by Morris, Marc
William the Conqueror (1066–87), who took a rather different view on the succession, also viewed the balance of power between the Crown and the earls with a fresh and critical eye. After a few years trying to govern England along conventional English lines, only to be rewarded with one rebellion after another, he set about a radical restructuring of power. The size of surviving earldoms was much reduced and, when new earls were created, as was the case in Herefordshire, Shropshire and Cheshire, their territorial responsibilities were confined to a single shire – or ‘county’ as the Normans began to call these units, for it was at this point that the English earl was equated with the French count. This, too, signalled a demotion: previously, the English word ‘earl’ had been translated into Latin as dux (duke). Duke was William’s own title as ruler of Normandy – he was not about to start sharing it.
The policy of keeping earls firmly in their place was followed by William’s sons. Under William Rufus (1087–1100) and Henry I (1100–35) the number of earldoms was kept down to single figures, and the formal powers that earls had enjoyed before the Conquest began to ebb away. Earls no longer aided in the collection of tax and were seen less and less in the county courts. If they raised and led armies, they did so in their capacity as the king’s sworn men, obliged to aid him as a condition of their landholding, rather than because of any public duties attached to their titles. Increasingly, ‘earl’ was regarded as only an honorary designation.
It was just at the point, however, when the position of the earls seemed to be almost entirely empty, that England acquired a king who took the deliberate decision to increase their number and devolve huge, unheard-of amounts of authority directly into their hands. King Stephen (1135–54) clearly felt that this was the best way to deal with the tricky state of affairs that obtained at the start of his reign, namely an aristocracy chafing at the bit for greater rewards, and a rival for power in the shape of his cousin, Matilda. His aim seems to have been to have an earl for every county: by the end of his reign only five counties had no earl, and the overall number of earls had trebled. But what seemed a straightforward and inexpensive way to appease his greatest subjects and outdo his opponents quickly spun out of control. Governmental powers that were given to one earl – say, the right to hold a royal castle, or to control the king’s sheriff – came to be expected by the others. Such expectations were difficult to contain, moreover, for this was not an insular aristocracy, but a cross-channel one. A man called comes in England was naturally likely to compare himself with a similarly-styled cousin or brother on the continent and think, as Roger Bigod did a century later, ‘I am an earl, just as he is’. Why, therefore, should English earls not hold their own courts? Why settle for a third of judicial profits when you could have the lot? Come to that, why not mint your own coins, with your own face on, rather than the king’s? By the end of Stephen’s reign, several English earls had done just that.
Stephen soon repented of his policy and tried to throw it into reverse. It took the greater skill and firmer purpose of his successor, however, to restore the primacy of the Crown and ensure that England did not become – as, for example, Germany had – a confederation of independent princes rather than a united kingdom. Nevertheless, Henry II (1135–54) faced a formidable task in this, the nature of which is well illustrated by the example of Hugh Bigod, great-grandfather of Roger, and no less bellicose than his descendant. Hugh was one of the new earls of Stephen’s reign, and it is quite clear from his actions that he intended to make East Anglia his own. Along the River Waveney, which divides Norfolk from Suffolk, he seized a string of manors, and built a new castle at Bungay to control them. Further afield, he set his sights on controlling the royal castles and county towns at Norwich and Ipswich. His comital title (that is, his earldom) had been given to him by Matilda, Henry II’s mother, and for this reason he may have expected some degree of latitude from her son. But Hugh and others like him who had done very well for themselves during Stephen’s reign suffered a rude awakening during the reign of his successor. Henry II not only wrested control of royal castles from those who had usurped it; he also in some instances compelled the destruction of fortresses built by the earls themselves. After Hugh Bigod and some other old die-hards attempted to reassert their independence in 1173–74, the earl was compelled by Henry to hand over his main castle at Framlingham, and watch as the king had it torn down.
Because of his success in dealing with the separatist tendencies of the English earls, Henry II is regarded as one of the great heroes of England’s ‘constitutional’ history. During his reign no new earldoms were created and many existing ones were allowed to lapse on the death of their holders. Hugh Bigod’s son, for example – another Roger – was not allowed to style himself ‘earl of Norfolk’, in spite of his record of loyal service to the Crown. It was only thanks to the generosity – and dire financial need – of Richard I (1189–99) that the Bigod family were able to buy back their lost title. Other changes initiated by Henry, especially his expansion of royal justice, increased the power of the Crown to the extent that, while the king himself might be challenged, his position was never again called into question.
