King, Lords and Commons in Late Medieval England: A Contractual Relationship?
p. 357-376
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1By the fifteenth century, England had, in appearance at least, a very sophisticated and highly centralised system of government, together with a well developed consultative structure in the form of parliament. Yet the usurpations and civil wars which took place in the second half of the century would seem to belie any idea that this system could be effective in preserving governmental stability. Indeed, the Whig historians of the nineteenth century were clear that it did not do so: things, they said, went badly wrong with government in fifteenth century England because the king’s over-mighty subjects, the nobility, began to compete with each other and with the king himself for power. The Wars of the Roses were, then, symptomatic of both a power struggle between kings and their greatest subjects, and a wider power struggle within the nobility, driven by their «vaulting» ambition.1 So it was that a formerly highly centralised and ordered realm became one that was fractured by chaos and civil strife.
2The origins of this seismic fault in the late medieval polity were, according to these historians, easy to identify. In the fourteenth century, Edward III, that reckless foreign adventurer, was desperate for soldiers to serve with him on his campaigns, and, as a result, the nobility recruited armed bands of followers to serve with them in war in return for cash payment.2 Whilst away at war, these «bastard feudal» affinities, as Charles Plummer first described them, caused few problems, except, of course, for their foreign enemies. Once back home, however, they were used to protect and further their lords’interests at all costs. Thus, Plummer argued, each great lord was surrounded, «with a horde of retainers, who wore his livery and fought his battles […] while he in turn maintained their quarrels and shielded their crimes from punishment».3 And so dispute after dispute descended into violence which destabilised whole regions and left few untouched or able to remain neutral. At the same time, Edward III’s misfortune of having too many sons created multiple claimants to the throne amongst the nobility, so kings in turn had their thrones usurped as later medieval England turned from an ordered society into one where chaos prevailed. Only the Tudors, through the vigorous assertion of their kingly prerogatives and power, could bring an end to this, and so emerged a period in which monarchical authority was resurgent, and the over-mighty subject defeated. In sum, not only was there serious disorder and indeed chaos at times in fifteenth century England, lords were actually in competition with the king for power. There was certainly no sense in which this relationship was even amicable, let alone contractual.
3This interpretation of English politics in the later Middle Ages has, however, come into serious question in recent years. The first major, and revolutionary, critique of it came from K. B. McFarlane, who in the 1940s and 1950s raised questions about how disordered and conflict-riven England really was in the fifteenth century.4 He began his assault on the existing paradigm through a re-evaluation of «bastard feudalism» and its effects. Although it was assumed that the development of such connections had in itself created disorder across England, McFarlane pointed out that there was little evidence for this. Rather, he argued, historians had conflated an increase in documentation, a result of the crown’s growing involvement in local peace-keeping, with a rise in disorder. Furthermore, whilst «bastard feudal» retainers had been caricatured as thugs hired to commit acts of violence on the lord’s behalf, McFarlane showed that they were in fact usually members of the gentry, stake-holders in local society, often representing their shires as the Commons in parliament. This suggested that affinities were something more than armed gangs of men recruited to do the lord’s bidding. McFarlane went on to develop this point by noting the similarities between «bastard feudalism» and feudalism–both were ways of ordering social relations in the localities; money payments had simply superseded grants of land as the outward manifestations of such relationships. In other words, «bastard feudalism» offered a way of preserving the social hierarchy and order, not undermining it.
4Such conclusions grew not only out of his research on «bastard feudalism», but out of the fact that McFarlane saw royal inadequacy as being at the heart of political crises in this period: put simply, when the king failed to do his job, the realm suffered and order broke down.5 The only insuperable barrier to adequate kingship thus came not from the nobility and their affinities, but from the king himself. Under «normal» circumstances, the relationship between the king and his nobility was one of co-operation, not conflict, and order could be maintained in the localities through the good offices of both, as in Henry V’s reign, for example. Thus, when under Henry VI «the king’s second childhood succeeded the first without the usual interval», as McFarlane put it, the lack of royal direction brought in its wake an inevitable breakdown of order, and an outbreak of political strife.
