CHAPTER XIX.

ENGLAND DURING THE LATTER YEARS OF EDWARD III.

Never was Edward's glory so high as in the years immediately succeeding

the treaty of Calais. The unspeakable misery of France heightened his

magnificence by the strength of the contrast. At eight-and-forty he

retained the vigour and energy of his younger days, though surrounded

by a band of grown-up sons. In 1362 the king celebrated his jubilee, or

his fiftieth birthday, amidst feasts of unexampled splendour. Not less

magnificent were the festivities that attended the visits of the three

kings, of France, Cyprus, and Scotland, in 1364.

Of the glories of these years we have detailed accounts from an

eye-witness a writer competent, above all other men of his time, to set

down in courtly and happy phrase the wonders that delighted his eyes.

In 1361, John Froissart, an adventurous young clerk from Valenciennes,

sought out a career for himself in the household of his countrywoman,

Queen Philippa, bearing with him as his credentials a draft of a verse

chronicle which was his first attempt at historical composition. He

came to England at the right moment. The older generation of historians

had laid down their pens towards the conclusion of the great war, and

had left no worthy successors. The new-comer was soon to surpass them,

not in precision and sobriety, but in wealth of detail, in literary

charm, and in genial appreciation of the externals of his age. He

recorded with an eye-witness's precision of colour, though with utter

indifference to exactness, the tournaments and fetes, the banquets and

the _largesses_ of the noble lords and ladies of the most brilliant

court in Christendom. He celebrated the courtesy of the knightly class,

their devotion to their word of honour, the liberality with which

captive foreigners was allowed to share in their sports and pleasures,

and the implicit loyalty with which nearly all the many captive knights

repaid the trust placed on their word. To him Edward was the most

glorious of kings, and Philippa, his patroness, the most beautiful,

liberal, pious, and charitable of queens. For nine years he enjoyed the

queen's bounty, and described with loyal partiality the exploits of

English knights. With the death of his patroness and the beginning of

England's misfortunes, the light-minded adventurer sought another

master in the French-loving Wenceslaus of Brabant. The first edition of

his chronicle, compiled when under the spell of the English court,

contrasts strongly with the second version written at Brussels at the

instigation of the Luxemburg duke of Brabant.

Even Froissart saw that all was not well in England. The common people

seemed to him proud, cruel, disloyal, and suspicious. Their delight was

in battle and slaughter, and they hated the foreigner with a fierce

hatred which had no counterpart in the cosmopolitan knightly class.

They were the terror of their lords and delighted in keeping their

kings under restraint. The Londoners were the most mighty of the

English and could do more than all the rest of England. Other writers

tell the same tale. The same fierce patriotism that Froissart notes

glows through the rude battle songs in which Lawrence Minot sang the

early victories of Edward from Halidon Hill to the taking of Guînes,

and inspired Geoffrey le Baker to repeat with absolute confidence every

malicious story which gossip told to the discredit of the French king

and his people. It was under the influence of this spirit that the

steps were taken, which we have already recorded, to extend the use of

English, notably in the law courts. Yet the old bilingual habit clave

long to the English. Despite the statute of 1362, the lawyers continued

to employ the French tongue, until it crystallised into the jargon of

the later _Year Books_ or of Littleton's _Tenures_. Under Edward III,

however, French remained the living speech of many Englishmen. John

Gower wrote in French the earliest of his long poems. But he is a

thorough Englishman for all that. He writes in French, but, as he says,

he writes for England.[1]

[1] "O gentile Engleterre, a toi j'escrits," _Mirour de

l'Omme,_ in John Gower's _Works,_ i., 378, ed. G.C. MaCaulay,

to whom belongs the credit of recovering this long lost work.

It was characteristic of the patriotic movement of the reign of Edward

III, that a new courtly literature in the English language rivalled the

French vernacular literature which as yet had by no means ceased to

produce fruit. The new type begins with the anonymous poems, "Sir

Gawain and the Green Knight," and the "Pearl". While Froissart was the

chief literary figure at the English court during the ten years after

the treaty of Calais, his place was occupied in the concluding decade

of the reign by Geoffrey Chaucer, the first great poet of the English

literary revival. The son of a substantial London vintner, Chaucer

spent his youth as a page in the household of Lionel of Antwerp, from

which he was transferred to the service of Edward himself. He took part

in more than one of Edward's French campaigns, and served in diplomatic

missions to Italy, Flanders, and elsewhere. His early poems reflect the

modes and metres of the current French tradition in an English dress,

and only reach sustained importance in his lament on the death of the

Duchess Blanche of Lancaster, written about 1370. It is significant

that the favourite poet of the king's declining years was no clerk but

a layman, and that the Tuscan mission of 1373, which perhaps first

introduced him to the treasures of Italian poetry, was undertaken in

the king's service. Thorough Englishman as Chaucer was, he had his eyes

open to every movement of European culture. His higher and later style

begins with his study of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Though he

wrote for Englishmen in their own tongue, his fame was celebrated by

the French poet, Eustace Deschamps, as the "great translator" who had

sown the flowers of French poesy in the realm of Aeneas and Brut the

Trojan. His broad geniality stood in strong contrast to the savage

patriotism of Minot. In becoming national, English vernacular art did

not become insular. Chaucer wrote in the tongue of the southern

midlands, the region wherein were situated his native London, the two

universities, the habitual residences of the court, the chief seats of

parliaments and councils, and the most frequented marts of commerce.