By the thirteenth century, therefore, there was no power that automatically went with being an earl: certainly nobody claiming independence from royal control by virtue of his title. This is not to say that earls were not powerful men – they were. Their power, however, was based on purely material measures: how much land they had, how much money they raked in, and how many men they could afford to keep in their service as a consequence. Most earls had land and money in abundance, and were therefore politically important. But the few exceptions prove the point that simply being an earl did not in itself grant much of an advantage. The earl of Oxford, for example, had little in the way of land and resources; his wealth was only a fraction of that enjoyed by his fellow earls, and he was less well-off than a good many barons. As a result, he was politically inconsequent – his title counted for next-to-nothing. Of the public powers that had once belonged to the earl in Anglo-Saxon times, only a single vestige remained in the thirteenth century. This was the so called ‘third penny’, once taken as a third share of the profits of royal justice, but now commuted to a fixed sum, and not a particularly large one at that.
All of which is to say that the more thoughtful earls of thirteenth-century England, if they ever took a moment to reflect on the nature of the title they enjoyed, must have been left wondering precisely what the point of it was. To be an earl was clearly to be special: in the first half of the thirteenth century there were never more than twenty individuals who could style themselves as such at any one time, and in the second half their numbers rarely rose above ten. ‘Earl’ was, moreover, a unique distinction: there were no other competing ranks of nobility – no dukes or marquises of the kind found on the continent, and introduced to England in the fourteenth century. English society at this time was quite open to ambitious social climbers, and those with sufficient drive and ambition could rise through a variety of means: a career in royal service, distinguished conduct on the tournament field or in battle, the acquisition of lands by purchase. Such men could get themselves knighted, but they could not buy or fight their way to an earldom. Only the king, it was accepted, could create an earldom from scratch and, after Stephen’s reign, kings were understandably reluctant to do so. The only way to obtain an earldom was to inherit one or marry into one, and in both cases the king might still withhold the title (as nearly happened in the case of the Bigod family, and as did happen in the case of William Longespée and John fitz Geoffrey, who succeeded to their fathers’ lands but not to their titles). When an individual was admitted to the rank of earl, it involved a special public ceremony, in which he was ‘belted’ by the king with a sword. The restricted numbers, the ceremonial investment: it all suggested that contemporaries still saw the rank of earl as significant, yet if they had any specific theories about the rights and duties that went with the title they have
not survived.
Doubtless many earls conceived their role rather vaguely as being leaders of local society and the king’s natural advisers. For most of the time, it is important to remember, kings and their magnates got along with the routine business of government. We might expect, therefore, that theories about the nature of ‘comital’ power would develop more rapidly at times of political crisis, when this normal working relationship broke down. Again, however, this does not seem to have happened. There were three great crises in the thirteenth century – in 1215, 1258 and 1297 – and in each case earls were at the forefront of opposition to the Crown. Yet, in the propaganda and the programmes for reform they generated, nothing specific is said about the role of earls. ‘Community’ and ‘common counsel’ – these were the buzzwords of thirteenth-century political debate. Nor was this mere rhetoric to disguise the schemes of great aristocrats: the demand for greater political involvement of the wider community led to the firmer establishment of parliament, and parliament involved more than just earls and barons.
The failure to develop any special claims for the rank of earl is seemingly underlined by the fairly desperate attempts of certain thirteenth-century earls to invest their other honorific titles with greater meaning. Simon de Montfort, the celebrated earl of Leicester who effectively seized control of Henry III’s government after the battle of Lewes in 1264, sought to bolster his precarious position by investigating his rights as hereditary steward of the king’s household – even to the extent of quizzing an aged and distant female relative about their precise extent. Similarly, when Roger Bigod and Humphrey de Bohun opposed Edward I’s plan to lead an army to Gascony in 1297, they took their stand not as the earls of Norfolk and Hereford, but in their capacities as the king’s hereditary marshal and constable.
And yet, as the thirteenth century progressed, and the power of the Crown increased inexorably, the notion did begin to develop that earls were in some sense uniquely placed to challenge it. The germ of such an idea can be found as early as the 1230s, in a legal treatise known as Bracton, notable in almost every other respect for its staunch defence of royal supremacy. In one particular passage, inspired by a rebellion against Henry III in 1233–34, the author speaks of the necessity of ‘bridling’ the king if he goes beyond the rule of law. He is not terribly specific about what this entails or who is to do it – responsibility for dragging the king into line falls to the ‘his court – that is, his earls and barons’. Elsewhere, however, Bracton had more to say on the subject of earls. They are called comites (the plural of comes), he said, because they are the king’s companions. Etymologically speaking, he was quite right: originally comes had simply meant ‘companion’; it was first used as an official title in the fourth century for the courtiers of the Roman emperors. Having reasserted this idea, Bracton expanded on it: the king’s associates helped him to govern the people, he said, and the swords with which they were girded signified the defence of the kingdom.
