CHAPTER XX

THE PLANTAGENETS IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND

If the kings of England after John had been content to acquiesce in his giving up of practically all that were of value of his possessions on the Continent, it is likely that they would have saved much fighting and misery, both for the people of England and of the Continent also.

It was not to be thought for a moment that they would so acquiesce, however. It took the almost continual fighting of some 300 years to effect that useful separation of England from the rest of Europe.

To understand the story we have to bear in mind that the character and will of the king in those days were all-important for the country. He could practically dictate what was to be done. He could declare war and make peace.

And yet, remember this, even a king could not make war without money, to pay and feed his troops and to get munitions of war and horses and so on. The kings of England often found themselves in want of money for their wars. They tried once or twice to impose, of their own authority, a tax--over and above the taxes which had grown out of ancient usage and were recognised as the king's right--to pay these expenses, but the people and the barons always proved too strong for the king when he attempted these exactions. If they did not actually force him to give up the new tax, they at least compelled him to accord them some further liberties and privileges in return for their consenting to pay the extra contribution demanded of them. It was largely in this way, {182} because of the necessity for money in which the king found himself, that the "rights of the people," as we call them, were conceded.

So it is possible to argue that out of the evils and miseries of the wars this good did come, and that it might not have come but for these evils and miseries, because it was through them, or through the wars that caused them, that the needs of the king became so pressing.

Henry III., succeeding the wretched John, gave his subjects further offence, besides that of the money which he made them subscribe for his wars, by the number of foreign counsellors and officials that he had about him. And the effect of this again was perhaps not altogether evil, for it helped the English people to a stronger idea that they were one nation--to a stronger idea of their national unity, as we say. While the kings were trying to be both English kings and French kings, the people grew more and more purely English.

Because of Henry III.'s money difficulties, he had often to summon that Great Council which had grown out of the Anglo-Saxon "witanagemote" or "meeting of the wise men" of the nation. It began to be written of by its present name of "parliament," and exercised, as we have seen, one of the most important powers of parliament, namely, allowing the king to collect money from the people. And this very phrase, that it seems natural and right to use, "allowing the king," shows how the power of the king was already limited. It was very different in France; and it was largely because the French people had not been able to put any such check on their king's power that the horrors of the French Revolution had to happen. The English counties sent up representatives, chosen by themselves, to the Councils or Parliaments; and so government by the representatives of the people began.

Charters for free trading and immunity from {183} certain taxes were granted by the king at these Councils, but he broke his word as readily as he gave it, and his barons soon came to open war against him. The barons had the better of the fighting. Twice they defeated him and extorted promises from him as a condition of letting him continue on the throne at all, but the last and deciding battle at Lewes, went in the king's favour. By that time he was perhaps softened by age. His terms were not severe and the last years of his long reign were the best.

When he died in 1272 his son Edward, his heir, was on Crusade, and it was not until two years later that he returned. That no claimant to the throne came forward in that interval seems to show that the idea of hereditary succession to the throne was at length fully recognised.

[Sidenote: First Prince of Wales]

It looks as if Edward had learnt wisdom from his father's folly. He did not attempt expensive foreign adventures, except as he was compelled to them by his difficulties with his feudal lords in Aquitaine and Gascony. He had the King of France as his own feudal overlord in respect of those lands. But he did undertake, and successfully, an enterprise against a foe nearer home--Wales, whose prince refused him the homage due. He conquered Wales and, although it rebelled against him about ten years after, and again against a later king, he really had conquered it once for all. From that time forward the eldest son of the King of England has had the title of Prince of Wales.

He was not nearly so fortunate in his attempt to settle the affairs of Scotland. He was called in as an umpire over the question of who was the rightful heir to the Scottish throne, and trouble quickly arose because he claimed that he had given this decision as the overlord of Scotland, whereas the Scottish view was that he had merely been invited, as an independent party, to arbitrate in a case of difficulty.

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Hence came war, and repeated war, with Scotland--repeated, because after more than one conquering invasion Scotland appeared to be defeated, and at the conqueror's mercy, but always its spirit revived, first under the leadership of William Wallace, then under that of Robert Bruce; and Bruce was the effective ruler of Scotland when Edward I. died, in 1307. Seven years later, in Edward II.'s reign in England, Bruce won the decisive battle of Bannockburn, which made Scotland secure in her independence during all the years of Bruce's life, and left her a constant menace to England until the happy union of the nations was accomplished by the succession of the Scottish king--James, the first Stuart King of England--to the English throne. But that was not for many a long year beyond the date that this book tells of.