For the first time a standard English language came into being, largely

displacing for literary purposes the local dialects which had hitherto

been the natural vehicles of writing in their respective districts. The

Yorkshireman, Wycliffe, the westcountryman, Langland, adopted before

the end of the reign the tongue of the capital for their literary

language in preference to the speech of their native shires. The

language of the extreme south, the descendant of the tongue of the West

Saxon court, became the dialect of peasants and artisans. That a

continuous life was reserved for the idiom of the north country, was

due to its becoming the speech of a free Scotland, the language in

which Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, commemorated for the court of

the first Stewart king the exploits of Robert Bruce and the Scottish

war of independence. The unity of England thus found another notable

expression in the oneness of the popular speech. And the evolution of

the northern dialect into the "Scottish" of a separate kingdom showed

that, if England were united, English-speaking Britain remained

divided.

Other arts indicate the same tendency. Even in the thirteenth century

English Gothic architecture differentiated itself pretty completely from

its models in the Isle de France. The early fourteenth century, the age

of the so-called "decorated style," suggests in some ways a falling back

to the French types, though the prosperity of England and the desolation

of France make the English examples of fourteenth century building the

more numerous and splendid. The occasional tendency of the later

"flowing" decorated towards "flamboyant" forms, to be seen in some of

the churches of Northamptonshire, marks the culminating point of this

fresh approximation of French and English architecture. But the division

between the two countries brought about by war was illustrated before

the end of the reign in the growth of the most local of our medieval

architectural types, that "perpendicular" style which is so strikingly

different from the "flamboyant" art of the neighbouring kingdom. This

specially English style begins early in the reign of Edward III, when

the cult of the murdered Edward of Carnarvon gave to the monks of St.

Peter's, Gloucester, the means to recast the massive columns and gloomy

arcades of the eastern portions of their romanesque abbey church after

the lighter and brighter patterns in which Gloucester set the fashion to

all southern Britain. In the buildings of the later years of Edward's

reign the old "flowing decorated" and the newer and stiffer

"perpendicular" grew up side by side. If the two seem almost combined in

the church of Edington, in Wiltshire, the foundation dedicated in 1361

for his native village by Edward's chancellor, Bishop Edington of

Winchester, the triumph of the perpendicular is assured in the new choir

which Archbishop Thoresby began for York Minster, and in the

reconstruction of the Norman cathedral of Winchester begun by Bishop

Edington, and completed when his greater successor, William of Wykeham,

carried out in a more drastic way the device already adopted at

Gloucester of recasing the ancient structure so as to suit modern

tastes. The full triumph of the new style is apparent in Wykeham's twin

foundations at Winchester and Oxford. The separation of feeling between

England and Scotland is now seen in architecture as well as in language.

When the perpendicular fashion was carrying all before it in the

southern realm, the Scottish builders erected their churches after the

flamboyant type of their French allies. Thus while the twelfth and

thirteenth century structures of the northern and southern kingdoms are

practically indistinguishable, the differences between the two nations,

which had arisen from the Edwardian policy of conquest, expressed

themselves ultimately in the striking contrast between the flamboyant of

Melrose or St. Giles' and the perpendicular of Winchester or Windsor.

English patriotism, which had asserted itself in the literature and art

of the people long before it dominated courtly circles, continued to

express itself in more popular forms than even those of the poems of

Chaucer. The older fashions of instructing the people were still in

vogue in the early part of Edward's reign. Richard Rolle, the hermit of

Hampole, whose _Prick_ of _Conscience_ and vernacular paraphrases of

the Bible illustrate the older didactic literature, was carried off in

his Yorkshire cell in the year of the Black Death. The cycles of

miracle plays, which edified and amused the townsfolk of Chester and

York, crystallised into a permanent shape early in this reign, and were

set forth with ever-increasing elaborateness by an age bent on

pageantry and amusement. The vernacular sermons and popular manuals of

devotion increased in numbers and copiousness. In this the time of the

Black Death is, as in other aspects of our story, a deep dividing line.

The note of increasing strain and stress is fully expressed in the

earlier forms of _The Vision of Piers Plowman,_ which were composed

before the death of Edward III. Its author, William Langland, a clerk in

minor orders, debarred by marriage from a clerical career, came from the

Mortimer estates in the march of Wales: but his life was mainly spent in

London, and he wrote in the tongue of the city of his adoption. The

first form of the poem is dated 1362, the year of the second visitation

of the Black Death, while the troubles of the end of the reign perhaps

inspired the fuller edition which saw the light in 1377. It is a

commonplace to contrast the gloomy pictures drawn by Langland with the

highly coloured pictures of contemporary society for which Chaucer was

gathering his materials. Yet this contrast may be pressed too far.

Though Langland had a keen eye to those miseries of the poor which are

always with us, the impression of the time gathered from his writings is

not so much one of material suffering, as of social unrest and

discontent. The poor ploughman, who cannot get meat, still has his

cheese, curds, and cream, his loaf of beans and bran, his leeks and

cabbage, his cow, calf, and cart mare.[1] The very beggar demanded

"bread of clean wheat" and "beer of the best and brownest," while the

landless labourer despised "night-old cabbage," "penny-ale," and bacon,

and asked for fresh meat and fish freshly fried.[2] There is plenty of

rough comfort and coarse enjoyment in the England through which "Long

Will" stalked moodily, idle, hopeless, and in himself exemplifying many

of the evils which he condemned. The England of Langland is bitter,

discontented, and sullen. It is the popular answer to the class

prejudice and reckless greed of the lords and gentry. Langland's own

attitude towards the more comfortable classes is much that of the

self-assertive and mutinous Londoner whom Froissart looked upon with

such bitter prejudice. He boasts that he was loath to do reverence to

lords and ladies, or to those clad in furs with pendants of silver, and

refuses to greet "sergeants" with a "God save you". Every class of

society is flagellated in his scathing criticisms. He is no

revolutionist with a new gospel of reform, but, though content to accept

the old traditions, he is the ruthless denouncer of abuses, and is

thoroughly filled with the spirit which, four years after the second

recension of his book, found expression in the Peasants Revolt of 1381.