5In the light of McFarlane’s insights, a good deal of work followed, on both individual members of the nobility and their affinities, and, latterly, on local society.6 The result has been broadly to amplify his original observations. Affinities existed to order local society and regulate behaviour. Where they did otherwise, they attracted censure, which, in turn, undermined the reputation of the noble who presided over the affinity. This is not to say that England was entirely peaceful in the later Middle Ages; naturally there were disputes and problems, and these could be extremely violent. To give just one example, in Warwickshire in 1406 a landowner in the north of the county, Alan Waldeve, was murdered by William Mountford, an associate of the earl of Warwick.7 «Bastard feudalism» itself was not, however, the cause of that disorder. In fact, the problem at that point, it has been argued, was that, after a period of extended national political crisis and his father’s confiscation and exile, the earl of Warwick had not yet managed to establish control in Warwickshire, which was regarded by contemporaries as a place whose roads were «infested with bands of ruffians».8
6So how exactly did «bastard feudalism» bring order to society? One of the most comprehensive studies of the operation of an affinity is that of Christine Carpenter on Warwickshire in the fifteenth century.9 Here, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, presided over much of the county between the beginning of the century and his death in 1439, bringing relative stability to it from around 1407. He did this by being quick to respond to conflict which broke out between landowners, personally arranging, for example, the settlement of such disputes by arbitration, as in 1407 when he was able to force William Bagot to accept the loss of the manor of Aston in his dispute with William Holt.10 Thus, instead of legal cases drifting on from year to year unresolved, they disappeared quickly between one meeting of the court where they were entered and the next, indicating settlement out of court, in which the earl’s hand could, as in the case of Holt and Bagot, frequently be seen at work. Within the judicial system itself, the earl also managed to exercise influence. He might, for example, have his men attend sessions of the peace: in November 1417 William Clopton was sent to attend the Worcester sessions.11 He might alternatively become personally involved in the settlement of a dispute, as he did with that of four gentry members in Warwickshire, William Mountford, William Boteller, Baldwin Freville and John Catesby, which progressed speedily through the courts;12 this was undoubtedly not the only such case in which the earl took a personal interest. Even when he was out of the country fighting in France with Henry V, Beauchamp’s influence prevailed. The earl and his council kept in regular and close contact, with officers visiting the earl across the Channel on occasions, as John Throgmorton did in 1417–18. This meant that he was consulted about the situation at home and was regularly able to authorise action from France.13 All of this worked to maintain peace locally, as the earl, with the king’s backing, took active responsibility for it. Naturally much was done for his own affinity members by Beauchamp, but, Carpenter concludes, common sense dictated that Beauchamp had to be reasonably even-handed if he were not to alienate potentially important local lords; internal strife was of no benefit to him; quite the reverse.14
7Problems arose in Warwickshire, however, following Henry V’s death in 1422, and it is in what happened thereafter that we can see most clearly the importance of the king in this complex system of peace-keeping. The first problem was that Henry’s death brought with it a long minority (Henry VI was just a baby at the time of his accession), and a consequent absence of a single central source of authority. At the same time, with official peace having been declared by the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, several important landowners and troublemakers now came back from France, an event which would make it difficult to maintain order in the county during the minority.15 To add to this, the demise of a number of significant landowners in the midlands brought more land to Richard Beauchamp through inheritance. This latter occurrence might not seem at first glance to have been a bad thing. However, in practice, more land meant that, as Carpenter summarises, a «compact area of authority […] gave way to a more unwieldy one».16 So Beauchamp was spread more thinly at a time when problems were more likely, as a result of a combination of an absence of personal oversight by the king, disputes between returning soldiers and others, and the inevitable challenges with which Beauchamp himself would have to deal in his newly acquired lands. Mercifully, at this stage these problems promised to be temporary, for what the inhabitants of England faced in 1422 was simply a minority, not a total failure of kingship. Furthermore, Henry V had left a good legacy, and, though there were problems, the minority council managed the situation relatively well in the 1420s.17 Hopes that Henry VI might soon take up the reins of government began to recede as the 1430s went on, however, for it became ever clearer that the child-king was showing no sign of taking control and relieving his minority councillors of their responsibilities; described as a man «little given to the world and its works», Henry was in fact, the evidence suggests, to remain a cipher throughout a long and troubled reign in which the English king’s position on the continent, and order at home, unravelled in the most catastrophic way.18 Thus, just as McFarlane argued, royal inadequacy can be seen to have been at the heart of problems both at the centre and in the localities.
8Despite being pivotal in transforming our understanding of fifteenthcentury English governance, McFarlane’s picture of late medieval England is not without its limitations, in part because two of his central conclusions are inherently contradictory: on the one hand, as we have seen, he emphasised natural co-operation between the king and his nobility, yet on the other he placed an antithetical stress on patronage and reward as being crucial for the smooth operation of politics.19 And so the king became simply the «good lord of all good lords», who, like all other lords, needed to reward his followers in order to secure their support. In other words, despite elsewhere implicitly hinting at a public dimension to kingship relating to shared interests between the king and nobles, McFarlane at the same time explicitly denied it. As time progressed, he began to see this contradiction in his work, and came to argue that nobles had «corporate traditions as well as a sense of their own interest», though this was a strand of thought which remained relatively undeveloped in his later publications. It has continued to be so in much work since. Recently, however, the tide has begun to change, as historians have, in the light of the manifest co-operation between the king and his nobility increasingly examined what ideas informed this co-operation–how king and lords perceived their own and each other’s roles. It is in what those historians have found that we come closest to a sense of the existence of a political contract, not formal, but informal and implied, between the king and his greatest subjects, founded on accepted notions of the roles of both.
The nature of the late medieval English «political contract»
9So, how can this implicitly contractual relationship be more specifically articulated? First, we must understand how the king and his subjects perceived his role, a relatively easy task, for it was long established, not just in England, that the king’s principal duties were to maintain the internal peace of the realm and to defend it from foreign enemies. The king recognised the importance of the former aspect of his role explicitly in the oath he took at his coronation in which he swore to «cause justice to be rendered rightly, impartially, and wisely» and to «grant to be held and observed the just laws and rightful customs» of the realm.20 And, well before the early fifteenth century, he was equipped with a wide and impressive variety of mechanisms and personnel through which to fulfil his responsibilities to his subjects. Not only did his legal system govern almost all tenurial relationships in the realm (only the now dwindling numbers of villeins were not permitted to have access to his law), his officers were appointed to take responsibility for peace-keeping even at village level.21 At the same time, he had unrivalled power to raise both armies and national taxation for war to defend the realm and the crown’s rights. In these things, he was not, however, alone or unaccountable; he was assisted in particular by his nobility, who, although they relied on him to provide leadership, themselves played an important role in the implementation of royal rule. First, they were active in local peace-keeping, working through the «bastard feudal» networks, or affinities, which we have already discussed, and as leaders of armies in military campaigns. Secondly, at the political centre, the nobility expected to counsel the king both formally, through the royal council, and informally, and for him to pay heed to their advice. The gentry too were by this time an important part of the political community. As the Commons in parliament, where they approved grants of taxation and engaged in dialogue under the direction of the king about royal policy, as soldiers themselves, and as royal officers in the localities, they played a crucial part in the governance of the country. Some richer peasants were similarly engaged in local government, and were increasingly taxpayers, demanding a say in how their money was spent. Large numbers of them had done this violently in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, for example, and it was therefore arguably more important than ever before by the early fifteenth century that, as McFarlane argued, the quality of the leadership provided by the king was good.
