A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485 Read online

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF

  BRITAIN 1066–1485

  NICHOLAS VINCENT

  FOR HENRY MAYR-HARTING

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Maps and Figures

  1 The Anglo-Saxon Past

  2 Norman England

  3 From Hastings to Henry II, 1066–1154

  4 The Foundations of a Dynasty, 1154–1189

  5 From Richard I to Henry III, 1189–1272

  6 Edward I to Edward III, 1272–1377

  7 Late Medieval England

  8 From Richard II to Richard III, 1377–1485

  Further Reading

  Index

  About the Author

  Recent highlights from the series

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Some years ago, a colleague of mine remarked, ‘The thing is, Nick, that neither you nor I are ever going to write a book that anyone will want to read.’ What follows is intended to test that statement. It is decidedly neither a ‘textbook’ (of which there are many splendid examples) nor a piece of undiluted scholarship targeted at a few dozen scholars, none of whom, save the reviewers (and even then not all the reviewers), will ever read it. It must open with an apology. My title and my task were given to me already formed. To all Welsh, Scots, Manx, Irish or Channel Island readers, it is necessary to point out that this particular brief history of ‘Britain’ focuses almost exclusively upon the history, indeed upon the ‘Birth of the Nation’, of England, with barely a glance towards other undeniably ‘British’ concerns. To trace the history even of England from the beginnings to 1485, is itself a daunting task. To have done so in tandem with a narrative of other British histories, themselves drawn from very different source materials, would have resulted in a story as confused and as set about with reefs and shipwrecks as the rocky western coast of Britain itself. Excellent histories of Wales, Scotland and Ireland already exist, and readers are urged to explore them. As for the English history which follows, I have both the privilege and the pleasure to belong to a history department at Norwich, and more broadly to a community of scholars, whose friendship and mutual support have ensured that medieval studies flourish today as never before, and that our connection with other scholarly communities, particularly in France, are stronger now than they have been at any time since the nineteenth century. Those who responded to requests for information or who talked over various of the issues in this book, not always aware of the fact that their pockets were being picked, include Martin Aurell, John Baldwin, Julie Barrau, David Bates, Paul Binski, Paul Brand, Christopher Brooke, Bruce Campbell, Martha Carlin, David Carpenter, Stephen Church, Alan Cooper, David Crouch, Peter Davidson, Hugh Doherty, John Gillingham, Chris Given-Wilson, Christopher Harper-Bill, Sandy Heslop, Jim Holt, Nicholas Karn, Simon Keynes, Edmund King, Tom Licence, Rob Liddiard, Roger Lovatt, Scott Mandelbrote, Lucy Marten, Gesine Oppitz-Trotman, Michael Prestwich, Carole Rawcliffe, Miri Rubin, Richard Sharpe, Henry Summerson, Tim Tatton-Brown, Alan Thacker, Tom Williamson and Andy Wood. There are a lot more who might be named, not least the many dozens of scholars whose contributions to the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography I have mined with such pleasure and such a sense of my own essential ignorance.

  All accounts of history are the product of their own time. It is no coincidence that after 1970 or so, historians began to explore the impact of inflation upon the politics of England in the 1180s, or that the ‘ethnic cleansing’ practised (or not practised) by the Normans after 1066 first became a burning issue after 1990, with the former Yugoslavia almost daily in the newspapers. The present book was written in a time of economic crisis, following the great ‘credit crunch’ of 2008, in the midst of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the face of glib assertions from the usual quarters that if long-term educational, cultural and economic decline do not finish off the British, then environment and ecological factors almost certainly will. I began writing it in Caen, in November 2009, within sight both of the castle from which William the Conqueror planned his conquest of England and of the University, founded by Henry VI, one of the last acts of English patronage in Normandy. Warfare and education have always sat rather well together. Most of the final chapter was written at Fontevraud or Poitiers in May 2010, the last pages at Rouen, within sight of the place where Joan of Arc was tried and executed. What I know of the period after 1300, I owe to the teaching of Roger Highfield and in particular to John Maddicott, who turned me from an early into a high medievalist but who failed to eradicate what he already suspected might be a populist streak in my prose. The book as a whole is dedicated to Henry Mayr-Harting, prince amongst teachers and an inspiration to the generations of undergraduates whom he has tutored.

