POSTSCRIPT
So ended three turbulent centuries of rule by Henry II and his Plantagenet successors. They were years of almost unremitting warfare as kings contended with foreign monarchs and with their feudal barons, whose power in their own regions was greater than the monarch’s. The Plantagenet rulers gained and lost a sizeable continental empire and gained control of Wales, but failed to conquer Scotland or to extend effective rule over the whole of Ireland.
Although we use the term ‘England’ to describe the heartland of Plantagenet territory, this land was far from being a recognizable, independent entity. Not only was the country divided into petty princedoms held in fee from the crown, but also, for much of the period, the magnates who held sway in their localities had more in common with their counterparts on the other side of the Channel, and their fortunes were intertwined with those of French dukedoms such as those of Normandy, Brittany, Anjou and Maine. The English had no common language, regional dialects varying widely from each other. Norman French was spoken at court and was the language of diplomacy. Churchmen, scholars, lawyers and the scribes who drew up official documents used Latin, the language that united England with the rest of western Christendom. Only gradually did the language of London and the southern counties emerge as a common vernacular and this process was only completed in the 16th century thanks to the greatest invention that the Plantagenet age bequeathed to its followers – the printing press.
The merchant turned printer, William Caxton (c.1422–91), wrote the following in the preface to the first book to be printed in the English language: ‘… I have practised and learned at my great charge and dispense to ordain this said book in print after the manner and form as ye may here see, and is not written with pen and ink as other books [have] been, to the end that every man may have them at once, for all the books of this story named the recule [collection] of the histories of Troy thus imprinted as ye here see were begun in one day, and also finished in one day.’1
His Recuyell of the Histories of Troy began a revolution. The invention of the printed book was the biggest single development in communication before the invention of the telephone. Caxton was a successful member of the London Mercers’ Company who, by about 1450, settled in Bruges and enjoyed the patronage of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, Edward IV’s sister. There he developed a commercial interest in the latest craze sweeping Europe – cheap books.
Johannes Gutenberg had developed in Mainz an apparatus that combined movable type, oil-based ink and a wooden screw press. The result was a machine for mass-producing books, pamphlets, posters and official documents. The printing press caught on rapidly and by 1475 there was scarcely a town or city of any size in continental Europe that did not have at least one printworks. The cheap book was an idea whose time had come. The gradual spread of education created a demand for the written word. The ‘Clerk of Oxford’ in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was shabbily dressed because he spent all his money on books:
For he would rather have at his bed’s head.
Twenty books, bound in black and red
Of Aristotle and his philosophy,
Than rich robes or a fiddle or a psaltery.2
Books were expensive because they were laboriously hand made and took days or weeks of work to complete. Originally they were produced by monks labouring in the scriptoria of monasteries. This was because most books were intended for religious use – bibles, psalters and devotional works. Many were labours of love whose pages were embellished with beautiful coloured decoration. But there was also a secular trade in volumes of stories, technical manuals and songsheets. By the 13th century many commercial scriptoria had come into being employing teams of scribes who worked long hours to meet the growing demand. But this was still a luxury industry whose products could only be acquired by the relatively well-to-do. An efficiently run printworks was, therefore, a potential gold mine. Caxton returned to England and set up his press in Westminster in 1476.
The impact of the printed book was incalculable. Just as a literate clientele had created the demand, so the growing volume of books encouraged more people to become literate. Writers were able to spread their ideas more rapidly and widely than had ever been conceivable. This was not always welcomed by the authorities. We have seen how the church clamped a ban on the circulation of Lollard bibles and tracts. The spread of ‘heretical’, unorthodox or ‘seditious’ books created fresh problems for ecclesiastical and government censors. From time to time they staged public burnings of ‘undesirable’ books. But there was no effective way to stop people reading. As the 15th century came to a close books were bringing a whole new dimension to the lives of many people.