10Kings were, of course, not without guidance on how to rule well. In both theoretical treatises (the so-called Mirrors for Princes of the period) and in wider political theory and dialogue across Europe, the rules by which kings should operate were clearly articulated.22 The king represented, wrote the famous fifteenth century English political commentator John Fortescue, «the highest estate temporal in the earth […] it is an office in which he mynestrith to his realm defence and justice».23 Theorists agreed: as holder of this office, the king was appointed by God to be representative of the realm; indeed, he was not simply an office-holder; he and his subjects (the regnum) were as one, and so the king and the well-being of the realm (the status regni) were inextricably linked–on him the «common profit» depended. Aquinas had first spelt this out in detail in the late thirteenth century when he brought together the long-standing notion that the king was appointed by God with rediscovered Aristotelian ideas about governance.24 The Mirrors for Princes also offered specific guidance to kings on how they should behave, counselling them to exercise prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. In the act of ruling they should listen to counsel and allow their judgment to be informed accordingly.25
11The English king was, then, by the late Middle Ages, both supremely powerful within his realm and expected to rule for the «common good», and there was plenty of literature to advise him of this. In practice, the policies he chose were subject to discussion and question, both informally, through the counsel of his leading subjects, and formally, through the mechanisms of the royal council and parliament. Furthermore, his subjects were willing to place constraints on his freedom of action if they deemed it necessary, as seen in the reigns of Henry IV and Henry VI, when the king was placed under conciliar supervision; two kings had even been removed from the throne in the fourteenth century as a result of their behaviour.26 However, we should not overstate the king’s practical accountability to his subjects, for conciliar restrictions proved difficult to justify if the king was unwilling to be restrained–he simply threw off the shackles of supervision and might only be compelled to accept it by force, something which the English political community showed itself repeatedly to be uncomfortable with for any sustained period of time. It was equally difficult for conciliar government to be effective–too often councillors disagreed about the direction of policy, as they did frequently in Henry VI’s reign.27 Where deposition was concerned, the nobility had shown themselves to be extremely ill at ease with this course of action, as we shall see.28 So, in reality, restraining the king was a very difficult business, removing him a last resort. Since the king’s free will was therefore paramount, it had, above all, to be hoped that he was an able leader, and one who was amenable to good advice.
The origins of the late medieval English «political contract»
12How had England reached this point in its constitutional development?29 Arguably we must go back to the Conquest of 1066 and before in a quest for the origins of English governmental centralisation. That granted, critical strides forward took place thereafter, particularly in the first instance during the reign of Henry II (1154–89), for it was under him that the English common law was created.30 This placed the king at the head of one of the most centralised and sophisticated legal systems in Europe. Ironically, however, the transformation of the king’s judicial role which took place as a result of the creation of the common law was not deliberate. In 1154, when Henry acceded to the throne, England was gripped by civil conflict born in the troubled reign of King Stephen, and his central aim was to re-establish peace. Increasing the availability of access to royal justice was a way (amongst others, of course) of achieving this. He undoubtedly did not foresee the implications of his actions for the future of the English monarchy.31
13What Henry did explicitly believe, however, was that royal authority should be more broadly defined than ever before, and this undoubtedly informed his actions too. Such ideas were inevitably not unique to him or to England; influenced by Roman and Canon Law, they were circulating in Europe at this time.32 Thus, Henry continued the development of a concept of the public rights of the crown, as opposed the private rights of the king, which had first emerged in England after the Conquest, attaching new civilian terminology to his arguments.33 The impetus for this, Harriss argues, was his policy of «recovering and exploiting the rights of the crown» through things like the resumption of royal lands early in his reign.34 We might say, in the light of this, that it is fitting that this king who comprehended the public nature of kingship more fully than any of his predecessors was also the one who, through the common law, made it more of a practical reality than ever before too.
