For the overwhelming majority of Edward’s subjects, therefore, a cattle plague was a life-and-death issue. During 1319, attacks of rinderpest killed 65 percent of England’s bovids—cattle, sheep, and goats. The consequences were both wide and long-lasting, since the disease killed not just plow animals but dairy producers as well. And it did no favors for the ones that survived; the 35 percent of cattle remaining were so undernourished that their milk production fell from 142 gallons per animal annually to 45 gallons. And because animal populations bounce back far more slowly than cereal production, it was 1327 before the flocks recovered. All by itself, the lack of milk was bad enough. Combined with a deficiency in other protein sources, it resulted in widespread malnutrition that lasted for—in another nod to the Book of Genesis—seven very lean years.
• • •
Though Edward had tried, with limited success, to address the horrific first two years of the famine—price controls, import subsidies, exhortations to his subjects to forego hoarding—he had little to say about the destruction of millions of pounds’ worth of livestock. For whatever reason, his attention was directed elsewhere. Despite the Treaty of Leake, things between the king and Lancaster weren’t exactly resolved; the earl continued to assert his claim to be Steward of England, and used the purely nominal title to try to approve everything from appointees to the royal household to control of royal castles. And it wasn’t just Lancaster: Two of the king’s closest advisers, the earl of Pembroke and Antonio Pessagno, quarreled so fiercely that Pessagno left England for Paris. And he was no closer to liberating Berwick.
The only “good” news—good in the king’s eyes, anyway—was that, at the end of 1318, Hugh le Despenser the Younger was confirmed as the king’s chamberlain, serving as Edward’s official spokesman and as liaison to the kingdom’s highest nobility.*
The new chamberlain’s first task was to prepare for a new Scottish expedition. Despenser, acting in the name of the king, demanded a new set of subsidies and taxes from Parliament, asked the episcopate for contributions, and applied to the Italians for loans. His coffers replenished, in the spring of 1319, the king summoned 23,000 soldiers to muster at York (though only 8,000 appeared). England’s earls and barons supplied their usual contingent of men, notably 140 knights and 350 men-at-arms from the earl of Lancaster, along with a decent number of archers. Perhaps 10,000 men, along with a siege train, followed Edward north to Berwick.
The English arrived in the first week of September 1319 and immediately began assaulting the town and castle from both land and sea. They continued hammering at the city’s walls, and sapping, or digging under them—one of Edward’s siege engines was a “sow,” a long covered shed on wheels, intended to allow sappers to approach a castle’s walls—until September 17. Then, just as the Scottish garrison, under Walter Stewart, was about to surrender, Edward learned he had been duped.
While Edward was marching north, King Robert had sent ten thousand hobelars under James Douglas and Thomas Randolph, the earl of Moray, south; at just about the moment that the English arrived at Berwick, Douglas and Moray entered England, and headed for York. Their plan was not to capture a castle but a queen. When the king took his army on the hundred-mile journey to Berwick, Isabella had stayed near York with her three children—Edward, John, and Eleanor; Joan, the youngest, wouldn’t be born until 1321—which meant that the king had left behind a much bigger prize than Berwick. The authors of the Vita even wrote that Douglas “would have inflicted great loss and immeasurable damage on us . . . if the Queen had at that time been captured.”
The “would have” is a giveaway, of course. One of Douglas’s scouts was captured just outside of York and brought to William Melton, the archbishop. None of the English authorities had any idea what a Scottish scout was doing in Yorkshire, and told him that he would be “put to the question”—that is, tortured—in order to find out. The scout immediately gave up everything he knew of Douglas’s plan, only to be greeted with disbelief. Melton “laughed his intelligence to scorn,” though he did take the precaution of sending his own scouts to where the Scottish prisoner directed. Finding ten thousand heavily armed hobelars, the archbishop alerted the queen and arranged for her to escape by boat to Nottingham. It cannot have failed to occur to the queen that, seven years after stranding her at Tyneside at the mercy of Scottish raiders, her husband had abandoned her yet again. Neither was she likely to forget that he had done so at the behest of the man who had taken Gaveston’s place in his inner circle.