But the printed word was far from being the only positive contribution of the Plantagenet centuries to posterity. Political and constitutional conflict produced a bicameral parliament. Thanks to the honing of technical and entrepreneurial skills England emerged as the producer of Europe’s finest woollen cloths. The church’s long struggle with Lollard heresy indicates that there existed a vigorous intellectual life struggling for independence from control by ecclesiastical and political hierarchies, which produced, en passant, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge where many of the acutest English minds were trained and have continued to be trained throughout ensuing centuries. When we think of ‘medieval England’ the image that comes most readily to mind is of soaring Gothic cathedrals and parish churches filled with masterpieces of the carvers’ and glaziers’ art. But, if we were to seek the ‘biggest’ contribution to national life made during the period 1154–1485, a case could very well be made for the growth of the British legal system. From manorial and market courts, through regional assizes and episcopal courts right up to parliament and the king’s council there developed a complex but functional system whereby – theoretically at least – the ordinary subject might obtain justice. The system did not always work well; there were times and places when and where it did not work at all. But Magna Carta, the Constitutions of Clarendon, the Peasants’ Revolt and the numerous adjustments to the workings of the judiciary displayed a deeply felt concern for the right relationships between the king and all his subjects, high and low, under a written code, impartially administered.
It was the refusal of ordinary people to submit to baronial terrorism and royal tyranny that built up a body of statute law, established the inns of court as schools where lawyers learned their craft and brought pressure to bear through parliament – and through revolution – on the men who controlled their destinies.
Ultimately, it was the sort of people who joined Jack Cade’s rebellion who shaped England as much as – perhaps more than – all the kings and councillors of the Plantagenet years.
REFERENCES
HENRY II
1 William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, ed. H.C. Hamilton, 1856, I, pp. 105–6.
2 Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, eds. J.C. Robertson and J.B. Sheppard, VII, pp. 572–3.
3 W. Stubbs, Select Charters and other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, 1921, pp. 175–6.
4 Roger of Howden, Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi, ed. W. Stubbs, 1867, I, pp. 191–4
5 Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, eds. J.S. Brewer, J.F. Dimock and G.F. Warner, 1861–91, VIII, pp.178–9.
6 Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi, p. 337.
7 The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs, 1879–80, I, p. 436.
RICHARD I and JOHN
1 William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, ed. H.C. Hamilton, 1856, II, p.105.
2 Poésies complètes de Bertran de Born, ed. A. Thomas, New York, 1971, p. 103.
3 Ibid., p. 190
HENRY III
1 Matthew Paris’s English History: From the Year 1235 to 1273, tr. J.A. Giles, 1852–4, I, p. 240.
2 The Song of Lewes, ed. C.L. Kingsford, Oxford, 1890, p. 33.
EDWARD II
1 Vita Edwardi Secundi, ed. W.R. Childs, 2005, pp. 68–9.
2 Chroni
cles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls series, 1882–3, II, p. 167.
3 Quoted in S. Phillips, Edward II, New Haven, 2010, p. 175.
4 Vita Edwardi Secundi, pp. 30–31.
5 Ibid., pp. 96–7.
6 Ibid., p. 136.
7 Ibid., No.10, p. 136.
EDWARD III
1 Froissart’s Chronicles, ed. J. Jolliffe, 1967, p. 35.
2 Ibid., p. 134
3 B.W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, 1978, pp. 87–8.
4 Froissart’s Chronicles, p. 172.
5 Ibid., p. 213.
RICHARD II
1 William Caxton, The Chronicles of England, 1520, ccxxxix, p. 264.
2 Rotuli Parliamentorum, ed. J. Strachey et al., 1767–77, III, p. 90.
3 Froissart’s Chronicles, p. 387.
4 Chronica Monasterii S. Albani, Thomae Walsingham … Historia Anglicana, ed. H.T. Riley, I, p. 230.
HENRY IV
1 Chronicon Adae de Usk, ed. E.M. Thompson, 1904, p. 29.
2 Statutes of the Realm, 2:12S–28: 2 Henry IV.
3 A.W. Pollard, Records of the English Bible, Oxford, 1911, p. 79.
HENRY V
1 Chronicles of London, ed. C.L. Kingsford, Oxford, 1905, p. 69.
2 Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London, ed. J.G. Nichols, 1852, p. 12.
