hi s life, praising God, studying the sacred writings, and using his literary talen ts to teach others the elements of the Christian faith. The monastery at Jarrow was filled with books that its founder, Benedict B iscop, had brought from Rome and elsewhere. Bede made the best use possible of t hat library: he was an expert not only in the interpretation of the Bible, but in chronology, poetry and music, as well as a historian and biographer of great talent. Was Bede the typical English Christian of the 8th century? No,but Bede is symptomatic of the great changes that had overtaken English society. His learni ng and his religion were not unique, nor was his monastery. Perhaps most import ant of all, Bede was part of a large group of English people who believed that b eing Christian was an essential element of being English. For Bede, the English were a New Israel, a chosen people, brought to Britain from the pagan wilderness so that they might enjoy a new homeland as faithful Christians. Bede's history combines a zealous Christianity with an unmistakeable English patriotism. The co mbination is a remarkable one, especially when one remembers that there was no s ingle English kingdom or people in Bede's time. The closest thing they had to a national institution was the English church led by the archbishop of Canterbury. Bede could exist in his time because in the previous generation, Christian ity had caught the imagination of a number of native-born English people, people of talent and, often enough, wealth and rank. They created the securely Christi an England that Bede grew up in. A couple of examples will give you an idea of this activity. One of the mo st famous English bishops of the generations before Bede was Wilfrid. He lived b etween 634 and 709. He wa brought up in the Irish mission to his kingdom, Northu mbria. Early on, he was also influenced by Rome. He went there in 653. Before re turning home, he spent time in a monastery in Lyons, in southeastern France. Whe n Wilfrid came back to England about 660, he became quickly prominent as one of the best trained of the native-born clergy. He was the spokesman for the Roman p oint of view at Whitby, and when the Irish bishop of Lindisfarne left afterwards , Wilfrid became bishop in Northumbria. Wilfrid spent the rest of his life as a sort of ecclesiastical wild card. He was very independent of spirit, and three times lost his see because he could not get along with the king or the other bishops. Wilfrid went to Rome twice to demand his rights, and was in exile from Northumbria for long periods before he was finally given a smaller see around Hexham. Despite this peculiar contentious aspect of his character, Wilfrid had his constructive side. He founded a number of monasteries, acted as a bishop in Mer cia and Wessex, converted the last pagan kingdom, Sussex, and even preached to t he Frisians on one of his journeys to Rome. Wilfrid did his best to found an ind ependent family of monasteries obeying only on him, and at his death, though he had a lot of enemies, there were many English people who looked to him as their father in God. Benedict Biscop is a second example of a Northumbrian noble who threw hims elf into ecclesiastical activity at an early stage. He was in fact a young warri

or at court in the 650s, when Bishop Aidan was reconverting Northumbria. Aidan h ad a big impact on Benedict (this was not his original name): at the age of 25, he gave up his secular life and went on pilgrimage to Rome. For 20 years, he tr avelled around the continent, mostly visiting monasteries to learn how each one practiced what was considered the apostolic life. During these years he also vis ited Rome six times. Eventually he came back to Northumbria, not to become a bis hop, despite his name, but an abbot instead. He was the founder of Wearmouth and Jarrow, the two monasteries that Bede lived in. . Bede was precisely the kind o f learned monk that Benedict Biscop was seeking to produce. His monasteries were remarkable centers of Christian culture. I could cite other early saints, but these two suffice to make a number of points about the founding generation of native English churchmen. First, they were eager students of everything they could learn from the ou tside world. Second, they were extremely charismatic. These English bishops and abbots convinced kings to finance their projects, young men and women to enter monaster ies and nunneries, and students to immerse themselves in Christian learning. Finally, in their effort to move from the basics of Christian belief to th e real thing, a full Christian life, they were all promoters of and participants in the monastic life. In the seventh and eighth century, the monastic life was universally seen as the true Christian life, the high road to salvation. Zealous Christians burne d to give up the world, seen as a place of temptation and sordid involvement wit h transitory things, and to take up a life devoted to eternal things: knowledge of God, prayer to God. Denial of the flesh was seen as a necessary part of this devotion. Monastic life was respected by many who felt no desire or aptitude for it themselvesThe foundation and endowment of monasteries was the most pious act tha t a king or a noble could undertake. The sons and daughters of the aristocracy s aw monasticism as a respectable career. Monasticism in this period was the institutional framework of the church, and the highest expression of its life. These men, and a few women like St. Hild a, were amazingly successful in planting a new Christian culture in England. Two innovations associated with this movement were the book and building i n stone. The first had an incalculable impact. Reading and writing exposed the E nglish of Wilfrid's time, or Bede's. to an entirely new tradition, mostly Christ ian, but with important elements of pagan philosophy and lore from the distant p ast. Of course the direct effects were limited to a fraction of the elite of Ang lo-Saxon England. But it was the elite that was affected, and everyone else was influenced too. Most Anglo-Saxon stone buildings were pulled down in the later Middle Ages to make bigger and better ones. The surviving ones show that the English caught on quickly here, too. The impact of these buildings must have been very great a s well, and maybe more direct than writing. Early stone buildings were all eccle siastical, and they must have served in a very concrete way to mark out the chur ch as a special institution. The issue of expense occurs to me, too. The constru ction of a stone church could not help but have economic consequences; they may not have all been good. So far I have depicted the introduction of Christianity to England as a fl ood of foreign influence being absorbed by the English. But there was more to it than that.

First, the English were not just second-rate imitators of a superior cult ure. What the English did with the new techniques surpassed what other Christian peoples were doing in the West. Bede was not just the best English scholar of h is generation: he was the best scholar working in Latin anywhere. Second, the English, while they adopted foreign standards and styles, used their own artistic tradition in the service of their new goals. The English wer e expressing themselves and their new found faith in every medium with a startli ng energy. This new "high culture" affected not just churchmen and patrons. The establishment of the church in England meant the establishment of an e ntirely new aristocracy. Founding and maintaining espicopal establishments and m onasteries involved a major redirection of resources in an era where making sure that everyone had enough to eat required the vast majority to work on the land all the time. Church corporations, even in the seventh century, were big and we re given large endowments. Wearmouth and Jarrow had hundreds of monks and lay br others, big stone buildings with glass windows (another innovation), and an init ial endowment of 150 hides -- enough land, or payments from enough land, to supp ort 150 free families in some style. When Wilfrid's patron Cadwalla, King of the West Saxons, conquered the Isle of Wight, he gave a quarter of it to Wilfrid fo r the use of the church. At another time, the king of the South Saxons, in grati tude to Wilfrid for converting his people, gave him eighty-seven hides at Selsey . One thing that distinguished church corporations from other lordships is t hat the church properties were meant to be eternal. Lay properties were not ver y stable -- families died out or split their property among many heirs. Church p roperty was different. It was held in perpetual trust for the service of God and the support of the poor. It was often visualized as the property of a dead patr on saint, under whose protection it was. The church introduced written royal cha rters into England in an effort to guarantee that donations to the church would be respected over the generations. The possession of all this inalienable prope rty made the heads of the church a big political factor in Christian England. Once the church was well established in England, the inevitable process of accommodation began. Wealthy bishops and abbots found it hard to avoid living l ike secular men of the same rank. Early church councils had to forbid bishops su rrounding themselves with the harpists who praised and entertained warrior noble s. This process of secularization accelerated when noble families began to re alize the earthly benefits that founding monasteries could have. Giving land to a monastery nullified the claims that the king or more distant relatives had on that land. It was permanently sacrosanct, untouchable, protected by supernatural guarantees, church law, and the king's law. But if that monastery was entrusted to abbots who were members of the family, the property could still be used to a dvance family interests on earth. It was like a tax-free foundation. We know of at least 200 monasteries and nunneries that were founded in Eng land before the Vikings. Some of these monasteries were almost indistinguishabl e from noble estates. We hear of kings disporting themselves with noble nuns who lived all too much like secular ladies, and Bede himself complained that the ma ny family monasteries, with their untouchable endowments, were causing a land sh ortage. There was not enough disposable land to set up the new dioceses that Be de thought England needed. There wasn't even enough to endow young warriors to d efend the country. Bede's history reads like the tale of a golden age -- but it could also be read by contemporaries as a warning. The British had misused their prosperity, and look what happened to them!

But in Bede's time, and even after, there was plenty of real dedication le ft in the English church. The eighth century, in fact, was one of the periods of European history where England has had the most influence on the continent. Chu rchmen looking for new lands to conquer for Christ went to Frisia and still-paga n Germany to convert peoples they thought of as their distant cousins. They were remarkably successful, not just in doing the work of conversion, but in setting up a well-organized German church on the English model, a church not only well-run, but closely tied to Rome. The English idea that Rome should set the religious style of the church was a very influential one. The cultural u nity of Western Europe thus owes something to the spirit of Bede and the age of Bede.

English Kingdoms of the 8th Century The subject of this lecture is royal power in the last century before the appearance of the Vikings in England. The eighth century on the continent was the era of Charles Martel, Pepin t he Short, and Charlemagne -- the Frankish leaders who established the power of t he Carolingian dynasty, forged an alliance with the papacy, and built a Frankish empire and a theocratic kingship. Offa of Mercia (the dominant English kingdom of the time, ruled 757-796) was the one western king that Charlemagne called "brother." Aethelbald (another Mercian king, ruled 716-757) and Offa did not have kingdoms anywhere near the si ze of their Carolingian neighbors, but in their sphere they temporarily provided a greater English unity than had obtained before. In the eighth century, we see a de facto division of the English kingdoms -- a division that will recur in one form or another through the Middle Ages. Th at division is between North and South, Northumbria on one hand and Southumbria on the other (divided by the river Humber). The two halves are not comparable in all ways. Northumbria by this time was a reasonably well unified kingdom. Southumbria was never the name of a kingdom at all; rather, Southumbria wa s the more fertile Lowland Zone of Britain under another name. There were severa l kingdoms there at any given time. In the eighth century, however, it would be effectively dominated by the Mercian kings. The two halves of England were also ecclesiastically distinct. The south w as the ecclesiastical province of Canterbury, the northern bishops depended on Y ork, which had evolved into the second archbishopric of England. In the late 7th century and the early 8th, we have more information about kings and their power than we have had before. There is not as much as we would like, particularly for Mercia itself. Something may have been written, but many churches and documents were destroyed in the Viking era, and the history of Merc ia may have gone with them. So the lecture will have more general consideration s and few telling anecdotes than it might. We'll begin with the effect of Christianization on English kingship. It en hanced the position of the king, there can be little doubt. The church gave the king the role of protector of the church, a role it had been finetuning since th e conversion of Constantine. Oswald of Northumbria, who restored the true faith after apostate kings had thrown off Christianity was regarded by Bede as a sain

t. The field where he planted his cross became the site of miracles, as did Os wald's tomb, after he was killed in a later battle. Not every king could aspire to sainthood, but they all received an ideolog ical boost from Christian theories of worthy kingship. How deeply the king's sel f-image could be affected is shown by the curious phenomenon of kings retiring i nto monasteries at the end of their lives. Several English monarchs gave up thei r thrones and went to Rome so they could die there as monks and be buried near t he tomb of St. Peter. It appears that some eighth century monarchs were deeply receptive of the sense of Christian duty that bishops and monks were trying to i nstill in them. Christianity did not merely change the ideology of kingship. It changed th e content of royal power and affected the methods by which it was exercised. First, the church was a source of patronage. Kings had influence over the appointment of their bishops, and if they chose them wisely, bishops could serve as valuable deputies. Kings had close links to a number of monasteries they or their predecessors had founded, and these too were potential power bases. Second, the church was normally a supporter of royal power and stable gove rnment out of practical as well as ideological reasons. A third factor was the introduction of writing and recordkeeping as tools of government. This was barely beginning in the eighth century. Charters, which recorded the transfer of land in a permanent, detailed form, were increasingly i mportant -- but charters in this period were not official documents issued by th e government, but were drawn up by the churches and monasteries that recieved th e lands for their archives. Written law was introduced to England almost as soon as Augustine landed. Writing was not yet an important part of royal government, but the seeds of future developments had been planted. Let's look how royal power was exercised by three important Mercian kings , Aethelbald (716-757) and Offa (757- 796), with some reference to Offa's second successor Cenwulf (796-821). These men exercised overlordship over Southumbria and, just as important, over the church in southern England, with some ups and downs, for over a century . They seem to be stronger kings than any we have seen to date. Offa went so fa r as to dispense with separate kings in Kent, Sussex, Hwicce (which is near Worc ester), Lindsey and East Anglia. Tributary subkings were replaced by ealdormen, the official ancestors of both earls and sheriffs. These men were deputies who o versaw a territory called a shire, supervising the collection of taxes and defen ding the king's prerogatives when necessary. In some cases the new ealdorman may have been the same person as the old subking. But although he remained an impor tant person, he had suffered a demotion. In most cases the demotion was permanen t. East Anglia regained its independence, but the other dynasties were gone for good. To a neighbor like Charlemagne, Offa looked like the only real king in sou thern England. The Mercian kings were remarkable too for fighting the Welsh actively and successfully. This was a major enterprise, because the Welsh were no pushovers - they gave as good as they got for quite some time, and forced Offa to build a huge fortified frontier between Mercia and Wales. Political superiority was reflected in the way the Mercian kings treated t he church. They ruled or dominated the entire ecclesiastic province of the archb ishops of Canterbury, and thus exercised a great influence on how it was run. In the days of Aethelbald, Mercian candidates were elected archbishop, even though Kent still retained some independence at the time. Aethelbald was also able to

act as the president of a church council of the province of Canterbury in 746/7. Previously, the bishops had run their own meetings independently of monarchs. W as Aethelbald's active role applauded or resented by the churchmen? Probably bot h. Aethelbald, like many other medieval kings, sometimes regretted the pious generosity of his predecessors in giving away royal lands and rights. Aethelbald found it necessary to insist, around 749, that whatever grants had been made in the past, all lands had to contribute men to the army and labor towards the bui lding and maintenance of bridges and fortresses. Offa's position was stronger than Aethelbald's, and so he took an even mor e prominent part in the running of the church. He (and his successor Cenwulf, to o) routinely presided over councils of the southern English bishops. One of his great triumphs was his presidency of a council in 786 where papal legates were p resent. On this occasion, Offa got to play the role that Charlemagne was playing on the continent -- pious king as protector, even head, of a "national" church, a role backed by the acquiescence of St. Peter's representatives on the spot. The special religious role claimed by Offa was asserted the next year, whe n Offa had his son anointed king by bishops, in imitation of Saul and David in t he Old Testament, and more directly, in imitation of recent Frankish kings. The pope himself had anointed Charlemagne's sons a few years earlier, thus giving ec clesiastical and divine approval for the power of Charlemagne's dynasty. Offa ho ped, in vain it turned out, to smooth his son's way to the throne in this way. To return to Offa's position in the church. Offa could be very high handed in getting his way. At one point, he decided his control of the church would be more secure if Lichfield, a bishopric central to his own territory, was elevate d to the rank of archbishopric, and given many of Canterbury's subordinate bisho ps. The archbishopric of Lichfield was dismantled on Offa's death, but the Cenw ulf inherited the essence of Offa's power over the church. When the archbishop o f Canterbury in his time tried to take over monasteries connected to the royal f amily, Cenwulf had him suspended from his position for six years. At least in Southumbria, Offa and Cenwulf had gained the kind of ecclesias tical predominance that their brother monarch Charlemagne had on the continent. Offa and Charlemagne are roughly comparable in other ways as well. Offa was a ki ng capable of conceiving of and carrying out major projects. Offa's huge fortifi ed Welsh frontier, known as Offa's Dyke, is an impressive piece of engineering a nd a demonstration of royal control of resources. Originally it was 150 miles lo ng, and made up of a ditch 6 feet deep backed by a rampart 25 feet high. It was not fortified and so would not have stopped a determined army. But a barrier thi s size would have been quite effective in containing Welsh raiding and thus in s tabilizing the frontier. The existence of the dyke cannot be explained without granting Offa the ab ility to conscript tens of thousands of workers in an organized fashion. Offa and Charlemagne are both notable for their interest in regulating and exploiting trade. Perhaps this is just the beginning of documentation, and not interest, but since both men were more powerful than their predecessors, we can say that their interest had more practical consequences. Neither king seems to h ave doubted that they could enforce their decisions on their own merchants. This period also saw, both in England and the Continent, the first practic al, royally sponsored currency since Roman times. In England it was a silver coi n called, eventually, the penny. Offa's kingdom seems to have produced millions of pennies. Each penny was worth a substantial amount, but not so much as to mak

e its daily use difficult, which was the problem with many earlier gold coins. T he gold coins were medals, or jewelry, or even propaganda pieces demonstrating r oyal wealth. The silver pennies were useful money, and their existence both refl ected increased trade and promoted it. The number of coins indicates a richer, commercially more active society, closely watched and systematically exploited b y the king. Offa was the first king to call himself "King of the English," and "King o f the English homeland," in other words, King of England. Cenwulf used the even more impressive title of emperor. But their power, like that of Charlemagne's dynasty, was less stable than it looked. Murder and civil strife were an almost constant part of English royal politics. The English rule was that a king must have royal blood, but there was no rule that said he had to be the closest male relative of his predecessor. Lo ts of people had royal blood, or could make a claim to it, and many did. Rivalri es and dissatisfactions within the aristocracy, a moment's weakness in the thenruling family, could lead to quick revolutions in power. In the early ninth century this type of instability led to the loss of Mer cian supremacy in the south. Indeed, in 829, Mercia was temporarily conquered by the King of Wessex -- if you can believe the records preserved by the West Saxo ns. By that time, the country was on the verge of a greater political revolution yet. In 829, Viking raids had been hitting England for a generation. They were yet small ones, but the big ones were just over the horizon. The coming of the V ikings to England is our next subject.

The Vikings And The Rise Of Wessex

The Appearance of the Vikings The appearance of the Vikings on the Western European scene is one of the most dramatic episodes of medieval history. The raids, the conquests, the settle ments, the sea voyages of the Vikings were remarkable achievements. These achiev ements have left a mark on the historical imagination of Western Europeans. Some times scholars have been tempted to make wide claims for the uniqueness of the V iking raids and migrations. This in turn has provoked other scholars to minimize the importance of those phenomena. I will give what I think is a balanced account, but be warned that there a re a lot of different opinions out there in the scholarly world, and this is onl y one. The word "Viking." "Viking" is not an ethnic or racial identity, it is the name of an occupation. In other words, not all Scandinavians were Vikings, and not all Vikings were Scandinavians. A Viking was "a man of the vik," in other wo rds a man who hangs around a vik or a trading center. This ambiguous word, was u sed by the Scandinavians of our period to mean a sea-going adventurer, a man who might be interested in the profits of trade, but who was more likely to be a pi rate and a plunderer. Vikings were a by-product of trade, that trade which, we saw in the last l ecture, was increasingly important in Western Europe in the eighth century. The growing commercial activity of Western Europe in some sense created the Vikings.

The peoples on the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic were pulled into it. The sheltered "Northern Mediterranean," as it is sometimes called, is an ea sily navigated waterway, and it leads to some desirable resources. It was also a route to Russia, and through Russia, to the mighty Islamic empire centered in Baghdad. This increase in trade was a destabilizing influence. There were literally dozens of minor rulers around the Baltic. Those who controlled trading centers grew rich, and the others grew envious. The envious ones turned to war and pirac y in an attempt to muscle in on the new wealth. It is in this period, the eighth century, that the famous Viking longship may have been developed. Piracy put a premium on speed and maneuverability for b oth pirates and their prey, and led the Scandinavians to combine both sails and oars in one very seaworthy ship. Eventually this pirate activity spilled out of the Baltic, and isolated Vi king bands began to hit the coasts of Christian countries in the west. This was a complete surprise to the English, the Franks, and others. The northern seas ha d been peaceful for a good long time. Mariners who showed up at English ports, f or instance, were assumed to be peaceful traders -- thus the ASC entry for 787: When the first Norwegian ships showed up on the south coast of England, a royal reeve went down to tell them to go to the customs station and pay their taxes. T he murder of the reeve was the first indication that England was about to face h ostility from overseas peoples. Up to about 830, however, the Viking threat to England and the continental Christian countries was so sporadic as to be easily ignored. After 820, Ireland became the target of many small Norwegian raids that came around the northern t ip of Britain. But the still mighty Frankish empire contained Danish aggression by the southern sea routes, and England had only to contend with a few isolated raids. After 830, however, dissension in the Frankish royal family and then outri ght civil war weakened the empire and distracted its rulers from the problems of external defense. The Danes soon took advantage of the situation. They began by sacking the port towns in modern Netherlands and Belgium, towns that had been b asically unfortified because they could count on the protection of the Frankish emperors. These trade centers were easy pickings for the Vikings. News of the we alth that the raiders gained on these occasions attracted more pirates, and soon the western seas were swarming with them. The bigger Viking expeditions of the 830s made the English on the coasts f eel more insecure, but England was still not the main target of Viking activity. The continent, still torn by civil war between rival Frankish rulers, was too t empting. What little information we have about England in this period gives the impression of a prosperous country. After about 850, the scale of Viking expeditions seems to have increased y et again. The accounts of the victims of the Vikings -- and in this period as al ways, these victims' accounts are our main source of information -- say that Vik ing fleets included 150 ships and more. Even taking exaggeration into account, t his means that some of the fleets carried thousands of warriors. Another difference between the post-850 expeditions and the earlier ones i s that some of the leaders called themselves kings. These were not great nationa l kings with extensive lands in Scandinavia. Rather they were failed contenders for power at home looking for opportunity elsewhere -- more aggresive counterpar ts to the English princes in exile who were always a part of English political l

ife. But still in the 850s, the main opportunities were in disorganized Ireland and on the continent. Only occasionally would one of these large fleets descend on Britain. Charles the Bald, who ruled most of modern France in the mid-ninth century , had a role in bringing about the most devastating Viking attacks on England. I n the 850s and 860s, he took the first effective action by a Frankish king again st the Vikings. Paying Vikings to fight each other was just one of his tactics. The use of fortifications was another. Such tactics were not infallible, but they made France a less attractive d estination for Vikings, and England more attractive, just as their activity was reaching a peak. The storm broke in 865, with the appearance of the so-called Gr eat Army. The name "Great Army" was probably an invention of the chroniclers, but it expresses the dismay that the English felt when faced with an enemy of unpreced ented size. The East Anglians, rather than fight, gave the Viking army tribute, including the horses they would need for further campaigning. After spending the winter of 865 in East Anglia, the army, perhaps reinforced by other Vikings fro m France, went to Northumbria, where a civil war was in progress, and took York, which was the chief town of the kingdom. After some delay, the contending kings , Osbert and Aelle, came to their senses, and in March of 867 they combined thei r forces to attack the army at York. They lost badly -- both English kings were killed. The Viking army was effectively in control of Northumbria, but did not set tle at this point. Rather, they appointed a client king, took tribute, and moved on. They seized Nottingham, in Mercia, and spent the winter of 867/8 there. Kin g Burgred of Mercia was frightened enough by the approaching army, to appeal to his neighbor and former rival, King Aethelred of Wessex, for aid. Aethelred resp onded favorably -- he and his brother and heir, Alfred, took an army to Nottingh am to help the Mercians beseige the Vikings. English cooperation against a comm on enemy didn't work this time, though. For some reason the Mercians decided tha t peace was less risky than storming the Viking camp. So they made a treaty and the West Saxons went home. The Mercian peace gave them a respite of four years. The Vikings went back to York in 869, and then, probably after being reinforced from overseas, they m arched back to East Anglia. This time they didn't merely take tribute: they kill ed the king, Edmund, perhaps as a pagan sacrifice, and in the words of the chron icler, "overran the kingdom the entire kingdom." East Anglia was well and truly overrun. The East Anglian royal dynasty disappeared forever. In 870, the Great Army attacked Wessex. Because the ASC comes from Wessex, we know what happened there in some detail. The chronicler knew, for instance, who the Viking leaders were. They were a collection of warlords, some of whom ca lled themselves kings, others who did not have the support or the ambition to be more than jarls (earls). What is more interesting is how well Wessex did in the face of the assault. The kingdom did not collapse at the appearance of the army at its borders, and was not defeated in the field. In the early part of the yea r there were four separate battles. The West Saxons won some and lost some, but neither side got a decisive victory. Aethelred died, but Alfred stepped right into his shoes and continued his campaign. There were at least nine engagements that the chronicler considered wo rth of the name "battle," plus innumerable lesser forays mounted by the English to harrass or repulse the attacking army. By the end of 870, the Vikings had los

t one king and nine jarls, and they were willing to make peace. One wonders about the resistance of Wessex. Did they face a smaller army t han the earlier kingdoms? Had some of the Vikings stayed behind to consolidate t heir gains elsewhere? Perhaps, but the fact that the army Aethelred and Alfred f aced had two kings and many jarls speaks for a sizeable force, and certainly one that began its campaign confident of victory. One is forced to give a great dea l of credit to the leadership ability of the brothers Aethelred and Alfred. It i s not so much the battles they one that impress us, though that was quite an ach ievement, but the fact that they could suffer a number of defeats and continue t o fight, without losing heart or the support of their subjects. Even the death o f Aethelred in mid-fight did not sap West Saxon morale. This morale must be kept in mind when we look at later events. The great V iking army backed off from Wessex temporarily, and spent its energy subduing Mer cia. In 871 the London area was taken, in 872 the area around Lincoln. In 873 th ey took Repton, in the north-central part of the kingdom. In that year or the ne xt, King Burgred called it a day. He abandoned his kingdom and retired to Rome, no doubt with a great deal of treasure to console him for his loss of status. Pa rts of Mercia remained unconquered, but it was now a Viking client state, somewh at like the Vichy republic in France in the second World War. The Vikings chose a king they could control, a king's thegn named Coelwulf, who ruled on their suf ferance. After this victory, the army appears to have split. Part went to York and then farther north, raiding into Pictland and the lands of the Strathclyde Brito ns. Another part took possession of Cambridge. In 875, this southern army renewe d the war against Wessex, the one undefeated English kingdom. Riding fast, as th ey often did on raiding expeditions, they dashed right across Wessex to the sout h coastal town of Wareham. Alfred brought up a force and made them swear to leav e his kingdom when the winter was over. But in the next spring, that of 876, the y broke their oath. Part of them went by sea. Immediately a storm blew up and ac cording to the chronicler, 120 ships were lost. The Vikings who went by land did much better. They dashed out of Wareham and got into the fortress at Exeter, a major town, before Alfred could stop them. This time, however, he did convince t hem to go. The next year they went to Mercia, where they started to divide the land f or settlement. It appeared in 877 that Wessex had survived the storm. Viking ban ds were beginning to settle down. Much of the army they had faced in 875 and 876 was taking land in eastern Mercia. The Danes in York were also appropriating th e land, and according to the ASC, they spent the year of 876 "ploughing and maki ng a living for themselves." But there were others who were not satisfied. In early 878, the army, or w hat was left of it, attacked Wessex in midwinter. In the words of our source, it "rode over Wessex and occupied it, and drove a great part of the inhabitants ov ersea, and of the rest the greater part they reduced to submission." This situat ion is usually seen as merely the prelude to Alfred's amazing comeback in the sp ring. It takes nothing away from Alfred's achievement to look instead for a mome nt at the amazing conquests of his enemies. In 865, there had been no Vikings based in England whatsoever. England ha d really suffered very little from the fleets that had roamed freely over France , the Low Countries, and Ireland. The political and social structure built up si nce the Anglo-Saxon invasions was intact. In a very few years, the Great Army had by sheer force rearranged the enti

re English scene. The ruling dynasties of Northumbria and East Anglia had been destroyed. Yo rk had become a Scandinavian capital. Alfred of Wessex had been chased into the swamps, and the one remaining native king, the Mercian king Coelwulf, ruled only a fraction of his realm at the will of his overlords. Most of north and eastern England was being settled by the victorious warr iors and their friends, and this would lead to a permanent change in the ethnic makeup of that part of the country. The church had especially suffered. The archbishopric of York somehow surv ived the occupation of its city, but all other episcopal sees in the area of Vik ing settlement were vacant. Monasteries were sacked and destroyed, many of them so thoroughly as to be lost to our knowledge. The Viking descent between 865 and 878 went beyond raiding, although the s cale of plunder must have been immense, including as it did the very land itself . This was invasion, and it changed the face of England forever. But England was not reduced entirely to foreign rule. Alfred, hiding in the marshes, was down b ut not out.

Alfred We left King Alfred of Wessex in the early months of 878, when he was hidi ng from the Danish invaders in the marshes of Somerset. The Vikings who had beat en all the other English kings and subjugated their kingdoms appeared to have ta ken Alfred's kingdom as well. In the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Vik ings "drove a great part of the inhabitants overseas." This doesn't mean the gen eral population fled -- the refugees were undoubtedly the ruling class, the big property owners. They abandoned the kingdom, or they stayed and submitted. Alfred's few months in the marshes are the most famous part of his life -legend-makers could not resist the image of the fugitive king who was neverthel ess destined to win in the end. From what we know of Alfred, he may have indeed spent some of his time in the marshes contemplating God's will. But he was not alone, and he was preparing himself in a practical way to make his big comeback. He had a base at a royal estate in the marshes, and when the time seemed right, he moved. In the spring of 878, he left the marshes and summoned the men of the west ern Wessex to his standard. Gratifyingly, they responded, and within three days he was leading an army. He beat the invaders in the field at a place called Edin gton, then besieged them in their fortified encampment. After two weeks, the Vik ings asked for terms. Alfred agreed to let them out if they would leave his king dom, give hostages guaranteeing peace, and, finally, agree that their leaders wo uld be baptized as Christians. All the terms were fulfilled. Three weeks after t he Viking army left Wessex, their king, Guthrum and 29 other chief men returned to Wessex and were baptized. Guthrum was sponsored by Alfred himself, and thus b ecame the godson of his former enemy. Symbolically, this move was very important, for it showed a willingness of the invaders to bow, at least temporarily, to English standards. It was the beg inning of a process of accommodation. Alfred's victory was a crucial one for him. Attacks on Wessex did not imme diately end,but Alfred began to make some gains. In 886, he took London, quite a n important town, from the Vikings, and about the same time he made a treaty wit h Guthrum, now the king of East Anglia and the leading Dane in the south of Engl and. The treaty (pp. 171-172) drew a boundary between English held Mercia and We ssex on one hand, and Danish held areas on the other. It also recognized the leg

al equality of the Engish and the Danes. Two men of the same rank were to have t he same weregild, whatever their nationality. The Danes again were making an eff ort to fit into English society. Alfred posed in the treaty of 886 as the chief representative of all the n ative English -- he acted with "the councillors of all the English race," and wa s looking out for native interests in dealing with the Danes. Whether he was acc epted as such by other Englishmen is a doubtful matter. But in regard to Mercia, Alfred did show the magnanimity that one would expect from the king of all the English. . He returned the rich port of London to Mercian control very soon afte r he took it. Rather than earning resentment, he won an ally. Aethelred, the Mer cian "ealdorman" married Aethelflaed, Alfred's daughter, and was a faithful adhe rent to Alfred's family for a quarter of a century. Between Alfred's return in 878 and 892, Alfred worked to reorganize his ki ngdom against the possibility -- near-certainty, rather -- of further Viking att acks. The actions Alfred took can be broken down into three parts. First, Alfred established a navy. He was the first English king since the seventh century to show much interest in the military use of ships. Alfred's f leet was not a great formidable force. It was used for close in defense, and sel dom if ever strategically. But the innovative attitude it reveals is impressive. Second, Alfred reorganized his army. He enforced his right to call up free men to fight in defense of the kingdom, and exercised that right in a systemati c manner. The levy of free men, called the fyrd, was divided into two parts, whi ch were called up in rotation when necessary. This made it possible to get servi ce from poorer free men who could not afford to fight full time. Alfred's arran gements were not perfect. The ASC tells us in 893 of a levy leaving the moment t heir term was up, even though they were besieging a dangerous Viking force. Yet Alfred's system generally seems to have provided him with troops when and where he needed them. Alfred's third innovation was the establishment of a series of forts calle d burhs -- in modern English, boroughs. These served as the backbone of Alfred's defensive system, and were to evolve into the basis of English local government . Alfred created in the course of his reign about 30 strongholds.The new strongh olds were meant as places of refuge and as obstacles to invasion. They were very well situated for both purposes. There was a burh within twenty miles of almost every spot in Wessex. Not only were these places fortified, practical arrangements were made to ensure garrisons for them. The evidence for them is a brief document known as th e Burghal Hidage (pp. 193-194). On the surface it is pretty cryptic, being just a list of burhs with the number of hides (units of assessment) attached to them. The explanation tacked on to the end, however, gives the key. Each hide is to s upply one man, and the number of hides assigned to each city is enough to put fo ur men on each pole (or 16 and 1/2 feet). The Burghal Hidage is a plan to assign 27,000 men to the various royal strongholds whenever garrisons are needed. Nor is the BH merely fantasy -- or at least it is very careful fantasy. Modern archa eology has found that the length of wall attributed to the burhs in the BH is ve ry close to the actual length of wall at the time. Somebody made accurate measur ements. Right from the beginning most burhs were more than bare forts. They were t owns with regular street plans, drawn up in anticipation of permanent settlement

. They were centers of royal administration, or quickly became so. This is where mints were located -- for security and to service the merchants who gathered th ere. Merchants were there because Alfred (or at least his successors) required t rade to be done in towns, where royal officials could collect taxes and prevent the sale of stolen goods. Alfred's network of burhs made his successors the lords of all the most im portant towns in the kingdom, to their great financial and political benefit. Th e assignment of districts to those burhs encouraged the development of the tradi tional shires or counties of medieval and modern England. Alfred and his planning was tested in the years 892-895. The last of the n inth century Viking attacks on England took place in that year, and they were ai med at Wessex, the center of resistence. The response of Wessex, as documented i n the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, was quite impressive. The landing of Viking raiding parties in Wessex was invariably met by an immediate response. The Vikings were pinned down, besieged in their camps, sometimes cut off from their boats, and t hen chased away or defeated. The army of Wessex not only held its own, but, with the support of Mercians and some of the Welsh, fought the Vikings in disputed M ercia, and forced them finally to give up. Those who had property in England wen t home. The rest sailed for France, to raid up the Seine. Alfred's success should be neither under- nor over-estimated. He was able to defend his kingdom better than any king on the Continent, and came out of the war with his power strengthened rather than diminished. But then it must be rem embered that he had a small kingdom. He should be compared not to Charlemagne's descendents, who failed to hold their vast domains together; he rather should be compared to the newer warlords, the so-called feudal princes, the dukes and cou nts who gained power because they were effective defenders and organizers of ter ritories threatened by war. Alfred did about as well as the Counts of Flanders o f his time, or the Dukes of Burgundy. Alfred's victories cannot be seen as "English" victories in a modern natio nal sense. Alfred was still a sectional king, though he desired to be more. So much for qualifications. Alfred's victories are pretty impressive, and were won by hard work and intelligence. Alfred's military and political success is only part what makes him a pivo tal figure in the history of pre-Norman Conquest England. Alfred was something o f a literary man, even a scholar, a fact that makes him the most knowable of pre -Norman kings. Asser, Alfred's biographer says Alfred spent every moment he was n't fighting the Danes or hunting lamenting that he never had the time to study. You might be tempted to dismiss Asser's picture of Alfred the scholar too easil y. At first glance it seems hard to reconcile Asser's Alfred with Alfred the warrior-king. Yet the combination if unusual, is not unique, even within Alfred' s own century. Charlemagne is the classic case of a phenomenally successful warl ord who was also a dedicated patron of learning. Charlemagne, like Alfred, like most medieval men who thought about such things, identified learning with Christ ianity, which is of course a religion based on books. Charlemagne, like Alfred, believed that only rulers who deserved God's favor could hope for continued vict ory in this world, not to mention salvation in the next. The maintenance of reli gion, and therefore learning, was a duty and a necessity. The loss of learning w ould by itself diminish religious life, by making the proper praise and service of God, the proper rituals, impossible. It is evident, however, that Alfred was something more than a patron. He was personally involved in the actual educational work. Alfred was alarmed by th e loss of literate men -- literate in Latin, that is -- which cut the English of

f from Scripture and other religious works. He saw the solution in translations, not of the Bible, but of other morally uplifting books, so that men who knew no Latin would still have some fundamental moral and theological knowledge. Alfred himself became the mainspring of the translation project. Alfred was something of a philosopher, and convinced, like all philosopher s, that many of the world's problems came from a lack of philosophy. Alfred was a Christian philosopher, of course, and recognized that England's troubles were due in great part to purely moral failings. But he also blamed them on a lack of Wisdom with a capital W. Wisdom was something that could be found in books. The moral exhortations and philosophical reflections of ancient figures such as Boe thius and Gregory the Great were things that all of the leaders of society shoul d be exposed to. Alfred was particularly concerned that people should really bel ieve the basic truths of religion -- for instance, in the immortality of the sou l. If they did, they would act more sensibly, for long-term advantage and not fo olishly and selfishly. I have the feeling that Alfred may have been a rather uncomfortable king t o be around. The works from his court have an intense, almost self-righteous atm osphere. Nevertheless, once again Alfred commands our respect. His intellectual achievements and those he inspired in others were the basis for the most success ful western European vernacular tradition in the early Middle Ages. That he did this while he was fighting or preparing to fight is nearly as amazing as Asser w ould have us believe.

England after Alfred The Viking impact Despite the big impact the Vikings had on England, and the number who sett led there, we know very little about Viking individuals from the 8th and 9th cen turies. I can't invent personalities to put more color into that history, somethin g should be said about their impact. The Danes, and to a lesser extent the Norwegians, came to England in great enough numbers to change the political and cultural map permanently, and even t o affect the English language. For the northern church, the invasions were a disaster. Two bishoprics, that of Lindisfarne and York, managed to maintain some kin d of institutional continuity, and were restored, but the other three simply dis appeared. Bishoprics were the solidest institutions of any medieval country. Wel l before the Vikings came, they were an essential part of English society, and m ore stable than any kingdom. The imposition of a rapacious pagan ruling class, however, wrecked these pillars of the church. The same applies to monasteries - they almost all disappeared in the area of settlement. Does this mean that a lot of Vikings settled in England? Not necessarily. A destructive warrior aristocracy that did nothing more but seize land and subju gate those who worked it could have accomplished the same thing. Other evidence has to be used. There are legal differences between northeastern England and the rest, whi ch much later led that area to be called the Danelaw. Again, this is not a foolp roof indicator. A new ruling class could have imposed new customs, and Danish cu stoms could have been adopted by Englishmen for their own reasons between 900 an

d the period when the Danelaw is first documented. Legal customs do move around if people find them useful. The linguistic evidence is the best. First there is the matter of placenam es. In the Danelaw, if I can use that inexact term, there are a lot of Danish to wn names, which end with the suffix "by." Whitby is an example of that type of n ame. There are other names where a Scandinavian personal name, such as "Grim," h as been attached to the English suffix "ton," to give a hybrid English-Danish hy brid, Grimston, a kind of name that would be found neither in the rest of Englan d or in Denmark. Finally, along the northwest coast of England, in Cumbria and W estmoreland, there are Scandinavian names that show a strong Norwegian influence . These Norwegian Vikings were connected with the Norwegians who dominated the I rish coast, the Isle of Man, and western and northern Scotland. Scholars disagree on how to interpret the distribution of names, but the t he most likely reconstruction is that a considerable number of Danes settled in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, and that in these areas they were a rea sonable proportion of the population. In East Anglia, there may have been a lot of settlers, too, but East Anglia had a higher English population, and so the ne wcomers were probably a smaller percentage of the total. It looks like Vikings settled both in the best land and on land that was b ad and probably never before settled. This suggests that the newcomers were not just aristocrats taking over an existing society, but also there were peasant so ldiers looking for new, perhaps rather modest, homes. The linguistic evidence also shows that there was nowhere that English dis appeared. The basic names of the countryside, the names of fields, are English a lmost everywhere. Invaders and natives lived side by side. They must have talked a great deal, too. It is interesting that the modern words "they," "them," and "their" are not originally Anglo-Saxon, but Danish. This is a good symbol of the interaction of the two groups, and of the impact of the Danes on England. How did the native English and the invaders get along? We can take it for granted that the English did not enjoy been robbed, not to mention being enslave d and murdered. But the invasion did not provoke a detectable national resentmen t, either. We know for a fact that some English aristocratic families survived w ith their property and social position substantially intact. Even the church felt justified in striking up a modus vivendi with the pag ans. The bishopric of Lindisfarne, known to contemporaries as the church of St. Cuthbert after its famous early bishop, was the earliest English victim of the V ikings, in 795. Nevertheless, St. Cuthbert's people made a quick accommodation w ith pagan conquerors after the fall of Northumbria about 70 years later. One reason for this, it appears, was that the last English kings in the no rth had been robbing St. Cuthbert's community, and had forfeited the loyalty of the clergy. When the Vikings seized Northumbria, the monks hit the road, taking the relics of the saint and other precious things with them. After a few years, however, St. Cuthbert appeared to the community in a vision and told them to mak e their peace with the Danes, who would endow the church with a large tract of l and. That land, known in the Middle Ages as St. Cuthbert's Land, survives today in the modern county of Durham. The story shows that quite quickly both pagan Vi kings and Christian clergy realized that they would have to live together, and s tarted working on a friendly relationship. The accomodation was helped by the fact that the Danes soon began to conve rt to Christianity, first perhaps as a matter of convenience, but then quite sin cerely. There are some interesting stone crosses in the north carved with scenes from both Christian and pagan stories, which shows that paganism was not immedi

ately forgotten. But it disappeared as an active force quite quickly. Two more topics should be touched on before I take up my next subject. Fir st, the economic impact of the Vikings. Viking conquest had the result of tying England very closely to the Scandinavian economic area. The robbery and the taki ng of slaves that followed the appearance of the Great Army created a class of f reebooters with money burning holes in their pockets. Piracy and trade always go close together, because most pirates eventually end up selling much of their ga ins so they can buy exactly what they want. Slavery almost always accompanies pi racy and conquest. So there were a lot of goods crossing the North Sea in both d irections. Once the trade routes opened up they tended to stay open. York benefited s ubstantially from this development, and it became the main emporium of central B ritain. In the last fifteen or twenty years York has been archaeologically inves tigated, and the Danish, pre-Norman town has been revealed as a populous, prospe rous place. It had close to 10,000 people -- a very big city for western Europe at the time -- and in area, it was about as big as York would ever be before mod ern times. The archaeological director of the York site has said that between 8 66 and 1066, York had "a pre-eminence and international importance it has never since equalled." York is just the best example of how England almost became part of Scandin avia after 865. The political map of England, c. A.D. 900 There was no single Viking state set up in England by the invaders. The co nquests were parcelled out among a number of small kings. The most powerful was the of Northumbria -- the far north of their own. The Achilles heel ival. There was a Norse dynasty n York, and this was a constant Danish king of York, who ruled most but not all was left to English aristocrats who had no king of the king of York was the fact that he had a r based in Dublin that thought it really should ow worry.

Farther south, there was a Danish kingdom of East Anglia, Guthrum's kingdo m. We know very little about it. Between the Kingdom of York and the Kingdom of East Anglia was the Danish section of Mercia, which is called the Five Boroughs. These were the towns of Li ncoln, Nottingham, Derby, Leicester, and Stamford, and the districts attached to each one. From what the chroniclers say, the boroughs were the settlements of f ive separate small armies. We hear nothing of their kings, and if they acknowled ged the overlordship of a king elsewhere, they acted as independent little state s. The picture is rounded off by the two unconquered English states, southwes tern Mercia led by the ealdorman Aethelred and his wife Aethelflaed, and Wessex, ruled by Alfred's oldest son Edward. Edward is usually called Edward the Elder to distinguish him from the later, post- Norman Conquest Edwards. The Expansion of Wessex Wessex expanded significantly in the time of King Alfred's children. Aethe lflaed, Alfred's daughter and the wife of the Mercian ealdorman, turned out to b e as important as Edward. Almost as important, too, was their cousin Aethelwold, because he nearly u pset the whole applecart. Aethelwold was the son of Alfred's brother and predece

ssor Aethelred. Aethelwold had been excluded from politics. Now that his uncle Alfred was dead, Aethelwold tried a coup d'etat to push his cousin Edward aside. He seized a royal manor, thus defying the new king. Edward promptly called up his levies and surrounded the hall where Aethelw old and the men who had sworn allegiance to him. Aethelwold refused to come out, saying he would live or die there in true heroic fashion. Then, in a scene out of satire instead of epic poetry, he sneaked out in the middle of the night and made his escape. Even in the heroic age, some people thought that discretion was the better part of valor. Aethelwold ran off to Northumbria, presumably to the kingdom of York, and began to look for Viking allies. Indeed, over the next few years Aethelwold act ed just the way we expect Vikings to act, raiding parts of Wessex and Mercia, u ntil he was killed in 903. The rebellion illustrated how important unity within the ruling class was for these English kingdoms. Aethelwold seems to have had little support within W essex, but he still inflicted damage. If any sizeable number of West Saxon noble s had defected to him, the kingdom might have lost its independence. There were still Vikings around interested in the profits of warfare, and fleets and armies could be raised on spec by anyone who was a good enough promoter. A few years later (909), Edward the Elder felt strong enough to begin raid ing the Danish states on his border. In 909 he made a great raid into Danish ter ritory and carried off a great deal of booty. After he killed the king of Yor in 910, Edward felt safe in beginning to seize territory. The first piece he took from his ally, Mercia. The ealdorman Aethelred died in 910, and Edward took cont rol of Oxford and London, formerly Mercian areas. He left his sister in charge o f the rest -- she was called Lady of the Mercians and was effectively the uncrow ned queen. For the next eight years, Edward and Aethelflaed slowly gobbled up the sma ll Danish states of southern England. They had no overall ruler, and don't seem to have worked well together. The children of Alfred, however, had good tactics: they build strong burhs on their boundaries, then used these forts to harass th eir neighbors. They took small bites of territory, and when they got them, they built new burhs to secure them. In 918, for a moment, brother and sister dominated all of England except t he far north. They were nearly equal in power and in territory. But then Aethelf lead died, and things changed dramatically. The King of Dublin, one Ragnald, too k York and made himself king there. Edward himself played the evil uncle. Aethel flaed had left her kingdom to her only child, a daughter named Aelfwyn. At the e nd of 919, Edward marched into Mercia and deposed her. Mercia then disappeared f orever. With the victories of Edward the Elder, we are very close to the foundatio n of a united Kingdom of England under the dynasty of Wessex. They had gone so f ar so fast because of the legacy of Alfred. It is clear that Edward and Aethelfl aed had not let Alfred's military organization go to waste. They had turned it i nto a weapon of aggression, one that worked very well against the small, disorga nized Danish states. We can imagine these states as being full of fat graying Vi kings and their sons, playboy Anglo-Danes, all of them easy meat for the tough W est Saxons. I'm not sure that image is fair, but on the organizational level it is close to the mark. Alfred had learned in a hard school how to make royal authority a reality -- a military reality, a naval reality, an administrative reality. His methods, when pursued with the thoroughness that was one of his chief traits, were a good

foundation for a strong kingdom. In the time of his equally thorough children, we see the first story of the new structure going up.

Wessex Conquers England How Alfred's dynasty conquered England After the death of his sister Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, in 918, h er brother Edward (the Elder), king of Wessex, moved into Mercia in 919, remove d Aethelflaed's daughter from her position as de facto queen, and Mercia was abs orbed into his own kingdom. He was not crowned king of Mercia. Nor was this all. As lord of Southumbria, he dominated all of Britain. In the year 920, Edward met with Constantine, the King of Scots, Ragnald the King o f York, the King of Strathclyde, and Ealdred of Bamburgh, the English ruler of n orthern Northumbria, and all of these rulers acknowledged Edward's overlordship. The Welsh princes had already sworn their allegiance. It was an impressive clim ax to a career of successful expansionism. The year 920 is perhaps as good a date as any to stop talking about the Ki ngdom of Wessex and begin to speak of the Kingdom of England. Tenth century desc endants of Edward the Elder called themselves kings or emperors of England or ev en of all Britain. Their claim to overlordship of all England was generally secu re. But the job of bringing all the English under royal control was not finish ed in 920. Direct control of Northumbria eluded Edward. There was still a king i n York, and he was a powerful man. And the existence of that separate kingdom le ft England open for further Scandinavian intervention. There were a number of d ifferent claimants for the throne of Dublin and the kingship of York, so there w as always the danger that one of them would get together a Viking fleet and try to take York. The politics of the north were further unsettled by the ambitions of other rulers. Until the Danes took York in 866, Northumbria had dominated the area fr om the Humber to the Firth of Forth. After that date, Northumbria was split betw een York and smaller English rulers further north, and so the Britons of Strathc lyde and particularly the Kings of the Scots were ambitious to move in. The King s of the Scots were up and coming figures in this period. Since about 850, they had been Kings of the Picts as well, and so they enjoyed, at least in theory, a monopoly of royal power in most of modern-day Scotland. When Edward's son Athelstan became king in 925, incorporating Northumbria into his kingdom was the obvious challenge. He immediately started working on Yo rk. By the summer of 927, Athelstan had taken York, razed its walls to discourag e further resistance, and gained the submission of all the remaining northern ru lers. Seven years later, Athelstan tried a more ambitious project. In 934 he con ducted a great invasion of Scotland, both by land and by sea. Permanent conquest was not the goal. Athelstan wanted loot to reward his followers and to fill his treasury, and wished to impress the King of Scots and the rest of the north wit h his power. He did impress them, but so much so that he terrified his enemies into str iking back. In 937, the King of of Scots and the King of Strathclyde joined with the King of Dublin, a man named Olaf Guthfrithson, to attack Athelstan. Athelst an survived the challenge. At a great battle at an now-unknown location called B runanburh, Athelstan beat his combined enemies in a victory that the English saw at the time and for decades to come as a turning point. The solidity of the new English kingdom had been confirmed.