14This combined practical and theoretical extension of royal public authority continued in the thirteenth century. King John (1199–1216) and Henry III (1216–72) certainly contributed to these developments–writs and statutes made during their reigns increasingly contained references to action they deemed «necessary» to uphold the status regni and the common profit, for example, and both kings used embryonic forms of national taxation to fund war.35 Both also placed emphasis on crown lands and rights. R. S. Hoyt summarises the early stages of this development neatly: «Under John and during the minority of Henry III, the royal demesne… emerged for the first time as a Crown endowment specially subject to the unhampered royal will and annexed to the office, rather than merely belonging to and disposable by the person of the king».36 By 1258, Harriss has noted, Henry III was referring to «the ancient demesne of the Crown» rather than the «royal demesne» Thus, by the time Bracton wrote in the mid-thirteenth century, a doctrine of the inalienability of the land and rights of the crown was well developed. Furthermore, during the reigns of both John and Henry III there was an expansion in the scale of royal intervention in the shires. For example, where previously the general eyre, created in Henry II’s reign, had been responsible for delivering the gaols and hearing pleas of novel disseisin and mort d’ancestor, new mechanisms were introduced in the 1220s to provide for these things to happen when an eyre visitation was not taking place.37
15Yet the expansion of the public authority of the crown is not the only story to tell of this period, for it does not alone explain the growth in the practical importance of ideas (visibly enshrined in the informal political contract of the fifteenth century, as we have seen) that the king should be below the law, and that he should rule in the interests of the common good.38 It was the excesses of the first two kings of the thirteenth century, and arguably their Angevin predecessors too, that provided the major impetus for this development. At the simplest level, both John and Henry III found themselves subjected to questioning as groups of their subjects complained about the way they were ruling England. John, in attempting to bolster his own security (as he perceived it), and obtain money for his military commitments across the Channel, had raised huge sums of money through, for example, the exploitation of his feudal rights.39 The relief a baron might pay to inherit his father’s lands varied, for instance, from £ 100 to some thousands of pounds, depending on how much money the king needed or how loyal John thought the baron in question was. These burdens could not be easily passed down the feudal pyramid by his tenants-in-chief because, unlike the king, they could not threaten their own tenants with disinheritance or dispossession if they refused to pay, for under the common law the latter could apply for a royal writ and challenge the baron’s action in court. The burden of the king’s arbitrary impositions thus fell squarely on the shoulders of his tenants-in-chief, and could only be borne for so long. Crisis came after the defeat of John’s allies at Bouvines in 1214, when it became clear that the king’s attempt to regain Normandy was at an end. At that point, the barons presented John with Magna Carta, demanding that he act according to his own law, and not arbitrarily; he could not simply take land without due legal process. At the same time, Magna Carta was a signal that the king was deemed answerable to his subjects for actions they viewed as unacceptable. The barons of 1215 failed in their aims in one sense, of course, because John was able to appeal to the Pope to annul the Charter, but civil war ensued which was only ended by the reissue of Magna Carta in the name of his under-age son following John’s death in 1216 and the later defeat in battle of the rebel forces. The principle of the king being subject to the law and answerable to his subjects was thus established.
16This was developed further under Henry III, who learnt the lessons of his father’s reign only imperfectly. Explicitly he accepted the terms of Magna Carta, but repeatedly infringed both its letter and its spirit, first with his barons–his behaviour led to crises in both 1233–4 and 1244–and then with both barons and knights, when his failures as king led to even more serious crisis in 1258 and civil war thereafter.40 In the earlier years, the issue at stake had mainly been the arbitrary dispossession of barons (a clear infringement of Magna Carta, and an indication that the king believed he should not be below the law). Later, having ironically placated his barons in the years after 1244 in the interests of a peaceful life, he then alienated some of them again through his favouritism towards his Lusignan relatives and the consequent denial of justice to some native barons, another clear infringement of Magna Carta. At the same time, the knightly class had been made to bear increasing financial burdens by the king, through excessive fines by his justices in eyre, heavy shrieval increments, and the calling in of Jewish debts, for example, the latter having a knock-on effect on knightly finances as Jewish lenders sought to find the money to pay the king. It was the knights’voice which was to be the loudest in the crisis that stretched into the 1260s.
17The idea of royal answerability had thus spread beyond the baronial class to encompass the knightly class too. At the heart of all of Henry’s major problems lay his ill-conceived foreign policy, and his need to find money to fund it other than through grants of taxation (which were consistently refused in the years after 1237), and at the heart of his subjects’response lay their own growing sense of the rules by which kingship should operate. What made the crisis of 1258 so serious was partly the fact that opposition to the king was so broadly based and so indebted to the wider principles enshrined in Magna Carta, but also Henry’s refusal to accept the restraints placed on him, namely a council partly chosen by him and partly by his barons, charged with «the correction and reform both of their own affairs [those of Henry and his son Edward] and of the state of the realm».41 This reaction was no surprise, for Henry had allegedly said in 1248, for example, that, «no more should vassals judge their prince or confine him to their conditions, than servants would their lords».42 Although the king had «won» the ensuing civil war by 1265, this crisis and that of 1215 had shown that the king’s subjects were willing to question his behaviour and to stand up to him with force. In 1258, they were even willing to place Henry under formal supervision, and undertake to oversee reform for the «common profit» themselves. Thus, in practice, by the late thirteenth century, it was imperative for the preservation of internal peace that the king should rule with the interests of his subjects in mind and should place himself below the law.
18The great achievement of Edward I (1272–1307) was that he broadly understood these things, and so, for the first time in the century, the king spoke the same language as his subjects. He not only talked about the king’s duty to uphold the common good, he acted to fulfil it. As a result he boasted far greater authority and support than either John or Henry III had ever achieved. Statute after statute, for example, was promulgated (he became known, of course, as the English Justinian) in which action was taken to maintain internal peace and order. Through the Statute of Winchester (1285), for example, he took a greater interest than ever before in local peace-keeping, and, in the early 1300s, he created a new category of crime, the criminal trespass, which made it possible for the crown to pursue not only felons, but those committing trespasses such as conspiracy (about which Edward was particularly concerned) too.43 He was even able to argue successfully that this need to maintain the «common profit» might at times override the king’s subordination to the law: in settling a dispute between the marcher lords, the earls of Hereford and Gloucester, in 1291, his commissioners stated that, when acting for the «common utility» the king was above the laws and customs of the realm; in a sense here, the king was, of course, paradoxically overriding the spirit of Magna Carta where he believed it stood in opposition to royal authority and therefore the good of the realm.44 Edward’s perception of the common profit is also seen in his sense of the king’s duty to steward the resources and rights of his crown, and by extension, the realm, carefully. Developing the action taken by his Angevin predecessors, he took the notion of the inalienability of crown rights further through the quo warranto proceedings of 1274–94.