With all the archaism of his diction and metre, Langland, even more than

Chaucer, reflects the modernity of his age.

[1] _Vision of Piers Plowman,_ i.,220, ed. Skeat.

[2] _Ibid.,_ i., 222.

Even the universities were growing more national, for the war prevented

Oxford students from seeking, after their English graduation, a wider

career at Paris. William of Ockham, the last of the great English

schoolmen that won fame in the European rather than in the English

world, died about 1349 in the service of the Bavarian emperor. In the

same year the plague swept away Thomas Bradwardine, the "profound

doctor," at the moment of his elevation to the throne of Canterbury.

Bradwardine, though a scholar of universal reputation, won his fame at

Oxford without the supplementary course at Paris, and lived all his

career in his native land. As an English university career became more

self-sufficient, Oxford became the school of the politician and the man

of affairs as much as of the pure student. The new tendency is

illustrated by the careers of the brothers Stratford, both Oxford

scholars, yet famous not for their writings but for lives devoted to the

service of the State, though rewarded by the highest offices of the

Church. His conspicuous position as a teacher of scholastic philosophy

first brought John Wycliffe into academic prominence. But he soon won a

wider fame as a preacher in London, an adviser of the court, an opponent

of the "possessioner" monks, and of the forsworn friars, who, deserting

apostolic poverty, vied with the monks in covetousness. His attacks on

practical abuses in the Church marked him out as a politician as well as

a philosopher. His earlier career ended in 1374, the year in which he

first became the king's ambassador, not long after proceeding to the

degree of doctor of divinity.[1] His later struggles must be considered

in the light of the political history of the concluding episodes of

Edward's reign. In a few years we shall find the Oxford champion

abandoning the Latin language of universal culture, and appealing to the

people in homely English. With Wycliffe's entry upon his wider career,

it is hardly too much to say that Oxford ceased to be merely a part of

the cosmopolitan training ground of the schoolmen, and became in some

fashion a national institution. Cambridge, too young and obscure in

earlier ages to have rivalled Oxford, first began to enjoy an increasing

reputation.

[1] This was before Dec. 26, 1373. See Twemlow in _Engl. Hist.

Review_, xv, (1900), 529-530.

Hitherto culture had been not only cosmopolitan but clerical. Every

university student and nearly every professional man was a clerk. But

education was becoming possible for laymen, and there were already lay

professions outside the clerical caste. The wide cultivation and the

vigorous literary output of laymen of letters like Chaucer and Cower

are sufficient evidence of this. But the best proof is the complete

differentiation of the common lawyers from the clergy. The inns of

court of London became virtually a legal university, where highly

trained men studied a juristic system, which was not the less purely

English in spirit because its practitioners used the French tongue as

their technical instrument. There were no longer lawyers in England

who, like Bracton, strove to base the law of the land on the forms and

methods of Roman jurisprudence. There were no longer kings, like Edward

I., with Italian trained civilians at their court ready to translate

the law of England into imperialist forms. The canonist still studied

at Oxford or Cambridge, but his career was increasingly clerical, and

the Church, unlike the State, was unable to nationalise itself, though

the whole career of Wycliffe and the strenuous efforts of the kings and

statesmen who passed the statutes of Provisors and Praemunire, showed

that some of the English clergy, and many of the English laity, were

willing to make the effort. English law, in divorcing itself from the

universities and the clergy, became national as well as lay. There were

no longer any Weylands who concealed their clerical beginnings, and hid

away the subdeacon under the married knight and justice, the founder of

a landowning family. The lawyers of Edward's reign were frankly laymen,

marrying and giving in marriage, establishing new families that became

as noble as any of the decaying baronial houses, and yet cherishing a

corporate ideal and common spirit as lively and real as those of any

monastery or clerical association.

In enumerating the many convergent tendencies which worked together in

strengthening the national life, we must not forget the growing

importance of commerce. Merchant princes like the Poles could rival the

financial operations of Lombard or Tuscan, and climb into the baronial

class. The proud and mutinous temper of the Londoners was largely due

to their ever-increasing wealth. We are on the threshold of the careers

of commercial magnates, like the Philpots and the Whittingtons. Even

when Edward III. was still on the throne, a London mayor of no special

note, John Pyel, could set up in his native Northamptonshire village of

Irthlingborough a college and church of remarkable stateliness and

dignity. The growth of the wool trade, and its gradual transfer to

English hands, the development of the staple system, the rise of an

English seaman class that knew all the havens of Europe, the beginnings

of the English cloth manufacture, all indicate that English commerce

was not only becoming more extensive, but was gradually emancipating

itself from dependence on the foreigner. Thus before the end of

Edward's reign England was an intensely national state, proudly

conscious of itself, and haughtily contemptuous of the foreigner, with

its own language, literature, style in art, law, universities, and even

the beginnings of a movement towards the nationalisation of the Church.

