T.F. Tout - The History of England

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Struck by these undoubted results of the pestilence, some modern
writers have persuaded themselves that the Black Death is the one great
turning-point in the social and economic history of England, and that
nearly all which makes modern England what it is, is due to the effects
of this pestilence. A wider survey suggests the extreme improbability
of a single visitation having such far-reaching consequences. Moreover
the Black Death was not an English but a European calamity, and it is
strange to imagine that the effects of the plague in England should
have been so much deeper than in France or Germany, and so different.
In the fourteenth century there was little that was distinctly insular
in the conditions of England, as compared with those of the continent.
A trouble common to both regions alike could hardly have been the
starting-point of such differentiation between them as later ages
undoubtedly witnessed. There was a French counterpart to the statute of
labourers.

In truth the Black Death was no isolated phenomenon. There were already
in the air the seeds of the decay of the ancient order, and those seeds
fructified more rapidly in England by reason of the plague.[1] It is
only because of the impetus which it gave to changes already in progress
that the pestilence had in a fashion more lasting results in England
than elsewhere. The last thirty years of the reign of Edward were an
epoch of social upheaval and unrest contrasting strongly with the
uneventful times that had preceded the Black Death. It is not right to
regard the period as one of misery or severe distress. The war of
classes, which was beginning, sprang not so much from material
discomfort of the poor, as from what unsympathetic annalists called
their greediness, their pride, and their wantonness. The wage-earner was
master of the situation and did not hesitate to make his power felt.
While the spread of manufactures, the rise of prices, and the opening
out of wider markets still secured the prosperity of the shopkeeper, the
merchant, or the artisan of the towns, the whole brunt of the social
change fell upon the landed classes, and most heavily upon the
ecclesiastics and especially upon the monks. Broken down by the heavy
demands of the state, unable to share with the layman in the new avenues
to wealth opened up by the expanding resources of the country, the monks
saw the chief sources of their prosperity drying up. Their rents were
shrinking and it became increasingly difficult to cultivate their lands.
They never recovered their ancient welfare, and were already getting out
of touch with the national life.

[1] See for this W. Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and
Commerce,_ vol. i., p. 330 ff. (ed. 4); T.W. Page, _The End of
Villainage in England_ (American Economic Association, 1900);
and, above all, P. Vinogradoff in _Engl. Hist. Review, xv._
(1900), 774-781.

One immediate result of the plague was a renewed activity in founding
religious houses. Upon the two plague pits west and east of the city of
London, Sir Walter Manny set up his Charterhouse in Smithfield, and
Edward III. his foundation for Cistercian nuns between Tower Hill and
Aldgate. More characteristic of the times was the foundation of secular
colleges, which were established either with mainly ecclesiastical
objects or to encourage study at the universities. Both at Oxford and
Cambridge there were more colleges set up in the first than in the
second half of the fourteenth century; and it is noteworthy that
several Cambridge colleges incorporated after the plague were founded
with the avowed motive of filling up the gaps in the secular clergy
occasioned by it. The riots between the Oxford townsmen and the clerks
of the university on St. Scholastica's day, 1354, resulted in the
victory of the former because of the recent diminution in the number of
the scholars. Yet even as regards the monasteries, it is easy to
exaggerate the effects of the plague. Five years after the Black Death,
the Cistercians of the Lancashire abbey of Whalley boasted that they
had added twenty monks to their convent, and were busy in enlarging
their church.[1]

[1] Cal. _Papal Registers, Petitions_, i., 264. Professor Tait,
however, informs me that the monks took a sanguine view of
their numbers. After the plague of 1362, we know that they were
not much more numerous than in the previous century.

