Disunited Kingdoms

Peoples and Politics in the British Isles 1280-1460

Michael Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317865124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the last decades of the thirteenth century the British Isles appeared to be on the point of unified rule, dominated by the lordship, law and language of the English. However by 1400 Britain and Ireland were divided between the warring kings of England and Scotland, and peoples still starkly defined by race and nation. Why did the apparent trends towards a single royal ruler, a single elite and a common Anglicised world stop so abruptly after 1300? And what did the resulting pattern of distinct nations and extensive borderlands contribute to the longer-term history of the British Isles?

In this innovative analysis of a critical period in the history of the British Isles, Michael Brown addresses these fundamental questions and shows how the national identities underlying the British state today are a continuous legacy of these years. Using a chronological structure to guide the reader through the key periods of the era, this book also identifies and analyses the following dominant themes throughout:

- the changing nature of kingship and sovereignty and their links to wars of conquest

- developing ideas of community and identity

- key shifts in the nature of aristocratic societies across the isles

- the European context, particularly the roots and course of the Hundred Years War

This is essential reading for undergraduates studying the history of late Medieval Britain or Europe, but will also be of great interest for anyone who wishes to understand the continuing legacy of the late medieval period in Britain.

chapter one

EDWARD THE CONQUEROR

The key political relationships within the late medieval British Isles were products of a period of major warfare and upheaval which ran from the 1280s to the 1350s. This era witnessed the outbreak of the long wars which cast their shadow over the whole period. The English crown’s conflicts with the French and Scottish monarchies influenced the character of politics and political society in all parts of the British Isles. In these decades the French and Scottish wars also formed part of a network of conflicts which have often been regarded as separate but which, together, marked the end of old continuities and relationships which had characterised the politics of the British Isles for well over a century. This ‘age of war’ was bound up with the character and policies of two rulers within the isles.¹ The first of these was King Edward I of England (1272–1307) whose pursuit or defence of what he perceived as his rights lay behind conflicts in Wales, Scotland and on the Continent. The other was his former subject and enemy, Robert Bruce, King Robert I of Scotland from 1306 to 1329. Bruce’s efforts to secure the Scottish throne re-ignited warfare which spilled out from Scotland to encompass many parts of the British Isles. The legacy of these two kings was lasting division and disengagement between the different lands and realms of the archipelago. The period they presided over, from the 1270s to the 1330s, was the most violent period in the history of the isles between the arrival of the Normans and the civil wars of the seventeenth century. It was an era brought to an end, not by clear victories or even by compromise settlements, but by a gradual reduction in the intensity of warfare in the isles during the 1340s and 1350s. The resulting unresolved conflicts, animosities and disruption would do much to define the late medieval British Isles as a political region of Europe.

The English Crown and the British Isles in the late 1270s

In the opening years of his reign, Edward I’s position in the British Isles followed patterns which had developed during the preceding two centuries. These patterns are nicely illustrated by the events of autumn 1278. After holding parliament at Gloucester in August, on 13 October, Edward presided over the marriage of the Prince of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, at Worcester Cathedral. The bride was the king’s cousin, Eleanor de Montfort. The ceremony was a display of the king’s goodwill to a former opponent. The previous year, after a short but sharp war, the Welsh prince had been forced to seek Edward’s ‘grace and mercy’, accepting a loss of territory and influence to the English king. In attendance at the marriage were many great lords, headed by Edward’s brother-in-law, King Alexander III of Scotland. In subsequent weeks, Alexander met with Edward and attended a new meeting of parliament at Westminster. During this, the Scottish king performed homage for his lands in England but rejected a request that he acknowledge the sovereignty of the English crown over the realm of Scotland.²

