History of England 1-6

This newly found unity of purpose was dramatized when, in 1348, Edward III instituted the Order of the Garter. The celebrated motto, Honi soit qui mal y pense or ‘Shame on him who thinks ill of it’, refers to Edward’s claim upon the throne of France. Almost all of the original twenty-six knights, divided into two groups for the sake of jousting competitions, had taken part in the French campaigns. It was a military brotherhood.

The king had in any case a strong sense of the dramatic, and loved ceremonial occasions; he engaged in all the panoply of chivalry and, more than a century before Sir Thomas Malory wrote Le Morte Darthur, he tried to restore an Arthurian sense of kingship. The king was therefore popular among the grandees of the realm. They were once more part of a great adventure, and Edward had become their warrior king. The king’s eldest son, Edward – dressed as Lionel, cousin of Lancelot – took part in a grand tournament. The contemporary chronicler, Jean Froissart, wrote that ‘the English will never love or honour a king who is not a victor and a lover of war’. Other kings of Europe might be celebrated for their piety, or for their learning, but in England those criteria did not apply.

The king’s lavish architectural patronage was part of the chivalric programme. He had been born in Windsor Castle, but he proceeded to demolish the existing castle and build an even grander edifice in its place. It was his way of advertising his own glory and of proclaiming his superiority over the French king. It was here, in 1344, that the Round Table was recreated; the king and queen, clothed in red gowns, led a procession of knights and barons into the castle chapel where their quest for valour and virtue was consecrated. In the circular Round Table building, larger than the Pantheon of Rome, lavish feasts and dances were held in which the participants dressed as characters out of Arthurian romance. The foundations of this early theatre, or centre of ritual activity, were uncovered in the summer of 2006.

As the knights sat on a stone bench running around the wall, and watched jousts as well as tournaments, the real conflict of the period was proceeding slowly enough. The first two of the hundred years of war (in fact 116) were spent in posturing; Edward sailed over to the Low Countries for the purpose of launching an invasion from Flanders, and for purchasing new allies. It was said that he was spending his time, and the money of the country, idly. The complaints against heavy taxation were mounting all the time. The poems and chronicles of the period are filled with complaints about oppression and shortages; no farmers or merchants were safe from the king’s depredations. It had become a familiar refrain of the fourteenth century. ‘He who takes money from the needy without just cause’, one versifier wrote, ‘commits sin.’ The wool merchants, in particular, were forced to pay for the king’s armies; the proceeds of 30,000 sacks of wool were to be lent to the king, accompanied by a temporary ban on exports to keep the prices high. Since wool was the single most important aspect of the English economy, the king’s demands led directly to unemployment and consequent poverty. The country had become essentially a cash cow for Edward’s military needs.

Yet his plans for a rapid campaign were frustrated; the scheme for financing the war through wool proved disastrous; problems arose both with the merchants and the collectors of the customs. The king’s financiers were growing restless, and threatened to cut off supplies. With the king out of the country, too, rumours spread of invasions from France and from Scotland. The members of the council that Edward had set up to rule England in his absence were growing fractious; the king accused them of withholding money from him, while they in turn complained that they had many expensive duties to perform including the defence of the realm. It was said that the king was growing as reckless and as extravagant as his father. ‘I counsel that ye begin no war in trust of your riches,’ Dame Prudence declared in Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Melibee’, ‘for they … suffice not wars to maintain.’

In 1340, three years after the declaration of war with France, a taxpayers’ revolt was organized in the parliament house. It was said that ‘a king ought not to go forth from his kingdom in manner of war unless the commune of his realm agree to it’. The parliament had become the institution that, according to the injunctions of Magna Carta, gave the consent of the realm to fresh taxation. Successive kings, under force of circumstance, had accepted its role. The knights and townsmen had already begun humbly to submit petitions from their various neighbourhoods, to which appropriate royal legislation came in response. It was a system of quid pro quo.