Of the three Edwards who succeeded each other at this time as kings of England, the first was the best and most statesmanlike, the second the least worth, and the third, bold and chivalrous, committed many of the sins of the father of Edward I. and wasted the country's strength and resources in foreign war. In his reign began that of which history speaks of as the Hundred Years' War: and indeed it lasted for more than a hundred years, seeing that it had its commencement before the middle of the fourteenth century and did not end until just after the middle of the fifteenth. That long-drawn-out war was of course with France, and France had Scotland ever ready to help with a stab from the north of England when England was in trouble.

The war was almost forced upon the kings of the unfortunate countries, France and England, by the circumstance that the English king was the lawful feudal holder, under the King of France, of Aquitaine and the Gironde in the south of France. It was a possession far from the English centre, and immediately attached to France. Geographically it was a part of France.

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Therefore, in defence of these and other claims to territory on the Continent, England was practically obliged to fight, seeing that France was scarcely less obliged, for her own safety and settlement, to endeavour to win this territory to herself. The long war was fought with very varying success, and not without intervals of peace. The feudal lords of the disputed districts were willing to play off one king against the other, proclaiming themselves now under allegiance to the one and now to the other, as they found it to their best advantage.

[Sidenote: The Black Death]

Edward began by winning a great naval victory, which made his fleet unquestioned mistress of the sea for twenty years or more, and at the end of the first ten years of the war, from 1337-1347, all the gains seemed to be with him. He made a truce with the French king, after winning a great victory at Crécy, after capturing Calais, and after his armies had been no less victorious in the south. We can never know how matters might have gone, when the time of that truce ended, had not an awful calamity, far worse than war, fallen upon England and upon all the Western world. It was that calamity known by the dreadfully suitable name of the Black Death.

It seems to have been the same disease as that which is now called the plague, and it was so terribly deadly that actually one-third of the population in England is said to have died from it, and the loss of life on the Continent was no less. Most countries had far fewer inhabitants then than they have now, and they could less afford the loss. The result, in England--and it must have been much the same elsewhere--was that much of the cultivated land went back to wild waste land, for want of workers to keep it tilled. This lack of labourers led to a general change in the system on which agriculture was carried on. It led to the system that is still in use.

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According to the old way, the workers were practically bound to stay and work on the manors. They were called villeins, and their condition was quite different from that of the serfs. The condition of serfdom itself was dying out. The villeins could not, at all events, be bought and sold, like chattels or cattle. They were protected by law. But they were obliged to give so many days' work, and do other services, to the lord of the manor on which they lived. They had to till the lord's land for him. The rest of their time they might employ in working for their own livelihood.

Under the new system, which came in by reason of the scarcity of labourers after the two years or so of the Black Death had passed over the land, the lords of the manors found it more to their advantage to let out part of their land--to "farm" it out--to tenant farmers, who paid partly in money and partly in produce, instead of by so many days and pieces of work. The farmers engaged labourers to whom they paid a wage, again part in money and part in kind, of which the amount was settled by Act of Parliament. The modern system, in fact, was established.

But another result of this terrible Black Death, which lasted till just after the middle of the fourteenth century, was that the truce between France and England was formally renewed. Troubles on the boundaries of France, however, both in the south and in the west, were constant. Edward, claiming to have a right through his mother to the throne of France, gave the French lords a ready pretext for declining feudal services which they did not wish to render to the king who occupied that throne.

Open war was renewed, and both in Normandy and in the south Edward triumphed. The Black Prince, as he was called, King Edward's eldest son, the Prince of Wales, conquered more than all that England claimed in and around the troubadours' Langue d'oc {187} and won the wonderful victory of Poitiers in which he took captive the French king. Again a truce, all in England's favour, was made. Once more war broke out, aroused as usual by the discontent of the French nobles; but this time it was discontent, on the part of those nobles of the south who had long been under the suzerainty of the French king, with the foreign rule of England.

We have mentioned two great battles won by the English, Crécy and Poitiers. They deserve a few words more, for they marked a big change in the military story.

[Sidenote: Mediæval armour]

The ideal of the formidable fighting engine during all the earlier years of those Middle Ages of which we are speaking now, was the knight, in armour clad. Up to the fourteenth century it was armour of mail, that is to say of rings of steel connected with each other and so forming a flexible covering, and yet able to keep out a moderate sword thrust or arrow shot. During the course of the fourteenth century the armour became more solid and weighty, with plates of metal instead of the mail. The horse, as well as the knight, was thus plated, and, so defended, neither could easily be hurt by the weapons then in use. Horse and man together were so heavy that they could bear down, in their charge, a great force of men on foot. Therefore they were so feared that a very small number of the heavy cavalry could put to flight, and to death, a very much larger number of infantry.