Change was in the air in religion as well as in society. Along with
democratic ideas filtering in with the exiles from the great Flemish
cities, came a breath of that restless and unquiet spirit which soon
awakened the concern of the inquisition in the Netherlands. There
brotherhoods, some mystical and quietistic, others enthusiastic and
fanatical, were growing in numbers and importance. Some of these bodies,
Beguines, Beghards, and what not, were harmless enough, but the whole
history of the Middle Ages bears testimony to the readiness with which
religious excitement unchastened by discipline or direction, grew into
dangerous heresy. The strangest of the new communities, the Flagellants,
made its appearance in England immediately after the pestilence. In the
autumn of 1349, some six score men crossed over from Holland and marched
in procession through the open spaces of London, chanting doleful
litanies in their own tongue. They wore nothing save a linen cloth that
covered the lower part of their body, and on their heads hats marked
with a red cross behind and before. Each of them bore in his right hand
a scourge, with which he belaboured the naked back and shoulders of his
comrade in the fore rank. Twice a day they repeated this mournful
exercise, and even at other times were never seen in public but with cap
on head and discipline in hand. Few Englishmen joined the Flagellants,
but their appearance is not unworthy of notice as the first concrete
evidence of the religious unrest which soon became more widespread.
Before long the Yorkshireman, John Wycliffe, was studying arts at the
little north-country foundation of the Balliols at Oxford, and John
Ball, the Essex priest, was preaching his revolutionary socialism to the
villeins. "We are all come," said he, "from one father and one mother,
Adam and Eve. How can the gentry show that they are greater lords than
we?"[1] In 1355 there were heretics in the diocese of York who
maintained that it is impossible to merit eternal life by good works,
and that original sin does not deserve damnation.[2]

[1] The sentiment, or its equivalent in Ball's famous distich,
was not new; it was employed for mystical purposes in Richard
Rolle's

"When Adam delf and Eue span, spir, if thou wil spede,
Whare was then the pride of man, that now merres his mede?"

_Library of Early English Writers. Richard Rolle of Hampole and
his followers_, ed. Horstman, i., 73 (1895).

[2] Cal. _Papal Registers, Letters_, iii., 565.

The Flagellants were denounced as heretics by Clement VI.; the
Archbishop of York proceeded against the northern heretics, and in 1366
the Archbishop of Canterbury forbade John Ball's preaching. But there
were more insidious, because more measured, enemies of the Church than
a handful of fanatics. The English were long convinced that the Avignon
popes were playing the game of the French adversary, and Clement VI.'s
efforts for peace never had a fair hearing. Since the beginning of the
war, the king laid his hand on the alien priories, and, though in his
scrupulous regard for clerical rights he had allowed the monks to
remain in possession, he diverted the stream of tribute from the French
mother houses to his own treasury. Bolder measures against papal
provisions were taken in the years which immediately followed the
pestilence. Finding remonstrances futile, the parliament of 1351, which
passed the statute of labourers, enacted also the first statute of
provisors. It recited that the anti-papal statute of Carlisle of 1307
was still law, and that the king had sworn to observe it. It claimed
for all electing bodies and patrons the right to elect or to present
freely to the benefices in their gift. It declared invalid all
appointments brought about by way of papal provision. Provisors who had
accepted appointments from Avignon were to be arrested. If convicted,
they were to be detained in prison, until they had made their peace
with the king, and found surely not to accept provisions in the future,
and also not to seek their reinstatement by any process in the Roman
_curia_. Two years later this measure was supplemented by the first
statute of _praemunire_, which enacted that those who brought matters
cognisable in the king's courts before foreign courts should be liable
to forfeiture and outlawry. Though the papal court is not specially
mentioned, it is clear that this measure _was_ aimed against it.

General measures proving insufficient, more specific legislation soon
followed. In 1365 a fresh statute of _praemunire_ was drawn up on the
initiative of the crown, enacting that all who obtained citations,
offices, or benefices from the Roman court should incur the penalties
prescribed by the act of 1353. The prelates dissociated themselves from
so stringent a law, but did not actively oppose it. When in 1366,
Edward requested the guidance of the estates as to how he was to deal
with the demand of Urban V. for the arrears of King John's tribute,
withheld altogether for more than thirty years, the prelates joined the
lay estates in answering that neither John nor any one else could put
the realm into subjection without their consent. Even the ancient
offering of Peter's pence ceased to be paid for the rest of Edward's
reign. If these laws had been strictly carried out, the papal authority
in England would have been gravely circumscribed. But medieval laws
were too often the mere enunciations of an ideal. The statutes of
provisors and _praemunire_ were as little executed as were the statutes
of labourers, or as some elaborate sumptuary legislation passed by the
parliament of 1363. The catalogue of acts of papal interference in
English ecclesiastical and temporal affairs is as long after the
passing of these laws as before. Litigants still carried their suits to
Avignon: provisions were still issued nominating to English benefices,
and Edward himself set the example of disregarding his own laws by
asking for the appointment of his ministers to bishoprics by way of
papal provision. Papal ascendency was too firmly rooted in the
fourteenth century to be eradicated by any enactment. To the average
clergyman or theologian of the day the pope was still the "universal
ordinary," the one divinely appointed source of ecclesiastical
authority, the shepherd to whom the Lord had given the commission to
feed His sheep. This theory could only be overcome by revolution; and
the parliaments and ministers of Edward III. were in no wise of a
revolutionary temper.