I should say, the solidity of the kingdom under a strong and capable king. Athelstan died only two years after his great victory, and Olaf Guthfriths on, waiting in Dublin for some break in his favor, moved immediately to seize Yo rk. He succeeded in doing so, and wrung from Edmund, Athelstan's successor, reco gnition of his rule not only over York, but over the Five Boroughs as well. The personal element in 10th century politics is emphasized by the fate of this king dom. Within two years Olaf was dead and his kingdom was soon retaken by Edmund. Edmund strikingly reasserted English power in the north by destroying the kingdom of Strathclyde. Rather than trying to hold it himself, he turned it over to the Scots, buying friendship and what he hoped were stable boundaries. This is the beginning of the abandonment of the farthest parts of old Northumbria to the Scots, a process of accommodation that would take centuries to complete. The English kings, with their power based in the far south, were admitting that the re were limits to what they could hold on to in the north. After about 945, the new Kingdom of England had almost thirty years of pea ce. The kings had an opportunity to consolidate their power -- a process most n otable for the creation of governmental units that would last, in some cases, fo r over a thousand years. Ruling the new kingdom When we talk about the unification of England by the dynasty of Wessex, we have to look both at the institutions they built, which had a lasting significa nce, and also at the personal, dynastic element. Let's look at institutions first. England can be viewed in this connection as a number of different communit ies, each of which the king had an interest in controlling and regulating. The m ost important type of community was the shire. Shires were led by men called ealdormen, who were the king's deputies with a particular responsibility for leading the fyrd of the shire to war. When Wes sex conquered the rest of England, a new organization was imposed on Mercia and East Anglia -- but not on the north. The new organization featured the building of royal strongholds, or burhs, and the definition of districts around them. As in Wessex itself, the free men of the burghal districts were required to garriso n and maintain the burh, and to fight under the king's deputy for their district , and act as centers of trade and taxation. The districts marked out by the Wessex dynasty evolved quickly into perman ent subdivisions of the kingdom, shires. The new shires had their own ealdormen, and they had regular shire courts, meetings of the local nobles to decide issue s of local importance, especially disputes over land. A shire court was a fairly aristocratic assembly. Not every free man could knock off work and travel to th e burh, nor was everyone interested. Those who showed up were wealthy local lead ers, the people who were influential in the area. The shire court was therefore an important assembly. Shires of this sort did not exist north of the Humber River. The kings, wh ose power was based in the far south, had much less control up there. Northumbri a was given instead to an earl -- a word derived from the Scandinavian word jarl -- who was practically a minor king. The king of England counterbalanced this m archer lord's great power by keeping a monopoly on episcopal appointments. The a rchbishop of York, and to a certain extent the bishop of Durham were important m

en in the kingdom, and effectively his deputies in the north. The shires in south and central England were subdivided, in most cases int o units called hundreds. In the areas of Danish settlement hundreds were called wapentakes instead. Theoretically hundreds were areas of 100 hides in extent, or with a tax assessment of 100 hides, but in reality they varied in size. Hundreds and wapentakes were the basic unit of local government. Some hund reds were pre-existing communities, others seem to have been created in the 10th century when the shires were. Most of what we know about hundreds concerns judi cial functions. All members -- all free men -- were required to meet every four weeks to do justice, which mainly meant controlling cattle theft. If a theft was reported to the hundred man -- the headman of the district -- he organized the members to pursue the thief. Anyone caught stealing cattle w as tried by customary law and had to pay a fine if convicted. Despite the Old We st atmosphere, they didn't string up rustlers. Trials were either by ordeal, or through oath-helping. Under the latter system, a person proved his innocence by assembling a given number of responsible people who would back his claim under o ath. In the Danish areas, the same kind of local policing was done in a slightl y different way. In each wapentake, twelve leading thegns (noblemen or gentry) w ere sworn to accuse and arrest thieves. They brought accused lawbreakers before the wapentake court, where a judgement was pronounced by the same twelve men, by a unanimous decision if possible, or by a majority of at least eight to four if necessary. This is the first trace of the English jury and also the first examp le of the principle of majority rule. Both seem to derive not from Anglo-Saxon r oots, but from Scandinavian ones. Hundreds and wapentakes had other functions as well. One 10th century ordi nance required hundreds to have a designated body of twelve official witnesses. When local people wanted to buy and sell, they were to have two or three of thes e men present in case there was doubt later. Hundreds also had military and taxa tion functions. Groups of three hundreds were organized into shipsokes, district s that were each responsible for providing a ship and sixty men to man it for th e royal navy. I have completely ignored the role of the church in government, but otherw ise I have now given you a sketch of 10th c. local and regional government. It w as pretty basic, but reasonably logical. The country was organized into local co mmunities that owed service to the king and were made responsible for maintainin g law and order. The communities were run by assemblies of the responsible membe rs. It all sounds very democratic, straightforward, and well-organized. But this was a very aristocratic and family-oriented society, and I must c onclude by reminding you of the fact. Tenth century England was a society where some people were slaves and had no rights. Women had more control over property than they would after the Norman Conquest, but they were not part of the politic al structure. Even among the free, feud law declared that some were worth 1200 s hillings and others only 200. The feud law that settled many disputes, despite t he attempts of kings to restrict it, meant that one had to rely on one's lord or family or allies to a very great extent -- personal connections meant a lot. The neat theoretical structure I sketched before was many times adjusted i n practice to account for regional differences and local political realities. Th e king systematized as much as he could, but he also had to bind the existing ch ieftains and communities to him with personal ties. There was no concept of citi zenship he could rely on, there was not even one of a single English kingdom.

At least the idea would bear no political weight. As an example of the adj ustment of theory to reality, let's look at the office of the ealdorman. Consist ency would demand that there be one for every shire. In fact, larger areas, incl uding several shires, were handed over to ealdormen who were practically subking s. The kings created such powerful subordinates not because they were tenderhear ted towards local sensibilities. Rather, they knew that to govern a very diverse realm they had to win over and control the local big men. This was best done by putting the strongest men in charge and then holding them accountable. The king kept them loyal to him not through bureaucracy, but by travelling around his ki ngdom and meeting them face to face, and calling them all to court three times a year.. England is often cited as the great exception of 10th century Europe. Many European kingdoms were falling apart, disintegrating into a myriad of principal ities and dukedoms. England, by contrast was developing centralized institutions , and beginning on the long road to the nation-state. This is all true, but I wa nt to impress on you that the line between English success and continental failu re was a thin one. English unity depended on the continuous effective use of roy al power. The kings were executing a balancing act. The binding together of Engl and into a single country was a long and sometimes precarious enterprise.

King Edgar and Church Reform Of all the English kings of the tenth century, Edgar, who reigned from 959 to 975, was the happiest -- in the classical sense -- , in that his rule over the still-new English kingdom was essentially untroubled. With no serious Viking rivals, Edgar was effectively the emperor of the Br itish isles. He did not directly control everything, but he was the acknowledged overlord of all neighboring monarchs. The climax of his reign came near the end , in 973, when six kings from around the Irish sea came to Chester, where they s ubmittted to him, and demonstrated their inferior status by rowing him in a smal l boat up and down the River Dee. Edgar did not have much need to fight, but he was far from being a do-not hing king. He put his energy into another project. He tackled the great challen ge of church reform. Church reform is a tricky word, because it assumes that the reformers are the good guys and their opponents are corrupt and evil people, battening on the church and misusing its power and property for illicit purposes. This is certain ly the way that the reformers in any given era see the matter. It is permissible to take sides in history, and say, for instance, that the reformers were right. But it is not necessary to do so, and we certainly do not have to adopt the ref ormers' point of view by default. Throughout the medieval period, the church had an uneasy relationship to i ts lay patrons. The church was very willing to accept material favors and privil eges from nobles and kings. Land was the most secure form of wealth, and if the church was to finance ambitious projects, it needed to have land. At the same t ime, the church, which saw itself as a spiritual organization essentially differ ent from all others, wanted to enjoy complete freedom in the way it used those p rivileges, gifts, and lands that it received. But a family that had endowed a church or monastery tended to think of tha t institution as part of their family estates. It was very common for monasterie s in particular to be headed by a member of the founder's family generation afte r generation, in this way serving as a prop for the dynasty. In such an organiza tion, spiritual goals and strict eccelsiastical discipline could easily be forgo

tten. Institutions and property became "secularized" -- converted to worldly (o rdinary) uses. This was a perennial problem in the Middle Ages. In times of insecurity or turmoil, more drastic secularization was likely. This might simply be theft of church property by a local warlord, or the approp riation of church offices. Another type of secularization involved a church c orporation turning over some of its land to a protector in return for a low, low rent. These drastic types of secularization were dangerous to church discipline, because they either removed an institution from ecclesiastical control or impo verished the corporation. In the tenth century, all over Europe, the most dedicated churchmen saw a crying need for reform, because Viking raids and civil wars had resulted in a lo t of secularization.. The consequences for the church's mission as an unwordly institution were what you might expect. Things seemed worse in the monasteries that survived. It was hard to find disciplined monasteries at the beginning of the tenth century. Many so-called monks had wives and children. Not too many people objected to marriage for the "secular" clergy (those parish priests and other clergy who liv ed "in the world"), but married monks could not be monks at all. Any further acc usations against them -- and reformers talked about debauchery and dissipation a t length -- were just icing on the cake Most people took this stuff for granted, I suppose, but a zealous minority was really alarmed. Some were dedicated monks; others, perhaps surprisingly, i ncluded some very influential lay people. Even people who had built their power on stolen church property sometimes put much of their ill-gotten gains into refo rming monasteries. Monasticism was the key for the reformers because there was a consensus in society that a good monk and his prayers were pleasing to God in a way that no else could be. Lay people who were religiously inclined knew that their normal l ives were not pleasing to God; nor could their unaided prayers move him. They ne eded intercessors -- those who could speak to God for them. Dead saints might he lp, but among the living, the good monk held a unique place. Some very powerful and of course very worldly men and women in the tenth century became patrons of a purer monasticism because they wished to have that heavenly connection. The new monasticism, where the rules were taken seriously, began with a fe w determined monks who convinced patrons to give them land for a new foundation, or to make them abbots of old monasteries that could be turned into strict comm unities. The reforming abbots who succeeded became monastic superstars. They wer e sought after by other patrons who also wanted that heavenly connection, and wh o gave them further monasteries to reform. Monastic reform in England was due to the efforts of three clerics. The first was Dunstan, who was a nobleman from Wessex with connections at the royal court. Another was his close friend Aethelwold, another West Saxon, an d also of high rank. The third was Oswald, interestingly enough from a Anglo-Dan ish family, but one well-established in the church. He was related to two archbi shops. Their common trait was that, despite being born into comfortable circums tances, and having easy access to good careers either in the church or outside i t, they felt compelled to work for radical change. Dunstan was the first prominent agitator for monastic reform. Dunstan, on ce he became a monk did not avoid the court, but seems to have hung around being

obnoxious. Part of this obnoxiousness was a natural consequence of his reformin g aims. The new monasticism was unavoidably an attack on the property rights of every important family in the kingdom. They all had some interest in church prop erty. King Edmund considered exiling him, but in 940, after nearly being killed while hunting, he decided to make a pious gesture: Dunstan was given the old and prominent monastery of Glastonbury. Aethelwold joined him there. Glastonbury became Dunstan's experimental community, and later Aethelwold was granted control of Abingdon. But until 957, their efforts gained halfheart ed royal support (Eadred) or hostility (from his successor Eadwig). In 957, however, the reformers got a king willing to shake things up. In t hat year the Mercians decided that Eadwig was no good, and chose Edgar as king, or perhaps subking, of central England. This is a curious incident, but we have almost no information on it. Edgar called Dunstan back and gave him not one but two bishoprics -- London and Worcester. When Eadwig died in 959, and Edgar becam e sole king, Edgar tossed out the recently appointed archbishop of Canterbury an d gave the top spot in the English church to Dunstan. A little later, Aethelwold was made bishop of Winchester. About the same time Oswald, who was only in his twenties, but who had been at the French reformed monastery at Fleury, was made bishop of Worcester. Oswald later became archbishop of York, without having to g ive up Worcester. Through these appointments, Edgar had made the three monks great royal dep uties and extremely wealthy lords. Edgar followed this up by generously endowi ng new monasteries that Dunstan, Aethelwold andOswald set up. Reform proceded against great resistance, and sometimes involved the use o f revolutionary violence. In 964, Aethelwold got fed up with the older clergy at his cathedral at Winchester, whom he considered a bunch of licentious blaspheme rs, and so he tossed them out and deprived them of their incomes, replacing them with monks. All these people were well connected, so this was no easy matter. I t required, in fact, royal support to make the purge stick. The sudden success of the reform in England really hung on Edgar's determi nation. The charter for Aethelwold's new monastery at Winchester, issued in 966, explained his motivation thus: Fearing lest I should incur eternal misery if I failed to do the will of h im who moves all things in Heaven and Earth, I have -- acting as the Vicar of Ch rist -- driven out the crowds of vicious canons from various monasteries under m y control, because their intercessions could avail me nothing...and I have subst ituted communities of monks, pleasing to God, who shall intercede for us without ceasing. Aethelwold's purge is here justified on purely religious grounds. The old clergy represent false religion. The new monks are holy and effective channels o f communication to God. Indeed, in the same charter, the monks are compared to s oldiers, who protect the king and the clergy of the realm from invisible enemies and "the aery wiles of the devils." [Quotations from Richard Southern, Western Church and Society in the Middle Ages (Penguin Books)] There is a kind of partnership between the secular power and the spiritual one, both being defenders of the realm in their own way. How close that partner ship was meant to be is indicated by the phrase Vicar of Christ, which means "Ch rist's deputy." The king, just like Constantine and Charlemagne, has the respons ibility, to make sure that right religion was practiced and observed. And this r esponsibility implies power, power over the church and the whole Christian peopl e, power of a very high order. How seriously Edgar took this is indicated by one of his most sweeping act s, the imposition, in 975, of a standard rule on all monasteries and nunneries.

Only a strong king could hope to implement such decrees, to live up to the imag e fashioned for him by his bishops and monks as a figure with a power to reform and reshape society comparable to Christ's. There were both risks and benefits to taking on such a role. Edgar was str ong, but there were many conflicting interest groups. By supporting the monastic reformers, he was creating a new and wealthy interest group uniquely bound to h im. The reformers aimed at creating a purified clerical caste that would control the church. Purity in their terms meant that clerics, celibate and disciplined, would foresake normal family ties and cleave to the artificial family of the ch urch. If you recall how important family ties were in politics and society, this is a very radical demand. And it could only be accomplished by robbing many pow erful clans of lands and privileges they had held for decades or centuries. The reformers knew that they had no hope of gaining their goal without roy al support. They would perforce be loyal to him, unless he provoked them. Edgar himself was gambling. Like the earliest Christian kings, he was imposing a new a ristocracy on a society that already had one. When he gave lands to new abbeys l ike Ramsey, or Ely, or Peterborough, they were not empty lands. The reform of the English church can be rated both a success and a failure . Success, in that a new, stricter monasticism was established and enforced. Eve n the early death of Edgar did not stop the movement, in part because the three clerical leaders lived to a great old age. The reform movement led to a church that was better organized and more lea rned outside the monasteries as well as within them. On the other hand, the poli tical resentments that resulted from Edgar's radical and sometimes high-handed a ctions created political divisions in the kingdom that surfaced once his strong hand left the tiller. And the tenth century was a dangerous time for a ruling cl ass to indulge in feuding.

The Eleventh -Century Invasions Aethelred the Unready The original name was Aethelred Unraed -- Aethelred the Ill-advised. It wa s a pun. Aethelred, like many Old English names, had a meaning -- it meant "good advice," or "good counsel." So Aethelred Unraed meant "Good Counsel the Ill-Adv ised." A crucial talent for a king must be knowing who to trust and who to liste n to. Aethelred did not have this gift, and so he spent most of his reign stagge ring from one defeat to the next. Finally he lost his throne and his wife both t o Cnut (Knut), better known as Canute, king of Denmark. This rather complicated story begins in 975, with the death of King Edgar, Aethelred's father. Edgarwas still a very young man -- he was in his early 30s. He left behind him two young sons, the half-brothers Edward and Aethelred. He a lso left a divided nobility and court, who lined up behind the two brothers. The divisions were no doubt partly due to personalities, but there were al so issues in doubt. Edgar had stepped on a lot of toes in his reforming zeal. T he person who was most bent out of shape was a man named Aelfhere, the ealdorman of Mercia and formerly the most important man in the district of Worcester. He was angry about that great territory around Worcester that had been given to Osw ald.

With the reformers' support, Edward won the backing of most of the nobilit y and was chosen king. But he was in a weak position. Aelfhere, a bold character , started sacking abbeys in western Mercia and dispersing their monks. Elsewhere the reformers were not so vulnerable, but lesser landowners started suing monas teries for the return of property they had lost in Edgar's time. Edward may have tried to halt this reaction, but he was not successful. No r did he last long himself. In 978 some of Aethelred's retainers, almost certain ly including Aelfhere, murdered him as he came to visit his brother. The crime w as something of a shock, and it cast a shadow over Aethelred, who of course imme diately followed his brother on the throne. He was too young to have been person ally responsible, but the political atmosphere was soured nonetheless. An aggrav ating factor was that no one was ever accused of the crime or punished for it. Aethelred had gained little but the throne itself. Aelfhere died a few yea rs later, and his son, who took his place in Mercia, turned traitor at the first opportunity. So Aethelred had the misfortune of growing up as king with no clos e allies, no one he could really trust. He was soon in need of those allies, because beginning in 980, Viking raid s on England began again. There were differences between the early Vikings and the Scandinavian atta ckers who worried England in the time of Aethelred. The ninth-century Vikings we re either small groups of pirates or the followers of landless warlords looking for a country to rule. The military regime built by Alfred and his children was specifically designed to keep England safe from such Viking attacks, and it wor ked. By the late 10th century, however, the Vikings themselves had adapted. Sca ndinavia had produced a new breed of warlords who were more powerful and well-or ganized than their predecessors. The evidence indicates that the warlords of Ae thelred's time were a more sophisticated bunch, leading professional, well organ ized armies instead of larger or smaller pirate bands. These warlords were correspondingly more powerful than the earlier ones. T wo of the men who raided England in this period, Olaf Tryggvason and Olaf Harald sson, later went home and made themselves King of Norway -- something earlier Vi kings had been unable to do. Aethelred's most dangerous enemy, Svein Forkbeard, was dangerous precisely because he was already king of Denmark, and had the reso urces of that realm to throw against England. The most detailed account of the new Viking attacks on England is the Angl o-Saxon Chronicle. The section up to 1016 gives the impression that Aethelred's reign was one of unmitigated disaster and treachery, almost from the beginning. Actually, the whole section on Aethelred was written in retrospect in 1016, when the author knew that the outcome was complete defeat. Knowing the outcome, he s aw a black cloud over the whole reign. Those who were living in the 980s, even up to 994, might not have recongiz ed this gloomy picture. Aethelred's kingdom was still the most powerful English state that had ever existed. It was probably in this time, in fact, that the pa rishes of England were created.Religion was being brought directly to the ordina ry people, who were thenceforth expected to pay for it on a regular basis throug h tithes -- a ten percent income tax paid to the parish priest or his patron. Th e government that was able to do this was also able to beat off a number of raid s in force. Aethelred also took the sensible precaution of forging an alliance with Ri

chard, duke of Normandy in 991. Richard, a descendant of Danish Vikings, had lon g allowed pirates access to his ports, right across the English Channel. The agr eement of Aethelred cut the Vikings off. Aethelred later, in 1002, strengthened this alliance by marrying Emma, Richard's daughter. Emma, rather confusingly, wa s known to the English as Aelfgifu, which had been the name of Aethelred's first wife. Despite his diplomatic coup in 991, things started getting worse for Aethe lred soon after. Near the end of that year, a sizeable Viking fleet under Olaf T ryggvason landed in Essex, and defeated an English army under Brythnoth, an old, experienced warrior who had long been a political power in the land. Aethelred and his advisors decided, rather than risk further losses, Olaf and his troops s hould be paid to go away. Aethelred's government had the power to collect a larg e amount of silver quickly, and the deal was made. The paying out of so much silver at once encouraged others to try their lu ck in England. At the same time, the English military leadership faltered. In 99 4, England was attacked for the first time by Svein, king of Denmark, who in coo peration with Olaf Tryggvason ravaged the southeastern corner of England and tri ed to take London. The Londoners repulsed them, which created an opening for neg otiation. In the end, 16,000 pounds were paid out, and both Scandinavian kings s ailed away. Olaf was gone for good. Svein, however, would return in a few years, and in the meantime other armies were attacking England. Neither Aethelred nor his s ubordinates showed capable leadership. Armies were gathered, fleets assembled, b ut they were seldom put to effective use. What is remarkable is that he retained administrative power. Aethelred's t ributes, paid out in 991, 994, 1002, and 1007 were very large and collected very quickly. This is indicative of a well-organized government. The taking of tribu te evolved very quickly into a permanent tax on land, eventually known as Danege ld. Aethelred was the only European monarch to have the ability to collect a lan d tax (excluding Muslim Spain), and he was perhaps the first since Roman times ( excluding the Muslims) to do so. Thus militarily weak Aethelred was, curiously e nough, uniquely strong when it came to raising taxes. This emphasizes that England, even with poor leadership, was not the easy target it had been in the 860s. The large, tough Viking armies could loot and ex act tribute, but for a long time they did not dare do more. In 1009, the Vikings stepped up their campaigns. A Dane named Thorkell th e Tall, an ally of Svein ravaged SE England. After two years of raiding, Thork ell went over to Aethelred with forty ships. It was at this time that the Daneg eld became a permanent tax -- it was used to pay Thorkell for his services. Thor kell, surprisingly enough, stayed loyal to Aethelred for several years, but his services were not sufficient to stem the tide. In 1013, Svein showed up with a big fleet and started to conquer the count ry. Towns, counties and noblemen, fed up with war, submitted to Svein. At Christ mas Aethelred and his wife Emma ran off to her relatives in Normandy. Svein was generally recognized as King of England. Just a few month later, the Danish conquest of England came unravelled. Sv ein died at the beginning of February, 1014. The Danish army chose his son Cnut as king. The native aristocracy, however, had second thoughts. They sent messeng ers to Normandy, telling Aethelred that he would be king if he promised to forgi ve their defection and to be a better king than he had been before. Aethelred ca me right back and did his best. He led an army personally to attack Cnut's fleet and his Engish allies by the banks of the Humber. Cnut was actually forced to f

lee. This was not so much because he feared to fight the English (and Thorkell), but because he was worried about things in Denmark. Thorkell, too, left England. Danes had become very unpopular suddenly, and his brother had been murdered. It was a very short respite. In 1015, with things sorted out in Denmark, b oth Cnut and Thorkell returned. Despite his determined performance of the year b efore, Aethelred was unable to keep the loyalty of his chief men. The one thing that prevented a quick collpase was the leadership of Edmund Ironside, Aethelre d's eldest son,a ruthless and decisive man with a good amount of military talent . When his father died in 1016, Edmund claimed the kingship, forced concessions from Cnut, but then himself diedat the end of November. Cnut, without a fight, got all of England. Despite the long agony of Aethelred's reign, England was not wholly overth rown in the early years of the 11th century the way it had been in the years aft er 865. There was no large-scale settlement, no pagan presence (Cnut was a third generation Christian), and no destruction of monasteries and episcopal diocese. The chief result of Cnut's victory was to give the richest, best organized gov ernment in Christian Europe and one of the most cultured of western Christian co untries to the greatest warrior in Europe. For the near future, England was to f ind itself not so much a conquered country as the center of a large Scandinavian empire.

Canute and His Sons When Cnut, or Canute, was recognized as the sole king of England in late 1 016, the English must have been exhausted. Ever since 991, or 994 at the latest, they had been under serious Scandinavian pressure. England was content to acc ept Cnut as king, and only hoped he would be a good one. Cnut was a man who had many irons in the fire. Cnut had only inherited his father Svein's claim to England; his brother had become King of Denmark in 1014 . But soon after Cnut secured England his brother died and he inherited his home land as well. With Denmark came Svein's ambitions to take Norway; with England c ame Aethelred's worries about Norwegian aggression. What he wanted in England mo re than anything was an end of war and a quiet, peaceful reign there so that he could attend to his other territories. To secure his rule in England, Cnut followed a three part policy of elimin ating powerful men he didn't trust, putting in people he did trust, and concilia ting everyone else. Several inconvenient ealdormen were killed at the same time. This was not the ruthlessness of an old, hardened monarch, but the ruthlessness of a young m an in a hurry. Cnut at this point was not yet 20 years old. Once he had killed or pushed out the existing royal deputies, Cnut appoint ed new ones, some Scandinavian, some English. Cnut kept direct control of Wesse x, where most of the royal estates and therefore royal wealth was located. The r est of England was given to men called earls -- after this we don't hear much ab out ealdormen any more. The most important English retainer, soon to become an e arl was Godwine, apparently the son of Wulfnoth, the piratical Sussex nobleman w ho wrecked Aethelred's fleet in 1009. With the most dangerous men out of the way and his own trusted followers i n position, Cnut could make conciliatory gestures to other segments of the polit ical community. He had already made some friends in Mercia and Northumbria by ma

rrying a well connected noblewoman named Aelfgifu -- the same name, oddly enough , as Aethelred the Unready's first wife, who was mother of Edmund Ironside. Then he dealt with his most dangerous rivals, the surviving family of Aeth elred. Emma (also called Aelfgifu), Aethelred's queen, was the sister of the duk e of Normandy, and she was in Normandy with her two young sons, the princes Edwa rd and Alfred. To disarm the threat of a Norman-supported attempt on his throne in favor of the young princes, Canute married Emma and restored her as queen of England. He did this, by the way, without divorcing or dismissing the other Aelf gifu. He couldn't have her hanging around the royal court, but he maintained her in honorable estate, as we shall see later. This case is an indicator of how di fficult it was for the church to enforce marriage laws among the nobility at thi s time. In the next few years Cnut made a number of further gestures to impress th e English people that he would be a good ruler, and not an oppressive conqueror. In 1018, he paid off his army with one last great collection of Danegeld and co ntented himself with a small fleet and a personal bodyguard like all kings had. In this way he reduced the tax burden on the free men of England and showed that he was confident in his rule. He also agreed in a meeting of all the important people in England that the basis of his rule would be the laws of King Edgar -the last good native king. Cnut made a more important commitment the next year, when he was on expedi tion to Denmark. He told them that he would rule as a good Christian monarch and a upholder of law and order; but further, he told the English that if they supp orted him, he would make sure that England would no longer be troubled by Viking s. This was a deal that everyone could approve of, and Cnut had little trouble i n England for the twenty years that he reigned. England was really the least of his worries. Securing his power over Denma rk and conquering Norway were far more difficult. You will read in history books about Cnut's northern empire -- I've referred to it myself. He was certainly on e of the strongest kings of his time, and contemporaries were very impressed. Hi s rule, at its greatest extent, covered a lot of territory and several distinct countries. In that sense it can be called an empire. But we must remember that t here was not a single institution that bound the conglomeration together. The em pire was simply the personal ascendancy of a ruthless, energetic and lucky warlo rd over many local and regional rulers. To keep his position, Cnut had to be con stantly on the move, supervising his deputies and vassals, doing a never-ending balancing act. If you look in detail at Cnut's policies, you can see how delicate his pos ition was. Cnut began to worry about Thorkell the Tall, an older experienced war rior who had been a key ally of his father Svein. In 1021 Cnut banished him fro m England. Thorkell returned to Denmark, where he was just too strong to ignore. So in 1023, Cnut was reconciled with Thorkell. They exchanged sons -- in other words, gave hostages -- and Thorkell was made Cnut's chief deputy in Denmark. Th orkell was essentially a sub-king of Denmark under Cnut. In fact, when Thorkell died, Cnut had to create a new Thorkell. An earl named Ulf was married to his s ister, and Ulf and he traded sons to guarantee their alliance. England was really the key to Cnut's power. It supplied the men and money to finance wars in Scandinavia. It was a combined English-Danish fleet that conq uered Norway for Cnut in 1028. Two years later, when Norway had been lost and wo n again, Cnut sent his English first wife Aelfgifu to Norway to rule the country in his name and the name of their young son Swein. Ironically enough, this strong king who depended so much on England to mai ntain his empire ended up by seriously weakening the power of the monarch in Eng

land. He certainly did not do this intentionally. But in the mid-1020s, when he was very concerned with matters overseas, he decided he needed to have an earl in Wessex. Godwine, his long-time English fol lower, got the position. Wessex was the home turf of the native English dynasty. The vast majority of royal estates were there. Wessex was full of thegns whose direct loyalty to the crown was a family tradition. The English kings before Cnu t had been so concerned to control their home turf that they seldom left Wessex except for special occasions. They apparently felt that as long as they had Wess ex, they could rule the whole kingdom through deputies -- an accurate conclusion , if the record means anything. Cnut looked at things differently. He had no personal connection with Wess ex.; But turning over Wessex to Godwine was a dangerous expedient. If England we re ever separated from the rest of Cnut's empire, Godwine would have most of the power that Edgar or Athelstan had enjoyed in the past. He would be in a positio n to be king himself. Cnut's parcelling out of England among great earls created problems for hi s successors. These men were almost sub-kings, and could give a weaker king than Cnut a hard time. In fact, when Cnut died in 1035, at about the age of 40, Engl and and Scandinavia both were thrown into confusion. Before he died, Cnut had al ready been losing his grip. In 1035, Aelfgifu had been forced out of Norway. The loss of Norway endangered Denmark and even England -- if Cnut could not protect England from the Norwegians, his claims on the loyalty of the English would eva porate. It was at this inconvenient point that he died. Cnut's intention had been to leave his entire empire to his son by Emma, H arthacanute. There were problems to this arrangement. Harthacanute was the son w ho had been sent to Thorkell in Denmark as a foster-son and hostage in 1023. He had lived in Denmark ever since, and so he was not known to the English earls or the rest of the nobility. Furthermore, the loss of Norway meant that Harthacanu te would have to stay in Denmark indefinitely. But England country needed a strong leader or else there would be trouble. One candidate was Harold, the son of Aelfgifu and Cnut. He was in England and h e had important relatives in the nobility of Mercia and Northumbria. The earls o f those two areas started agitating for Harold to be elected king. Others didn't want Harold. Emma, who controlled the treasury and was thus an important figure, hated Aelfgifu and didn't want her rival's son to be king. She and Godwine declared for Harthacanute and were determined to wait for him. T he archbishop of Canterbury, also a southerner, supported them. Since he consecr ated kings in England, his feelings were important. Divisions were opening up in the governing class. Very soon, however, the country got restive waiting for Harthacanute, who had his hands full in Scandinavia. So Godwine and Emma started to look around fo r another candidate. They looked right across the English Channel to Normandy, w here Emma's sons by Aethelred had grown up. In 1036, Emma summoned them to her a t Winchester, where she still held the royal treasury. Edward, the elder son, wa s too cautious to come, but his brother Alfred took the chance. But when he got to England, he fell into a trap. Godwine had secretly changed sides. He intercep ted Alfred, wined and dined him and his retinue, and when they were asleep, had the lot of them murdered. Actually Alfred was merely blinded and sent to a monas tery, but he did not last long after that. Godwine's reward was to be the man wh o gave England to Harold, and Harold's favor made him secure in Wessex. Harold was elected king soon after, in 1037, and Emma left the country.

When Harold died, Harthacanute took over peacefully in 1040, and Denmark a nd England were reunited. Harthacanute was a little more secure than Harold, but he still had to worry about Edward's claims to the throne and there was still a possibility of trouble from Norway. In 1041, he decided to solve one of those p roblems by inviting Edward to England, where he recognized him as his heir. And just in time, too. The very next year, although he was still a very young man, H arthacanute died at a wedding feast. According to the C version of the chronicle , he "died as he stood at his drink and he suddenly fell to the ground with a ho rrible convulsion." Poison? No one knows. But the succession crisis had been settled for the moment. Edward, known a s the Confessor for his later piety, was undisputed king of England. In some ways he was in a very weak situation. He was, like Harthacanute, a stranger to England. Ever since 1014 or so, he had been living in Normandy. Tha t was an absence of nearly thirty years, and he was not yet forty years old. He had no territorial base. The ancestral territory of Wessex was under the thumb o f Godwine, and some earl or other had a grip on every other district in England. He had no money. He had no special friends. He didn't even get along with his m other, who had always preferred her Danish family and was involved, purposely or not, in the death of his brother. Edward's unenviable position had nothing to do with him personally. Cnut had made a big splash while he lived, but he spent all of his energies building up a ramshackle empire that had little chance of surviving him. In the course of his empire-building he undermined the position of the English kings in their ow n realm. His great deputies, the earls, did not dare cross Cnut, but they were a danger to any weaker monarch. They can be compared to the great dukes who disma ntled the empire of Charlemagne in the ninth and tenth century, when his dynasty became divided and then died out. Cnut's dynasty died too, far more quickly than Charlemagne's, thus deprivi ng the English kingdom of the one factor that could guarantee domestic peace -a strong king who could keep everyone else in line. Edward was left to pick up t he pieces -- and even in 1042, people must have doubted that he was the man to d o it.

Edward the Confessor and His Earls We are now approaching that extremely important event, the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. It was the immediate sequel of the death of King Edward, c ommonly called the Confessor for his supposed piety. But for people who lived in Edward's reign (1042-1066), the relations of E ngland and Normandy were only a part of the political situation in which they fo und themselves, and until the very end, not necessarily the most important part. For those who concerned themselves with politics in that era, the big ques tion was whether England could ride out the reign of King Edward without being i nvaded once more from Scandinavia. The early deaths of Cnut's sons left the way clear for Edward, the eldest son of Aethelred the Unready and Emma, to become king. He was a mature man, of u ndoubted royal birth, and as a long-time resident of the Norman court, he had th e friendship of Duke William the Bastard. This was not a bad thing to have, cons idering Normandy's strategic position. A Norman alliance, by securing the other shore of the English Channel, would help cramp the style of any would-be Vikings

. But Edward did not turn out to be a strong enough ruler to make the English fe el confident about the unity and security of the country. There was more than one reason for this feeling of insecurity. First, he had the misfortune to produce no heir. Second, Edward, without being a wimp, was not a great warrior, either. He did not launch any great military adventures or find any other way of putting hi mself at the head of the warriors of the nation. Third, his ancestors had ruled England for a century because they had the resources and the loyalty of Wessex at their command. Cnut had given Wessex awa y to an earl, Godwine. By 1042, Godwine had held Wessex for almost twenty years. A generation of thegns, that is warrior aristocrats, had grown up looking to Go dwine, not the king, for leadership and largesse. So Edward did not have a secur e territorial base from which to dominate the kingdom. The final problem was the Scandinavian threat. Magnus, the king of Norway and Denmark, felt that he was the logical ruler of England as well. In 1038 he a nd Harthacanute had made a peculiar peace treaty in which each made the other hi s heir if he had no direct descendants. Magnus died in 1047, but his successors in Norway and Denmark felt they had a similar claim on the country. No Scandinav ian king was ever in a position to invade England during Edward's time, but the threat was always present. What made the threat so dangerous was that many influ ential people in northern England were of Scandinavian descent or had long stand ing connections with Scandinavian royalty, and would not necessarily be adverse to a Danish or Norwegian king. Nonetheless, Edward was not a negligible ruler. He could show determinatio n and the ability to maneuver between factions. His willingness to act decisivel y was demonstrated in 1043, when he went to Winchester, the traditional West Sax on capital, and seized all the treasure that his mother Emma had there. The chro nicle says that she had been too close-fisted with him. No doubt Edward also rem embered the death of his brother Alfred. He didn't trust his mother, so he shut her right out of the government. It was more difficult to deal with the earls. There were three great earls in 1042 and 1043. There was Siward the earl of Northumbria, Leofric the earl of Mercia, and Godwine. Existing rivalries meant Edward had to chose between the n ortherners and Godwine. Since Godwine was stronger and most royal property was i n Wessex, Edward chose Godwine. In 1045 he closed an alliance with his most powe rful subordinate by marrying Edith Godwinesdaughter. About the same time, Godwin e's two elder sons, Svein and Harold, were made earls in their own right, which increased the holdings of the Godwine family immensely. But Edward was not long content to be dominated by Godwine, if indeed he h ad ever been content. He tried to do what any king in his position would have do ne, which was to build up a faction loyal to himself. He had to look for followe rs overseas -- in Normandy. So during the 1040s, Edward promoted likely Normans to positions of influence in the kingdom. Of course Godwine and his family had the most to lose from this developmen t. In 1051, a crisis for Godwine's influence blew up. Edward rejected Godwine's candidate for the archbishopric of Canterbury and chose instead the Norman Rober t of Jumiges, who had formerly been bishop of London. At about the same time, Edw ard, who was childless and almost 50 years old, decided he should designate an h eir. For this position he chose his cousin William duke of Normandy. The designation of William as heir was a great blow to Godwine's ambitions

. A chance incident provoked Godwine into action. Edward's brother-in-law Eustac e, the count of Boulougne in France, was going home from the English court when his men got into a fight with the townsfolk at Dover. According to one version, nineteen members of Eustace's retinue and over twenty people of the town were ki lled in the riot. Eustace rode right back to the court at Gloucester and complained to Edwar d. Edward was angry at the insult to his relative, and ordered Godwine to take a punitive expedition to Dover, which was in his earldom. But Godwine and his son s marshalled their armies and went to the king to demand the punishment of the f oreigners. Earls Siward and Leofric were alarmed by Godwine's actions, and they came to court with their armed retinues to support the king. A great council was called for later that year in London to settle the dis pute without civil war. But when Godwine showed up in London, he found that the issue on the table was his disloyalty to the king. His thegns were unwilling to fight the king on this issue, and soon the entire Godwine family was outlawed. H arold, the second son and the most intelligent of the bunch, fled to Ireland, an d most of the rest of the family went to Flanders, right across the channel. As soon as they were gone, Edward made the sweep a clean one by sending his wife to a nunnery. It was a great triumph, both for Edward and for Norman influence in Englan d, but it was soon reversed. The Godwine family returned the next year in force, attacking England from Ireland and Flanders simultaneously. This time it was th e king who had to surrender rather than risk full-scale civil war. Godwine and h is sons got their dignities and property back, Queen Edith returned to a place o f honor at Edward's court. Many of the Normans were sent packing. Robert the archbishop of Canterbu ry was deprived of his see and replaced by Stigand, bishop of Winchester, a man closely connected with Godwine. This last move would come back to haunt the Godw ine family. Dismissing archbishops in this way was frowned upon by the church, a nd the papacy was in the middle of a reforming push. The deposition of Robert ma de England look bad and cast doubt on the legitimacy of someone who was effectiv ely a key member of the government. But for a long while, things went well for the Godwine faction. The old ma n died in 1053, but Harold, his eldest surviving son, stepped into his shoes qui te handily.Each of his three younger brothers got an earldom. Leofwine got the a rea around London, Gyrth got East Anglia. The third, Tostig, got the greatest pr ize of all. When Siward died in 1055, Tostig was parachuted in, metaphorically s peaking, to be the effective ruler of the north. No Wessex lord had ever held so much power in Northumbria as Tostig did, and this clinched the Godwine clan's d omination of England. In fact, between 1057 and 1065, they held all the earldoms except a dimini shed Mercian earldom, which stayed in Leofric's family. Harold's prestige was boosted by victories on the Welsh frontier, where he personally defeated the most powerful king the Welsh had had in centuries. One of the chronicles of the time called Harold "the underking." There was only one thing that stood between Harold and the throne when Kin g Edward should pass away: this was the fact that several powerful princes had a claim, or thought they did. William of Normandy's designation as Edward's heir had never been withdraw n. William had the potential to be serious trouble. By 1060 he was no longer str uggling to survive.

Farther away but still dangerous were the Scandinavian candidates. King Sv ein Estrithson of Denmark, a first cousin of Harold of Wessex, could press his r ights as a nephew of Cnut. Another Harald, Harald Hardrada of Norway, had inheri ted a claim from Magnus of Norway through Magnus's treaty with Harthacanute. Har ald of Norway was a feared warrior-king. He had spent most of his early life as a mercenary in Constantinople. After making his fortune in Byzantine politics, h e had come back to Norway and enforced his claim to the Norwegian throne against a variety of rivals. He was not the kind of person that you would want casting greedy eyes on your kingdom. But Harold of Wessex was no slouch himself. He and his family already cont rolled the ground and the military resources of the kingdom. As King Edward, chi ldless and old, approached death, Harold of Wessex looked like a good bet to suc ceed him, despite his lack of royal blood. What tripped Harold up was trouble in the family. In 1065, the last year of king Edward's life, Tostig went off the rails. T ostig was in a delicate position as an outsider in very-independently minded are a, Northumbria. Rather than rule with discretion, however, he acted in an autocr atic manner, killing opponents and confiscating land from both the church and se cular lords. The story went around that he had had his sister, Queen Edith, proc ure the killing of a prominent northerner at court. In August of 1065, the thegns of the north had had enough of him, and rose against him. They killed all of his men they could catch, seized his treasure, and then sent to Edwin the earl of Mercia, asking him to send his brother Morcar to be their earl. This was a great reverse. Morcar of course was a member of th e one noble family in England that could rival the Godwins. Edwin and Morcar's f ather Aelfgar had been fighting Harold and Tostig in Wales only a few years back . Morcar and the northerners marched south with an army, and significantly, were joined by men from the old Danish Five Boroughs, part of Edwin's earldom. I t was beginning to look like a confrontation between the Scandinavian-influenced north against the Wessex-dominated south. Harold went north to meet them, not t o fight, but to negotiate. No matter how much he talked to them, the Northumbria ns would not agree to take Tostig back. Harold had to choose between civil war a nd abandoning his brother. Finally he agreed to the latter. Harold went south to the court, and got Edward to appoint Morcar earl of N orthumbria. The king was probably all too happy to ratify this setback for the G odwine family. It may have been at this point that King Edward required Harold to go to N ormandy to confirm William as heir to the throne of England. The story, which is not found in any English source, is universally insisted on by all Norman histo rians, and is illustrated in the Bayeux Tapestry. Harold had the bad luck to be captured by a castellan in France, and the humiliation of being rescued by his r ival, William. While in William's company, or perhaps custody, he swore to suppo rt William's claim to the crown, became his vassal in the Norman style, and was given the arms of knighthood. Harold probably had no intention of living up to h is oath, but it made William feel a lot more justified in attacking Harold the n ext year. The oath to William, however, was nothing to compare with another problem. Harold's capitulation to the demands of the Northumbrians had alienated his bro ther Tostig, who had sailed away to Flanders, whose very powerful count was Tost ig's father-in-law. He was known to be looking for allies -- not only the count of Flanders, but Harald Hardrada in Norway. In the winter of 1065, as King Edwar

d, now old and concerned only to finish his abbey at Westminster, approached dea th, there was no one in England to stop Harold from claiming the crown. But ther e were plenty of potential enemies overseas. Harold had no way to know who would strike at him, or from where.

1066 On December 31, 1065, Edward the Confessor, old and childless, was near de ath. His most powerful subject, Harold earl of Wessex, an experienced war leader and heir to the richest noble dynasty in the country, was in control of England and by this time seemed, at least to his own large faction, to be Edward's logi cal successor. Others had claims: Harold Hardrada, king of Norway, and William duke of No rmandy, who at one point had been Edward's designated successor. Besides these t wo potential foes, Harold had his own brother Tostig to worry about. After he'd lost his position as earl of Northumbria, Tostig had sailed off to find allies so that he could return to power in England. On January 5, 1066, Edward the Confessor died at Westminster. The word w ent out that in his last moments Edward chose the great earl as his successor. T he very next day Harold was crowned king of England. No one within the kingdom made any moves against him, but there was soon t rouble from the outside. In May, not long after the portentous appearance of Hal ley's comet, Tostig Godwineson attacked the isle of Wight and raided along the s outh coast of England until he heard that his brother, King Harold, was coming. Then Tostig sailed north to the Humber, where he and his followers started harry ing the countryside. Earls Edwin and Morcar repulsed him with some loss. Tostig was forced to flee. His brother Harold, however, had no time to relax. He had heard that Willi am of Normandy was preparing an army and fleet to cross the Channel, and was in the midst of marshaling what the chronicle called "greater naval and land hosts than any king in this country had ever gathered before." William was the ruler of a very bellicose province of France. During the f irst half of the eleventh century, Normandy produced a large number of adventuro us knights looking for a way to carve out a living with their swords. This was a n era when armored warfare on horseback was being refined and perfected in Franc e; it was also an era when the use of castles in seizing and holding onto territ ory was becoming a key part of warfare. The Normans seem to have been early mast ers of both types of tactics. Between 1026 and 1060, Normandy had gone through a period of great disorde r. The new aristocracy that emerged was tough, ruthless, and treacherous -- in o ther words, skilled in both warfare and politics. William himself epitomized thi s warlike group. He had become duke at the age of 7, saddled with the taint of i llegitimacy and especially low birth. His mother had been the daughter of a tann er. When he reached adulthood, however, he soon showed an ability not just to su rvive but to conquer. He was a determined warrior, a skillful manipulator of a lliances, and was ruthless to those who opposed him but merciful and even gracio us to those who submitted promptly. By 1060, William had used those traits to pu t himself at the head of his ambitious aristocracy and had increased his influen ce in all the countries that bordered on Normandy. When his cousin Edward the Confessor died, he had the wealth and reputatio n to mount a sizable expedition to claim the throne that had been promised him.

At the same time, William pursued a diplomatic offensive against Harold. U sing the pretext of Edward's designation and Harold's broken oath to support him , William got recognition of his claim from the imperial court in Germany. Also , the anomalous position of Stigand as archbishop of Canterbury helped William g ain the support of the Roman church. The papacy was in the midst of an offensive against lay control of church offices, and William could portray the English ch urch as a corrupt institution needing reform. William, obtained, on the basis of his reputation as a church reformer in Normandy, a papal banner sanctioning his expedition. Harold of England waited for this rather formidable opponent all summer lo ng. But William did not come. Perhaps Harold had mustered his troops too soon. Perhaps William feared the great fleet Harold was supposed to have, and was look ing for an opportunity. In any case, by the beginning of September, Harold's sup plies and the military obligations of the fyrd had been used up. He was forced t o dismiss them. Almost as soon as the fyrd had gone home, a new crisis erupted for Harold of England. Harald Hardrada, king of Norway, had landed in Northumbria with some thing like 300 ships. He was accompanied by Tostig. Harald's army had been att acked by the Northumbrian fyrd under Edwin and Morcar at Fulford on the 20th of September, and Harald had won. He and Tostig then entered York, where a substan tial party welcomed him with open arms, and asked him to lead them to conquer En gland. Harold of England reacted quickly to news of the Norwegian landing. With his household forces, a rather substantial body, he marched from the south of En gland to the outskirts of York in six days, where he joined with Edwin and Morca r and the remnants of the northern army. On the seventh day, which was the 25th of September, he caught Hardrada's army at a place called Stamford Bridge. By ni ghtfall on the 25th, Harold of England had won. Both Harald Hardrada and Tostig were killed, and the Norwegian threat was over. But then King Harold heard that William had landed in Sussex and was devas tating the countryside. Harald was was forced to turn around his weary househol d troops and rush as quickly as possible back south. By the sixth of October he was in London, where he paused to gather reinfo rcements -- he had moved so fast that he had been able only to bring as many tro ops as he could find horses for -- no doubt a tough force but a very small one. Harold was dependent on these and whatever troops he could gather in the south. There is no doubt that if he had paused, he could have gathered a larger army. B ut after after five days, he moved south from London, to take on William with wh at was on hand then. Was he trying to stop the devastation? Was he uncertain about his domestic suppor

England Under The Normans

Domesday England One of the most remarkable products of the Norman Conquest of England is t he record known as Domesday Book (pronounced like "doom," not "dome"). It was c

reated near the end of William the Conqueror's reign, when he decided that he ne ed to know more about the country he now ruled, in particular its taxable wealth . As soon as he began granting out English lands to his followers, there were be en arguments about who owned what. In between putting down revolts and repulsing attacks on his territories, William had much of his time occupied in sorting ou t such problems. In early 1086, he decided that a great survey of England was necessary to the workings of his government. When William spoke, his officials listened, and so by the end of the year, Domesday Book was largely finished, as finished as it ever got. It is a unique record of an eleventh-century country as seen by a go vernment that was quite powerful by the standards of the time -- a snapshot of E ngland as the taxman saw it. Or rather, since the surveyors asked about past conditions, two snapshots: one of England in 1086, another of England in 1066, on the day, as the clerks p ut it, when king Edward the Confessor lived and died: England on the last day of peace that Anglo-Saxon England enjoyed, and what conditions were like after t wenty years of Norman rule. I hope by this point in the course that you no longer feel that England be fore 1066 was a backward, barbaric place. Even so, the prosperity of England in 1066 is quite remarkable. In the eleventh century, all of western Europe was exp eriencing the beginning of commercial prosperity. England in 1066 seems to have been ahead of the crowd in this development. Already England could boast of several important cities that lived largely on trade and industry. These cities were not big by our standards. The largest, London, may have had 15,000, about a third of the size of North Bay. Other citi es were smaller: York had 8 to 10,000, Norwich, another trade center, something over 5,000. By our standards these are tiny places, but there were no western E uropean cities outside of Muslim Spain that had much over 20,000 people, and the y were all in Italy. As things went in 11th c. Europe, England had some vital u rban centers. Even the smaller towns were significant economically. There were t hirty-two with 1,000 or more people [Chibnall, 148], and they constituted a com mercial network that would suffice for England until the fourteenth century. One fact that shows the prosperity and commercialization of the English ec onomy is the quality of its currency. Since the tenth century, the coinage all o ver England had been uniform, based on the silver penny. Royal efforts to maint ain control over purity and weight were very successful. It was the best curren cy in western Europe at the time, testimony to royal power and to the existence of trade. It was also an encouragement to commercialization and trade, as a stab le currency always is. What was this trade? Domesday book does not address this question directly . From archaeology we know that Norwich produced pottery and York iron, and ther e is plenty of evidence for clothmaking, one of the early manufactures of Wester n Europe. Wool was already a well-established agricultural product: domestic an imals are recorded in the assessment of manors, and sheep are by far the most nu merous. Commercial prosperity in England, as elsewhere in medieval Europe, was nec essarily based on agricultural prosperity. Domesday Book shows us a country that , by the standards of its time, was well developed. Almost every place that exis ts in England today was already settled in 1066. There was no great untapped wil derness. There were extensive woodlands, but they were a resource that was watched and managed. The king had the largest share in this management, because he cont

rolled the "forest." The forest was not a woods. The word "forest" is derived from the Latin "foras", outside, and signified a royal park system outside of th e normal administrative framework of the kingdom, where agriculture, woodcutting , or other exploitation was allowed only under the strictest regulation. William the Conqueror is famous -- or notorious -- for creating more forest, and savage laws against poaching, but no one thinks he invented the idea of forest. Agriculture in 1066 is only shown in passing in Domesday Book. Arable agri culture, that is plowing fields to grow grain was very important, and the survey ors were especially charged to find out how many plowlands and plowing teams the re were for each manor. But fishing was a big business in some areas, and livest ock was very important. Besides sheep, pigs were the most important animal raise d for meat. The woods were used to provide acorns and other feed for pigs. Surpr isingly, there were almost no cows kept: only enough, it seems, to breed oxen to pull the plows -- horses were seldom used for farm work at this time. So Englan d had no Devon cream and no Cheddar cheese. What cheese there was, was probably made from goat's milk. The High Middle Ages -- the period from A.D. 1000 to about 1350 is known a s a period of technological innovation down at the farm. One innovation that can be demonstrated from the Book is the use of mechanical mills to grind grain int o flour. There were something like 6,000 of these establishments in England in 1 066. This far more than Roman Britain would have had, even though Roman Britain was probably more populous and more prosperous. In Roman times, grain was ground by slaves using hand mills. In all we have a country that is far from backward. It would be interestin g to know how many people lived there. But since this is a taxman's survey, we h ave only a list of people who paid taxes or were assets attached to the estates of taxpayers. There are 268,984 such people mentioned, almost all of them male, none of them children. We can guess that there may have been two million people in all of England. Today there are about 48 million. The wealth of this country was very unevenly distributed. Over 25% of the land was held by great church corporations. A very small number of lay magnates held another quarter. For instance, in Surrey, a shire in the earldom of Wessex, Harold of Wessex held about 10% of the land, King Edward about 8%, Queen Edith, Harold's sister, about 4%, other earls about 5% The church held about 30% of Su rrey, and all the other landholders together about 45%. Just from property holdings, we can see that this was an extremely aristoc ratic society before the Normans ever came. Domesday book allows us to study the social structure of England as well a s its tax base. Governmental organization based on shires with shire courts, di vided into hundreds with hundred courts -- through which the free and influentia l people policed the countryside, decided land disputes, and distributed the bur dens of military service and taxation -- was very strong in 1066. The geld, or d efense tax levied on the land, had been collected for over three-quarters of a c entury, so there was an assessment system in place: all the land in the country had a set tax obligation, which was recorded in documents used by the makers of Domesday Book. The king, despite the existence of princely earls in the provinces, had th e ability to get his decisions implemented. There was a writing office which iss ued short, efficient documents called writs that told the sheriffs and other off icials what the king wanted done. England was well on the way to a literate form of government. But beside this organization was a web of personal obligations that tied n

early every person to the service of a great landlord. England was divided not o nly into shires and hundreds, but also into manors. A manor was a property whos e owner enjoyed a certain amount of jurisdiction and economic lordship over depe ndents on his land or nearby. The classic manor is one where there is a demesne or home farm, run directly by the landlord (or an agent) for his direct profit. Attached to the demesne are plots of various sizes worked by the landlord's depe ndents, who owed him rent and labor services of various types. But there were ma ny other types, some that had no demesnes, others that were so small they had no attached dependents. So, more generally, a manor can be thought of as a bundle of rights, held by a lord, over land and over people. The lord received not just rent on the lan d, but service from people who were in a sense his property. These manors, whate ver they looked like, were effectively governmental subdivisions of England. Gel d, for instance, was assessed by shires and hundreds. But it was actually collec ted at the manors. Almost everyone in England was a dependent attached to a manor. To begin with, England was still a country with many slaves, people who we re property pure and simple and who could be freely bought and sold. Slaves see m to have been most common in heavily manorialized shires -- i.e., in shires whe re there were many classic manors with demesnes and peasant tenancies. They did much of the manual labor on the home farms. Above the slaves but still in a very poor position were people who might b e called cottagers. They usually had a bit of land, but no more. The average peasant was a more substantial man, the villein. Villein is th e Norman word, and implies a lack of freedom. In 1066 the same people were proba bly called geburs (the root of our word boor), and were counted as free. The geb ur or future villein usually had a fairly large tenancy, maybe a hide, maybe onl y a quarter of a hide; he also had some plow oxen. To pull a plow, you needed ei ght oxen, four yoked pairs. The villein's possession of some oxen made him a val uable resource for the lord -- the peasant oxen, the peasant plows, and the peas ant plowmen were used on the demense. Plowing service, a heavy burden, was the b asic duty this class of men owed their lords. The villeins, besides plowing serv ice and usually rent, in produce or in money or both, often owed the lord a vari ety of miscellaneous services. Villeins, even when they were still geburs, although not slaves, were not free by our standards. They could not leave the manor without permission, and th ere were a number of other restrictions on them. In most legal manners they woul d have been responsible not to the public courts, but to the manor court held by their landlord. Almost half the people recorded in DB were villeins Above the villeins were a number of people who were technically free, who had some status in the hundred courts and the shire courts, but were still under someone's patronage. First, There were people who had long-term leases (three generations long) on what was called thegnland. A small piece of thegnland might owe the same kin d of services that a villein's plot did. A larger piece might owe military servi ce, and the leaseholder would be in a much more honorable position in society. S till their independence was restricted. Second, there was also a large number of people called sokemen. Sokemen we re people who were free, owned their own property, and did little or no plowing for a lord, but who fell nevertheless under the jurisdiction of a lord. Sokemen usually had to do some miscellaneous services for their lords, but not the heav

y duties of a villein. Sokemen, holders of thegnland, free men under someone's patronage, people who commended themselves to a lord, were members of the middle class, politicall y and economically. On economic grounds we can put townspeople in the same class, although man y of them rented their properties directly from the king, who was the lord of mo st boroughs. Who were the "full citizens"? They were the lords at the top of society, t he king's thegns, those who had no lord but the king, those who held jurisdictio n rights, the right of "sake and soke," over their tenants, over their poorer ne ighbors, even over whole communities. They were rich, they were influential. The y were the king's sheriffs, they rented royal estates from the king, they got sp ecial tax breaks unavailable to the bulk of the population. To call them citizen s is almost to travesty the word. They were lords. How many of them were there? Very few. I have no figure for 1066, but in 1 086 there were only about 200 "tenants-in-chief," direct tenants of the king. Th ere can only have been a few more in 1066 -- even if there were 1000 holders of sake and soke, that would be one half of one tenth of one percent of the estimat ed population of 2 million. The popular institutions of England, the strong public authority of the ki ng, did not undermine the aristocratic monopoly on power. In later times, when P arliament was fighting the King, there was a theory that England was a free coun try before the imposition of the Norman Yoke. There was a Norman Yoke, as we wi ll see later, but as far as most people were concerned, there was also, before 1 066, a Saxon Yoke.