The events of these few weeks illustrated the key political relationships on the island of Britain. They confirmed that King Edward was by far the most powerful figure in both Britain and Ireland as king of England, lord of Ireland, the sovereign lord of Wales and the personal lord of the Scottish king. However, in the 1270s the lands of the archipelago were nothing like a unitary realm or even a clearly-defined political hierarchy. The power of the English kings in the isles was a product of ideological claims to empire and sovereignty, of political pressure and direct warfare during the preceding centuries. Demonstrations of such power had forced the other rulers and lands of the archipelago to recognise the pre-eminence of the English crown to some extent but did not mean that Edward and his predecessors were the only princes of ambition and authority in Britain. Both King Alexander and Prince Llywelyn represented dynasties which had successfully increased their status and territory since the late eleventh century. The work of a line of effective rulers had made Alexander III king of a realm which covered the northern third of Britain. This kingdom had been forged and held together from disparate provinces by the physical power and successful ideology of the kings of Scots. Alexander inherited and continued the process of building a sense of Scottishness from a shared allegiance to the crown. Llywelyn held a primacy in Wales which was much less secure and extensive. His family were princes of Gwynedd, the region of north-west Wales centred on Snowdonia and Anglesey. From 1200 they, rather than the other princely houses in Powys and Deheubarth, were established as the leaders of the native Welsh. In his career since 1249 Llywelyn had gone beyond his predecessors in his efforts to turn powers of leadership into effective monarchy. His efforts had been bound up with the latest phase of warfare between the Welsh princes and the Anglo-French lords who held lands in the south and east of Wales. These lords of the Welsh march were backed by the power of the English crown. The decades before 1280 had witnessed a series of conflicts between the princes of Gwynedd and the English crown whose outcomes appear as swings of the pendulum in terms of territory and authority. The outcome of the war of 1276–7 had swung the balance in Edward’s favour, extending his rule at Llywelyn’s expense. However experience had shown that previous settlements were just the prelude to new warfare in Wales. In comparison, relations between the English and Scottish kings appear stable. No war had been fought between the two realms since 1217 and relations were mostly cordial. However, Edward’s claim to sovereignty and Alexander’s response were an indication that not all was settled.

The English king’s dealings with Llywelyn and Alexander in 1278 indicate that, even when apparently stable, relations between rulers and their lands were not static. Disputes and open conflicts concerning the nature of the English crown’s authority over the rulers and communities of the isles had been a longstanding and regular feature of politics in the archipelago since the mid-eleventh century.

There was, however, a stable core to Edward’s primacy, in the territories he ruled directly as king, duke and lord. Above all, this primacy rested on the traditional authority and material power provided by the English realm. Since the loss of Normandy and Anjou to the French crown in 1202–4, England had been the principal dominion of the Plantagenets. As well as being the source of their royal status, England became the principal residence of Edward’s grandfather and father, John and Henry III, and the main focus of their political activities. The kingdom was also the principal source of their wealth. Since the start of his reign in 1272, Edward had been able to draw heavily on these financial resources. A decade later his normal income from England would be assessed at over £26,000 per year, but this could be vastly increased by securing a grant of taxation from his subjects. In 1275 Edward secured a grant which yielded £80,000 to replenish the royal treasury. The king’s income was raised by, and partly spent on, an impressive, professional bureaucracy. The legacy of the wide geographical interests of the Angevin kings was a two-tier central government, which had developed since 1066 to deal with the long periods when the kings of England were in their continental lands. As well as a developed royal household with its own financial and secretarial offices, there were fixed royal courts of justice and finance and the chancery (secretariat), almost permanently located at Westminster. After 1204 both household and fixed courts operated within England, resulting in a royal administration capable of massive interventions across the kingdom. In 1279, for example, King Edward would set in motion the massive Quo Warranto inquiry into the judicial powers held by private landowners and ordered a full recoinage of the currency. Four years earlier, in his statute of Westminster, the king had issued legislation designed to reform justice at a local level. This bureaucracy and revenue could be translated into military interventions too. For the brief war against Llywelyn in 1277, Edward had raised over 800 cavalry and mustered 15,000 foot soldiers, spending some £23,000 on the campaign.³

Though such numbers would seem small in coming decades, they demonstrate resources far beyond any other ruler or lord in the British Isles. Measuring this wealth and the population from which it was derived in the late thirteenth century is very difficult but figures drawn from the papal taxation of the church in the early 1290s have been used to suggest taxable values for the different lands in the archipelago. These show the value of the English church to be roughly six times higher than that of the Scottish province, ten times greater than that of Ireland and richer than the Welsh dioceses by a multiple of twenty-five. This wealth rested on a massive disparity in population. Again, there are no wholly accepted figures for this but all estimates suggest that the population of England was nearly twice as large as that of the other lands of the British Isles put together. Calculations of urban population and circulating coinage provide evidence that the English economy was not simply larger but was also more developed and more capable of responding to the demands of their government in the form of large-scale contributions of cash. The size and material wealth of England, long proverbial in the minds of historians and administrators, was the basis of the sovereignty claimed by its kings in the surrounding lands.⁴