19At the same time, in calling representatives of the shires to parliament (the Commons), Edward secured the position of that institution as a consultative (as well as legislative) body. He did not, however, negotiate on how the common profit should be defined, something which caused problems in the late 1290s. Defensive necessity overrode private property rights, and, put simply, for the king, that was that; the political community had accepted the defensive necessity, and so they must provide subsidies. However, he paid a price for his adoption of such an uncompromising stance, for the nobility, having turned up armed to confront him, insisted that parliament should be called to agree separately to every grant of taxation. Furthermore, they disagreed with the direction of his policy–in brief, it was on Scotland that they felt his efforts should be concentrated, not Flanders.45 But crucially they also argued that the king had impoverished his people, and not even defensive necessity could justify that, because it was manifestly detrimental to the common good.46 The king’s own rhetoric was thus now being deployed in arguments against him. The reasoning on both sides of this debate was strong, both focussing implicitly or explicitly on the common profit, and the means by which it should, and could, be upheld; in the end, however, although Edward was forced to agree concessions in order to secure taxation, and an important brake had been put on the king’s right to continuous taxation, he was not made to change his military strategy, and did secure more subsidies.
20By the beginning of the fourteenth century, it had therefore been established that kings were expected to place themselves below the law, and that rule should be for the «common good», even if definitions of what constituted the «common good» might vary, and might usually be considerably weighted towards the king’s own interpretation of it. If kings did show disregard for the law, or if the political community disagreed significantly about the definition of what constituted action for the «common profit», they were overwhelmingly likely to be subjected to a degree of questioning by that community. It was now that the exact lengths to which those subjects would go to secure good governance were to be tested. In 1307, when Edward II came to the throne, it rapidly became clear that his abilities as king were seriously limited. Failing to deal with the Scottish threat, he devoted his attention, and, it seems, a good deal of the money his subjects had given in taxation for the Scottish war, to his favourite Piers Gaveston.47 Given that the answerability of the king for his actions was now well established, it is unsurprising that opposition soon materialised and through Ordinances made in 1311 Edward was placed under conciliar supervision. The situation worsened, however, partly because Edward refused to accept counsel and partly because of the murder of Gaveston by the earl of Lancaster, an act not condoned by his fellow magnates, and which inaugurated a bloodfeud between Edward and Lancaster that was only ended by the latter’s execution in 1322. Thereafter, Edward formally threw off the constraints placed on him in 1311 by annulling the Ordinances in the Statute of York. He even argued that these restraints not only limited the king’s power, but «blemished the estate of the crown».48 His subjects were therefore responsible for causing damage to the very realm they purported to be protecting. Such arguments were, of course, clever, but they did not help him retain the throne when he followed this with a period of sustained tyranny in which he rode roughshod over the property rights of his subjects. Whatever clever words the king could deploy in defence of his right to do this, ultimately his removal from the throne became preferable to his continued rule, and it was only a question of who would attempt to unseat him and when. In 1326 an invading army, led by the queen’s lover, Roger Mortimer, arrived vowing to remove him; few could be found to fight for the king, and his defeat was therefore easy. In the written justification which followed he was said to be «incorrigible and without hope of amendment», to have been guilty both of incompetence and of «cruelty».49 A clear message had now been sent to his successors by the political community: not only was the king expected to rule with the common profit in mind, but, in addition, a tyrannical king, one who oppressed his subjects and deliberately and systematically flouted the law to which all were subject, could expect to face the most serious opposition and possibly even the nuclear option–removal from the throne.
21The events of 1326–7 were to be re-enacted under Richard II in 1399, and the principle that tyranny would most likely be met with deposition thereby cemented. Initially the problem had been incompetence, first by others during his minority, and then by the king himself.50 In summary, Richard inherited a realm in crisis as a ten-year old boy in 1377. The court had become heavily factionalised and associated with corruption during Edward III’s later years when the king had drifted into senility, the war effort was expensive and going badly, and the Commons were complaining about the failures of government. Meanwhile, England was experiencing a dramatic economic downturn which made landowners, the nobility and gentry, keen to limit their own exposure to financial demands. In 1381, England’s first major peasant rebellion took place, as the lower orders rose up against the various impositions being placed on them by lords and the king. Once Richard had grown older, it must have been prayed for that the situation would improve. However, it became rapidly clear that he would not provide the sort of leadership that would restore faith in the government. Restraints were imposed on him several times when he failed in his duties as king, spending taxation foolishly on favourites, for example, and finally, after a period of outright tyranny in 1397–9, he was removed from the throne by an invading army, this time led by the disinherited duke of Lancaster, Henry Bolingbroke.