3 Chronique de France, Enguerrand de Monstrelet, c.1450, in www.deremilitari.org Agincourt.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
THE WARS OF THE ROSES
1 Robert Fabyan’s Concordance of Histories, ed. H. Ellis, 1811, p. 594.
2 ‘A Short English Chronicle: London under Henry VI (1422–7)’, Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles: With historical memoranda by John Stowe, ed. J. Gairdner, 1880, p. 59.
3 ‘Historical Memoranda of John Stowe: On Cade’s Rebellion (1450)’, Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles pp. 94–5.
EDWARD IV, EDWARD V and RICHARD III
1 ‘A Spanish account of the battle of Bosworth’, ed. E.M. Nokes and G. Wheeler, The Ricardian, No. 36, 1972.
POSTSCRIPT
1 William Caxton, The Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, Bruges, 1475.
2 The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. W.W. Skeat, Oxford, 1920, p. 422.
PICTURE CREDITS
Pope Alexander III. Art Archive/Kharbine-Tapabor/Cheuva.
Massacre of Muslim prisoners at Acre. Scala/White Images.
The nave vault at Westminster Abbey. Werner Forman Archive.
Stonemasons and builders. Art Archive/Kharbine-Tpabor/Coll. Jean Vigne.
Queen Isabella and Prince Edward reach Oxford. The Bridgeman Art Library/Collection of the Earl of Leicester, Holkham Hall, Norfolk.
The Battle of Sluys. Art Archive/Bibliothèque Nationale Paris/Harper Collins Publishers.
Effigy of the Black Prince. Art Archive/Canterbury Cathedral/Eileen Tweedy.
Death’s grim harvest. Art Archive/Bibliothèque Nationale Paris/Harper Collins Publishers.
The death of Wat Tyler. British Library, London.
Richard II giving the crown to Henry Bolingbroke. Topfoto.
The Battle of Agincourt. Bridgeman Art Library/Lambeth Palace Library, London.
Edward IV and Earl Rivers. Bridgeman Art Library/Lambeth Palace Library, London.
Margaret of Anjou with Prince Edward. Topfoto.
The Chronicles of England. Art Archive/Museum of London.
The murder of Becket. Illustration from the French Playfair Book of Hours.
Massacre of Muslim prisoners at Acre. Illustration from a manuscript by Sebastien Mamerot (1490).
The nave vault at Westminster Abbey. The designs of Henry III’s master mason, Henry de Reyns, were closely followed when building was resumed in the mid-14th-century.
Stonemasons and builders. Image from a French translation of St Augustine’s City of God by Raoul de Presles (early 15th-century).
Queen Isabella and Prince Edward reach Oxford, October 1326. Illustration from Chronicles of the Court of Flanders by the Master of Mary of Burgundy (fl. 1469–83).
The Battle of Sluys, 24 June 1340. Illustration from Froissart’s Chronicles.
This effigy of the Black Prince was made soon after his death in 1376. It surmounts his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral.
Death’s grim harvest: the horror of the Black Death is illustrated in this French illuminated manuscript c. 1503.
The death of Wat Tyler. Illustration from Froissart’s Chronicles. King Richard is shown twice, witnessing Tyler’s death, and addressing the rebels.
Richard II giving the crown to Henry Bolingbroke. Illustration from Froissart’s Chronicles.
The Battle of Agincourt, 25th October 1415. Illustration from the 15th-century St Alban’s Chronicle.
Edward IV and his brother-in-law, Earl Rivers. The book Rivers is presenting to the king is probably the first English book to come from the printing press of William Caxton.
Margaret of Anjou (1430–82) protecting her son, Prince Edward. This commemorative statue can be found near the cathedral of her native town of Angers, where she is buried.
In 1480 William Caxton issued The Chronicles of England, an account of the history of England, from the earliest times to 1471. This later edition, retitled Brut, (c. 1491) was from the press of Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534), who took over Caxton’s workshop.
The Plantagenets: The Kings That Made Britain Page 18