The anti-papal laws of the fourteenth century were the acts of the
secular not of the ecclesiastical power. They were not simply
anti-papal, they were also anti-clerical in their tendency, since to the
men of the age an attack on the pope was an attack on the Church. No
doubt the English bishop at Edward's court sympathised with his master's
dislike of foreign ecclesiastical interference, and the English priest
was glad to be relieved from payments to the curia. But the clergyman,
whose soul grew indignant against the curialists, still believed that
the pope was the divinely appointed autocrat of the Church universal.
Being a man, a pope might be a bad pope; but the faithful Christian,
though he might lament and protest, could not but obey in the last
resort. The papacy was so essentially interwoven with the whole Church
of the Middle Ages, that few figments have less historical basis than
the notion that there was an anti-papal Anglican Church in the days of
the Edwards. However, before another generation had passed away,
ecclesiastical protests began.

Monasticism no less than the papacy was of the very essence of the
Church of the Middle Ages. Yet the monastic ideal had no longer the
force that it had in previous generations, and even the latest
embodiments of the religious life had declined from their original
popularity. Pope John XXII. himself, in his warfare against William of
Ockham and the Spiritual Franciscans who had supported Louis of Bavaria,
denied in good round terms the Franciscan doctrine of "evangelical
poverty". Ockham was now dead, and with him perished the last of the
great cosmopolitan schoolmen, of whose birth indeed England might boast,
but who early forsook Oxford for Paris. Conspicuous among the younger
academical generation was Richard Fitzralph, Archbishop of Armagh, whose
bitter attacks on the fundamental principles underlying the mendicant
theory of the regular life are indicative of the changing temper of the
age. A distinguished Oxford scholar, a learned and pungent writer, a
popular preacher, a reputed saint, and a good friend of the pope,
Fitzralph made himself, about 1357, the champion of the secular clergy
against the friars by writing a treatise to prove that absolute poverty
was neither practised nor commended by the apostles.[1] The indignant
mendicants procured the archbishop's citation to Avignon, and it was a
striking proof of the ineffectiveness of recent legislation that Edward
III. allowed him to plead his cause before the _curia_. By 1358 the
friars gained the day, but their efforts to get Fitzralph's opinions
condemned were frustrated by his death in 1360. Fitzralph had the
sympathy not only of the seculars, but of the "possessioners," or
property-holding monks.

[1] See his _De Pauperie Salvatoris_, lib. i.-iv., printed by
R.L. Poole, as appendix to Wycliffe, _De Dominio Divino_.

The period of experiments in economic and anti-clerical legislation was
also marked by other important new laws, such as the ordinance of the
staple of 1354, providing that wool, leather, and other commodities
were only to be sold at certain _staple_ towns, a measure soon to be
modified by the law of 1362, which settled the staple at Calais; the
ordinance of 1357 for the government of Ireland, to which later
reference will be made; the statute making English the language of the
law courts in 1362, and a drastic act against purveyance in 1365. The
statute of treasons of 1352, which laid down seven several offences as
alone henceforth to be regarded as treason, also demands attention. Its
classification is rude and unsystematic. While the slaying of the
king's ministers or judges, and the counterfeiting of the great seal or
the king's coin, are joined with the compassing the death of the king
or his wife or heir, adherence to the king's enemies, the violation of
the queen or the king's eldest daughter, as definite acts of treason,
its omission to brand other notable indications of disloyally as
traitorous, inspired the judges of later generations to elaborate the
doctrine of constructive treason in order to extend in practice the
scope of the act. It was, however, an advance for nobles and commons to
have set any limitations whatever to the wide power claimed by the
courts of defining treason.