With their primary objective unattainable, Douglas and Moray marched toward York and met up with the English defenders in the village of Myton-on-Swale, though “defenders” suggests a level of martial skill that was in short supply. Virtually the entire English force had never picked up a weapon before, and at least a quarter of them were men in religious orders: priests, friars, and clerks. On October 20, Melton’s twenty thousand men attempted to surprise the Scots, encamped on the west side of the river Swale, by crossing over Myton Bridge. However, the experienced hobelars saw the English advancing in nothing like a military formation, and formed a wedge-shaped schiltrom behind a smoke screen created by setting three haystacks on fire. As they slowly marched toward the priests and townsmen, the Yorkshiremen broke, then started running back toward Myton Bridge, where they found that Douglas had sent a force of horsemen to block their retreat. At least one thousand men of Archbishop Melton’s “army” died there—some sources say four thousand—three hundred of them priests, and one of them Nicholas Fleming, the mayor of York. Another thousand died trying to swim across the Swale. In the words of the Chronicle of Lanercost, “Had not night come on, hardly a single Englishman would have escaped . . . many were taken alive, carried off to Scotland and ransomed at a heavy price.”
Douglas and Randolph had landed a heavy enough blow on the north of England at what became known as the “White Battle” (or “The Chapter of Myton”). The defeat, and especially the number of clerics involved, gave Edward no choice but to break off the siege of Berwick, not least because Lancaster used the excuse of the attack on York to depart. On September 1, 1319, Edward II and the rest of the army followed him back to Newcastle, and eventually York, where an attack of rinderpest killed virtually all the oxen in Edward’s siege train and baggage. Meanwhile, Douglas carried out “the most savage raid yet seen on the west side of the Pennines, cruelly waiting until after the harvest”—only the second decent one in five years—“and on about November 1 destroyed the corn and seized great numbers of men.” “Then, after ten or twelve days [Douglas’s troops] fared through part of Cumberland, which they burned on their march, and returned to Scotland with a very large spoil of men and cattle.”
A disaster as monumental as the Berwick campaign of 1319 called out for scapegoats, and there were many to choose from: Some blamed Hugh le Despenser the Younger (who was responsible for spreading rumors about the rift between the king and Lancaster). Others pointed the finger at Lancaster himself; a rumor in wide circulation had the earl taking as much as £40,000 from Robert Bruce to allow James Douglas free passage on his expedition to capture the queen.
But the real blame lay with the king himself. Defeated at Berwick, and with Douglas and the earl of Moray raiding in Yorkshire, Edward had no choice but to offer a truce. And, just before Christmas of 1319, he had one, guaranteeing no further battles for two years while the Scots were barred from building any new castles in specified territories, a compromise that fooled no one; the Scots had won a decisive victory in their struggle for independence. Four months later, King Robert sent a grandiloquent letter to Edward proposing negotiations between the two kings, and another reminding Pope John XXII—who had already placed him excommunicate, and generally opposed his rebellion—that “while agreeable peace prevails, the minds of the faithful are at rest, the Christian way is furthered, and all the affairs of holy mother church . . . are carried on more prosperously.”
King Ro
bert’s letter to Edward was a demand for the recognition of his own royal status; the one to the pope, a call for the blessings of peace. On April 6, 1320, thirty-nine Scottish nobles—eight earls and thirty-one barons—put their names to a far more consequential document.* They signed, at Arbroath Abbey, on the North Sea south of Aberdeen, Scotland’s true charter of independence. The so-called Declaration of Arbroath wasn’t simply a piece of political symbolism, intended to promote the interests of King Robert Bruce. It was also a powerful argument that his claim on the throne was validated by the fact that he had been chosen by the Scots themselves—by the “community of Scotland”—and that he could even be replaced by the nobility if he proved unable to defend them against the English. By the standard of the day, it was as revolutionary a document as the Magna Carta, an argument that a king wasn’t selected by God but elected by man; or, at least, noblemen. It ends, “As long as a hundred of us remain alive, we will never on any condition be subjected to the lordship of the English. For we fight not for glory nor riches nor honours, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.”