The Norman Settlement The Norman Conquest is one of the more obvious turning points in English H istory, an event that in retrospect divides all English history into two. There is no reason to think that even William of Normandy intended it to be that way. The death of many English nobles in battle, plus the fact that William's followers expected to be rewarded for faithful and efficacious service, meant th at much land would change hands. But this was no more than had happened in Cnut' s time. In 1016, many substantial men, the ordinary and middling thegns, had bee n left in peace. At first, William followed a policy much like Cnut's. Indeed, he was milde r.He left three earls in place, Edwin, Morcar, and Waltheof, and used the establ ished power of the English monarchy to assert his authority in those parts of th e country -- most of it north of London -- not actually under Norman occupation. William, like Cnut, had another realm elsewhere that demanded much of his atte ntion. The last thing William needed in 1066 was to cause himself unnecessary tr ouble in England. But William was soon put into a position where he had to either thoroughly subdue England by force, or give up and go home. His choice, to fight, shaped t he Norman settlement of England. Very soon after his Christmas, 1066 coronation, William felt it necessary to return to Normandy. He also took with him to Normandy the natural leaders of the English: all the surviving earls, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Edgar A theling. Nevertheless, there was trouble. William returned and put down these fi

rst revolts easily, but new ones followed. The great northern revolts of 1069 and 1070, which are recorded in some de tail in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, were the most serious challenge that the Conq ueror faced in England. The ability of a southern ruler to control Northumbria was never completely sure. Northerners had alternative rulers available to them: the King of the Scots and the King of the Danes. In 1069-1070, William faced not just the proud Northumbrians, but also Edgar Atheling, the heir of the house of Wessex, Edgar's ally Malcom Canmore, and a Danish fleet sent by King Svein E strithson. After William had beaten the challengers, he systematically harried Yorksh ire and other parts of Northumbria and northern Mercia to make sure that these a reas would never again dispute his rule. He sent armies through the countryside, depopulating large areas and making them uninhabitable. The Harrying of the Nor th destroyed the prosperity of York and ultimately had the desired effect. After a further major revolt that involved the English earls, the new king eliminated Englishmen from nearly all positions of responsibility. The property of the English nobility was confiscated and redistributed to Norman warriors. W illiam ended up redistributing almost all the land of England in a twenty year p eriod. The English aristocracy of 1066, especially the middle ranks, was an nd comfortable aristocracy. The Normans, Bretons, and other Frenchmen who ced them were hungry men. They were foreigners with no cultural connection e people they ruled, and so they became even more of a military class than might have been otherwise. old a repla to th they

One of the great symbols of Norman rule in England is the castle, and it i s an accurate one. The English of course were not strangers to fortifications. But the chief English fortifications had been burhs, built, maintained and garr isoned by the free men of the district. The early Norman castles were meant to k eep down the population and protect the foreign masters. (They did this job ver y well.) Another symbol of the Norman era is the knight, a mounted armored soldier who is a specialist in war and usually bound to a greater lord by strong persona l bonds of vassalage. None of these elements was new to England in 1066. But al l of these elements of warfare were newly emphasized in Norman England. The Nor mans were in the forefront of cavalry tactics, which tended to make warfare more expensive and more specialized. William encouraged the creation of a new chivalric aristocracy. When he gr anted out land to his higher-ranking subordinates, he did so on the understandin g that they would guard his castles and more importantly that they would supply him with armored, mounted, well-trained knights. This expectation of service in return for land was defined later by lawyer s into a number of principles. One was that all land in England was ultimately t he king's and that tenure was granted conditionally, in exchange for what was ca lled knight-service. Great lords, the tenants-in-chief of the king, fulfilled t heir obligations of castle guard and knight service -- which were not well-defin ed at the beginning -- by surrounding themselves with poorer knights who were th eir own vassals. In the earliest days, most of these lesser vassals lived with the lord, or in one of his castles, and were rewarded with money or other favors. The tenant s-in-chief began soon to subinfeudate. A knight would be given part of his lord' s property, which he would hold as a military tenant. Like the estates of the lo

rd, the knight's land would be a hereditary possession of his family unless he b etrayed his lord or the male line died out. William the Conqueror's division of England into fiefs owing military serv ice created a second governmental hierarchy parallel to the earlier hierarchy of shires and hundreds. Shires and hundreds still had tax obligations and still on occasion provided English free men to fight in the fyrd. But at the same time E ngland was divided into military fiefs, called feudal honours or later, baronies . Each great lord, meaning each tenant-in-chief of the king, had an honor court, a right of jurisdiction over his vassals, whether landless stipendiary knights, or military tenants, that is knights who had received land from him. Thus the c rimes and disputes of the Norman military class were often settled in a legal ar ena quite distinct from that used by everyone else. This applied most of all to the retinue of the king. All the tenants-in-ch ief were subject primarily to what we might call the king's feudal court. They w ere all his vassals, and owed attendance at his court, where he judged them by t he standards appropriate to their place in society and their special relationshi p to him The small upper crust, two hundred tenants-in-chief and a few thousand kni ghts and their families lived in a world of their own. The native English found their status correspondingly depressed. The geburs of 1066 became the villeins of 1086. Geburs had been free men, with some access to the public courts. They had the wergilds of free men, even i f they were economically subservient. After the conquest, wergilds ceased to be used, and formerly free men with little property and heavy labor obligations found themselves to be villeins. Vi lleins -- a French word -- were considered unfree, and eventually were entirely excluded from the shire and hundred courts, at least when they had disputes with their lords. These ended up in the lord's manor court. Sokemen and the lesser thegns also found themselves farther down the socia l scale. Whatever their rights, they were certainly not part of the new ruling c lass, which was distinguished not only by language, but by a distinctive type of military obligation, knight service, one that few Englishmen were capable of fu lfilling, and by the military tenure and feudal status that went with that oblig ation. Before we leave this subject, two more aspects of the Norman settlement of England should be referred to, if only briefly. First, the church. After the great revolts, William decided that he could not leave the great church corporations in English hands. He was encouraged in t his attitude by the difference in styles of piety between England and the Contin ent, which led him and other Europeans to conclude that the English church was i n need of reform to bring it up to snuff. Very soon all English bishoprics and a bbacies were filled with continentals, not all of them Normans. This change spelled the slow doom of Old English as a literary language. I t was replaced by Latin, which was the administrative language of England for mo st of the rest of the Middle Ages, and the chief literary language as well. Fren ch also became a literary language, though it took a while to become established . Again we see the native population was shut out of the highest ranks of societ y and foreigners and foreign standards predominated. Second, the conquest enhanced the power of the English king. William destr oyed the old earldoms, and did not replace them. His earls, except in border reg

ions, were much less powerful than their Anglo-Saxon predecessors. Also William acquired in the course of his reign not only all the royal property, but the fam ily property of all the earls of 1066. Even after granting out much of it, he wa s fabulously wealthy. He was perhaps the strongest ruler of his day, and he lef t a reputation -- for strength, if not humanity -- that has scarcely faded with time. When he died in 1087, he left big shoes to fill. His sons had a hard time filling them.

The Conqueror and His Sons For the next four lectures, I will diverge from my usual chronological pla n. I will be talking about the policies of William and the two sons who followed him as king of England in a topical manner. The first of these lectures concerns the relations that obtained between E ngland and Normandy under these Norman kings. The success of William the Conqueror in 1066 and his repulse of Danish in vasions thereafter cut England's long-established connection with Scandinavia an d at the same time established strong ties with France which would survive the M iddle Ages. It would be French rather than Scandinavian politics that would effe ct the English most. To appreciate the new order, we must take a brief look at the political si tuation in France in the second half of the 11th century, and the events that ha d produced that situation. In the ninth century civil war and Viking invasions had drastically reduce d royal authority in France. Dukes, counts, and other deputies of the king set themselves up as independent powers -- indeed they were almost forced to do so b y the inability of the kings to keep any kind of order. These dukes and counts ( whom we will call princes for simplicity's sake) could not claim to rule by roya l right. They depended primarily on might -- on the control of those vital resou rces of the Central Middle Ages, trained knights and castles. The ambition of ev ery prince was to turn the territory he controlled into a hereditary possession that could be passed down to his descendants. Each wanted to be the founding fat her of a dynasty of rulers. But it was a tough job. There was the eternal challenge of the prince's d eputies and officials. They held castles and territories under his rule, as the prince had once held them from the king. But like the prince, the deputies wante d to turn their offices into hereditary possessions, mini-states of their own. S ince the prince couldn't be everywhere at once, he led a constant struggle to ke ep his subordinates under control. That unruly subordinates were still a problem for the rulers of the 11th c . can be illustrated from the career of William the Conqueror. William spent mos t of his life keeping the Norman aristocracy in line, and very soon after he too k England, he had to contend with a serious revolt of the Norman barons he himse lf had established there. Nevertheless, by 1066, there were some signs of stabilization in French po litics. Some principalities, some ruling families, were beginning to look like p ermanent players on the scene. Thanks to William, Normandy was pretty solid. Fla nders had a long history of rule under the Baldwins, and was entering a period o f commercial prosperity. The county of Anjou, south of Normandy, was ruled by a capable and ambitious dynasty. Perhaps the greatest of the princes was the king of France, based in Paris and Orleans. Usually French kings of this period are l

ooked upon as weak, because they ruled very little of their kingdom directly. If we think of them as princes rather than kings, however, they look pretty good. The growing solidity of these northern French principalities meant an inte nsified competition between them for advantage and for the domination of dispute d areas between them. A fairly typical rivalry is the longstanding struggle between the Norman d ukes and the counts of Anjou for the county of Maine. Maine was a small territor y that lay directly between these two strong principalities, and had never devel oped a well-established dynasty of its own. Thus it became a bone of contention between its neighbors. The battle between Anjou and Normandy was not a simple, s traightforward war, and therein lies its typicality. Decisive battles like Stamf ord Bridge or Hastings were very rare in 11th c. warfare. More usual were expedi tions intended to take strategic castles, and the counter-expeditions that sough t to relieve those beseiged castles before they fell. Campaigns were fought for very limited goals. The building of alliances was an important part of politics. The count of Anjou, for instance, wanted to get the king of France on his side, and the king, afraid of the new might of William the Conqueror, was sometimes willing to obli ge. William sought to avoid French intervention, and often succeeded, either thr ough fighting or bribery. All the princes were jealous of each other, so allianc es tended to be shortlived. Despite his greatly increased power and all the vast territory he had acqu ired in England, William spent most of his reign as king in Normandy fighting to preserve his continental position. William used English resources, directly and indirectly, to support his continental position and to forward his continental ambitions. William used English levies in Maine in 1073 -- a mere seven years af ter Hastings -- and used the unique taxing powers of the English crown more than once to finance his wars. The question of the succession to William's domains also affected the rela tionship of England to Normandy. The impartibility of great honors had been pret ty well established by the mid-eleventh century. On the other hand, there was no set rule to govern the inheritance of an empire such as William's. William had three capable sons. Robert Curthose, his eldest son, would be duke of Normandy after him. But what would happen to England? There was prece dent for settling younger sons on territories newly acquired by the father. On t his basis, England or parts of it could be given to William, known as Rufus for his ruddy complexion, or to Henry. The succession was complicated by the fact Ro bert caught a disease that elder sons of rulers often suffered in the Middle Age s -- impatience. In 1078 he made an alliance with the king of France and various other neig hbors of Normandy, and open war broke out. Amazingly enough, he won. At a battle near Gerberoi, King William's forces were defeated and he himself unhorsed and wounded. Robert got a guarantee from his father that he would inherit Normandy. In 1083, for unknown reasons, Robert left Normandy and allied himself once mor e with the king of France and William's other French enemies. When William died in 1087 in Normandy, in the course of an anti-French offensive, Robert was still in revolt. On his deathbed William was still angry with his son, and decided Robert w ould have no share of the kingdom. William Rufus, who was in attendence, was de signated king. The third son, Henry, had to be satisfied with the small grants o f lands he already had, and a gift of money -- perhaps as much as l5,000, which w as an immense amount then. So when William the Conqueror died in 1087, his great

empire was split into its main component parts. No one was really satisfied with this situation. All three sons wanted a s much as they could get. All the important Norman families held property and po sition on both sides of the Channel. If England and Normandy were truly separate , they would soon face conflicts of loyalty and interest. Robert found it very difficult to control his barons, but William used Eng lish levies to control his. By 1089, William Rufus was in a position to attack R obert at home. By 1091, William had gained territory and influence on the contin ent, and forced Robert to acknowledge his position. The rivalry ended unexpectedly in 1096. Pope Urban II had just declared th e First Crusade, and Robert, like many others, was burning with the desire to fr ee Jerusalem. To get the necessary funds, he pawned the duchy of Normandy to Wil liam, who thus peacefully established his power over all his father's possession s. Such was William's determination and ability that he was able to hold onto th e whole assemblage for the rest of his reign. In August of 1100, William was out hunting in the New Forest -- the most f amous of the forest areas created by William I -- when one of his hunting compan ions shot an arrow into him. His brother Henry, who was on the fatal expedition , marked his brother's death in true Norman fashion, by riding off immediately t o Winchester to seize the royal treasure. The dead king's body was entirely aban doned, left on the ground until some peasants transported it to a nearby church for burial. Henry's quick action assured him of the English throne and control of Norm andy as well. Henry was able to establish his rule in England, partly because h e made an elaborate oath at his coronation in which he promised to correct all t he grievances the English barons and church had had against his brother William. Holding on to Normandy was more difficult. Robert arrived in Normandy in the au tumn and was acknowledged as duke by almost everyone. Robert then collected his supporters together and invaded England. The barons on both sides, most of whom had property on either shore of the channel, forced the brothers to negotiate. H enry was forced to surrender his remaining castles in Normandy and to promise to pay Robert a big yearly pension out of the English royal revenues. Within a few Henry was able to invade Normandy. At the end of it, Henry wa s the victor, and Robert his captive. Duke Robert Curthose lived until 1134, the year before Henry died, but his brother the king never let him go free again. H enry had all of Normandy now, and was determined to keep it. And he did. The un ity of the empire created by William the Conqueror was restored. Thanks to Henry 's long life and ability as a ruler, the unity was maintained for nearly a gener ation, long enough for it to be taken by almost everybody as something normal, s omething to be taken for granted.

England, Wales, and Scotland This lecture will be devoted to insular politics, relations with Wales an d Scotland. This was a period when both countries found themselves under more i ntense English and Norman pressure, pressure that produced some important change s in Welsh and Scots politics and culture. Both Scotland and Wales were poor, divided and lightly populated countries . Geography had much to do with this situation. Both were located in the Highlan d Zone of Britain, which was a mountainous, cold, rainy area, not very suitable for arable agriculture.

G.W.S. Barrow, an eminent historian of medieval Scotland, has said: "If one takes the modern map of Scotland and considers the enormous number of names on it which contain an element denoting marsh or bog, the wonder is th at any room was found at all for permanent habitation." [Barrow, Feudal Britain In fact, not much room was found. Barrow himself estimates that there were no more than a third of a million inhabitants within the modern limits of the c ountry in 1100, compared to two million or more in England. Today, in the age of industrialization, Scotland supports roughly 5 million people. Wales, which is very mountainous, was in a similar position. Herding was m ore important than plowing as a means of supporting the population. Wales is a m uch smaller country than Scotland, and the population would have been smaller: E ven with extensive industrial development, it supports less than three million p eople today. Neither country was politically unified. Wales, which could easily be put into a square 140 miles on a side, with plenty of room for ocean, had never had a single ruler. The position of the many Welsh rulers was much like that of the petty English kings of the seventh century. The princes were warlords, surround ed by a retinue of professional warriors. The weakness of Welsh princes was aggravated by two factors, besides the p overty of the country. The Welsh were semi-nomadic and thus hard to control. Als o Welsh inheritance customs called for equal division of the father's property a mong his sons. The one unifying factor was the dominance of a single language an d the existence of a Welsh high culture, consisting for the most part of poetry and music as cultivated in the courts of princes. No such unifying factor could be found in Scotland in the year 1100. In fa ct, the country we call Scotland had no single name at that time. The word Scoti a applied to the area between the Firth of Forth and the Moray Firth, an area in habited by Picts and Scots and ruled, at least in theory, by the King of Scots. Other areas, although they might owe some allegiance to the King of Scots, were not part of Scotia. Lothian, around Edinburgh, was an English-speaking district with close con nections to Northumbria. Strathclyde or Cumbria was an ancient British land that straddled the mode rn border between England and Scotland. The people of Galloway were called Picts by outsiders, but they were actually a unique blend of Britons, Irish-Scots, an d Norwegians. The islands of Orkney, the Hebrides and Man were considered part o f Norway. The King of Scots was the only ruler within the boundaries of modern Scotl and who was strong enough to call himself king, and he could, on good days, exer cise a certain overlordship over the rest. Both Wales and Scotland were fairly isolated from the European mainstream. The condition of the church in those areas is a good indicator. Wales's most im portant bishop dwelt at St. David's in the south, and there was a bishop of Scot ia at St. Andrew's. Otherwise there was nothing like a settled diocesan structur e in either country. Unlike England or most other countries, there were no fixed episcopal sees, and of course no network of parish churches. Monasteries were usually closely controlled by the families that had founded them. In twelfth-ce ntury terms, both countries' churches were exceedingly unreformed. When the Normans took England the resulting disorder was seen by Welsh and Scots (of various sorts) as an opportunity to pour over a border that in normal times was not so easy to penetrate. On both borders, in fact, disaffected Engli sh noblemen were allied with the raiders.

Of course William the Conqueror was not the man to tolerate any nonsense o f this sort. His policies had an important effect on how England and Wales relat ed for the rest of the Middle Ages. In most parts of his new kingdom, William eliminated the power of earls. O n the Welsh border, however, he quickly erected what are often called "palatine earldoms." These were districts where the earl exercised power almost independen tly of the king. An example of a palatine earl was William fitz Osbern, who was made earl of Hereford in 1066 or 1067. He was given most of the land in Hereford shire, possession of its chief castle, and jurisdiction over its inhabitants. In return for this semi-regal status, he was expected to do one thing for his over lord William: He was to keep the Welsh out of England. The status and identities of the border lords changed often in the twelft h century, but the policy of entrusting extraordinary powers to them became a se t one. Such warlords, who are often called the marcher lords, were not content t o merely defend England; they used their position to conquer and colonize as muc h of Wales as they could. Norman techniques of castle building and systematic a ggression worked well against the Welsh. During the reign of William Rufus, the king and his marchers struck deep i nto south Wales and seized several strong points, including Pembroke. The marche rs followed this offensive up with colonization -- peasants from Flanders and el sewhere were planted in the newly conquered territory to be a trustworthy popula tion. This type of penetration was much more than had ever been accomplished by Anglo-Saxon rulers, and opened Wales up to an unprecedented flood of English and continental influences. Not that Wales was absorbed into England. The marcher lords themselves pre vented that. Their march developed into a turbulent frontier zone with its own unique characteristics. Relations between Scotland and England were somewhat more complicated. The king of Scots was no match for the king of England, but he was more dangerous t o William the Conqueror than any Welsh prince. He lived closer to Northumbria th an any King of England ever had, and was less of a foreigner to the Northumbrian s than the man who ruled in London or Winchester. In the unsettled period right after Hastings, Malcolm Canmore was a potential champion to those in the north w ho wanted to resist England. In 1073, William took an army and a fleet up the east coast of Scotland an d marched right across the Firth of Forth and into the center of Malcolm's kingd om. Malcolm was forced to pay tribute and do homage to make him go home again. I n 1080, Robert Curthose led a second great expedition to avenge a raid made by t he Scots when Robert himself had been fighting his father in Normandy. The resul ts this time were similar. It is hard to see any sign that Malcolm really wanted to rule Northumbria. It has been suggested that Malcolm used the opportunity to raid England to bol ster his own position in Scotland. The northern boundary of England stayed much where it had been under Edwar d the Confessor. In fact, under Malcom, Scotland was opened to two waves of foreign influen ce, the first English, the second Norman. The English wave took place in the 107 0s, when many noble refugees from Northumbria pulled up stakes and moved with al l their portable wealth and settled in Lothian, what might be called Scottish No rthumbria. The already-existing English element in the Kingdom of the Scots was

thus reinforced. The most important single English refugee was Queen Margaret, known to lat er generations as St. Margaret of Scotland. One must qualify the adjective Engli sh in her case. She was of royal English descent, but like her brother Edgar Ath eling she had been raised in Hungary, and like him was a cosmopolitan. Her influ ence in Malcolm's court was immense. She is most noted for her determination to reshape up the Scottish church on the English or continental model. Margaret's influence lived on in her sons. These descendents of Saxon roya lty opened Scotland to Norman influence. Like their uncle Edgar Atheling, they e njoyed a great deal of favor from William the Conqueror and his sons, even thoug h, like the Atheling, they could be seen as rivals for the English throne. The greatest benefit, perhaps, was the way William Rufus helped the younge r son, Edgar, establish himself on the Scottish throne. In 1093, Malcolm and his eldest son Edward were killed while leading an invasion of England. A tradition alist, anti-foreign party made Malcolm's brother Donald Ban king, and he expelle d all the English and the Normans who had hung around Malcolm's court. In 1097, however, Edgar Atheling convinced William Rufus to give him an army so that he c ould put young Edgar on the throne of Scotland. The expedition was a success. Wi lliam Rufus' action seems peculiar, until one reflects that William had replaced a potentially hostile king with one who depended on him to stay in power. The line of brother-kings that began with Edgar introduced into Scotland a new Norman aristocracy, English methods of administration, and a further wave o f church reform. The most important of the sons of Malcolm and Margaret was David I, who ru led for thirty years between 1124 and 1153. He was the most Anglicized and Norma nized of the bunch. He spent part of his youth at the English court. In 1107 his brother Alexander made him lord of Lothian and Cumbria, the southern and most E nglish provinces of the Scottish crown. In 1114, Henry I married him to the rich est heiress of England, Maud, a descendant of both William the Conqueror and Ear l Waltheof. David became the earl of Northampton and Huntingdon in the southern Midlands of England, and a great vassal of the English king. In the ten years be tween David's marriage and his succession to the Scottish throne, he was a very important man in England. He was a travelling justice in Henry's administration, and a patron of religious houses all over England. In Scotland, he introduced English-style government and the new style of m onasticism into his lands, built castles there, brought in Flemish and English townsmen to inhabit his towns, and revived the old episcopal see of Glasgow. David was modernizer of a type familiar in the 12th century, practicing f or the day when he would be king. In 1124 he got his chance, and his reign marks the entrance of Scotland, at least the more accessible parts, into the mainstre am of European development. David promoted the reform of the Scottish church begun by his mother. He f ounded at least a dozen reformed monasteries, all offshoots of continental organ izations. He was able to divide the kingdom into dioceses with fixed boundaries, just as in England or France, and give these new sees to foreign or native refo rmers. His influence on secular politics was just as great. As Earl of Huntingdon , David had a number of Norman vassals, who held lands of him in return for knig ht service. He brought them with him into Scotland, as a group of retainers who would be especially dependent on him and provide him with valuable military reso urces. Among these families were the Bruces and the Stewarts, so famous in later

Scottish history. David I holds a peculiar position in British history. He did much to stren gthen the Scottish crown by the use of English and Norman methods. He opened up Scotland to the vital culture of continental Europe. But in some ways he was mor e a Northumbrian king than a king of Scots. His personal power base was the grea t border zone between the Firth of Forth and the river Tyne, which he personally dominated -- especially in the years when his only son was Earl of Northumberla nd in England. David's own capital was in Carlisle, now an English city. In the long term, his was not an easy position to maintain. In the twelfth century, it was possible for one king to be the vassal of another if neither fe lt his vital interests were threatened. But if conflict should come, the king of Scots' increased dependence on English and Norman elements in his kingdom would make life difficult for him.

The Church under the Normans In this lecture we will examine how Norman rule opened up England to cultu ral influences from outside, particularly in regard to ecclesiastical observance and government. The major issues of church reform in the mid-eleventh century, in the time of Edward the Confessor, were much the same as they had been in the time of Edg ar, in the tenth century. However, the issue of simony was heating up in the eleventh century. Simon y was the buying and selling of church offices, usually for the benefit of secul ar patrons. Simony could be seen as buying and selling the Holy Spirit, and thus a serious sin, maybe serious enough to cast doubt on the sacraments performed b y clerics guilty of it. To this sinful practice, which was very common, the reformers opposed the ideal of free, canonical elections, in which abbots were elected by their monks and bishops by the clergy and people of their dioceses, without the interferenc e of patrons and without money changing hands. As in the tenth century, reformers in the mid- eleventh century looked to powerful rulers to help purify the church and restore its proper independence. From our point of view, the big difference between the mid-tenth century a nd the mid-eleventh century was that England, once in the vanguard of reform, wa s lagging behind. When a new line of crusading popes came to power in Rome in t he 1040s and 1050s, England was out of step. The case of Stigand was a major fac tor here. Stigand was made archbishop of Canterbury in 1051, after the Norman R obert of Jumieges was expelled by Earl Godwine. His installation was a flagrant example of all they were fighting against -- the violation of church law and ecc lesiastical independence by powerful members of the laity. I have mentioned before how this played politically into William the Conqu eror's hand. William the Conqueror, even before he came to England, enjoyed the type of reputation in church circles that King Edgar had in his time. When he c ame to effective power in Normandy he had restored the authority of bishops to r ule their dioceses, founded monasteries, and recruited the ablest men he could f ind to be his bishops and abbots. Some of these new ecclesiastical leaders were famous monks from outside Normandy, such as the Italian scholar, logician and th eologian Lanfranc, who was entrusted with the monastery of Bec. William's reform ed Norman church was thus put in touch with the latest ecclesiastical fashions.

When William came to England, he had a mandate, if he wanted it, to make s weeping changes in the English church. He did not move precipitously. Not until 1070, after the first serious English revolts against him, did William even depo se the discredited Stigand -- to replace him with Lanfranc, abbot of Bec. This w as the beginning of a flood of continental prelates into England. After 1070, Wi lliam was desperate to fill all positions of authority with those he could trust . Even without the ideology of reform, this probably would have meant that Engli sh prelates would have been replaced with Normans and other continentals as incu mbents died and positions opened up. The reform ideology gave William and his cl erics a rationale for sweeping institutional changes. Many Anglo-Saxon sees were moved from small towns, where they had been for centuries, to larger towns that had grown up in the meantime. The moves marked a step in the urbanization of England, and no doubt made the bishops more power ful figures politically. Lanfranc was concerned to build up the stature of his own see of Canterbur y. He insisted that the archbishop of York in the north swear obedience to him. Eventually the case went to Rome, where Lanfranc's position won, on the strengt h of forged documents and, no doubt, the influence of King William, who was dete rmined to limit northern autonomy wherever possible. The supremacy of Canterbury in the church of England dates from this time. More important perhaps than these purely institutional matters was the way that the English clergy were suddenly expected to live up to the highest reform ing standards, as defined by a bunch of foreigners. England, like every other La tin Christian country, had a terrible record of enforcing clerical celibacy. The circumstances of the Conquest gave the new bishops the clout to change this -or at least try. This policy must have pushed out a lot of Englishmen from plu m positions in the higher ranks of the church. An even faster revolution took place in the monasteries. English monasteri es were not especially corrupt or lax, but none of them followed the Benedictine rule in quite the same way as the famous reform monasteries of the continent. T he new abbots began to impose their own customs on their monks, and they sometim es went to extremes to do so. Relations between the English church and its king changed somewhat as a re sult of the conquest. William fulfilled one point in the reformers' program by s eparating church and secular courts. Formerly, matters of church discipline, lik e other lawsuits, were judged at the regular shire and hundred courts. From Will iam's time on, they were to be adjudicated by special ecclesiastical tribunals m ade up of clerics using church law. On another serious matter, however, William bound church and state (if we can use the latter term for convenience) closer to gether. Ecclesiastical bodies had always been generally obligated to help defend the realm. William made this obligation a formal and burdensome one by treating all monasteries and episcopal sees as fiefs, required like all other fiefs to p rovide knight for the royal army. William the Conqueror made the English church conform more closely to cont inental standards. He increased the king's power over the church, to the point t hat he refused to let anyone communicate with the pope without royal permission. He made it an instrument of political and cultural penetration. He must have se emed, by the standards of the mid-eleventh century, to be an ideal reforming kin g. His sons did not enjoy the same reputation. By the mid-1070s, the pope, as leader of the reform movement, had decided

that the church must be independent, not only of lesser lay patrons, but even of rulers. Rulers, formerly seen as Vicars or deputies of Christ, were no such thi ng. They were hardly better than any other laymen. If they dared to invest bisho ps with the symbols of their office, the staff and the ring, it was simony; dema nding homage from bishops and abbots was almost as bad. Since rulers everywhere had a big role in ecclesiastical elections, the pa pacy was making a revolutionary demand. A major result was the investiture contr oversy with the German emperor, which convulsed Germany and Italy with war for h alf a century. William was too much a designated hero of the church to be held to the new standards, especially since the pope had his hands full with the emperor. But W illiam Rufus, once king, faced opposition from the more zealous of his prelates. The conflict was aggravated by personalities. William Rufus, unlike his fa ther, did not give a hang about church reform. He was unwilling even to pretend an interest. William, who was the quintessential warrior-king and a hero of the rising knightly class, cared nothing for anyone who was not a knight. For him, t he church was just one of his possessions, to be exploited like any other. It was an established rule that when there was no bishop or abbot, the rev enues of the bishopric or monastery went to the king. Following the death of Lan franc, Rufus left Canterbury vacant for some years, which must have boosted his income substantially. In 1093, Rufus became very ill, and in an effort to turn aside divine wrat h, promised gifts and concessions to the church. The king allowed the church of Canterbury to elect an archbishop. This was Anselm, abbot of Bec, and a protege of Lanfranc. Like Lanfranc, Anselm was a theologian and scholar of European-wide reputation, a monk of unsullied life, and a convinced reformer. He was to be Wi lliam Rufus' most aggravating adversary. Anselm felt honor-bound to resist Rufus's attacks on the independence of t he church. In 1097, after four years of sparring, Anselm left England without th e king's permission in order to consult with the pope. Rufus made it known that Anselm shouldn't bother to come back. That was where things stood when William R ufus was shot down in the New Forest in the year 1100. The scandal about Anselm' s exile, in fact, was one of the reasons that contemporaries interpreted the kin g's death to God's vengeance on a wicked man. One of Henry I's initial moves upon becoming king was to call Anselm back. The reconciliation between king and archbishop quickly broke down, however. Ans elm returned to England determined to enforce the church's rights. He was partic ularly insistent that the king could not invest bishops with their staffs and ri ngs, or require them to do homage. Anselm refused to recognize any bishops Henry created in this matter. After a bit, Anselm went back into exile. Both English protagonists were t ired enough of fighting that they cast around for a solution. The royal advisors put forward the idea that bishops held two kinds of rights and property. First, there were the spiritualities, things that only a cleric could legitimately own , like tithes and offerings, specifically meant to support the church and its sa craments. The second kind of ecclesiastical property was called the temporalitie s, ordinary rights and lands given to bishops by the king's ancestors. Henry's camp offered to surrender the right of investiture with ring and s taff and all claim on the spiritualities; in return, the bishops should agree to do homage for the temporalities. Anselm was dubious about this compromise, but

the pope Paschal II, jumped at the chance to settle with one of the great kings of the west -- at that point he was on the outs with every important Christian m onarch. Indeed, the English settlement was used as a model for later agreements with the French king and the German emperor. In 1107, Anselm returned home and everybody was happy. The agreement between the king and the pope over the appointment of bishop s was only a limited victory for the reformers. Kings in England, as elsewhere, continued to get their candidates elevated to bishoprics, and to draw upon their talents for their own purposes, just as before. Bishops continued to be the equ ivalent of cabinet ministers or of presidents of crown corporations. But the ending of the investiture controversy established a principle very dear to the reformers. Bishops were not just servants of the crown, at the beck and call of kings and princes. The church was a body with its own rules, rules that even kings had to follow. The guarantor of those rules, the ultimate refere e and legislator, was the pope. The agreement between Paschal II and Henry I was a recognition that the English church was a department of the universal or Roma n church. That church was no longer just an expression or an idea, but a real wo rking organization, with its own law, courts, and rights over property. The victory of the reform papacy, limited as it was, amplified the effects of the Norman Conquest. William I had made England part of a larger state, the remainder of which was on the continent, thus opening England to all sorts of in timate cultural contacts. Anslem and Paschal succeeded in attaching the English church even more clo sely to the western European headquartered in Rome, thus making the church even more than before a tie between England and the wider world beyond. Both processe d made the twelfth century the time when England was less insular than ever befo re or since.

English Government under Henry I Royal policy under William I, William II, and Henry I was dominated by war . The constant continental wars of England's kings had a very definite effec t on English royal government. All three kings were far more secure in England t han in their homeland of Normandy. And government in England was far more develo ped than government in Normandy, or any other continental country. If the kings provided the land with a reasonable level of security and justice -- and they di d -- they themselves enjoyed power and acceptance that any other contemporary Eu ropean ruler would have envied. This meant that the Norman kings could exploit E ngland to support their position in France. The resources and tools were all there: The king owned vast estates directly. His subjects, both English and Norman, owed him military service, as did t he prelates of the church. The assessments and the personnel were in place to collect a direct tax on land, the so-called Danegeld. The king's rights of justice were extensive and, if properly managed, prof itable. An effort towards efficient exploitation of England is particularly notice

able in the time of Henry I. To win the support of his subjects in 1100, when his right to the throne c ould easily have been questioned, Henry promised various measures of good govern ment. Two of them had a drastic effect on his income. First, Henry said he would not take the income of vacant churches which ha d provided William Rufus with perhaps one fifth of his income Second, Henry swore to discontinue charging his barons arbitrarily large s ums for for the right to inherit -- a tax called relief -- or to marry. Henry kept as few of his promises as he could, but he undoubtedly had less money to throw around than Rufus had, and thus had to work harder to raise reve nue. Although I am no fan of Henry, whose record shows that he was greedy and c ruel, I think it likely that his reign of 35 years was something of a turning po int in English history. Henry ruled in a period when the conquering Normans were entering the second and third generations of lordship. It was a period when the established noble families were beginning to think of their baronies and honors as hereditary possessions, pure and simple. Had there been a weak king, it is p ossible that England might have fragmented politically, as it almost did in the time of Edward the Confessor. The service that Henry performed was to keep the m inor tyrants on a strict leash. He preserved and even extended the royal power he had inherited from his N orman and Anglo-Saxon predecessors. Henry's treatment of sheriffs is a good case in point. If the king could control his sheriffs, his grassroots administrators, he could control the country. If he lost control, if sheriffs became independent ma gnates, then his power would be in danger. Royal control of sheriffs had see-sawed over the centuries. In the time of Canute and Edward the Confessor, sheriffs had been overshadowed by powerful ear ls, who had a semi-regal position. William the Conqueror had effectively destroy ed the great earls, even though continued to grant the title, and made the sheri ffs more important again. However, the Conqueror gave the office of sheriff to g reat barons, usually the man who held the most land in a given shire. This was a good tactic for a time of conquest and occupation, but it was easy for such me n to think that their sheriffdoms and the profits therefrom were just another fa mily possession. Henry I realized this danger, and was constantly reminding the sheriffs th at they must obey him, and act as his officers. He was determined to preserve t he fullest extent of his freedom and his own hereditary rights, and to stop othe r men from usurping his rights to add to their family estates. He replaced powe rful local sheriffs with lesser men, men who were not rich or influential enough to defy the royal will. Earls and barons were thus replaced with simple knights , or clerics from the royal household. It was said by contemporary chroniclers that Henry raised men up from the dust to serve him. Henry also supervised his sheriffs directly. The most famous method of doi ng this was the Exchequer, which was founded during his reign. In origin, the Ex chequer was a special session of Henry's council, a gathering of his closest adv isors, to receive from the sheriffs the money they owed the king. There was a se t amount owing from every shire each year, made up of estimated profits from jus

tice and royal estates. The sheriffs would have to pay the amount (called the fa rm of the shire) or produce receipts for expenditures accounting for the differe nce. The Exchequer was a simple, even primitive method of keeping track of this information, and also a technique for keeping the sheriffs on their toes. The significance of the exchequer lies in several things. First, it was the best method of governmental accounting used anywhere in Europe. It was a systematic way to keep track of the royal finances and the perf ormance of the king's most important local agents. Second, it demonstrates the growing use of written records in government i n twelfth century Europe. The written record most applicable to Henry's primitiv e exchequer were the pipe rolls. The pipe rolls were so called because the finan cial parchments at the end of the year were sewed together and then rolled up in to a great cylinder. We only have one pipe roll from the time of Henry I, that o f 1130, but it is clear that there were others before and after it. Third, it is obvious that specialists were necessary to run such an office . This is a period when better-educated clerics ("clerks") were available to st aff the royal government. Such "royal clerks" often made careers in government. Finally, the Exchequer was the first department of the central government to settle down in one location as a permanent body. The Exchequer always met at London, later Westminster, and did not follow the king around. It was the beginn ing of a trend. In Henry's time he was the state. But his own innovations presaged the day when the king's household and the central government would no longer be identic al. As Henry tried and succeeded in taming his sheriffs, and in making them tr uly accountable, so also he worked at extending the king's role in the field of justice. The English court system, as I have sketched it in the past, sounds very s imple and rational: Hundred courts, shire courts, ultimate appeal to the king. T he reality of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was more complex. There were ma ny private courts: franchises granted to important earls or church corporations, manor courts, honour courts. Public courts had become private possessions. Henr y's reign marks the beginning of a royal push to subject the shire and hundred c ourts to closer royal supervision, and to subordinate private courts to royal ju stice. Henry worked very hard at pulling more business into his courts. Some exam ples: Henry greatly expanded the number of cases that could be considered "pleas of the crown." Pleas of the crown were, in pre-Conquest times, such offenses as housebreaking, ambush, neglect of military duty, and breach of the king's speci al peace. In such cases, the king was the offended party, and all fines from tho se found guilty went to the king. Henry increased the pleas of the crown to incl ude thirty-seven different offenses, including matters like rape, treason, and r obbery, but also purely financial matters, like not paying Danegeld or concealin g the discovery of buried treasure, which belonged to the crown. To make the most profit out of this expansion of royal justice, Henry comm issioned traveling royal justices to go out to shire courts to hear the pleas of

the crown. Nor were the direct fines the only method of making money off of justice. He could charge for access to the curia regis, the court held in the king's pres ence, or for access to his most important justices. This was very profitable for a simple reason, because any decision reached there (for example, over a proper ty dispute) was final. It was not unknown for bribery to influence the outcome, and this was yet another source of profits. A last way that Henry made money should be mentioned. This was the traditi onal method of selling privileges. Many people wished to buy privileges, but I w ill mention only one set of customers, towns. To pursue their occupations, town speople needed greater freedom from exactions and labor services than the averag e peasant. They were in a position to pay for that freedom, too. Henry, as the lord of most English boroughs, sold charters of privileges t hat guaranteed burgesses -- the richer townsfolk who held land and paid taxes -their right to make wills, to marry freely, and to buy and sell urban propertie s, etc. I have portrayed the government of Henry I as one in which just about anyt hing was for sale. I do not think this is an unfair portrait. But I would not li ke to give the impression that Henry was unique. Indeed, he was typical of 12thcentury princes, if a bit ahead of the pack. Because of greater prosperity, the existence of a large cash economy, the growing number of well-educated clerics t rained in law and logic, strong central governments were now easier to erect tha n at any time since the fall of Rome. Lords everywhere were selling privileges a nd justice to anyone who would buy. Peasants, townsmen, church communities were willing to pay for peace and order and freedom from arbitrary harassment if they thought their prince could guarantee those things. Henry was in a position to m ake a killing in the market. He had much to sell, and willing buyers. His motivation was hardly altruistic -- yet his greed and his harshness co ntributed to welding England together more securely as a single political commun ity. For all of his hangings, mutilations, and castrations of criminals, he was missed by many when he was gone, when things went to hell in a handbasket. Ironically, Henry's single failure, which almost undermined everything he built, was beyond his control. Despite producing a vast number of bastards, he o nly had one legitimate son, William. William drowned in the Channel when his shi p went down in 1120. Church law, now stronger than before, made impossible the s uccession of an illegitimate son, such as the respected Robert, earl of Gloucest er. Henry made all his barons swear to accept as their queen his daughter Matild a, the widow of the German emperor Henry V (and thus known as "the Empress"). When Henry of England died in 1135, the settlement came undone. Too many b arons could not accept a woman as ruler, and they found an alternative candidate . Civil war broke out.

The Civil War of Stephen and Matilda If Henry I's reign saw the building of bureaucracy and energetic royal con trol over the kingdom, his power like that of previous kings was a personal one that depended on his own vigor, intelligence, and judgement - - and perhaps most of all, on his ability to inspire fear in those who might cross him. The future of Henry's realm -- a realm thought of as a family possession and not as a comm unity of citizens -- depended on his ability to pass it on to a suitable and und oubted heir.

Henry lost his only legitimate son in 1120. So as his reign drew to a clo se, he tried to gain the acknowledgment of his major vassals that his daughter, Matilda, also known as Maud, would succeed to his lands and powers. Henry was able to obtain oaths of recognition both in England and Normandy , but not honest support for his proposal. War was a man's game, and the warrio r aristocracy that owned almost everything saw no role for women on the battlefi eld. How then could Matilda be an effective king and duke? Then there was the matter of her husband -- or rather, her second husband who was Geoffrey, count of Anjou. Anjou was the traditional enemy of Normandy. T here was always war between the two countries. It appeared to the Normans that i f they acknowledged Matilda as their queen, then they would get Geoffrey as thei r king. And that was intolerable. So there was a search for another candidate. It did not take them long to settle on Matilda's cousin Thibaut, or Theobald, count of Blois. He was the son of one of the Conqueror's daughters, a lord of some consequence, well known and well liked by the Norman and English aristocracy. The only problem was that he d idn't seem very interested. In December 1135, King Henry I died when Matilda was in Anjou and not in a position to secure an immediate coronation. So there was a scramble for the thr one. But the one who scrambled was not Count Thibaut -- it was his younger broth er, Stephen. Unlike Matilda, he was in England when Henry died. His brother Henry was b ishop of Winchester, and thus in a position to help Stephen seize the royal trea sury, which was still kept in that city. Bishop Henry also swayed the church in his brother's direction. So at the end of December, Stephen got himself crowned by the archbishop of Canterbury, who by tradition had the right to consecrate En glish kings. Soon after this, Stephen crossed to Normandy and rounded off his co up d'etat by gaining the support of the Norman aristocracy. There were those who had reason to support the empress, as Matilda (former ly married to the German emperor Henry V) still called herself, either from prin ciple, family attachment, or self-interest: David, king of Scots; Matilda's ille gitimate half-brother Robert, earl of Gloucester, who was highly capable and hig hly respected; and Matilda's own husband Geoffrey of Anjou, who was well placed to put capture Normandy. Matilda's party, or potential party, was not negligible . The Angevins (people from Anjou) attacked Normandy and the Scots northern England, but they plundered indiscriminately and undermined Matilda's cause. Stephen's most dangerous opponent was Robert of Gloucester, a man who migh t well have been king in another century, who, once he declared for his half sis ter, served as the center of a powerful alliance in the west of England. Stephen aggravated his problems by being, most of the time, too nice to co ntrol his subordinates. As the

Henry II And His Sons

Henry, Eleanor and their Empire We begin the second half of this course with the reign of Henry II, grands on of Henry I through his daughter Matilda ("the Empress"), son of Count Geoffre y of Anjou. Henry is the first of the "Angevin" or "Plantagenet" dynasty: Angevin is derived from Anjou, and the name Plantagenet came from the broom plan t, which was Henry's father's badge or symbol. Henry II came to power (in 1154) facing a number of challenges -- for inst ance, rebuilding royal authority in England after a period of civil war. At th e same time, the mid-twelfth century was a a dynamic and interesting period, one when a talented and determined ruler -- and Henry was both -- could make a big mark. Let's begin this lecture by sketching some of the main features of the 12t h century as they affected England. England at this time was very much affected by important pan-European deve lopments. During the the century and a half following the Norman invasion of England (1066 to 1216) the rulers of England had extensive continental holdings. During the same period European culture as a whole was becoming more vigor ous, both materially and culturally: this is sometimes called the Twelfth Centu ry Renaissance. Economic factors: Compared to other parts of the world, northern and western Europe had alwa ys before been economically backward. Its agriculture was less productive than that of the older countries of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and as fa r as trade went, it was in a subordinate position to countries more centrally lo cated in the "Old World." Which was the chicken and which was the egg is hard to say: did unproductive agriculture doom northern Europe to a stagnant commer cial economy, or was the lack of markets responsible for stagnant agriculture? In the 11th and 12th centuries, both agriculture and commerce increased dr amatically. In agriculture, the development of new tools -- especially better plows -made practical better yields out of the same lands. Indeed, wastelands that h ad seldom or ever been cultivated were brought under the plow, and forests were cleared. There was an increase in population, and work for them to do. At the same time, trade of all sorts, in staples as well as luxuries, inc reased. More people could buy and more could live by selling. This is a great pe riod for urban growth. Specialists in trade and industry gathered together in ol d towns or in brand new ones, and recreated an urban style of living that had ha rdly existed in most of western Europe since the sixth century. As a result, Western Europe as a whole expanded. No longer were the Latin Christian countries victimized by pagan or Muslim neighbors; on the contrary, th ey became the aggressors. The first Crusade was launched in 1095, and expedition s to the Middle East continued until nearly 1400. Spanish Christians were simult aneously conquering the Muslim-ruled part of their own country. And the conquest and Christianization of the pagans of the Baltic began in the twelfth century.