Partial respite from war did not diminish the martial ardour of the
king and his nobles. The period of the Black Death was precisely the
time when Edward completed a plan which he had begun by the erection of
his Round Table at Windsor in 1344. By 1348 he instituted a chapel at
Windsor, dedicated to St. George, served by a secular chapter, and
closely connected with a foundation for the support of poor knights.
Within a year this foundation also included the famous Order of the
Garter, the type and model of all later orders of chivalry. On St.
George's day the king celebrated the new institution by special
solemnities. The most famous of his companions-at-arms were associated
with him as founders and first knights. Clad in russet coats sprinkled
with blue garters, a blue garter on the right leg, and a mantle of blue
ornamented with little shields bearing the arms of St. George, the
Knights of the Garter heard mass sung by the Archbishop of Canterbury
in St. George's chapel, and then feasted solemnly in their common hall.
Ten years later the glorification of the king's birthplace was
completed by the erection of new quarters for the king, more sumptuous
and splendid than were elsewhere to be seen. The fame of the Knights of
the Garter excited the emulation of King John of France, who set up a
Round Table which grew in 1351 into the knightly Order of the Star.

The rival brethren of the Garter and the Star found plenty of
opportunities of demonstrating their prowess. Though between 1347 and
1355 there was, so far as forms went, an almost continuous armistice
for the space of eight years, its effect was not so much to stop
fighting as to limit its scale. In reality the years of nominal truce
were a period of harassing warfare in Brittany, the Calais march,
Gascony, and the narrow seas, which even the ravages of the Black Death
did not stop.

In Brittany affairs were in a wretched condition. The nominal duke,
John, was a child brought up in England under the guardianship of
Edward III. Edward was not in a position to spend either men or money
upon Brittany. As an easy way of discharging his obligations to his
ward, he handed over the duchy to Sir Thomas Dagworth, the governor,
who maintained the war from local resources and had a free hand as
regards his choice of agents and measures. In return for power to
appropriate to his own purposes the revenues of the duchy, Dagworth
undertook the custody of the fortresses, the payment of the troops, the
expenses of the administration, and the conduct of the war. In short,
Brittany was leased out to him as a speculation, like a farm left
derelict of husbandmen after the Black Death. Dagworth sublet to the
highest bidders the lordships, fortresses, and towns of Brittany. He
established at various centres of his influence a military adventurer,
whose chief business was to make war support war and, moreover, bring
in a good profit. The consequences were disastrous. Dagworth's captains
were for the most part Englishmen, men of character, energy, and
resources, but utterly without scruples and with no other ambition than
to raise a good revenue and maintain themselves in authority. The most
famous of them were members of gentle but obscure houses, whose poverty
debarred them from the ordinary avenues to fame and fortune, and whose
vigour and ability made good use of their exceptional positions. Two
Cheshire kinsmen, Hugh Calveley and Robert Knowles, thus won, each for
himself, a place in history. Some of the adventurers were of obscurer
origin, some were foreigners, German, French, or Netherlandish, and
some few Breton gentlemen of Montfort's faction. Of these Crockart, the
German, and Raoul de Caours, the Breton, were the most famous.

The results of the system bore heavily on the Breton peasantry. Each
lord of a castle levied systematic blackmail on the neighbouring
parishes. These payments, called ransoms, were exacted as a condition
of protection. The governor, though severely maltreating those who
neglected to pay their ransom, did little to save his dependants from
the ravages of the partisans of Charles of Blois. Despite such
misdeeds, the war of partisans was brightened by many feats of heroism.
The friends of Charles of Blois disregarded the truce and waged war as
well as they could. Among them was already conspicuous the son of a
nobleman of the neighbourhood of Dinan, the ugly, able, restless
Bertrand du Guesclin, whose enterprise and valour won for him a great
local reputation. In 1350 Dagworth was slain. The history of the
following years is not to be found in the acts of his successor, Sir
Walter Bentley, but in the private deeds of daring of the heroes of
both sides. Conspicuous among these is the famous Battle of the Thirty,
well known from the detailed narrative of Froissart, and the stirring
verses of a contemporary French poem. This fight was fought on March
27, 1351, between thirty Breton gentlemen of the Blois faction, drawn
from the garrison of Josselin, and a less noble but even more strenuous
band of thirty English and other adventurers of the Montfort party,
from the garrison of Ploermel, seven miles to the east. Beaumanoir, the
commandant at Josselin, had been moved to indignation at the cruel
treatment of peasants who had refused to pay ransom by Robert Bembro,
the commander of Ploermel. He challenged the tyrant to combat, and
thirty heroes of each party fought out their quarrel at a spot marked
by the half-way oak, equidistant from the two garrisons. After a long
struggle, in which Bembro was slain, victory fell to the men from
Josselin. Among the vanquished were Knowles, Calveley, and Crockart.
This fight had absolutely no influence on the fortune of the war.

