HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/people/edward-iii Sun, 17 May 2026 14:30:04 GMT en hourly 1 The ultimate Cold War sex scandal – and 11 other political outrages from British history https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-ultimate-cold-war-sex-scandal-and-11-other-political-outrages-from-british-history/ Sun, 17 May 2026 14:30:01 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-ultimate-cold-war-sex-scandal-and-11-other-political-outrages-from-british-history/ From the fall of Thomas Cromwell to Cold War sex dramas, James Osborne examines some of the most extraordinary episodes in British political history The first English parliaments were intended as countermeasures to bad kingship, protecting the realm from the worst excesses of rogue royals.

From these medieval beginnings, and through its evolution into the modern parliament of the United Kingdom, the institution has spread across the world as a model of representative government and as a symbol of democracy. But that doesn’t mean that it has been without controversy.

Since its inception, parliament has been dogged by scandals that have affected its reputation and altered its procedures. But which episodes have had the most lasting influence and infamy – and why? James Osborne investigates…

1. Alice Perrers and the Good Parliament (1376)

By the start of the 1370s, King Edward III had ruled England for nearly half a century. He was a transformative monarch who had taken the country into the Hundred Years’ War with France. But age and illness had left him diminished, and he had withdrawn from day-to-day rule. Filling that vacuum of power were the king’s courtiers and confidants, including Alice Perrers.

Perrers had risen from relatively modest origins to become the king’s closest companion after the death of Queen Philippa. She was ever-present at court, decorated with jewels belonging to the crown. She had accumulated lands, wealth and influence on a scale that positioned her as one of the most powerful women in England. Both in appearance and power, she had assumed the role of a pseudo-queen.

Chroniclers accused her of inserting herself where she didn’t belong, interrupting legal proceedings and persuading the king to reward her allies. Whether these claims were true (or an instance of medieval misogyny) didn’t matter. The perception was that royal power was being manipulated for personal gain.

When parliament met in 1376, the long war with France was going badly, taxes were high and confidence in the royal household had collapsed. With Edward III’s power eroded, this assembly (later known as the Good Parliament) was able to be unusually assertive. Alice Perrers quickly became its central target.

MPs accused her of using her sexual relationship with the king to enrich herself, distort justice and dominate access to royal favour. Parliament forced Perrers to swear an oath to never again approach the king, stripped her of property, and removed her from court.

But within a few months, Perrers had returned, protected by the king and his allies, and many of the reforms of the Good Parliament were undone. It wasn’t until Edward’s death in 1377 that Perrers was tried for corruption and subsequently exiled.

The episode marked parliament’s growing confidence in naming, shaming and punishing abuses of power – even when those abuses were entangled with sexual politics and the private life of the crown.

2. The fall of Thomas Cromwell (1540)

In the mid-16th century, during the apogee of Tudor England, Thomas Cromwell was second only to Henry VIII as the most powerful man in the realm.

The son of a blacksmith, Cromwell had risen from simple origins, elevating himself with a combination of fierce intelligence, canny administrative skill and absolute loyalty to the king. He was the architect of the English Reformation, the man who used parliament to break with the pope, dissolve the monasteries, and place the king at the head of the Church of England.

But by tying himself so closely to the king, Cromwell’s power was predicated on his patron’s favour. When Henry’s fourth marriage, to Anne of Cleves, proved a humiliating failure, Cromwell was blamed. It proved disastrous: his numerous enemies at court seized the moment, assembling accusations of treason and heresy.

Cromwell was arrested in June 1540, stripped of office, and executed a month later on Tower Hill. The man who had expanded parliament’s authority was killed by the same institution, at the king’s behest. Later generations would look back on cases like Cromwell’s as examples of how parliamentary power could be abused, and why limits on that power were necessary.

3. The ship money crisis (1630s)

The second Stuart king, Charles I, deemed parliament a nuisance. He dissolved it in 1629 and chose to govern without it. This period, later dubbed the ‘Personal Rule’, lasted 11 years. This wasn’t illegal in itself – and parliaments were only called periodically anyway – but it created a practical problem: war, government and the royal court all required money. But taxes were meant to be raised only with parliament’s approval.

So, Charles and his advisers turned to older forms of revenue that didn’t require parliamentary assent. The most controversial was ‘ship money’, a levy traditionally raised from coastal towns to fund naval defence in emergencies. In the 1630s, the crown extended ship money across the country and began demanding it in peacetime.

In effect, this was a tax by another name, imposed without parliament’s consent. Ship money wasn’t the largest source of royal income, but it did become the clearest example of royal overreach.

When Charles later faced rebellion in Scotland and needed funds for an army, he was forced to recall parliament in 1640 – which was now an assembly brimming with pent-up anger. In the long term, the scandal became part of the chain of events that led to civil war.

4. The South Sea Bubble (1720)

The South Sea Company was founded in 1711. A joint-stock company, it took on government debt in return for guaranteed interest payments, and in 1713 secured a significant contract to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish South America. This was one of many examples of complex arrangements between government and private companies, as the state sought to deal with the heavy burden of debt accumulated from protracted wars.

In 1719, the company proposed a new and ambitious scheme. It would absorb a large portion of the national debt, and in return, it would offer its shares as a route to great wealth. Parliament approved the plan, and ministers, MPs and members of the royal family were given shares on favourable terms.

The value of the company’s shares rose rapidly, driven by hype rather than financial stability or impressive profits. Similar opportunist ventures quickly popped up, many with no serious business behind them. Ordinary investors, encouraged by the involvement of political leaders, poured their savings into the schemes. By the summer of 1720, the bubble burst and prices collapsed, ruining the finances of thousands who had become involved.

Against a backdrop of intense public anger, parliament was forced to act against its own members who had accepted bribes in the form of shares and loans, or unscrupulously promoted legislation from which they stood to profit directly. Several politicians were expelled or otherwise left in disgrace.

One figure who emerged strengthened was Robert Walpole, who helped stabilise the system and limit the fallout. He would later become Britain’s first prime minister.

• Read more | The South Sea Bubble: when was it formed and what happened?

5. The Wilkes affair (1763–74)

As the Georgian era progressed, Britain was becoming a more politically engaged society. With growing press freedoms, newspapers had taken on a new and important role, and elections were becoming fiercely contested. Parliament was no longer such a distant institution.

John Wilkes benefited from these changes. He was a journalist, pamphleteer and MP who made his name by attacking the government in print.

Wilkes was elected to parliament in 1757, and within a few years he had become a sharp critic of the ministry and of George III’s advisers. In 1763 his newspaper, The North Briton, published an issue accusing the king’s speech to parliament of being deliberately misleading.

Fearing the damage he might cause to royal reputations, the government responded by issuing a general warrant for Wilkes’s arrest. Wilkes was imprisoned, but successfully argued that as an MP he was protected by parliamentary privilege. He was released and became a public cause célèbre.

The conflict between Wilkes and the government escalated when he fled abroad and was convicted of obscene and seditious libel in absentia.

On his return, he was repeatedly elected as MP for Middlesex. Each time, the House of Commons expelled him. At one point, parliament declared his defeated opponent the winner of the election, despite Wilkes having the most votes. The affair dragged on, but, eventually, parliament retreated. Wilkes was allowed to take his seat in 1774.

Wilkes’s name became a shorthand for a wider series of demands: freedom of the press, fair elections and limits on parliamentary privileges.

6. The Duchess of Kingston’s bigamy trial (1776)

For much of its history, parliament acted in certain cases as a court. Members of the peerage could only be tried by the House of Lords. This placed some of the most private and scandalous disputes of elite life at the centre of public politics – including the trial of Elizabeth Chudleigh in 1776.

Elizabeth Chudleigh had built a reputation as one of the most flamboyant figures of Georgian high society. She served as a maid of honour at court, cultivated powerful patrons, and was well known for her conspicuous wealth and independence. In 1769 she married Evelyn Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston, only enhancing her status further.

But after the duke’s death in 1773, questions were raised about whether the marriage had been legal. In 1744, Chudleigh had secretly married a naval officer, Augustus Hervey. The marriage was poorly documented and later disputed, but it had never been formally dissolved. If it was valid, her later marriage to the Duke of Kingston would have amounted to bigamy – a serious criminal offence.

Because she was now a duchess, the case was heard in the House of Lords, and the trial became a public spectacle. The personal life of a prominent woman was dissected in full view of parliament, attracting enormous public interest and extensive press coverage.

The Lords found Chudleigh guilty. She was spared imprisonment but stripped of her title.

7. The Charles Dilke affair (1885–86)

Toward the final decades of Queen Victoria’s long reign, Britain’s political system was becoming more democratic, but it remained shaped by Victorian ideas about morality and respectability. Public figures were expected to embody private virtue, as well as public service.

Charles Dilke was a wealthy Radical Liberal MP, first elected in his mid-twenties and widely regarded as a future prime minister. He supported republican ideas, social reform, and the expansion of the franchise. By the mid-1880s he was president of the Local Government Board and one of the most recognisable faces in British politics.

But Dilke’s highest political ambitions were derailed by allegations that surfaced in Donald Crawford’s 1885 divorce petition against his wife, Virginia. The scandal became public at the first hearing of Crawford v Crawford and Dilke on 12 February 1886, when Donald Crawford told the court (repeating a confession Virginia had made to him in July 1885) that she had committed adultery with Dilke and described lurid “French vices”, including an allegation that Dilke involved her in a ménage-à-trois.

Although the judge dismissed the case against Dilke for lack of evidence while granting Crawford a divorce, press and political pressure made this an inadequate vindication for Dilke. Seeking to clear his name, Dilke helped trigger a second hearing in July 1886, in which further explicit testimony and admissions proved disastrous for him.

The MP lost his seat in the general election that same month, and although he re-entered parliament in 1892, Dilke’s political career never fully recovered.

8. The Marconi scandal (1912–13)

The Marconi scandal centred on a government contract to build a chain of wireless telegraphy stations across the British empire.

The contract was awarded to the British subsidiary of the Marconi Company, a firm at the forefront of a new and strategically important technology. But not long after the decision, questions were raised in parliament about whether ministers had financial interests connected to the deal.

It emerged that several senior figures in the Liberal government, including the chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, the attorney general Sir Rufus Isaacs and the postmaster general Herbert Samuel, had bought shares in the American Marconi Company. Although this was a separate business from the British subsidiary that received the contract, the distinction was subtle, and widely misunderstood. Opposition MPs accused ministers of insider trading and misleading parliament and, thanks to interest from the press, the issue became a prolonged public controversy.

As for the fallout, Professor Nicholas Allen of Royal Holloway University of London tells HistoryExtra, “Lloyd George obviously survived Marconi after a (perceived friendly) select committee inquiry, and, indeed, went on to prosper!”

• Read more | 6 shocking presidential scandals that rocked the White House: from the Petticoat Affair to Clinton-Lewinsky

9. Cash for honours (1916–22)

During the First World War and its immediate aftermath, Britain was governed by a coalition led by David Lloyd George, a forceful and unconventional prime minister. Lloyd George relied heavily on political fundraising to maintain his position, particularly after the war.

