I have used New Style dating throughout, the conversion to which can be confusing. Until 1582, England and most of Europe used the Julian calendar – the Old Style – until Pope Gregory XIII introduced the far more accurate Gregorian version – the New Style – which was Julian plus eleven days. This was duly adopted in Europe, but, as Elizabeth I’s England had no intention of kow-towing to some foreigner in the Vatican, she stayed on the Julian calendar until 1752. It gets more complicated. Under both Old and New Styles the year started on Lady Day, 25 March, and did not switch to 1 January until 1752 – except in Scotland, which also retained the Julian calendar until 1752 but had switched New Year’s Day to January in 1600, just to be awkward. A difference of eleven days might not matter very much, but the date on which the year begins does, and, whereas we might describe an event as happening on 20 March 1377, people who recorded it at the time or before 1752 would date the same event as happening on 9 March 1376.
It is almost impossible to translate medieval prices into their modern-day equivalent, if only because things that were expensive then are not necessarily so now, and vice versa, and occupations that today would attract a living wage (like commander of an army) might then only receive an allowance towards expenses. Even comparing like with as near as possible like does not help very much. The medieval English pound sterling was divided into twenty shillings, each shilling into twelve pennies, a system expressed in writing as £sd; this lasted until decimalization in 1971, when the same pound became 100 (new) pence, so the old shilling equated to five new pence and the penny to 0.416 new pence. We know that in the year 1400 an ounce of gold was equivalent to £0.75, while if we take the average price of gold for the five years between 2000 and 2004 inclusive, before recession began to skew the market, the same amount of gold would cost £212, giving an inflation factor of 283 (for the five years between 2006 and 2010 the factor is 722). The same exercise for silver (£0.04 an ounce then, £3.30 now) gives a factor of 82.5. If we take wages, then a foot archer under Edward III, paid three pence (3d or 1.23p) a day, earned £4.48 per year, whereas today’s equivalent, the infantry private, is paid £17,500 per year, an inflation factor of 3,906. Admittedly, today’s soldier has to pay for his food and accommodation, but even so the two factors are not in the least comparable. One more example: a knight banneret of Edward III’s, who acted as a junior officer, was paid four shillings (£0.20) per day, £73.00 per year. A modern lieutenant earns £30,000, giving an inflation factor of 329. However, this is further complicated by a banneret’s pay being twelve times that of a foot archer, whereas today’s lieutenant gets but 1.7 times that of a private.
A possibly more helpful comparison could be taken from the tax rolls of 1436, where the tax was levied on all with an income of more than £20 per annum. These show that the average income of a nobleman (duke, earl or baron) was £865, that of a knight £208, of a lesser knight (possibly one risen by military service) £60, and of an esquire £24.2 If we translate that into chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, senior fund manager, upper-middle-class professional and white-collar worker, then we might arrive at an inflation factor of 1,000. Farther down the scale, a ploughman, say, might earn £4 per year in 1436, but this figure is skewed by the effects of the Black Death, which enabled those skilled labourers who survived to put a much higher price on their services (before 1348, he might only have earned an eighth of that). In conclusion, where I have translated prices into modern values, I have used the silver standard, as that appears to have been less volatile than any other comparator. But I would accept that it is probably impossible to arrive at any overall comparison of wages and prices that is more than a very rough approximation.
In the army, any army, it is the commander who gets the acclaim when things go well, although he could not have achieved anything at all without the willing cooperation of his soldiers, the often unnamed and usually unsung heroes of any war. So it is with writing a book. The author’s task is a relatively easy one, and once he has committed his scribbling to paper or disk, the real work begins: by the editor, copy-editor, graphics design team, indexer, cartographer and a whole myriad of humpers and dumpers, pushers and pullers, publicists and sales people all working towards the common goal of getting the book on the shelf. It is the author who will attend the book-signing, but he could not do it without all those people behind the scenes, and I am, as always, eternally grateful to them. My wife is also an historian, of the Anglo-Saxon and medieval persuasion, and so far our paths have not crossed: I steeped in blood and slaughter from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, she in dynasties, art, society and culture from before the Conquest to Bosworth Field. In this book I have strayed into her territory, and I am grateful for her constructive comments, which have prevented me from going down divers blind alleys that would have led me to completely irrelevant conclusions. Any remaining errors are of course entirely mine.
A GREAT AND GLORIOUS ADVENTURE
From top to bottom: The coat of arms of Edward III adopted on claiming the French throne in 1337; the coat of arms of King George III prior to and after the abandonment of the claim to the French throne in 1801.