In 1352 the French strove to carry on the Breton war on a grander scale,
and a large army, commanded by Guy of Nesle, marshal of France, was sent
to reinforce the partisans of Charles of Blois. They met Bentley at
Mauron, a few miles north of Ploermel, where one of the most interesting
battles of the war was fought Taught by the lesson of Crecy, Nesle had
already, in obscure fights in Poitou, ordered the French knights and
men-at-arms to fight on foot.[1] He here adopted the same plan for the
first time in a battle of importance, but, after a severe struggle,
Bentley won the day. In 1353 Edward III. made a treaty with his captive,
Charles of Blois. In return for a huge ransom Charles was to obtain his
liberty, be recognised as Duke of Brittany, marry one of Edward's
daughters, and promise to remain neutral in the Anglo-French struggle.
The treaty involved too great a dislocation of policy to be carried out.
Charles, after visiting Brittany, renounced the compact and returned to
his London prison. Thus the weary war of partisans still went on, and
thenceforth the fortunes of Charles depended less upon negotiations than
on the growing successes of Bertrand du Guesclin.

[1] See my paper on _Some Neglected Fights between Crecy and
Poitiers_ in _Engl. Hist. Review_, vol. xxi., Oct., 1905.

During these years Calais was the centre of much fighting. Eager to win
back the town, the French bribed an Italian mercenary, then in Edward's
service, to admit them into the castle. The plot was discovered, and
Edward and the Prince of Wales crossed over in disguise to help in
frustrating the French assault. The French were enticed into Calais and
taken as in a trap. Edward then sallied out of the town, and rashly
engaged in personal encounter with a more numerous enemy. He was
unexpectedly successful, and made wonderful display of his prowess as a
knight. In revenge, the English devastated the neighbouring country by
raids like that led by the Duke of Lancaster in 1351, which spread
desolation from Therouanne to Etaples. Of more enduring importance were
the gradual extensions of the English pale by the piecemeal conquest of
the fortresses of the neighbourhood. The chief step in this direction
was the capture of Guines in 1352. An archer named John Dancaster, who
escaped from French custody in Guines, led his comrades to the assault
of the town by a way which he learnt during his imprisonment. The
attack succeeded, and Dancaster, to avoid involving his master in a
formal breach of the truce, professed to hold the town on his own
account and to be willing to sell it to the highest bidder. Of course
the highest bidder was Edward III. himself, and thus Guines became the
southern outpost of the Calais march.

In Aquitaine and Languedoc there was no thought of repose. In 1349
Lancaster led a foray to the gates of Toulouse, which wrought immense
damage but led to no permanent results. There was incessant border
warfare. The Anglo-Gascon forces spread beyond the limits of Edward's
duchy and captured outposts in Poitou, Perigord, Quercy, and the
Agenais. In retaliation, the Count of Armagnac, a strong upholder of
the French cause, did what mischief he could in those parts of Gascony
adjacent to his own territories. On the whole the result of these
struggles was a considerable extension of the English power.

The most famous episode of these years was a naval battle fought off
Winchelsea on August 29, 1350, against a strong fleet of Spanish
privateers commanded by Charles of La Cerda. The Spaniards having
plundered English wine ships, Edward summoned a fleet to meet them, and
himself went on board, along with the Prince of Wales, Lancaster, and
many of his chief nobles. The fight that ensued was remarkable not more
for the reckless valour of the king and his nobles than for the
dexterity of the English tactics. The great busses of Spain towered
above the little English vessels, like castles over cottages. Yet the
English did not hesitate to grapple their adversaries' craft and swarm
up their sides on to the decks. Edward captured one of the chief of the
Spanish ships, though his own vessel, the Cog _Thomas_, was so severely
damaged that it had to be hastily abandoned for its prize. The glory of
the victory of the "Spaniards on the sea" kept up the fame first won at
Sluys.