For many years, honours such as knighthoods and peerages had been influenced by political service and donation. Under Lloyd George, this informal system evolved into something altogether more formal. Wealthy individuals were invited to make large contributions to party funds with the clear expectation that an honour would follow: a knighthood for thousands of pounds, a peerage for a sizeable sum more.

The practice was an open secret in political circles, but it came to the attention of the public after Lloyd George left office in 1922. Former associates and journalists published details of the dealings, including lists of honours that appeared to match donations with suspicious precision. The idea that seats in the House of Lords could effectively be bought by the wealthy created widespread public anger.

The scandal damaged trust in the honours system and reinforced perceptions of postwar politics as cynical and corrupt, though Lloyd George managed to avoid any formal consequences – the second time he dodged punishment for a scandal within the space of a few years.

The wider impact has also been limited, according to Professor Allen. “Cash for honours led to legislation that made explicit sales illegal. But, of course, the correlation between party donations and honours has continued ever since.”

10. Hugh Dalton’s accidental budget leak (1947)

Hugh Dalton was chancellor of the Exchequer in the postwar Labour government led by Clement Attlee. Dalton was an experienced figure, a key architect of Labour’s economic policy and the expansion of the welfare state.

On 12 November 1947, he arrived at the House of Commons to deliver his latest budget. While waiting outside the chamber, Dalton chatted briefly to a journalist and mentioned a small detail of the forthcoming budget: a proposed increase in the rate of purchase tax.

Working quickly, the journalist was able to rush from parliament and publish the information almost immediately. As a result, a detail from the budget appeared in print before Dalton had even finished presenting it to parliament.

The next day, Dalton resigned – though this was only a “formal resignation”, according to Professor Allen, who says that, in reality, the chancellor was “swiftly sacked by Attlee”.

There wasn’t any suggestion of personal gain, corruption or deception. Dalton’s only mistake had been to unintentionally break the convention that parliament should be the first recipient of major financial information from the government – but it was a fatal mistake.

Surely one of the strangest and most arcane scandals in parliamentary history, Professor Allen says that Dalton’s downfall “was more of an executive failing. Though, of course, Dalton re-entered government later in Labour’s term.”

11. The Profumo affair (1963)

John Profumo was the secretary of state for war in the Conservative government led by Harold Macmillan.

Profumo was seen as a reliable figure in a sensitive defence role during the peak of Cold War tensions. Profumo was married, but in 1961 he began a brief sexual relationship with Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old model and showgirl connected to social circles that included prominent diplomats and figures within the intelligence community.

But Profumo wasn’t Keeler’s only romantic liaison. Keeler was also intimately acquainted with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché widely believed to be an intelligence officer working for the Soviet Union. At the height of the Cold War, the possibility that a prominent cabinet minister – and the secretary of state for war, no less – might have shared a lover with a Soviet spy raised shocking security concerns.

Rumours began circulating in Westminster in early 1963, prompting Profumo to make a personal statement to the House of Commons in which he categorically denied any impropriety. Within weeks, mounting evidence made that denial untenable. Profumo was forced to admit that he had conducted a sexual affair with Keeler and, crucially, that he had deliberately misled parliament.

He resigned immediately. That resignation helped to embed the expectation that lying to parliament or misleading the house would be widely accepted (though not entirely accepted) as a resigning matter.

The affair eroded confidence in the judgment and competence of Macmillan’s government, reinforcing simmering perceptions of moral decay and elite irresponsibility. Macmillan’s personal authority never fully recovered, and he resigned later in 1963, officially citing ill health.

• Read more | "We shall never surrender": 14 quotes that have defined the past century

12. The Jeremy Thorpe affair (1976–79)

In 1967, during Harold Wilson’s tenure as prime minister, homosexuality between consenting adults had been partially decriminalised in England and Wales. But well into the 1970s, parliament still clung to old expectations about private conduct.

Jeremy Thorpe was leader of the Liberal Party from 1967 and, for a time, one of the most prominent politicians outside the two leading parties. He was articulate, media-savvy, and played a key role in the closely fought general elections of 1974, when the Liberals briefly held the balance of power at Westminster.

But Thorpe had a secret that would quickly spiral out of control. Thorpe had met a man called Norman Scott (then known as Norman Josiffe) in the early 1960s, and the pair began a relationship. However, noting the damage that it would do to his political career if this secret relationship were to become public, Thorpe allegedly threatened Scott into silence. This escalated into a botched conspiracy to have Scott killed to ensure that the secret would never get out.

In 1975, Scott’s dog was shot by an associate of Thorpe who was sent to intimidate Scott. Scott himself was unharmed, but the incident triggered a police investigation.

Thorpe was charged in 1978 with conspiracy to murder. The trial, held at the Old Bailey, was followed with immense interest by the press. Thorpe denied the charges and was ultimately acquitted, but the damage was irreversible. He had already resigned as party leader, and his parliamentary career had effectively ended.

]]> How King John helped bring about a political miracle in medieval England https://www.historyextra.com/membership/england-politics-magna-carta-parliament-law-courts-taxation/ Wed, 07 Aug 2024 20:02:44 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/england-politics-magna-carta-parliament-law-courts-taxation/ From the historic moment that 'bad' King John was made to put his seal to Magna Carta to parliament, taxation and the law courts, the 13th and 14th centuries heralded many changes in England. In fact, Caroline Burt and Richard Partington explore how these changes laid the foundations for the modern British state Good. But could do better. That was the message that the English people conveyed to their all-conquering monarch at the height of the Hundred Years’ War. In 1358, England’s great warrior-king Edward III asked parliament if he should accept a peace treaty he’d negotiated with the French, following a series of dramatic military victories.

Parliament emphatically advised the king to fight again. Too much blood had been shed and too much treasure expended. The French, MPs declared, were not offering enough.

For Edward’s distant predecessor King John, such a scenario would have been unthinkable. Then, at the dawn of the 13th century, there was no notion of shared national enterprise around foreign policy. The English king’s lands in France were a matter for the king alone – not for the community of the realm expressing its will through parliament. The people, if they had been courageous enough to venture their opinions to John, would have been told – not so politely – to keep their noses out.

It was also unimaginable during John’s reign that other matters that parliament routinely considered in Edward III’s day – issues such as how much tax people paid, and the way in which law and justice was dispensed to the masses – might be a matter of nationwide debate.

English state transformed

Yet the 150 or so years between John’s reign and Edward’s victories over the French witnessed the utter transformation of the English state. This extraordinary period saw the introduction of a system of national taxation by consent, and the advent of the forum that approved that tax: parliament. It saw the legal system grow exponentially and a network of royal officers being appointed across the land.

It saw striking advances in military organisation, including the professionalisation of the army. And, of course, it saw the introduction of Magna Carta, which established the much-cherished principle that the king was subject to the same law as his subjects.

Today we think of the 13th and 14th centuries as a period of protracted warfare and plague. It was undoubtedly both those things. But it was also the period that laid the foundations for many elements of the English, and by extension British, state as we know it today. So why did this transformation happen? And who were the main drivers behind this change?

When John became king in 1199, it is doubtful that he gave any thought to these grand questions of statehood. That’s partly because the concept of the state as we know it did not exist. But it’s mainly because John had far more urgent concerns occupying his in-tray. He had to fend off a rival claim to the throne of England from his nephew Arthur, and he had to get to grips with a major assault launched by his great French rival, King Philip II.

English losses in France

Philip was determined to assert himself, and that meant seizing lands held in France by John. Those English possessions stretched far across France, from Normandy in the north to Aquitaine in the south-west – a block much larger than the territory directly controlled by the French king.

Unfortunately for John, Philip was not only hugely ambitious but also vastly capable, and in 1204 the French king seized the jewel in the English crown, Normandy, shortly followed by many of the other English territories in France.

The key moment in this English debacle was the loss of Château Gaillard, Richard the Lionheart’s extraordinary defensive system on the cliffs of the Seine at Les Andelys. Richard had declared that the walls of this mighty castle could hold out against the French even had they been made of butter. John’s manifold deficiencies as both a king and a military commander proved his older brother decisively wrong.

The loss of Normandy in 1204 was a shattering blow. But it was also a turning point in English history: for it prompted a chain reaction that would lead to Magna Carta. Determined to regain his territories, John returned to England to regroup. Over the following decade, he raised vastly more money in England than any of his predecessors, money he used to build continental alliances and fund a new military expedition to France.

• Read more | Was King John really that bad? Yes!

Funds flowed into the royal coffers through fines levied by the king on members of the nobility. These were extorted with threats, violence and the sale of justice to the highest bidder – and triggered a wave of resentment across the realm.

John is rightly seen as one of England’s cruellest kings. According to one chronicler, he violated the wives and daughters of his nobles; in the words of another, he roasted French prisoners of war on tripods and gridirons. The unfairness and brutality of all this was not lost on England’s barons, who, as the wealthiest subjects, bore the brunt of John’s impositions.

King John and Magna Carta

If the common law – which since 1166 had offered all men and women cheap access to royal justice – dictated that the barons could not abuse, bribe and extort their fellow countrymen without facing legal action, then why, they asked, should the king be allowed to do it?

And so, when John’s ambitions to regain lost territory came crashing down with military defeat in 1214, his opponents in England lost no time in demanding change. In Magna Carta, literally the ‘Great Charter’, they attempted to put an end, one by one, to all the questionable practices of their king. While John fought the rebels with all his might, his death in 1216, and the accession of his son as Henry III during a civil war that showed little sign of leading to any lasting settlement, meant that no government could hope to move forward in peace without compromise.

• Read more | Alternate history: what if Magna Carta hadn’t been written?

That compromise was the confirmation of Magna Carta. By placing kings under the same law as their subjects, Magna Carta made it impossible for future monarchs to raise money for war arbitrarily. Doing so would bring political crisis, as Henry III discovered when, in an echo of his father, he began to threaten the landed property of his barons.

It soon became abundantly clear that if the king wanted to defend his lands, he would have to find a new way of raising the money he required – one that involved accessing his subjects’ wealth in a legitimate manner. It was this imperative that led to the introduction of a national system of taxation by consent – and, in the 1230s, the emergence of the body that would grant (or refuse) such consent: parliament.

Birth of the English parliament

Parliament took its name from the French Parlement, ‘the place of discussion’, and true to that name, it soon became an arena for national debate on all areas of public policy. It was initially the exclusive domain of the very rich and powerful. But, by the end of the 13th century, a wider cross-section of the population was contributing to that debate.

In 1258, when political crisis erupted in the face of Henry III’s unpopular foreign and financial policies, demands were made that angry knights, as well as disaffected barons, should be represented. This broader social representation was extended again during the reign of Edward I. In the 14th century, parliament came to consist of Lords and Commons, just as it does today – the latter elected to represent all the localities in the country.

• Read more | “He was not a great king but he was respected as a most Christian one”: David Carpenter on Henry III

Under Edward, a partnership was established with parliament that led to repeated grants of taxation to support the king in wars in Wales, Scotland and France. This practice – of the crown co-opting the resources of the realm to royal military imperatives – led to a developing sense that foreign policy was not merely dynastic but national, in the interests of the entire country.