From these two unconnected and rather unpromising strands a new theory of what it meant to be an earl was woven in the latter part of the thirteenth century, when the power of the English medieval monarchy reached its highest point. During the reign of Edward I (1272–1307), huge armies, tens of thousands strong, conquered Wales and invaded Scotland, while in England royal lawyers were pushing the Crown’s rights to their utmost limits, even to the extent of debating whether in all instances the king was bound by the law. Just as military expansion provoked resistance from the likes of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and William Wallace, so too did the extension of the king’s power in England find its opponents. The Mirror of Justices, a legal diatribe written in the period 1285–90, took as its main theme the idea that the king should not be allowed to rule unfettered. Taking his cue from the earlier comments of Bracton, the author of The Mirror concocted a spurious historical justification for what he saw as the proper function of earls vis-à-vis the king. When the Anglo-Saxons, he says, first came to Britain, they were a folk led by as many as forty sovereigns; only after a long time fighting among themselves did they agree to put themselves under the rule of a single king, whom they elected and crowned. The forty sovereigns, the author then explained, settled down to govern and defend individual districts, which were known as counties, so-called because the sovereigns were the king’s companions. From all this nonsense a powerful conclusion flowed: namely, that it was the special job of the earls to bring the king to book if he should govern badly.
Frustratingly, we do not know who wrote The Mirror of Justices, or for whom it was written. It is interesting to note, however, that in its detestation for royal justices and its appeal to an imagined past in which the king and earls were partners, the Mirror chimes very well with the views famously put into the mouth of John de Warenne, earl of Surrey in precisely the same period. According to a later chronicler, Warenne reacted angrily when called before the king’s justices to defend his rights. When asked ‘by what warrant’ (quo warranto) he held his lands, the earl produced an ancient and rusty sword, and said ‘Look at this, my lords: this is my warrant! For my ancestors came with William the Bastard and conquered their lands with the sword, and by the sword I will defend them from anyone intending to seize them. The king did not conquer and subject the land by himself, but our forebears were sharers and partners with him.’
It is unlikely that appeals to history of this kind would have convinced Edward I to share more of his authority with his earls, or to allow that they had the right to correct his actions. This was, after all, a king who regarded history as yet another weapon in his own armoury; who ordered every monastery in England to search their chronicles for historical precedents that would justify his superior lordship of Scotland, and who had dug up King Arthur at Glastonbury to prove to the Welsh that their legendary leader was not coming back to save them. When, in 1297, the earl of Norfolk chose to make a stand against Edward, he appealed to the rights of the community as set down in Magna Carta, and what he called ‘human and divine reason’. It was only after the king’s death that the theories that had been germinating in his reign began to be advanced as political argument. During the reign of Edward II (1307–27) there was far less talk of community, and much greater emphasis on the importance of earls. Chroniclers who otherwise lamented the behaviour of certain individual earls nevertheless claimed that England’s woes – especially its embarrassing defeats in Scotland – were caused by their insufficiency. ‘There was a time,’ opined one anonymous writer, ‘when fifteen earls or more were wont to follow the standard of English kings to battle. But now only five or six earls bear help to our king.’ Such sentiments caught on fast, to the extent that by the beginning of the next reign the necessity of having more earls was accepted as self-evident truth even by the king himself. In 1337, Edward III declared that royalty worked best when ‘buttressed by wise counsels and fortified by mighty powers’, expressed regret at the ‘serious decline in names, honours and ranks of dignity’, and aimed to set things right by the simultaneous creation of no less than six new earldoms. It was the first deliberate attempt to increase the numbers of earls since the reign of King Stephen two hundred years before.
Fortunately, much had changed in that time: England’s aristocracy now had a much greater sense of themselves as the leading members of a united kingdom. When Hugh de Courtenay, created earl of Devon by Edward III in 1335, went around boasting that his new title made him the king’s equal and gave him the right to make laws, there was little cause for genuine alarm. Courtenay had been a victim of Edward I’s masterful meanness, denied his ancestral right to inherit his earldom when still a teenager. Having spent almost forty years pressing for redress, he was no doubt rather surprised in his old age to find his claim suddenly upheld, and seems to have let his imagination get the better of him. Back in the real world, there was no likelihood that England might fragment into tiny pieces, each governed by an independent earl who thought himself the equal of the king. It was no longer possible to say to
the king, ‘I am an earl, therefore you cannot touch me’. Instead, the earls had developed a new theory: something along the lines of ‘we are earls, and therefore we can replace you’. Before the deposition of Edward II in 1327, no king of England had been permanently removed in this way. In the late Middle Ages, however, many others would share his fate. And it was the earls, above all, who were the kingmakers.
8. Introducing Edward I