1
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
The English ownership of lands in what is now France began with Stamping Billy, William the Conqueror, duke of Normandy and king of England, whose claim to the English throne by inheritance may have been thin – he was a distant cousin of Edward the Confessor – but was a lot stronger than that of Harold Godwinson, who had no blood claim at all but was merely a brother-in-law of the late king. William the Norman’s conquest of England was a lot easier than he may have expected: in one great battle, Hastings in 1066, Harold was killed and with him died Anglo-Saxon England. William was faced with opposition all over the country, particularly in the north and in East Anglia, but all these revolts were local and uncoordinated, and William was able to put them down, stripping the ringleaders of their lands and awarding them to his Norman vassals. By the 1070s, the old English aristocracy had been virtually wiped out, English churchmen were being replaced by Normans, castles had been built all over the country and, secure within their walls, French-speaking Normans ruled over Old English-speaking Saxons. By the time of the completion of the Domesday Book in 1086,2 only two Anglo-Saxons are named as having holdings of any significance. It was the greatest upheaval in English society, law and religion since the Roman withdrawal.
Now the ruling classes held lands on both sides of the Channel, which was fine as long as their feudal overlord was the same person in England as he was in Normandy, as was the case until William I’s death in 1087. Then his eldest son Robert became duke of Normandy, while his third son – the second had been killed in a hunting accident – became king of England as William II.3 Now the great magnates had a problem, for when William and Robert were opposed, as they often were, cleaving to one lord meant alienating the other, a situation not resolved until Robert went crusading financed by money advanced by William against the stewardship of Normandy. William Rufus never married and nowhere in the chronicles is there any mention of mistresses or bastard children, but by the time he died in 1100, to be succeeded by his brother, the Conqueror’s fourth son, Henry I, he had added Maine and much of the Vexin – that area between Rouen and Paris – to his territories.4
Henry was no great soldier, but he did manage to take Normandy from his brother Robert, now returned from crusade, and he did manage to govern England and Normandy for thirty-five years, avoiding revolt by a judicious mixture of terror, reward and shrewd financial management. Although Henry had numerous illegitimate children, he failed to produce a male heir to survive him,5 and attempts to persuade the barons to accept his daughter Matilda as his successor as queen regnant failed spectacularly. The great men of the kingdom might have accepted Matilda, who was the widow of the Holy Roman Emperor and hence usually referred to as ‘the Empress’, but they were not going to accept her second husband, Geoffrey of Anjou. Instead, they awarded the t
hrone to Stephen of Blois, duke of Normandy, a nephew of Henry I and grandson of the Conqueror through his daughter Adela – and confusingly also married to a Matilda, this time of Boulogne. The result was a prolonged period of instability and civil war, only resolved when it was agreed in the Treaty of Westminster in 1153 that Stephen should be succeeded on his death by Henry, the son of the empress Matilda and Geoffrey of Anjou.
Henry II came to the English throne in 1154 and is mostly remembered for his disputes with Thomas Becket, one-time chancellor of England and subsequently archbishop of Canterbury. These disputes included the question of ‘criminous clerks’, or persons in holy orders who committed civil offences and could only be tried by an ecclesiastical court which could not impose the death penalty (Henry thought they should be defrocked and handed over for trial by the civil administration); the appointment of bishops; Becket’s feudal duty to provide men-at-arms or cash in lieu for the king’s military adventures; and Becket’s objections to the crowning of Henry’s son and heir, also a Henry, during his father’s lifetime, the only such occurrence in English history. Although Becket may well have deserved all he got, and certainly seems to have gone out of his way to provoke his own assassination, it was probably not at the king’s instigation but due to the killers’ misunderstanding of the latter’s wishes – although to this day Canterbury Cathedral continues to attract tourists happy to view the site of the murder.
Henry was, in fact, already enormously rich and a great landowner when he came to the throne. Duke of Normandy from 1150 and count of Anjou from his father’s death in 1151, he married in 1152 the fabulously wealthy Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine and countess of Poitiers, who had inherited both lands and titles in her own right from her father, who had no sons. Eleanor had married the future king Louis VII of France when she was fifteen, but after fifteen years the marriage was annulled on the grounds of consanguinity, although the real reason was presumably because she had produced only two daughters and no sons.6 Henry married her a mere two months after the annulment, which cannot have pleased the king of France, who nevertheless must have considered the chances of remarrying and bearing sons worth the loss of Aquitaine and Poitiers to the English.7
By the time of Henry II’s death in 1189, he had added Brittany to Normandy and Aquitaine as his domains in France, was the accepted overlord of Scotland and Ireland, and ruled a vast area of lands that stretched from John O’Groats to the Pyrenees. France was little more than the area around what is now the Île-de-France, with the virtually independent duchies of Burgundy to the south and Artois to the north. Henry said himself that he ruled by ‘force of will and hard riding’, for in an age without instant communications and mass media, medieval kings had to be seen and had to move around their lands to enforce the law and keep over-mighty subjects in check. In the thirty-five years of his reign, Henry spent twenty-one of them in his continental possessions, for it was there that he was threatened, rather than in a united England which was now mainly a source of revenue. A mere twenty years later, nearly all of Henry’s empire would be lost, and it was the memory of that empire that would provide one of the provocations for the Hundred Years War.