The new prosperity had definite cultural effects. It was not a simple matt er of renewed contact with more developed Greek and Arabic cultures. The availab ility of resources made experiments possible. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw a renaissance in Latin and classica l learning, the revival of logic as a method of dealing with intellectual, relig ious, and practical problems. Such learning, although still restricted to a smal l minority, became much more common. An international intellectual class (made u p well-educated clerics) came into existence, and an international networks of s chools was created. Our universities owe their origins to this period. Nor was culture restricted to the Latin-literate clergy. The same time saw the knightly aristocracy of western Europe, up till now a pretty rough bunch, d evelop its own literary tradition. The first chivalric epics, like the Song of R oland, were entirely devoted to war, very much as Beowulf had been. Soon enough, however, a more courtly element crept in. Poems were devoted to both adventure and love, and presented a picture of the knight as a tender lover as well as a t ough fighter. Thus the troubadour poetry and the romances, which were tales of a dventure and love usually set in a fictional or fictionalized land where wonders were common. The romance tradition early on became attached to the legend of Ki ng Arthur -- the most influential stories of Arthur and his Round Table were inv ented in this period to please the knightly class -- though many worldly clerics both wrote and appreciated them. This is also the era when the knightly class adopted the tournament as the ir central ritual of prowess, courtesy, and what we think of as chivalry. All of this progress and change had taken place despite a general politica l fragmentation -- or perhaps because of it. The new, smaller, but more cohesive communities that had grown up in the ruins of the empire of Charlemagne provide d an environment where variety and experimentation could flourish without a lot of unwelcome attention from despotic emperors. Western European rulers in genera l did not have the power to be despotic. Whatever the reasons, Western Europe's culture in the twelfth century was, on the aristocratic and clerical level, as international as it had been in late Roman times. England participated in it fully. For instance, the only Englishma n to become pope was elected in the time of Henry II. Henry II and and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, helped the process along . They were king and queen of England -- but they were both born and raised on t he continent, held important ancestral properties there, spent most of their liv es there. They were living manifestations of intense contact between England and the continent. Henry II's intimate political involvement in French affairs is rather stag gering to the modern mind, which thinks of England and France as nation-states o f quite distinct character. His paternal inheritance, his maternal inheritance, and his wife's property, taken together, amounted to a claim to nearly half of t he kingdom of France. This territory, with England added in, is often called the Angevin Empire by modern historians (no one called it that in the 12th century) . Let's start with the most familiar part of the so-called empire, the mater nal inheritance. This is not quite an accurate designation, because Matilda live d on for years after Henry became king. In any case, Henry through luck and the hard work of his parents, had succeeded to the position held by his mother's fat her, Henry I. Henry II was king of England, and enjoyed an ill defined overlords hip over Wales and northern Britain. During his lifetime, Henry was able to incr ease the effectiveness of that vague overlordship. As ruler of England, he was p

otentially very powerful, if he could enforce the kind of obedience that his gra ndfather had enjoyed. Henry II was also duke of Normandy through his mother. Nor mandy before 1100 had been a bellicose place, a good source of tough warriors fo r its duke, but a difficult land to control. Henry I had changed that. Normandy had become one of the most firmly governed of the French principalities. Here ag ain, Henry II had great prospects if he could get his act together. Finally this maternal inheritance included the traditional predominance of Normandy over som e of the neighboring areas, such as Brittany. There was no institutional basis f or this predominance, so it was unstable. From his father, Geoffrey, Henry II inherited the county of Anjou and the attached areas of Maine (often in the past disputed with Normandy) and Touraine. This Angevin principality was, like the Norman one, a strongly governed one. He nry's paternal ancestors had been a crafty, ruthless bunch, who firmly nailed do wn everything they were able to grab. The Angevin lands were no doubt prosperous in this period, too. They were located on the Loire river, a miserable place to be when Vikings used it as a raiding highway, but in the more peaceful twelfth century it must have been quite wealthy. The third part of Henry's empire was his wife's great principality, the du chy of Aquitaine (also known in part as Gascony). This was an entirely different kettle of fish from Anjou or the Anglo-Norman realm. It was big, it was prosper ous, it was culturally very active, but it was not strongly governed. Eleanor's territory was in fact a number of distinct counties and lordships. Despite the lofty title of duke that her father had enjoyed, he had never exercised the kind of power over his diverse lordships that Henry I or Geoffrey of Anjou had in th eir lands. The sole unifying factor holding the duchy together was the person of the ruler, who held various rights in various places. There were no unifying in stitutions that covered the entire principality. Thus Eleanor's part of Henry's empire demanded special attention from its ruler. The Angevin Empire was not an institution, but a personal ascendancy. In m any parts of it, Henry had no more than a bundle of diverse rights and propertie s, which he could only exploit through constant hard riding from one corner of h is empire to another and, perhaps, the aid of a few trusted deputies. The most important of Henry's deputies was his own wife Eleanor. She playe d a key role in English politics for nearly half a century. Eleanor came from a family that was not only rich and powerful, but fashio nable as well. Her grandfather, the ninth Duke William of Aquitaine, was one of the very first troubadours, writing erotic and courtly poetry in the dialect of southern France. Thus the Aquitainian court was one of the first places that the new chivalric culture of the twelfth century appeared. Eleanor herself is often credited with a central role in spreading the ideals of courtly, that is refine d, love to northern France and England, on no very strong evidence. But I think we can take it for granted that Eleanor was a patron of good living, southern Fr ench style, wherever she went. Eleanor was the only child of William X of Aquitaine. William had decided that Eleanor's principality could not survive unless she was married to a lord of sufficient prestige and power. His choice was Louis VII of France. As king a nd ultimate overlord of France, Louis also had a paramount legal position that w ould help him defend the integrity of Aquitaine from other greedy types. It was a good plan, but personal factors and chance sabotaged it. Louis an d Eleanor did not get along very well. In part it may have been a difference of style. The court of Paris was very pious and took much of its tone from prominen t monks, first Abbot Suger and then Bernard of Clairvaux, the famous promoter of the strict Cistercian order. Bernard in particular disapproved of Eleanor's wor

ldly ways, and tried to shut her out of politics. Also, her free and easy personal style gave rise to a scandals -- notably the rumor that she had committed adultery with her uncle in the course of the Se cond Crusade, which she took part in along with Louis. The marriage probably wou ld have survived, however, if a male heir had been born. Eleanor had only daught ers, though, and by 1152, both Louis and Eleanor were fed up with each other. Th ey got a divorce in the only way it was possible in the twelfth century -- after fifteen years, they suddenly discovered that they were too closely related for their marriage to be valid, and got the pope to annul it. a new uke of e that d that ope. It is significant that as soon as the annulment came through, Eleanor made alliance with the second most powerful man in France, Henry II, who was d Normandy and count of Anjou and about to win the English throne. I imagin she felt that she could teach this promising young man a thing or two, an their combined properties would make their court the premier court of Eur

In the early years, the new partnership worked well. Eleanor was a key fig ure in Henry's regime. Without the personal loyalty of the Aquitanian aristocrac y, Henry had no chance in that part of his empire; with her, he had a fighting c hance. But Eleanor was not just a figurehead, she was an active partner -- Henry entrusted the English regency to her more than once when he had to be on the co ntinent. Eleanor also provided Henry with not one but four male heirs. As the years went on, however, Henry got tired of Eleanor. Henry, who had been glad to have a well-endowed and politically experienced wife when he was e ighteen, wanted when he was thirty or so to be the absolute boss. His willfulnes s towards others is well attested. So Henry took lovers and shut Eleanor out of his confidence. Many of the troubles that afflicted Henry in the second half of his reign came from the alienation between him and Eleanor. She found ways to ma ke trouble for him. Henry found it difficult to deal with his sons once they gre w up, and Eleanor was always there to encourage them to revolt. Henry imprisoned Eleanor off and on, but he could never afford to get rid of her -- the Aquitain e was hers, not his. But in the 1150s and the early 1160s, there was no rift between Henry and Eleanor, and they could concentrate on turning their theoretical powers into a r eality. In these years, Henry's policy in France, surprisingly enough, hinged on maintaining good relations with Eleanor's first husband, Louis of France, who w as his overlord in Normandy, Anjou and elsewhere in his continental possessions. The perennial problem of kings and princes in the middle ages was to maint ain control over their vassals, their military subordinates, on whose loyalty th eir effective power depended. From the vassal's point of view, the problem was t o gain recognition from the prince that the fiefs he, the vassal, held, were her editary possessions, not to be taken from his family for any trivial reasons. Th ere was a conflict of interest here. To resolve it lords and vassals were evolvi ng during the twelfth century a code of conduct, usually called feudal law, whic h specified their respective rights and duties. For instance, feudal custom established that there were certain circumstan ces in which a vassal was entitled to revolt against his lord -- but any other t ype of betrayal allowed the lord to confiscate the vassal's fief. Since Henry was the lord of innumerable vassals, it was in his interest to encourage them to observe this feudal code. Thus it was necessary for him to se t a good example to them. Henry was the vassal, many times over, of the French k ing. He felt it incumbent upon him to be a good vassal. So Henry was the first E

nglish king in a long time to swear fealty for Normandy and his other French ter ritories. There was a time when Henry passed up a rich conquest rather than be seen as defying his lord the king illegitimately. In 1159, Henry was in a position to seize the county of Toulouse in the far south of France; Eleanor's family had a long-standing claim to the area. Count Raymond of Toulouse appealed to his over lord, Louis, for support. Louis had no army big enough to beat Henry, but entere d Toulouse anyway, so that an attack on the city would be an attack on him. Henr y backed off. Much of Henry's later life was blighted by his struggles with his own wife and sons, which involved him in wars he could never finally win. But the first decade or so of his reign were a great success. He was able to act the part of the greatest prince in Europe, more or less . This was possible because Henry, like the earlier Norman kings, was able to use the revenues he enjoyed as king of England to finance an adventurous policy in France. How did Henry manage this? Last we looked, England was in chaos and roya l authority had been sorely diminished by the rivalries of Empress Matilda and K ing Stephen. To understand Henry's position, and gauge his considerable succes s, we have to look at how he restored royal power in England.

Law and Administration under Henry II In our last lecture we discussed Henry II in his role as a French prince t rying to build and maintain a great empire out of the various territories that h is parents and his wife had given him. This is probably how contemporaries, and likely Henry himself, viewed his efforts and career. Yet Henry's historical reputation in England derives mainly from another a spect of his activity. Henry is the father of the common law of England. What is the common law? The older meaning of the word is the simpler. It m eans that there is, or should be, one law, royal law, for all English people. Th e phrase common law has a second meaning as well. It means the indigenous system of principles, procedures and precedents that evolved in England and which is t he basis for the legal systems of Britain, the USA, most of Canada, and other En glish-speaking countries. Common law is distinct from Roman or civil law which s urvives today, in a form modified in medieval and modern times, in much of conti nental Europe, in Louisiana, and Quebec. Henry's legal initiatives lie at the basis of the common law system. His o wn goal was to enforce the ideal of the common law in its first sense -- and in this he was largely successful, since from his time royal justice had a monopoly over almost all serious crimes. But the various solutions he and his advisors c reated for the problems of the 12th century were good enough to allow for the de velopment of the common law in the second sense, of a law system. Henry became a great legal innovator not because he had any great ambition s in that direction, but because of the specific political situation that he fac ed when he became king in 1154. This situation can be summarized under three points. Point one: By the twelfth century, following a long period of chaotic poli

tical competition, things had settled down a bit: strongpoints had been built, p olitical units had been created, ruling families had become established dynastie s. Rulers not only waged war on each other, but also competed administratively - each ruler sought to create a body of officials who could carry out his will w ithout resort to force. This administrative competition centered on the right of justice, because no ruler was a ruler unless he could gain the consent of his s ubjects to accept his judgements in disputed manners. Henry faced this challenge in an acute form. He held title to vast lands. Could he actually enforce his peace and justice in them, and make his rule a rea lity, or would effective power be acquired by his vassals on the spot? Point two concerns England specifically. A tradition of strong government and effective if harsh royal justice had been thrown into doubt by nineteen year s of civil war. His claim to the throne had been accepted by the greater lords l argely because they feared to lose what they had gained if unrestrained competit ion between them continued. They wanted a king to give stability to the country. Lesser members of the political community hoped that a strong king would give f airer justice than the magnates, unsupervised, would. Thus in England there was a great desire for justice, for an alternative to brute force as a way of settli ng disputes and restraining violence. Point three is Henry's own desire to restore the royal prerogative, the ki ng's personal power, to the state it was in the days of King Henry I. The "good old customs of King Henry I" was the phrase that justified Henry's regime. It wa s a phrase with a great deal of appeal to his English subjects. For Henry II, t he appeal to the order of his grandfather's time was also a claim to his rightfu l inheritance. Thus Henry was much occupied, all his life, in defining and defending roya l rights. Two examples: The destruction of "adulterine castles". These were castles built without royal license in the time of Stephen. Their existence weakened royal authority i n the English countryside, and Henry very determinedly got rid of them. He made sure that sheriffs, who had fallen under the domination of local e arls, were recognized as royal officials, just as in Henry I's time. Henry also established that earl was a titular honor, not an office and not a claim to terr itorial jurisdiction. A third instance deserves more commentary: military obligation. Any me dieval king had to be very concerned with the enforcement of his subjects to fig ht (under certain defined circumstances). Henry energetically asserted what he saw as his rights in this area, redefining things to his advantage when he coul d. One of the mainstays of Norman royal power had been the obligation of tena nts-in-chief (direct tenants of the king) to fight as knights in the king's army , accompanied by a certain number of their own tenants. This was called "knigh t service." This obligation had become imprecise over the years. In 1166, Henry held an inquest or investigation into the knight service owed by the military and cle rical aristocracy to the king. This was in part a fiscal measure. Magnates who se great-grandfathers had been glad to fight were now just as happy to stay home and pay "scutage" or shield-money instead of performing their knight service. Henry was happy to have the money if they took that option. Henry knew, or at least suspected, that many of his great lords had enfeof fed more knights than the number they had formerly owed to his grandfather. So i

n the inquest he asked each tenant-in-chief how many knights he had owed Henry I and how many he had enfeoffed since then. It was Henry's intention to make them serve with the higher number of knights, or pay scutage for them. He also want ed to establish how many "knight's fees," fiefs that could support a knight, the re were in England so that aristocratic property could be taxed systematically. (Knight's fees after his time became a standard assessment unit for taxation, replacing some of the obligation formerly assessed on hides and hundreds.) Though Henry was interested in taxing fiefs and using them to raise troops , he was not content to exploit only the military aristocracy. At a later date, Henry required every free man, whether he was a knight or a vassal or not, to h ave certain weapons to use in the king's service. Feudal service and the obligat ions of vassalage was an important part of royal power, but not the sum total of it. Henry thought of himself as the king of all the people, all the free people . In other words, they were all his to exploit. The inquest of 1166 is just one example of how Henry shook things up. It also shows that he could go too far. He was only able to use the result of his inquest to collect scutage at the higher rate once, but then baronial and episco pal pressure made him back off. This shows that even as pushy a king as Henry II could not go too far beyond the consensus of the upper class as to what was rea sonable. In fact, Henry had to make his innovations in consultation with bishops, a bbots, and his most important tenants-in-chief. Many of his most sweeping change s were made in council with his vassals, so that they could discuss and approve changes in taxation, justice, or other government policies. On the other hand, Henry almost always got what he wanted out of such coun cils. We should ask why. I've already started sketching a picture of Henry a s a powerful and energetic king. How did an 18-year-old attain this position a fter an era of civil war? An important reason that Henry quickly became an effective king was that he offered the English upper class a stability that most wanted. Let us look at a specifically legal innovation that illustrates how royal self-interest and the interest of landowners, great and small, went hand in hand . One of the issues that exercised the rich was legal protection for their t itle to land. This issue of security of property was much on people's minds beca use during the civil war lots of land had changed hand by force, and everyone ha d reason to worry about holding on to what they had. Even the restoration of tr aditional legal norms wouldn't solve this worry, because it called for trial by battle to settle questions of landownership. Henry and his officers devised a number of standard writs, or standard leg al procedures that provided free tenants a certain security. The writ of novel disseisin. Someone who had been recently dispossessed (d isseized) by force could buy this writ, which commanded the sheriff or royal jus tices to call together a jury of local men, who under oath would declare if inde ed the plaintiff had been recently dispossessed. If the jury said he had, he got the land back, with no questions. The writ of mort d'ancestor had a jury a man's claim to a hereditary tenur e. If a man's ancestor had held the land on his day of death, and the plaintiff was his closest heir, the plaintiff got the land.

Of course these writs did not solve all land problems. The man who had sei zed the land might say that he had taken it because he had legal right to it. Th is more complicated question of legal right as opposed to simple possession was settled by a long complicated procedure called the Grand Assize, which also invo lved a jury. But even the Grand Assize was an improvement over trial by battle, and it produced a permanent record of who owned the land. The Grand assize and the various possessory writs were a popular innovatio n because they were simple, clear-cut ways of settling upper-class disputes over land, possession of which made them the upper class in the first place. They we re also a great boost to royal power. It made the king the ultimate protector of all free men against their feudal lords, if any, and thus expanded the jurisdic tion of royal courts at the expense of feudal courts. It forged a direct link be tween the king and the whole knightly class, at the expense of earls and barons. Juries were a key device in Henry II's legal system. They were not new -similar panels had settled disputes in the past. The main use of the jury was to provide the royal government with information on which judgements could be made , not usually bodies with the power to make judgements. But Henry II made extens ive use of them in his reforms of the criminal justice system. There was a feeling in the early part of Henry II's reign that crime was g etting out of control. (In the aftermath of civil war there were even more goon s, thugs and bandits around than usual.) Part of the problem was the cumbersome legal system. It depended on the sw orn accusations of individuals to bring criminals before the courts, and this co uld be risky for the accuser. If the accused was found innocent, the accuser was punished. Also, the traditional methods of finding guilt, ordeal and oath-helping, w ere falling into disfavor. The ordeal appealed to God's judgement by throwing th e accused into cold water to see if he floated, or subjected him or her to some other test. Oath-helping involved the accused finding a certain number of respec table supporters to swear to his or her trustworthiness. The intellectual curren ts of the 12th centuries cast doubt on both methods. The vulnerability of oath-h elping to manipulation is obvious. But deeply religious men were equally suspici ous of the ordeal. They began to feel that the appeal to God was unworthy, and t hat human justice was and should be sufficient for human problems. Indeed, confi dence in human judgement, especially among rulers and their judges, was high. Hu man judgement would be more successful in bringing the bad guys to book. Henry II did not replace the traditional methods, but he did try to supple ment them to make justice more effective. His reign introduced the grand jury, s till used in the United States to indict defendants, that is, to determine that they should be tried. In 1166, after a large royal council on the issue of crime , juries from every hundred and village were summoned to the county court to dec lare the names of those reputed to be guilty of murder, larceny, or harboring cr iminals, since 1154, when Henry became king. The sheriff was to arrest these peo ple and they were to be tried before special touring royal justices. These peopl e were still tried by ordeal, and those found guilty were hung or mutilated as t he law required. Ten years later juries were given the power, or perhaps the obligation, to identify men of bad reputation who passed the ordeal to leave the country anywa y. This is the very beginning of the power of the jury to judge -- the evolution of the jury into a body that decided guilt or innocence took another century or so.

Nowadays, the jury is usually, and quite rightly, seen as an adjunct of de mocracy -- Anglo-American juries contrast with the powerful judges of the Roman law tradition, who make all the decisions themselves. Twelfth century juries, ho wever, were not expressions of popular political power -- or at least not simply that. Local people were being compelled to co-operate with royal justices to en force the king's peace. In many cases the people may have been happy to cooperat e, but others probably resented what was an onerous intrusion into the lives of local communities. The use of juries in Henry II's time, like the use of juries or inquests by earlier kings like William the Conqueror or Charlemagne, was an e xpression of royal power at the grassroots level. (If also perhaps an acknowle dgment of how much power remained at the grassroots level.) On the level of the realm as a whole, Henry's consultative assemblies of b arons and great churchmen played a similar role, that of magnifying the royal po wer. Occasional resistance to or criticism of royal policy was possible. Usually , however, people were called together to hear the proclamation of the royal wil l by the king or his officers. Thereafter, the people were supposed to help impl ement that will, with no backchat. That juries and parliaments might become expr essions of the popular will, bodies that might oppose the king, that was no part of the king's plan. I should mention briefly that the use of specifically appointed royal just ices, both itinerant ones and permanent ones at Westminster, was a big part of m aking royal justice available to all. Henry establishment of a permanent court a t Westminster, so that plaintiffs did not necessarily have to follow the king ar ound, was very popular. This court became in time the court of common pleas. Henry's innovations, however popular or unpopular they may have been at th e time, were not intentionally the foundation of our democratic system, or of ou r legal system with its presumption of innocence and commitment to due process. Rather those policies were the tools of what can be called Angevin autocracy. He nry, as perhaps the most successful of twelfth-century princes, was using the ne w tools of literacy and sophisticated legal doctrine, the learned men produced b y the schools and by his own court, and the possibilities of an increasingly mon etary economy to make himself one of the strongest kings England ever had. Because of the foundations he laid, royal power continued to increase in t he reigns of his sons Richard and John. Eventually it would provoke a reaction. But in the short term, Henry won all his battles, save his battle with the churc h -- the one organization that could match, or overmatch Henry in legal and inst itutional resources.

Becket and Other Foes In this lecture, we will talk about the setbacks that Henry suffered in th e latter part of his life. Perhaps powerful men who like Henry are bent on innovation must create pow erful opposition. Henry did indeed create some opposition of this sort. His most dangerous enemies, however, were personal ones -- and Henry must bear a great d eal of responsibility for turning friends and family into implacable foes. The f irst of these enemies was Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury. The others we re Henry's wife Eleanor and his sons, Henry, Richard, Geoffrey and John. The conflict between Henry and Thomas Becket could be seen as a conflict o f principle, but it became a major crisis because of the personalities of the tw o major antagonists. Let's look at the matter of principle first. Henry spent his reign systematically building up royal power in England.

These efforts brought him up against the other great organization with English i nterest, the church. For about a century, a series of reforming popes had been fighting to make the clergy independent of all laymen and women, and to make themselves, as the head of the clergy, the undisputed overlords of the church and its property. The justification for this program was of course the usual one for any ecclesiastic al reform, namely, the purification of the church. Previous generations of reformers had often relied on royal support, but t welfth century reformers felt that royal control of the church led to corruptio n, and so they sought to reduce this influence. In England they had quite a bit of success during Henry I's and Stephen's reign in gaining more autonomy for the English clergy a greater role for the pope in refereeing ecclesiastical disput es in England. Henry II had come to the throne as the restorer of Henry I's good governme nt, when it came to the church, this implied a rolling back of the privileges of the biggest interest group in the kingdom. Thus, some trouble was inevitable. H enry, however, would probably have got most of what he wanted from the English c hurch if it had not been for Becket. Reforming ideology was very attractive to m ost ranking churchmen, but it was new. The habit of working with and for the kin g was very old. Most English bishops were willing to go to some lengths to accom modate Henry as he went about restoring royal influence over the church. This wa s a normal way of behaving. What was surprising was the way Thomas Becket acted. Thomas Becket has bee n recognized for centuries as a martyr. It takes an effort to realize that he wa s, at the time, the English bishop least likely to become a saint. No would have imagined him even as a principled defender of ecclesiastical liberties. For mos t of his life he was a careerist, pure and simple, a man who through ability, lu ck, and the favor of powerful patrons had made it to the big time. Becket's father was a London merchant who later fell on hard times. Luck a nd a family friend got him a job as a clerk in the household of Archbishop Theob ald of Canterbury, and while acting as liaison between Theobald and Henry when t he new king came to England in 1154. The young king took a liking to the older m an, and soon enough he had made Becket chancellor of England. It was an importan t office, if not of the first rank. Becket became a wealthy man when Henry had him appointed archdeacon of Can terbury, in other words CEO of the diocese. Becket, like many royal servants enj oyed the privileges and the revenues of a church office without actually perform ing the duties -- this was entrusted to low-paid deputies, who did the unpleasan t jobs. The early Thomas Becket, although a member of the clergy and holding churc h office, was a worldly man and recognized as such. He was well known for his lo ve of display and his frank enjoyment of wealth, and for being one of the king's favorite drinking buddies. Yet no one was shocked: he was a common enough type , a professional administrators and a courtier who had got his training in the c hurch and was employed by it. If he showed no aptitude for a spiritual life, no one was surprised. After all he was not a priest or a monk. Henry trusted his judgement and loyalty. At one point he gave command of a royal army to Becket, the one that attacked Toulouse unsuccessfully. (This mili tary role did raise a few eyebrows in ecclesiastical circles. Clerics were not s upposed to wield the sword.) So when Archbishop Theobald died in 1162, Henry dec

ided that his chancellor should succeed to the highest position in the English c hurch. This was shocking. A worldly archdeacon was one thing, but a courtier bein g made archbishop was another matter entirely. Two other things about Becket made the bishops uneasy. First, he had no gr eat amount of education. He had gone to the schools of Paris but never finished any course. Second, he had been an ally of the kings in bullying the churches fo r war taxes. They expected him to be the king's tool, pure and simple. Henry got his way, and Becket was consecrated. But very soon thereafter, t he new archbishop began to obstruct the royal will. Those who think of him as a saint believe he underwent a conversion from his worldly life. The less sympathe tic see him as a proud man who had always been a subordinate but now had the opp ortunity to be his own boss. Finally an issue came up that brought the two old friends into direct conf lict. This was the matter of criminal clerics, "criminous clerks." In the twelfth century, clerics accused of crimes, even violent ones, were supposed to be tried before ecclesiastical courts. The punishments imposed on t hose found guilty in these church courts were notably milder than those imposed by lay courts. Murders and rapists were not hung, but merely expelled from the c lergy and required to do penance. Many lay people objected to this double standard, especially since a large number of men living ordinary lives, no less worldly if less prominent than the early Thomas Becket, had been ordained into some minor clerical rank, and could claim the "privilege of clergy" -- the privilege of being tried by a church cou rt. The basic qualification was the ability to read simple Latin. That such peop le could get away with murder offended lay opinion. Henry proposed to eliminate or modify this privilege of clergy so that ser ious criminals could not get off with simple penances. Most of the bishops were willing to make some accommodation, but Thomas, to everyone's surprise, stood fo r absolute clerical independence in this matter. But his tactics were poorly cho sen. He not only earned Henry's lasting enmity, but alienated the other bishops by first convincing them to follow his lead, then capitulating to the king, then going back to a stubborn opposition. He earned a reputation as a thoughtless ho thead. Henry, who felt betrayed by Becket, decided to destroy him, and harassed h im in every possible way. Becket finally fled to the continent, where he lived f or years in exile, under the discreet protection of the king of France, Louis VI I. Despite Louis's self-interested support, Becket was almost isolated. The Engl ish bishops were against him. The pope, Alexander III, did little to help. The p ope had other worries. He was fighting the German emperor and the emperor's anti pope, and he needed Henry's support and recognition. If Becket was isolated, the exile of the chief bishop of the kingdom was a great inconvenience to everybody concerned, and in 1170, the two former friends , now deadly enemies, were convinced to kiss and make up -- quite literally, sin ce the kiss of peace was an important sign of reconciliation. It soon became evident that no real reconciliation had taken place. When B ecket returned to England, royal officials treated him like a traitor and obstru cted his efforts to reclaim his episcopal property. Becket was equally unwilling to let bygones be bygones, and pursued his feud against some of the other bisho ps. The unresolved crisis stretched nerves to the breaking point.

In December of 1170, an enraged Henry, then in Normandy, asked why no one would rid him of that pesky priest. Four of his knights took him at his word, cr ossed the channel, and murdered the archbishop in his cathedral. Becket's death turned him from an unpopular maverick churchman into a mart yr. He was no longer a stubborn politician, the champion of a controversial caus e, but a myth, a timeless symbol of a righteous man struck down by a tyrant. He became a heavenly intercessor showering miracles down on those who visited his s hrine in Canterbury. It was now Henry who was on the defensive. Eventually the king had to capitulate on the issue of criminal clerks; ind eed, in 1174, he performed a dramatic public penance by being flogged at the tom b of the newly canonized St. Thomas Becket. In the long view, it is easy to say that Henry's real troubles began with the murder of Becket. But for three years, Henry had cruised along with no grea t problems. What tripped Henry up was his bad relations with his own progeny. In the early 1170s, Henry and Eleanor's four sons were growing up, and th e question of succession was being raised. There were no set rules for successio n to royal or princely titles, and Henry's sons could reasonably expect him to m ake provision for all of them out of his vast dominions. In 1169, Henry made his first will. His eldest son, Henry, was to be king of England, duke of Normandy, and count of Anjou. In other words, as first-born, he would get the paternal in heritance. The second son, Richard, later called Lionheart, would get the matern al inheritance of Aquitaine. Geoffrey, the third son, was married to the heiress of Brittany, and would thus be a duke too. Henry followed up this will by having the young Henry crowned king of Engl and, thus making him his partner in power -- at least in name. Actually the olde r Henry very reluctant to let his sons exercise any real power. That was one pro blem with the settlement. Another was that John, the youngest son, had been left out. In 1173, Henry II decided to tinker with his will to give John some proper ty at the expense of the young Henry. This act almost brought his whole empire d own around his ears. Henry and Richard, with the encouragement of their mother E leanor, created a grand alliance of the elder Henry's enemies. These included th e king of France, who still feared his mighty vassal, and the king of Scotland, whose claim to the earldom of Northumbria had long been frustrated. There were a lso three major English earls and a number of barons who hoped by supporting the young king to loosen the grip of the old one. The count of Flanders jumped onto the pig-pile too. Henry II was faced nearly simultaneous invasions in Northumbria and Norma ndy and risings in Anjou, the Aquitaine, and Brittany. Putting down such a host of enemies was no easy matter. The chief reason that Henry survived is that most politically conscious pe ople in his empire considered him a good lord and saw the revolt of the young ki ng and the invasions as simply an outbreak of lawlessness. Yet Henry's danger was very real; it was during the revolt that he made hi s dramatic penance at Thomas Becket's tomb, which may have been cynical politics or attempt at gaining some supernatural insurance; but in the end, Henry won. H is opponents were reduced to his mercy. Yet all the victories in the world could not create peace within his ambit

ious family. There was jealousy among them all, and no easy solution to the prob lem of the succession. In the 1183, the young Henry and Richard Lionheart fought over the Aquitaine. Their father wanted Richard to have it, but Henry aimed at inheriting everything and declared war on Richard. Only the young Henry's sudden death put a stop to the fighting. After that, Henry II decided Richard, as the eldest son, should succeed hi m in England. But he wanted Richard to give up the Aquitaine, which he would no t do. Richard's subsequent revolts against Henry were more dangerous than the e arlier ones because of one factor. That was Philip II of France, who had succeed ed his father Louis VII in 1180. Philip was only fourteen or fifteen at the time, but very quickly made him self the master of his realm. He cleverly used the support of the Plantagenets to throw off the influence of his mother and her pushy brothers, then began to plot against the Plantagenets, who remained the greatest danger to his throne. G .W.S. Barrow has well summed up Philip's tactics: when Henry's sons were on the outs with their father, Philip supported the sons, acting as an overlord referee ing between vassals -- since all of them held French lands. But when Philip had a quarrel with the sons, he would call their father to account, telling him it w as his responsibility to control his vassals. In the last years of Henry's life, Philip, Richard, and even his favorite younger son John were almost constantly working together to bring the old man -actually he was only in his fifties -- to his knees. Finally, they succeeded. I n 1189, Henry, at last exhausted after a life of hard riding, politicking, and f ighting, accepted all of the demands that Philip and Richard were pressing on hi m. He died soon after, to be followed on the throne by Richard. Henry died pathetic and unloved, a fact that evokes a certain amount of sy mpathy for him. The Plantagenet Chronicles says, for instance, that "Henry II wa s denied the peaceful and honorable end to his reign which he so richly deserved ." But did he deserve that? The greed and selfishness manifested by his various sons were typical of Henry himself. He was at heart a pirate, or perhaps a Mafia don. He did all that he did to establish his own dominance and that of his fami ly, and he spared no one who got in his way. Thomas Becket was right to fear his enmity. He knew that Henry would never forgive him for his opposition, that the king would get back at him in any way that he could -- and in fact Henry did de stroy Becket, and lived on for another nineteen years as lord of the English chu rch. It would be hard to deny that Henry's policies and innovations were in som e ways beneficial, and that we are among the beneficiaries. But the rule of such an autocrat would be intolerable to most of us today. One of the nice things ab out history is that the strongmen and villains who populate it so thickly can't get at us now, and we can appreciate their colorful traits in the safety of our libraries and lecture halls.

William Marshal as an Example of Twelfth-Century Chivalry At this point in the course I devote an entire lecture to knighthood. The twelfth century saw not only a strong self- awareness among the knight ly class, but a self-awareness that became a part of in European literature. The growth of literacy has preserved the dreams of and about twelfth century knigh ts as an inspiration for later romantics. Both the ideals of chivalry and the facts behind the ideals have a lot of

historic interest. Begin with a basic fact: the aristocracy of the twelfth century was not a comfortable upper class. It was a turbulent group; the individuals and families who made up the ari stocracy were anything but settled. Their business and constant occupation was war. It is only by contrast with their counterparts in the tenth or eleventh cen tury, that the knights and lords of the twelfth century look more peaceful. Yet the individual rulers and their dynasties were far from secure. All ar istocrats or would-be aristocrats fought to maintain their position if they had something, or to gain one if they did not. A powerful monarch like the English k ing might be able to limit private wars and feuds between his own followers; but he still depended on their fighting ability to rule. Even in their most benign moments, knights threw themselves with enthusias m into deadly games. Hunting was practically an everyday occupation. The prey wa s usually deer, but often it was wild oxen or boar, either of which could easily disembowel a person. Hard riding after prey and stray arrows claimed many victi ms. Another "peacetime" occupation was the tourney. The tournaments of the twe lfth century were not jousts, or formalized single combats. Rather, they were mo ck wars, in which two or more groups of mounted warriors fought each other for l oot and glory. Tournaments differed from real battles in only two respects. First, there was usually a safe area near th e tourney site. Second, the chief goal of the warriors was not to kill or injur e their opponents, but to capture their equipment and ransom their persons. Tournaments offered twelfth-century knights an opportunity to practice the ir warlike skills and to win or lose fame and treasure when no real wars were ta king place. It was a very dangerous amusement, and it was thus most popular am ong the so-called "youths," young knights who had no yet settled down to raise f amilies and run their own households. The warlike manners and occupations of the twelfth-century knight meant th at able-bodied men were constantly at risk of their lives. A noble family could easily die off or be killed off in the course of a generation. Example: The twelfth-century French castellan, Henri de Bourbourg, had n o less than twelve sons, all by one wife. Seven were found positions in the chur ch; of the other five, two were killed in their youthful wanderings, another wa s blinded in a tournament, and the last two proved unable to have children. A da ughter inherited everything, and took the Bourbourg estates into her husband's l ineage. Questions of property added to the turbulence and unpredictability of uppe r-class life.. Living a noble lifestyle was an expensive business. The only secu re form of wealth in the twelfth century was lordship over land and men: in othe r words, the possession of estates, castles, rights of justice, the right to lab or services from peasants and tolls from merchants and townsmen. It was possible for simple knights to live off the generosity of some patron, or to become merc enaries, but every knight dreamed of independence, of owning enough property to be at least a minor lord, and of passing his property on to his sons. Every male aristocrat wanted to end his life as an independent lord, as a patriarch of a w ealthy clan, and as the ancestor of a noble lineage. But not everybody could achieve this dream. In the twelfth century it was difficult even for the younger sons of established families to acquire the nece

ssary piece of the family heritage. The nobility had realized that if they cont inued to split their family estates between all the heirs, as had been the custo m in earlier times, entire clans would soon be too poor to maintain their aristo cratic status. To insure that this would not happen, primogeniture was slowly be coming the rule in England and northern France. By the rules of primogeniture, the first-born son inherited the great bulk of his father's possessions, thus keeping the family power base intact. Other h eirs got little or nothing. Younger sons were usually not even allowed to marry. Such marriages might produce children who would dispute the privileged positi on of the eldest son's descendants. By denying the younger sons the right to mar ry and the possibility of legitimate children, the continuation of the lineage w as made more secure. The nervousness of the sons of Henry II over the division of his lands ref lects the general insecurity of noble heirs. Like lesser aristocrats everywhere , they feared a disgraceful slide down the social scale. In many lesser families , the younger sons faced a harder future. These young warriors were sent out to make their own way in the world, condemned to suffer the curse of perpetual yout h. As I've mentioned already, youth was a distinct phase of life in the twelf th century: the youth was a young aristocrat who was not yet the head of his own household. The life of the youth was in many ways an attractive one, made up of war and tourney. The carefree young knight could find in one or the other the o pportunity to prove his worth as a warrior and to win fame and treasure. When th e fighting was over, the tourney site or the war camp were the settings for spec tacular self-indulgence. Ecclesiastical writers thought tournaments were hardly less sinful than un just wars. Robert Manning, a thirteenth century monk, said that tourneys gave kn ights an excuse for all seven deadly sins: Pride, in one's strength Envy, of others Wrath, in the combat Sloth, in placing pleasure for devotion Covetousness, of the opponents' horse and equipment Gluttony at the feast and Lechery afterwards. In other words, they offered everything a red-blooded young knight could w ish for. The adventurous life of youth attracted many first-born sons whose fathers were still alive. Bored and frustrated with waiting for their inheritance, they would leave or be sent from home to amuse themselves on the tourney circuit. Of ten an heir would take a company of young knights with him--usually the sons of his father's vassals, who would become accustomed to his leadership. Eventually the heir, having sown his wild oats, would return home to marry and raise a fami ly--if he wasn't killed in the process. An example of such an adventuring heir is the young king Henry, eldest son of Henry II. For the younger son, there was to be no marriage, no family life, no noble descendants unless he could win wealth with his sword or find a young heiress o r eligible widow whose wealth would allow him from youth to established manhood. The existence of this class of rowdy, irresponsible knights-on-the-make were th e cannon fodder of their day, easily available to any warlike lord. They were an essential ingredient of the crusading movement. They exacerbated the violent as

pects of aristocratic life, since there was no peaceful activity that they could turn to without losing status. The youths also had a significant cultural influence. The romantic figure of the knight on quest, which originated in the 12th century, is the idealized y oung knight. It is no coincidence that the quest often ended in a marriage to a beautiful heiress. We can get some of the flavor of chivalric life by looking at the career o f William Marshal, perhaps the most successful "young knight" of the entire twel fth century. William Marshal was born about 1146, the fourth son and the product of his father's second marriage; thus, although his father was Marshal of England and his uncle an earl, William had no inheritance. Fortunately for him, he was spect acularly successful on the tourney field, and was able to use the reputation he earned there to win a place in the courts of four English kings, one of whom gav e him the hand of the richest heiress in the country. William ended his life as Earl of Pembroke and Regent of England, ruling on behalf of the young Henry III. William Marshal's life was recorded for posterity soon after his death in 1219, in an anonymous poem called The History of William the Marshal. It reads in places like a romance, but the anecdotes it contain the storie s remembered by his family and friends. What makes the poem particularly interes ting is that these stories were assembled to demonstrate that William Marshal su rpassed all the knights of his time in prowess, honor, and loyalty. Thus the his tory describes not only an exceptional man, but the ideal of chivalry as seen by some knights of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. As a fourth son, he was not in line to inherit land, but his father did wh at he could for him. John arranged for William to be sent to his uncle in Norman dy, an influential man who held the post of Chamberlain of Tankerville. There Wi lliam was to receive further training in chivalry. At first William was anything but a promising student. He became known in the Chamberlain's household mainly for loafing about, eating and drinking. In 1167, however, a war broke out between the kings of France and England. This was to be William's big chance; he was made a knight, then rode off with h is uncle to his first battle. This took place on a bridge outside the Norman tow n of Drincourt. William was so anxious for honor that he pushed in front of more experienced fighters to get into the fray. Once he got there he did well, felli ng and unhorsing many enemy knights. In this first battle William suffered a great misfortune: his one and only warhorse was killed under him. William was so intent on fighting that he neglec ted to find a replacement. His folly was pointed out to him at the victory feast that evening. William de Mandeville, an ally of the chamberlain, jokingly asked young William for a gift--a saddle or a bridle from one of the horses he had ca ptured. "But I don't have any such thing," replied William. " Nonsense," said Mandeville, "you must have forty at least." Then everyone laughed, because despite his great success in battle, Willia m had not paused to capture either horses or prisoners for ransom, and so he was poorer after the battle than he had been before.

William did not make the same mistake again. Peace soon broke out, and a g reat tourney was announced. The young Marshal attended on a mount he had begged from his uncle and in the course of the day captured several knights and their c hargers. After this he never looked back. William Marshal spent sixteen years tourneying, with occasional interrupti ons for war. The History dwells at length on this period of his life, and tells us much about the tourneys of the time. For instance, although tournaments involved much fighting, and people were often killed in them, the poet presents them primarily as equestrian sport. Wil liam's favorite tactic was to ride up to an opponent, seize his bridle, and desp ite his resistance, drag the other knight away from his friends and out of the l ists, where William forced him to take an oath of submission and swear to pay ra nsom. Sometimes the victim would escape ransom by slipping off his horse and run ning away on foot. Then, however, William would still have the warhorse, a most valuable prize. William could fight as well, a fact that he demonstrated on many fields. I n one of his earliest tournaments, five knights attacked him at once; they struc k him several hard blows, and tried to pull him off his horse. William escaped, but found that his helmet had been pulled around backwards on his head. He had t o break the helmet's lacings and take it off before he could put it right. Just as he had accomplished this awkward task, he heard two experienced knights say, "Any army led by that young man will be hard to conquer." Thus encouraged, the y oung Marshal charged back into the fray. William gained much profit from his tourney success. One of the first thin gs he got was a patron. King Henry II, hearing of his chivalry, chose him to be the tutor of his eldest son, Henry the young king. William and the young king spent most of their time on the tourney circuit . The two of them trained up a group of penniless knights to follow them. Willia m and Henry developed a ruse which gave them a distinct advantage over the other participants: they would hold back until after the first clash, then charge in with their fresh troops. This seems vaguely unfair to us, but it won the English knights much acclaim and, of course, many horses and ransoms. Little or none of the prize money stuck to William's fingers, however. The poet repeatedly praises his hero for his generosity, and with reason: when Will iam quit the tourney circuit, soon after the death of the young king in 1187, he was not only penniless, but saddled with a 100 mark debt contracted by his patr on. This prodigality was not considered a failing--indeed it was almost expected from a nobleman. Longer lasting than his monetary gains was the honor, or respect, that Wil liam earned. But if the poet is any guide, twelfth-century ideas of honor could be quite a bit different from ours. There is a story of a tournament where William had been separated from his fellows, and, riding alone, came upon sixty English knights besieging fifteen F rench warriors holed up in a farm house. When the Frenchmen saw William they cal led out that they were willing to surrender to him because, in their words, "You are more worthy than those who are bent on capturing us." The Marshal immediate ly accepted their submission, which outraged the besiegers. When they protested, William replied that he had accepted the French surrender, and that if the Engl ish wanted to resist by force, they would have to pay the consequences. In the e nd he faced down all sixty of them, and they dispersed. This seems very high-handed. But the incident is used to demonstrate Will

iam's honor--his ability to inspire respect. The French knights were glad to sur render to him rather than those who so greatly outnumbered them; the English kni ghts could not quite bring themselves to defy him. A final measure of his honor is that William released the fifteen French knights without any ransom at all--a nd they swore never to forget that good deed. It was William Marshal's honor, his reputation as a skilled commander and a wise counselor that made his fortune. William did not remain masterless for lo ng after the death of the young king. Henry II quickly took him into his househ old, and established him on a fief. William was landless no longer. This marks a new stage in William's life. He had ceased to be a youth--and high time too, be cause he was now over forty. Once he had received his fief and entered seriously into Plantagenet famil y politics, we never hear of William entering a tourney again. The virtues expec ted of a man in his position were quite different, as King Richard Lionheart poi nted out to him on one occasion in 1197. Richard's army, of which William was a part, was assaulting a castle and t hings were going badly. Only one man had got to the top of the wall, and he was in imminent danger of being tossed off. William saw his plight, leaped into the moat, climbed the other side, ran up a ladder, and went to his rescue. Indeed, h e fought so fiercely, that the enemy fled and abandoned the wall to him, which g ave the English an opportunity to capture it. When Richard saw him after, his fi rst words were, "Sir Marshal, it is not fitting that a man of your rank and prow ess to risk yourself in such feats. Leave them to young knights who must win ren own." William Marshal at fifty-three was still capable of great deeds, but they were no longer appropriate. The virtue appropriate to a great baron was loyalty, and indeed the poet s hows us William's loyalty on many occasions. William was one of the few nobles w ho did not desert Henry II as his life came to a miserable end. William was a st alwart supporter of Richard's rights when that king was on crusade. William was loyal to King John throughout the latter's struggle with his barons over Magna C arta. Finally it was William Marshal whom the dying John chose as regent for and protector of his the nine-year- old Henry III. But there are spots on this record, too. When the young king was still ali ve, William supported him in his revolts against his father, Henry II. A more se rious matter is his policy after the French took Normandy away from John. Willia m got from John permission to swear fealty to the French king for his Norman est ates; thus his lands were not confiscated as were most English fiefs in Normandy . But when later John launched an expedition against France, William refused to help in any way, because he was now the French king's vassal, too. This was the beginning of a long feud between John and the Marshal. In later times some Englishmen, looking back on William's years as regent, found much to criticize. William, rather than destroying the French army that h ad been supporting the barons against John, negotiated an agreement that allowed them to withdraw. Some said this was because he did not want to endanger Prince Louis, the heir to the French throne and the leader of the army. Matthew Paris, in reporting this incident a generation later, said "William Marshal was ever a fter branded as a traitor." I am inclined to side with the poet. William Marshal's claim to loyalty wa s not his patriotism, or his attachment to the English crown, but his personal f idelity to his immediate lord. He never broke his pledged word or was disloyal t o his lord, even when King John, who distrusted him after the disagreement over Normandy, spent years trying to ruin William and the whole Marshal family.

At least, this is the version put forward by his friends. Yet there is evidence that this type of loyalty was understood and valued by other knights. When Richard Lionheart came to the throne, he quickly made Wil liam a trusted courtier and an earl to boot; this despite the fact that they had recently been on the opposite sides in a civil war. Even the suspicious John co uld think of no better person to entrust his young son to. The paradoxical opinions about William's loyalty have a simple resolution. William was loyal, but he also looked out for his own rights--and few of his am bitious, acquisitive peers would have faulted him for that. It is worth pointing out what the History does not mention. There is no courtly love in the poem; there is one anecdote that shows Wil liam entertaining some ladies with his singing before a tourney, but there is no t a trace of self-denying, idealistic or romantic love in his makeup. The respec t he shows for his wife has a lot to do with the immense size of her inheritance , and her consequent political importance. Likewise there is nothing particularly interesting about William's religio us sentiments. William was a crusader at one point in his life, but, curiously, the poem says very little about it. Otherwise his religion consists of generous gifts to the church, and an association with the Knights Templar, in whose Londo n church he was buried. The audience of the History of William the Marshal was not interested in e ither love or religion, past a certain minimal point. They were far more concern ed with William Marshal as an example of prowess, honor, and loyalty. The intere st shown in these matters is quite sincere. More important than the literal truth of the work is the impression the li fe of William Marshal made on his friends. They knew that knights, like other pe ople, were imperfect creatures; everyone was afflicted with original sin. But Wi lliam Marshal had made them believe that it was possible for a knight to live a long, successful life in accordance with the chivalric virtues -- their chivalri c virtues, not necessarily ours. William Marshal is important to us, as students of chivalry, because he wa s the man they would have liked to have been.

Richard and the Crusade This lecture is about the other great knight of twelfth-century England, R ichard Lionheart. Richard is the English king who closest approaches the medieval ideal of c hivalry. He was a bold warrior: not only a good general, but also a champion at individual combat. He was a poet in the southern French troubadour tradition. He was a generous patron of knights and their tournaments. He was also an enthusia stic crusader. As such, he has a great historical reputation, even among sober historians : "an able as well as a heroic king," says one [Clanchy, 142]. If you like warrior-kings whom no one dared defy, Richard is certainly one of the best of that lot, but romanticizing such figures is dangerous.

There is a revealing anecdote about Richard that brings him down to earth. On his way to Palestine, Richard rode through southern Italy with only a single attendant. In Calabria, the toe of the boot, he saw a hawk in a peasant's hut. Richard decided that this hunting bird was far too noble to be owned by such a c hurl. So he took it upon himself to steal it. A man of vast wealth, he did not h esitate to steal from someone far poorer. The end of the tale is as unromantic a s the rest: the valiant king was set upon by the villagers and beaten almost to death. [Runciman, History of the Crusade III: 37-38.] Those historians who don't like Richard have been tempted to dismiss him a s a Crusading fool. They hold it against him that he only visited England twice, for a total of six months, during a reign of ten years. The argument shows a ce rtain English chauvinism, and forgets his commitments in France. Even as king of England, Richard is not easily written off. Although he wa s absent from the kingdom almost all the time, he had little trouble getting his orders obeyed. Richard's reign provided challenges to the power of the new roy al bureaucracy built up in his father's time, and it passed those tests with fly ing colors. It is hard to dispute that Richard was an able king -- in other words, he was able to get his own way. He did pay close attention to his own business as r uler of England. But we cannot really understand him without looking at him as a chivalric, Crusading king. There is little doubt that he was a warrior first an d foremost. Richard is remembered mainly for his leading role in the Third Crusade. Im mediately after he succeeded his father, Henry II, in 1189, he devoted his energ ies to launching a great expedition to the Eastern Mediterranean. This was not a personal eccentricity. It was part of a wave of concern tha t was sweeping western Europe at the time. It was also Richard's effort to compl ete some unfinished personal business. The Crusades began at the end of the previous century with an expedition t hat captured Jerusalem from Turkish rulers in the year 1099. As the twelfth cen tury progressed, however, the western Christians in Palestine began to lose grou nd. In the 1170s and 1180s the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem came under heavy p ressure. A Kurdish adventurer named Saladin had united Egypt and Syria and was i ntent on regaining Jerusalem. In 1187, he succeed. At the battle of the Horns of Hattin, the King of Jerusalem and most of his nobility were destroyed. Every ci ty in the kingdom save for Tyre was taken by Saladin. Jerusalem was lost again, and the failure of the whole Crusading enterprise seemed near. When the news came to Europe, its kings came under great pressure to do so mething "for the Holy Land," as people then would have put it. King Henry II and Richard and Philip of France all took the cross, swearing to go to Palestine an d rescue the Holy Sepulchre, Christ's tomb. Their personal divisions derailed ighting each other again. Henry's death been a reluctant crusader. But Richard g Jerusalem was the ultimate challenge. once crowned, began making preparations this plan. The three princes were soon f in 1189 changed things. Henry had always loved war for its own sake, and retakin He responded to it with enthusiasm, and to fulfill his earlier oath.