The cosmopolitanism of the earlier Middle Ages was everywhere on the

wane. A modern nation had arisen out of the old world-state and

world-spirit. In the England of Edward III., Chaucer, and Wycliffe, we

have reached the consummation of the movement whose first beginnings we

have traced in the early storms of the reign of Henry III. It is in the

development of this tendency that the period from 1216 to 1377

possesses such unity as it has.

During the years of peace after the treaty of Calais, Edward III.

completed the scheme for the establishment of his family begun with the

grant of Aquitaine to the Black Prince. The state of the king's

finances made it impossible for him to provide for numerous sons and

daughters from the royal exchequer, and the system of appanages had

seldom been popular or successful in England. Edward found an easier

way of endowing his offspring by politic marriages that transferred to

his sons the endowments and dignities of the great houses, which, in

spite of lavish creations of new earldoms, were steadily dying out in

the male line. Some of his daughters in the same way were married into

baronial families whose attachment to the throne would, it was

believed, be strengthened by intermarriage with the king's kin; while

others, wedded to foreign princes, helped to widen the circle of

continental alliances on which he never ceased to build large hopes.

Collateral branches of the royal family were pressed into the same

system, which was so systematically ordered that it has passed for a

new departure in English history. This is, however, hardly the case.

Many previous kings, notably Edward I., carried out a policy based upon

similar lines, and only less conspicuous by reason of the smaller

number of children that they had to provide for. The descendants of

Henry III. and Edward I. in no wise kept true to the monarchical

tradition, but rather gave distinction to the baronial opposition by

ennobling it with royal alliances. But the martial and vigorous policy

of Edward III. had at least the effect of reducing to inactivity the

tradition of constitutional opposition which had been the common

characteristic of successive generations of the royal house of

Lancaster, the chief collateral branch of the royal family. Subsequent

history will show that the Edwardian family settlement was as

unsuccessful as that of his grandfather. The alliances which Edward

built up brought neither solidarity to the royal house, nor strength to

the crown, nor union to the baronage. But the working out of this, as

of so many of the new developments of the later part of Edward's reign,

can only be seen after his death.

Edward's eldest son became, as we have seen, Duke of Cornwall, Prince

of Wales, and Earl of Chester even before he received Aquitaine. He was

the first of the continuous line of English princes of Wales, for

Edward III. never bore that title. The Black Prince's marriage with his

cousin, Joan of Kent, was a love-match, and the estates of his bride

were scarcely an important consideration to the lord of Wales and

Cheshire. Yet the only child of the unlucky Edmund of Woodstock was no

mean heiress, bringing with her the estates of her father's earldom of

Kent, besides the inheritance of her mother's family, the Wakes of

Liddell and Lincolnshire. The estates and earldom afterwards passed to

Joan's son by a former husband, and the Holland earls of Kent formed a

minor family connexion which closely supported the throne of Richard of

Bordeaux. Though their paternal inheritance was that of Lancashire

squires, the Hollands won a leading place in the history of the next

generation.

Edward III.'s second son, William of Hatfield, died in infancy. For his

third son, Lionel of Antwerp, when still in his childhood, Edward found

the greatest heiress of her time, Elizabeth, the only daughter of

William de Burgh, the sixth lord of Connaught and third Earl of Ulster,

the representative of one of the chief Anglo-Norman houses in Ireland.

Even before his marriage, Lionel was made Earl of Ulster, a title sunk

after 1362 in the novel dignity of the duchy of Clarence. This title was

chosen because Elizabeth de Burgh was a grand-daughter of Elizabeth of

Clare, the sister of the last Clare Earl of Gloucester, and a share of

the Gloucester inheritance passed through her to the young duke. His

marriage gave Lionel a special relation to Ireland, where, however, his

two lordships of Ulster and Connaught were largely in the hands of the

native septs, and where the royal authority had never won back the

ground lost during the vigorous onslaught of Edward Bruce on the English

power. In 1342 the estates of Ireland forwarded to Edward a long

statement of the shortcomings of the English administration of the

island.[1] No effective steps were taken to remedy those evils until, in

1361, Edward III. sent Lionel as governor to Ireland, declaring "that

our Irish dominions have been reduced to such utter devastation and ruin

that they may be totally lost, if our subjects there are not immediately

succoured". Lionel's most famous achievement was the statute of

Kilkenny. This law prohibited the intermixture of the Anglo-Normans in

Ireland with the native Irish, which was rapidly undermining the basis

of English rule and confounding Celts and Normans in a nation, ever

divided indeed against itself, but united against the English. Lionel

wearied of a task beyond his strength. His wife's early death lessened

the ties which bound him to her land, and he went back to England

declaring that he would never return to Ireland if he could help it. His

succession as governor by a Fitzgerald showed that the plan of ruling

Ireland through England was abandoned by Edward III. in favour of the

cheaper but fatal policy of concealing the weakness of the English power

by combining it with the strength of the strongest of the Anglo-Norman

houses. Under this faulty system, the statute of Kilkenny became

inoperative almost from its enactment.

[1] Cal. of Close, Rolls, 1341-43, pp. 508-16.