By the time Edward I’s grandson Edward III was striding across Europe with aplomb in the mid-14th century, his subjects in parliament were fully engaged in consultation with the king, his ministers and judges on all aspects of national government. National taxation, approved by parliament, produced predictable and reliable war finance that enabled England to professionalise its army under Edward I and particularly Edward III.

This enabled England to punch well above its weight internationally until the mid-15th century, most especially in the first half of the Hundred Years’ War with France. The battle of Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356 respectively saw the English destroy the French field army and capture the French king, John II.

At the naval battle of Sluys in 1340, thousands of French soldiers drowned, fleeing English men-at-arms and archers charging across their decks. This was the English realm in its military pomp, producing arguably the country’s most significant naval triumph until the battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

“How do we know that French knights are braver than English knights?” asked a jester of his master, the French king Philip VI, in the aftermath of Sluys. When Philip failed to provide an answer, the jester gave the sardonic reply: “Because English knights are afraid to jump into the sea.”

• Read more | 9 things you didn’t know about the history of parliament

England's legal system

Government, too, was growing increasingly sophisticated. The common law was in such demand that the courts struggled to keep up with the volume of business. The people of England were clearly hungry for the impartial, enforceable and centrally recorded justice provided by this ever-growing national legal system.

Kings added to the pressure themselves because they regularly commissioned nationwide enquiries into crime and corruption. Edward I created so much legislation during his 35-year-reign that he was later called the English Justinian, after the famous law-giving Roman emperor.

Such extensive legislating required a new professional cadre of judges, attorneys and justices of the peace. Government co-opted so many of the king’s subjects into its work that it is estimated that, by the mid-14th century, some 40 per cent of male house-holders were involved in some way – as sheriffs, jurors, constables, military recruiters, purveyors of supplies and tax collectors.

England was hardly alone in all of this. Rapidly evolving ideas about the authority of the king as lawgiver were mirrored across Europe. Monarchs from Louis IX of France to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II embarked upon vast legislative programmes. In Iberia, Alfonso X of Castile ordered the compilation of law codes into a document, La Siete Partidas, that remains celebrated today.

The 13th-century rediscovery in Europe of Aristotle’s work added another flavour to this. Influenced by the ancient Greek philosopher’s ideas, writers began to see government as a force for good, not simply a necessary evil. Kings and their subjects eagerly embraced these ideas, both to claim power and to demand accountability.

Yet not all nations experienced this thirst for power and accountability in the same way. In England, the quest for the common good was put under intense pressure by conflict and mass death. War in France and across the British Isles drove political change – and brought with it significant disorder.

In the early 14th century, during a break in hostilities, demobbed soldiers formed armed bands that marauded across England, leaving a trail of outrages in their wake. That prompted one of the biggest enquiries into crime that had yet taken place in England – the so-called ‘trailbaston’ commissions.

Black Death and Peasants’ Revolt

Pandemic also shattered society’s sense of security. The Black Death, which first hit England in 1348 and re-appeared in several waves, killed at least 40 per cent of the population, forcing government to intervene to regulate the labour market. The Statute of Labourers of 1351 sought to constrain wage growth and labour mobility, as workers exploited their scarcity to demand higher pay and move to better paid jobs.

Those in the upper echelons of society were clearly disturbed by this new thirst for social mobility. We can see this in the Sumptuary Law of 1363, which stipulated that the lower orders should not dress in clothes above their station. Such enforced restraint was hugely controversial, and the combination of a surprisingly buoyant economy and fierce opposition meant that the laws were widely ignored.

What no one could ignore, however, was the crisis that struck the economy in the early 1370s. The fall-out from the financial downturn – caused by a collapse in prices, for reasons historians do not fully understand – was long and ultimately bloody.

In the immediate aftermath, peasants experienced a double whammy of the sudden enforcement of earlier labouring legislation and the imposition of the first poll tax. Anger and resentment simmered away until, in 1381, they exploded in the popular uprising known as the Peasants’ Revolt.

It took the authorities just a few months to put down the revolt, but not before the rebels had chopped off the heads of two of the most powerful men in the land – the archbishop of Canterbury and the lord high treasurer – and reduced the Savoy Palace, John of Gaunt’s opulent residence on the Thames, to a smouldering ruin. At the height of the uprising, the king himself – Richard II – felt compelled to ride out to Smithfield to listen to the rebels’ demands.

• Read more | The Peasants’ Revolt: did Richard II side with the rebels?

Richard II survived his encounter with the peasants but it was a mere stay of execution. Like John before him, Richard was a weak, negligent and ultimately tyrannical ruler. And like John, his reign ended in ignominy, deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in 1399. Yet there was a crucial difference – one that signals just how far the tectonic plates of the English state had shifted over the two centuries between the reigns of these hapless rulers.

John’s downfall occurred in the midst of a chaotic war in which a tiny cadre of the most powerful men in the land sought to limit the power of the king on behalf of ‘the community of the realm’. When Bolingbroke ousted Richard II, he presented deposition articles for the approval of a packed parliament of Lords and Commons gathered from across the kingdom.

Where John had failed his dynasty, Richard had failed the entire English nation.

Caroline Burt and Richard Partington are medieval historians at the University of Cambridge, and the authors of Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State (Faber & Faber, 2024)

This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> “A eulogy to the cult of chivalry”: what can Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tell us about Edward III and the Hundred Years’ War? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/green-knight-eulogy-chivalry-hundred-years-war-propaganda/ Fri, 30 Jul 2021 10:05:34 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/green-knight-eulogy-chivalry-hundred-years-war-propaganda/ The chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the great Arthurian stories. But it’s also one that reflects the ideals of Edward III’s England during the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War, writes historian Helen Carr “A time when honour was everything,” begins the trailer for the 2021 film The Green Knight. The movie is based on perhaps the greatest chivalric poem of the Middle Ages, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, produced in the second half of the 14th century (c1370–1400) by an anonymous author from the north-west of England — probably around Cheshire.

The history of the original manuscript is as obscure as its author, first appearing in the records in the late-16th­ to early-17th century under the ownership of a Yorkshire landowner, Henry Savile of Banke. A century later it formed part of the collection of Sir Robert Cotton, a well-known antiquarian collector whose collection famously included the Lindisfarne Gospels and the only surviving manuscript of Beowulf. Despite belonging to Cotton’s inimitable collection, the manuscript gathered dust in Ashburnham House in London (an original home for manuscripts preceding the British Library) until it was unearthed from the archive, examined and deemed a masterpiece of medieval romance literature.

It is likely that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written roughly around the same time as Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but where Chaucer focuses on the feudal social model of the 14th century — the Knight, the Plowman and the Parson; warrior, worker, worshipper — Gawain is rooted in myth, romance and morality. It is also an adventure story written to captivate an audience and illustrate the plight of the noble knight.

In the 2021 movie, Gawain confesses to Bertilak de Hautdesert: “Honour. That is why a knight does what he does,” Honour is a pervading theme throughout Gawain, but it was also imbued within both courtly and martial spaces in the 14th century.

Honour was an integral part of chivalry: an art form, and moral code of conduct for an aristocrat and a warrior. Chivalry was the ‘ethical’ component of war, a pious code that would meet the approval of God, demanding honour, valour, courtesy, mercy and piety, coupled with an almighty set of skills on the battlefield. In the 14th century, chivalry was popularised, aggrandised and performed with ceremony.

At the height of Edward III’s reign, in the 1340s–60s, during the peak of the first stage of the Hundred Years’ War, chivalry was adopted by Edward III not only as a moral code he expected his knights to stand by, but as propaganda: to unify of Englishmen under one cause — war.

In a similar manner to the nationalist, patriotic posters of the First and Second World War eras – Your Country Needs You! – Edward III adopted chivalry and honour to propagandise his war of succession in France. Part of this propagandist programme was adopting popular national figures from myth: virtuous warriors who fought with courage and honour, the legendary King Arthur and the pious but mighty warrior Saint George. The figure Edward personally sought to emulate was Arthur, even modelling Windsor Castle, his favourite home, on the mystical Camelot, investing heavily in its renovation which included founding Saint George’s Chapel.

Edward III’s Arthurian ideals

King Arthur is a key character in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the story begins at Camelot with a scene of feasting, dancing, ladies, wealth and luxury, a common trope in medieval courtly love prose:

With all the meat and mirth that men might well devise

Right glorious was the glee that rang in riotous wise
(Verse III, IX- X)

The scene opens at Christmas, the most celebrated Christian festival in the Late Middle Ages, and King Arthur is feasting with his court on New Year’s Eve and hearing carols with his famous knights at the Round Table. As the feast is laid out Arthur refuses to be seated until someone can entertain him with a tale: a “marvel”, setting the precedent for the narrative to unfurl.

In a moment of high drama, an uninvited guest bursts into the hall, a “champion, fierce and fell” holding an axe. This intruder — the Green Knight — is a warrior. Tall, lean and muscular in stature and obscurely, “overall was green”. He comes with a challenge for Arthur and his knights: a beheading game.

Sir Gawain seizes the opportunity to prove his worth and accepts the Knight’s challenge. Gawain decapitates the Knight, however the Knight unexpectedly retrieves his head as it rolls before him, turning to Gawain with the line “on the New Year’s morn’ I pledge me to repay”. A year and a day from this moment, Gawain is told by the Knight that he will repay the beheading.

Gawain is then faced with a choice. He can keep his date with destiny – “the New Year’s morn” – which is likely the day of his death, or he can break his word and keep his life but lose his honour.

Keeping faith with the code of chivalry and honour Gawain chooses to meet his destiny. He sets off on a full-calendar-year-long mission where he faces giants, monsters, enemies, and the bitter elements as he treks closer to the Green Knight who awaits his arrival.

A work of Arthurian propaganda?

Like most mythical heroes, Gawain survives the Green Knight (with the help of a little magic) and returns to Camelot and to Arthur, but it is the anchoring of Gawain’s character in the chivalric code: honour, courage and faith in God’s mercy that speaks of the days of Edward III and his drive for war with France.

In 1346, England won the most famous victory of the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War at the battle of Crécy. The Black Prince, eldest son of King Edward III, plucked three feathers from the helmet of the slain John of Bohemia and adopted them as his part of his heraldry; he was only 16, but it was this battle that propagated his reputation as the greatest prince and young warrior in Europe. Edward III was determined to immortalise the victory by binding it to the chivalric code of conduct and to the myth of Arthur, who he already idolised.

In February 1344, two years before Crécy, Edward III held a royal tournament at Windsor where he announced his intention to form a “Round Table… in the same condition as Arthur, formerly king of England, established it”. After Crécy, in February 1348 came a series of tournaments spanning five months that celebrated the victory. These were spectacular, elaborate and boastful, with no expense spared.

At a tournament in June Edward appeared wearing red robes emblazoned with twelve embroidered garters. Shortly afterwards he formalised his commitment to the chivalric code and its marital ideals by founding the Order of the Garter at Windsor Castle — his ‘Camelot’. The Order was an elitist fraternity representing chivalry, valour and high military command. It was also a deliberate parallel to Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

Of course, the concept of chivalry is riddled with paradoxes. Though Edward III glorified war and conquest as a noble venture celebrated through tilts, jousts, mêlées and the Order of the Garter, the realities of war are brutal, bloody and inhumane. War feeds off the worst parts of humankind: cruelty, greed, lust. Chivalry celebrates the best: mercy, courage, piety. War and chivalry, despite being deeply interwoven in medieval martial standards, set men up to fail at their quest in the same way that Gawain fails at his when his deeply human fallibility is exposed on multiple occasions throughout his year long journey to meet the Green Knight and his fate.