One very important matter that concerned Richard was convincing his former ally and present rival Philip of France to fulfill his oath. Philip was more li ke Henry than Richard: he preferred ruling to fighting. Nevertheless, Philip dec ided to go -- not only Richard but the whole western church was urging him. Phil ip was able to wring some concessions from Richard strengthening his position as

overlord of Richard's French lands. Richard had to make other preparations at home. He had to scrape up a vast amount of money to finance his expedition. Extraordinary taxation was called fo r. Here, too, the church was helpful. The papacy had declared what was called "t he Saladin tithe," a tax to be paid by all who did not take the cross themselves . It was the beginning of systematic papal taxation, and an important precedent in English finance. In England the Saladin tithe, which had actually been approv ed by Henry II in 1188, amounted to 10% of yearly income and 10% of the value of all movable goods. It is interesting to note that juries were used to assess pr operty in any disputed cases. The Jews were also shaken down. Legally all Jews in England were the prope rty of the king, and Jewish moneylenders, still an important part of the economy , worked only at his pleasure. They could be taxed without limit. During the pre parations for the Crusade, some Jews were massacred, especially in York, as xeno phobia, religious prejudice, and the desire of some debtors to kill those they o wed flared up. I will not follow the Third Crusade in detail, but something must be said about it. Richard's own conduct exemplified the mixture of selfish and religious motivations behind the entire movement. Richard was sincerely determined to tak e Jerusalem, and did more than anyone else toward that goal. At the same time, h owever, he was out for profit, and didn't care much how he got it. Along his way: He used his time in Sicily to promote his influence in that kingdom, where the succession to the throne was in doubt. When the Greek tyrant of Cyprus seized one of his ships, Richard conquered and looted the entire island, which he later sold for a great profit, without e ven a nod towards its legitimate ruler, the Byzantine emperor. Richard is deservedly noted for his military accomplishments in Palestine. He put heart into the disunited crusading army, captured some important towns, and laid the foundations for a restored, if much smaller, Kingdom of Jerusalem. It was a kingdom that did not include the city it was named after, though. The b est Richard could do was get a long truce and guaranteed access to the shrines f or Christian pilgrims. One reason that Richard gave up and started for home in 1192 was trouble a t home. Philip of France had left the previous year, and Richard was understanda bly nervous about what he might be up to. There were also political problems in his own realm. Richard had left the bishop of Ely, William Longchamp, behind as one of two justiciars, or prime ministers. William was an ambitious man, and he proceeded, once Richard was gone, to force his partner in power to resign. As so le ruler of England, he went on to alienate many of the most important of the ki ng's subjects. William's unpopularity gave John, Richard's brother and possible heir, the opportunity to pose as the champion of English interests against Longchamp, who was French. In 1191, Longchamp was forced out of office by an alliance of John, various members of the nobility, and the citizenry of London. The Londoners had formed a commune, an association of members sworn to support each others' inter ests, and then required the leading nobles and prelates of the church to join. I t was this ad hoc political association that pushed Longchamp out. The actions of the commune was an omen for the future. It showed how a bro adly based political alliance, including commoners, could stand up against an un popular administration. Despite the rising against Longchamp, Richard's own position was not in da nger. The strength and loyalty of the central government built by Henry II was d

emonstrated dramatically during Richard's captivity in Germany. Richard had no one to blame for his trouble for himself. After the fall of Acre, he had gone out of his way to belittle the part played by German knights. He had ordered the banner of the duke of Austria, who was standing in for the G erman emperor, to be taken down from its place by the English and French banners , and thrown in the moat. Then, in 1192, Richard found himself required to cross Austria on his way home. He was detected and the duke gleefully seized him. Ric hard was turned over to the emperor Henry VI, long a rival of his. Henry then to ld Richard that if he did not pay 150,000 marks ransom, he would be turned over to Philip of France. Imagine, if you like, what would have happened to any previous king of Eng land in the same situation. But Richard's empire did not crumble and he did not lose his throne. Willi am of Coutances, Hubert Walter, the newly elected archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard's mother Eleanor of Aquitaine started to make arrangements to pay the ra nsom. Although it was an immense amount, and required people to pay a quarter of the value of their movables, the money was collected quickly and without notabl e resistance. No greater test of a late twelfth-century monarchy could have been devised. The result was to confirm the solidity of the central government and its a bility to govern the country even in the absence of the king. Several factors ac count for this solidity. There are some personal ones: Richard was personally po pular with his nobility. Would they have gone to such lengths for John? Eleanor' s influence must have done much to stabilize the situation. Also, Richard was well served by his capable and professional officials. B ut here we are crossing from personal factors to institutional ones. It was no a ccident that Richard had such servants. His father, and to some extent his great - grandfather Henry I, had worked hard to develop a cadre of such men. Something more should be said about the royal servants. The important ones tend to show up in the history books under titles that disguise their character . I have mentioned three of them, William Longchamp, William of Coutances, Huber t Walter. They were all bishops. A leading lay official, Geoffrey fitz Peter, wa s like the others a justiciar, but ended up as Earl of Essex. Despite their ulti mate promotions to the clerical or lay nobilities, all four were professional ad ministrators who had come up through the ranks of Henry II's bureaucracy. A lea rned enemy of Hubert Walter complained to the pope that Hubert had got all of hi s education in the Exchequer (rather than in a notable ecclesiastical school). W illiam of Coutances had begun his career in Henry's chancery, or record office. Geoffrey fitz Peter was a judge and a part-time general. These were people who h ad helped create the systematic recordkeeping and who promoted the systematic ex tension of jurisdiction that typify royal government in the late 12th century. Such officials were in some ways greater champions of royal authority than even so arrogant a king as Richard could be. They believed very strongly in the crown as the ordering principle of society, because they believed in their work , and also because the king's power was their power. With such men and such institutions, the king's government could now impos e itself on local communities in entirely new ways. Hubert Walter ordered weight s and measures standardized throughout the kingdom, and had fish-weirs -- barrie rs to catch fish -- removed from the river Thames so that navigation would be un impeded. Geoffrey fitz Peter established standards of quality for bread and ale -- the Assize of Bread and Ale that would continue for centuries. It all sounds very sensible and rational, and indeed Angevin government was a wonder of modern

rationality, consciously so. But from the subject's point of view, government, whatever its advantages (and there were some), was getting increasingly intrusive. The king was forcing them to use bilingual cereal boxes and buy gasoline in liters instead of gallons -- so to speak. Royal government was uniting the kingdom as never before, but o ne of the unifying factors was irritation and resentment of new taxes and new ro yal powers, and fear of potential abuses. Trouble was brewing, although it would not come in Richard's time. The king was sprung in early 1194, after paying all but the last 10,000 ma rks and doing homage to the Emperor Henry for his kingdom -- he was now official ly an imperial vassal. Richard returned to England, where he staged a ceremonial recoronation. He immediately put in train a diplomatic offensive against those who had humiliated him, and got the pope to release him from his homage to the e mperor and condemn the duke of Austria for imprisoning a homeward-bound crusader . Richard also crossed to France spoiling for a chance to fight Philip, who had seized some of his castles and territories. Richard would live for five more years, but he never went back to England. In France, Richard won all the important sieges and skirmishes and was able to force Philip into an unfavorable peace. Richard capped his triumph by building a spectacular fortification, Chateau Galliard, on the French-Norman border. It w as an expensive and well-designed edifice, and Richard boasted that he could hol d it even if the walls were made out of butter. In the late 1190s, he had recovered whatever prestige he had lost in Germa ny, and was once again the foremost warrior in Europe, and one of the most power ful monarchs of the time -- the most powerful after Henry VI of Germany died pre maturely. But Richard, too, was fated to die in relative youth. The story is fairly well known, if not certainly true. Richard heard that a great treasure had been discovered by one of his Aquitanian vassals. Richard hurried there to claim it - buried treasure was a traditional right of the overlord. The discoverer, the v iscount of Limoges, shut himself in his castle rather than hand it over. Richard then besieged him. In the midst of this confrontation, Richard was hit by a flu ky crossbow shot. The wound became gangrenous, and he died of it. Whether this was actually a spat over buried treasure we will never know. But if it was, it was not so absurd an end for a great king as is sometimes thou ght. Richard, like the rest of his family, got he was by pushing his claims to t he limit, even in such trivial matters. Satisfying his greed was his constant oc cupation, and so we should not be surprised that death claimed him in the midst of it. When Richard died, the empire he had received from his father and mother w as again imperiled. It had come to him intact more or less by accident, and no s teps had been taken to ease the transition to a new ruler. This failure led to the disintegration of Henry II's Angevin Empire.

King John and the Loss of Normandy The years 1199-1216, the reign of King John. were crucial ones for the hi

story of both France and England. Ever since Henry II had united England, Norman dy, Anjou and the Aquitaine under a single ruler, the two monarchies had been en gaged in an unavoidable rivalry. For a long time the contest had been stalemated . Now there was a winner -- it was Philip of France, hands down. Philip died a king who was clearly superior to any of his princes. John wa s the loser then, and in history. Philip is known to the French as Philip August us, for the imperial splendor he restored to the French kingship. It is possible to find English historians who think well of John, but they are in a distinct m inority. John is remembered for frittering Normandy away and far more importantl y as the king whose arbitrariness made Magna Carta necessary. The pioneering nineteenth century constitutional historian William Stubbs summed him up this way: the very worst of all our kings...a faithless son, a treacherous brother.. .polluted with every crime...false to every obligation...not devoid of natural a bility...in the whole view there is no redeeming trait. But in fact, all the unlovely traits for which John is famous were found i n most medieval kings. What made John vulnerable to criticism is the fact that h e lost some crucial contests and died in miserable circumstances. Had he lived a little longer and overcome his opponents, he would be known as a good, strong k ing like Henry I, and people would remember his love of literature and his atten tiveness to the business of government, traits that he actually did possess. We will divide our discussion of John's eventful reign into two part. This lecture will concentrate on John's struggles with Philip of France and Pope Inn ocent III. The next will discuss the rising against John and the writing of Magn a Carta. Fortunately this can be done without distorting chronology. John began his reign in 1199 with his title in doubt. Richard had made lit tle provision for the succession. In 1190, when he left for the Crusade, Richard had designated his nephew Arthur, count of Brittany, the son of his dead brothe r Geoffrey. Geoffrey had been older than John, and so by some reckonings, Arthur had a better claim to the throne than his uncle. But there was no fixed rule, and thus plenty of room for political maneuve ring. John had spent Richard's reign building up his claim to the throne, with s ome success. Arthur was young, his mother was not on good terms with his father' s family, and he spent more of his time at the French court than in England. Wh en Richard died, John was a well-established political figure with a party behin d him. On hearing the news of Richard's demise, John quickly seized the family tr easure and was quickly recognized as king in England and duke in Normandy. His m other Eleanor delivered the support of Aquitaine. In between these two blocks of territory were the lands of the house of An jou, namely, the counties of Anjou, Maine, and Tours. Here, in the area directly bordering on Brittany, the nobles were induced to chose Arthur as their count. Uncle and nephew began to fight. Philip took the opportunity to interfere. In his role as overlord of the entire Kingdom of France, Philip declared in favor of Arthur as heir to all of t he Plantagenet fiefs outside of Aquitaine. He immediately mobilized his forces a nd went out to fight John. But John quickly gained the support of important peo ple in Anjou, and offered to pay Philip to to abandon Arthur. Philip readily ac cepted the handsome terms John gave him: a county in Normandy, a huge "relief" o r death duty, and homage for all John's French lands (an acknowlegement of Phili p's overlordship). . In return Philip acknowledged that Arthur was John's vassal for whatever lands he held. Arthur, thus isolated, made his peace with John.

John ended up with all his brother's land, and Arthur had to be content wi th Brittany. But the whole competition was opened up again almost immediately, when Joh n unnecessarily alienated an important Aquitanian vassal. In 1200, John decided he would marry the 12 year old heiress to the county of Angouleme, one Isabella. Contemporary historians talk about John's infatuation with the girl, but much o f her appeal must have been political. Her county was strategically placed, and her family had a pesky claim to the county of La Marche, which Henry II had boug ht from another owner in 1177. Before John's quick marriage to Isabella, she had been engaged to Hugh of Lusignan, another claimant to La Marche. John's marriag e thus forestalled a very inconvenient alliance between two important vassal fam ilies. But John then made a bad mistake. Rather than compensate Hugh for taking h is betrothed, John attacked him and confiscated his lands. Hugh made the obvious riposte. He appealed to John's lord and his own ultimate overlord, Philip, aski ng for justice. Philip went through the form of summoning John to his court in P aris to answer for his offense against Hugh. John refused on various pretexts, a nd this gave Philip a legal justification for confiscating all of John's French fiefs. Arthur joined him and the war was on. Once again the first victory went to John. In the summer of 1202, Arthur besieged the Angevin castle of Mirebeau, then occupied by his grandmother Eleano r of Aquitaine. John rescued her in a lightning strike reminiscent of his brothe r Richard. He surprised his enemies, capturing Arthur and about two hundred impo rtant knights and lords from Poitou. But John wasted this victory, which might have been decisive, by showing great cruelty to some of his captured foes, starving some of the less significan t prisoners and loading others with chains. Worst of all was the case of Arthur, who simply disappeared. The rumor quickly went around that Arthur was dead. The Bretons were enraged and even some of John's supporters were offended. Arthur w as never seen in public again and it is almost certain that John had him killed soon after Mirebeau. The war between John and Philip continued without Arthur's presence. John concentrated on establishing himself in Poitou, while Philip had his eye on Nor mandy, a province that was by itself nearly as large as his own domains around P aris. For whatever reason, John allowed Philip to take Normandy without any seri ous opposition. By 1204, Philip had forced the nobles of Normandy to submit to h is rule or clear out. This was something of a turning point in English history, and French as we ll. Although Philip was obliged by feudal law to find another heir after a year and a day for any territory that he confiscated, he simply kept Normandy for hi mself. By doing so, he broke up the Channel state that had been a threat to the French monarchy ever since 1066. At the same time he had added to his own reven ues and power. He became the heir of the strong government that Henry I, Henry I I and his sons had imposed on their Norman duchy. John dedicated rest of his life to regaining his lost inheritance, but as before he gave priority to establishing his power in Poitou and Aquitaine (in 1 206 he mounted a quite successful expedition there). The northern part of his inheritance (Normandy and the Angevin domain) remained in Philip's hands. John pinned his hopes for a further recovery on a long-term plan. One par t involved taxing England, so that the next expensive campaign could be fought p

roperly. The second involved assembling an alliance to encircle Philip. John's allies, whom he largely subsidized, eventually included the rulers of Boulogne, Flanders, Brabant, Hainault, and most important of all, the Empero r Otto of Brunswick. (Germany at the time split between two would-be emperors, F rederick II of the Hohenstaufen family, backed by Philip and the Pope, Innocent III; thus the struggle of John and Philip involved them in a multifaceted Europe an power struggle.) There was nothing wrong with this plan. John still had the resources to m ake a comeback. But again John got himself involved in a controversy that sappe d his support: a disagreement with Pope Innocent III over the election of the ar chbishop of Canterbury. It was another conflict between the long-established ro yal right to influence if not direct episcopal elections and the ecclesiastical right to free canonical elections. John got into big trouble because he was faci ng a pope of great determination. Innocent III was a distinguished canon lawyer (expert in church law) with an exalted view of the privileges and duties of the papacy. He did not hesitate to declare Holy War against those who defied his authority. Also, in contrast to most of his predecessors, he did not have to worry about any immediate attack b y the emperors. In his time there were two emperors, who could be played off aga inst each other. Thus when John openly defied him over the Canterbury election, Innocent had both the inclination and the ability to discipline the king. The first major dose of discipline was an interdict on England, imposed in 1208. An interdict was a prohibition of any religious services being held in th e country. This was a horrifying penalty, and one that must have frightened many ordinary people concerned about the good of their souls. But John was very stub born. The next year, 1209, saw John excommunicated. Christians were forbidden to associate with him, and almost all the bishops left the country. But John merel y used the excommunication as an excuse to confiscate church lands. In fact, dur ing the interdict John campaigned successfully against the Welsh and the Scots, and even launched a major expedition to Ireland. Eventually, however, Innocent blessed a proposed French invasion of Englan d. Louis, Philip's son and heir, was looking for an adventure, and thought that making himself king of England would do. John had by this time alienated enough of the English baronage that he did not care to face this further threat. He gav e in. Over the winter of 1212-13, negotiations produced a settlement with the po pe. John accepted the papal candidate for Canterbury, Stephen Langton; he resto red church property; and finally, he submitted personally to the pope, doing hom age and admitting that he held England and Ireland as fiefs from Rome. John also agreed to pay 1000 marks a year tribute. Once John had swallowed his pride, he gained some concrete benefits. The t hreat of a French invasion dissolved at once. Furthermore, John now had the whol ehearted support of the church against any of his subjects who might defy him. T he king's power was now seen as an extension of the pope's power. So, the year after his submission to Innocent, John was in an excellent p osition to launch his great attack on Philip of France. His allies, especially t he count of Flanders and the German emperor Otto IV, were ready and willing to i nvade France from the north. John was prepared to invade Poitou. At first thing went very well for John. He recovered a great part of Poito u and even won back the Lusignan clan, whose opposition had triggered the whole problem. Then John invaded Anjou. Here, however, he was caught by Prince Louis,

whose army scared off the Poitevins and forced John to retreat. The big disaster took place on the northern front. In one of the biggest o pen battles of the 13th century, Philip demolished the coalition army at Bouvine s. Many important prisoners were taken, including an illegitimate brother of Joh n. The battle of Bouvines was the seal of Philip II's success. With all his enemies in disarray, Philip was able to keep all that he had won over the previo us fifteen years, a period in which he had quadrupled the size of his kingdom. T he unheroic Philip had beaten the flamboyant Plantagenets, and enjoyed a power a nd prestige that no French king had had since the ninth century. Bouvines also sealed John's failure. Normandy, Anjou, Poitou were all gone for his lifetime. The significance of his defeat went well beyond the frustrat ion of his personal ambitions. Up to 1204, there had been many families with bot h English and Norman possessions. The French conquest of Normandy dramatically r uptured the link between the two countries. When John did not rewin Normandy qui ckly, families had to make a choice between warring kings. Normans found it easier to swear allegiance to France than than one might expect. Once they had done so, their cousins in England began to realize that th ey were indeed English and not French or Norman. Thus 1204 marks the beginning o f a new phase in English cultural self-consciousness. More immediately, John's repeated defeats created a crisis for the burdens ome Angevin style of government built up over the previous sixty years. The king 's prestige in England hit a low point. Subjects were not surprised that monarch s should demand much of them, but the important ones, at least, expected a cert ain level of success from their leaders, and even some profit for themselves. In this, John had disappointed them. Thus all the grievances that the English had against his government, and n ot just his but his brother's and his father's government too, came boiling up. It was Bouvines that made it necessary for John to confront his unhappy subjects , and either give them redress or fight them as rebels. It was very uncomfortabl e position for a medieval king to be in, and John did not meet the challenge gra cefully.

Magna Carta Magna Carta (the Great Charter) is the most famous single document ever pr oduced by the English government. It is generally seen as a guarantee of human rights, the first in the long series that includes the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the American Bill of R ights, and the late comer in the field, the Canadian Charter of Rights. Magna Ca rta is in this sense a myth -- a timeless symbol that has been created by extrac ting the document from its original context, and made to serve purposes that its authors never had in mind. In 1215, Magna Carta was part of an agreement of peace between rebellious barons and the king who had provoked them into rebellion. It tried to settle iss ues outstanding between the two parties. It attempted to set a standard for the behavior of the king's government towards his free subjects and to devise an enf orcement procedure. As J.C. Holt, an authority on subject has said, Magna Carta was a failure: war came anyway, and very soon.

Magna Carta was saved from obscurity by a political accident that made it convenient for it to be reissued. Magna Carta attained its long-range symbolic r ole because it faced some of the great problems caused by the success of Angevin government. The proponents of Magna Carta were reacting to the growth of royal power. However, they did not reject that growth. They insisted, however, tha t the new style of royal government should work not just for the king's benefit, but for all free men of the realm. This is a respectable attitude to take towar ds government, and this attitude, more than the specific remedies of Magna Carta , is what has survived. John's personality and military failures had much to do with the creation of Magna Carta. But the demand of the political classes for a charter of liberti es from a powerful prince was a commonplace phenomenon in 12th and 13th century Europe. Such demands were usually made when the prince had just suffered a setba ck. For instance, in 1188, the king of Leon in Spain found it necessary to grant privileges to his vassals. Similar charters were issued in Germany, Sicily, a nd France in the 13th and early 14th centuries. In all these cases, subordinate but still important members of the politic al system, nobles, bishops, large urban corporations, were combining to limit th e power of their rulers. They were not out to kill the king or dismantle the kin gdom, but simply to make it work better. The resentment of princely government a nd the cure for that resentment were, paradoxically, closely related. The very s uccess of princely government that created this opposition and even the form thi s opposition took. First, princes and kings had made their governments more profitable and po werful through systemization. Bureaucracy made it possible to impose the royal w ill by means short of brute force. This kind of regularity in government created a further demand for it -- from the prince's subjects. Second, strong rulers profited from their ability to grant privileges to t heir subjects for a price. They made it possible to buy the king's good will and dispensation from the rules his officers had devised. The granting of privilege s created a demand for more privileges. The political classes felt that what som e could buy should be available to all. Eventually this would lead to a demand f or rights, for a change in the rules in the favor of the subjects. But even this demand presupposed the prince's ability to maintain a peaceful and orderly comm unity in which those rights meant something. Finally, the greater power of 12th and 13th century princes over all their subjects, and not just their immediate vassals, welded their subjects into a po litical class with certain common problems, fears, and interests. Princely power created a political public with a common interest in controlling the power of t he prince. Let me now illustrate those generality with specific examples (drawn from Holt). Henry II had created special procedures so that questions over land -- vit al to a landed aristocracy -- could be settled without private war. Juries were to be assembled to declare who had the better right to the land or, in some case s, who had most recently been dispossessed. People got used to this orderly mann er of settling disputes, and they began to see it as a pattern for resolving al l kinds of disputes. Thus John was eventually faced with the demand that disagre ements between him and his subjects should be settled not by will but by judgeme nt -- not arbitrarily, but through some form of due process. The granting of privileges was likewise an important aspect of Angevin gov ernment in England. John could demand a variety of payments and services from h

is important subjects. For instance, he could require enants to remarry men of his choice -- a convenient way rters; he could also extract relief, or death duty from . John could directly exploit these rights, or he could ing dispensations.

widows of his military t to reward valuable suppo the heirs of his vassals profit from them by sell

In 1199, for instance, the widow Nichola of Hermingford paid the king 100 pounds so that she should not be forced to marry again. The king granted this on condition that if she did decide to marry, she would do so on the king's advice . Similarly, the king also took money on occasion to fix reasonable, rather tha n ruinous reliefs on estates. The king could also sell privileges to those who were not his vassals, or even to whole communities. Inhabitants of the "forest" suffered under close sup ervision of all their activities by royal foresters. Many people found it worth their while to pay the king to disafforest their district, so that they could ge t out from under that regulation. For instance, in John's reign the wapentake of Ainsty in Yorkshire paid 10 0 pounds to have their wapentake entirely disafforested, that is, removed from t he jurisdiction of the king's foresters. This sale of privileges created a demand for more easily available privile ges, and even that privileges that were generally available should be granted fr eely by the king. It is no accident that Magna Carta contains several articles defending the rights of widows and restricting the power of foresters and their courts. The power of the crown encouraged people to band together to buy communal privileges. Towns, wapentakes (hundreds) like Ainsty, and entire counties organized to raise money and buy rights (or more precisely "liberties") important to its inh abitants. No doubt it was the leaders of local society who did the organizing a nd ponied up most of the money, but they didn't buy individual privileges, they bought them in the name of the community as a whole (all free men). Thus royal power was creating or defining community consciousness and community organizatio ns in some sense opposed or at least counterposed to the power of the crown. That Magna Carta was written in King John's reign is often taken as a cons equence of his personal character. There is some truth to this. John certainly ran a burdensome government. The expensive of his wars pushed him to make the mo st of his right to tax his subjects, a right that at this time was almost absolu te. One tax that particularly caused resentment was the scutage. This levied o n the king's vassals, and was meant as a substitute for military service in pers on. In the past it had been levied relatively rarely, though its frequency had b een slowly increasing: Henry II and Richard had collected eleven scutages in for ty-five years. John collected eleven in sixteen years, at higher rates than usua l, and sometimes when no military expedition was launched. Similarly, John raised reliefs to a much higher level. The maximum relief set in Magna Carta was 100 pounds for a earl's or baron's estate. One hundred po unds is about 150 marks. In John's heyday he was demanding and getting two thous and, five thousand, seven thousand, even ten thousand marks for major baronies. This measure, like the previous one, struck directly at the prosperity and even the existence of family fortune in the military aristocracy. It did not help that John exploited these unprecedented taxes to keep his barons politically dependent. Those who were submissive could get reasonable ter

ms of payment, or even be excused some of their tax debt. Those who fell out of favor could be destroyed by a simple demand for prompt payment. The classic example from John's reign is the case of William de Briuoze. H e was a marcher baron who was very powerful in South Wales and had long been in John's confidence. He apparently knew what exactly had happened to Arthur. In 12 10, William fell out of favor, possibly because his wife had been talking about Arthur's fate. Whatever the reason, John called in all his debts at once. Willia m revolted rather than be ruined, and eventually fled to Ireland, where John pur sued him to prevent an alliance between William and the Anglo-Norman aristocracy newly established there. William's wife Matilda fell into John's hands, as did one of their sons, and the two were thrown into a dungeon to starve to death. Almost any great baron was vulnerable to such treatment, and John was erra tic enough that no one felt entirely safe. John was not a nice man, and that he was a hard and unpopular master. But even so, one should not overstate the contrast between John and his father and b rother. If one eliminates the purely personal element and just looks at the issu e of arbitrary government, no distinction is really possible. As J.C. Holt has s aid, the Angevins stood or fell together; Henry II was as much a target of Magna Carta as John himself. Movements to limit and control the king were an ever pre sent possibility. John just gave them the opportunity to break out. And opposition did break out in 1213-14, just before Bouvines. The country was just recovering from the interdict and the king's excommunication, when Joh n began actively planning a new campaign. A new scutage was proclaimed. In the North of England, this was the last straw. A number of important ba rons declared that they would not pay, because they owed no service south of the Channel. They drew up a list of demands, consisting what they considered royal abuses of feudal custom and forest law, which they wanted the king to correct. J ohn negotiated with them, and made a few concessions, but was unable to defuse t he opposition. With the disaster of Bouvines, the discontented barons gained heart, and b egan to press for a full-scale grant of liberties. John again negotiated, with t he archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, acting as chief intermediary. But John also began to arm. He did not think that anything he was willing to grant w ould satisfy the barons, who now included East Anglians as well as Northerners. The barons armed too. In fact they had formed a commune, or at least a swo rn organization, and, early in 1215, elected a leader, whom they called "the mar shal of the the army of the Lord and of Holy Church." The title probably had no precise significance; perhaps they were reaching to find a justification to defy their rightful lord, and found it in religion. The rebels do seem to have had the sympathy of some church leaders, and especially Stephen Langton. An important turning point came in May of that year. The barons caught Joh n off guard by entering London on a Sunday, when most people were at church. Som e of the citizens actively helped them. Once John had lost his major city, he decided serious negotiations were in order. The result of these negotiations was the granting of Magna Carta on June 15, 1215. Magna Carta was, on that date, a general confirmation of liberties that th e barons wanted or believed that they had possessed in the past. It included a v ariety of provisions, including the protection of widow's rights, the end of abu ses of relief and forest law, and the setting of limits on the king's ability to

levy scutage or feudal taxes without consultation. Most clauses were directly of benefit to the barons, but there were a numb er that secured the liberty of all free men. Most important was chapter 39, whic h forbade the king to condemn any free man except by legal process. And there we re others that protected lesser free men from abuses by their own feudal lords. The document as a whole was to set a new standard for royal behavior, and as such act as part of a peace between the king and his greater subjects. However, neither John nor his barons trusted one another. John wanted the rebels to disperse and disarm so that his authority would be restored. The rebel s wanted John to put the mandated reforms into action. There were clauses in Mag na Carta permitting them to police John's behavior through a council of twenty-f ive barons, but since there was no tradition of constitutional government this w as a weak straw. Once the barons disarmed, they well knew, they could have no in fluence on the actual workings of government. Thus each side waited for the othe r to move as a sign of good faith, and when nothing happened, took it as a sign of bad faith. Perhaps there was no good faith to be had -- John at least, immediately ap plied to the pope for a dispensation from his oath to uphold the charter. The po pe being John's overlord, his request was granted as soon as it got to Rome. By the time the pope's condemnation of the Charter reached England in September, bo th sides were preparing for war again. It soon broke out. The rebels were in a difficult position. If John was their king, they woul d eventually have to submit to his authority, and trust to his good grace. By co ntemporary standards, they had no way to control him unless he consented to that control. Their only alternative was to depose him. The barons, or some of them, took this step. They invited Prince Louis of France to be their new king. Louis jumped at the opportunity -- having been frustrated in a previous attempt in 12 13 -- and in May of 1216 he landed in Kent with a French army. Many of those who followed him were Normans who had lost their English lands after the fall of No rmandy, and were anxious to regain them. The French invasion put John in a very bad position, but it also split his opponents. Not everyone was interested in aiding this new Norman invasion. If i t succeeded, someone was going to be dispossessed. Some of the more conservative barons went back to John's side. Many others could not forget their hostility t o the king, however, and the civil war continued. The Plantagenet dynasty was saved by the only event that could end divisio n in the country -- the death of John. This took place in October of 1216, as th e result, some say, of drinking too much new cider. He left behind a minor heir, his son Henry III, in the care of William Marshal. The new regency quickly became stronger than John had been. William Marsha l was widely respected, and the very vulnerability of the young king caused a re action in his favor. No one could hold his father's sins against him, and theref ore one of the chief motives for the rebellion dissipated. Another motive disappeared when William Marshal reissued a somewhat shorte ned Magna Carta as a promise of future good government. With this promise before them and the devil dead and buried, many barons made their peace with young Hen ry. In September of 1217, after some military defeats, Louis renounced his cla im to England and was allowed to leave. His remaining English supporters were re stored to their estates. As a final measure, Magna Carta was reissued one more t

ime, as was a Forest Charter that defined and limited the king's privileges over his game preserve. This second reissue of Magna Carta consecrated the document as part of an overall restoration of peace and good government. As modified there was nothin g in it that the king's councilors could not live with, at least for the time be ing. A willing partnership between the king and the free men of the realm had a dvantages for both sides. Magna Carta was just one of many such charters of privileges. There is one thing that sets the English charter apart from the rest: its survival. The othe r charters are only known to certain medieval and legal historians. Millions of people know Magna Carta, and some parts of it still have legal validity. Why? All the other charters of liberties of this period were grants to nobles, high-ranking clergymen, and in some cases, to a few important urban communities. Where effective, these charters increased the privileges of the nobility vis-avis the lower orders of society. But important parts of Magna Carta were applica ble to all free men. Already in the early 13th century, the barons had found it necessary to unite with knights and burgesses, and to consider their interests, in order to build an effective reform coalition. This was a consequence of Angev in despotism -- royal methods of government had already united the free men as s ubjects of a strong central authority. Magna Carta thus reflects unique English conditions. It also helped to create unique English conditions. The Magna Carta strugg le itself helped the political classes realize that they had a community of inte rest, and if they wanted to protect that interest, they must work together. Afte r it was written and accepted the charter made it possible for anyone who was a free man to appeal to it as guaranteeing important liberties. Such appeals, in f act, were not long in coming, in many ordinary court cases before the royal just ices. Not that Magna Carta assured constitutional government, even for the minor ity of English men to whom it applied. Once Henry III grew up, and acquired a wi ll of his own, government by royal will rather than judgement was revived. Thirt eenth century England was fated to go through another great civil war.

The Thirteenth Century And The First Two Edwards

Economy and Society up to the Thirteenth Century < This lecture hopes to give you some feeling for how English society as a w hole worked between 1066 and 1300. There are some unifying trends in the events of the period that make such a synthesis possible. One such trend is expansion, both in population and in eco nomic production; another is the partial demilitarization of English aristocrati c society. Economic expansion Domesday Book (1086) shows that England was neither particularly backward, economically speaking, nor especially empty of people. Nevertheless, England wa

s lightly inhabited, with plenty of room for more population if resources were u sed more intensively. Likewise, the English economy was only partially commercia lized -- many of its people lived as subsistence farmers. They produced most of what they ate, and ate most of what they produced. Only a small surplus remained , almost all of which went in taxes to a lord or the local clergyman. Again, the re was plenty of room for increased production, increased production, and increa sed trade. During the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, England, like most of western Europe, began to grow in population and in wealth. Indeed, DB shows a country where both sorts of growth were already well under way. First, let's look at population estimates. I stress that these are indeed estimates, but they are from a recent and authoritative study of the English eco nomy by H.E. Hallam [Rural Economy 246-247]. Year Est. pop. 1086 2,000,000 1193 3,440,000 1230 5,120,000 1265 6,380,000 1294 7,200,000 These are very large increases, especially when you consider that there wa s no major immigration and no medical breakthroughs. There must have been other changes to allow such an increase. One change that can be easily demonstrated is the conversion of wasteland, or at least land that was rather lightly used, to intensive uses such as arable farming. In Yorkshire the spread of villages to higher elevations can be traced, th e result of moorlands, high pastures used only seasonally, being converted first to more intensive pasturage and then into ploughlands. In eastern England, large areas were rescued from the marshes and put unde r the plough. Perhaps the most important type of settlement was less dramatic. Woodlands around many existing villages were cut down and turned into farmland, a process usually called "assarting." Another change that seems to have taken place in this period is an improve ment in the climate. The centuries on either side of the year 1000 were years of glacial retreat. The retreat began about 750 A.D. and ended perhaps in 1150. T his warming resulted in a milder, drier climate in northern Europe which made ar able agriculture less risky and more productive. The warmest point of the trend was right in the middle of the period of greatest economic expansion in England. A third fact

Robert Grosseteste: A Thirteenth-Century Churchman In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the English church wa s part of an international institution that was more powerful, better organized and intellectually more vital than ever before. Those who directed (or attempted to direct) the organization had a single goal, to implement reform. To them tha t slippery word meant the unification of Christian society under papal sovereign ty, so that society could be sanctified and purified. Around 1200, reform was not merely a vague longing or a set of demands fo r clerical independence. It was a comprehensive program. Key church leaders and clerical intellectuals had spent a century creating that program. Christian doct rine -- in other words, what believers were expected to believe; the rights of t he church hierarchy over its personnel, its property, and the laity; the legal s

tructures that enforced these rights: By 1170 or so, all of these things had bee n clarified and defined. Even more than the papal court, it was the schools of Paris and Bologna an d elsewhere that established the broad principles and the detailed rules that wo uld govern the church and all its members. When you think about the twelfth-cent ury renaissance and the revival of learning, you must think of it as an ideologi cal movement with practical aims, not as pure scholarship untouched by power pol itics. In the words of Richard Southern, the schools were the parliaments that l aid down the rules for Latin Christendom. They were also the places where execut ives were trained to enforce those rules. After 1170 or so, most of the work of definition was done. Doctrine had be en developed, as had a system of church courts focussed on the pope. Then the ch urch elite moved on to their next task: making church doctrines and church insti tutions a central part of every believer's life. The aim was to impose on societ y a single set of religious rules -- rules that standardized ritual practices, t he rules of marriage, and the right use of economic and political power. In the early 13th century the Dominican and Franciscan orders, which were directly dependent on the papacy, would also throw themselves into the fray as i tinerant but highly trained preachers, confessors, and inquisitors. We've talked a lot this term about the growth and systemization of royal p ower over local communities through the wonders of bureaucracy. What we must und erstand is that at exactly the same time, those local communities were living t hrough another revolution planned and managed by the papal bureaucracy. The hea rt of the papal revolution was really the shaping of religious life on the local level, and subjecting it to central control. Measured by this standard, it was remarkably successful. During the thirteenth century, much of what we think of a s Catholicism, medieval and modern, was invented. Church rituals, laws and belie fs all over western Europe were brought to a high degree of uniformity and stabi lity, for the very first time. This lecture will focus on one member of the clergy of that period: Robe rt Grosseteste, whose name might be translated as Bob Bighead. Richard Souther n, one of the twentieth century's most learned scholars of medieval Christendom, wrote a book-length study of Grosseteste in which he argued that Grosseteste th anks to his many writings and other documentation, is the most knowable individu al of 13th c. England. I am going to take advantage of Southern's work to give you some feeling f or this clerical movement and the people who took part in it by looking this one man. Warning: in some ways Grosseteste is quite atypical of the Englishmen of his time: for instance, he was the best practicing scientist of the 13th centu ry. He is not even typical of the higher clergy. Robert Grosseteste was born in 1170 in Suffolk. His parents were poor, per haps even peasants. It was extremely rare for a real peasant to rise to any prominent position in the church. Grosseteste, genius as he proved to be, might never have amounte d to anything but for a lucky break. He came to the attention of a rich and char itable merchant, who paid for Grosseteste to get a good basic education in a Lin coln school. He may afterwards have gone to Cambridge for a few years. Cambridge was not yet a university, but it had some reputation for scholarship. About 1189 -- the year Richard Lionheart became king -- Grosseteste had to

leave school and look for a job, or in more medieval language, a patron. If he could make himself useful to some important person, lay or clerical, he might ev entually hope for a benefice, a paid position in some church that would be his f or life. Such ecclesiastical positions were the closest things to the modern jo b with a yearly salary that the Middle Ages had. Often they financed a person' s "real work"; that is how royal civil servants were supported. Grosseteste's first patron was Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, but he got no prefe rment from him, so about 1195 he found a position in the household of bishop Wil liam de Vere of Hereford. In 1198 the bishop died, and Grosseteste lost the man who might have been his ticket to promotion. There was no place for Robert in the next bishop's household, and he had t o be content with a lesser post. For the next twenty years he worked in Shropsh ire for one of the archdeacons of the diocese. It was only when his superior was made bishop of Hereford in 1219 that Grosseteste's career got back on track. During those twenty years of humdrum employment, Grosseteste became deeply interested in natural science. One of the most interesting things about Grosset este is that he was able to stay abreast of scientific progress while in Shropsh ire, which has never been a great intellectual center. His involvement in natural science once again put Grosseteste a little out of the mainstream. In fact, most scholars were not very interested in science. They were all working at theology and canon law, figuring out the moral and lega l principles that could be used to organize the ideal society. Such work did not encourage scientific habits of thought, because theology and law were built on authority, on the interpretation of past writings. Indeed, it was assumed by alm ost everybody that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, had already be en discovered and written down by ancient writers. If one could interpret those authorities, and resolve their apparent contradictions, you could know everythin g without any kind of independent investigation. And scientific "facts" (true o r simply taken as true on authority) were generally put to use to make moral poi nts. In England, however, there was something of a practical scientific traditi on that gave greater weight to observation than symbolic interpretation. It was this tradition that Grosseteste ended up working in. Grosseteste concentrated on astronomy (which included the whole heavens, i ncluding the weather). It included calendrical calculation and attempts to unde rstand the future (astrology). To us, one interest looks sensible and the othe r superstitious. But both encouraged people to look closely at natural phenomena , to measure them, and to keep records of them. In Grosseteste's time the astrol abe was introduced into Europe, which gave further impetus to exact observation. Grosseteste's first known works are on the relations between the sky and t he calendar, and he knew (though he was not the only one) that the Julian calend ar and the sky were falling out of synch. Later he spent a lot of time doing what we would call optical work, and us ed mathematics to describe the rainbow and other such phenomena. This was a meth odology with great promise for the future, and in fact his optical theories were of some use in the early years of the scientific revolution. Grosseteste was a outstanding member of the minority of thirteenth century intellectuals who were willing to trust their own observations more than author ity. He was even willing to disagree with the revered Aristotle's explanations w hen they didn't make sense to him.

Around 1225, at the age of fifty-five, Grosseteste finally got his benefic e. But he did not retire. He began to hang around the schools at Oxford, which w as not far from his parish. Grosseteste quickly became a lecturer in the liberal arts, a post he was well qualified for. At Oxford he got interested in the Que en of Sciences, theology, and was soon lecturing and writing on sacred subjects. The willingness to be original that Grosseteste had shown in natural scien ce appeared in his theology as well. Most theologians, rather than reading the Bible directly, they worked on selections and commentaries of their predecessors in the hopes of producing a definitive interpretations of one small point or an other. This was the method used in the best schools, the scholastic method. Gro sseteste had never had a scholastic education, and didn't take to the scholasti c method now. Rather, he plunged right into the Bible and into the early church fathers, and was determined to make them the basis of his understanding. His determination to get back to basics led him to learn Greek (not a comm on accomplishment at the time) so he could read the eastern fathers of the chur ch in their own language. When he was bishop, he was able to finance and organiz e a group of scholars to create new and better translations of both secular and religious Greek works. In his Oxford years, Grosseteste came up with an original theological conc eption quite appropriate for a natural scientist. He believed that the whole un iverse reflected the glory of God. It was a great educational machine, meant for the instruction of humanity. For Grosseteste, Christ's incarnation was not a la st-minute rescue plan devised to rescue fallen humanity. It was part of the plan from the beginning. Christ, God incarnated in man, had always been meant to be the capstone of creation. There was a close relationship between this vision and Grosseteste's optic al work. He thought the glory of creation was best seen in light, the purest, th e most basic, and the first of substances. During his time at Oxford, Grosseteste had become well known, and had coll ected some extra church offices. By 1230 he was quite prosperous. But all this t hinking about religion had impressed him with the futility of earthly prosperity -- an idea encouraged by his association with the Franciscans at Oxford. In 123 2 he resigned all his benefices but one. He had experienced a religious conversi on. Grosseteste was not permitted to spend his declining years contemplating G od, nature, and the state of his soul. In 1235, he was elected bishop of Lincoln , one of the largest and most prosperous dioceses in England. In much of central England, he was responsible charge of implementing the reform program we spoke of before. You must recall that Grosseteste had not been trained for this role. He had not had the usual education that church leaders had. He'd been restricted to a provincial career, and pursued science instead of a more fashionable subje ct. He ended up as a more than usually zealous reforming bishop. Part of his zeal was philosophical. His scientific and theological work had together convin ced him of the importance of order and hierarchy. On the important issues ther e was no room for compromise, and little room for debate. In a way he is reminis cent of Alfred the Great. Grosseteste's disinclination to compromise was not bridled by the politica l prudence that restrained more typical bishops. Other bishops learned about pol itics at university. While they were being groomed for success, they learned the

ways of the world, how to pursue their goals without alienating the powers that be. But Grosseteste had never been groomed for success. He had risen to the top without making the usual concessions, and thought he could continue in the same way. Thus Grosseteste as bishop of Lincoln was harsh and puritanical in his eff orts to clean up his diocese. Someone who had watched him closely before might h ave predicted this. In 1234, he had been chosen by the king as an appropriate ma n to force prostitutes to leave Oxford. A little earlier, while he was archdeaco n of Leicester, he cooperated with Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, in expe lling Jews from the earl's chief town. Ghettoizing and controlling the Jews was an integral part of the 13th c. papal program, but Grosseteste pursued them with unusual enthusiasm. He was not content to rid Leicester of Jews, but when he he ard that the Countess of Winchester had welcomed the refugees to her city, he wr ote her and condemned her hospitality in the harshest terms. In his efforts to clean up his diocese, Grosseteste made great use of the usual disciplinary technique: the episcopal visitation. A visitation involved th e bishop going around to see that all was well in the parishes and religious hou ses under his jurisdiction. He went through his diocese, district by district, a ccompanied by a group of Franciscan and Dominican friars. In every district the dean (the supervisor of the parish priests) was to bring the whole population so that they could confess their sins to the friars and hear them preach. Then Grosseteste corrected public sins as best he could. He had a generous idea of his mandate. He closed Sunday markets that were being held in church ya rds. He fulminated against drunken parties, popular jousting, and even miracle p lays, which he considered indecent mockery of sacred things. A visitation as Rob ert Grosseteste ran it was an energetic re-education and enforcement campaign. Grosseteste, to his lasting discredit, wanted to introduce something very like the inquisition into England. Not that he proposed to use torture to hunt o ut heretics -- there were very few heretics in England; but he did want to requi re local juries to denounce their neighbors' sins under oath so that sinners cou ld be disciplined. Only Henry III's jealousy of his own judicial prerogatives pr evented this project from going ahead. Grosseteste was at least consistent. He was as critical of the clergy, e ven those of high rank, as of his ecclesiastical subjects. Late in his career as bishop -- a career that lasted 18 years, until he wa s eighty-three years old -- he started attacking abuses that a more politic bish op would have ignored. The abuses I refer to were the appointment of absentees t o ecclesiastical benefices. It had long since become standard practice for rulers, including the pope, to give benefices to someone who actually worked in the bureaucracy. The holder of the benefice was not expected to do the job in the parish or the cathedral; he just used part of the attached income to hire a replacement. High ranking off icials often had several different benefices, each staffed by low-paid vicars. ( Grosseteste had been in this position once.) The ability of rulers to divert ben efice income to their own servants was what made possible the great 12th century growth of government. There was no other convenient source of income that coul d be used to pay civil servants. In attacking such absenteeism, Grosseteste was opposing the entire establi shment. Indeed, in the 1240s he found himself fighting the popes. He made two tri ps to Rome to assert his right to control his own diocese, and protect it from a

bsentees. The papal court was sympathetic in theory to his concerns. The ultimat e goal of reform was the improvement of the care of souls all over the world. Bu t in practice, Grosseteste was being impossibly pure. The pope had problems to d eal with that required an assured income from the provinces. Grosseteste thus go t no satisfaction. Finally, in 1250, the elderly Englishman made an impassioned speech before the pope and his cardinals, asking them to reform themselves before it was too late. It was a stirring plea for religious conversion, but it was not a practi cal program, so it went nowhere. The pope -- it was Innocent IV -- returned to h is immediate concerns, and Grosseteste returned to England in despair. When he c ontinued to block papal appointments, he was suspended from office. On his death bed, in 1253, Grosseteste reflected that it was heresy not to denounce the crimes of the rich; by the same standard, the pope's current polic ies were heresy, because he allowed the church's powers and properties to be mis used for worldly purposes. Here are three points worth remembering about Robert Grosseteste. First, his intellectual career, including experiments in physics, scholarl y translations from the Greek, and original insights in theology emphasizes the intellectual vitality of Europe and England in his time. The fact that Grossetes te did good work in the provinces says much about the growing sophistication of European society as a whole. Second, his career in all its variety reminds us how central the church wa s in 13th century society. It was not concerned simply with prayer. It was was d eeply involved in learning, in government, in promoting and enforcing an ambitio us program of social and moral reform. Third, his frustrations with and his scathing critique of the papacy point out a problem that the church would have to face sooner or later. As it got big ger and better organized, it seemed less and less spiritual. How could the churc h be better than fallen world it lived in if it was trying to run that world, us ing many of the same tools that secular rulers used? This is not the way Grosset este saw the problem, of course; he used authority quite ruthlessly to attack si n and sinners, and would have had it no other way. But he saw there was a proble m, and spoke out. Grosseteste would eventually be a hero to those in the next ce ntury who were quite sure that the pope was Antichrist, and that the power of th e Roman church in England had to be tamed.

The Thirteenth-Century Civil War We left political history at the death of King John. John had been fighting a baronial revolt and a French invasion. You'll rec all that John's death was a key factor in ending that war. Barons who could not trust John were willing to support the government of his young son, Henry III. H enry's regents, who included William the Marshal, showed leniency to those who m ade peace with the king, and indicated their good faith by reissuing Magna Carta not once but twice. In this way the arrogant and erratic government of John was replaced by wh at can be called a reforming administration. It was led, at least initially, by the Marshal and by Hubert de Burgh, an experienced bureaucrat who served as just iciar. They were trusted and moderate men. Their government had the active suppo rt of the pope, who took seriously his position as overlord of England.