The widowed Duke of Clarence made a second great marriage. The

Visconti, tyrants of Milan, were willing to pay heavily for the

privilege of intermarriage with the great reigning families of Europe,

and neither Edward III. nor the French king could resist the temptation

of alliance with a family that was able to endow its daughters so

richly. Accordingly, the Duke of Clarence became in 1368 the husband of

Violante Visconti, the daughter of Galeazzo, lord of Pavia, and the

niece of Bernabò, signor of Milan, the bitter foe of the Avignon

papacy. Five months later, Lionel was carried away by a sudden

sickness, and thus the Visconti marriage brought little fruit to

England. Lionel's only child, Philippa, the offspring of his first

marriage, was married, just before her father's death, to Edmund

Mortimer, Earl of March, great-grandson of the traitor earl beheaded in

1330. Lionel's death added to the vast inheritance of the Mortimers and

Joinvilles the lands and claims of Ulster and Clarence, and so Edward

III.'s magnanimity in reviving the earldom of March after the disgrace

of 1330 was rewarded by the devolution of its estates to his

grand-daughter's child. The Earl of March was invested with a new

political importance, for his wife was the nearest representative of

Edward III, save for the dying Black Prince and his sickly son. The

fierce blood and broad estates of the great marcher family continued to

give importance to Philippa's descendants; and finally the house of

Mortimer mounted the throne in the person of Edward IV.

The estates of Lancaster were annexed to the reigning branch of the

royal house by the marriage in 1359 of John of Gaunt, Edward's third

surviving son, with Blanche of Lancaster, the heiress of Duke Henry,

who became, after her sister Maud's death, the sole inheritor of the

duchy of Lancaster. In 1362 John, who had hitherto been Earl of

Richmond, yielded up this dignity to the younger John of Montfort, its

rightful heir, and was created Duke of Lancaster at the same time that

Lionel was made Duke of Clarence. Ten years after her marriage Blanche

died, leaving John a son, Henry of Derby, the future Henry IV., whose

wedding, after his grandfather's death, to one of the Bohun

co-heiresses brought part of the estates of another great house within

the grasp of Edward III.'s descendants. Moreover, the other Bohun

co-heiress became in 1376 the wife of Thomas of Woodstock, the youngest

of Edward's sons, the Gloucester of the next reign. The three Bohun

earldoms of Hereford, Essex, and Northampton were thus absorbed by the

old king's children and grandchildren. John of Gaunt, like Lionel, lost

his wife early and sought a second bride abroad. In 1372 he married

Constance of Castile, a natural daughter of the deceased Peter the

Cruel. Henceforth he was summoned to parliament as King of Castile and

Leon as well as Duke of Lancaster, though it was not until the next

reign that he took any actual steps to assert his claim.

John's next younger brother, Edmund of Langley, Earl of Cambridge in

136% [1368?] married Isabella, Constance of Castile's younger sister.

He was the future Duke of York, and as the only one of Edward III.'s

sons who did not marry an English heiress, was the most scantily

endowed of them all. The union of his descendants with those of Lionel

of Clarence gave the house of York a territorial importance which was,

as we have seen, mainly derived from the Mortimer inheritance. Thus the

two lines of descendants of Edward III. which had most future

significance were those which represented through heiresses the rival

houses of Lancaster and March. The history of the next century shows

that the rivalry was only made more formidable by the connexion of both

these lines with the royal family. In this, the most striking triumph

of the Edwardian policy, is also the most signal indication of its

failure. From it arose the factions of York and Lancaster.

The legislation of the years of peace, from 1360 to 1369, is largely

anti-papal and economic, and is so intimately connected with the laws

of the preceding period that it has been dealt with in an earlier

chapter. But however anti-papal, and therefore anti-clerical, some of

Edward's laws were, his government was still mainly controlled by great

ecclesiastical statesmen. Simon Langham, though a Benedictine monk, had

as chancellor demanded in 1366 the opinion of the estates as to the

unlawfulness of the Roman tribute, and the clerical estate, if it did

not help forward the anti-Roman legislation, was content to stand

aside, and let it take effect without protest. Shortly after taking

part in the movement against papal tribute, Langham was removed from

the see of Ely to that of Canterbury in succession to Islip. His

conversion into a purely monastic college of his predecessor's mixed

foundation for seculars and regulars in Canterbury Hall, Oxford, showed

a bias which might have been expected in a former abbot of Westminster,

while his willingness to follow in the footsteps of Kilwardby, and

exchange his archbishopric for the dignity of a cardinal and residence

at Avignon showed that he was a papalist as well as an English patriot.

His successor as primate, appointed in 1369 by papal provision, was

William Whittlesea, a nephew of Archbishop Islip, whose weak health and

colourless character made of little account his five years' tenure of

the metropolitical dignity. With Canterbury in such feeble hands, the

leadership in the Church and primacy in the councils of the crown

passed to stronger men: such as John Thoresby, Archbishop of York till

1373; Thomas Brantingham, treasurer from 1369 to 1371, and Bishop of

Exeter from 1370 to 1394; and above all to Edward's old servant,

William of Wykeham, chancellor from 1367 to 1371, and Bishop of

Winchester, in succession to Edington, from 1367 until 1404. Wykeham

was a strenuous and hard-working servant of the crown, a vigorous and

careful ruler of his diocese, a mighty pluralist, a magnificent

builder, and the most bountiful and original of all the pious founders

of his age. "Everything," says Froissart, "was done through him and

without him nothing was done."[1]

[1] Froissart, _Chroniques_, ed. Luce, viii., 101.