Chivalry and the English national identity

Edward III’s construction of chivalry as part of England’s national identity was a great high in England before a great low. As thousands attended jousts and mock tilts, as they celebrated and glorified knighthood and its celebrities, a great enemy approached England that sword and steel could not defeat. The Black Death arrived in the same year that Edward established the Order of the Garter, and killed up to 50 per cent of the English population. In the first wave, it killed largely men: the able-bodied plebeian fighting force that Edward sought to inspire to fight for his vision for continental power.

After the Black Death had passed, people cracked open the doors of their homes and released the ghosts of their loved ones and the grief that shrouded them. England began to recover and rebuild, but there was little space to glorify chivalry in the same hedonistic fashion as had existed prior to the plague. War continued, and in the 1350s Edward III mustered another army to lead into France in a final attempt to claim the French throne.

His campaign was a failure; literally a wash out as the elements unleashed their fury on the English Army in France as rain and hail destroyed his baggage train and supplies. The Black Prince however, in an earlier and more successful campaign, led his men — soldiers largely mustered from the north-west of England, the location of Gawain’s author — into battle and victory at the battle of Poitiers, where he captured the French king as a prisoner.

The success at Poitiers solidified the Black Prince’s celebrity status and his victorious procession back into London was nothing short of a chivalric circus. However, it was short lived. The Black Prince – who represented the “flower of chivalry” to chronicler Froissart, and to his biographer Chandos Herald, “the perfect root of all honour and nobleness, of wisdom, valour and largesse” – went to rule his own court in Aquitaine, the English power base in France. He became terminally ill, possibly with bowel cancer, after a final campaign in Castile. In 1370, crippled with sickness, he returned to England to recover and in 1376 he passed away. A year later the Black Prince was followed to the grave by his father, Edward III.

A lingering ode to chivalry

With Edward III’s death, the drive for chivalry and martial glory died with him, for his successor, Richard II – the Black Prince’s son, who came to throne at the age of 10 – would have a different idea of ruling England.

In the later 1370s, Richard’s interest and investment in the arts supported a mini Renaissance in England. This was seen in developing art and architecture, but most clearly in court culture and the literary trend for poems and prose in the vernacular. Where it was once popular to speak French at court, the English language began to gain favour amongst the elite. Given the poem’s alliterative style – which Poet Laureate Simon Armitage calls its “warp and weft” – it’s possible that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was produced around this time with the intention being orated, used to entertain a court in the same manner as Arthur wishes to be entertained at the beginning of the tale.

It is unknown who commissioned the poem, or who the author is. However the epic narrative, bound to Arthurian legend, celebrates chivalric qualities defended in the middle of the century: morality, courage and honour. All of this harks back to Edward III, Arthurian propaganda and the promotion of chivalry as a national incentive prompting every Englishman to see himself as a solider.

It is tempting to imagine the poem being performed in a wash of candlelight, captivating members of a north-west aristocratic household as they imagine Gawain’s plight. But what feels clear to me is that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is not only a form of entertainment, bound up in the trend for English verse in the late 14th century, but it is a eulogy to the dying cult of chivalry reminiscent of the age of Edward III and the Black Prince. It is an ode to chivalry, honour and the fallibility of mankind that transcends centuries and has the power to bewitch and inspire an audience even in the 21st century.

Want to read more about King Arthur and Arthurian legends? Here are some of our most popular articles...

• The Green Knight on screen: what can we expect from the retelling of an Arthurian epic?
• How much of the story of King Arthur is true? There's just one incident we can be sure of...

This content was first published by HistoryExtra in 2021

]]> Medieval(ish) matters #15: What's lurking in the background of medieval maps? And what did medieval people really know about the wider world? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/medieval-maps-what-did-people-know-about-world/ Sat, 25 Jul 2020 11:00:52 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/medieval-maps-what-did-people-know-about-world/ HistoryExtra content director Dr David Musgrove gets the lowdown on the latest research into the Gough Map and the Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi to find out what they tell us about medieval English aspirations on the world stage Consider maps, and you likely think of them as tools to get from A to B without the inconvenience of getting lost. You might not dwell on any underlying political context to your cartography. So, let’s talk about medieval maps.

I had a fascinating chat the other day with Dr Catherine Delano-Smith, who is heading up the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Understanding the medieval Gough Map through physics, chemistry and history’. You can follow the project's work through its splendidly droll twitter feed.

The Gough Map (named after the 18th-century antiquarian Richard Gough, who purchased the map and bequeathed it to the Bodleian Library) is one of the most important medieval maps. It shows Britain, with a somewhat different – but recognisable – outline from that on modern maps, and lots of interesting details of towns, rivers and other features. It is large (around 55 by 116 centimetres) and fills two pieces of sheepskin parchment.

Under the sheep skin

Dr Delano-Smith’s collaborative project is an interdisciplinary effort to get under the (sheep) skin of the map. Various scientific tests on the map have been carried out, including an instructive 3D scan, which sheds light on the pin-holes that seem to have been used to prick outlines of prominent places or buildings. These pin-holes were noticed in the 19th century, but the scanning work has enabled a better understanding of what they are about:

“We have come to the conclusion that the pinholes are likely to relate to the first production of the map and that they record a hitherto unknown, arguably unorthodox, form of transferring information onto the map by means of replicating a template, although not every place marked on the map has associated pinholes; many were just inserted into an appropriate space,” noted Dr Delano-Smith in the 2017 article New Light on the Medieval Gough Map of Britain (Imago Mundi 69).

The research team has further established that the map is an amalgamation of three successive layers of work: layer one shows the whole of Britain from Scotland to the English Channel; layer two is a reworking of that map south of Hadrian’s Wall; and layer three is a re-inking of place-names in the south-eastern/central quadrant of England.

That’s the general stratigraphy of the map, and it looks like these reworkings took place over the course of a century or so, but dating is difficult, as Dr Delano-Smith explains: “It is such a hotch-potch that it's very difficult to work out precisely. On the whole, the map seems to come from the decades just before and just after c1400, with some later additions.”

Fossilised features

The pinholes, it’s proposed, reflect the copying of a now lost proto-map from the reign of Edward III – which itself probably incorporated some information dating back to Edward I – onto which new material was added in the second half of the 14th century and later. In this way, it could be said that the map we see today contains a number of fossilised features, making the chronology the map represents all the more tricky to disentangle. Wales, for example, did not attract much interest from the English crown after c1300, while for Edwards I to III, Scotland was arguably the overriding political concern up to 1335 as they tried to make good the English claim, conducting a number of campaigns. All sorts of events and interests, though, might account for a particular place being marked on the map.

So it is the complex political context of that period in British history that’s going to be an area of focus for the Gough Map project team now. Certainly it seems that the map had a long working life, though exactly what it was used for, and by whom, is still very much a matter for research.

Useless for getting from A to B

*“*One thing to squash is the idea that it's a map for travelling or a map with pilgrimage routes. If you've got places on a map, you can always work out the general direction in which your destination lies and create an itinerary -assuming the places are shown in correct spatial order – but until modern times, for finding the way as you rode or walked you relied on local information gained stage by stage. In fact, travellers would have found the Gough Map useless both for way-planning and way-finding. It’s hopelessly inaccurate in that respect," says Dr Delano-Smith.

This leaves the question of what the map was for. If it was used by different people over a long period of time, it could of course have had various purposes to match their particular interests. At present Dr Delano-Smith does wonder if it might have fulfilled the role of an office document of some sort. Something to use and be referred to by the growing body of bureaucrats and administrators working within the apparatus of government in England.

It certainly shows evidence of wear and tear from being rolled and unrolled over the years, and of being pored over: as “Over the years readers and users of the map […] looked at it from the same side," the 2017 article notes, "their garments gradually rubbed out the markings in southwest England and Wales to illegibility and occasionally invisibility.”

One line of thought that Dr Delano-Smith’s team is considering at the moment, as she is going to outline more fully in a forthcoming article, is that it might be more profitable to attempt to assess the map’s usefulness as a strategic document connected to the crown’s need, at a time of heightened military and economic pressure, to move resources about the kingdom on an unprecedented scale.

Wondering about Hadrian's Wall

It’s interesting that the line of Hadrian’s Wall is described on the Gough Map as the Pict’s Wall. As Dr Delano-Smith points out, this name was taken, like the crenellated line itself, from one of Matthew Paris’s maps of Britain (c1250). But as I was looking at that, I was reminded of a conversation I’ve had recently on our podcast with Professor Gordon Noble and Dr Nick Evans about the Picts. In that podcast, we talked about the phasing out of Pictish language and identity in the ninth century AD, so I was curious about why this wording was still in play several hundred years later, and I dropped Dr Evans an email to ask him if this might be some sort of slight from an English scribe.

It appears, though, that the association of the Roman walls in Northumbria with the Pictish inhabitants to the north had a long history. The name could have come, Dr Evans explained, from “late Roman writers and Bede, who attributed the building of the Roman walls to Septimius Severus, although I don't think the Picts were specified as their enemies”, as well as from “Gildas's De Excidio Brittanniae, which had both walls being built against the Picts by the Romans near the end of Roman Britain".

From these texts, Evans adds, "the idea went into ‘Historia Brittonum’, which got a relatively wide circulation in England and the Continent from about 1100 onwards. In addition, in the 12th century, the Gaels of Galloway sometimes were called Picts (for instance in Aelred of Rievaulx's account of the battle of the Standard in 1138), and were regarded as savages.”

The Anglo-Saxon world map

One way or the other, the Gough Map is a map with a possible political context. Another is the Anglo-Saxon world map, otherwise known as the Cotton map from its location in the British Library, where it is preserved in MS Cotton Tiberius B.v. It’s thought to date from 1020–1050, and to have been produced in England (in Canterbury perhaps) in the reign of King Cnut or his successors. As the British Library description notes, this world map “contains the earliest known, relatively realistic depiction of the British Isles, seen in the bottom left hand corner of this map”. At the top of the rectangular, full-page map, we see the east of the inhabited world, and a lion standing over part of Asia. The ocean surrounds the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa.

Incidentally, this rather splendid map has just won the Twitter 'world cup of maps', in a bit of fun orchestrated by the British Library on social media.

View oEmbed on the source website

I noticed that Dr Helen Appleton at Balliol College, Oxford, has written an interesting analysis of this map recently in her article The northern world of the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi (Anglo-Saxon England, v47), so I dropped her a line to talk about it. She explained to me that it’s an outlier in the tradition of medieval mappae mundi (maps of the world), for the simple fact that it’s earlier than most of the others (the famous Hereford Mappa Mundi is dated to c1300 for instance). Also, however, it differs in content: “In most of the later larger mappae mundi, you will have an episode from the life of Christ somewhere in the map. So you'll get the crucifixion or maybe the nativity shown. And so there's a very obvious Christian overlay on world history that's being presented visually by the map, and this map doesn't do that. So compared to these other maps, it's very unusual. But on the other hand, it's a couple of hundred years earlier than them. So it may be representative of its time.”

