The Three Edwards

by Thomas B. Costain

  The earnest and hard-working Cistercians were called the Gray Monks, and wherever they established themselves the hillsides soon became dotted with the backs of cropping sheep. They were allowed few opportunities to speak among themselves, but there must have been evenings after their one meal of the day (a pound of bread apiece, a dish of beans, and sometimes a piece of cheese) when they gathered in the chapter houses and earnestly debated the proper care of the flocks. The records show that in 1280 the Abbey of Meaux alone had 11,000 sheep. The figures fluctuated, of course. A low year was 1310 when Meaux had no more than 5,406.

  That so much of the wool thus raised could be sold was due to the needs of the cities of Flanders. The Flemish people manufactured the finest textiles in Europe and they had little wool of their own. They depended almost exclusively on England. At certain periods when English kings experimented with costly changes in trade relations, the Flemish looms would be silent. What would have happened to England if the weavers of Ghent and Bruges had found a substitute for wool? A dire speculation, indeed.

  Credit is due Edward III on two counts. He encouraged the bringing over of weavers from Flanders (one detects here the hand of the fair Philippa) to teach the English how to make cloth. Some of them settled around Norwich and some went to points in the west. Master Thomas Blanket started his business in Bristol with a staff of foreign workers. Edward remained rather consistently on the side of the Policy of Plenty, as free trade was called, as against the Policy of Power, or protection.

  But this had to do with the purely national side of the subject. The emergence, referred to above, was a matter of world-wide change. It was the result in large part of vast developments in international trade and commerce.

  On the exact spot in London where the Cannon Street station stands, there was a very large building with an extensive courtyard and a most handsome hall which was known as the Steelyard. It was a busy spot, tenanted by heavy, sober-eyed men of North German extraction who were acting as representatives of the Hanseatic League. The name of the establishment came from the fact that a steel bar was kept for the weighing of goods. The Hanseatic League was a spectacular development of the theory of union in trade which had begun with the guilds. It was made up of the trading ports on the Baltic Sea and affiliated cities, including Lübeck, Hamburg, Rostock, Riga, and Danzig, as well as Thorn and Krakow in the east, Wisby and Reval in the north, and Göttingen in the south. Despite the fact that each member city was within the domain of one of the northern nations, the league did not recognize national considerations. It had been organized to control the trade of the Baltic, and this it succeeded in doing for centuries, in spite of attempts at interference by kings, princes, and grand dukes. The wealth of the league was enormous, its power absolute.

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  The feudal system would die hard. Forced upon England by the Normans, it was so profitable and gratifying to the nobility that they fought against any change. Although some of the kings strove to reduce the strength of the baronage, it was not in the interests of the commonality, but to gather more power into their own hands. To king and noble alike the feudal system was the bulwark, the unscalable wall about the citadel of privilege.

  A few of the kings who would follow this constellation of the Edwards were brilliant rulers. Many, however, were unable to lead and too stubborn to follow. Some would be cruel, some sly, some dull. Even the best of them, with perhaps one exception, were unwilling to relinquish a jot of what they considered their privileges. A few would even proclaim the divinity of these rights.

  But to return to Edward. He was a king of contradictions, consistent only in the grandiose scale of his ambitions. He was more than extravagant, he was lavish: lavish in his personal life, in his court; lavish to his friends and his mistresses. Above all else, he was lavish in the diplomacy with which he sought to gain his ends. He would go to Flanders and Germany with a bounty granted by a complaisant Parliament and would spend it all in reckless subsidies to the rulers of the Low Country states to join him against France. The diversity of Flemish interests broke up his first attempts to unite them in a firm alliance. After each rebuff he would come back to Parliament with empty pockets and no constructive gains to report. Apparently he was a good advocate, for Parliament would always advance him what he wanted, generally a tenth of all revenue. Once he asked for a ninth and got it. This meant a ninth of church revenues, of baronial income, of the stock of merchants; and one horse in nine, one cow, one sheep, and a green bough stuck in one sheaf in nine in every harvest field, which the king’s tax collector would come and take away.

  Like all strong-willed kings with unenlightened ministers, he often did arbitrary and ill-considered things about the trade of the country. He laid restrictions on the Cistercians which led to a curtailment of their valuable activities. He put restrictions also on trade which had no purpose but to increase the state revenue and which had to be repealed when the disastrous results became apparent. He confiscated to the crown all cloth that his aulnagers found to be deficient in measurements. He interfered with the system of fairs, even granting them to towns, which compelled the merchants of London to close their shops and use temporary booths at the seat of activities. If Edward was the father of English commerce, he was an inconsiderate and careless parent.

  The subsidies that Parliament granted the lavish king, the untying of the national moneybags, the planting of green boughs in so many sheaves of grain did not suffice for his ambitious schemes. He borrowed money in many quarters and in huge amounts.