The year of the breach of the treaty of Calais was also marked by the

third great visitation of the Black Death, and the death of Queen

Philippa. Parliament cordially welcomed the resumption by Edward of the

title of King of France, and made liberal subsidies for the prosecution

of the campaign. Disappointment was all the more bitter when each

campaign ended in disaster, and in the parliament of February, 1371, the

storm burst. The circumstances of the ministerial crisis of 1341 were

almost exactly renewed. As on the previous occasion, the state was in

the hands of great ecclesiastics, whose conservative methods were

thought inadequate for circumstances so perilous. John Hastings, second

Earl of Pembroke of his house, a gallant young warrior and the intended

son-in-law of the king, made himself the spokesman of the anti-clerical

courtiers, probably with the good-will of the king. At Pembroke's

instigation the earls, barons, and commons drew up a petition that,

"inasmuch as the government of the realm has long been in the hands of

the men of Holy Church, who in no case can be brought to account for

their acts, whereby great mischief has happened in times past and may

happen in times to come, may it therefore please the king that laymen of

his own realm be elected to replace them, and that none but laymen

henceforth be chancellor, treasurer, barons of the exchequer, clerk of

privy seal, or other great officers of the realm ".[1] Edward fell in

with this request. Wykeham quitted the chancery, and Brantingham the

treasury. Of their lay successors the new chancellor, Sir Robert Thorpe,

chief-justice of the court of common pleas, was a close friend of the

Earl of Pembroke, while the new treasurer, Sir Richard le Scrope of

Bolton, a Yorkshire warrior, represented the interests of John of Gaunt,

whose long absences abroad did not prevent his ultimately becoming a

strong supporter of the lay policy. A subsidy of £50,000 and a statute

that no new tax should be laid on wool without parliamentary assent

concluded the work of this parliament.

[1] _Rot. Pad._, ii., 304.

The lay ministers did not prove as efficient as their clerical

predecessors. Want of acquaintance with administrative routine led them

to assess the parliamentary grant so badly that an irregular

reassembling of part of the estates was necessary, when it was found

that the ministers had ludicrously over-estimated the number of

parishes in England among which the grant of £50,000 had been equally

divided. Meanwhile the French war was proceeding worse than before.

Thorpe died in 1372, and another lay chief-justice, Sir John Knyvett,

succeeded him in the chancery. Pembroke, as we have seen, was taken

prisoner to Santander within a few weeks of Thorpe's death. Fresh

taxation was made necessary by every fresh defeat, and the clergy, who

looked upon the misfortunes of the anti-clerical earl as God's

punishment for his enmity to Holy Church, had their revenge against

their lawyer supplanters, for the parliament of 1372 petitioned that

lawyers, who used their position in parliament to advance their

clients' affairs, should not be eligible for election as knights of the

shire. Next year, the discontent of the estates came to a head after

the failure of John of Gaunt's march from Calais to Bordeaux. The

commons, by that time definitely organised as an independent house,

answered the demand for fresh supplies by requesting the lords to

appoint a committee of their number to confer with them on the state of

the realm. The composition of the committee was not one that favoured

the existing administration, and, guided by men like William of

Wykeham, it made only a limited and conditional grant, which was

strictly appropriated to the payment of the expenses of the war. The

anti-clerical party was still strong enough to send up denunciations of

papal assumptions, and the anxiety to adjust the relations between the

papacy and the crown led to some abortive negotiations with the legates

of Gregory XI at Bruges in 1374, which were mainly memorable for the

appearance of John Wycliffe as one of the royal commissioners. Disgust

at the attitude of the commons may well have postponed the next

parliament for nearly three years. But the truce of Bruges made

frequent parliaments less necessary.

The truce brought John of Gaunt back to England, and the rivalry

between him and his elder brother, which had begun during their last

joint campaigns in France, crystallised into definite parties the

discordant tendencies that had been well marked since the crisis of

1371. The old king was a mere pawn in the game. His health had been

broken by the debauchery and frivolity to which he had abandoned

himself after the death of Queen Philippa. He was now entirely under

the influence of Alice Perrers, a Hertfordshire squire's daughter,

whose venality, greed, and shamelessness made her the fit tool for the

self-seeking ring of courtiers. John of Gaunt sought her support as the

best means of withdrawing the old king from the influence of the Prince

of Wales, and the lay ministers were glad to maintain themselves in

their tottering power by means of such powerful allies. Prominent among

their party were courtier nobles--such as the chamberlain, Lord

Latimer, and the steward of the household, Lord Neville of Raby,--and

rich London financiers, chief among whom was Richard Lyons, men who

made exorbitant profits out of the necessities of the administration.

Faction sought to appear more respectable by professions of zeal for

reform. The cry against papal encroachments was extended to a

denunciation of the wealth and power of the clergy. John Wycliffe was

called from his Oxford classrooms to expound the close connexion

between dominion and grace, and to teach from London pulpits that the

ungodly bishop or priest has no right to the temporal possessions given

him on trust for the discharge of his high mission.[1]

[1] Until recently all historians have dated the beginning of

Wycliffe's political career from 1366, but J. Loserth has

proved that 1374, the date of the last demand for the Roman

tribute, to be the right year. See his _Studien zur

Kirchen-politik Englands im 14ten Jahrhundert_, in

_Sitzungsberichte der Académie der Wissenschaften in Wien_,

philos. histor. classe, cxxxvi., 1897, and, more briefly, in

_Engl. Hist. Review, xi._ (1896), 319-328.

A vigorous opposition to the dominant faction was formed. At its head

was the Black Prince. Hardly less important and much more active than

the dying hero of Poitiers was Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, the

husband of Philippa of Clarence, and the father of the little Roger

Mortimer whom nothing but the uncertain lives of the Prince of Wales

and the sickly Richard of Bordeaux separated from the English throne.

Hereditary antagonism accentuated incompatibility of personal

interests. The ancient feuds of the houses of Mortimer and Lancaster

still lived on in the hostility of their representatives. The

understanding between the Prince of Wales and the Earl of March seems

to have been complete. They had as their most powerful supporters the

outraged dignitaries of the Church, who saw themselves kept out of

office and threatened in their temporalities by the dominant faction.