What it does do is pay particular attention to the British Isles, as Dr Appleton points out in her article: “The Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi is notably rather independent of other cartographic traditions. In particular, it is unusually accurate concerning the shape and inhabitants of Northwestern Europe and offers an exceptionally exact depiction of the British Isles – not until the 13th-century work of Matthew Paris is a better representation made."

Anglo-Saxon interests

So why is that? Dr Appleton has carried out a detailed inspection of what’s in the map and concluded that “the geography represented on the Anglo-Saxon Map can be seen as an expression of later-Anglo-Saxon interests in the arrangement of space and power”. She sees the map as “the product of an island culture keen to emphasize its connections to Rome, its place in the history of empires, and its links to the rest of the world. The Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi is a fundamentally outward looking document, albeit one that declares its vantage point to be in the north-west. The place of Britain on the map asserts its prominence; it occupies the north-western corner of the map, surrounded by sea, rather than squashed against the boundary, as it is on later maps such as the Hereford mappa mundi.”

So this is where the political context comes in again, and once more it relates to a fossilisation of political ideas from an earlier proto-map. Dr Appleton continues: “I'm arguing that the map, as we have it, is almost certainly a copy of a larger map. And so I was trying to think about when and where and why the larger map would have been produced. So I looked at the history of cartography and how and why maps were used in Europe in the early medieval period. And they very much associated with political power and ideas of control.

"So it made sense to think about the 10th century in England as a kind of logical place for production, because we know that you've got the kings Edward the Elder and Æthelstan. They were very politically ambitious rulers who were wanting to assert England's place at a moment of decline in power of the Carolingian empire. This creates an opportunity to become more politically influential," continues Dr Appleton.

"We know that Athelstan was acquiring a lot of material associated with Charlemagne and the Carolingians, and imitating that sort of mapping is a kind of statement of imperial power. It's pretty speculative, and unprovable, but it would be a logical point really.”

Two maps, two different expressions – perhaps of English attempts to have more of a standing on the world stage.

Silk Route of the Sea

As an addendum, it just so happens that I’ve been talking to Professor David Abulafia recently for the HistoryExtra podcast about his Wolfson Prize-winning book The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans, and particularly the connections engendered by oceanic travel and communication in the earlier medieval period. Looking at a map like the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi, produced in England but showing the world, it does make one wonder how far someone living in Europe or the Middle East in the Middle Ages would have known about China and the East, the places that feature on the top of the map. I asked Professor Abulafia precisely that, and you can listen to the podcast to hear his reply to that, and his evocative description of the Silk Route of the Sea.

David Musgrove is content director at HistoryExtra. He tweets @DJMusgrove. Read the full medieval matters blog series here

]]> How did Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III, become one of medieval England’s best-loved queens? https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/philippa-of-hainault-england-best-favourite-queen-edward-iii/ Tue, 23 Jun 2020 13:51:32 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/philippa-of-hainault-england-best-favourite-queen-edward-iii/ She was married as a teenager to a near-stranger in exchange for military aid. But Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III, survived and prospered to become one of the most beloved English royals of the medieval era, says Kathryn Warner... On 24 September 1326 Isabella of France, the estranged queen of Edward II, landed on the Suffolk coast. She arrived at the head of a force of 1,500 mercenaries, there to enforce her audacious plan to take the English throne from her husband in favour of the couple’s son, Edward of Windsor, the future Edward III. She had also sworn to destroy her husband’s powerful, detested and despotic chamberlain, Hugh Despenser the Younger.

Isabella succeeded. Within two months, a man the king had elevated to the status of his co-ruler had been executed – a term that hardly does justice to the grotesque humiliations he endured on the day of his death. Despenser was dragged through Hereford by horses, hanged, cut down, disembowelled, castrated and finally beheaded. In January 1327, meanwhile, Edward II was forced to abdicate and probably followed Despenser to the grave at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire in September 1327 – though almost certainly not via the red-hot poker of legend.

But there was a price to be paid for mounting this coup, both in hard coin and in human terms. Isabella had come to an agreement with Willem, Count of Hainault (in modern-day Belgium), Holland, and Zeeland in the Netherlands. In return for the count aiding her invasion financially, Isabella promised that her son Edward would marry Willem’s third and eldest unmarried daughter, 12-year-old Philippa of Hainault, and that the girl would become the Queen of England.

Philippa was, in effect, exchanged for ships and soldiers so that her mother-in-law could invade England – the most unromantic beginning to a marriage imaginable. To make the girl’s situation even more undignified, when Isabella requested a dispensation from Pope John XXII for Philippa and Edward of Windsor to marry, she referred to Philippa merely as “a daughter of the count of Hainault” and did not even use her given name.

A “much spoken-of marriage”

Yet despite this unpromising start, it is beyond doubt that Philippa of Hainault and Edward III formed one of the great royal marriages of the Middle Ages, and that Philippa went on to become one of the most beloved and successful queens in English history. So who was Philippa, and how did this teenage bride grow up to make such a success of her situation?

Her family connections reveal someone at the heart of Europe’s aristocracy. She was born around February 1314, probably in her father’s capital of Valenciennes. Her mother was Jeanne de Valois, the sister of King Philip VI, the first of the Valois dynasty, who ruled France from 1328–1589. Philippa’s younger brother, Willem, was their father’s successor as Count of Hainault, Holland and Zeeland.

• The 10 best English queens in history
• Eleanor of Aquitaine: the medieval queen who took on Europe’s most powerful men

Philippa arrived in England at Christmas 1327, 11 months after the forced abdication of Edward II and several days after his funeral in Gloucester. On 25 January 1328, she married Edward III in York. He was 15 and she was almost 14. After the turbulent years of Edward II’s disastrous reign, the people of England looked forward to a brighter future, and there are references in Exchequer records to Philippa and Edward III’s “much spoken-of marriage”.

But the first few years of the young queen’s life in England were difficult. Her mother- in-law, Isabella, and Isabella’s favourite and suspected lover, Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, dominated the government. Controlling the royal purse strings, they treated the king and queen in a way the young couple found suffocating and infantilising. The queen mother refused to cede any ground to her daughter-in-law, and Philippa was neither crowned nor granted any lands or independent income until February 1330. Indeed, Philippa hardly appears in the records during Isabella and Mortimer’s regime.

Despite these slights, the relationship was flourishing. Edward III had found in his wife a loving, supportive partner. After a 16-year-old Philippa gave birth to their first child, Edward of Woodstock (later known as the Black Prince), on 15 June 1330, the teenage king found the courage and will to overthrow his mother and to have the detested Roger Mortimer executed – hanged at Tyburn, where his body was left to swing for two days and two nights. Edward’s mother was held under house arrest and relieved of the vast estates and income she’d granted herself, then pushed aside to enjoy a lengthy and pampered retirement until her death in 1358. Edward had taken control of his kingdom. This, in turn, meant that in late 1330, almost three years after her wedding, Philippa of Hainault finally became queen in more than name.

She learned from her mother-in-law’s mistakes. Isabella of France wielded power to which she was not entitled, but Philippa acted more discreetly and within a more conventional framework, and cleverly exercised a considerable measure of influence. For four decades, she regularly interceded to her husband on behalf of others, opened parliament when the king was absent overseas, and helped to negotiate her children’s marriages to benefit both her children themselves and her husband’s foreign policy.

• Isabella of France: the rebel queen

She was less adept at handling money. After Isabella kept her son and daughter-in-law humiliatingly short of cash during the couple’s regency, Philippa went rather too far in the opposite direction. She spent huge sums on lavish garments and jewels, so much so that one chronicler commented sarcastically on “King Edward and Queen Philippa, who first invented clothes”. Philippa accrued enormous debts, and by 1360 owed almost £6,000 – a few million in modern terms – to tailors, furriers, embroiderers and jewellers.

In fairness, she used much of her huge expenditure to promote her husband’s vision of regal magnificence – medieval royals were expected to live extravagantly and to look the part. The queen also gave generously to charity: she was the patron of the hospital of St Katherine near the Tower of London, and in 1341 her almoner founded the Queen’s College at Oxford University in her honour.

Family showdown

In Edward’s dealings with continental powers, Philippa was called on to side with her husband against members of her mother’s family after he claimed the French throne in 1337. Edward’s argument was that, as the only surviving grandson of Philip IV, he had a better right to the throne of France than its incumbent, Philippa’s uncle Philip of Valois. Philip had become Philip VI of France in 1328 when his cousin Charles IV died without leaving a son and heir.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the various claims, the scene was set for decades of conflict between Philippa’s husband and uncle – the first phase of what would become known as the Hundred Years’ War. At the battle of Crécy in 1346 – a great victory for her husband and their 16-year-old eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, over the French – Philippa’s uncle the Count of Alençon and her cousins the King of Bohemia and the Count of Blois were among those killed.

• Listen | Historian Rémy Ambühl discuss his new research into the fate of captives during the era of the Hundred Years’ War

It is beyond doubt that Philippa faithfully supported her husband, and in 1338 she sent a minstrel to Paris to “investigate secretly the actions of Lord Philip de Valois” for 40 days. Minstrels aroused little suspicion as they routinely travelled all over Europe, so sending one to spy on her uncle’s movements was a shrewd choice, while Philippa’s refusal to recognise Philip as King of France reveals where her loyalties lay.

In the wake of Crécy, Edward III led an 11-month siege of the French-held port of Calais, and Philippa stayed with her husband and some of their children nearby. Calais finally surrendered in August 1347, and two chroniclers relate what happened next. The king, furious with the townspeople for resisting him, decided to have the mayor of Calais and five other burghers beheaded in revenge, and none of his advisers was able to dissuade him. It fell to Queen Philippa, in the most famous individual incident in her life, to kneel before her husband and to implore him, “for love of Our Lady’s son”, to show them mercy. Moved by her passionate entreaties, Edward relented and spared the men’s lives.

It’s worth noting that this famous tale – narrated by chroniclers Jean le Bel and Jean Froissart – may not be accurate. (They claim the queen was “heavily pregnant” at the time, which she was not.) Although Philippa did often persuade Edward to help others and had a kind, compassionate personality, it is likely she did not genuinely save the burghers’ lives but that Edward had already decided to spare them and, with Philippa’s help, created a piece of theatre to showcase his clemency to an impressed public. As the story is still told even today, the royals’ ruse clearly worked.

A hands-on mother

In siding with her husband over the French succession, Philippa showed that family was central to her life. Her 41-year marriage to Edward proved a fertile one, producing a dozen children between June 1330 and January 1355. Five of their seven sons survived infancy, and the couple inadvertently brought about the Wars of the Roses in the 15th century as their descendants battled for the English throne. The queen was a loving mother to all her children and created a happy family environment. The couple’s fecundity stood in sharp contrast to that of their grandson Richard II, Edward’s successor on the throne, whose marriage to Anne of Bohemia produced no children.