The result was a reasonably stable government that avoided the excesses of John's reign. Royal government without the king worked quite well. There was no active monarch to stir up controversy. Eventually, however, Henry III grew up and took control of his realm. In 1 227, he got the pope to agree that he was of full age. Very quickly friction aro se between him and Hubert de Burgh, who had been running the country since Willi am the Marshal had died eight years before. Hubert got in Henry's way. Where Hen ry was determined to reconquer the lost Plantagenet lands in France, Hubert was constantly holding him back. In this Hubert represented the English baronage. Henry found his own supporters to oppose the English establishment. His mo ther, after John's death, had gone back to Poitou and married the man she had ji lted in 1202, Hugh de Lusignan. Her second family were among Henry's closest all ies. Also some of his father's Poitevin servants were still around. The most imp ortant was Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, an old government hack who ha d been a trusted counselor of both Richard Lionheart and John. With Peter des Ro ches came his son or nephew, Peter des Rivaux. These two men were royal absoluti sts at heart, and they encouraged Henry in his desire to be his own master. In 1232, Henry deposed Hubert de Burgh. There was a trial in which Hubert was accused of all kinds of crimes, some of which he may have committed. Hubert had his enemies, so his fall in itself did not alarm the barons. What did upset them was Henry's next move. Peter des Rivaux was put in charge of both the Exch equer, the Chamber (the king's record office) and made sheriff in twenty-one cou nties simultaneously. This was not government in the spirit of Magna Carta -- it was a return to rule by will instead of judgement. Just as bad, the barons, an d foreigners made the important decisions. The barons, under the leadership of Richard Marshal, William's heir, insis ted that Hubert de Burgh should get a proper trial as specified in Magna Carta. Eventually Richard Marshal went to war against the king. When that failed, Richa rd crossed to his Irish estates, where he was murdered, probably at royal behest . Richard's murder shocked the English barons, and the two Peters were temporari ly dismissed. But Henry had won the confrontation. He had control of his governm ent, and he kept it for the next twenty-five years. Henry III was heir to Angevin efforts to impose royal authority on the cou ntryside. Methods that had been suspect innovations in his ancestors' time were now routine. On the basis of such practical power, Henry was able to revive the oretical claims for the king's absolute power. Henry III, in his wealth an power , thought of himself as God's vicar, as had Charlemagne and Alfred. In the view of Henry and his officials, who shared and implemented his power, all men were e qually humble before the king, who had a divine power to judge them and order th em around. Anyone can say such things, but making others believe them is another matt er. Henry had mixed success. His power seemed very great to his contemporaries, and he very often got his way. Although his attitude irritated many of his subje cts, his claims were not all hot air. Second, Henry was not alone in building up the image of the monarch as an imperial ruler. In Germany and Italy at the same time, the emperor Frederick II made similar claims, and worked energetically for decades to make himself in tru th a universal ruler. He failed because he came into conflict with the pope, the other would-be universal ruler. Another king of the same time, Louis IX, St. Lo uis, was much more successful. Louis was the most powerful French king in at lea st 300 years. With this growth of practical power came an ideology of absolutis m, divine right. Along with Louis' famous piety only enhanced his determination to do things his way. He, after all, was directly responsible to God.

Henry, like these other rich and powerful monarchs, was a man of ambitious projects. Henry had several goals, none of which he eventually attained. Henry's fir st project was to recover the French territories lost by his father. He pursued this directly until he suffered a humiliating defeat in Poitou in 1242. Then he changed his angle of attack. Henry had married into the ruling family of Provenc e, and he hoped to use his family connections in Provence and nearby Savoy to be come a power in southern Europe. Italy, Germany and Southern France were in turm oil in the mid-thirteenth century, and Henry hoped to take advantage of this. He especially wanted to weaken Louis of France. Henry had not given up on Poitou, Anjou and Normandy. After 1250, both Henry and his brother, Richard earl of Cornwall, found gr eater goals. In that year, Frederick II died. The pope was anxious to destroy Fr ederick's family and give Frederick's kingdoms, Germany and Sicily, to someone e lse. Richard of Cornwall used his extensive personal wealth to get himself elect ed king of Germany, and set about trying to establish himself there. Henry enter ed into negotiations with the pope to buy Sicily for his second son Edmund. It was this Sicilian deal, concluded in 1255, that proved to be Henry's Ac hilles heel. The pope, who was overlord of Sicily, wanted Henry to pay well for his son's kingdom. The pope had been fighting Frederick II for a long time and h ad big debts. So the price of a crown was set at 135,000 marks, almost as much a s Richard Lionheart's ransom, to be paid in 18 months. If it wasn't paid in full , the king would be liable to excommunication. The payment to the pope was to be raised through taxing the clergy in Engl and; as big as that payment was, it was just the beginning. The pope did not act ually control Sicily; an illegitimate son of Frederick II was in possession, and a war would be necessary to get rid of him. This Sicilian business was very unpopular in England. The barons stood on their rights as defined in Magna Carta and refused to contribute taxes. Henry s oon realized that he would not be able to raise the 135,000 marks. At the same t ime as Henry's foreign policy was going awry, things were bad at home. In 1256 a nd 1257 there were crop failures in England, and famine resulted. This, just as Henry was raising all the money he could through taxation. Also, there was troub le on the Welsh border, from Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, who called himself Prince of Wales. Henry had nothing effective about Wales. In early 1258, the pope, still unpaid, threatened to excommunicate Henry. Henry was desperate, and was forced to do something he had been avoiding for a l ong time: he decided to consult with his chief barons, in hopes they would bail him out. The barons were in no mood to help Henry. For years now, he had been doing pretty much what he wanted; worse, he had offended against the barons' dignity. They believed that they were the king's partners in government, his natural adv isors, his chief men. Henry had ignored this special relationship, and ran his government with the help of obscure, often foreign advisors, who were specialist s in administration. He also favored his Lusignan half-brothers and sisters and his relatives from Provence and Savoy. So the barons, in this moment of royal we akness, were ready to press for a return to what they considered good government . Behind this move was a small but powerful group of 5 earls and two great barons. All were men of diplomatic and military experience, most had holdings on the militarized and now-threatened Welsh border. The most determined reformer a

mong them was, strangely enough, a Frenchman and the king's brother-in-law, a ma n who had a European-wide reputation. He was Simon de Montfort, earl of Leiceste r, who eventually became the symbol of the baronial cause. Simon de Montfort was the son of another famous Simon de Montfort who had been the military leader of the Albigensian Crusade, the papacy's campaign again st heresy in the South of France. The elder Simon had been a brilliant general, and for a few years he had been ruler of a vast principality. The younger Simon shared many traits with his father. He was pious, he was arrogant, he was a good war leader. He had cooperated with Robert Grosseteste in expelling the Jews from Leicester. In other circumstances he would have been an excellent king by divine right. Simon had settled in England after making good his hereditary claim to Lei cester. At first he had been on very good terms with Henry -- Henry allowed him to marry his sister Eleanor. Simon was also governor of Gascony for a while. But he had been so tough on the independent Gascons that they had got him tried for abuse of office. Simon was acquitted, but permanently embittered against Henry. In April of 1258, Simon de Montfort and his six confederates to support ea ch other against all others but the king and his heir. The oath was meant to cem ent an alliance, or commune, so that they could take decisive action to reform t he realm. Around this core, other barons and even knights gathered. By the time Henry and his barons met at Westminster on April 30, the king was facing a commu ne that took in the most important men in England. This group, armored but not armed, demanded that the king should dismiss h is Poitevin supporters and join their commune. Henry and his eldest son Edward h ad little choice but to swear the oath, and thus join with them in a program of reform. This time the barons wanted more than a one-shot guarantee of good governm ent like Magna Carta. They had in mind a whole new system of government. First, there was an attempt to halt and remedy abuses by royal officials i n the local communities of England. New sheriffs, substantial local men, were to be appointed. Also, in each shire, a panel of four local knights was to hear co mplaints against royal officers. Second, the barons set up a new central government to prevent future abuse s. A council of 15 members was set up to advise the king, and the king was requi red to follow their advice. The chief officers of the realm, the justiciar, the treasurer, and the chancellor, swore to obey the council. Third, the barons established that there should be three parliaments -- th e word meant discussion, and did not imply an institution -- per year, at which the 15 councilors, 12 major barons, and the king should treat the business of th e realm. It was probably intended that these 28 people were a minimum, not a max imum, for attendance at these discussions. The intent was not to narrow the poli tical process but to widen it. Implied in the reform agenda, but not spelled out, was the reduction of He nry's adventures overseas. The Sicilian involvement was dropped, and negotiation s for peace with France were begun. Triumphantly the barons had these decisions, called the Provisions of Oxfo rd (1258), publicly proclaimed in English, so as to reach all the free men of th e country and thus build support. The barons were surprised, then, to find that

their program did not satisfy the lesser people. Knights, burgesses, and other s mall but reasonably important types were still feeling hard pressed. Partly it w as the continuing famine; but mainly it was the incompleteness of reform. Smalle r people, you see, were often more concerned with the abuses of baronial powers and baronial officers than they were with the king's government. The unrest was enough to bring forth, in the fall of 1259, the Provisions of Westminster, aimed at restricting the power of lords over their tenants. Free tenants wanted, and got, limits set on the power of their superiors to collect money and require attendance at feudal courts. Added on to these measures were n ew restrictions on royal officers, so that they could not push around the lesser free folk. The non-baronial free men, invoked by reformers both in 1215 and in 1258, were making their presence felt on the national scene. These measures l community had some hey be turned into a luck controlling the were an astonishing victory for the idea that the politica rights, some say in how the realm was governed. But could t permanent form of government? Would these barons have more king than their predecessors had had in 1215?

The simple answer is no. Henry never really believed in this revolution. He saw the realm as his h ereditary estate, which he could run as freely as any other free man ran his. Re member this was the era of high farming, when every landlord in England was tryi ng to gain maximum advantage from his holdings, customary restraints notwithstan ding. From the very beginning he tried to wiggle free. He got the pope to absolve him from his oath to the commune of barons, an d his oath to uphold the Provisions of Oxford. He exploited divisions between th e barons. When war with the barons seemed imminent, he got his former enemy, Kin g Louis of France, to act as an arbiter between him and his domestic enemies. Th is was called the Mise of Amiens. Louis was famous for his justice, but he also was a king, and in the end, he came down on the side of unrestrained royal powe r. Louis' decision left the reformers in disarray. The only alternative to su bmission now was war. Some barons would not take that step. But a determined gro up under Simon de Montfort decided to fight -- and they won. In May of 1264, the re was a battle at Lewes in Sussex, where the king's forces were scattered and H enry and his son Edward were taken into custody. The results of Lewes were, in fact, rather paradoxical. Many of the lesser folk were heartened by the apparent victory for constitutional government, or p erhaps, more accurately, the communal ideal. But constitutional government was i tself a casualty. Many barons no longer supported Simon. To avoid losing power, Simon had to act as a dictator in the king's name. While he controlled the king , he could issue orders in the manner of a shogun. Simon tried to rebuild constitutional government on a new basis. He was th e first to hold parliaments -- formal discussions of national business -- in whi ch representatives of the knightly class and of the burgesses took part. This mi ddle class group was right behind him. When Queen Eleanor threatened to invade E ngland, Simon was able to call up a middle class and peasant militia to defend t he country. Most of the bishops supported him too, because they believed in rest raints on royal power. But without support of the earls and great barons, Simon was in a precarious position. The royal position was clear-cut and easily understood. The kingdom belong ed to the king, as a person, not as an impersonal, institutional crown. He shoul d be able to do with it what he liked; he had the same freedom as any free man t

o run his own property. Other "free men" felt that their powers and rights were not dissimilar to his. And his power was traditional. He was the king, and peo ple knew, without thinking, that they owed him obedience. Any time the king got loose, he could take command of his bureaucracy, call on his vassals, and invoke the customary oaths that people had sworn to him. The case for constitutional government, of institutional restraints on the king's will, was new, not entirely thought out, and had only the support of the dissatisfied and the enthusiasts. The reluctance of many high-ranking laymen to join Simon in the last stage of the struggle was motivated partly by personal f actors. Simon could be very hard to deal with. But also lords who treasured thei r position, their freedom of action, and their hereditary privileges could easil y fall into sympathy with the king. Besides, it was quite obvious that Simon de Montfort was an upstart and a traitor to his liege lord. In early 1265, Edward, Henry's heir, was allowed to escape from custody. Edward was already a grown man of military talent. He was able to assemble an ar my, and in August of that year, defeat Simon de Montfort at Evesham in Warwicksh ire. His body was hacked to bits, and his remaining followers hunted down. What is the significance of this conflict? On the most obvious level, it was a royal victory. Henry III regained ever ything he had lost. He was able to spend his declining years finishing his recon struction of Westminster Abbey as a great shrine to divinely sanctioned royal po wer, which of course it still is today. Edward, his heir, was confidently able t o go crusading in the holy land without fear of trouble in England. Simon de Mo ntfort was secretly honored by some as a political saint, but the royal idea was stronger than ever. Yet the communal cause was not utterly lost. The experiment led by de Mont fort kept the ideas behind Magna Carta alive when they could have so easily been forgotten. There were practical results as well. The widening of the political commun ity that had taken place in the communal period turned out to be permanent. The knights and burgesses, long a source of tax revenue and manpower for royal commi ssions, were now recognized as having a collective national role. Under Edward I their presence in parliament would become almost normal. And as we shall see, e ven as powerful and popular a king as Edward I would have to bow on occasion to institutional restraints on his freedom of action.

Edward I: The Early Years Henry III's efforts to rule unrestrained caused civil war, and victory in civil war allowed Henry and his son, the Lord Edward to do as they liked. It was the beginning of a period when royal rule was as secure as it ever was. Edward I, whose effective reign began with the fall of Simon de Montfort, was close to being the ideal medieval king. He was personable, tall, handsome, s uperficially charming. He was a brave warrior and a good general. He was a dilig ent administrator. He combined the talents of Richard Lionheart and Bad King Joh n. He was popular, at least in his early days, capable in just the way the rulin g class wanted him to be capable, vigorous, and intelligent. His position was so secure in the early 1270s that he left his aged father and toured the world, with no fear that the result might be political instabili ty. He went crusading, one of the last western European royal princes to do so,

and when he heard news of his father's death in 1272, he did not hurry back to b e crowned. Instead, he spent two years in Gascony, shoring up the foundations of English rule in that country. Only in 1274 did he return to England for a coron ation. The ancient Norman and Angevin custom of grabbing the royal treasure and getting oneself crowned immediately after the old king's death was obsolete There is no doubt that he is the classic English example of a powerful lat er medieval king. He used that power for two purposes fairly typical of English kings: consolidating his government at home and extending it over other lands. Both successes and failures enable us to trace the changing shape of medieval so ciety around the year 1300. One of the things Edward usually gets high marks for is reforming zeal. Re form, once again, has to be defined. Edward was concerned the constant problem of corruption and abuse of power by royal officials. Edward devoted much energ y during the first half of his reign to calling his own officials to account for their actions. In part this was an effort to fight the slow transformation of appointive offices into hereditary positions. Thus the housecleaning desired by his subjects also benefited him in a very direct way. Edward began his reforms before he was king, in 1267. At a great meetin g of king and nobility, (a "parliament," in the terminology of the time, Magna Carta, the Charter of the Forest, and some of the reforms of the De Montfort er a were confirmed.. This was enough to reconcile most of the population to royal rule. When Edward returned to England in 1274 for his coronation, he plunged rig ht into a further round of reform. First was the Ragman Quest. It was a series of inquests. Juries were form ed in most localities to give information into royal rights and the conduct of o fficials. The information so gathered was written down, and each juror was requi red to affix his seal to the resulting documents. The parchment documents with t he dangling seals were called "ragmen," and thus the name for the inquest as a w hole. Such a procedure was not new, but the Ragman Quest was an unusually large, thorough, and systematic inquest. The Ragman Quest brought to the royal attent ion the complaints of the hundreds and villages of England, at least those of th e more substantial members of those communities. It laid the basis for much roya l legislation over the next ten years or so. The Ragman Quest also led to what is generally called the Quo Warranto pro ceedings. I have often emphasized the strength and organization of royal governm ent in England. But there were gaping holes in that organization. Many royal ri ghts had been granted away in the past. Private lords enjoyed liberties that ena bled them to exercise royal judicial and financial rights for their own profit. Quo Warranto was an investigation into each of these liberties and privile ges, aimed at requiring anyone who possessed one to justify his possession. "Quo warranto" means "by what warrant?" This is what the royal justices asked the lo rds who came before them. The justices wanted to see written proof that the king 's ancestors had actually granted the privileges in question. John, Earl of Warrenne, when questioned about his right to the liberties e held at Lewes, produced a rusty sword he said had been borne by his ancestor n the time of the Conqueror, with which he had conquered his lands. The story, rue or not, indicates the resentment that Quo Warranto excited among the great ords. h i t l

Edward was strong enough to reclaim many powers that had been lost to the crown for decades or centuries, and limit many liberties that he could not aboli

sh. But great lords also won privileges from Edward. A law of 1290 basically forbade subinfeudation. If a tenant granted part of his fief away for money, in essence sold a piece of land, he forfeited the fe udal service owing from that part of his fief. The buyer became a direct tenant of the seller's lord, and the seller lost any interest in or rights over the lan d. The purpose of this law was to preserve the superior lord's feudal profits in an era where the buying and selling of land was increasingly common. It prev ented the fragmentation of knight's fees into pieces so small that the knight se rvice and customary payments were lost to the superior lord. This measure of course benefited earls and other tenants-in-chief most, be cause it made their power over their vassals meaningful. But it also benefited t he king, who was the greatest lord of all, one who had a keen interest in seeing that knight service was performed or at least commuted into money payments. This technical matter illustrates a salient characteristic of Edward I's r eign. It was a time of definition or perhaps redefinition, when old rules were a dapted to take into account social changes. The redefinition augmented the autho rity of the crown, which had made itself the final arbiter in such matters, but also stabilized the power of the highest ranks of society. Edward's program of defining, reclaiming, and extending royal rights over English society has its counterpart in his foreign policy. English kings had long exercised overlordship over Wales and Scotland. Ed ward tried to turn this vague suzerainty into a real rule over those lands, with mixed success. Wales There was new and serious challenge to English overlordship. During the 13th century, the princes of Gwynedd, the mountainous northwest ern part of Wales, came close to uniting Wales under them. The last of them, Lly welyn ap Gruffydd, built up his power while Henry III was distracted by Savoy an d Sicily, increased it further by allying with the Montfortians in the civil war , and in 1267, when he made his peace with Henry and Edward, was acknowledged by the English rulers to be the overlord of nearly all the other Welsh princes. He called himself, with some justification, Prince of Wales. When Edward became king, Llewelyn refused to do homage to Edward, and he p rovocatively married the daughter of Simon de Montfort, thus fulfilling a contra ct he had made with the dead earl some years before. In 1277 made war on Llywely n , running a brilliant campaign. He allied himself with Welsh allies, in the s outh while attacking Gwynedd from the east and using his fleet to seize the fert ile isle of Anglesley, source of much of Gwynedd's food supply. Edward was bas ically besieging Gwynedd, which was rugged enough to be a natural fortress. Llywelyn surrendered in November of 1277. Llywelyn was not deposed, but Ed ward replaced him as the direct lord of every Welsh prince. Edward secured his p ower by building the first of his expensive, impressive, and nearly impregnable Welsh castles. The Welsh princes soon found that Edward, the great definer of royal right s, was going to be a very onerous overlord. English justices were sent through m

ost of Wales to take control of the legal process. Princes were constrained to a ttend English courts and argue their claims just as every other petitioner did. In this situation, revolt was predictable. The man who broke the peace (i n 1282) was not Llywelyn, but his younger and troublesome brother David. He seiz ed a royal castle in anger over some slight to his rights, and the action immedi ately touched off a general revolt that Llywelyn, who still thought of himself a s a national leader, had to join to keep his credibility. The Welsh won some impressive victories in the beginning, but Edward's gen eral ship and his much greater resources made the war a short one. Llywelyn hims elf not been killed in December of 1282, and by June of 1283, Edward was in cont rol of the country once more. After the second Welsh war, all of Wales except the marcher lordships was subjected to royal authority. North Wales was divided into shires. Big and stup endously expensive castles were built to foil further revolts. English criminal law was substituted for Welsh practices. The officials in charge of administerin g this revolution were, of course, almost entirely non-Welsh. This was the defin itive conquest of Wales. What Edward won by arms was secured by the imposition o f a new legal regime that made Wales scarcely more than another region of Englan d -- though it had its own prince, the king's second son Edward, and some remain ing peculiar customs. In the early 1290's Edward upset the independent marcher lords of the Wels h border lands by abrogating their right to private war. His officials justified this by saying the king could alter ancient custom in the common interest, a do ctrine that was very dangerous to any established lesser power. The earls of Her eford and Gloucester defied him by fighting each other anyway, and found themsel ves tried, imprisoned, and heavily fined. In doing this, Edward was storing up t rouble for himself, but for the moment it was an impressive flexing of the royal muscles. The Welsh conquest, which had been accomplished quickly if not cheaply, wa s the result of Edward's determination to define and enforce his royal rights as widely as possible. H Edward is typical of the strong monarchs of his time, who had both the pow er and the ideology to make possible a more absolute style of monarchy. Scotland Very soon after he put his Welsh settlement into effect, Edward found hims elf enmeshed very deeply in Scottish affairs. Once, however, circumstances invol ved him in the politics of the northern kingdom, his acquisitive instincts and t he legalistic techniques of high medieval monarchy led him inevitably to attempt ed conquest. The circumstances that brought Edward into Scotland were these. In 1286, t he King of Scots, Alexander III, died unexpectedly. His only heir was his threeyear-old granddaughter, Margaret, the daughter of the king of Norway. Arrangemen ts were made to bring her to Scotland to serve as a royal figurehead. The counci l of regency negotiated with Edward for a marriage between Margaret and his son Edward, now his heir. This marriage would have led to a union of the crowns of E ngland and Scotland. No one was too concerned about this. Many influential Scott ish lords were lords in England, too, and could not see the English king as a fo reign villain. This contract collapsed, however, when the young Maid of Norway died on th e voyage to Scotland.

There were many possible claimants to the throne. None of them were closel y related to Alexander III. One serious candidates, Robert Brus, was the great-g reat-grandson of King David I, who had died 130 years previously; another, John Balliol, was one generation further removed from David. Twelve other candidates with more tenuous claims came forward. Who was to judge between the competitors? The obvious answer was Edward. He was asked to be an arbiter and agreed to act as judge. Edward required all of the competitors to acknowledge his feudal superiori ty over Scotland, and of course they did. The other nobles and churchmen of Scot land refused to do this, but they were ignored. Edward had gotten an important a dmission from the future king of Scots, whoever he might be. In November of 1292, the decision was made by the English royal council an d accepted by the Scots. John Balliol, a man with important holdings on both sid es of the border, was named king. immediately afterwards he swore fealty to Edwa rd as superior lord of Scotland. Once Edward had wrung this concession from the new king of Scots, he gave it the widest possible interpretation. He insisted on acting not as a distant ov erlord, but as an active feudal superior who could sit in judgement on how the S cots king treated his own vassals. In other words, he treated John Balliol as he treated his English barons, or the Welsh princes after 1277. By accepting appeals from Scotland and making unprecedented demands on Joh n Balliol, Edward created a situation that could only result in war. The paralle l with Wales between 1277 and 1282 is almost exact. The process took less than t wo years this time. Edward had gotten himself in trouble in Gascony. The French king had confi scated that duchy and occupied it. In this crisis, the English king called all h is vassals up for service in France -- and he included in this summons both the recently conquered Welsh and the Scots. There was a major Welsh rising, which, since it failed, was the last for a century. In Scotland, King John prepared to resist. But he had no more luck than th e Welsh. In the spring of 1296, Berwick, then a Scottish town, was sacked and th e male inhabitants were slaughtered. Soon after, the Scots royal army was routed . Thereafter King John surrendered his kingship to Edward. He was carted off to England, along with the Scottish royal regalia, the governmental records, and th e Stone of Scone, symbol of the Scots monarchy. Edward insisted on receiving hom age and fealty from 2000 Scots lords, prelates and even parish priests. As far a s he was concerned, he had abolished Scotland as a separate kingdom. In 1296, Edward I presented the picture of a great conqueror. His power in Britain was unprecedented. True, he was in trouble in Gascony, but his success had been astonishing to date. To this point, he is an example of how well the 13 th century English monarchy, considered as a war machine, could work under the b est possible leadership. After this date, Edward's career illustrates a differen t theme: however rich and powerful he seemed, he had already overextended himsel f. Not only did the Scots refuse to lie down and roll over, but Philip of France insisted on treating Edward much as he had treated Llywelyn ap Gruffydd or John Balliol.

Edward I: Later Difficulties Edward I inherited an enviable tradition of royal power. With it, among ot her things, he launched a very ambitious and expensive foreign policy. Edward's policy, at least at first, was far more successful than his father's. Rather th an trying to establish himself in southern or central Europe, he tightened his control over small countries already dominated by England. With his resources he was able to conquer Wales and force the king of Scots to surrender his crown. B y 1296, Edward had apparently conquered all of Britain, finishing a process of E nglish expansion that began in the fifth century. But a united Britain was not to be. By 1296, Edward was already involved i n continental wars that were to frustrate his Scottish conquest and create many other problems for him. There are two ironies in Edward's position in the mid-1290s. The first is that he did not have any continental ambitions. As far as we can tell, he simply wanted to hold on to what he already had, the Duchy of Gascony, what was left o f Eleanor's Aquitaine. But Philip IV (the Fair) of France was a man with just as high an opinion of his own royal power and dignity as Edward had. In 1293, Philip, who had just lost an embarrassing war with Aragon in Spain, was given a pretext to beat up on the English king. English and Gascons fought a battle with Norman and Poitevin sailors, won, and sacked the French-ruled port of La Rochelle. Philip immediate ly demanded the Edward's subjects pay compensation to his own. The second irony is that once Philip had a legal pretext, Edward was in th e same uncomfortable relation to the French king that Llywelyn ap Gryffudd and J ohn Balliol were to him. Edward was in regard to Gascony a vassal of the French king. The French king and his officials were very glad to have an opportunity to call him to account. As the most powerful of French vassals, Edward was a stand ing challenge to the superiority of the king in his own kingdom. Edward was summ oned to Paris to answer the complaint against him. When he refused, the duchy wa s formally confiscated. English negotiators were led to believe that if this confiscation was allo wed to proceed, the duchy would be handed back on conditions acceptable to both sides. Thus French troops were allowed to occupy Gascon strongpoints without opp osition. Once they got there, however, they showed no signs of leaving. In 1294, Edward was faced with the choice of fighting for Gascony or leaving. Of course, he decided to fight. A war with France was no laughing matter, not at all comparable to fightin g Welsh princes or the King of Scots. France was, as it always had been, a much more populous and fertile country than England, and in the 1290s most of these resources were under the control of the king. To fight France, Edward felt it n ecessary to call up all his vassals, even the Welsh princes and John Balliol and the Scots lords. Their reaction was to revolt. Edward quickly reasserted his control over W ales, and his Scots war ended in the deposition of the Scots king. But despite t hese successes, the revolts were ominous symptoms of what kind of strain all-out war with France would be. Both kings, that is Edward and Philip, put all they had into their prepara tions. In 1294 both decided to tax the clergy so they could fight each other. Th e pope was infuriated. Boniface VIII threatened Edward and Philip with excommuni cation and forbade the clergy to pay the taxes. In both cases, the kings browbea t their clergy into obedience. Edward did so by the shocking expedient of withdr

awing royal protection from the church and its property. Eventually clerical opp osition collapsed, and the pope had to back down. This incident demonstrated that the predominance of the popes over secular rulers since the mid-eleventh century was over. The great monarchies, and not t he international church, held the balance of power, because they now commanded r esources and organization superior to that of the pope. From another point of view, however, the grab for clerical revenues was j ust one desperate expedient among many other, as two ambitious kings found the w ar they had undertaken to be far more expensive than they had anticipated. Edward's strategy involved building an alliance in the Low Countries and G ermany against France, (like King John had) but this was an expensive propositio n (as in King John's time). Despite the expense, the results were not impressive.. Edward's one succes s was to win over the Count of Flanders to his side. The Flemings were natural a llies of the English. The industrial cities were dependent on English wool, and the count hated royal interference in his own affairs. Thus there was a consider able community of interest. But Flanders was politically divided, and so the cou nt turned out to be a rather useless ally. By 1297, Edward was strapped. He put the screws to the English clergy, and when he used several dubious methods to raise his revenue from the laity. Very quickly he had provoked strong political opposition. In the spring of 1297, Edward ordered his officials to seize all foreign o wned wool, which was to be sold for his own profit. Royal officials were so enth usiastic that they started seizing wools from English merchants as well. These p rotested and got some relief from the king. But wool immediately became the cent er of a more serious dispute. Some of Edward's magnates, in particular the Earls of Hereford and Norfolk , were already upset about the conduct of the war. Those two earls were Constabl e and Marshal of the Kingdom respectively, in other words, Edward's chief milita ry subordinates. Already by the the beginning of 1297, they were refusing to ser ve overseas unless the king went with them. Hereford was one of the marcher lord s disciplined by Edward five years earlier, so resentment of the king may have m otivated him. But Edward's expensive policy and the arbitrary measures he was in creasingly turning to meant that the earls could were not alone in their discont ent. Dissatisfaction became open protest in August. Edward announced that high taxes on wool exports granted him in a meeting of parliament in 1294, a tax so h igh everyone called it "the bad tax," (maltolte) had been regranted him. No form al parliament or discussion had been held. He had merely secured the agreement o f some of his closest supporters meeting in his private chambers. This was a vio lation of Magna Carta's provision that taxes were to be levied only with the agr eement of the community of the realm -- which, to men of the 1290s, meant that a ll the important tenants-in-chief and representatives of the knights and commons should have been consulted. The two earls protested at the Exchequer and then drew up a formal petitio n, which they presented to Edward as he was sailing to Flanders. He ignored them and left the country. Opposition continued to grow. By the end of September, when a full parliam ent took place, (the Michaelmas Parliament) presided over by regents for Edward , opposition was general enough that the king was forced to make concessions.

He reconfirmed Magna Carta and the Forest Charter, and repealed the "bad t ax." He also agreed to the principle so dear to his opponents, that no extraordi nary taxation should take place without "the common assent of the whole realm." This was the sharpest check that Edward's absolutist tendencies ever received. T he Confirmation of the Charters became a building block of the English constitut ion. The example of aristocratic resistance on constitutional grounds was import ant in the next reign. Once the Michaelmas parliament was dismissed, Edward was again the boss, and he did not hesitate to continue his French war. But a new problem quickly ar ose. In Scotland, Edward's officials had made themselves very unpopular in the north, and by 1297, there were already Scots fighting against them. Two men in p articular were active, Andrew Moray, the son of a baron, and William Wallace, a knight. They called themselves "leaders of the army of Scotland." In September o f 1297, just before the Confirmation of the Charters, their army destroyed a for ce of English knights at Stirling Bridge. It was the signal for a full-scale Sc ottish revolt. For a number of years, France and Scotland cooperated to make his life mis erable. Edward could nearly always win his battles with the Scots. For instance, he led an army into Scotland in 1298 and destroyed William Wallace's army at Fa lkirk. But once he left Scotland the opposition reassembled and the country beca me uncontrollable once more. The efforts of Moray and Wallace had been successfu l enough to convince greater barons to throw their lot in with the resistance. D espite the loss at Falkirk, Robert Brus, Earl of Carrick and grandson of the com petitor for the crown, and John Comyn, part of a very powerful family, became jo int guardians of Scotland. The bishop of St. Andrews became a third guardian the next year. His participation was indicative of the solid support of the Scottis h church for the cause of independence. Edward returned to the country in force in 1300 and 1301, but was unable t o win any meaningful victories. Soon after that, however, things began looking u p for the English cause. The Brus and Comyn factions fell out in Scotland. Both men wanted to be the boss, and undoubtedly Brus wanted to revive his grandfather 's claim to the throne. Their mutual hostility grew until, in 1302, Brus made hi s peace with the English king. Then the French war came to a sudden halt. Philip the Fair had attacked Flanders and found himself in terrible trouble. To cut hi s losses he had made a quick peace with Edward, and even gave Gascony back. Thus Edward was free to throw all his resources against Scotland. He did s o in 1303. A great army entered Scotland and found no organized resistance. Most Scottish leaders were willing to swear fealty to him, including John Comyn. Sti rling Castle was taken from its Scottish garrison, and William Wallace was captu red by deceit. He was dragged off to Westminster where he was tried and executed for treason, although he maintained he had never owed loyalty to Edward. In 1305, Edward was able to set up an organized administration for Scotlan d. Many important Scots, including Comyn and Brus, took part in it. But the whol e scheme fell apart in 1306, when Robert Brus decided to go into revolt once aga in. He apparently tried to interest John Comyn in the scheme, and when he refuse d to go along with it, Brus murdered him. This was a particularly shocking crime in that it took place in a church. Once Brus had murdered Comyn, and assured the permanent hostility of his i nfluential family, there was no turning back. He immediately summoned all Scots patriots to muster under his leadership, and he had himself declared king.

Robert Brus's coup almost failed at once. An English army under the Earl o f Pembroke defeated his army and Brus had to leave the country. Edward treated a ll his supporters savagely. The old irascible king seemed to have won again. Just to make sure, he org anized another army to subdue Scotland thoroughly. None too soon: Brus was soon back in Scotland winning victories against English garrisons. Friars were going around Scotland repeating a prophecy of Merlin, that Le Roy Coveytous would die, and the people of Scotland and Britain -- that is, Wales -- would rise together and live in harmony to the end of the world. Edward never got a chance to fight that last campaign. The covetous king d id die, leaving a mess for his son to deal with as best he could. The mess he left behind is what impresses me most about Edward I. The powe r he inherited was very great, unprecedented in centuries. His personal talents were exceptional. His situation seemed to offer great opportunities for extendin g his rulership even further. But despite the conquest of Wales, Edward, so pop ular in his youth, lost the devotion of the political class long before he died. They resented his demands and feared his techniques of rule, which verged on th e arbitrary. He bequeathed to his son great debts, an endless guerilla war on th e northern frontier, and a restive baronage. Philip the Fair, Edward's French contemporary, was a good match for him. H e too inherited great power and harbored absolutist ambitions. He did everything Edward did, fought great wars, made great and unprecedented demands on his subj ects, and, like Edward, expelled the Jews from his kingdom while confiscating th eir property. He went beyond Edward when he had his agents arrest the pope and a ccuse him of heresy, and when he denounced the Crusading Order of Knights Templa r as secret apostates and idolaters, seized their property, and had lots of them burnt at the stake. Philip was a true believer in royal supremacy and spent his life enforcing his rights and destroying all possible opposition to his power. Both men are rightfully seen as kings who, through their dedication to the supremacy of the royal power, unified their realms as they had never been unifi ed before. They certainly helped build the French and English nations we know to day. But one is impressed not only by the cost to other people of their wars an d ambitions, but also by the instability of the whole enterprise. It is not simp ly that Philip never got Gascony, or that Edward failed to subdue Scotland. It i s that they undermined political consensus at the same time as they were vindica ting their rights. When Philip died, his nobility and his towns were in revolt. It was only with great effort that his son conciliated the opposition. Edward's son quickly faced similar opposition.

The Deposition of Edward II At his death in 1307 Edward I left his son Edward II three burdensome bequ ests. The first was his Scottish war, which was no closer to an end now than it had been in 1297. The second was a debt of around 60,000, a vast amount by contemporary stand ards. The third was-- his shoes. These shoes were so big that Edward II found th em impossible to fill. Edward I had been peculiarly well-suited to be a medieval king, but had no t had an easy time of it. Edward II, by contrast, was the worst politician ever

to be King of England, and he had a very rough ride indeed. Edward II's main fault was his inordinate attachment to a few favorites. A few select men, men not of the first rank in society, were loaded with estates, offices, and other rich gifts. They also enjoyed his full confidence and he oft en acted after consulting only them. It is possible that some of these favorites were the king's lovers. Whether or no, he could scarcely have been more enamore d of them. Edward ignored everyone else most of the time, alienating the aristocracy with astonishing speed. Some of the great earls with fairly general support resp onded by asserting their right to take part in and even control the royal govern ment. The result of this conflict of interests was not one, but three episodes o f civil war, the degeneration of orderly government into near-anarchy, and the h umiliating defeat of English might by the Scots under Robert Brus. It ended only with Edward's deposition and death. I will break the political conflict into five stages. Stage One includes the first six years of Edward's reign, in which the kin g provoked his earls into armed resistance. Once again, the speed with which he did this is rather astonishing. Edward was popular at first (people were tired of the old man), but very quickly his friendship with an obscure Gascon squire n amed Piers Gaveston became an issue. Piers Gaveston had already been banished on ce by Edward I as a bad influence on his son. The new king immediately summoned him back and installed him as one of his most trusted and best rewarded companio ns. By 1310-1311, a united baronial opposition forced Edward not only to send Gaveston away -- they had already done this once, without lasting success -- but also to accept baronial control of his government. A group of Lords Ordainers w as assembled to write Ordinances than would regulate the king's officers and the king's spending. The Ordainers themselves would act as a committee to oversee t he great and lesser officers. In essence, this was a revival of the baronial pro gram of 1258. Edward II took these restraints in no better spirit than had Henry III. En gland. In 1312 there was a short, sharp outbreak of fighting, during which Edwar d revoked the Ordinances and Gaveston, who had returned to England in defiance o f those Ordinances, was captured and executed by some of the barons. This event inaugurated Stage Two of the struggle. The killing of the king' s favorite split the opposition. Some of them were shocked and began to cooperat e with the king. The result was an uneasy peace between Edward and his earls. Th ose who had killed Gaveston were pardoned, but the Ordinances were not restored. At this point, in 1313, the business of Scotland pressed on the English po litical class. The feuding in England had allowed Robert Brus to take control of most of Scotland and raid. deeply into northern England, pillaging and looting or extracting protection money from the inhabitants. Edward had paid little attention to these problems. Now, however, the last important English garrison in Scotland, the one holding Stirling Castle, had ag reed with its besiegers to surrender by a Midsummer Day 1314. In the meantime th e seige would be raised. This was a challenge to English prestige that could not be ignored. Edward assembled a vast force to relieve Stirling and reassert his authori ty in the north. Edward's force met the army of Robert Brus on June 23, 1314, an d was crushed. Apparently the defeat was caused entirely by bad generalship. Ma

ny important English lords were killed, and Edward fled to England ignominiously . The battle had important consequences in both kingdoms. It confirmed in th e eyes of Europe that Scotland did exist as a separate country for England, and vindicated Robert's claim to be its king. He, with the unwilling help of Edward I, had founded the Scottish sense of common nationhood. For England, it was the beginning of Stage Three in the struggle between k ing and baronage. Edward, with his prestige shattered, was at the mercy of his o pponents. The chief of these was Thomas Earl of Lancaster, Edward's cousin and t he second wealthiest man in the kingdom. He led the movement to restore the Ordi nances, and quickly made himself the arbiter over the king's council. Lancaster refused to take responsibility for that government's policies, but he reserved t he right to veto any measure the king's officers might take, if they seemed susp ect. As you can imagine, the government was paralyzed. England was helpless in the face of Scots aggression. Edward refused to re cognize that Robert Brus, who had humiliated England, was actually king of Scotl and, but no strong measures were taken against him. So the Scots continued to bl eed northern England white, and Robert Brus sent his brother Edward to Ireland, in the hopes of making him king of that country. One of the few pieces of good n ews for England in this period was Edward Brus's defeat and death in October 131 8. Eventually this situation discredited Thomas of Lancaster. Edward had acquired new favorites: two men, father and son, named Hugh Des penser. They were English and had some government experience, and were not quite the total liability that Piers Gaveston had been. In 1322, Edward was able to i solate Thomas of Lancaster politically, defeat him militarily, and execute him a s a traitor. The execution of Thomas of Lancaster ushered in Stage Four in the struggle . King Edward was in charge once more. The Despensers, who had been widely unpop ular before, were soon hated for their unbounded greed and their monopoly of the king's friendship. Thomas of Lancaster quickly became an underground saint, a m artyr, and people swarmed to his grave and the site of his death to honor him. The regime of the Despensers made him look very good. They used kidnapping , imprisonment, and other nefarious means to rob noble men and women of their in heritances. They did manage a long truce with the Scots, but even this must have been unpopular with some. Stage Five of the struggle was the overthrow of Edward. After so many batt les with his barons, his most dangerous enemy turned out to be his wife, Isabell e of France. Edward had married her when she was twelve, at the very beginning o f the reign, and always shown her outward respect. Frenchmen present at the wedd ing had said that Edward loved Piers Gaveston better than Isabelle, but that was a long time ago. More important in alienating her was the determination of the Despensers to keep the king and queen apart. Eventually Isabelle used a diplomatic mission to her brother the King of F rance to escape from the English court. In 1325 she went to Paris and arranged a good treaty between her husband and her brother. The Despensers discouraged Edw ard from going in person; his son and heir was sent as an acceptable substitute. Once young prince Edward was in her care, Isabelle planted herself in Pari s. She showed no desire to return to her husband, and started to plot against hi

m. Soon she had taken a lover, Roger Mortimer, a marcher lord who had been impri soned by the Despensers and had escaped to France. The affair eventually became a scandal, and Isabelle and prince Edward went with Mortimer to the Netherlands. It was from there, in 1326, with the help of the count of Holland and Hain ault, that Isabelle and Roger Mortimer launched a small invasion of England. Her company -- the term is more appropriate than army -- numbered only 700 men. Isa belle's coup was a brilliant success. Edward knew they were coming, but his sail ors refused to sail against her fleet because of their hatred for the Despensers . Once landed, Isabelle was joined by many important people, and no one was will ing to stand by the king. Edward fled London to the West Country (Wessex), and thence to Wales. He a nd his party were planning an escape to Ireland when they were captured. The Des pensers and other royal officers were hunted down and executed as traitors. With the king in custody, the questions the rebels had to face was, what n ext? No one was willing to allow the king to return to power. He had proved inco mpetent, extravagant and unreliable. He was a dangerous man. In the early days o f the coup, there was an obvious pretext for running the king's government in hi s absence. In October, when Edward II was in flight, the magnates of the realm r ecognized the prince as keeper of the realm. Writs summoning a parliament were i mmediately sent out. When the king was captured, things became more complicated. Isabelle, Mort imer, and their allies had to pretend that the king had delegated his power to h is son. The upcoming parliament posed another challenge. Parliament was scarcely y et an institution. It was rather an occasion when various great men and represen tatives of local communities met with the king to consult with him, to assent to the measures he proposed (though perhaps after some debate), and to agree to im plement his will. Parliament, as then conceived of, could hardly happen without the king. It was his court of parliament, not a body representing the kingdom in dependently of him. Nevertheless, the parliament went ahead in London in early January, 1327, and the only business before the assembly was how to get rid of the king. Some apparently were reluctant -- some of the bishops had to be convinced to do the d eed. After some argument, a deputation of two bishops was sent to King Edward's place of confinement, asking him to meet with the parliament. He made everyone's task easier by refusing, and calling the emissaries traitors. When this answer was heard in London, it caused a public uproar. The citizens of the town asked t he magnates of the kingdom to swear with them to uphold the cause of Queen Isabe lle and her son, and to depose the king in favor of his heir. On the 15th of January, the archbishop of Canterbury announced that the ma gnates, clerics, and people of the kingdom had decided that King Edward was depo sed, and that all had agreed to the succession of Edward III. A new deputation w as appointed to take the decision of the nation to the king. But before they rea ched him, the bishops who had visited him before went to Edward II and convinced him to abdicate by threatening to disregard his children's claims if he did not do so. Edward III was proclaimed king on January 25th. Only a few months later, Edward II was murdered under obscure circumstances, following two attempts to r escue him from prison. This revolution of 1326-27 was an important moment in the evolution of the post-Conquest political system. It was a victory for the great earls, who held

the balance of power between Isabelle and her husband. The entire struggle had m ade the earls and great barons conscious of themselves as being a group of peers , more important than the average royal vassal, with special rights and privileg es. But their privileges were dangerous ones. If they fell dangerously out of favor, they might find themselves executed without any opportunity to answer cha rges against them. To be tried without right of reply was the fate of Lancaster and Mortimer and several others I have not named. The importance of the magnates increased, then, but led to no new constitutional arrangements. There was constitutional development of a sort in the role of parliament. Over the past century parliament had developed into the highest court in the lan d, where the king did, or should do, all his most important business. When the c ountry determined that it must depose its lawful king, a meeting of parliament w as the only means that suggested itself. Only a parliament including the estates of the realm, bishops, secular lords, clergy and commons, thus representing all the legitimate interests of the realm as a whole, could discuss and deal with t his matter. The success of the revolution guaranteed the increased prestige of p arliament as representing the estates or classes and thus the realm as a whole. The need for the various parties to appeal to the country at large for legitimac y led to the permanent inclusion of representatives of the boroughs and the coun ties in parliament. Indeed, it was Edward II in 1322 who, when he was trying to discredit the Ordainers and Ordinances, established that all statutes had to be approved by a parliament of prelates, earls and barons, and the commonalty of the realm. In ot her words, the consent of the aristocracy alone was not enough to make law. We have gone through five stages, from Edward's coronation until his depos ition and death. There was in addition, a sixth stage, constituting the first th ree years of Edward III's reign. The revolution of 1326-27 got rid of a bad king , but did nothing to restore stable government. For that, a strong king was nece ssary. Edward III, who was fourteen at his accession, did not control his own go vernment at first. Rather his mother and her lover, Roger Mortimer, were in char ge. The kingdom was back where it had started, with a government dominated by an unsuitable favorite. Mortimer's position at the top was anomalous, and was doo med from the start. What finally finished him was another unsuccessful war with Scotland. It w as a blow to the new government. Once again the king had been shown unable to de fend his northern borders. Mortimer took the only sensible step -- he arranged a treaty of peace recognizing Robert Brus's title as king, something Edward II ha d always been unwilling to do, in exchange for a large payment. But although the move made good sense, Mortimer got pinned with the blame for English humiliatio n -- and for profiting from it. When, in 1330, Mortimer and Isabelle executed one of their critics, the Ea rl of Kent, on a trumped up charge, the rest in fear for their lives got to the young king and with his support launched a coup. Mortimer was captured, tried be fore parliament as a traitor, and executed. Isabelle was allowed to retire, and she survived until 1358. After this, the young Edward III, seventeen years old, assumed real power. Like his grandfather, he was personable, popular, warlike, and competent. With a king all could respect, many of the worst political problems simply disappeare d. The system could work without the distraction of a constant struggle for powe r. It was a welcome respite for the political class. What did Edward do with his undisputed power? Like his grandfather, he led

his country into war, war with France -- a war at first profitable, but ultimat ely debilitating.

The Era Of The Hundred Years War Edward III and the Origins of the Hundred Years' War Edward III was perhaps the most popular king England has ever had. I think this is because he was not only a great soldier, but also a great knight. To hi s subjects at least he was not just the man who won victories that made them pro ud to be English. He was also personally admirable, a man of generosity, courage , and style. He symbolized the virtues of his age in the way Victoria symbolized the virtues of hers. If Edward III was popular and revered because he symbolized 14th century a ristocratic virtue, and since it was his job to excel in warfare, then we need h ardly look for any special causes for the Hundred Years' War that he launched. E dward came to the throne after a period of defeat and disgrace for the monarchy. He quite naturally sought to restore the prestige of his line and vindicate his rights -- by war. For Edward, a warlike young man, there were his stuff, including the Crusade. But in the end, e past generation or two, the Scottish war and the gether pulled Edward III into the great enterprise several possible ways to show it was the two quarrels of th dispute over Gascony, that to of his career.

The conquest of Scotland attempted by his grandfather seemed to have come to a definitive end with the treaty of 1328 that Mortimer had concluded in Edwar d III's name. But almost immediately after the treaty was signed, the new peace between England and Scotland broke down. Robert Brus died in 1329, which was f ollowed or preceded by the deaths of many of his closest supporters. The new ki ng, David II, was only five years old. This gave an opening for a group of Anglo-Scottish lords known as the Disi nherited. Some of the greatest families had supported the English cause during t he War of Independence, and lost their lands when Brus won. They hoped to regain their old estates. The Disinherited had a leader, too -- Edward Balliol, son of King John Balliol, who claimed that he was the rightful King of Scots. So, in t he early 1330s, the uncertain regime of the child king David II was threatened b y a "contra" group based in England. Edward III found it convenient to give surreptitious and irregular encour agement to the Disinherited. This support paid dividends. In 1332, Edward Ballio l invaded Scotland and won a stunning victory over David's army. He was able to have himself crowned Edward I of Scotland. His period of power was very brief, b ut in supporting him Edward of England got involved in a Scottish war that would simmer on for the rest of the fourteenth century. The two Edwards also drove David II and his supporters right into the arms of the King of France. Now Edward III was already having problems with the king of France, who at this point was Philip VI. The main issue was the usual -- Gas cony. This time, however, the situation was a bit touchier. There was the uncert ainty of Philip VI's royal title. Philip VI was a cousin of his predecessor, not his son, and there were other claimants to the throne. One of these was Edward

III. The Scottish war, which forced David II's court to flee to France, introduc ed between the two kings another issue that had no easy solution. By 1337, war between France and England seemed inevitable. Edward was alre ady seeking continental allies. In May of that year, Philip confiscated Gascony. This confiscation became the first shot in a dynastic and eventually national war that would turn the English and the French into traditional enemies. When Edward decided to fight, he adopted the old strategy of finding allie s to the north of France, in Germany and the Netherlands. He then attacked Fran ce from the north in concert with them. This policy plunged him into a war, the expense of which could hardly be imagined. Edward III, one of the richer monarchs of the time, had a normal yearly re venue of no more than 30,000 a year. This was scarcely enough to meet his ordinar y expenses. Borrowing money was a normal royal expedient. When war came, 30,000 w as a drop in the bucket. For instance, in 1337 Edward III promised his allies 124 ,000 before the end of the year. Edward raised taxes through Parliament, of cour se, but these were enough to raise his annual income to no more than 57,000 a yea r. Perhaps Edward promised his allies too much. Some people thought that at t he time. But his allies had some justification for asking for lots of money to r isk themselves in a war with France. Warfare, which had been getting increasingl y costly for a long time now, was now horrendously expensive. Take, for instance, the big, well-designed castles that Edward I built to control Wales. Just one of these, Caernarfon Castle, cost 20-25,000 between 1284 and 1330, when it was essentially finished. This is as if Canada had bought a sm all fleet of submarines, each of which cost 80 billion dollars. Caernarfon Castl e was exceptional, but not unique. When war came, it cost a lot to knock such fortifications down, or starve out their garrisons. Another factor was the routine use of wages to pay the soldiers who fought the wars. This was not entirely new. For a long time kings had preferred profes sional soldiers to unpaid amateurs. By the time of Edward I, the feudal levy ha d become quite useless for any serious military expedition. During his wars, Edw ard I paid almost all of his troops, from earls on down. Perhaps the most important factor in raising military expenses was the gre ater ambition of the combatants. In the 14th century, many principalities and ki ngdoms were more unified and strongly governed than earlier. Kings and princes f ought for absolute lordship, not simply hegemony or tribute. Thus bigger politic al units, with greater resources, fought each other in bigger and more destructi ve wars. In any war, vast borrowing was necessary, because sufficient tax revenue w as politically impossible to raise. Unfortunately for the peace of Europe, borr owing was easier than ever. . In the early 14th century, pioneering merchant ban kers (mostly Italian) were out looking for investment opportunities. In the earl y years of the war, Edward made frequent resort to Italian firms willing and abl e to lend tens of thousands of pounds at a time. Edward also resorted to manipulating trade to achieve both political and e conomic gains.