22The fourteenth century was, then, a period in which the limitations on royal freedom of action were more firmly established than ever before. It was now that the king’s subjects thought both of opposing him when he ruled badly, and of removing him from the throne if his behaviour were deemed to be tyrannical–in other words, when he not only failed to uphold, but directly contravened, the «common good» in the most serious way. However, as we have already noted, the deposition of a divinely appointed king was not something his leading subjects did without a degree of discomfort. This is shown by the fact that a fiction was created that both Edward II and Richard II had abdicated, even though they had clearly been removed from the throne.51 The line had been drawn more firmly than ever before, then, but it was clear that this was an action that the political community could only bring itself to take in extremis. The king still held most of the cards; indeed it had to be so if royal government was to be effective and the king able to act as the supreme arbiter and decision-maker.
23The practical reach of royal authority increased still further too during the course of the fourteenth century. If Edward II and Richard II’s reigns represented the nadir of English kingship, that of Edward III (1327–77) was arguably one of its apotheoses–not only did he win dazzling military victories in France, he also restored order at home following the chaos of Edward II’s reign. As the reign progressed, there was a growth in both royal intervention in disputes, and in the number of crimes which the crown undertook to prosecute. The scope of royal taxation was moreover increased, arguably initially as a result of the necessity created by the French raids on the coasts in the 1330s and the Scottish advance into the north of England which had taken place during Edward II’s reign (1307–27).52
24It was during the fourteenth century too that the specific type of partnership between king and nobility in local governance, which existed by the early fifteenth century, was established. Local society in England had, of course, a long tradition of self-policing and dispute resolution in which the nobility played a role. Furthermore, with no police force or standing army, the crown, when it expanded the practical remit of its authority, had no choice but to rely on private landowners for the enforcement of royal rule: offices and commissions had to be filled and staffed and armies raised, for example; and the personnel for all of this had to be supplied from the locality. This meant that government was conducted through a mutually reinforcing «public-private partnership», to use modern parlance, between king and landowners, in which both parties had a clear sense of the role of the other. However, the nobility’s role in this had not always been as formal or extensive as it would be by 1400. In the thirteenth century, it seems clear that «bastard feudalism» was relatively undeveloped, with the nobility retaining very few local knightly office-holders, and playing a limited formal role in local government. During the course of the fourteenth century, those affinities grew significantly in size, coinciding with the nobility playing a much more formal role as the king’s agents in the localities–they were asked to head the newly created local peace commissions under Edward III, for example, and some of the recently ennobled lords were given lands and offices in specific geographical areas (William Clinton became Warden of the Cinque Ports and a major landowner in the region, for example).53 Expanding «bastard feudalism», and the written contracts and indentures that often went with it, represented the practical manifestation of that formalised noble control locally.54
25Why did this development take place, for it would, at face value, seem antithetical to the centralisation that had occurred in the previous 250 years? The answer to this question may lie in how royal authority had developed in the later middle ages, but what follows represents speculation rather than firm conclusions. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as the royal judicial system expanded and rule became heavily centralised, the nobility were perhaps not felt to be needed as local formal representatives of the crown. We might argue that, if this were so, it suited them, for even informally, although the phenomenon of «bastard feudalism» existed, it seems that they spent little time retaining royal officials, preferring to concentrate on other local gentry, and on relatively small numbers of them too. If they were involved in local government, it was more through informal pressure, for example, than formal retaining of officers or appointment as crown agents themselves. Only in the fourteenth century did a system of local government emerge in which the nobility were closely involved both formally and informally.55 Why this was so is not yet entirely clear, but, again to speculate, what may have been important was a combination of nobles’ realisation that such a heavily centralised system needed their input when the king was not willing or able to engage with internal rule, and a recognition on the part of the king that he needed more help from his greatest subjects. Edward III seems certainly to have believed this when he appointed nobles to peace commissions and gave them responsibility (through grants of lands and offices) for certain discrete parts of the realm. In other words, royal centralisation could only be taken so far in the absence of formal, professional policing structures. This is a subject ripe for investigation and new conclusions, but however it developed, it is clear that the way in which the localities were ruled in the fifteenth century differed from earlier, with the nobility being much more formally involved.
26How far did the nobility’s new role in the localities vis-à-vis their local «subjects» echo that played nationally by the king? On one level the answer to this question is manifestly that it did not do so at all.56 The nobility did not have public authority as the king did; rather they derived their authority from their ownership of land, and so their relationship with their clients was fundamentally different from that of the king with his subjects. In short, if they did not protect their own clients adequately, someone else might, and so the nobility could only ever be partial whereas the king was expected to be the opposite. This, in a sense, was therefore a more formally contractual relationship than that with the king because clients often had a choice about whom to ally themselves to. It did not, however, mean that noble authority was entirely distinct from kingly authority. For a start, public authority was delegated to nobles by the king as he appointed them formally to local commissions, and informally relied on them to preserve local peace. There is thus a sense in which we may speak of the lord’s «country», the area in which, broadly speaking, his lordship was recognised, as similar to the king’s realm, though proportionately smaller. So, although it is true that lords had to protect the supporters on whom they depended, they were also in the service of, and acted as councillors, and counsellors, to, the king. Their role in the maintenance of the common weal was thereby made clear, and a delicate balance had consequently to be struck between upholding the interests of one’s followers and keeping the peace locally.