Edward of Woodstock, as heir to the throne, lived in his own household almost from birth, but in November 1342 Edward III granted custody of their younger children to Philippa herself. In an age when the nurture of royal and noble children was almost always outsourced to others, Philippa’s desire to take charge of her children’s upbringing and education stands out. Her fifth son, Edmund of Langley, remained in her custody until he was 13, a long time in an era when high-ranking boys were sent to other households at age seven or earlier, while Philippa’s eldest daughter, Isabella of Woodstock, still lived with her mother in 1351 when she was 19, and perhaps later.

• Listen | Richard Barber describe the life and career of one of England's most successful medieval kings, Edward III

Philippa also often demonstrated her affection and concern for her children’s spouses – for example by looking after Blanche of Lancaster, the wife of her fourth son, John of Gaunt, during Blanche’s first pregnancy in 1359–60. Unlike many other medieval English kings, Edward III retained the love and steadfast loyalty of all his sons until his death, and Philippa, by raising her children in a loving environment and teaching them to respect and admire their father, was to a great extent responsible. Sadly, though, she experienced much bereavement, outliving seven of her 12 children, including all but one of her five daughters.

• Don’t forget the spare heirs, plus 7 other tips for raising successful royal children
• What was Queen Victoria like as a mother and did she really hate being pregnant?

The end of Philippa’s reign came prematurely. She fell from her horse while hunting in 1358 and broke her shoulder blade. She spent the remaining 11 years of her life in considerable pain and often immobile. Despite this, she retained her desire to participate in her husband’s government, and Edward retained his trust in her abilities.

In December 1368, eight months before her death, the queen sent an envoy to Flanders to negotiate a marriage between the recently widowed John of Gaunt and the Count of Flanders’ daughter and heir, Margaret. Even though her efforts were not successful – Margaret of Flanders was already betrothed to the Duke of Burgundy – the count’s courteous reply to Philippa tellingly conveys his genuine respect for the queen.

Philippa died at Windsor Castle, her husband’s birthplace, on 15 August 1369, aged 55. Her husband and their youngest child, the 14-year-old Thomas of Woodstock, remained with her until the end. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, where her effigy can still be seen, on 9 January 1370, and the solemnities lasted six days. King Edward, who had taken a mistress, Alice Perrers, for the last few years of his wife’s life when Philippa was ill and often unable to move, outlived her by eight years, and was succeeded by their 10-year-old grandson, Edward of Woodstock’s son, Richard II, in June 1377.

The fact that Richard would be deposed by his cousin, Henry IV, only emphasises England’s comparative stability during Edward’s 50-year reign. Philippa of Hainault played a key role in this, as contemporaries acknowledged. The St Albans chronicler Thomas Walsingham called Philippa of Hainault “the most noble woman”, while Froissart wrote that she was “the most courteous, noble and liberal queen that ever reigned”. The chancellor of England stated: “No Christian king or other lord in the world ever had so noble and gracious a lady for his wife as our lord the king has had.” The girl who was exchanged for ships and soldiers had overcome the odds and blossomed into one of England’s finest and best-loved queens.

Kathryn Warner is a historian and the author of Philippa of Hainault: Mother of the English Nation (Amberley Publishing, 2019)

This article was originally published in the January 2020 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> The Good Parliament of 1376: Crown v Commons https://www.historyextra.com/membership/good-parliament-john-gaunt-clash-commons/ Mon, 28 Oct 2019 10:37:33 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/good-parliament-john-gaunt-clash-commons/ Many will know of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which saw violent demonstrations against the crown. But the seeds of discontent were sown five years earlier in the Good Parliament of 1376, says historian Helen Carr. Writing for HistoryExtra, she examines how Edward III’s third son, John of Gaunt, clashed with the will of the Commons… In 1381, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster was not a popular man. The third son of the deceased Edward III and the uncle of the current king, the 14-year-old Richard II, he was a prince as well as a politician and wealthy magnate, and he had many enemies. That summer, John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace – the “fairest manor in the kingdom” – was destroyed by furious rebels during the Peasants’ Revolt, in which a vast rebel army ransacked the Tower of London, burned palaces and murdered government officials.

The uprising demonstrated the hatred that people felt towards John of Gaunt – regarded as the manipulative, scheming, usurping uncle of King Richard II – and no other royal figure was targeted in such a manner. But to understand his unpopularity fully, we perhaps need to go back to one of the most significant moments in domestic politics of the 14th century: the Good Parliament in 1376.

• Why did the peasants really revolt?
• 10 dangers of the medieval period

A crown losing control

By 1376, Edward III’s long reign was beginning to draw to a close. The king had begun a war with France and won a significant amount of land and property. Throughout his reign, he was vivacious, ambitious and politically astute; however, in later life he had begun to lose control of his hard-won lands in France and had seemingly given up on ruling the country as he once had. Now, his attentions were largely occupied with his mistress, the “unscrupulous whore” Alice Perrers, a lady-in-waiting of his dead queen, Philippa of Hainault.

• 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about the houses of Lancaster and York
• Royal sibling rivalry: Henry VIII, Richard III and other monarchs whose fate was determined by their brothers and sisters

King Edward’s son and heir, Edward the ‘Black Prince’, was ravaged by illness, and mostly kept himself away from the politics at court. He spent most of his time at his palace in Kennington with his wife, Princess Joan, and his own son and heir, Richard. This left the king’s third son, John of Gaunt, [the king’s second son, Lionel, had died in 1368] as the true authority, acting as a go-between for the king and his council. The king, once revered and celebrated, had become something of a liability –and so, by 1376, tensions were high in anticipation of a catalogue of grievances from the Commons.

On 28 April, parliament – made up of two factions: the knights and burgesses (the lower chamber) and the lords and clergy (the upper chamber) – gathered in the King’s Chamber at Westminster Palace. Edward III soon made himself scarce, for he was acutely aware of the tension that had come to surface, and that would be directed his way. Instead of facing the inevitable backlash over his actions and those of his councillors, he left John of Gaunt as his representative, as “lieutenant of the king to hold parliament”. In his narrative poem Piers Plowman, writer William Langland characterises Gaunt as “the cat of the court”, echoing the popular belief that he was devious, self-interested and untrustworthy. This parliament would prove to be a test of his loyalty to the crown, his family and his diplomacy. With all of these factors at odds with each other, he was doomed to make enemies.

King’s advisors accused

After the opening session of parliament, members were reminded of their duty; essentially, to assist the king in his war against the French. The Commons were then separated from the Lords and were given the chapter house at Westminster Abbey to conduct their discussions. The lords and clergy were granted the White Chamber.

The Commons concluded that, had the king not been so poorly advised, he would not have come to be in such a compromised financial position that he needed further funding for his campaigns. All eyes were quickly turned to his closest advisors, those they considered deceitful, corrupt and a bad influence.

In order to represent their views, the Commons chose the best man they could think of among them, a figure who would be able to withstand the intense pressure and scrutiny exerted by the nobility. They chose Peter de la Mare, a Knight of the Shire for Herefordshire and a steward for the Earl of March. Peter de la Mare became the first ever speaker of the House of Commons.

The Commons made their way from the Chapter House at Westminster to the palace, where the general assembly was to be held. When they arrived, they were shocked to discover that the ageing king was nowhere to be seen, but in his place sat John of Gaunt. Nonetheless, Peter de la Mare did not lose his nerve and stepped forward to accuse four of the king’s closest advisors of crimes against the crown. William Latimer, the king’s chamberlain; John Neville of Raby, the steward of the household; and Richard Lyons, warden of the mint, were all accused of deceit and fiddling with the crown’s finances. In addition to this, the king’s mistress, Alice Perrers, was accused of extracting a shocking sum from the king’s purse.

Latimer and Lyons were blamed for selling illegal shipping licences to merchants, as well as taking a cut of loans arranged between the crown and the Exchequer. More seriously, however, they were accused of committing war crimes in France by plundering land and conspiring with the French, actions that would result in loss of English territory. The last accusation caused such a consternation in parliament that the accused – William Latimer – was challenged by a knight who had once owned part of the land that Latimer had lost in France.

Initially, Gaunt tried to cooperate with the Commons, adhering to their requests and grievances. He agreed to the imprisonment of Lyons; the stripping of land and title from Latimer; and the exile of Alice Perrers. However, the proceedings in parliament had spilled from Westminster and had attracted public attention. The king’s relationship with Alice Perrers became a source of gossip – and that thrust John of Gaunt’s affair with his own mistress, Katherine Swynford, into the spotlight. While Alice had been removed from the king’s side, Gaunt continued to be involved with Katherine. And so he was painted as an adulterer and hypocrite.

• 12 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Wars of the Roses
• The Peasants’ Revolt: did Richard II side with the rebels?

Did John of Gaunt try to usurp his nephew?

Where Gaunt was becoming increasingly unpopular, the Black Prince, “the flower of chivalry”, continued to command the admiration and love of the people from his sickbed. He had little involvement in the Good Parliament – but did make a personal effort to see that Alice Perrers was removed from the side of the king, who, it was claimed, was being “drawn downward with lechery and other sins”. The Black Prince set about having Alice investigated, subsequently ‘discovering’ – with the help of a necromancer – that Alice was guilty of witchcraft.

In the middle of proceedings, on 8 June, the Black Prince died at Westminster Palace. He had finally lost his battle with the illness that had plagued him for the last eight years. It is uncertain exactly what killed him. It was claimed that he suffered from a “bloody flux”, commonly known as dysentery, which left him weak and often in and out of consciousness. However, this is unlikely. Death by dysentery is fast and agonising, whereas the Black Prince suffered for nearly a decade. It is possible that a form of cancer was the cause of his death.

Edward III was devastated at the loss of his eldest son, and quickly left for his countryside residence at Havering, leaving John of Gaunt to continue the Good Parliament. The impact of the death of the Black Prince on Gaunt cannot be underestimated. They had lived together, fought together and John was trained in war, chivalry and duty by his brother – they were literally brothers in arms.

Despite this, John of Gaunt continued with his role in parliament, shrouded in the ongoing suspicion that he was a usurper. Soon after the prince’s death, the Commons requested that Prince Richard be endowed with the title ‘Prince of Wales’. This move was clearly designed to wound Gaunt but, for all that, Gaunt was hugely loyal to his brother. At the Black Prince’s bedside he swore to oversee Richard’s succession.

Seeds of future unrest

Parliament finally broke up on 10 July, but over the months that followed, John of Gaunt’s actions became increasingly feckless, rushed and ill-considered.

In November 1376, the king took a turn for the worse, possibly suffering a minor stroke. To the horror of the Commons, Alice Perrers was permitted to return to his bedside; John of Gaunt had revoked her banishment. At the same time, the Speaker of the Commons, Peter de la Mare, was imprisoned in the cold, dark cells of Nottingham Castle; he had been arrested on John of Gaunt’s orders.

Gaunt’s intention was to undermine the Commons and restore the dignity of the crown. His enemies stated that he was “under pretence of responsibility which he bore for the realm”. But Gaunt was under no pretence; he was simply the only member of the royal family who was truly able to reinvigorate the monarchy’s authority. His attempts to do so would shatter his reputation.