England was not Edward’s only possession or source of wealth. Long before he became king of England, Edward had received a grant of other territories from his father, Henry III, in 1254. This apanage had included the dominions of the Plantagenets beyond England. As well as the Channel Islands and the lordships held directly by the crown in Wales, this grant conferred on Edward the duchy of Aquitaine and the lordship of Ireland. While the lands assigned to Edward were clearly regarded as secondary to the English realm, Henry was insistent that they remain bound to the line of kings as key parts of the royal dignity. Aquitaine, in particular, had a special significance for Edward and his family. The southern part of Aquitaine, often referred to as Gascony, lay in south-western France and was the last of the great continental dominions of Henry II to be retained by his descendants. Its possession gave Edward the, not always easy, status of a French prince and Gascony posed serious problems of government which involved relations with his lord and rival, the king of France. Personal supervision of the duchy was provided by Edward’s visits to Gascony in 1254, in the early 1270s and again between 1286 and 1289, showing the concern of the king-duke for his rights.⁵ This concern would exercise a major influence on events in the British Isles during the next sixty years. Since 1171, Ireland had formed the second realm of the English crown in the islands.⁶ The problems of government it presented were no less than those of Gascony, but Edward’s possession of the lordship from 1254 did not lead him to cross the Irish Sea. Instead, his authority was exercised via an administrative structure modelled on that of England, headed by a justiciar acting as the king’s lieutenant. The main job of the king’s officials was to maintain Edward’s authority in an environment defined by the limits to the conquest and settlement of Anglo-French invaders in the later twelfth century. This partial conquest left a legacy of localised but continuous warfare between English and Irish lords and communities. English lordship, in one form or another, extended over the richest and most populous parts of Ireland, and the royal administration produced a financial surplus for Edward’s coffers, but issues of war, allegiance and identity were a source of problems for his justiciar. Though Ireland was lower in his priorities than Gascony or Wales, Edward did not ignore it and maintained close contacts with the lordship.⁷

The list of territories and administrations belonging to the English crown does not fully express the nature of Edward’s rule. The events of October 1278 show Edward exercising authority not in terms of government but of lordship. His relations with the king of Scots and the prince of Wales hinged on the relations between himself as a superior lord and the other rulers as his vassals. Such vassals had obligations which were personal, involving loyalty and counsel, and related to the lands they held. Though he had spent much of his career at odds with English kings, Llywelyn of Wales acknowledged that Edward was his lord, following his predecessors and contemporaries amongst the Welsh princes. By contrast, Alexander of Scotland, whose relations with Edward were generally cordial, did not accept that the lordship of the English king extended over the Scottish realm. Like his predecessors, however, Alexander paid homage to Edward for lands he held within England. This ensured that, while he accepted the personal lordship of the English king, he ruled in Scotland without any earthly superior. The status of rulers had implications for their lands which would have critical importance in the coming years.⁸

Edward’s relations with King Alexander and Prince Llywelyn were the pinnacle of a network of connections which also defined the political hierarchy beneath the English king. His predecessors had exercised authority via the personal submissions and services of great lords and noble lineages from across the British Isles. The formation of an interlinked aristocratic world which encompassed all the realms and regions of the islands had been produced by processes of colonisation and cultural change since the late eleventh century. This reshaping of elites had been closely bound up with the extension of the lordship of the English crown into Wales and Ireland. Edward’s forebears had sought to manage developments which saw lords from England achieve new lands and power beyond the kingdom. The result by the 1270s was that the king of England had an established place as superior lord or patron recognised by rulers and magnates in all parts of the Is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Figures
• Maps
• Introduction: Warlords and Sovereign Lords
• chapter one Edward the Conqueror
• chapter two Robert Bruce
• chapter three Sovereignty and War
• chapter four Rulers and Realms
• chapter five Peoples, Crises and Conflicts
• chapter six Elites and Identities
• chapter seven Borderlands: Lords and Regions
• chapter eight Hundred Years Wars: The European Context
• chapter nine Politics and Power in the British Isles (c. 1360–1415)
• chapter ten Four Lands: The British Isles in the Early Fifteenth Century
• Conclusions: Nations and Unions
• Bibliography
• Index