Like his grandfather before him, Edward taxed wool, seized wool to sell it himself, gave wool export monopolies to those who would lend him money up front , and pledged future wool revenues to guarantee loans. He also prevented wool fr om being sold to his enemies and directed it to his continental allies. All of these expedients did not meet the need. Edward piled up huge debts. In one three month period in 1338, he borrowed 100,000, more than three times his normal peacetime annual revenue. By 1340, he was so strapped that he left the northern theater of war for England, to raise m oney in person, and had to leave his queen and children behind in Ghent as a hos tage to his debtors. What was worse, there was little in the way of results to show for the mon ey. Edward had succeeded in gaining the alliance of the Flemish wool cities, and the sea battle of Sluys had destroyed the French fleet. But no big victories on the land had been gained. The position in Gascony was perilous, the northern al lies were unreliable, and Scotland was unbeaten. In 1340, therefore, Edward's debts forced him to extreme measures. He call ed in all debts owing the crown, used the justice system to extract fines wherev er possible, and used other oppressive methods to raise money. When his efforts did not work, he tried to pin the blame on his regent, John Stratford, the archb ishop of Canterbury. The result was the biggest crisis of Edward's reign, one that paralleled t he crisis of 1297, when Edward I's arbitrary taxation had turned the political c lass against him. Archbishop Stratford, seeing he was to be the scapegoat, refused to go qui etly. Rather he defended himself by bringing up constitutional issues. He refuse d to submit to an examination of his conduct in office, which he said was blamel ess, except before his peers. Indeed, he successfully made the king and his arbi trary methods the chief issue. Here he had plenty of sympathizers: clergy and co mmons were upset about the way taxes were being collected without their consent. The bishops and the secular lords were concerned about Edward's bullheadedness. When a parliament finally met in 1341, Edward had to back down. Arbitrary methods of making money had to be disowned, and Stratford was off the hook. An important aspect of this confrontation was the leading part taken by th e commons. In the 1260s, in the 1290s, in the crisis of the Ordinances, in the d eposition of Edward II, the commons had followed the baronial leadership. In 134 0-41, the commons, hard pressed by taxation and disturbed by the use of the righ t of justice to raise money, took much of the initiative. Edward III learned then that if he wanted to get what he wanted, he would have to stay on good terms with the political classes, and especially with their representatives in meetings of parliament. It was a lesson he learned well. Edw ard was very adept at wooing the commons with propaganda and appeals to loyalty and even national pride. He became very good at trading well-timed concessions f or grants of the money he needed. Redress of grievances in return for taxation, both taking place in a parliamentary context, became a regular part of English p olitics in his long reign. After 1341, things began to go better for Edward. He abandoned his expensi ve German and Netherlandish allies (though not the Flemings) and cut down on the outflow of his funds. At the same time, he repudiated his debts to the Italian bankers. Despite his bad debts, Edward found it quite possible to raise money i

n different ways. Also the war went somewhat better for him. In 1337, in response to Philip VI's confiscation of Gascony, Edward had claimed the crown of France. There was some justification for his claim. Through his mother, Edward was a direct descen dant of Philip IV of France. Philip VI was not so closely related to the earlier Philip. Raising the claim was probably just a bargaining chip. But as the war went on, Edward began to put his claim to good use. By presenting himself as an alte rnative king, he could exploit divisions within Philip's realm, which was divers e and highly regionalized. The Flemish alliance was the first triumph of this te chnique. Because Edward said he was king of France, the Flemings (who disliked the French court anyway) were able to join Edward and say that they had not brok en earlier oaths to Philip, but merely recognized that his rule was illegitimate . Similarly, when the succession to the Duchy of Brittany was disputed in th e 1340s, Edward as king of France was able to bring the disappointed rival into alliance with him. Brittany was a convenient landing place for English armies, a nd soon became the next battlefield. English armies won enough loot there to ple ase Edward's troops and keep the war effort alive. But Edward was no really no closer to winning his war. Despite the damage done by Edward's armies to French farms, towns, and subjects, Philip VI was ahea d of the game. In 1346, however, Edward led a provocative raid through Normandy and the v icinity of Paris. Philip raised a great army and decided to hunt Edward down and teach him a lesson. He caught Edward, who was retreating towards Flanders, and forced him into battle. But although the French much outnumbered the English, Ph ilip lost. He rushed headlong into battle and met a devastating new tactic, a co mbination of infantry and archers, and his army was destroyed. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, after years of cavalry dominat ing military practice, disciplined infantry began to be used with some effect. T he ability of infantry to stand against cavalry was much aided by using archery in combination with them. Edward I, in fact, had been an early pioneer in recrui ting longbowmen from the Welsh marches to beef up his armies. The Scottish wars of the 1330s emphasized how useful archers were if given the right opportunities . Thus when Edward was trapped at Crecy, it did not take great genius for him to take the best defensive position he could, dismount his knights and squires, an d put archers on the flanks of his formations to shoot down the French knights a s they charged. He probably did not expect that tactic to work as well as it did . Crecy was a great victory for English arms. It won Edward and his subjects prestige and booty, and made it possible for him to seize Calais as a permanent base on French soil. The cake was iced by the fact that David II of Scotland wa s captured about the same time. But these victories did not win him the war. Scotland continued to resist, even with its king in captivity. The plague of 1348-49 slowed down the French w ar. Even without the interruption of the plague, there is no reason to think tha t Edward could have gotten much more mileage out of Crecy than he did. His big b reak came only in 1356, ten years later, when King John of France, who had succe eded his father in the meantime, walked into the English longbows at Poitiers. A gain, the casualties for the French were terrible. John also found himself captured by the Edward the Prince of Wales, the so

n of his no doubt nsom. It king of

rival for the throne. This was the high point of Edward III's war, and of his life. Possession of the French king guaranteed him a fabulous ra might have meant more. Perhaps one last push could actually make Edward France in fact as well as in name.

The War in the Later Years of Edward III The battle of Poitiers, 1356 was the greatest English victory of the first half of the Hundred Years' War. The capture of King John was a great blow to th e French monarchy. Despite the best efforts of his eldest son the Duke of Normandy, the futur e King Charles V, France, which had suffered much from plague and the burning and looting of English armies, was quickly becoming ungovernable. Free companies, private armies of discharged mercenaries, continued to pil lage and kill. French royal finances were now near collapse. The taxpayers both in the p rovinces and in Paris, the capital, were near revolt. The nobility, disgusted with constant royal incompetence, did little to su pport the new regime. Royal authority in the provinces had almost disappeared. Finally a war-weary peasantry rose against the useless nobility who could exploit them but not defend them. After a further English invasion that fell short of taking Paris, a treat y (the Peace of Brtigny, 1360) ,was negotiated that gave much to Edward but allow ed the Valois line of Philip VI to retain the throne of France. King John was to be ransomed for a huge amount, two million livres, or Fre nch pounds. Edward also was granted his territorial claims: Calais, his mother's dowry of Ponthieu, and a much expanded Gascony. Poitou, lost in the time of King John of England, was returned to English rule. Gascony was to be held in full sovereignty; the Duke of Aquitaine (i.e. th e King of England) was no longer to be a French vassal. Edward promised little more than to give up his claim to be King of France . The last two provisions were at the last moment withdrawn from the treaty, supposedly to be implemented later. Edward held his claim in reserve, and the F rench king held onto his overlordship of Edward's duchy. A large first installment was paid for King John's release, and Poitou and other areas near Gascony were turned over to Edward. The Peace of Brtigny, however, quickly turned into a dead letter. King John's ransom, which may have been beyond France's power to raise, wa s never paid, and became impossible to collect once John died in 1364. In the countryside, fighting never really stopped. Even though war betwee n the English and French kings had ended, many of the disbanded warriors stayed in their units and continued to pillage. Some of the Free Companies were exporte d to fight in new wars in Spain and Italy. But many others remained in France. I n such circumstances, Edward had a very hard time gaining real control over terr itories theoretically his. English military energies were diverted to Spain, where Edward (called in

history books "the Black Prince") fought on one side of a civil war, and Bernard du Guesclin, the leading French commander, fought for the other. The Black Prince lost his war in Spain, incurring substantial debts. He tr ied to make up the money by taxing Gascony heavily. These taxes served to aliena te the Gascons. In 1369, an appeal against the Black Prince was made to Paris. C harles V, after some hesitation, he accepted the appeal from Gascony. War soon f ollowed. That war was destructive and inconclusive. The French tactics were to let the English roam where they would, but to follow and harass them with picked for ces, and never join in a decisive battle. This resulted in a truly horrifying ty pe of war, in which the country was bled by the English and allowed to bleed by the French, both sides hoping that the long campaigns would hurt the other badly enough to make victory possible. But war showed little signs of burning out. In much of France it had beco me the normal way of life, and continued because many people profited from it. Indeed, England as a whole seems to have done well out of it. Save for a short period at the end of Edward's reign, it was a very popular war. For the English, war with France came to have both a tangible and an intan gible appeal. Let's begin with the tangible aspects; let's talk about profit. Ov er the years, many Englishmen fought in France, and of the survivors, many came out ahead of the game. Such gain was not restricted to the upper class, the esta blished military aristocracy. This was a war in which there was a demand for all ranks of men. A peasant or yeoman from rural England who had grown up practicin g with the bow -- and the king encouraged them to do so -- could turn this skill into a steady job that paid cash. The army was particularly tempting as a career in the pre-Plague period wh en land was scarce and the population too high, when wages were low and prices h igh. Even after the Plague, when the pressure came off, army pay was still attra ctive. Of course pay was not the only attraction. Men both high and low hoped fo r and expected loot. The best kind of loot was the ransom. Any knight or noble captive could be expected to buy his freedom, and fourteenth century warriors went into battle l ooking for likely prisoners. For those who took a man of high rank, a count, a d uke or a prince, it was like winning the lottery. Such men were usually confisca ted by the commanders -- who took a share in all ransoms won by their followers -- but those who did the actual capturing were richly rewarded. In this war, where almost all the fighting was done on French soil, and wh ere several major battles were won by the English, the flow of loot and ransom m oney was of great benefit to many English people of all ranks. It was possible, therefore, for adventurous, reckless, or desperate Englishmen to make a good liv ing from the war -- granted, of course, that they did not get killed or die of d isease. One of this war's attractions was that, after a while, the war never stopp ed. Kings and princes ran out of money, or signed truces, and disbanded their ar mies. But the armies stayed in being, as Free Companies, the embodiment of perma nent war. If no prince could afford to pay them indefinitely, there was a new wa r somewhere else -- in Italy, where city-states and tyrants were constantly figh ting, or in some spin-off of the English-French conflict. Or, more likely, the F ree Company could wage war on its own behalf, looting or extorting protection mo ney from the French countryside.

The new tactics and the new methods of recruiting and paying soldiers had resulted in the democratization of war. The predatory, adventurous life was no l onger restricted to the knightly classes. England also reaped psychological benefits from the long war. The Hundred Years' War slowly acquired some of the characteristics of a modern, nationalist war. By the beginning of the 14th c., the people of England of all classes were far more united than they had been a hundred years before. Members of the aristo cracy could still speak French of a sort, and French remained a prestigious lang uage. But they were no longer a Norman aristocracy; the vast majority of English lords and knights had been born in England, of English parents, and spoke Engli sh as a mother tongue. Important proclamations were made in English, and literat ure in the English language was beginning to appear. The difference between English and French peoples was of course emphasized by the war. A war that lasted forty years makes the combatants well aware of th eir distinct identities, even establishes distinct identities that did not exist before. At the same time, duty to one's lord the king, apart from nationality, rem ained an important motivation to fight. The English people may have been fightin g for their English king, but they were fighting to vindicate his title as king of France. All ranks willingly served Edward III, and all were proud of his vali ant heir, Edward the Black Prince. Edward III's reign, in fact, was almost wholl y free of aristocratic intrigue and treason. Edward did exactly what the nobles wanted a king to do -- gave them a good war to fight, and thus validated their r ole in society. Edward revitalized the chivalric ideal. He gave people symbols they could believe in. Perhaps his most brilliant stroke was the invention of the Order of the Garter, early in the war. It was an exclusive club of the best knights in th e realm, sworn to Edward's service and to the practice of knightly virtues. Befo re this time, all such elite orders had been crusading orders. Edward secularize d the chivalric order -- he made the service of the king, by implication, as wor thy as the service of the holy sepulchre. He also drew on the symbolism of Arthu r's Round Table. The Order of the Garter, like the elaborate tournaments of the time, like the victories of Crecy and Poitiers, embodied and justified an entire set of soc ial values and gave Edward's followers a sense of high purpose. That sense of purpose was severely tried in the years after 1369. The simp le reason is that the English began to lose badly. After 1371, the Black Prince was seriously ill and returned to England. With the king old and his heir sick, the next oldest prince, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, took charge of the wa r and the government. He, however, had even worse luck than his brother. His gre at expedition of 1373 was his chance to be a hero, but he lost half of his army. Through the 1370s, the English had little to cheer about and many causes for co mplaint. After Brtigny, everyone had expected great and continuing profit from a suc cessful war. The ransoms of John of France and David of Scotland were supposed t o pay the king's debts. But the ransoms were never paid in full and what money d id come in quickly disappeared into the pockets of creditors and officials. One of the most interesting developments of this period was in parliament. It was here that the knights of the shire and the citizens of London criticized the king's ministers and demanded reforms. Harsh criticism and strident demands were not often heard in medieval assemblies. But now there was no strong royal leadership, and the continuing military and naval disasters made the government

politically vulnerable. The king, now over sixty, paid no attention to state business. He spent al l his time with his young mistress. The Black Prince was dying -- he would die b efore his father. The Prince's heir, Richard of Bordeaux, later Richard II, was very young. John of Gaunt was despised as a lousy general, more concerned with m aking himself King of Castile in Spain than in beating the French. And the counc il, John of Gaunt's cronies, were suspected of being crooks. If the kingdom was broke, it was their thievery and incompetence that had made it so. By the time the parliament of 1376 was called, in order to vote more taxes , many people were angry. This resentment broke into the open almost as soon par liament met. The chancellor asked for a grant of money, and the commons asked fo r a chance to discuss the proposal in private. Once they were sequestered, a lon g angry debate took place. Then the commons requested a meeting with four great lords -- two bishops and two earls of their choice. In consultation with these, the commons formulated their petition. The king was asked to act first on a vast number of petitions to redress a buses, far more than any other medieval parliament ever produced. Then the commo ns, with the support of a significant number of lords, began to attack the minis ters and their business associates. Acting through the first real Speaker of the Commons, a knight named Peter de la Mare, the commons as a body accused the min isters of lining their own pockets. They were then tried by the Lords, and two of the most important were convicted. A new royal council was then appointed. Th is was the first impeachment, and the first time ministers of the king had been explicitly held responsible to parliament. The parliament of 1376 quickly became known as the Good Parliament. Just as quickly all of its actions were overturned. John of Gaunt consider ed the revolt of parliament a slight on the royal dignity and an attack on his p olitical position. His brother the Black Prince had died during the Good Parliam ent, and so there was nothing to prevent him from doing this. It was beyond his power, however, to get English politics back on an even keel. The English system demanded as strong king in whom people could have confi dence. It demanded victory in war. Neither of these were likely to be available soon. Also there were social and religious pressures, dating from the time of th e plague and even before, that we have not yet discussed. They resulted, in the early years of Richard II, in an unprecedented crisis.

Religious Conflict in Fourteenth-Century England In the fourteenth century England, like the rest of Europe, began to deve lop in new directions. We've seen political and military novelties: bigger, more expensive wars governments that had more power than ever before to draw on the resources of their subject populations the involvement of the higher ranks of the common people (who paid the bi lls) in political life In economics, an era came to an end in the first half of the fourteenth c entury. The great expansion of population, of land under the plow, of commercial activity slowed as the limits of growth, given current technology were reached. The Black Death, by killing up to a third of the population, fundamentally al

tered economic relations. On the bread and butter level, the whole century was o ne of shocks and adjustments. A change in the relative positions of laity and clergy, which had been slo wly taking place for a long time, was becoming increasingly obvious to all obser vers. The leaders of lay society were less patient with the special privileges o f the clergy; laymen of all ranks questioned the vast wealth of the church -- we alth that was not all that much greater than before, but which seemed more irrit ating; and many genuinely religious people, lay and clerical both, criticized th e spiritual failures of the church. The institutional church, led by the pope, his cardinals, and the bishops, was less and less the source of new ideas and spiritual leadership, and increas ingly an embattled establishment trying to maintain the position it had gained i n earlier eras. The political side of the conflict between lay and clerical interests The centralization of the church under the pope had begun as a reaction t o disorder. The reforming clergy had morale, education, and organization on the ir side; lay rulers were initially at a disadvantage and lost ground to church g overnment. But as secular governments became better organized, the prestige of t he centralized church was bound to decline. The "state," meaning successful princes backed by their own bureaucracies and tamed vassals, could guarantee order better than the church could. One turning point in that long struggle occurred in the 1290s, when Philip IV and Edward I insisted on taxing the clergy not for the crusade or for a papa lly sponsored war, but for their own war against each other. Both kings had the political strength to face down the pope when he objected. Yet the pope's power to regulate and tax the clergy of western Christendom did not disappear. Indeed, through the 14th century his power increased dramati cally, in what Richard Southern has called an inflationary spiral. The wars of the late thirteenth century had made Rome ungovernable. The pa pal court fled to France in the early 1300s and did not return to Italy for deca des. A new papal court was built, on a lavish scale, on the borders of France, i n Avignon, and expensive new wars were launched to restore the papal position in Italy. To pay for these projects, and to keep their control of the church intac t, the popes increased the number of agents in the provinces and bureaucrats in the capital. Much of what they did was raise money. It was during the fourteenth century that the sale of indulgences became a mass market operation. The pope's ability to control church appointments was pushed to the limit. Thus, despite recent reversals, the pope's power was more evident at the g rassroots than ever before. The pope gained authority by absorbing many of the p rerogatives of local bishops. (Remember Grosseteste's conflict with Rome.) The English were irritated all the more because the papal court seemed to favor their enemies. Avignon was not officially part of France, and the popes w ere not French puppets. But the popes, their cardinals, and their other servants were French themselves, and it angered English people paying high taxes for a F rench war to see money from English benefices going to French-speaking absentee clergy.

At mid-century, this issue came up regularly in parliament. There were sta tutes passed against papal provisions, that is, papal appointment of English cle rgy. The king, however, never really enforced those laws. He merely used them to extort approval of his own clerical candidates from the pope. (In other words cooperation between king and clerical powers continued.) Spiritual complaints In the old days, a passive laity had been content with the intercession of monks and the protection of the saints. Since the eleventh century at least, de vout members of the laity began to look for more. They wanted preaching, they wa nted to learn the Scriptures, they wanted to follow a Christian way of life with out necessarily entering a monastery or a convent. During the thirteenth and fourteenth century, the Franciscans and Dominica ns were the most popular bodies within the church because they met the spiritual needs of the laity best. By the end of the 14th century, the mendicants (beggin g clergy) had lost their first enthusiasm, and some of their early popular respe ct. People still resorted to them for guidance and to make confession, but the re were just as many who saw the friars as corrupt, poor in theory but not in pr actice, cajoling their clients for handouts instead of rebuking them for their s ins. In the view of the most concerned laymen and clergy, what had been the cutt ing edge of the church was now blunted. The appearance of heresy in England Heresy, meaning religious revolt against the established church, had been fairly common in most parts of Europe since A.D. 1000, but rare in England. In England, the power structure was secure and unambiguous enough to compe l obedience in matters as serious as religious belief and discipline. The appear ance of an energetic heresy was indicative that something basic was changing. The origin of the heresy was equally interesting, and equally ominous. Un like earlier heresies, this one was led by a solid member of the establishment: an Oxford scholar, a theologian of the first rank. Such a figure was more influential, at least in the short run, than a hund red wandering preachers. He had access to the highest powers in the land, and fo r a few years poured into their ears the not unpopular message that the clergy h ad grown too rich and too corrupt, and needed to be corrected by the secular pow er. His name was John Wyclif. Wyclif, his ideas, and his patrons Wyclif was not obviously born to be a radical. He was a Yorkshireman whose talents and connections led him to Oxford. Beginning in the 1350s, he began to pursue a doctorate in theology, a quest that usually took twenty to twenty-five years. His first notoriety was not in theology as such, but in philosophy, where he forcefully argued a novel, if not wholly original, position. He rejected the reigning skepticism among scholars that God could be known through logic. He believed that knowledge of God was not only possible, but that it was t he only true knowledge. It was also accessible in the Bible and in the writings

of the church fathers, but mainly in the Bible. This may sound either commonsens ical or simplemindedly fundamentalist to you, but it attracted a lot of attentio n from his academic peers. In the early 14th century, Ockham had apparently prov ed, with brilliant and impeccable logic, that theology was impossible. Wyclif, w ith equally compelling logic, said that real theology, certain knowledge about G od, was indeed possible. This made him very attractive to some academics, and an object of suspicion among others. Besides being a philosopher, Wyclif was a priest and a passionate believer in the Gospel, and from his near fundamentalist philosophical stance, he saw mu ch that was wrong in the church of his time. He saw little scriptural warrant fo r the powers of the papacy or the hierarchy of ecclesiastical offices and instit utions. This freed him to criticize errors and abuses, even those that emanated from the papal court. In the early 1370s, Wyclif's ideas began to attract attention outside of a cademic circles -- or perhaps he went peddling his ideas. The commoners in parli ament, upset by the expenses of war, were blaming the financial crisis on the ch urch, which was too wealthy and prone to tax evasion. John of Gaunt, the effecti ve regent, was known to be sympathetic to this view; so were forces in the churc h. In the parliament of 1371, when the clerical ministers were dismissed and the clergy heavily taxed, two Augustinian friars, representing an order that claime d to be poor already, were brought into to argue that it was right and just to t ax the rich clergy. Wyclif was in the audience observing. He about to begin a career as a high powered consultant to John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster. The next year, Wyclif w as receiving a retainer from the crown. Over the next few years Wyclif spent his time justifying theologically and philosophically a course of action that the lay leaders of society were already considering -- the confiscation of clerical wealth for the uses of the state. For Wyclif, though, money was not the main thing: authority within the chu rch was. The older view, held by the pope and his subordinates, was that the visibl e church was the vehicle of God's grace and therefore of true authority. The pop e, as Vicar of Christ, was the rightful leader of Christian society. Wyclif said the real church was not the visible institution, but the "elec t," those whom God had predestined to salvation. Only the elect, those in a stat e of grace, had any right to exercise authority. Holding office alone was insuff icient warrant. Anyone of bad character, any obvious sinner, including the pope, forfeited his just claim to power. Furthermore, Wyclif aimed this critique of power squarely at the church. I f the church erred, as many thought it did, it was up to the lay rulers to corre ct it. If the pope was worldly, he was a heretic who ought to be deposed by the lay rulers. Wyclif dodged the obvious problem -- who will correct or depose an u njust lay prince? He was too anxious to reform the church to give this serious c onsideration -- or perhaps, with his dreams of royal implementation of his ideas , it was inconvenient to think about that subject. The ideas that Wyclif put forth were inflammatory, and gave theoretical en couragement for parliamentary attacks on ecclesiastical wealth, which were frequ ent between 1371 and 1381. He himself appeared in the first parliament of Richard II (1377) to argue that in case of necessity it was lawful for the English government to sequester

papal funds. He was called before a church court in England in 1378 to answer for his ideas. The princess of Wales, the mother of the young king, exerted her influence and he went free. That same year Wyclif was back in parliament on behalf of John of Gaunt, c ondemning the right of sanctuary on theoretical grounds. Although Wyclif was actively promoting extreme measures against clerical i ndependence, he was not a puppet of his patrons. He saw himself as a teacher of the truth, and he followed his arguments to their logical and very extreme concl usions. He had become convinced by 1379, if not before, that the highest power cla imed by the priesthood was a fraud. He began to attack, first in lectures and la ter in a book, the orthodox doctrine of transubstantiation. Transubstantiation m eant that when a priest blessed the sacramental bread and wine at mass, it was a ctually turned into the body and blood of Christ. It might look like bread and w ine still, but in essence it was Christ. It was the miraculous power of transubstantiation that set priests and bi shops apart from the laity, and justified their superior role in the church. But transubstantiation could not but be offensive to Wyclif. Philosophically he tho ught it was nonsense. Theologically it was a doctrine not found in Scripture. Po litically, it was a prop for the corrupt hierarchy of his day. Wyclif, who like later Protestants thought that preaching and teaching sho uld be the main occupation of the clergy, was willing to grant that Christ was s acramentally or mystically present in the Eucharist, but not that His body and b lood were actually there. In promoting such a dangerous idea, Wyclif went well beyond the desires of his patrons. His own institution, Oxford University, felt compelled to move aga inst him. Nobody was willing to take up his cause. The Duke of Lancaster visite d him and told him to shut up about the Eucharist. Wyclif, now in exile from Oxf ord, continued to write works that were clearly heretical by most people's stand ards. Wyclif had clearly overreached himself. If he wanted to be the power behin d the throne of an English reformation, he had blown it. His certainty that he k new the truth had led him to isolate himself from the court. But the inflammator y possibilities of his theories were soon to be demonstrated in the most dramati c way possible -- when disgust with a worldly church contributed to the Peasant' s Revolt.

Economic Change and Social Tension in the Late Fourteenth Century In the 1370s, English society was under a great deal of tension. There were: Political problems resulting from the lack of an undisputed leader and fr om the failure of the war effort. Religious problems due to lack of spiritual leadership from the church, c omplicated by the same war pressures, which introduced the divisive issue of cle rical taxation into relations between clerical and lay politicians. In the same decade of the 1370s, there were other social and economic prob

lems: Landlords (a class that included almost all rich and important people) a nd their peasant tenants were set against each other, because economic change ha d made the social structure of the 12th and 13th centuries obsolete. The background The thirteenth century was an era of expansion. Population, agricultural p roduction, commercial activity, and prices for commodities had all been rising s ince the eleventh century at least. Landlords did well. Land was scarce and labo r was plentiful; thus prices for agricultural good and rents were high, while wa ges were low. There was profit to be made in exploiting the rights most lords he ld over their peasant neighbors -- rights to labor services, death duties, restr ictions on marriages to outsiders. Management by literate professionals became the norm on big estates, and s ome of the lesser ones. An era of "high farming" (intensive investment, specialization, close supe rvision by the owner). After 1315, this pattern was disturbed. 1315 was the beginning of the firs t major famine England and western Europe had seen in a long time. Many people w ho had been living at the bare subsistence level died. Thereafter the population continued to decline, perhaps because peasants began to marry later and limit t he size of their families. The great expansion had come to an end. A long recess ion, in which markets shrank and prices fell, began. The greatest single shock was the Black Death or bubonic plague of 1348-4 9, which may have killed a third of England's population. It is difficult to me asure the psychological component of this catastrophe, But economically, the pla gue, following on the earlier decline changed the whole shape of society. The prosperity of the earlier period. had been based on constant expansion . The upper classes in particular had benefited from their monopoly of scarce re sources and the cheapness of labor. In the second half of the 14th century, labo r became the scarcest resource, while everything else dropped in price. Food and other agricultural commodities became cheaper because the market for them was s maller. Rents were lower, because the return on land was less and there were few er people competing for it. The new economic climate spelled opportunity for the peasant survivors of the plague. Of course this situation frightened all landlords. Their income was droppi ng at precisely the time that wages were soaring. In 1349, almost immediately, t he king's council issued an ordinance forbidding wage raises. Two years later, p arliament passed its first notable economic legislation, the Statute of Laborers of 1351. Wages were pegged at the pre-plague level, and all landless men under sixt y were compelled to accept work at those rates. A man's own lord had first claim on his services. Agricultural workers were forbidden to leave their masters bef ore their contracts were up, and no other master was to hire them if they did. There was also a rather weak and unspecific attempt to regulate prices, bu t as usually happens, the price controls were an immediate failure. The wage controls were somewhat more successful. The people who agitated f or this law, the people who were in charge of enforcing it, and the people who b enefited were all the same, and they put a great deal of effort into keeping wag

es down and workers in their place. In the long term, of course, legislation could not reverse the economic tr end. The landlords themselves undermined the statute in bidding against each oth er for labor. But the statute and the attitude behind it did make adjustments a difficult matter. Peasants and other workers wanted to take maximum advantage of the new situation. They wanted the freedom to sell their labor for the highest price. Workers increasingly resented the lords. They were not desperate for land or work as their ancestors had been in past decades -- they knew they could make it on their own. Out of such perceived injustice come revolutionary ideas. The late fourteenth century saw a phenomenon that had been rare before -- the refusa l of peasants to render lords the services that were demanded. In other words, s trikes. The situation in the 1370s The conflict with the peasantry added quite a bit to the tensions of the 1 370s. The landlord class, to which almost all taxpayers belonged, was being pres sed from above and below at the same time. Their discomfort led to an attempt to change the taxation system to give them some relief at the expense of the poor. By the late fourteenth century, the scutage, or tax on military fiefs, was long obsolete. Besides the tax on wool export and other tolls, the main type of levy was a wealth tax that fell heaviest on landowners. During the 1370s, the landowners who sat in parliament were sure there mus t be a better way to raise money. They tried innovative taxes on the church, and they were equally willing to experiment on the laity. Thus in 1377, a head or p oll tax was devised. Every lay person over the age of 14 was to pay 4 pence, sub stantial amount for a poor person. It was not a popular tax. The unfairness of everyone, rich or poor, paying the same amount bothered some people. Taxpayers were also aggravated by tax col lectors grilling them about their personal circumstances. Politically prominent people ignored those complaints; they were mainly bothered by the inefficiency o f the tax. The government needed more money for the war, and allowing the rich t o get off cheap seemed foolish. In 1379, a graduated poll tax was introduced. The fact that the rich paid more, or were supposed to, did not stop the grumbling, and the tax still yielded less than Parliament and the king's council had hoped for. When the financial crisis deepened the next year, 1380, Parliament went ah ead with a third poll tax. . Once again, rich and poor were to pay the same and the tax rate was jacked up: In 1381, every lay person above the age of 15 was to pay one shilling, 12 pence, three times the rate of the first poll tax of 13 77. The parliament was not unaware that this was ruinous for the poor, whose f amily income was often 20 shillings a year or less. A family with two adults wou ld have to pay ten percent of their yearly income. The parliamentarians reassure d themselves that the rich would, as a matter of what we might call noblesse obl ige, help the poor to pay. Also instructions were given to collect the tax in in stallments: two-thirds by January of 1381, one-third by the following June. These minor adjustments did nothing to stem public discontent. People refu sed to cooperate with the tax collectors, and up to a third of the adult lay pop

ulation succeeded in avoiding the tax. The London collectors reported to the Exchequer that they couldn't do thei r job without stirring up dangerous agitation. The king's council told collector s to put on the screws and collect the whole tax at once, and now. It was a fata l mistake. In June of 1381, commissioners following the instructions of their superio rs sparked off a rising at Brentwood in Essex. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 Essex, like East Anglia and Kent, was an area where the unfairness of the tax was especially evident. These counties had many small free and near-free lan dholders, well placed to take advantage of the new economic conditions, who re sented the harassment of manorial lords who tried to enforce their remaining rig ht -- perhaps more than some people who suffered under greater disabilities. The poll tax was the last and greatest of upper-class harassments. In a so utheastern village, there was often no great man in residence who might feel som e obligation in meeting the local tax bill. Everyone was in much the same econom ic position, and equally vulnerable to financial ruin. It was these villages, fu ll of resentful people with obvious common interests, that united to defy outsid ers. The rising quickly spread from Brentwood to other Essex villages. Soon the rising was general in Essex. Nor was it confined to that county. Quite independ ently there was a tax revolt in Kent. The two sets of rebels were soon in contac t with each other, and peasant armies from those areas converged on London to ma ke their demands known. Despite the standard upper-class prejudice against the peasants, we can se e that the peasants had a quite sophisticated political consciousness. They were not striking out blindly in rage, nor were they only concerned with the wrongs inflicted on them, though these were of course near the top of their agenda. The ir view of the current political situation was much the same as that held by the knights and burgesses who sat in Parliament. Peasants were angry about the recent military setbacks. The war was going so badly at this time that the coast was suffering raids from French and Castili an ships. The peasants of the southeast were at personal risk because of the gov ernment's failures. When the men of Kent marched to London, they first decided t hat everyone living near the sea should stay at home to defend the coast. They d id not want to leave the country helpless before its foreign enemies. The peasants were also angry about the continuing financial crisis. They, like parliamentarians, were sure that mismanagement and corruption were behind t he problem. The men of Essex picked out the property of the royal treasurer to b e pillaged. The men of Kent told the monks at Canterbury that they should elect one of themselves as archbishop, because the current one, who was royal chancell or, was a traitor, and they were going to London to behead him. The peasants felt themselves to be by right members of the political commu nity, with an interest in affairs of state. All the rebels thought they had a right to speak and a right to act. This attitude lay behind the social demands t hat the rebels made: The least radical one was an abolition of the poll tax and a return to the traditional wealth taxes, the tenths and fifteenths. All the rebels wanted the abolition of the disabilities of villeinage and

almost certainly an end to the labor legislation. A minority of the peasants went beyond this, to call for a more sweeping r eformation of society. Some wanted the church dispossessed, and its lands redist ributed. Others wanted all ranks below the king to be abolished, so that there s hould be no lesser lords and only a single bishop in all England. A poor priest named John Ball argued for some kind of communism, and preac hed a famous sermon on the text: When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? ["Delved" = dug; "span" = spun (thread)] The depth of peasant dissatisfaction, and the confidence of peasants that they could do something for themselves, is the remarkable aspect of the Rising o f 1381. There were several other outbreaks as news of the first risings spread. Pe asants took it upon themselves to demand freedom from villeinage, especially fro m oppressive ecclesiastical landlords. The climax of the Peasant's Revolt was in London, where the original two g roups converged. The young king Richard II (14 years old) was was forced to do something by the incapacity of his ministers, and personally negotiated with the two rebel groups from Essex and Kent -- they were camped separately on opposite sides of the Thames outside of London. The Essex men largely dispersed after Richard promised them charters of em ancipation -- which shows that most rebels were willing to settle for less that total revolution. Wat Tyler, the leader from Kent, wanted more, but at a critica l moment he overplayed his hand, and was killed. At that moment Richard cooly de clared to the rebels "I am your leader" and this prevented a massacre. They wer e dispersed and went home. Once the threat to London was over the government was free to restore the status quo ante. None of the promises made by the king were kept. The French pe asant revolts of the previous generation (at the height of the war there) had be en met with mass repression. In England, the government was (and could be) more restrained. A number of the major leaders were executed, and other rebels must have been killed out of hand. But the government was happy to let things return to normal without a demonstration of its potential for ferocity. Results of the Peasants' Revolt The effects of the Peasants' Revolt were several. Poll taxes fell out of u se. Otherwise, it is remarkable for making almost no difference in the long term economic and social development in England. The rebels had failed to throw off the remnants of villeinage in a moment. But the repression of the rising did not hing to stop the decay of old institutions. In the fifteenth century, most peasa nts would attain a de facto freedom from personal servitude, though as we will s ee later, this does not mean that they lived happily ever after. Landlords by an d large ceased to manage their estates in the old way, and were content to colle ct rent only rather than attempt to enforce labor services and other servile pay ments. And the labor laws fell out of use because everyone preferred a freer mar ket in labor. Perhaps this general loosening would not have happened so easily if the la ndlords had not had a good scare. The crisis of 1381 had a considerable ideological impact. Even before the rebellion, John of Gaunt had decided that his pet academic, John Wyclif, had gon e too far in attacking the doctrine of transubstantiation. The revolt ended the duke's willingness to attack the church. The anti-clericalism of the peasants m ade anti-clericalism suspect.

In 1382, the government, the bishops, and even the friars, who were shocke d by Wyclif's doctrine of the Eucharist, combined forces to discipline those Oxf ord theologians who were sympathetic to Wyclif. This ended the possibility of an easy alliance between court and anti-papal clerical reformers. Yet Wyclifism was not dead. Though Wyclif never tried to attract a popula r following, his influence and ideas were reaching a broad public by an undergro und route. Both learned and unlearned clerics were attracted by his vision of a less ritualistic, less hierarchical church. The learned men adapted Wyclif's writings and translated them into English ; more importantly they created the first widely available English translation o f the Bible. The unlearned clerics hit the road, as did some of the learned ones, bring ing their message directly to the people under the noses of the bishops. Anti-clericalism was still popular enough that the commons in parliament, suspicious of ecclesiastical authority, prevented the new archbishop of Canterbu ry from hunting out these heretics when there were only a few of them. The movem ent that became known as Lollardy thus got a head start on its enemies. Nor was it only poor people who listened to this heresy. The survival and spread of Wyclif's heresy, an unprecedented phenomenon in English history, was symptomatic of the divisions remaining in that society.

The Reign of Richard II The Peasant's Revolt was only the most dramatic indication of the disconte nts of late 14th century English society. The glory days of King Edward III, the profits and the confidence derived from a victorious war, all were gone, but un happily, not forgotten. Though the profits had been dispersed, the mundane probl ems of life remained. Military defeat followed upon military victory. In the 1370s and 80s, Engl and was threatened with casual sea raiding and at one point with a serious Frenc h invasion. Necessary economic readjustments had to be faced up to, but the war debt a nd the need for further spending made that difficult. Worst of all, the leadership of the kingdom remained divided. After 1371, when the Black Prince's illness had forced him to retire, no r oyal figure was able to inspire and lead the ruling class. The emergence of Rich ard II as an important figure in his own government (in 1381 at age 14) did not solve the question of leadership. The main reason was the continuing influence of his uncles, who were the s ons of Edward III and the brothers of the king's father, Edward the Black Prince . Chief among them, of course, was John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, a man w ith vast estates and semi-regal powers in various parts of England. There were t wo others as well: Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, and Thomas of Woodstock, Duk e of Gloucester. None of them helped Richard to become an effective king. Nor were they cap able of devising a successful foreign policy of their own. A number of ineffect ive campaigns against France, the count of Flanders, and the Scots just increase d the governmental debt. In the mid-1380s Richard himself was being blamed.

Richard had responded to his uncles' neglect by assembling a court party a round himself. These men were later reviled by their opponents as upstarts, but they were scarcely obscure men. The real issues were not obscurity of birth, but greed and military failure. It was said that the war was going badly because th e king, who was not particularly warlike himself, had surrounded himself by "kni ghts of Venus instead of Bellona (the war goddess)," and that rich gifts to thes e idle men was impoverishing the crown and necessitating high taxation. It is hard to say if Richard was really extravagant, but what is true is t hat Richard made little effort to gain wide support in the aristocracy. Because he had felt shut out by his elders, he in turn shut them out of his confidence. When John of Gaunt left to pursue a claim to the kingdom of Castile in 138 6, the court party seems to have seen this as their opportunity to really take c ontrol. But hardly had Gaunt left than the courtiers came under attack. In a parliament in October of 1386 to discuss measures for defense, the co mmons refused to vote any money unless the Earl of Suffolk (Michael de la Pole) and the treasurer were removed. Richard, who had withdrawn to one of his estates after the opening speeches, refused to consider it. But the lords and commons b oth remained adamant. They were especially aggravated by the recent elevation of Edward de Vere (Earl of Oxford), one of the least popular courtiers, to the ran k of Duke of Ireland. The king finally agreed to received a small delegation fro m parliament. When it came it was made up of Thomas, duke of Gloucester, and Thomas Arun del, bishop of Ely, two of his harshest critics. With a third, Richard, Earl of Arundel, brother of the bishop, they were soon to become the king's most determi ned enemies. Gloucester was the youngest of the king's uncles. He was only in hi s thirties, not a lot older than his nephew. He thus combined the impatience of youth with a sense of generational superiority. He seems to have been the spoke sman. The king said that the parliament's complaints against his friends were tr easonous, and he threatened to call in his cousin the king of France to help him against them. Gloucester said the king's counselors were ruining the realm; if he did not replace them, there would be trouble. This was a reference to the fat e of Edward II, who had relied too much on unsuitable men. Richard backed down. He returned to parliament, dismissed Suffolk, and sub mitted to a year's supervision by a commission of lords, bishops and knights, wh o would have a mandate to clean up the royal household and oversee the war effor t. Bishop Arundel became chancellor, while his brother the Earl of Arundel and o f course the Duke of Gloucester were members of the commission. Richard refused to cooperate with those he saw as his enemies. For most of the year of 1387, he avoided London, where the commission was transacting busin ess, and toured the country with his court. Nor was he merely sulking. In Cheshire, which was a special domain of the crown, and in the borders o f Wales, he began hiring armed retainers, whom he gave a special royal badge. He sent messages to various sheriffs in other parts of the country, asking them if they could raise troops and influence parliamentary elections. Many of them responded that they were helpless to do either, because the commons -- mean ing the influential non-nobles, the knights, squires and important burgesses -all favored the lords of the council. Richard also consulted with a number of influential royal judges, who were asked to give opinions about the extent of the royal prerogative. The judges sa

id that the impeachment of the king's servants was illegal and that the commissi on erected by parliament was a derogation of royal power. Indeed, the judges fav ored a very wide interpretation of the king's prerogative: anyone who tried to r estrict it, through parliament or any other means should, in their opinion, be p unished as a traitor. In November of 1387, Richard returned to London and tried to force a showd own. Gloucester and the two Arundels assembled their troops rather than meet pri vately with the king. They also found enough public support to make Richard back down once again. Gloucester, the Earl of Arundel, and the Earl of Warwick formally appealed -- that is, accused -- five of the king's favorites (including de Vere and Nich olas Brembre and the archbishop of York) of wrongdoing. Richard accepted the Lor ds Appelant's demand that the favorites should be arrested pending a trial in pa rliament. Richard's compromise was merely a ploy. He hoped that he could gather a fo rce to beat the Lords Appellant before parliament could meet. De Vere indeed tri ed this, but failed. He was outmaneuvered by Gloucester and the Earl of Derby (t he eldest son of John of Gaunt) and had to flee the country. In February of 1388, the promised parliament met to judge the king and his favorites. This parliament became known as the Merciless Parliament, and well d eserves its name. The five men accused by the Appellants were convicted of treas on, and several of Richard's friends were executed. The judges who had given Ri chard II legal opinions were exiled. Notably, the lords in parliament were unwilling to execute the "traitors" but the Appellants had enough support in the commons to overbear this opposition . Queen Anne went down on her knees to Gloucester to beg for the life of Sim on Burley (a respected companion in arms of the Black Prince. But Gloucester was implacable. His hand was strengthened by the obvious public hostility to the ki ng and his court and his distrust of the devious king. So Burley died. The Merciless Parliament closed by declaring that its measures could neve r be repealed by any future parliament. At the same time its own proceedings wer e never to be used as a precedent -- the Appellants were looking out for their o wn necks. The parliament also awarded them 20,000 pounds for their great service s to the country. Bishop Arundel was promoted to archbishop of Canterbury. Following the Merciless Parliament, the king worked to build a government by consensus. He and his ministers were careful to consult with the Great Counci l of peers (in other words, the House of Lords), and with the parliament as a wh ole. Political peace was immeasurably aided by the return of John of Gaunt, who had not gained Castile, but who had been paid by its king to abandon his claim. Gaunt, formerly unpopular, was hailed as a grand old man simply because he had n ot been involved in the political turmoil of 1386-88. Gaunt also promoted a peace policy with France. Things had gone so badly f or so long that negotiations seemed worth a try. For years Richard played it very cool. He slowly regained the trust of man y of his lords in a way that infuriated the Earl of Arundel. Arundel was so inca utious that he criticized John of Gaunt in parliament for being too cozy with th e king. Richard rose to defend his uncle, putting Arundel in a bad position. Aft er he cooled off, he decided it was necessary to buy a royal pardon. Later he ma de a scene at Queen Anne's funeral, and had to humiliate himself to gain pardon.

Three things strengthened Richard's position. The fact that he was the king, and had to be allowed to act as such. He took a major expedition to Ireland in 1394, where the English position was in a bad way, and scored a propaganda victory when four Irish kings swore fe alty and accepted knighthood from him. In 1396, a 28-year truce with France was signed, an agreement secured by R ichard's marriage to a young French princess. This was unpopular, but the drain on royal finances that had hedged the king about for years was temporarily ended . In the spring parliament of 1397 the commons sponsored a bill complainin g about the extravagant spending of the royal household. Richard was strong enou gh to force the commons to apologize for bringing it in. He also got the lords i n parliament to agree that exciting the commons to reform the household was trea son, and on this basis, a lobbyist named Thomas Haxey was convicted. Very soon after that, Richard openly moved against his old enemies. He arr ested the three Appellants. Gloucester apparently pled for mercy when he realize d what was happening, but the king replied he would have as much mercy as Glouce ster had shown Burley when the queen pleaded on her knees. Gloucester was taken off to Calais, the strongest royal fortress outside of England, to forestall any rescue attempts. Richard then proceeded against the Appellants in much the way they had wor ked against his friends. Eight lords, all of them important, appealed the Appell ants for treason, and they were tried in parliament -- all but Gloucester, who h ad died in prison. The business of this parliament, which has no name, but which should be ca lled the Merciless Parliament, Part II: The King Strikes Back, was pretty predic table. The legislation of the Merciless Parliament was annulled, just as the Goo d Parliament's had been in 1377. The pardons that Richard had been forced to giv e to the Appellants and the other commissioners were also canceled, but save for the four on trial, they were essentially regranted. Arundel was executed, Glouc ester was forfeited posthumously, and the Earl of Warwick was exiled for life to the Isle of Man. Archbishop Arundel, who had found himself on trial without war ning at the proceedings themselves, was banished, and Richard later had the Roma n pope transfer him to another see held by a supporter of the Avignonese pope. The parliament of 1397 was a tremendous coup. Richard had gained the compl iance of the vast majority of the aristocracy in the condemnation of the Appella nts. The commons cooperated, too. Their willingness to turn on the heroes of 138 8 has been cited as evidence of tampering with elections and the king's efforts to overawe them. But the House of Commons in the fourteenth century was not a bo dy with independent power. The MPs of the time were comparable to government bac kbenchers in a majority situation. Unless they were wrought up about a subject, they followed their leaders. In this case the accused were isolated. John of Gaunt presided over the tr ial; his brother the Duke of York and his son Henry Earl of Derby also were work ing with the King. So they went along. Richard rewarded those people who went along, and even made some new dukes . But Richard's revenge amounted to government by terrorism. He pursued a host of lesser men who had opposed him in 1388. Anyone who had "ridden in arms and ri sen forcibly against the king" was required, by act of parliament, to sue for p ardon. The king applied this to no less than seventeen counties. The counties we re forced to pay a thousand marks each for pardon, and their representatives mad e to seal blank charters that the king could fill in at any time to their disadv

antage if they got out of line. One can easily understand that the surviving commissioners of 1387-88 migh t wonder how much their pardons were worth, and fear the coming of the Merciless Parliament, Part III. Because the new regime was one of fear, and because the king had no solid party behind him, trouble sprang up almost immediately. In January of 1398, Henry Bolingbroke (heir of John of Gaunt, formerly Ear l of Derby newly made Duke of Hereford) came to parliament and said that Thomas Mowbray, the new Duke of Norfolk, had suggested treason to him. Richard, who was not anxious for a new treason trial, did not quite know what to do. A commissio n was set to investigate, but they came to no conclusion. Then the king said the two dukes should fight a trial by combat. But on the day itself, he refused to let the duel commence, and banished both men. Norfolk was banished for life. Bolingbroke was banished for ten years. The latter sentence may have been a concession to John of Gaunt, for Henry was his eldest son and heir. Richard showed a different face four months later, when John of Gaunt died . Then Richard changed Henry's exile into one for life and confiscated his vast inheritance, the Duchy of Lancaster. In short order, this move brought about Richard's own downfall. At this po int he was childless, and Henry was by one reckoning his closest heir. He had gi ven this dangerous man a cause that few could deny -- he had been cheated of his rightful inheritance. If the king could disinherit so arbitrarily, every man of property was threatened. Once again, a king had frightened the political class, and they took the next opportunity to rise against him. In 1399, Richard sailed off to Ireland with an army to patch up his previo us settlement of that country. While he was gone, Henry Bolingbroke landed in th e north, to be met by the one of the strongest military leaders in England, Henr y Percy, the Earl of Northumberland. Percy was one of the wardens of the northern marches, where war had been g oing on for nearly a century. As such, he had a standing army financed out of ro yal revenues, but loyal to him. In recent years, he had been irritated by interf erence from London in an area he considered his own. To this point, however, he had concealed his irritation, and Richard had no inkling that he was unreliable. But Percy had decided that a king he helped create, Henry Bolingbroke, would be more amenable than the imperious Richard. With this backing, and with the justice of his cause clear to all, Henry B olingbroke quickly took control of England. Richard was trapped in a Welsh castl e, and convinced to surrender himself, with the assurance that his crown was not in jeopardy. The promise was immediately forgotten; in captivity he was pressur ed into abdicating. Parliament then renounced its fealty to him, and offered the crown to Henry, who accepted to become Henry IV. Richard was killed soon after that. Richard II's fall is interesting chiefly for what it tells us about the En glish political system. It shows us that the vast theoretical power of the king had no practical meaning if he did not use it properly. A king who wooed his subjects, who dealt with his lords with finesse, who upheld traditional standards of order -- in other words, Edward III in his prime - - such a king was loved and obeyed.

Richard had a ad had. He expected essions or consider f society. His use ut him off from the

much different conception of kingship than his grandfather h to be obeyed without question, without any need to make conc the rights and privileges of the other influential sectors o of his power had scared and angered almost everyone, which c willing support he needed to make his rule a reality.

Furthermore, Richard disappointed a kingdom that was looking for another m ilitary hero. Although not completely unmilitary, he was not the chivalric figur e that his grandfather had been. It was known and resented that Richard preferr ed to ally with his traditional enemy of France against his own subjects, rather than lead them to fight him. Richard and his people were thus a disastrous mismatch. They wished for a great knight; while he dreamed of being emperor.