Conclusion
27We can thus see how, by the early fifteenth century, a clearly reciprocal relationship had developed between the English king and his subjects. At its best, when kings governed with the «common good» at the forefront of their minds, this system of government could be hugely successful, as the reigns of Edward I, Edward III and Henry V testify. Yet things could, of course, also go badly wrong, as they did under John, Henry III, Edward II and Richard II, in which case subjects were willing to question their king and even place him under conciliar supervision, or, in the case of Edward II and Richard II, depose them if their actions became tyrannical. However, the restraints his subjects could impose on an incompetent or negligent king could only ever be temporary if they were not to hold a sword to his throat. And the last recourse worked only for so long as opposition stayed united and could remain at the king’s side with a sword.57 The ensuing situation was far from comfortable for either king or subject, but there were clearly no workable alternatives to this with which the political community was collectively happy. Thus, whilst the system of government in place in late medieval England might, as historians have realised in recent decades, be said to have been far more sophisticated than used to be thought, there were in practice no accepted remedies for incompetent or weak kingship; the king held most of the cards.
28So why did so much upheaval take place in the late fifteenth century? Why were Henry VI, Edward V and Richard III all removed from the throne with little or no reference to tyranny? What had changed? In a sense, the answer to this is nothing, at least in 1461. The events that took place in that year reflect the same discomfort as earlier with removing an incompetent king. For years, the nobility had tried to cope with Henry VI’s inadequacy by representing the king’s authority so far as possible. After decades of making do in this way, however, the situation had become intolerable in the late 1450s when the queen, in creating a party associated with herself, and consequently of course with the king, made it impossible for nobles to remain neutral and supportive of Henry.58 The fact that Henry was not simply deposed at this point on the basis of the failings of his rule shows the discomfort that existed with doing so; he was, of course, far from tyrannical. A novel approach was therefore required to a very difficult problem if anything were to happen at all, and it was finally alighted on by Edward of York in 1461: Henry, he said, was king «in dede, and not in right»; his own claim was dynastically superior to that of Henry VI, and the Lancastrians represented a usurping dynasty.59 Adopting this reasoning meant that York avoided the minefield of attempting to justify Henry’s removal by reference to his incompetence; indeed, arguably it was only the deployment of this argument that made Henry’s removal possible at all. The problem was that once such a usurpation had occurred, justified as it was by a superior claim to the throne rather than the failings of the king, nothing existed to stop ambitious claimants to the throne doing the same, as Richard of Gloucester did in 1483.60 The solution had become the problem. It was this development, and not a long-term decline in royal authority, which, it has been argued, made inevitable the re-definition of royal authority and the creation of a new governmental order under the Tudors in the sixteenth century.61 One form of political contract gave way to another.
Notes de bas de page
1 This is discussed and summarised in C. Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c. 1437-1509, Cambridge, 1997, p. 4-11.
2 See ibid., p. 8-10 for a more detailed summary of the argument discussed in this paragraph.
3 John Fortescue, The Governance of England, ed. C. Plummer, Oxford, 1885, p. 15-16.
4 For what follows, see K. B. Mcfarlane, «Bastard feudalism», in G. L. Harriss (ed.), England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays, London, 1981, p. 23-43; and K. B. Mcfarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England, Oxford, 1973. See also the introduction to G. L. Harriss (ed.), England in the Fifteenth Century, p. ix-xxvii; and C. Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses, p. 16-21.
5 For what follows, see K. B. Mcfarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England, p. 284; and id., «Bastard feudalism», p. 41-42.
6 Examples are: J. R. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 1307-1322: A Study in the Reign of Edward II, Oxford, 1970; J. R. S. Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 1307-1324: Baronial Politics in the Reign of Edward II, Oxford, 1972; C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401-1499, Cambridge, 1992; H. R. Castor, The King, the Crown, and the Duchy of Lancaster: Public Authority and Private Power, 1399-1461, Oxford, 2000; R. Virgoe, «The Crown, Magnates and Local Government in Fifteenth Century East Anglia», in J. R. L. Highfield and R. Jeffs (eds), The Crown and Local Communities in England and France in the Fifteenth Century, Gloucester, 1981, p. 72-87; S. Wright, The Derbyshire Gentry in the Fifteenth Century, Chesterfield, 1983; M. J. Ben nett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Cambridge, 1983.
7 C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, p. 363.
8 Ibid., p. 362-363.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p. 362-364
11 Ibid., p. 355.
12 Ibid., p. 365.
13 Ibid., p. 371.
14 Ibid., p. 397-398.
15 Ibid., p. 372.
16 Ibid., p. 375.
17 For a discussion of the minority, see J. L. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship, Cambridge, 1996, p. 111-122.
18 A full discussion of this can be found in ibid., p. 123-362.
19 For a discussion of what follows, see C. Carpenter, Wars of the Roses, p. 24-25.
20 For the full oath, see B. Wilkinson, Constitutional History of England, 1216-1399, London, 1952, vol. II, p. 102-107.
21 C. Carpenter, «Resisting and Deposing Kings in England in the 13th-15th Centuries», in R. Von Friedeburg (ed.), Murder and Monarchy: Regicide in European History, 1300-1800, Basingstoke, 2004, p. 101.
22 For a full discussion of what follows, see J. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship, p. 16-39.
23 Ibid., p. 21, n. 37.
24 See R. W. Dyson (ed.), T. Aquinas, Political Writings, Cambridge, 2006, Chapter 1 (b), De Regimine Principum, p. 5-52; and for other discussions of this see J. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship, p. 18-19; M. S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought, Oxford, 1999, p. 102-129.