Henry II’s intention was that his eldest son, also Henry, would become king of England, while his second surviving son, Richard, would inherit his mother’s lands and titles in Aquitaine and Poitiers. When Prince Henry died in 1183, the king assumed that, as Richard was now the heir apparent, Aquitaine would pass to his third son, John. But Richard, having learnt his trade as a soldier subduing rebellious barons there, had no intention of giving up Aquitaine, and family quarrels, culminating in an invasion of England by Richard supported by the French king, Philip II, in 1189, forced Henry to make a humiliating peace shortly before he died, to be succeeded as king by the thirty-two-year-old Richard.
Every little boy playing with his wooden sword storming imaginary castles sees himself as Richard the Lionheart, the great warrior king of England and chivalrous knight par excellence. His slaughter of prisoners taken at Acre in 1191 did not detract from the contemporary view of him as the epitome of knightly conduct – after all, the prisoners were not Christians. Certainly, Richard was personally brave and a competent general, well educated by the standards of the time, a patron of the arts and especially of musicians, and a reasonable composer and singer of songs himself. He spent little time in England, however, concentrating on putting down rebellion – including that of his brother John – and embarking on a crusade which, while it failed to capture Jerusalem, did take the whole of the coastal strip from Tyre in Lebanon to Jaffa (in modern Israel) and captured Cyprus, which was to prove very useful as a mounting base for military operations both then and since.8 Coming back from his crusade, he was captured by Duke Leopold of Austria, sold on to the Holy Roman Emperor, and held prisoner for a year while a ‘king’s ransom’ of 100,000 marks was raised to free him. A mark was eight ounces of silver, so the ransom was roughly equivalent to around £2.6 million today (using the silver standard), raised in the main by a 25 per cent tax on all rents and on the value of all moveable property, both in England and in Normandy – and that from a total population of around three million.
Richard showed little interest in the administration of his empire, but was fortunate in his choice of men to run it for him, particularly in Hubert Walter, King’s Justiciar and archbishop of Canterbury, who was not only a thorough and highly competent administrator but, unusually for the time, no more than moderately corrupt. Walter had accompanied the crusading army to Acre when bishop of Salisbury and found conditions in the camp of the army execrable, with a complete lack of sanitation and a breakdown in the commissariat leading to soldiers and officers dying of disease or starvation. He swiftly got a grip of the situation, organized a proper administrative machinery to provide rations and clean water, and insisted on such measures as dug latrines and the prevention of the pollution of wells, paying for sentries on water sources out of his own pocket. When King Richard arrived at Acre, the morale and efficiency of the army had improved markedly, and Walter was marked out in the king’s eyes as a man who could get things done.
During Richard’s absence on crusade and then in prison, the French had made considerable inroads into the English domains on the continent, and from 1194 Richard spent most of his time in Europe recovering the lost lands and castles, and building new defence works – notably Château Gaillard, which still looms 300 feet above the River Seine – to protect them. Then, at a militarily insignificant skirmish at Châlus, twenty miles south-west of Limoges, Richard sustained a wound from a crossbow bolt which went septic and from which he died on 6 April 1199, aged forty-two. As his marriage to Berengaria of Navarre was childless, he was succeeded by his brother John.
John has not been treated kindly by history, but it is difficult to see how this could have been otherwise: he was a younger son who rebelled against his father; sided with the French in an invasion of England; was a spectacular failure as governor of Ireland, where he managed to alienate both the native Irish and the Anglo-Norman lords who were carving out lands for themselves in England’s Wild West; attempted to usurp his brother’s throne; and spent a large part of his reign in opposition to his barons. His succession was accepted in England and Normandy, but not in Anjou, Maine or Touraine, where the local lords announced that they recognized John’s nephew, Arthur, duke of Brittany, as their overlord. As Arthur was twelve years old in 1199, he would be unlikely to interfere with the magnates’ governance of their fiefs as they wished, and, as the only legitimate grandson of Henry II in the male line, he was inevitably going to find himself cast as a pawn. He had been a ward of Richard I’s, had spent time at the French court, and had done homage to the French king, and to John, for Anjou, Maine and Brittany.
Then, in what seemed a shrewd and advantageous move, John put aside his first wife, Isabella of Gloucester, and married another Isabella, this time of Angoulême.9 The second Isabella had lands that lay between Normandy and Aqui
taine which would be a useful addition to English France. There was, however, a snag. The lady had previously been engaged to marry one Hugh of Lusignan, who objected to being deprived of his fiancée (and, presumably, of the lands that she would bring with her) and appealed to King Philip of France. Philip, seizing the chance to discommode the English king, summoned John to appear before him, and, when John refused, in April 1200 he declared all John’s continental fiefs forfeit.
A Great and Glorious Adventure Page 2