In the New Year, another parliament was held. This one implemented a Poll Tax and, in celebration of the king’s jubilee, extended a general pardon to all those who had committed criminal offences. The only person in the realm to whom the pardon did not apply was William Wykeham, bishop of Winchester and former chancellor of England.

After the Good Parliament, William Wykeham had been appointed into the Royal Council and was given the position of chancellor to replace the impeached Lord Latimer. However, as part of John of Gaunt’s modifications, he was soon charged with financial mismanagement and relieved of his position. The post was then returned to Lord Latimer – a move that infuriated Wykeham’s fellow bishops and the Commons. Unsurprisingly, they sought to retaliate.

One evening, John of Gaunt was dining with the new marshal, Henry Percy, on fresh oysters in the City of London, when he received news that angry rebels, who had made threats on his life, were close by. He apparently jumped up so fast he banged his knees on the table, before making a quick getaway by boat down the Thames with Henry Percy to Kennington, where they could seek refuge with Princess Joan, widow of the Black Prince.

The situation escalated. In a small-scale violent rebellion, angry Londoners besieged the Savoy and hung John of Gaunt’s arms back-to-front, an act that symbolically accused him of treason. As a further insult, a rumour was spread that claimed Gaunt was not a true-born son of Edward III but the offspring of a Flemish butcher. In the end, Princess Joan was forced to mediate before the situation snowballed out of control.

• When royals marry ‘commoners’: a brief history
• Margaret Beaufort: mother of the Tudors

John of Gaunt was reeling with rage and was probably deeply insulted by the painful rumour spread about his legitimacy. Initially, he intended to make an example of the rebels; however, he was persuaded to take the moral high ground, possibly by Princess Joan who was desperate to protect the interests of her son, Richard.

Equally, John of Gaunt sought to protect the interests of the crown and his family, above his own. The line of succession dictated that the crown would pass to Richard. In his feud with the citizens of London, John sought to protect Richard’s interests and help him cultivate the love and respect of the people, whose rightful place – he considered – was beneath the crown.

John of Gaunt never sought to disallow the Commons a voice. In fact, he endeavoured to hear their pleas. However, he would not entertain the notion that they could rise above their  station to make demands upon a king. Despite the actions of Latimer and Lyons, which were clearly corrupt, John of Gaunt had no other choice than to pardon them – as a means to rehabilitate royal control.

Alice Perrers was a different matter. He wanted to be rid of her for good, and had it not been for the king’s sudden downturn in health, John of Gaunt would never have allowed her back to his father’s bedside. He only did so because he believed it was one of the king’s final wishes.

The king died in June 1377, and Richard was crowned shortly after. John of Gaunt retired to his northern estates for a time and conducted diplomatic missions on the Scottish Borders. This suited him, for he was able to stay out of the public eye and away from his enemies in London. However, the wound between John of Gaunt and the Londoners was cut too deep. His unpopularity quietly festered until the uprising against him in 1381, during which (fortunately for him) he was negotiating with the Scots in Berwick-upon-Tweed as his magnificent home went up in flames.

Ultimately, John of Gaunt sacrificed his reputation to protect the authority of the monarchy against the will of the Commons. This was his greatest mistake. By doing so, he underestimated the voice of the people – and that cost him his home, his influence, and almost his life.

Helen Carr is a historian, writer and producer.

]]> Medieval inspiration: what the fantasy genre owes to the 14th century https://www.historyextra.com/membership/history-middle-ages-fantasy-stories-genre-how-inspired-inspiration/ Tue, 04 Jun 2019 10:55:58 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/history-middle-ages-fantasy-stories-genre-how-inspired-inspiration/ From its language and literature to codes of war and chivalry, the 14th century has provided inspiration to fiction writers for centuries. Following the finale of Game of Thrones and the release of a biopic inspired by the life of JRR Tolkien, historian Helen Carr explores the role of medieval history in the fantasy epics that we know and love… Last month saw the finale of HBO’s Game of Thrones, drawn from the epic series of books written by George RR Martin and set in the historical fantasy world of Westeros. The leading arc of the story is the enduring brutal war between multiple families, all gunning for the Iron Throne. Many parallels have been drawn between Game of Thrones and the 15th-century Wars of the Roses, a bloody civil war between the houses of York and Lancaster (Stark = York, Lannister = Lancaster) and the battles that ensued. However a large part of the award-winning series – as well as other historical fantasies and fiction – have found inspiration in the 14th century and the events of the Hundred Years’ War, which saw the Valois and the Plantagenets fight it out for the French throne.

In the first season of Game of Thrones we see the once meek and submissive Daenerys Targaryen enjoy the admiration and love of her new people – the Dothraki – to the resentment of her brother Viserys, whose life ambition is to take the Iron Throne. After Viserys threatens the then-pregnant Daenerys, her husband – the warlord Khal Drogo – pours molten metal over his head, instantly killing the would-be king. This grizzly moment in Game of Thrones may have been inspired by Peter IV, king of Aragon and his treatment of the burghers [wealthy citizens] of Valencia in 1348. Allegedly, the burghers rang a large iron bell to signal an uprising against Peter. The uprising was unsuccessful and as a punishment, Peter ordered the bell be melted down and poured down the throats of the rebellious burghers.

• 12 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Wars of the Roses
• Power plays and scheming queens: the ancient history behind Game of Thrones

The king of Aragon was not the only brutal Spanish monarch. Pedro [Peter] I of Castile, known as ‘Pedro the Cruel’, was even worse; he murdered some of his half siblings and stepmother, and also probably killed his French wife, Blanche of Bourbon. Pedro was so vile that he even offered to pay Edward of Woodstock, known as the Black Prince, the due ransom for Spanish prisoners taken at the battle of Najera in 1367, just so he could enjoy butchering them in revenge for supporting his half-brother and enemy, Enrique Trastamara. Pedro eventually met a sticky endin 1369 after he was captured by the French leader Bertrand du Guesclin and held hostage in a French camp, where he faced his brother Enrique in man-to-man combat. He was stabbed to death in what is perhaps one of the most dramatic scenes in medieval history**,** which may have inspired the showdown between brothers Sandor and Gregor Clegane in Game of Thrones.

The Middle Ages was a brutal period of history, and its battles and the warriors who fought in them were a large part of that brutality. During the Hundred Years’ War, the English army rode through France conducting chevauchées (brutal, guerrilla-style raids on local landscape). When war was paused, rebel soldiers – rather than go without pay – formed their own mercenary army; the Companies. Like the Golden Company in Game of Thrones and characters like the sellsword Bronn of the Blackwater, these soldiers followed cash and were loyal to nobody. In Game of Thrones, the Golden Company was quickly wiped out; in reality, however, the Companies caused serious problems in France. By raiding, pillaging and raping their way through the country they were reputed to be worse than the plague. Eventually, they were paid off by the King of France (Charles V), and the Pope in Avignon (Urban V) to leave France and they became paid mercenaries for the Aragonese king, Peter IV.

Much of this drama took place on land, but naval warfare was also a large feature of the war. In Game of Thrones, the inspiration for the battle at sea against the Iron Fleet – and the character of the ruthless king of the Iron Islands, Euron Greyjoy – may well have been inspired by the battle of Sluys in 1340, between the English and the French. The English were led by King Edward III, and the French by a notoriously brutal mercenary soldier and pirate, Pietro Barbavera. Barbavera had previously taken the isle of Cadzandt opposite the Zwin, which he subsequently pillaged and murdered over 300 Flemings. Like the story’s Euron Greyjoy, he became one of the most feared men at sea.

The cornerstone of historical fantasy

War is the cornerstone of much historical fantasy fiction and many iconic fictional characters were born amidst fire and blood. The most famous of these is the legendary King Arthur, who has appeared throughout history as the chivalrous hero of England. From the pagesof Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur in 1485, to Guy Ritchie’s 2018 blockbuster movie; Arthur has captured audiences for centuries. During the Hundred Years’ War, Edward III used the legendary king’s popularity to his advantage and Arthur became the inspiration for the Order of the Garter, a chivalric order of knights that still exists today. In mock battles, jousts and tournaments, Edward III popularised and glamourised warfare. Arthur was his poster boy; he even created a Round Table at Windsor Castle. Edward’s use of propaganda was ultimately a huge success. He refashioned himself as a descendant of Arthur and re-invigorated the concept of chivalry. In doing so, he gained the support of his people in the war against the French. The chivalrous image of King Arthur that we are so familiar with today is in part influenced by Edward III.

King Arthur is not the only popular fictional character that found its roots in the Middle Ages. Between 1330–40, the story of Sleeping Beauty emerged from the romantic narrative Perceforest, which describes the fictional origin of Great Britain. The original story is of a princess named Zellandine who falls in love with a knight named Troylus. To prove himself worthy of her, Zellandine’s father sends Troylus on a series of tasks and while he is gone, Zellandine falls into an enchanted sleep. When he returns, she is still asleep, but he impregnates her anyway and she later has a baby. She finds a ring when she wakes and realises that Troylus is the father of her child and they eventually marry. The story has been adapted over hundreds of years but the romance and chivalric undertone endures. The most famous versions are by the Grimm Brothers in 1812 and more recently, Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, released in 1959.

• Disney history: how has the corporation shaped our perception of the past?
• Good drama, bad history: 11 historically inaccurate films you need to watch
• 8 things you (probably) didn’t know about King Arthur

The 14th-century saw the popularising of romantic verse, but also the emergence of the English language in literature. The pioneer of this was Geoffrey Chaucer, whose Knight’s Tale went on to inspire the 2001 fictional feature film of the same name starring Heath Ledger, in which Paul Bettany plays a comic version of Geoffrey Chaucer. The historical comedy introduces figures such as the Black Prince, who is presented as handsome and honourable, able to see the worth in a poor but ambitious young man, William Thatcher (Ledger). The jousts that are a strong feature within the movie were a form of entertainment in the 14th century, often held at Smithfield. Part of central London, Smithfield was once a patch of green land outside of the city walls. In celebration of the marriage of John of Gaunt to Blanche of Lancaster in 1359, Edward III and his sons disguised themselves and fought in a tournament at Smithfield, called the Merchant’s Fair. When they revealed themselves, the crowd went wild. Maybe this moment is echoed in the finale of A Knight’s Tale, when the Black Prince reveals himself to the crowd to knight William Thatcher.

Chaucer’s verse has always been an important source for historians studying the 14th century. However, his narrative tales have not only served as source material for inquisitive historians. New evidence suggests that Chaucer may have inspired perhaps the greatest fantasy fiction ever written – The Lord of the Rings. Professor John Bowers, a specialist in Chaucer and Tolkien at the University of Nevada recently discovered an abandoned project, the Clarendon Chaucer by JRR Tolkien, which possibly influenced the narrative of The Lord of the Rings.

There are certainly parallels between Chaucer and Tolkien’s work. The Pardoner’s Tale by Chaucer is a moral tale about three men discovering and fighting over treasure. They fight to the death, encapsulating the Pardoner’s ‘theme’: "Greed is the root of [all] evils”.

In The Lord of the Rings, similarly, the Ring draws out the greed in men and finally sends the character Sméagol (Gollum) to his death at Mount Doom, as he follows the Ring’s descent into the fire in which it was forged. Another examples lies at the end of Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale, when the fairies are driven out of England*.* This may be mirrored in The Lord of the Rings when the elves leave their home in Rivendell; a mass exodus from the land of men.