25 For a fuller discussion of the Mirrors, see J. L. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship, p. 16-28.
26 For discussions of events under these kings, see C. Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses, p. 67-135.
27 J. L. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship, p. 111-362.
28 See below, p. 12-14.
29 For what follows, see W. L. Warren, The Governance of Norman and Angevin England, 1086-1272, London, 1987.
30 On Henry II, see id., Henry II, London, 2000. On the creation of the common law, see S. F. C. Milsom, Historical Foundations of the English Common Law, 2nd edition, London 1981.
31 E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, Princeton, 1957, p. 166.
32 For further discussion of European ideas in this period, see G. Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State 1100-1322, Princeton, 1964.
33 For the concept developing earlier, see G. Garnett, «The Origins of the Crown», in J. Hudson (ed.), The History of the English Law: Centenary Essays on «Pollock and Maitland», Oxford, 1996, p. 171-214, esp. p. 199-214.
34 G. L. Harriss, King, Parliament and Public Finance, p. 131-132.
35 G. Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought, p. 187.
36 For further discussion, see G. L. Harriss, King, Parliament and Public Finance, Part I, Chapter VI, esp. p. 134
37 Ibid., p. 134.
38 Ibid., p. 5-6.
39 On what follows, see J. Holt, Magna Carta, 2nd edition, Cambridge, 1992.
40 On what follows, see R. F. Stacey, Politics, Policy and Finance under Henry III, 1216-1245, Oxford, 1987; D. A. Carpenter, The Reign of Henry III, London 1996; J. R. Maddicott, «Magna Carta and the Local Community», Past and Present, 102, 1984, p. 26-65.
41 Provisions of Oxford, 1258 printed in R. Treharne, Documents of the Baronial Movement of Reform and Renewal, 1258-1267, Oxford, 1973, p. 97-113, esp. p. 98.
42 M. T. Clanchy, «Did Henry III have a ‘Policy’?», History, 53, 1968, p. 203-216, esp. p. 207.
43 For discussion of the Statute of Winchester, see M. C. Prestwich, Edward I, London, 1997, p. 280-281. On the development of conspiracy, see A. Harding, «The Origins of the Crime of Conspiracy», Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 33, 1983, p. 89-108.
44 G. Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought, p. 113, n. 94.
45 The Articles of Grievance (Monstraunces), 1297, printed in H. Rothwell, English Historical Documents, p. 469-472.
46 For a full discussion of this, see G. L. Harriss, King, Parliament and Public Finance, p. 58-74.
47 For an excellent narrative of the events of Edward’s reign, see M. Mckisack, The Fourteenth Century, 1307-1399, Oxford, 1959, p. 1-104.
48 G. Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought, p. 310-32 and 368-414.
49 Articles of Accusation, 1327, printed in B. Wilkinson, Constitutional History of England, 1216-1399, vol. II, p. 170-171.
50 For what follows, see M. Mckisack, The Fourteenth Century, p. 411-498; H. R. Castor, The King, the Crown and the Duchy of Lancaster, p. 7-19, C. Barron, «The Tyranny of Richard II», Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 41, 1968, p. 1-18.
51 This is discussed more fully in C. Carpenter, «Resisting and Deposing Kings in England»; and in L. Brown, Kingship and Usurpation, 1399-1485, Cambridge University Ph. D. Thesis, 2007, p. 17-18.
52 M. Mckisack, The Fourteenth Century, p. 32-41; J. Sumption, The Hundred Years War, London, 1990, vol. I: Trial by Battle, p. 147-148 and 159-184.
53 We can make some excellent direct comparisons to substantiate this sense of the growing size of affinities: on the earls, later dukes, of Lancaster, see J. R. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, whose early fourteenth century affinity can be compared with that of John of Gaunt much later in the century, for which see S. Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity. My own work, not yet in print, on the earls of Warwick in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries also shows much smaller followings than those of their counterparts in the fifteenth century. On the later see C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity. I am grateful to Richard Partington for sharing his work on Edward III with me, and for giving me the example of William Clinton.
54 On these formal written contracts, see M. Jones & S. Walker (eds), Private Indentures for Life Service in Peace and War, 1278-1476, London (Camden Miscellany, xxxii, Camden 5th Series, 3), 1994, p. 1-190.
55 See C. Burt, The Governance of Edward I, 1272-1307, with special reference to Shropshire, Warwickshire, and Kent, Cambridge University Ph. D. Thesis, 2005, for the situation in the late thirteenth century. This can be contrasted with that by the late fourteenth century. On this, see S. Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361-1399, Oxford, 1990; A. K. Gundy, The Rule of Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, in the West Midlands, 1369-1401, Cambridge University Ph. D. Thesis, 2000.
56 On what follows, see J. L. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship, p. 64-74.
57 J. L. Watts, «Usurpation in England: A Paradox of State-Growth», in F. Foronda, J. P. Genet & J. M. Nieto Soria (dirs.), Coups d’État à la fin du Moyen Âge? Aux fondements du pouvoir politique en Europe occidentale, Madrid, 2005, p. 115-130, esp. p. 122.
58.
58 On the events of the later part of Henry VI’s reign, see C. Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses, p. 136-155.
59 On this, see L. Brown, Kingship and Usurpation, p. 19 and 148-200, esp. p. 200.
60 Ibid., p. 258-63.
61 J. Watts, «Usurpation in England», p. 125-126.
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New Hall, Cambridge University
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