William of Wykeham, who had been the guardian of the Earl of March

during his long minority, was the most experienced and wary of the

clerical opposition to the lawyers and courtiers of the Lancaster

faction. He had an eager and enthusiastic backer in the young and

high-born Bishop of London, William Courtenay, the son of the Earl of

Devon, and through his mother, Margaret Bohun, a great-grandson of

Edward I. Office and descent combined to make Bishop Courtenay the

custodian of the constitutional tradition, which was equally strong

among the great baronial houses of ancient descent and such highly

placed ecclesiastics as were zealous for the nation as well as for

their order. His support was the more necessary since Simon of Sudbury,

who in 1375 succeeded Whittlesea on the throne of St. Augustine, was a

weak and time-serving politician.

The storm, which had long been brewing, burst at last in the parliament

of April, 1376. Of the acts of this memorable assembly, famous as the

Good Parliament, and of the other concluding troubles of the reign we

are fortunate in possessing not only copious official records, but a

minute and highly dramatic account from the pen of a St. Alban's monk,

who, alone of the monastic chroniclers of his age, represented the

spirit which, in the days of Matthew Paris, made the great

Hertfordshire abbey so famous a school of historiography.[1]

[1] _Chron. Angliæ_, 1328-88, ed. E.M. Thompson (Rolls Ser.).

Compare Mr. S. Armitage-Smith's _John of Gaunt_ for an

unfavourable estimate of its value.

The Good Parliament showed from the beginning a strong animosity

against the courtiers. The time was not yet come when the commons could

take the initiative, or supply leaders from its own ranks, and even

among the commons capacity was unequally divided. Authority and

influence were exclusively with the knights of the shire, and the

citizens and burgesses were content to allow the country gentry to

speak and act in their name. The knights of the shire demanded that, in

accordance with the precedent of 1373, a committee of magnates should

be associated with them in determining the policy to be adopted. The

lords spiritual and temporal were as eager as the knights to attack the

government, and a committee, of which the leading spirits included the

Earl of March and the Bishop of London, supplied the element of

direction and initiation in which the commons were lacking. The

resolution which prevailed was shown by the estates agreeing to make no

grant until grievances had been redressed, and by the choice of Sir

Peter de la Mare as spokesman of the commons before the king. Sir Peter

was elected, we are told, because he possessed abundant wisdom and

eloquence, and enough boldness to say what was in his mind, regardless

of the good-will of the great. Perhaps a further and more weighty

reason was that he was steward of the Earl of March. He was the first

person to hold an office indistinguishable in all essentials from that

of the later Speaker. Under his guidance the commons worked out an

elaborate policy of revenge and reform. The contempt with which John of

Gaunt and the courtiers had at first regarded their action, gave place

to fear. The duke found it prudent to stand aside, while a clean sweep

of the administration was made.

Charges were brought against the leading ministers of state, after a

fashion in which the constitutional historian sees the beginnings of

the process of the removal of great offenders by impeachment. Lord

Latimer was the first victim. He had appropriated the king's money to

his own uses; he had shown remissness and treachery during the last

campaign in Brittany; he had taken bribes; he was, in a word, "useless

to king and kingdom". His fate was promptly shared by Lyons, the London

merchant, the accomplice of his frauds, who had availed himself of his

court influence to make a "corner" in nearly all imported articles, to

the impoverishment of the common people and the disorganisation of

trade. Lord Neville, whose eager partisanship of Latimer had led him to

insult Sir Peter de la Mare, was threatened with similar proceedings.

Even Alice Perrers was attacked, though, says the chronicler, the

natural affection of Englishmen for their king was so great that they

were slow to molest the lady whom the king loved. However, Alice's

unblushing interference with the course of justice, her appearance in

the courts at Westminster, sitting on the judges' bench, clamouring for

the condemnation of her enemies and the acquittal of her friends,

roused the knights of the shire to action. An ordinance against women

being allowed to practise in the law courts was made the pretext for

her removal from court, and Alice, fearful that worse might happen,

took oath that she would have no further dealings with the king.

Meantime Latimer and Lyons were condemned to forfeiture and

imprisonment.

In the midst of these proceedings the knights lost their strongest

support by the death of the Black Prince on June 8. John of Gaunt at

once went down to the house of commons, and boldly suggested that the

English should follow the example of the French and allow no woman to

become heiress of the kingdom. This was a direct assertion of his own

claims to stand next to the throne after Richard of Bordeaux, and

before Roger Mortimer. Alarmed at the blow thus levelled against their

chief remaining champion, the knights courageously held to their

position. "The king," said they, "though old is still healthy, and may

outlive us all. Moreover he has an heir in the ten-year-old prince

Richard. While these are alive there is no need to discuss the question

of the succession." They completed the drawing up of the long list of

petitions, whose grudging and partial acceptance by the crown made the

roll of the parliament of 1376 memorable as asserting principles, if

not as vindicating practical ends. They forced Lancaster to agree to a

council of twelve peers nominated in parliament to act as a standing

committee of advisers, without which the king might do nothing of any

importance. After this revival of the methods of the Mad Parliament and

the lords ordainers, the Good Parliament separated on July 6. It had

sat longer than any previous parliament of which there is record. It

had persevered to the end in the teeth of discouragements of all kinds,

and, even after his brother's death, Duke John dared not lift up his

hand against it so long as the session continued.

When the estates separated Lancaster threw off the mask. The king, sunk

in extreme dotage, was entirely in the hands of his unscrupulous son.