The language, literature, war, conquest and chivalry of the 14th century has provided the skeleton of a story for fiction writers for decades, if not centuries. The success of Game of Thrones is just the most recent example of how the 14th century contains some of the most complex, terrifying, devastating and sometimes touching stories in history. As fantasy is often the bare bones of history trussed up, manipulated and maximised to become something powerfully entertaining, the true history of the 14th century reasonably deserves attention. It is time to further explore the way it shaped and influenced the world we live in – not just those in Westeros.

Helen Carr is a historian, writer and producer.

]]> Great wars were started by young men with “jangling hormones”, argues Simon Jenkins https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/great-wars-started-by-young-men-with-jangling-hormones-argues-simon-jenkins/ Thu, 13 Sep 2018 16:05:43 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/great-wars-started-by-young-men-with-jangling-hormones-argues-simon-jenkins/ It’s a curious feature of Europe’s history, says Simon Jenkins, that the continent has seen many wars of conquest sparked by “virile young men” “Yet another war caused by a 21-year-old,” was the thought that struck journalist and author Simon Jenkins when writing his forthcoming book A Short History of Europe.

In conversation with historian Kathleen Burk for BBC World Histories magazine, Jenkins highlighted a “curious feature of Europe’s history”: the many examples of “belligerent” young men who had launched wars of conquest on the continent.

Listen to the full discussion between Simon Jenkins and Kathleen Burk on the History Extra podcast, available now or read the conversation from BBC World Histories magazine in The Library

In his book, Jenkins explores the development of Europe which has been dominated by the struggle over land. It’s a relentless, “peculiarly violent” struggle that fascinates Jenkins, and in his research he noted several teenagers in the ancient and medieval worlds who "fought wars because they saw it as a great thing to do". So, Burk asks, could you say – albeit not entirely seriously – that there has been more peace of late because statesmen have become older?

“Yes, I do think that,” says Jenkins. “I hadn’t realised until I wrote this book that they had all been young. I suddenly thought: ‘yet another war caused by a 21-year-old’. Alexander I, Edward III, Alexander the Great, Frederick the Great… they were all young men. They became most belligerent when the hormones were jangling and they were getting up, showing off and being virile young men. I do find it to be a curious feature of Europe’s history – and it’s related, of course, to kingship. People tended to die young, and therefore their sons were even younger when they took power.”

Read more:

• 6 things you didn’t know about Alexander the Great
• Europe’s apocalypse: the Thirty Years' War (subscription)
• The great misconceptions of the First World War

“I was also fascinated,” Jenkins continues, “by the fact that, when each war came to an end, any so-called peace tended to last two generations – for 50 or 60 years – before the next war would come along, almost like clockwork. That suggests to me that the inclination toward violence has a lot to do with the memory of horror and the memory of war, not just a matter of how politics works.”

Do you think history shows that wars are more likely to be started by young men? Join the debate on social media and we may print your comments. Twitter: @historyextra | facebook.com/HistoryExtra

Listen to the full interview here or read the conversation in the latest issue of BBC World Histories magazine, available now in The Library

]]> Top 10 Plantagenet podcasts – from the Black Death to Richard III https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/top-10-plantagenet-podcasts-from-the-black-death-to-richard-iii/ Mon, 18 Aug 2014 13:21:41 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/top-10-plantagenet-podcasts-from-the-black-death-to-richard-iii/ Edward III, the Wars of the Roses and the reputation of Henry V all feature in our list of top 10 Plantagenet podcasts The Black Death

John Hatcher visits a village devastated by the Black Death, in this podcast recorded in December 2013.

Also in this episode: James Evans describes the doomed search for the north-east passage in the 16th century.

Click here to listen.

The Wars of the Roses

In May this year, historian and author Sarah Gristwood paid a visit to Tewkesbury Abbey, which was a pivotal location in the 15th-century Wars of the Roses.

Also in this episode: ahead of the 70th anniversary of D-Day, military historian James Holland challenges some popular assumptions about the 1944 Normandy campaign, and recounts his experiences of meeting veterans.

Click here to listen.

Edward III

Mark Ormrod examines the reign of Edward III, in this podcast recorded in October 2011.

Also in this episode: Sam Willis takes us back to a major naval battle in the French Revolutionary Wars.

Click here to listen.

The plague

Mark Ormrod discusses the Black Death in this podcast recorded in February 2011.

Also in this episode: Mark Nicholls explores the life of Sir Walter Ralegh, and Simon Sebag Montefiore explains the challenges involved in writing a history of Jerusalem.

Click here to listen.

A fresh look at Edward III

In this August 2013 podcast Richard Barber describes the life and career of one of England's most successful medieval kings, based on new research for his book.

Click here to listen.

Henry V

Anne Curry explores Henry V's disreputable youth, in this podcast recorded in March 2013.

Also in this episode: Diarmaid Macculloch offers a robust defence of Wolf Hall star Thomas Cromwell.

Click here to listen.

The Wars of the Roses

In this September 2012 podcast, Sarah Gristwood reflects on the role of women in the Wars of the Roses.

Also in this episode: Tim Benbow describes the Second World War battle for Madagascar.

Click here to listen.

The cruelty of Henry V

Ian Mortimer explains why he thinks Henry V was a cruel king who doesn’t deserve his heroic reputation, in this October 2009 podcast.

Also in this episode: Amanda Vickery talks about her radio series that delves into the history of private lives in Britain.

Click here to listen.

Richard III

In this July 2014 podcast Chris Skidmore, who is writing a new biography of Richard III, talks to us about how his research is presenting a different picture of the controversial 15th-century king.

Also in this episode: we speak to Pamela Hartshorne about the challenges people faced in Tudor England when trying to keep their cities clean and hygienic.

Click here to listen.

A grisly end

David Hipshon speaks about the controversial king Richard III and his violent death at the battle of Bosworth, in this podcast recorded in March 2009.

Also in this episode: Hallie Rubenhold reveals a remarkable tale of adultery that caused a scandal in the 18th century.

Click here to listen.

]]> Books interview: Edward III and the triumph of England https://www.historyextra.com/membership/books-interview-edward-iii-and-the-triumph-of-england/ Sun, 08 Sep 2013 11:42:51 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/books-interview-edward-iii-and-the-triumph-of-england/ Richard Barber is the author of a new book exploring the reign of Edward III and the crucial victory over the French army at Crécy in 1346. He spoke to Matt Elton about the king's strengths as a ruler and a strategist, and the reasons why he struggled later in his reign Do we get a sense of Edward’s personality early in his reign?

You begin to, yes, but really what’s more interesting was the group of people around him and the way in which he interacted with them. What emerges fairly rapidly – and this is a theme throughout the book – is that Edward’s great strength was that he didn’t interact with people in the way that

Edward II and Richard II did, which was to say “I am the king”. Edward was very much one of a group. He was first among equals, certainly at this stage in his reign.

Would you say that, in battle, he was stronger as a fighter or a strategist?

He is actually quite an all-rounder, and he’s clearly a thinker who is well advised and takes advice. I think that’s possibly one of the key things about Edward. Whether it’s about the reform of the law or what to do next in the middle of the battle, he doesn’t say “I know what do”: he sets the agenda but then lets other people work on it too and takes advice. It’s only in relation to parliament that he sometimes refuses to take advice, because it’s not an organised body and is quite difficult to deal with. But his great strength really is this business of acting together with people rather than going off on his own trail.

Moving ahead to the battle of Crécy, what kinds of tactics were used?

The important thing about Crécy is that Edward was clearly, in my view, using tactics and weapons that had never been seen on a battlefield before. And new evidence has come to light that indicates that Edward was actually fighting from inside a ring of carts. He was using archers, which in terms of continental warfare was completely new, and he was using guns, which were also completely new. He constructed this ring of carts in open country because there was nowhere that was suitable on the battlefield for the English technique of getting a defensive position with a narrow approach that archers could cover, so he created it. This is doubtless going to be argued about, but at least I’ve put it on the table for other people to knock it down!

What allowed him to be able to use all of these innovations at the same time?

Edward was interested in new technology: he had one of the first public clocks in England at Windsor and he liked new technology and new things. The archers, meanwhile, were an innovation in terms of continental warfare but were something that the English had particularly developed.

The other thing is that Edward was very good at improvising. The ring of carts was an improvisation in response to a situation using something that was known about – you can trace this ring of carts idea back into barbarian attacks on the Romans in the eighth century – but ringing them together so that you couldn’t break in, and the way that he used them to place the archers, that shows that he’s someone who can think and improvise. It may have been one of his knights who suggested it, of course, but he was open to this kind of suggestion.

What do we know about the Company of the Garter, which Edward founded?

This is rather sweeping, but nobody ever seems to have actually read the statutes before writing about the subject! There’s one military clause, which says you’ve got to be

a respectable knight, but it’s very vaguely phrased and is rather like saying that you’ve got to be a gentleman before you can be admitted to a club. There’s nothing that says they will hold a tournament every year on Saint George’s Day; they didn’t. There was one at the very beginning, and one that happens to coincide with Saint George’s

Day, but that’s all the evidence for regular tournaments, so it’s not a chivalric order of knighthood. What the statutes are is a great table of how many masses an earl or a knight has to pay for a deceased companion. So it’s an absolutely straight religious fraternity, like a guild of knights.

How important were tournaments as a social and political tool?

I think because of Edward’s own interests, they were extremely important. At one level, they were a bit like playing golf today: it was where you met and talked to people socially. But they had other real advantages, because they taught people how to work and fight together as a team.

What caused the downturn in his fortunes later in his reign?

I think Edward’s political strategy was quite limited. He didn’t understand how to bring the natives over, so to speak. He never managed to hold the people that came over to the English side, or he got the ones who were pretty devious anyway, such as Robert of Artois, who were more of a nuisance than they were worth. So he ended up with a successful English invasion of France but no French base and no French clientele, and he never managed to build it up.

So Edward’s political strategy was flawed only in that he hadn’t been able to solve something that very few people had, which was how to conquer a country which was basically, root and branch, hostile, and was also hostile because they don’t particularly like the idea, irrespective of nationality, of someone ruling them when they were used to being ruled with a pretty light rein.

You write a lot about sources. How difficult is it researching this period?

This is what I tried to show by starting the book by asking how we know what we know. I don’t think anyone’s quite set it out in this way before, but it is absolutely basic to our understanding of medieval history.

You get some very intelligent chroniclers who are really thinking about what they’re doing, not just putting down what they hear. There’s an author called Gilles Li Muisis who writes a wonderful passage about how, when you’re in the middle of battle, you really don’t have a clue what’s going on. It’s hugely useful to have somebody who is trying, within 10 years of events, to assess what happened.

Do you hope this book will change our understanding of Edward?

I wouldn’t claim to make anybody change their understanding, but what I hope they would do is go away and look at it all again and show me where I’m wrong!

Richard Barber has written widely on medieval history. He is the author of Edward III and the Triumph of England (Allen Lane)

This article was first published in the September 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine 

]]>