CHAPTER NINE
“The Dearest Beef I’ve Ever Seen”
1320–1322
On the last day of the month of June, in the year 1320, dozens of the most exalted members of France’s nobility congregated in a church eighty miles north of Paris to witness the most familiar ceremony in feudal Europe: a vassal kneeled, and presented his clasped hands to his lord, who wrapped them in his own. This church wasn’t just any place of worship, but Amiens Cathedral, the largest in France, reputed home to the head of John the Baptist, which had been part of the booty taken by French knights on the Fourth Crusade. And the participants weren’t ordinary men but the kings of France and England. Edward, accompanied by Isabella and Hugh le Despenser the Younger, had come to pay the long-delayed homage for the fiefs of Aquitaine and Ponthieu to Isabella’s brother Philip V, who had been waiting since he ascended the throne in 1316.
Homage was the connective tissue of feudalism: its bones, tendons, and ligaments. Its oaths bound one man to another, most especially vassal to liege. When they involved two of the most powerful men in Europe, these connections, as sacred as any religious obligation (and even more legally enforceable), were the occasion of a formal ritual as solemn as a Mass and as strictly choreographed as a coronation. Unfortunately, the ritual began better than it ended, when Philip surprised Edward by demanding not just homage, but fealty.
The distinction was subtle, but important. Homage was a surrender of a particular fief by vassal to lord, who then formally returned it, usually by handing over some object that symbolized the property in question: a baron could give a bag of salt to a freeman; an earl might receive a jewel from his king. Fealty, on the other hand, was an oath of fidelity: a promise that the vassal would harm neither the lord nor his property, and that he owed his lord military service. Symbolically and literally, they represented the two sides of feudal manorialism—land, in exchange for protection. Fealty was generally regarded as the less consequential of the two. Though vassals were required to make homage directly to their lords, fealty could be made to his representative—a bailiff, perhaps—and one could even declare fealty to more than one lord.
When the ceremony involved two kings, however, it became a more fraught affair. When Duke William of Normandy was crowned on Christmas Day, 1066, he became the last link in a chain of feudal obligations touching every family in England, and owed homage only to God. But because he retained his dukedom as a fief from the king of France, in Normandy he occupied the middle of a different chain, between his own vassals and (at the time) King Philip I. By 1177, Henry II, William’s grandson and Edward’s great-great-grandfather, finally agreed to pay homage to King Philip’s grandson Louis VII as duke of Normandy and count of Aquitaine—another fiefdom held from the king of France, acquired by marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine. However, he rewrote the normal oath to make it “only for lands held overseas,” and commenced the tradition that obliged the succeeding dukes of Normandy—and, therefore kings of England—to meet French kings under a tree at the southern border of Normandy, there to acknowledge their feudal obligations. Henry’s objective, and that of his successors, was avoiding the trap of offering fealty as the king of England, and thereby acknowledging the French king as overlord. Edward, however feckless in other matters, recognized the trap well enough that when Philip attempted to force him to swear an unqualified oath of fealty, Edward exploded, “as to the fealty, we are certain that we should not swear it.”
By the time Edward returned home in July, his brief and inconsequential victory over Philip had been pushed into the background. The Declaration of Arbroath had reached the papal court at Avignon while he was balking at swearing fealty to Philip in Amiens, and Pope John XXII had written to the English king, pressing him to end the conflict with his northern neighbor. Simultaneously, King Robert had sent a letter offering to send representatives to a peace conference. Having avoided Philip’s fealty trap, Edward was caught in an even more knotty one by the combination of church pressure and Scottish diplomatic ingenuity.
Though Edward managed to stall until the beginning of 1321, he had to agree to a meeting or risk provoking the pope and, worse, his lord-in-all-but-name, Philip V, who was not only already angry enough after Amiens but had considerably more troops surrounding Edward’s French fiefs than he had to defend them. However, a willingness to meet didn’t make Edward any more flexible about Scotland than before, which guaranteed that the peace conference, at which the king was represented by the earl of Pembroke and Hugh le Despenser, was doomed to failure. No parties ever give up at the peace table what they think they can still win militarily, especially with such an intractable issue at the core of the dispute: Edward was unprepared to even recognize Bruce’s kingship, and without such recognition, King Robert was unwilling to sign anything but another truce.