But this weight of armour made them very unwieldy. If they fell from their horses they could only regain the saddle with great difficulty. The Crusades, taking these heavy armed knights into the scorching sun of the East and nearly baking them alive within their armour plates, must have taught them some of the disadvantages of this weighty armour. But what taught the English, in the first place, that the heavy armed cavalry was not as {188} invincible as was commonly thought at that time, was the lesson learnt in their wars against Scotland. The Scots had adopted the plan of putting pikemen, with long pikes, in the forefront of their battle. The English heavy horse charged on these, but the pikes kept them back; and, all the while, lightly armed archers on either flank poured in showers of arrows to the destruction of horse and man.

That was the manner in which the Scots several times had beaten the English. The English, taught by these reverses against the Scots, adopted just the same order of battle against the French at Crécy and also at Poitiers. And they had an astonishing success. In both battles the enemy was in far larger numbers, but the pikemen stood firm and held back the French cavalry, which charged again and again, and all the while the famous archers of England poured in arrows, from either side, with the long bow.

These battles meant more than victories of the English over the French. They were victories of the common soldier, the foot soldier, over the knight and the cavalry. They took away, at a blow, much of the awe with which the knight in armour had been regarded. Doubtless they added something to the self-respect of the foot soldier as they must have diminished something of the pride of the other. They led, too, to a lighter arming of the cavalry which made the horsemen quicker in movement and less clumsy.

[Sidenote: England and Flanders]

Edward, after Poitiers and the capture of the French king, seemed to have brought his kingdom to the height of its power. The country increased in wealth, especially in the wealth which it derived from the wool trade with Flanders. The association of England with the Flemings was close, and many of that nation came over at this time and established a weaving industry in the towns of our eastern counties. But probably the great bulk of the wool that was {189} grown on the backs of English sheep was still taken to the Continent in the unworked state. We may picture to ourselves the long strings of pack-horses, led by carriers, going along the bridle-paths, as we might call them now, bearing the wool to the port whence it should be shipped across Channel. Wheeled vehicles were known and were in use, but it is tolerably certain that most of the carrying was on horseback, until a river was reached which was navigable by the small ships of that day. The roads were not adapted for carts--in spite of the old road-making of the Romans.

A considerable portion of the revenue of the Crown came from the "duties," that is to say the money due according to the arrangements of the law, that were paid to the king's officials by the merchants on the exported wool.

There had been Counts of Flanders ever since the tenth century, and the King of France was their overlord. When the King of England claimed to be King of France, the Count of Flanders, like other feudal vassals, was ready enough to take what advantage he could get from changing his allegiance from one master to the other. The industrial cities of Flanders, such as Ghent and Bruges, had secured great privileges for themselves. Like our own city of London, they had gained most of their privileges in return for sums of money given at one time or another to help their sovereigns in distress. The large degree of independence claimed by these cities, and the power which their wealth gave them, made the position of the rulers of Flanders constantly difficult. They were not independent States, like the Italian cities; but they had far more independence than our London.

England had become by this time a land possessing many beautiful buildings. Even the first of these three Plantagenet Edwards had been a great builder. It is one of the many curious facts about the story of {190} these Middle Ages, in which fighting was almost continual, that they were the date of the building of some of the most stately cathedrals and ecclesiastical buildings both in England and all over Europe. In Spain, nearly from the time that the Moslems first came there, there was building showing much of the Byzantine style, as it was called, from Byzantium or Constantinople.

[Illustration: BYZANTINE STYLE OF ARCHITECTURE. Capital and column from St. Sophia.]

But the most beautiful and impressive buildings were in what is known as the Gothic style, which had {191} many varieties, but of which the striking feature is that the tops, the highest points, of the arches came to an angle, or peak, and were not rounded as was the style of the arch in the older buildings, called Norman, which were before them. Arch is from Latin _arcus_, a bow, and the Norman arch was of the rounded shape of a bow when the string is pulled back to discharge the arrow. The Gothic form of the arch is said to have been copied by its builders from the form which the corner poles of the primitive Gothic houses naturally took when they were brought together at the top to form the angle of the roof, as described on p. 100. This name of Gothic for this glorious architecture is a little confusing, first because we made the acquaintance of the Goths a long time before we read of the Normans, and yet what is called the Norman style of building is older than that which is called Gothic; and secondly because the very words Goth and Gothic are apt to suggest to our minds a very barbarous and uncultivated folk.

And so they were, when they came first into this story, from their homes east of the Rhine, but they acquired, by degrees, civilisation from the Roman world which they conquered, and this particular science and art of architecture was carried to great perfection at the date to which we have brought the story now. It is almost enough, to impress upon our minds the idea of that perfection, to remember that the building of Westminster Abbey, as we see it now, was undertaken in the reign of Henry III. in the thirteenth century, and that the beautifully decorated chapel of Henry VII. attached to it was added later, as the name of the king after whom it is called, indicates. There are some traces left of Norman and still older Saxon building in the cloisters, for the original building was a monastery, established in Saxon times, of Benedictine monks.