  Nicholas Vincent

  Norwich

  Midsummer 2010

  MAPS AND FIGURES

  1 Genealogy of the Kings of England 1066–1154

  2 Genealogy of the Kings of England 1154–1327

  3 Genealogy of the Kings of England 1307–1509

  4 England and France in the Twelfth Century

  5 England and France in 1360

  6 England and France in 1429

  1. Genealogy of the Kings of England 1066–1154

  2. Genealogy of the Kings of England 1154–1327

  3. Genealogy of the Kings of England 1307–1509

  THE ANGLO-SAXON PAST

  By sundown on Saturday, 14 October 1066, events on a previously obscure Sussex hillside had decisively altered the course of English history, as indeed of world history. Surveying the scene of carnage, even those eyewitnesses who could hope to gain most from the day’s events were appalled by what they saw. As William of Poitiers, in all likelihood a chaplain attached to the army of the Duke of Normandy, later put it, ‘Far and wide the earth was covered with the flower of the English nobility and youth, drenched in blood.’ Pitched battles were rare events in the Middle Ages. Too much could turn upon a single moment’s hesitation, upon false rumour or an imperfectly executed manoeuvre. Only if prepared to gamble with fate, or absolutely certain of victory, would a general commit himself to battle. William of Normandy did precisely this in October 1066, not because he commanded overwhelming odds or could be certain of God’s favour, but because he had just staked the wager of a lifetime. By crossing the Channel with a vast army of Frenchmen, not only his own Norman followers but large numbers of knights and mercenaries from as far north as Flanders and as far south as Aquitaine, he risked everything on a single roll of the dice. Should his army fail in battle, should the enemy refuse combat, cut off the possibility of retreat and leave the French to stew in their own mutual recriminations, then William would go down in history as one of the most reckless gamblers of all time. As it was, his outrageous manoeuvre succeeded not so much through his own skills but because of the hubris of his enemies.

  The English commander, Harold Godwinson, had just celebrated victory in the north of England, having butchered an entire army of Norwegian invaders at the Yorkshire settlement of Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Clearly, God was an Englishman, and Harold was God’s appointed instrument. In these circumstances, when news reached him of the landing of William’s army at Pevensey, three days after his victory, Harold packed up his troubles and marched his army southwards for what he clearly expected to be yet another great celebration of English martial superiority. Not for the first time, nor the last, a sense of manifold destiny and of the invincibility of England in the face of foreign threat, lured an English army onwards to disaster.

  Yet the battle about to be fought at Hastings would be a disaster unprecedented even on
the scale of other such events, for example the English defeat at Maldon in 991 (when an English commander, once again convinced of his destiny and of the impossibility of negotiating with foreign terrorists, preferred his entire army to be massacred by Viking raiders rather than surrender to the heathens), or in Essex, at ‘Assendon’ in 1016 (when the English King Edmund ‘Ironside’ had been decisively defeated by Cnut of Denmark). In the whole of European history, Hastings finds few parallels either in the scale of the slaughter or the finality of the consequences. Like all such epics, it was fought on a scale and over a period of time that were appropriately vast. Like Waterloo, it was a close-run thing, lasting from about nine in the morning until dusk, nearly nine hours of fighting. At Hastings died not just Harold Godwinson but an entire civilization. Not just Harold’s army but the whole 500-year-old panoply of Anglo-Saxon England went down before the swords of a new Norman invader. Why was this so, and what were the consequences?

  The Dark Ages?