Henry IV Richard II had been deposed because he had been arbitrary, but also becaus e he ran a narrow government rather than a broadly based one, because he won no profitable and inspiring victories, and because he taxed the country heavily. Under Henry IV, England soon found itself with another king who ruled main ly through a small circle of friends, who launched no popular foreign wars, and who taxed England very heavily, without even being able to keep order in the kin gdom. In the years between 1399 and 1406, Henry came close to losing his throne several times. Henry's basic problem was his doubtful claim to the throne. Henry had retu rned to England to vindicate his hereditary right to the duchy of Lancaster, and most of his support had been support for that popular cause. When he then claim ed to be the true king of England, he seemed to contradicting the hereditary pri nciple that he had earlier relied on. In the parliament of 1399, several arguments were advanced to justify the usurpation First was the supposedly willing abdication of Richard in Henry's favor (e ven at the time people doubted this). Second was Richard's unsuitability. A bill was read in parliament that enu merated the old king's crimes and follies and justified his repudiation. Third was Henry's right of conquest, which revealed the divine will. Finally there a hoked-up hereditary argument, that the first Earl of Lanca ster, supposedly deformed, had been Edward I's elder brother and had been unfair ly excluded from the throne. Most of these were weak arguments. So at the very beginning of the reign, there was room for doubt and even opposition. In 1400, an attempt by friends o f Richard to restore him led to their deaths and his murder in captivity. Even after this, however, there was a strain of popular pro-Richard feeling, promoted by Franciscan friars. There was another claim to the throne that was more dangerous to Henry. He himself was the heir male of Edward III, the senior man whose descent from that king was solely in the male line. By normal English feudal custom, however, the re was an heir general, whose descent through a senior line would have been enou gh in other circumstances to claim any lordship. The heir general was Edmund, Ea

rl of March, grandson through his mother of Lionel, duke of Clarence, an elder b rother of John of Gaunt. In 1399 he was only eight years old. But he remained to make the Lancastrian line uneasy; and there was also his uncle, Edmund Mortimer , an adult whose claim might also be preferred to Henry's. In the circumstances, Henry was doomed to be a suspicious, insecure king. His other problems: Both the Scots and the French took advantage of the turmoil in England, an d forced Henry to take expensive defensive measures. Henry was strapped for money. Rather than cutting taxes, he was forced to ask for new ones. Finally, he was compelled, especially after the plot of 1400, to run his g overnment on much the same lines as his predecessor had. He ruled through a smal l council consisting of lesser men wholly dependent on him -- administrators who had got their experience in the Duchy of Lancaster. England once again had a cliquish government of royal favorites. And thus England was quickly dissatisfied with the new king. Dissatisfaction gave rebels against Henry an unusual latitude. The first of the important revolts, that of Owain Glyndwr (Owen Glendower in Shakespeare), blew up seemingly out of nowhere. Owain Glyndwr was a Welsh lor d of northern Wales of princely descent. To his ancestors in previous centuries, he might well have seemed almost English. But there was a great deal of dissati sfaction simmering under the surface. When Lord Grey of Ruthin, a Welsh marcher lord and a member of Henry IV's council, exploited his royal connections to hara ss Glyndwr, Glyndwr and his relatives (one of whom had the very English name of Philip Hanmer), saw or at least presented their grievance as a matter of English tyranny in Wales. This struck a chord all through Wales, and soon a significant part of the country was united behind Glyndwr, who took the title of Prince of Wales. The Gl yndwr revolt was successful for some years. After failing to get an early pardon and settlement from Henry IV, Glyndwr went all out for Welsh independence. He a ttempted a grand Celtic alliance with the Irish chiefs and the King of Scotland, and achieved one with France (which sent a small expedition to Wales). In 1404, he called the first and only Welsh parliament, in an attempt to solidify a Welsh political community behind him. One of the reasons for his amazing success record was Glyndwr's ability to exploit weak points in Henry's political position. Early on, in 1402, Glyndwr captured Edmund Mortimer, the uncle of the youn g Earl of March. Henry, who had just bought Ruthin of Grey out of Welsh captivit y, refused to pay more more money to Glyndwr to ransom this potential rival. Thi s looked bad, especially to Mortimer. He made common cause with his captor and e nded up marrying his daughter. Thus the Welsh national revolt paradoxically gain ed the color of an English legitimist revolt. In 1403 the Percies turned on Henry. You will recall that their power as wardens of the northern marches had made them the key element in Henry's coup. S ince 1399, their power had only increased. But they -- Henry Percy, earl of Nort humberland and his impetuous and warlike son, Henry Hotspur, were unhappy with K ing Henry because he didn't give them even more. They decided that if they had made Henry king they could unmake him. In the summer of 1403, Harry Hotspur raised a revolt on the Welsh border,

and his father began collecting forces in the north. They claimed that the king had defrauded the Earl of March of his inheritance, and his rule since had seen ruinous taxation. The king moved quickly and caught Hotspur at Shrewsbury, where in a hardfought battle, the rebels were defeated. Hotspur was killed in the battle and hi s uncle executed for treason afterwards. Surprisingly, Hotspur's father, the earl of Northumberland, was not punish ed for his part in the revolt. He was let off on the grounds that he had not act ually fought the king. His pardon was a miscalculation on the king's part. In 1405, the earl was in communication with Glyndwr and Mortimer. They str uck a deal that looks like purest fantasy. England and Wales were to be divided into three parts. Glyndwr was to rule Wales and the border counties; the Percies were to get the north country and most of the midlands and East Anglia. Mortime r, a man with royal ancestry but no independent forces, was to have the remainde r of the south and east. If the settlement was fantastic, the alliance was potentially formidable, since other peers and the French and Scots were willing to support it. But again, the Percies' ambitions were greater than their forces. The earl of Westmoreland, a member of the Neville clan, the Percies' rivals in the north , dispersed their forces. Percy himself was forced to flee to Scotland. After the second Percy revolt, Henry was able to breath just a little bit easier. Percy, after some years in exile invaded England from Scotland in 1408, but this time he was killed, which ended one threat to the Lancastrian dynasty. Glyndwr was slowly beaten back into the mountains, and after 1409, he was a fugi tive rather than a dangerous foe. Earlier, in 1406, two events abroad distracted Henry's foreign enemies. Prince James of Scotland, the heir to the throne, was captured at sea by t he English. His aged father died soon after. Having the king of Scotland in the Tower of London settled the northern border down, especially since the English a lso held the heir of the Scottish regent. At the same time the French princes began fighting each other. The king of France, Charles VI, had become insane, and his uncles and cousins competed to c ontrol his government. France lost the ability to take advantage of English inst ability. Rather, France was now the more unstable, and the English found ways to take advantage of that. Nevertheless, Henry IV never had a really easy time of it. There were seve ral reasons for this. As Maurice Keen has said, "in an age when so much revolved about questions of inheritance, people had to be troubled by what had happened in 1399." There were plots in favor of the Earl of March independent of the Pe rcies, and rumors that Richard II was still alive. Besides such doubts, there was the simple dissatisfaction and the disappoi ntment in Henry's rule that I refereed to before. This manifested itself in a most interesting way, in parliamentary critici sm of the king's policies. In was in this period that Parliament and the commons within parliament were in the strongest position vis-a-vis a king that they eve r were in the Middle Ages. Everyone had hoped that Henry would "live of his own, " that is, run the government on his hereditary revenues and the customary royal export taxes, without further extraordinary grants from parliament. This had pr oved impossible.

Eventually he went to parliament to ask for subsidies. Right from the begi nning of the reign, the commons were stubborn, and throughout the reign they use d their leverage to get petitions granted by the king, to have auditors appointe d to supervise royal spending, and to attempt to limit royal pensions and larges s. Finally the commons did not hesitate to voice some opinions on matters of high politics. The pardon of the earl of Northumberland in 1403 was partly a mat ter of pressure from the commons. Throughout the fourteenth century, the importance of parliament as a forum where the most important business of the realm was done had grown. Now, in the first decade of the fifteenth century, it had achieved some independent power in the decision-making process. The prominence of the commons, which claimed for t he first time the sole right to introduce money bills, was greater than ever. This prominence was not, however, to be permanent. As we shall see, when p olitical rivalries between the great nobles got nasty, the commons would back aw ay from state affairs as too dangerous to meddle in. Henry IV's final tribulation was to be his own son. The young Henry of Mon mouth, Prince of Wales, was not the playboy of Shakespeare's plays. He acquired such a following that he aroused the jealousy of his father and his brother Tho mas. In 1411, there was a serious division in the government. The two competing French factions were each bidding for English support. The Prince of Wales favo red the duke of Burgundy, who controlled Flanders and thus England's chief tradi ng partners. Another party, including Thomas, supported Burgundy's rivals, the A rmangacs. In 1411 an English force allied with Burgundy entered Paris. But befor e the campaign was over, Thomas had got his father to fire the Prince of Wales f rom the council and make a new alliance with the Armangacs, so that he, Thomas, could take his own expedition to France. The dismissal of the Prince of Wales was a scandal. The House of Commons g ave the prince a vote of thanks, which was something of rebuke to the king. The whole matter emphasized the continuing unpopularity of Henry IV. When King Henry died in 1413, it must have been a relief to many of his subjects.

The War Of The Roses

Beginning of the Wars of the Roses The loss of Normandy in 1450 was a great blow to the prestige of Henry VI . The country rose against the small group of men who dominated the royal counci l, against whom people had long grumbled.. In January of 1450. The bishop of Chichester, Adam Moleyns, keeper of the privy seal and a key member of the royal council for years, was lynched in Port smouth by unpaid sailors In February, parliament met and the commons impeached the Duke of Suffolk -- in other words, they demanded his trial on a number of counts. They accused h im of malfeasance and even treason. . Suffolk was condemned to exile in a bid to save his life. But when Suffolk was crossing to the continent, his ship was met

by another called the Nicholas of the Tower, whose crew arrested, tried, and ex ecuted Suffolk as a traitor. Then, the county of Kent, one of the most prosperous, freest, and most pol itically aware regions of the realm -- partly because of its proximity to the da ngers and opportunities of the continent -rose in a revolt, known as Jack Cade's Rebellion. Jack Cade was a Welshman who for political purposes took the significant alias "Mortimer." In June of 14 50, thousands of Kentishmen, not just peasants and yeomen, but knights and gentl emen too, followed him to London, where they killed another bishop and demanded reform. Reform meant throwing the rascals out and bringing in a broadly based gove rnment that should include various important peers heretofore excluded -- chief among them, the Duke of York. Cade's revolt was put down, but in September the Duke of York returned uni nvited to England from Ireland, where he had been in semi-exile. York was determ ined to take a leading role in the royal councils from now on. These events were the beginning of more than a decade of jockeying between various parties who wished to dominate the royal government. Between 1450 and 1 461, politics would get increasingly nasty, turning into civil war and eventuall y into a dynastic dispute between York's family and the reigning Lancastrians. T hese 11 years are the first phase of the conflict known as the Wars of the Roses . Because the events are so complicated, I will discuss the reasons for and the effects of the Wars of the Roses while drastically summarizing the course of events. Reasons for the political crisis We have to start well before the specific crisis of 1450. There was political instability in England from 1422, when the year-old He nry VI began to reign in England. Rivalries between people who, in France, wou ld have been called royal princes caused trouble. On one side was Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, the king's uncle, and somethi ng of a war hero. He felt unjustly deprived of the leadership. On the other was Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester and later a cardinal . He was a powerful ecclesiastical politician and personally very wealthy. And a s the king's great-uncle, he too was a prince of sorts. He was the senior repres entative of the Beauforts, John of Gaunt's family by his mistress Katherine Swyn ford. (They were legitimized later but by law barred from ever claiming the thr one.) Rivalry between these men came close to civil war several times in the 142 0s and 30s. Only the respected Duke of Bedford was able to keep them apart. But in the late 1430s, things changed. In 1435, Bedford died. Then, in 143 7, Henry VI came of age, and took an important role in his own government. Under Henry, the attempt to maintain a broadly based government broke down. Rather th an taking firm control, he relied on a small clique of men he could trust. Henry assured the victory of the Beaufort interest, first under Henry Beaufort, then under Henry's nephew Edmund, earl and duke of Somerset and his ally the Duke of Suffolk. These men, working with a few professional bureaucrats like Adam Moleyn s, controlled the country for almost fifteen years.

It was a bad government, militarily ineffective and financially irresponsi ble. The king loaded his ministers and friends with gifts and pensions. Many peo ple who were owed money at the Exchequer, such as military commanders, could not collect on their debts because there was not enough money to go around. Those i n favor at court got paid, others had to wait, perhaps indefinitely. Furthermore, this kind of favoritism extended into the administration of j ustice. Those in good odor with the council got a sympathetic hearing, others we re out of luck. People lost faith in the courts and turned to threats and violen ce to gain victory in their inevitable disputes. The result is a social climate approaching gangsterism. The social violence before and during the Wars of the Roses is often blame d on a phenomenon known as "bastard feudalism." Bastard feudalism is a form of p atronage and clientage that does not depend on the granting of fiefs in land. It was not really new. In this period, lords and their men regulated their rela tionships by written contracts, called indentures. The lesser man received an an nual retainer, and promised to be ready to serve his lord whenever he called upo n him. In war the retained man would receive wages, and share his loot with the lord; if he stayed with the lord in his household, he would be fed. In return th e lord not only paid his client, and gave him livery -- clothing in his heraldic colors and decorated with his heraldic badge -- but he maintained him against h is enemies. Livery and maintenance is another name for the system. Some of the possibilities for abuse are obvious. The lords might uphold th eir men even if they were engaged in criminal activity. But there was another side as well. Most retainers who received indentures were not insignificant thugs -- they were knights and squires, men of standing, sheriffs, justices of the peace, and MPs. By keeping such men under obligation to them, the lords gained the potential to manipulate the entire system of local government. Livery and maintenance or bastard feudalism cannot, however, be blamed for the Wars of the Roses. It had existed as far back as the time of William Mars hal. In normal times, livery and maintenance was simply one more prop for the s ocial system -- a system not noted for its justice at any time. During foreign w ars, it enabled lords to meet their military commitments. It got out of hand in the 1440s and later because there was no firm and respected hand on the tiller It was then that great lords and their retainers routinely turned to viole nce. J.R. Lander has calculated that between 1448 and 1455 at least one-sixth of the peerage was, at one time or another, imprisoned for violent conduct. An ast onishing proportion, when you reflect that these were the men who were supposed to be the king's partners in government. This then is the background to the Duke of York's attempt to take a leadin g role in government. The Duke of York and his cause Richard, duke of York was, except for the anomalous Beauforts, the stillchildless king's closest male relative, and had inherited the the seniority of t he Earls of March. He was chronically short of funds. Not all of this was his fault. The Exch equer owed him tens of thousands of pounds for wages paid to his soldiers in Nor mandy in the 1440s, but would not not pay him. York quite rightly blamed Suffolk and the Duke of Somerset for this state of affairs.

He also was embittered against them because they had frustrated his desire to command in France just before the fall. He thought that he could have made t he difference, but had been prevented by the court clique, no doubt a delusion. York's grievances were the grievances of the nation, and as the senior duk e, he was the obvious person to do something about those grievances. He was a po tent political symbol. Whatever gle for power. en after 1455, aining control esitate to use fly. In 1450, his partisans pressed for financial reform, which received genera l support, and also to have him recognized as the king's heir. This angered the court, and an MP was imprisoned for introducing a bill to that effect. York lack ed enough support among the peers to get his way, and he remained excluded from the king's counsels. In 1452, he came up with another plan. Gascony had been lost by this time, and the government looked bad again. York arranged for demonstrations in his fa vor to break out all over England; then he marched through Kent -- still restive after Cade's rebellion -- to London, in hopes of taking power by force. The pla n was a miserable failure. Few of the demonstrations took place; Kent refused to rise; and almost no peers supported his demands. The king agreed to have the Du ke of Somerset tried for his so-called crimes, but the moment York's forces disp ersed, York himself was forced to ask for pardon, and some of his retainers were executed. In 1453, however, he got another chance. An attempt to retake Gascony had flopped, and this was followed by a mental breakdown on the part of the king. Yo rk and Queen Margaret (who had just borne a son, Edward Prince of Wales) compete d for leadership, and York won. Somerset was imprisoned, and parliament made Yor k protector of the realm. For the next year or so, he was officially in charge. Under his leadership, however, things got worse rather than better. Uncert ainty at the top meant feuds increased. One of the most important was the feud b etween the Percies and their northern rivals the Nevilles (who had the earldoms of Westmoreland, Salisbury and Warwick). York was soon fighting beside the Nevil les against the Percies. In a sense, civil war had already begun. In early 1455, Henry VI regained his senses, and York lost his protectorsh ip. He was now more firmly excluded from influence than ever before. The Beginning of the Wars of the Roses York was unwilling to go peacefully, so he and the Nevilles raised an army in the North. In May of 1455, York's forces attacked the king's court at St. Al bans. There was a short battle; York and Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, won. Somerset was killed, as was the Percy earl of Northumberland and Lord Clifford, a Percy cousin. York and the Nevilles had destroyed their worst enemies in the p eerage. The parliament that was summoned to clean up the mess had little choice bu t to make York protector once again. But it was an empty title. Most of the peer principles York started out with were soon tarnished in his strug The court clique, led first by Somerset after Suffolk's death, th by Queen Margaret, was always strong enough to keep York from att of the government. In the face of this opposition, York did not h violence and intrigue to get his way.

York's maneuvering went through several stages, which I will describe brie

s were unenthusiastic about York and gave him no real support. Somerset had been unpopular, but the man who had attacked the king was resented, not cheered. In k of his . Albans and the February of 1456, the king simply came into parliament and relieved Yor office. Since Henry was the king, York had no pretext to refuse. All St had gained him was the more bitter hatred of the Beauforts, the Percies queen.

Richard earl of Warwick an ally of York, had been made commander of the ga rrison at Calais, a position he refused to give up when York lost power. It was the one card that the Yorkists still held. In 1459, war broke out again. This time the Yorkists lost. York himself wa s forced to flee to Ireland, Warwick returned to Calais. In the aftermath, the q ueen and her partisans called a parliament to attaint York and his allies of tre ason. The process of attainder was invented to crush York's party once and for a ll. A private bill was introduced into parliament that declared the king's enemi es to be guilty of treason, and sentenced them to death and their families to fo rfeiture. There was no semblance of a trial. The invention of attainder reduced Parliament, which had proved too weak to control noble rivalries, into a rubber stamp for the victorious faction. This parliament, called the Parliament of Devi ls, seems actually to have evoked some sympathy for York. His family had been le gally destroyed by a new and suspect legal process, and a few peers joined his s ide. In 1460, Warwick invaded England from Calais and captured the king. York q uickly returned from Ireland. When a new parliament met, he claimed the throne, on the basis that the Lancastrians had been usurpers all along. Parliament did i ts best to avoid accepting or rejecting York's claim. Again, hereditary rights, the basis of all social order, were being attacked. Eventually a compromise was reached: Henry VI would retain the crown as long as he lived. After that, York and his descendants would inherit. Edward Prince of Wales, Henry's son, would be ignored. Henry, the beneficiary of the Treaty of Troyes, which had attempted to dis inherit Charles VII, was to have his own son disinherited in the same way. There were two problems with this settlement. York still enjoyed the support of only a handful of peers, and even they s eem to have been taken by surprise by his claim to the throne. The Percies and the Beauforts, and Owen Tudor, earl of Pembroke in Wales s tood by Henry, his queen, and his son. Queen Margaret who was still at large, pu lled her party together and struck back. In late 1460, Margaret's supporters, the Dukes of Somerset and Devon, defe ated York at Wakefield in Yorkshire and killed him. In a second battle at St. Al bans, the earl of Warwick was defeated. He lost possession of the king, who rejo ined his wife. In a simple world, this would have been the end of the Wars of th e Roses. The apparent defeat of York put the strength of desperation into the survi ving members of his party. Knowing that they would never be forgiven their treas on, the Yorkist lords, led by Richard earl of Warwick, declared York's son, the nineteen-year-old Edward, earl of March to be the rightful king of England: Edwa rd IV. They then gathered all their forces, marched north and in a terrific and bloody battle, defeated the Lancastrians, killing most of their leaders. Henry V I, Margaret, and their son Edward fled to Scotland, leaving the new king in poss ession of the realm.

In mid 1461, fresh from a victory that he had done much to win, Edward was crowned king of England, the first of a new dynasty, the Yorkist dynasty, which , like the Lancastrian one, was founded on usurpation.

Economy and Society in the Fifteenth Century Following William Shakespeare, the Wars of the Roses are often presented as a great tragedy John Gillingham, in his recent book on the subject, quotes Lloyd George, t he British prime minister during the First World War, as saying that the Great W ar was the worst tragedy for Britain since the Wars of the Roses. As Gillingham points out, this is a somewhat ludicrous comparison. The Wars of the Roses were not a gigantic paroxysm that slaughtered the young men of an entire generation. Indeed, the Wars of the Roses weren't even comparable to the ever larger a nd more expensive wars on the continent in the same period. These wars demande d a tremendous organizational and financial commitment: It is no accident that s tanding armies were reinvented in France in this period. The Wars of the Roses were not like that. Compared to wars in France and I taly, the English ones were mere military coups, some successful, some not. Smal l armies were gathered by nobles attached to one party or another, and used in b rief campaigns. The goal was to subdue or eliminate key persons on the other sid e, and to alter the shape of the royal government. Thus the wars were flashpoint s of domestic tension -- not a continuous business or way of life. Most English people were scarcely affected by the wars. Even the peers, th ose nobles with hereditary seats in Parliament, were not obsessed with the ongoi ng political competition between the Yorkist and Lancastrian factions. There is a sturdy myth that intense rivalry between noble families wars le d to the extinction of the old Norman aristocracy, which had to be replaced late r by a new Tudor creation. Certainly some families lost all their male heirs, an d therefore their separate identities. But this was not unusual at any time in t he Middle Ages, and very few extinctions can be traced to the battlefield or the scaffold. Many peers opted out of politics quite early, and stayed out. No sing le leader, neither Henry VI nor the Duke of York, inspired enough confidence to make the average peer chose sides if he could avoid it. Bosworth Field in 1485, where Henry VII killed Richard III and took his th rone, was a battle attended by scarcely less than two dozen peers, all of whom w here very close associates of the contenders. Everyone else stayed home, willing to acknowledge whichever uninspiring claimant to the throne emerged victorious. The point of all this is not to minimize the Wars of the Roses to insignif icance, but to point out that they were not a great bloodbath; rather they were an erratic struggle between a few noble clans, during which most of England mind ed, and was allowed to mind, its own business. The rural economy The fifteenth century was not an era of social or economic crisis. Quite t he reverse. To economic historians, the fifteenth century appears to be a period of relative ease and prosperity between two periods of overpopulation. By 1400, the population had been falling for a hundred years -- it probabl

y continued to fall until 1450. Basic foodstuffs, especially grain, had made th e fortune of the high farmers. But with a falling population, basic foods were n o longer in great demand. Not only prices but rents fell. Labor was scarcer than it had been for generations, so wages went up, desp ite legislation to the contrary. Also exploitation of the peasantry was no longe r very profitable for the lords, because the kind of work that could be demanded -- plowing and harvesting -- was no longer needed. More peasants could hope to have farms of their own. Those with labor to s ell could eat pretty well on the wages they received. Real wages were high, beca use prices were low. And the disabilities of villeinage almost disappeared becau se landlords did not enforce their unprofitable rights. They became free tenants , whose personal and economic rights could be defended before the king's justice s. Yet this era was not a bad time for landlords as a class. Those who were adaptable found that there was profit to be made. In many p arts of England, lords turned from grain production, to a business that was both less labor intensive and more lucrative -- wool. This is the time of the first enclosures, when the formerly plowed fields of nearly empty villages were fence d in to be used for sheep runs. The progress made by the peasantry in this period was not permanent. Unfr ee peasants had enjoyed security of tenure. When fifteenth century tenants became personal ly free, however, they lost that security. A few of the most fortunate converted their lands into freehold land -- land they rented perpetually. These fortunat e peasant families had gained security that was comparable to the security of a knight's family. But most peasants had merely a leasehold or copyhold on their land. Leases under leasehold were like modern leases. They ended at a certain time, and the landlord could renew it, change it, or just take back the land. Leaseholders had no security at that point. Most former villeins, or their descendants, had copyholds, called this bec ause their leases were copied onto the manorial roll of the landlord. Most copyh olds were good for three [tenants'] lifetimes, which estate managers, calculate d to be only twenty-one years. At that point, the agreement was void, and had to be remade. Also, many copyholders paid entry fines that the lord could raise at will, meaning their tenure was threatened at every tenant's death. In the fifteenth century, tenants were not excessively insecure because la nd was plentiful. Landlords had no leverage against them. But in the 16th centur y, rising population made land scarce again. The early modern period in England is notorious for the sturdy beggar -- t he unemployed countryman who had no where to go but to town, where he begged -and for the enclosures that pushed peasants off land that lords could exploit mo re profitably. The urban and industrial economy In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as population, production, and co mmercial penetration of the countryside all grew, new towns were built and old o nes grew greatly. During the fourteenth and fifteenth century, this urban expans ion slowed in most places. Indeed, the period has the reputation as one of stagn ation. The plague, which affected everyone equally the first few times around, be

came an occasional, almost predictable hazard of town life. The impression of ov er-all decay is aided by the fate of a couple of well-known places. Lincoln, an important town since Roman days, the seat of the largest diocese in England, and a trading center for centuries, lost most of its population in our period. Adding to this impression is the fact that many towns that got impressive privileges in charters granted on spec before 1300 never fulfilled their promise . Parliamentary boroughs kept the right to send men to parliament even if no o ne lived there anymore -- something that actually happened in the case of old Sa rum near Salisbury. The new towns of the fourteenth and fifteenth and even later centuries wer e not given royal charters, thus grew up without ever gaining official recognit ion of their importance. J.R. Lander provides the example of an industrial district in the west cou ntry known as Stroudwater, where waterpower attracted the cloth industry. Entrep reneurs were moving in to set up in business. But Stroudwater had no legal ident ity of its own. It was split between the manors of Bisley and Minchinhampton, on e owned by an abbey, the other by the Duke of York. Far from exploiting the deve lopment of the area, the landlords were completely oblivious to it. All the prof it went to subtenants. It was officially invisible. In later medieval England, a lot of places of no importance in earlier era s that took off. Such places often grew up in response to the expansion of the wool industr y. Before the mid-14th century, the bulk of English wool was exported to Italy, France and the Netherlands, where it was made up into cloth in the bigger indust rial cities. During the later Middle Ages, war taxes on the export of raw wool e ncouraged English landlords to direct their wool to the domestic industrial sect or, which grew immensely. England became more of an exporter of industrial goods . Much of the new development took place not in the established towns, but i n the countryside. The availability of water (for the mechanization of fulling a n essential operation in cloth production, fulling). But established towns were unattractive to new weaving businesses because were dominated by a few rich merchants and artisans who regulated trade and labo r within the walls for their own advantage. It was not a place for a new investo r to get started. So the new weaving centers were out in the country where only the landlord need be consulted -- or where he, she or it took the lead. Compared to many European countries, England, though far from stagnant, wa s very much a rural country, or at least a country with only one real urban cent er, London, which continued to enhance its dominant position. In most of the cou ntry, political and economic leadership belonged to the landed class. This means the peers, of course, but also knights and squires, the lower aristocracy, some of whose members rivaled the lesser barons for wealth and influence. Knights and squires, lay culture The knights and squires largely kept their heads down during the Wars of t he Roses -- as did most barons -- but they solidified their position in parliame nt. During the fifteenth century, most borough representatives were actually lan downers from the nearby countryside, not townsmen. After the Lancastrian usurpation, few could doubt the right of the commons to speak on issues of policy. Only in unusual circumstances would the commons h old the political initiative, but their role was established. Playing to the com

mons was an important tactic of the rivals during the Wars of the Roses. Also, knights and squires took a greater than ever part in the local opera tions of the royal government. The crown, at least in name, was doing more than ever before at the local level, through men who held various commissions from th e crown. The most important were the justices of the peace, who held court in th e king's name, and judged the cases -- nearly all the important cases -- that we re reserved to the crown. There were commissioners of array, who raised troops; there were commissioners who maintained ditches and levees in swampy areas like Lincolnshire. All kinds of local matters were dealt under royal auspices -- but through the efforts of local dignitaries, not by salaried outsiders. Rather than absolutism (making some progress on the continent), it was (fo r the upper class at least) self-government by the king's command. The lay ruling class of England was increasingly confident in this period, partly because more of them were educated. English (rather than French or Lati n) was increasingly used for all sorts of practical business. The highest level s of education were still restricted to those who knew Latin. But many lay peopl e were going to university, some to take degrees, without any intention of becom ing clerics. A great many more went to the lesser schools that clustered around the uni versities without actually being part of them. For instance, in London, the Inns of Court supplied a specifically English and lay type of learning -- learning i n the peculiar law of England. We have a big collection of surviving letters from the Pastons, a 15th cen tury family from the "squirearchy." The letters tell us all sorts of things abo ut people of their rank. The letters themselves show literacy in the common English tongue was comm onplace, and a vital tool. One of them, Margaret Paston, did a great deal of business by letter, but never wrote one with her own hand. The male members of her family had a great d eal of schooling: Her father in law went to two different Inns for his legal education. Her husband John went to Cambridge, as did his brothers (none went into th e church). One of her sons got a B.A. at Oxford and another went to Eton. Of course the Pastons were rich, just one step below the peerage. But by 1 500, it has been estimated that between 40 and 60% of London householders could read English, and fair number Latin as well. When William Caxton set up the firs t printing press in England in 1476, he found an eager market for books in Engli sh, mostly translations of older classics. It is interesting that despite this lay interest in literacy and literatur e, there was not much Italian humanist influence. Classical models in writing, speaking, and art was introduced more than once, but did not really take. Englis h culture continued along paths developed in previous centuries. Some of the greatest triumphs of English architecture were created in the Gothic style in the 15th and 16th centuries, in a period where that style was de ad and reviled on the continent. This kind of continuity, (exemplary of English conservatism?), shows as mu ch as anything that this century was not one of basic disruption. It was one of further development of trends introduced before. England was culturally and (in the second half of the century) politically

disengaged from the continent: which may have had the benefit of keeping the country out of continental wars. In some ways, as a result, the era of the Wars of the Roses was a peaceful one, without basic disruption.

The House of York and the House of Tudor Edward IV's early years Edward IV was effectively king in 1461. The Lancastrian party, represented by the displaced rival king Henry VI, his wife Margaret of Anjou, and their you ng son and heir, also named Edward (Prince of Wales). Despite his victory at Towton, Edward IV, the Yorkist king, was far from b eing secure on his throne. The Lancastrians held parts of Northumberland (an are a dominated the Percy family, which supported them) and they hoped to hold out t here with the help of the Scots and Margaret's French relatives. The attitude of France was very important. The French king, Louis XI, was at odds with his cousins the Dukes of Burgundy. As in the reign of Henry V, Engl and potentially held the balance of power. Louis XI wanted a friendly government in England, or if that was not possible, a weak one. Since Margaret was a royal relative, and the Yorkists leaned towards Burgundy, Louis inclined toward the L ancastrians. Between 1461-64 Edward IV, his chief ally the Earl of Warwick, and John Ne ville, Warwick's brother fought to gain control of Northumberland. At the same t ime they used all the wiles of diplomacy to isolate Henry and Margaret. On both fronts they met success. By 1464, the Lancastrians had lost their northern castl es and were reduced to a mere court in exile. As soon as the Lancastrians were beaten, Edward IV began to have trouble with Warwick. Warwick was the senior member of the Yorkist party in terms of len gth of service. He had been Richard, duke of York's chief supporter since Edward , York's heir, had been a mere child. He felt entitled to a leading part in the government. In the 1460s, he was particularly anxious to turn Edward away from the Burgundians and towards a Fre nch alliance. Edward wanted -- and needed to be -- own man. Running a very narrow govern ment would lead to disaster. He demonstrated his independence by marrying a most unlikely woman -- Eliz abeth Wydeville (Woodville), the widow of a minor baron with a Lancastrian past. In 1469, Warwick and the king's second brother George, duke of Clarence, s eized Edward in an attempt to control his policy. It was a very stupid move. The country was thrown into uncertainty, and threatened to become ungovernable. No one would follow Warwick's orders. Very quickly Warwick and Clarence decided the y had to release the king. Warwick and Clarence were forgiven, but they feared f or their ultimate safety. In 1470 they both fled to France. Louis XI would promise Warwick support only if he would make common cause with the Lancastrians. Thus 1470 saw the curious spectacle of Warwick, the senio r Yorkist, and George, the brother of Edward IV, allied with Queen Margaret, the Beauforts, and the Percies, recently their deadliest enemies.

That summer, Warwick invaded England with French support -- successfully. Edward and his youngest brother, Richard duke of Gloucester were caught by surpr ise, and decamped to Holland (part of Burgundy). The Lancastrian regime, however, never solidified. Edward and Richard of G loucester returned with Burgundian help and destroyed Warwick's forces in two qu ick battles. Furthermore, Warwick, and the Lancastrian prince Edward, were kille d in battle, and Henry VI and Queen Margaret were captured. Henry VI was secretl y killed soon afterwards. The Lancastrian party was ruined and Edward seemed secure at last. There w as only one Lancastrian candidate for the throne, Henry Tudor, the earl of Richm ond, a Beaufort connection. He was not an important figure save for his descent, and in 1470 he was being held in honorable captivity in Brittany. So Edward had the opportunity, and thirteen more years, to establish his dynasty. Edward turned out to be a very talented and reasonably popular king. A standard theme of English history has been that the Tudors, beginning in 1485, created a despotism, or a New Monarchy, that with the support of the gent ry was able to tame the unruly baronage and peerage. More recently, some histori ans have pushed the introduction of the New Monarchy back into Edward's reign. A lthough I am no expert, I am somewhat skeptical of the New Monarchy. Like some o f the real experts, I suspect that renewed monarchy may be a more appropriate te rm. There is no doubt that Edward was important in substantially improving the p olitical position of the crown. The only question is whether his methods were re ally very innovative, whether he introduced a new style of government. Edward's efforts to widen his support and rebuild his finances One of his first acts was to call a parliament where his enemies and their supporters were attainted in great numbers. They were declared guilty of treaso n and they and their children disinherited. As he became more established, howev er, Edward proved willing to sell his forgiveness. By the 1470s, only the most adamant of his enemies were left out in the cold. Edward had to make himself wealthy enough to meet not only his own expense s, but also the demands of his followers, present and future, for leases of crow n lands, pensions, and other favors. He had to do this without extraordinary tax ation. Asking the commons for parliamentary grants was the surest way to forfeit public support. He had to use other methods. Among them were: Resumption tempered with dispensation. Resumption meant that all existing pensions and other crown grants were canceled. This was very popular with most t axpayers. However if resumption had been strictly enforced, it would have made E dward many enemies, as all sorts of important people were tossed off the gravy t rain. What Edward did was to allow those who had grants to apply for dispensatio ns. Edward examined each request himself, and agreed to many of them. Those whos e support he really needed got at least something. So Edward saved money, redist ributed his patronage in what he hoped was an efficient manner, and demonstrated his power, all at once. The introduction of up-to-date management techniques to the crown estates. The benevolence. When Edward traveled across the country, he made a point of dropping in on people known to have money, and asked them for gifts of money.

To gain the king's good will -- thus the name benevolence -- most came across w ith something. After all, it was harder for individuals, talking directly with t he king, to say no to such a request than it was for the commons assembled in pa rliament to do so. Engaging in trade as a private individual. It might have been more lucrati ve to restructure the out-of-date customs taxes, but this was politically impos sible. So Edward traded, mostly in wool, like many other great landlords. Cultivating public opinion Edward knew to survive he had to be popular in the country as a whole. Currying public favor had been an important part of government since at le ast the time of Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort. Not all kings, however, had r ealized just how important it was. Failure to gain the loyalty of the people was one reason that Henry VI had fallen. Richard of York, by contrast, had always a ppealed to the country at large (partly because his peers showed no great dispos ition to follow his lead). Many of Edward's methods of government had been used by Richard II and by Henry VI's hated ministers. But when Richard II or the duke of Suffolk did such things, they acted out of bad conscience, to control a country they saw as host ile to themselves -- and naturally they were hated. Edward, though he was no soft touch, tried his best to be everyone's frien d, insofar as that was possible. Though he was a usurper, he acted as if he were the rightful king, and many responded favorably. A famous story about Edward shows him asking a rich widow for money. He as ked her what her good will (benevolence) would be towards helping to pay his gre at expenses. When she said 10, a large sum, he thanked her and gave her a hug an d a kiss. She was so pleased that she doubled her contribution. Edward had Henry VI killed, had his brother George drowned in a barrel of sweet wine, the famous butt of malmsey. But for most, he was an accessible, ev en lovable king. Like his remote ancestors, he was an itinerant king, moving thr ough the country, constantly checking his power base, and winning hearts and min ds. Successful foreign policy Edward was required by traditional feeling, and by the old Yorkist claim t hat they represented the traditional martial valor of England, to renew the war on France. Edward also had close ties with Burgundy, ties that had saved his bacon in 1470. So in 1475, he planned an expedition to France in conjunction with the cu rrent duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold (or the Rash, according to taste). The combined campaign failed to come off, but Edward gained anyway. Louis XI paid hi m 75,000 crowns to leave and promised him a pension of 25,000 crowns a year to s tay away. Together with his other initiatives, the pension made it possible for Edwa rd to be the only king in centuries to die with no debts outstanding. English po litics also benefited from a prolonged period of domestic and foreign peace -- t he latter, at least, achieved more or less by accident. Edward was thoroughly me dieval in his taste for war.

Richard III's reign Edward died in 1483 at the age of 40. His impressive accomplishments then came unraveled. He left two sons, Edward V and Richard duke of York, but unfortu nately they were quite young. Edward V was only thirteen. Edward IV had left a will naming his brother Richard of Gloucester as prot ector, but he did not get along with the queen's family. Richard quickly decide d to push for full control. After he got custody of the young princes, and secur ed them in the Tower of London, Richard of Gloucester had them denounced as ille gitimate. Richard claimed that his brother had been engaged before he married El izabeth Wydeville, and this was enough by church law to invalidate the later mar riage. So Edward V was never crowned. His uncle Richard mounted the throne as Ri chard III, and young Edward and his brother soon disappeared, and were presumed dead by contemporaries. Richard III had the character to be a capable king, but the irregular way he came to power destroyed his legitimacy. During his two year reign he faced a variety of plots, backed by the Wydevilles, the remnants of the Lancastrian inte rest, and his own protege, the Duke of Buckingham. No one but those Richard had personally enriched were interested in supporting his regime. Not that the count ry was actively against him; but no one would lift a hand to save him. Thus in 1485, when the ministers of the new French king, Charles VIII, obt ained Henry Tudor's freedom and gave him money for an invasion of England, the p olitical nation sat on the sidelines. On August 22, 1485, Richard III was killed in battle at Bosworth Field, betrayed in the end by some of his small core grou p of supporters. Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, and a descendant of John of Gaunt and Edwar d III, became Henry VII. He secured this dubious hereditary claim by marrying Ed ward IV's daughter. Henry VII's reign Henry VII, a very obscure and inexperienced man at his accession, commande d no great loyalty in England. For years he was insecure, especially since he kn ew how little support he had had during his own usurpation. There were a number of revolts against him in the early years of his reign in favor of men who were supposed to be the young Richard duke of York, the second son of Edward IV. Henry VII's most important accomplishment was to survive these attempts. H e was a suspicious ruler, one who ruled by recognizance. Recognizances were ruin ous fines that he had adjudged against various peers, which were to be collected if they ever got out of line again. His methods, many of which were taken over from Edward IV and Richard III, and implemented by men who had previously served the Yorkists, worked well enough that Henry was able to pass his kingdom on to his son, the infamous Henry VIII. If, however, Henry VII had died only a few years earlier, anything might h ave happened - - Henry VIII was just 18 when he became king. Perhaps the most important continuity between the House of York and the Ho use of Tudor was peace with France. Although Henry did invade France once, in th e 1490s, this was not a serious attempt to reconquer the lost continental domini ons. France was stronger and more united than it had ever been. Henry VII recog nized that little England could not fight this French colossus, and so he did no

t try. Like the earlier belligerence toward France, non-intervention evolved into a habit of English foreign policy -- despite Henry VIII's two attempts to reviv e the glories of Henry V's time. England was on its way to becoming the island k ingdom of modern times; its monarchs were ceasing to be warlords, and without ta king on the characteristics of continental despotism. They would devote most of their time in the future, to the eternal balancing act necessary to control an i sland of peaceloving landlords.

Religion in Fifteenth-Century England In politics, we've reached the conventional end of the medieval period, 14 85. We'll end the course by looking at the state of religion in the fifteenth c entury. Religion in England retained many of the characteristics of the medieval e ra, and the church has been accused of being stagnant. On the other hand, there are some few symptoms of change; some precursors of the Reformation of the 16th century can be seen. Lollardy and attempts to repress it There is some drama at the beginning of the century in the development of Lollardy, the only widespread popular English heresy of the Middle Ages. It orig inated with Wyclif's moral and philosophical criticism; but it was not, however, the conscious goal of Wyclif and it soon developed in directions that he would have disapproved of. Wyclif had no desire to start his own church. Wyclif, a high-flying academ ic, disliked disorder and wanted the English church reformed from the top. You w ill recall that Wyclif wanted the secular power, in other words the king, to dis possess rich church corporations and the pluralists, those clerics who held more than one position at a time, and to forbid papal provisions and taxation in Eng land. A reorganized, poorer church, would be created, one more capable of effect ive spiritual leadership. Preaching would bring the message of the Gospel to the laity, and England would end up a holier place. Wyclif's state-sponsored reformation never took place, and he never consid ered any alternative. Wyclif's agitation inspired others who were willing to go farther than he did. Some of them created Lollardy. Some important characteristics of this move ment were: Lollards believed that the privileges of the clergy and clerical institut ions, which made the church a separate order of society, were unjustified and ev en harmful to the community of Christians. Many Lollards were strongly anti-sacerdotal as well. The theological justi fication for clerical privilege was the belief that ordained clerics had a God-g iven power to dispense sacraments that were necessary to salvation. Wyclif had a ttacked the orthodox theory of the Eucharist, but Lollards generally went well b eyond him. Many did not believe that Christ's body was physically present at c ommunion; they adduced many common-sense reasons for their skepticism. The two elements of anti-clericalism and anti-sacerdotalism together defin ed a religious stance that said laymen did not need the intercession of the cler

gy, or the institutional church, to be saved. What did they put in the place of the institutional church? Like several other medieval heresies and the later Protestants, the Lollar ds had fundamentalist leanings. The Bible, especially the Gospel, gave humanity all knowledge necessary for salvation. They derived from their fundamentalism a hostility to what they called "superstition" -- the devotion of the majority fel t towards the Mass, the Blessed Virgin Mary, saints and their relics, and pilgri mage. The most common devotional practice of the Lollards was learning large par ts of the Bible by heart, and repeating and discussing them with among themselve s. Finally, the Lollards were, like many other zealous Christian groups throu gh the ages, a bit on the puritanical side. They had in the New Testament a clea r guide to how Christians should live, and they seriously tried to follow that g uide. Lollards were not a unified group or organization. We can identify severa l different groups: Wyclif's ideas inspired a surge of religious activity in several disparate groups. The first group was made up of Oxford theologians who knew Wyclif personal ly and who had been convinced by his arguments, or by his zeal and sincerity. Se veral of these people became active preachers or propagandists of Wyclifism, at least for a few years. Some gave up during the serious repression of the 1380s A number of influential knights present at the court of Richard II, who ha d been exposed to Wyclif's ideas during political debates. After the deposition of Richard II the Lollard knights diminished in number and influence. But for a decade or so they had given heretical preachers protection and encouragement. The third group was the large number of ordinary priests and laymen who we re exposed to Wyclif's ideas through the efforts of the pioneers. From the very beginning Wyclif had held that the laity should have access to the Bible. Some of his earliest followers took him at his word, and produced not one but two English translations. The English bible became, as we've seen, the center of the movement. Also several of Wyclif's polemical works and original devotional and propaganda works were translated or adapted from Latin or composed in English. These devotional writings gave Lollardy a greater appeal to substantial la ymen and women than it would have had if it had been transmitted by word of mout h only. Lollard literature made it possible for Lollardy to survive persecution. Persecution of the Lollards was slow and unsystematic. There had never bee n any big outbreaks of heresy in England, and so the machinery of repression was very primitive compared to that on the continent, where heresy was much more co mmon. There were protests in parliament against the early anti-heretical actions of the archbishops of Canterbury. In 1382, following Wyclif's attack on transubstantiation and the shock of the Peasant's Revolt, William Courtney, archbishop of Canterbury, held a church council at Oxford where Wyclif's ideas and his best known followers were attacke d. Following the deposition of Richard II, Henry IV allowed a statute called De heretico comburendo (an Act to Burn Heretics) to be passed by the parliament of 1401 (not without some protest from the commons). It allowed for the burning

of heretics. Though only two heretics were burned, Lollardy lost its Lollardy lo st many of its upper class adherents. Nevertheless Lollardy, if very much a minority cult, continued to spread a nd still had a certain appeal to educated and pious laymen. It percolated under the surface until 1414, when it inspired a revolt against Henry V. The center of the storm was a man named Sir John Oldcastle, a close friend of the young king and one of Shakespeare's models for Falstaff. A man of milita ry accomplishment and political influence, he was known to be a Lollard and a pr otector of Lollards. In 1413, Archbishop Arundel found some solid evidence of this and decided to prosecute. Because his religious convictions were sincere, Oldcastle refused to deny his beliefs and was found guilty of heresy. He was sentenced to be burne d. Henry V stayed the execution of his friend in the hopes of getting him to rec ant. During the delay Oldcastle escaped from the Tower of London and went into h iding. There he began organizing a coup. The rather hopeless plan lost all chance of success when a group of London Lollards were arrested in a tavern the night before the coup was to take place. Oldcastle, though he knew that his plans were betrayed, went ahead anyway. His thousand or fewer Lollards were easily scattered. Oldcastle's revolt was counterproductive in the worst way. It never had a chance of success, because almost no one of any influence was involved. Yet it w as scary enough to provoke a strong reaction from the authorities and the upper class as a whole. From this point, knights, lords and trained theologians are ne ver found in the surviving movement. It lost any chance of converting the larger society to its own views. Lollardy did not die out. It had its effect on the grassroots. The connect ion between 15th century Lollards and some of the early support for the Reformat ion is increasingly accepted, though the Lollards did not start that Reformation . Rather the thin but widespread popularity of this anti-clerical, not very lear ned movement is an indicator of the growing independent involvement of lay men a nd women in religion. Lay piety The growth of lay literacy, especially literacy in English, had for a long time now made it possible for people to live a rich religious life without the clergy. From the middle of the 14th century, in fact, lay mystics began to appe ar. Mystics were people who lived an interior life that an earlier century wou ld have thought appropriate only to monks. Through prayer, asceticism, and conte mplation, these mystics sought to make direct contact with God. They did so with out any formal ties to an established religious order, and without any ambition to found a new order. Reading was part of their life. The classics of Latin devotional literatur e were increasingly translated into the common language. Furthermore mystics and other pious people wrote down their experiences and thoughts for others to read . All of this kind of activity had been monopolized by the clergy before the fou rteenth century. Now it was available to the laity. Not all pious laypeople were mystics or Lollards. There was the puritanic al, Scripture loving fringe of Lollards and near Lollards, skeptical of the sacr

aments and "superstition." But many other enthusiasts threw themselves into the orthodox devotion of the time. Such devotion centered to a great degree on the fear of purgatory. Purgatory was a doctrine developed in the earlier Middle Ages that caught the imagination of the Later Middle Ages. The idea was that few human beings, ev en if they are saved, deserved to go directly to heaven. Even if you confessed y our sins and had them forgiven, each sin had a punishment attached that had to b e suffered or otherwise taken care of. If you died with punishment still owing, you would spend time in purgatory until your soul was purged. Purgatory was visu alized as being a lot like hell but temporary rather than permanent. Purgatory w as not a pleasant prospect. Fortunately the church had long said that various devotional acts could ca ncel out the punishment due to sin. These included attending mass, saying prescr ibed prayers, going on pilgrimage, or even contributing money to pious purposes. Furthermore, even after death, prayers on your behalf performed by the living c ould shorten your purgatorial punishment. These beliefs were very similar in a w ay to the belief of the early and High Middle Ages, that prayer and intercession would gain God's mercy. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, intercession was syste matized, even turned into an industry. The sale of indulgences by the papacy was mass marketed to meet the papal bills. Lots of people thought that this corrupt ed true religion, even equated it with simony, but many more bought indulgences so that they would be spared the pains of purgatory. Frequent confession, hearing of masses and even communion, all of which we re promoted by the mendicant orders of friars, were part of a similar and very p opular strategy. One of the most important types of religious activity in the Later Middle Ages was the founding of chantries. A chantry was a private chapel, endowed by a rich penitent, where priests were to say masses for the founder for eternity. L ots of people who could not afford such a magnificent spiritual safety net left money in their wills to have a certain number of masses said for their souls. Ch antries had the additional advantage of providing employment for underemployed p riests, many of whom made extra pennies teaching the children of the laity how t o read. A similar attachment to old forms of piety can be seen in the parish churc hes of the fifteenth century. A richer laity put much of their new money into ma gnificent stone buildings that still survive today. Growing irrelevance of the institutional church Greater lay participation in religious life did not mean active revolt aga inst the clergy, but it is clear that some of the older institutions of the chur ch were losing their relevance for the English. This is particularly evident in regard to monasteries. A few very strict houses, especially those connected with the Carthusian order, attracted lay interest and patronage. But most of the mon asteries were increasingly irrelevant to religious life. The strict separation o f the religious life from the life of the world that they symbolized left people cold -- especially since the religion of the 15th century monasteries, though n ot corrupt, was lukewarm. The friars, who lived with the people, preached to them, confessed them, a nd directed the daily devotions of the pious were much more central to religious

life. But because the friars were so visible, they were obvious targets of crit icism. They could be blamed for the rather mechanistic piety and, as officially sanctioned beggars, the clerical obsession with money that contemporaries dislik ed. At the same time the organizational independence of the church was less th an it had been in centuries. We have seen that the crown and the estates in parl iament had put much pressure on the papacy's ability to direct the English churc h during the fourteenth century. At the beginning of the 15th century, the papal court lost the battle. The Great Schism that began in 1378 and continued until 1417 was the main cause. In this period competing popes fought to be recognized as head of the chu rch, and they could not afford to fight secular rulers whose support they needed . When the Schism was over, the popes found it impossible to regain the ground t hey had lost. The papacy remained the main clearing house for dispensations from church law and high clerical appointments, and it retained some of its taxing r ights, but in most parts of Europe, the pope could exercise such powers only at the sufferance of the appropriate kings and princes. In England, the king was effectively supreme in the church a century befor e Henry VIII. For instance, when Edward IV told parliament that he would "live o f his own" and not ask them for grants of money, this promise did not apply to t he clergy. He continued to call convocations of the English clergy and get grant s of taxes from them. And nobody protested. The church by this point was part of the king's "own" -- just as it had been in the time of Edgar or William the Con queror. In the fifteenth century, we are coming to the end of a cycle. The pre-Ref ormation English church cannot be fairly presented as a scandalously corrupt ins titution. Most clergy did their jobs reasonably well if in an uninspired fashion . But the clergy had lost its leadership position in society. English clergy wer e no longer part of an international class. They had lost their dominant positio n in the economy, and no longer had a monopoly of learning or piety. The only th ing left to lose was the privileged legal separation from the rest of society. O ne can see, if very dimly, the shape of the national Church of England that will soon come into being. ?? ?? ?? ??

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