  If he had paused to reflect, Edward would have been resentful of the thoroughness with which his French grandfather, Philip the Unfair of France, had demolished the order of the Knights Templar. The knights had been sound bankers, and it had been customary for the kings of England to visit the huge headquarters of the order on the banks of the Thames when they needed loans. But now, thanks to Philip, the bearded knights had dropped from sight, the buildings had passed into other hands, the beauséant no longer waved in the breeze. So Edward, who never knew the day when he did not need money, had to look elsewhere. He went, of course, to the Italian bankers, the Society of the Bardi of Florence, and the Peruzzi family of the same city, which had opened branches in England to take the place of the Templars. Even with the vast sums they loaned him, he was not content. He borrowed also from the leading figures in trade in England, most of all from a remarkable man of whom much will be told later, one William de la Pole.

  The Peruzzi family loaned the king in 1337 the sum of £11,732 for the war with Scotland. This was just the beginning, for in the following year Edward acknowledged an indebtedness to them of £28,000. Later this total was advanced to £35,000, some of which had been advanced “for urgent matters and for the king’s secret business beyond the seas.”

  The Society of the Bardi were perhaps a little more careful and astute. Beginning in 1328 they promised to find him £20 daily for the expenses of the king’s household and to give him £16,140 for a period of 807 days, the loan to be protected by a lien on customs receipts. The king continued to go to them when the flatness of the royal purse threatened to thwart him in his magnificent designs. He was loaned £100 for the funeral of his brother, John of Eltham, £300 as a gift for his still dearly beloved Philippa, £97 and some shillings and pence (arrears for nearly three years) for the upkeep of the royal menagerie of lions and leopards in the Tower of London.

  But the Italian sources of financial aid were not more helpful to the king than the colossus of the north, this bold, far-seeing, shrewd Yorkshireman, the aforesaid William de la Pole. If there had been a tendency in those days to give extravagant titles in trade as is done in these modern times when we have Napoleons of this and Caesars of that, William de la Pole would undoubtedly have been called the Midas of the Midlands or the Wizard of Wool. This remarkable merchant produced in 1339 the funds which Edward needed for his campaign in France of that year, the colossal sum of £76,180.

  These figures are so fa
r above the financial horizons of previous reigns that they serve to demonstrate more vividly than anything else the sudden upsurge in the world. The winds of trade were blowing high and strong and men were beginning to dream wondrous dreams. If Edward had seen fit to employ this strange deep prosperity (deep because it went right down to the roots of society) in strengthening the polity of the state instead of tossing it away on the bloody battlefields of France, his fame would have been everlasting and his place in history higher even than the reputation he was to win at Crécy and Poictiers.

  It may have been due to the beginning of this new wealth and the resultant improvement in living conditions that sumptuary laws were introduced at this time. The holders of feudal power and wealth could not tolerate, it seemed, the growth of what might become an aristocracy of trade without an effort to maintain social barriers. Sumptuary laws were intended to check extravagances and the moral decline which grew out of them, also to prevent the sinful adornment of the body in foolish fashions, such as the toes of shoes which curled so high that they had to be tied to the ankles. This type of law had originated far back in history, in the days when paternalism was rampant in Greece. Houses were not permitted then which required more than the ax and saw in building, and women were not allowed to adorn their bodies in expensive clothes, although an exemption was granted to prostitutes.

  In the laws which were passed at the stage of history with which we are dealing there was a tendency to depart from the original purpose and to impose restrictions solely for the maintenance of class distinctions. In Scotland it was declared by law that no man under the rank of baron was permitted to have baked meat and pies. Tasteless stews were deemed good enough for commoners. In England servants of the lower rank were forbidden to spend more for clothing in the course of a year than three shillings fourpence. No servant was allowed more than one dish of meat or fish a day. The wives of prosperous citizens were not permitted to wear dresses made of silk.

  Fortunately the people of England were not slavish in their obedience to these irritating laws. The merchant’s wife clothed her plumpness in silk and laughed at the lawmakers. If a maidservant had spent her yearly allowance on clothes and craved a new ribbon for her hair, she bought it. In Scotland many bellies belonging to Scots of low degree were filled with good baked mutton in spite of King Jamie I, who had passed the law against it. But the purpose back of these snob decrees stuck in the craws of the good burghers and their wives. Writing centuries later, Adam Smith summed it up with the words, “the highest impertinence and presumption in kings and ministers.”

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  The semi-renaissance in England was reflected in a more general desire for education. There had been grammar and chorister schools long before the Conquest, but these were conducted by the chancellors of the great churches. The spread of knowledge among the lower classes was limited largely to portions of the country within the sound of cathedral bells. It was in the matter of university training that the fourteenth century demonstrated a sudden surge of interest.

  A degree of antiquity has sometimes been claimed for Oxford which the facts do not bear out. The town at the junction of the Thames and the Cherwell, nevertheless, had for two centuries been collecting colleges around the administrative center growing out of the activities of one Robert Pullen and was in a position to respond to the sudden desire of the nobility and the wealthy classes to aid in further progress.

  Balliol College had been established in 1263 by the one-time King of Scotland. His widow had carried on the design, the original statutes being issued in 1282.