  What we know about events in the Middle Ages depends upon a surprisingly narrow source base. We need to imagine a stage with ninety per cent permanently in darkness. An occasional spotlight flickers upon this corner or that, suddenly revealing details and colours that we might not otherwise imagine existed. A vague half-light enables us to discern some broader outlines, a few darker and lighter shadows. For the most part, however, we depend upon inference and imagination to establish what is there. It is no coincidence that those trained as medieval historians have occupied a disproportionately significant role in both MI6 and the CIA, precisely because the medievalist’s training ensures that the bare minimum of detail is employed to the maximum effect in intelligence gathering. For the Middle Ages, a very large part of our intelligence emerges from one key source. Our spy network on the past is dominated by churchmen, which is to say by monastic chroniclers and the occasional bishop or parish priest, setting down their accounts of past events, virtually all of them men, most of them with a particular line to toe in respect to their own monastery or locality and their wider allegiance to the Church. Such men wrote not so much to illuminate the broader stage, to flatter kings, or to celebrate secular society, but for quite other purposes, above all to demonstrate the unfolding of God’s plan for mankind, with the Church or churches as God’s principal instrument.

  Bede of Jarrow

  To understand the Anglo-Saxon past and the society doomed to destruction at Hastings we need to go back to the eighth century, to Bede, Monk of Jarrow in the far north of England and his great Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples. Bede wrote almost three hundred years since the Angles, Saxons and Jutes had first crossed the North Sea from their German homelands, in the aftermath of the collapse of Roman rule. It was more than a century since at least some of these pagan invaders had first accepted Christianity, a Mediterranean religion closely associated with the pomp of Roman imperial government, reintroduced to a now pagan England via the more European-leaning parts of Kent. It was nonetheless Bede’s historical narrative which for the first time attempted to impose a pattern upon this chaos of conquest and conversion. In the very opening lines of his History, he proclaimed that ‘Britain is an island of the furthest west’, deliberately echoing the words of the Roman geographer Pliny, and thereby setting the stage for at least two key concepts central to Bede’s vision of Britain and its place in the wider world. Firstly, Bede believed that for all its physical insularity, Britain was linked intellectually and in terms of its peoples and their racial descent, to a mainland that had once formed part of the wider empire of Rome. Secondly, being an island supplied Britain with a compact unity that should have ensured, over time, a unified sense of purpose under a single monarchy.

  Bede did not invent the idea either of Christian kingship or of nation. He nonetheless brought these two concepts into a new and powerful conjunction, arguing that through their acceptance of Christianity, and hence through their willingness to unfold God’s master plan, the Anglo-Saxons had progressed to having one supreme King from having several. Kingdoms and peoples were pounded in the mortar of Christ’s Roman Church to form a single ‘England’ under a single race of English kings. The English, like the Jews of the Old Testament, might have good or bad kings, but they were now a nation united under kingly rule. In turn, and with the advice of churchmen, their kings gave them laws, just as the kings of Israel had dispensed a Deuteronomy and the laws of Moses. Upon the pillars of kingship and the law was the nation founded.

  There was much in this that was pure nonsense. But strongly expressed opinions often make for the most interesting writing about the past, and Bede, with his prejudices, racism and religious bigotry, was unquestionably a great historian, writing in a sophisticated and highly personal voice. According to his own lights, he was pursuing truth, on hunting down and verifying source materials that, but for his History, would be entirely lost to us. He wrote on an epic scale, and long books have always had the advantage in the bestseller lists. As a result, it was Bede’s highly literary, highly prejudiced and resolutely misleading account of Anglo-Saxon history that was adopted as the master narrative. In due course, it was this same History that was fed back into the historical process, used by later Anglo-Saxon kings, especially the rulers of Wessex, to justify their own kingly authority. Faced with a Viking onslaught in the middle of the ninth century, King Alfred of Wessex responded by appealing to an English sense of identity, king, law and nation, founded squarely upon the twin pillars of the Bible and Bede. A phenomenon observable from Homer to Mein Kampf, a book of history became crucial in shaping the fate of subsequent historical events. Bede’s History was translated into the vernacular English language at Alfred’s court, and Alfred himself sponsored the writing of a new history in continuation of Bede, the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, again in the vernacular, recording the events of more recent times on a year by year basis, copies of it being sent out to each of the major centres of West Saxon culture, the greater monasteries of Wessex, Kent and Mercia, from Winchester via Canterbury to Worcester.