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In the Poets' Corner, as it is called, of the Abbey is a tablet commemorating the poet Chaucer who lived, at one time, close to the Abbey. He died in 1400 and his stories of the pilgrims travelling to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, where he was buried, tell us very much about the manner of life of the people of that day.

But, besides, Chaucer was a poet of the highest genius, and the beauties of his verse are marvellous considering the rough and troubled times in which he wrote. Most of the earlier writers had been clerics, and none approached the grace of Chaucer, a layman. But, what is perhaps more wonderful still, he had no followers, certainly none for more than a century after his death, who came near him in beauty of language or of thought.

Our story does not take us as far as that great Renaissance, or new birth of learning and culture, which distinguished the sixteenth century. We must put our Chaucer, together with Dante in Italy, and a few disciples such as Petrarch and his friend Boccaccio, as forerunners, a century or more ahead, of that great revival of literature.

By far the most of the Gothic building was of places for worship or for the accommodation of the clergy. Men thought--and it was a view which the Church was very ready to encourage--that they could find salvation and forgiveness for their sins if they devoted their wealth to the building of houses for religious purposes; and they also supposed that they could secure the favour of God by giving lands and property during their lifetime to the Church or by leaving it to the Church at their death.

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[Illustration: GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE. Doorway of Beauvais Cathedral.]

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By these gifts and legacies the Church grew more and more wealthy. But this generous gift to the Church did not altogether find favour with the kings or other feudal overlords of the givers, because every {194} such gift to the Church meant a diminution of the taxes payable to the lord. Such feudal taxes were those paid at a vassal's death, on the succession of a new heir--but the Church did not die; or on marriage--but the Church did not marry. Lands of which the owners died without leaving an heir lapsed back to the Crown, which was looked on as having originally given the lands to the tenant on a feudal tenure, or tenancy--but the lands of the Church never thus lapsed.

In order to put a check on this, Edward I. found it easy to persuade his Parliament to pass an Act to prevent such giving of land to the Church unless leave were first obtained from the Crown. The Act was called the Statute of Mortmain, or of The Dead Hand, probably because land given to the Church passed into a hand that was dead so far as any giving of fees to a feudal lord was concerned. The Crown might, or it might not, grant the leave requested. The persuasion of the Parliament to pass the measure was easy, because most of the influential members of the Parliament suffered in the same way as the king. Their vassals, as well as his, might leave or give land to the Church, and so diminish their fees.

[Sidenote: Wycliffe and Huss]

Thus king and barons stood together in this particular, against the Church, and all through our story we find a certain difference in this respect between England and the rest of Europe. In England we find that the king, the nobles, and the commons were generally ready to stand together to resist the power claimed by the Pope, representing the Church. They might, and they did, constantly fight amongst themselves, but on the whole they were very ready to unite on this one point, and to resist Rome. The great teacher and preacher Wycliffe gave the Crown all the assistance of his eloquence in denouncing the greed of the Church for civil power and great possessions. {195} Just as we look on Dante, the Italian, as a forerunner of the new birth in learning, so we may regard our Wycliffe as forerunner of the great Reformation in the Church. A great preacher in Bohemia, John Huss, preached the doctrines of Wycliffe and gained far more followers than he; and after Huss, Luther, the greatest of all the reformers, carried the work to its conclusion in the seventeenth century.

The Hussites of Bohemia became a large and formidable armed force. In our country it is likely that a revolt of the people of the eastern counties, led by Wat Tyler, was in some part inspired by the teachings of Wycliffe. Questioning the authority of the head of the Government would easily follow from questioning the authority of the head of the Church. But partly by a very gallant show of courage by the young king, Richard II., and partly by the valour of the citizens of London, under the Mayor, the rebels were overcome and crushed.

This spirit, however, in which Wycliffe and his followers, the Lollards, disputed the authority of the Pope, found favour with the Government for a short while only, and then the Lollards were hunted down and burnt as heretics. In Southern Germany, it inspired the Hussites a little later. But it made no way in France. We have to remember that at the very beginning of the fourteenth century the Pope fled from Rome and came to live, with his court, at Avignon, and this fact, that the Pope lived, and lived for many years, in a French city, had the effect of drawing the Pope and the King of France closely together. A further effect of this was that, all through the weary years of almost incessant war between France and England, the favour of the Church was with France rather than with England, and it was a favour which had much value.

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