  The first practical response to the public desire was given in 1314 when Walter Stapledon, Bishop of Exeter, who has been encountered already in these pages and most creditably, founded Exeter College, providing a foundation for twelve scholars, eight to be drawn from Devonshire and four from Cornwall. The scholars sent up under this arrangement were accommodated at first in Hert Hall, which had been erected around the turn of the century by Elias of Hertford.

  Merton College began a little earlier, the estates of Walter de Merton having been turned over in 1264 for its maintenance. The scope of this institution would be enlarged in 1380 by the foundation provided by John Wyllyot, who had served as chancellor of Merton from 1349. Still later, in the last quarter of the century, the Merton library would be built on the gift of William Rede, Bishop of Chichester.

  Even Edward II, whose interest in education had never been remarked, founded Oriel College in 1326. The idea originated, it seems, with Adam de Brome, his almoner. The college was dedicated to St. Mary the Virgin and did not receive its final name until twenty years later. A tenement called La Oriela had occupied some of the land which the college finally pre-empted for its own use.

  Queen’s College, started in 1340 by Queen Philippa’s chaplain, Robert de Eglesfield, was always to be associated with royalty. The Black Prince was entered as a student, but there is nothing to indicate that he ever attended a lecture. However, Henry V was at Queen’s and it has been the rule for the consorts of English kings to serve as patronesses. Most of the students came from the north of England, and the Eglesfield scholarships were limited to natives of Cumberland and Westmorland.

  The same tendency to create colleges where ambitious young men could acquire learning was apparent at Oxford’s great competitor, Cambridge on the Cam. Here Peterhouse College was founded in 1284 by Hugh de Balsham. Pembroke College (from which emerged a stream of great graduates) was begun in 1347 by Mary de St. Paul, the widow of Aymer de Valence, who had figured prominently in the Scottish wars. Trinity Hall was founded in 1350 by William Bateman, Bishop of Norwich.

  The students who allied themselves with these halls and colleges were undoubtedly outnumbered at this time by those who did not receive nominations to scholarships but went to Oxford or Cambridge with little in their pockets. Generally these poor students found places with one of the many groups who rented small houses under the management of semi-learned officials known as principilators. They slept and had their meals in these halls, most of which were given wildly facetious names, at a cost which sometimes did not exceed a penny a week. They enrolled for lectures under men of some recognized worth. The lectures were held generally in the vestibules of churches or in rooms at inns, the students sitting on the reed-strewn floors. For warmth in winter, there being no fires, they would squat close together, knees hunched up to provide a resting place for ink and quill and parchment. Most of them were content with the Trivium, which consisted of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, as well as Latin. Some of the more ambitious of them attempted to scale the heights of the Quadrivium, where arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music were also taught.

  Classes would begin as early as the hour of prime (six o’clock!), which meant that the students would be up at dawn and indulging in hasty toilets in front of the community skeel, a wide wooden bucket. The scholastic labors would continue throughout the day, but the students would have plenty of energy left for frolics in the town after dark, carried on in taverns and on the streets at the expense of the somewhat more sober citizens. There was always an open state of war between Town and Gown.

  It will be seen from this that the national conscience was awakening to the need for education, a steady flame which would burn undiminished through all the centuries ahead in which dynastic wars and religious persecution would nearly succeed in plunging the world back into the darkness.

  In writing of Oxford, the memory is revived of a very great man who was at the university around the middle of the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon. He occupied a room in a small stone tower at Folly Bridge, and it was there, perhaps, that he had discovered the explosive possibilities in a combination of saltpeter, sulphur, and charcoal, which later was called gunpowder. He did not realize that he had thus uncovered the secret of a weapon which would revolutionize warfare, but others had stumbled on the fact in time to have gunpowder play some part in the wars of Edward III. A writer named John Barbour is responsible
for the statement that cannon (called at the time cracys) were used by the English king in his 1327 invasion of Scotland. There are records of the existence of small cannon in the Tower of London in 1338, together with a barrel of gunpowder, and that in the same year in Rouen there was an iron funnel called a pot de feu which would spray forth metal bolts. That the government of England had been awakened to the potentialities of this new weapon was evidenced in an order issued by Edward in 1346 to buy up all the saltpeter and sulphur in the kingdom. There is nothing in the records, however, to prove that cannon were planted around Edward’s windmill at Crécy or concealed in the hedges at Poictiers.

  CHAPTER VIII

  The Merchant Prince

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  SIR William de la Pole, the great Yorkshire magnate, was a man of parts. History deals only with his exploits and has little to say about the man himself. Clearly he was of good address and suavity of manner, for he conducted many missions requiring tact and polish, and he was for a number of years head of the Staple in Antwerp. He came up, however, in the wool trade, where fortunes could be most easily made, and there must have been something bluff and genial about him to stand on good terms with the hard-bitten raisers of sheep. The greatest breeders were the Cistercians, whose lands extended far and wide around their splendid monasteries in the north country, Fountains, Furness and Rievaulx, and it would be necessary for him to stand well with the heads of the order.