  The English

  It would be easy to deconstruct large parts of Bede’s narrative and the mythology founded upon it. For a start, the English had never been a single people. They were always, in Bede’s day as later, a mixture not just of Angles and Saxons from across the North Sea, but of those already settled in the island long before the Romans came, most obviously the Celtic peoples, still independently ruled in large parts of Wales, Scotland and the Lake District. Even these Celts had been superimposed upon a population of far more ancient settlement. Unless we assume wholescale genocide, either when the Celts arrived in the fifth century bc, or again with the coming of the Germanic Angles and Saxons from the 400s onwards (and in neither case has the idea of genocide found favour with the scientists, from DNA or blood-test analysis), it seems certain that the population consisted for the most part of a mixture of long-established peoples, ruled over from the top end of society by war bands of Celts, Romans or, later, Saxons. To this already rich mix, the ninth and tenth centuries added further migrants. In the century after 800, most of England north of the Thames was conquered and settled by pagan Vikings, who established for themselves an entire ‘Danelaw’ independent of West Saxon control. The modern regions of Norfolk and Suffolk might continue to be known as East Anglia, after their original ‘Anglian’ settlers, yet for the entire period 800–1000, a period for which we have less than a dozen recorded ‘facts’ about this region, they were entirely overrun by Viking settlers. Indeed, it is questionable whether, for this period at least, East Anglia and large parts of the Danelaw are to be considered, in historical, linguistic or cultural terms, still parts of a political entity that we can call ‘England’.

  Even beyond the Danelaw, and here ignoring the Celtic enclaves of Wales or Scotland, the peoples of Cornwall continued to look as much to Brittany as to Winchester for ideas and leadership. Those of Cumberland, as late as the days of William Wordsworth, if not later, took few i
nstructions from any authority beyond the Pennines and were more closely integrated with the worlds of Dublin, Strathclyde and even Norway than they were with those of Canterbury or London. This was a Britain, even an England, as it was to remain throughout the Middle Ages, of fiercely independent local identities, accents and even languages, in some ways more akin to modern-day Switzerland or to eighteenth-century France than to the peaceful and law-abiding chequerboard of green fields and pastures that is celebrated in myth and still visible, in places, from the air. Although by the year 1000 East Anglia and the Danelaw were Christianized and subsumed within the kingdom of Wessex, using precisely those dissolving myths of England’s Christian destiny and kingly virtue which Bede had first employed to suggest a united ‘English’ kingship leading a united ‘Engalond’, it is questionable whether a united England itself became any sort of political or historical reality even then. England was a myth, constructed in the four hundred years either side of the Norman Conquest on the basis of a powerful series of ideas, of racial, religious, historical and linguistic cohesion, yet still a myth well beyond the comprehension of most of those that we would consider ‘Englishmen’ in 1066.

  A Christian Nation?

  The idea that ‘England’ was a fully Christianized nation, as opposed to an assembly of semi-Christian peoples loosely ruled over by Christian kings, is itself wishful thinking. The Roman Empire had no concept of England, not least because the ‘English’ themselves had yet to cross the German ocean to their new homeland. England as we now know it is contiguous with the two ecclesiastical provinces of Canterbury and York, and it might be supposed that, like other regional or national divisions, the formation of England was in some way the outcome of the formation of these two archbishoprics, from the sixth century onwards. Yet, through to the twelfth century, the archbishops of York claimed jurisdiction north of the border in what then, as today, was considered Scotland. The archbishops of Canterbury claimed authority not only over southern England but over Wales, not subjected to English rule until the late thirteenth century, and even then seen as a land distinct from England. Canterbury also claimed authority, albeit disputed, over the Church in Ireland. Furthermore, although the reader of Bede might assume that Church and nation were one indivisible unity, in truth the Church as often sought to oppose or ignore the dictates of kings as ever it did to encourage kingly authority. Anyone who supposes that the Church was a tame creature of secular authority, even in the centuries before the year 1000, ignores the fact that the Church was principally concerned not with political order but with eternal salvation. Christ’s kingdom was not of this world, and the most influential political theorist of the early Middle Ages, St Augustine, had taught that it was false to identify any city or empire, even the Christianized empire of Rome, with the true City of God.