Perhaps unfairly, Hugh’s failure to return with a peace treaty served to solidify the battle lines between the Despensers and everyone else. Partly this was resentment toward the Despenser family for its control over access to the king; a contemporary account records that “no Baron could approach the king without their [the Younger and Elder Despensers’] consent, and then a bribe was usually necessary.” Partly it was the anger of the earl of Lancaster over accusations that his early departure from Berwick had been purchased by a bribe from Robert Bruce.
Lancaster had already refused to attend the parliament that Edward had called the previous year, thus ending the brief reconciliation outlined in the Treaty of Leake, and by February 1321, the earl had decided to attack Hugh the Elder. In May, Lancaster’s allies, including the earl of Hereford and the Mortimers (who, as Marcher Lords, were especially hostile to Despenser’s acquisition of nearby real estate), attacked the Welsh lands of the Young Despenser, plundering Newport, Cardiff, and Swansea. By July, Lancaster, after instigating the first attacks, joined in at the head of a fragile coalition of northern peers and Marcher Lords, and (perhaps more provocatively) in his capacity as Steward of England: the same dubious position from which he had attempted to control Edward’s access to his own castles four years before.
Edward called a parliament to resolve the dispute. On August 19, 1321, Lancaster and the Marcher Lords, including Hereford, the Mortimers, and Baron Badlesmere (who had deserted the compromisers of the so-called Middle Party, and broken with both the earl of Pem-broke and the king), argued strenuously against the Despensers. They weren’t alone. Isabella begged the king “on her knees, for the people’s sakes” to banish the Despensers. And the earl of Pembroke advised his king to cut them loose: “Neither brother nor sister should be dearer to thee than thyself. Do not therefore for any living soul lose thy kingdom: ‘He perishes on the rocks that love another more than himself.’”
Whether it was the force of their oratory or Lancaster’s five thousand armed retainers* that proved more pers
uasive, Parliament found against the Despensers, and ordered both Elder and Younger banished.
One reason for Edward’s posthumous reputation as one of England’s most feckless kings was his uncanny talent for repeating his own disasters. In April 1308, under pressure from his own earls—preeminently Lancaster—the king had exiled his favorite, Piers Gaveston, to France with less-than-stellar results. Now, an unlucky thirteen years later, the king did exactly the same thing, exiling both Hugh the Elder and Hugh the Younger to France. To anyone who could remember the years between Gaveston’s exile in 1308 and his murder in 1312, this could not have been a good sign, and Edward was nothing if not consistent. Just as when Gaveston became the target of his intransigent barons, the king’s immediate reaction, thirteen years later, was not compromise but combat. Only two months after Parliament banished the Despensers, Edward’s casus belli was indirectly handed to him by his onetime supporter, Baron Badlesmere.
On October 10, 1321, Queen Isabella arrived at Badlesmere’s home, Leeds Castle, a stopping point on one of her pilgrimages. The baron was away, so the castle was under the authority of his wife, Lady Badlesmere. When, for unknown reasons, Lady Badlesmere denied the queen admittance, Isabella insisted on confronting her, at which point the baroness ordered her archers to fire on the queen’s retainers, killing six of them.
Edward’s reaction was fierce. He summoned his own household troops, hired several hundred mercenaries, and immediately besieged Leeds Castle, which fell after only a week. Edward hanged the castle’s constable and thirteen others, and imprisoned Lady Badlesmere and her children in the Tower of London, all without benefit of trial. And his subjects loved him for it. After fourteen years on the throne, three major (and even more minor) defeats in his Scottish wars, nearly constant rebellion from his greatest vassals, livestock epidemics, and, most tellingly, five years of famine, Edward was the object of an unfamiliar outpouring of loyalty and affection. In fact, support for the king was so widespread that historians have speculated ever since whether the entire incident was a lucky opportunity, or a planned provocation—a put-up job intended to rally his realm against his rambunctious nobles—though it seems far too clever for this particular monarch.*
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