The old man was kept quiet by the return of Alice Perrers to court. She

had sworn on the rood never to see the king again, but the prelates

were "like dumb dogs unable to bark" against her; and no effort was

made to prosecute her for perjury. Latimer and Lyons returned from

their luxurious imprisonment in the Tower to their places at court. The

duke roundly declared that the late parliament was no parliament at

all. No statute was based upon its petitions, the council of twelve was

rudely dissolved, and Sir Peter de la Mare was imprisoned in Nottingham

castle. William of Wykeham was deprived of his temporalities, and the

rumour spread that his disgrace was due to his possession of a state

secret, revealed to him by the dying queen Philippa, that John of Gaunt

was no true son of the royal pair but a changeling. So timid was the

disgraced bishop that he vied with the weak primate in his subserviency

to Alice. The Earl of March, who was marshal of England, was ordered to

inspect the fortresses beyond sea, whereupon, fearing a plot to

assassinate him, he resigned his office, "preferring," says a friend,

"to lose his marshal's staff rather than his life". The powerful

north-country lord, Henry Percy, who had hitherto acted with the

opposition, was bribed by the office of marshal to join the Lancastrian

party.

Grave difficulties still beset the government, and in January, 1377,

John of Gaunt had to face another parliament. Every precaution was taken

to pack the commons with his partisans. Of the knights of the shire of

the Good Parliament only eight were members of its successor,[1] while

in the place of the imprisoned De la Mare, Sir Thomas Hungerford,

steward of the Duke of Lancaster, was chosen Speaker, on this occasion

by that very name. A packed committee of lords was assigned to advise

the commons. In these circumstances it was not difficult to procure the

reversal of the acts against Alice Perrers and Latimer, and the grant of

a poll tax of a groat a head. The only measure of conciliation was a

general pardon, a pretext for which was found in the jubilee of the

king's accession. From this William of Wykeham was expressly excepted.

[1] _Return of Members of Parliament_, pt. i., 193-97; _Chron.

Angliæ_, p. 112, understates the case.

The convocation of Canterbury proved less accommodating than the

parliament. Under the able leadership of Bishop Courtenay, it took up

the cause of the Bishop of Winchester, refused to join in a grant of

money until he had taken his place in convocation, and, triumphing at

last over the time-serving of Sudbury and the hesitation of Wykeham

himself, persuaded the bishop to join their deliberations. Lancaster met

the opposition of convocation by calling to his aid the Oxford doctor

whom the clergy had already begun to look upon as the enemy of the

privileges of their order. Wycliffe was not as yet under suspicion of

direct dogmatic heresy. He had not yet clothed himself in the armour of

his Balliol predecessor, Fitzralph, to wage war against the mendicant

orders. But he had already formulated his theory that dominion was

founded on grace, had declared that the pope had no right to

excommunicate any one, or if he had that any simple priest could absolve

the culprit from his sentence, and he had shown a hatred so bitter of

clerical worldliness and clerical property that he was looked upon as

the special enemy of the great land-holding prelates and of the

"possessioner" monks, whose lands, he maintained, could be resumed by

the representatives of the donors at their will. The strenuous advocate

for reducing the clergy to apostolic poverty was not likely to find

favour among the prelates. Wycliffe's only clerical supporters at this

stage were the mendicant friars, from whose characteristic opinions as

regards "evangelical poverty" he never at any time swerved.[1] He was,

however, eloquent and zealous, and he had a following. Fear either of

Wycliffe or of his mendicant allies forced the bishops to take decisive

action. Even Sudbury awoke, "as from deep sleep".[2] The duke's

dangerous supporter was summoned to answer before the bishops at St.

Paul's.

[1] Shirley (preface to _Fasciculi Zizaniorum,_ Rolls Ser., p.

xxvi.) thought that Wycliffe was "the sworn foe of the

mendicants" in 1377, and E.M. Thompson's emphatic words

repudiating the contrary statement of the St. Alban's writer,

_Chron. Anglice,_ p. liii., illustrate the view prevalent in

England in 1874. Lechler's _Wiclif und die Vorgeschichte der

Reformation,_ published in 1873 proves that it was not until

Wycliffe denied the doctrine of transubstantiation in 1379 or

1380 that the friars deserted him.

[2] _Chron. Anglice_, p. 117.

On February 19, Wycliffe appeared in Courtenay's cathedral. Four

mendicant doctors of divinity, chosen by Lancaster, came with him to

defend him against the "possessioners," while the Duke of Lancaster

himself, and Henry Percy, the new marshal, also accompanied him to

overawe the bishops by their authority. The court was to be held in the

lady chapel at the east end of the cathedral, and Wycliffe and his

friends found some difficulty in making their way through the dense

crowd that filled the spacious nave and aisles. Percy, irritated at the

pressure of the throng, began to force it back in virtue of his office.

Courtenay ordered that the marshal should exercise no authority in his

cathedral. Thereupon Percy in a rage declared that he would act as

marshal in the church, whether the bishop liked it or not. When the

lady chapel was reached, there was further disputing as to whether

Wycliffe should sit or stand, and Lancaster taunted Courtenay for

trusting overmuch to the greatness of his family. When the bishop

replied with equal spirit, John muttered: "I would liefer drag him out

of his church by the hair of his head than put up with such insolence".

The words were overheard, and the Londoners, who hated the duke, broke

into open riot at this insult to their bishop. It was rumoured that the

duke had come to St. Paul's, hot from an attack on the liberties of the

city that very morning in parliament. The court broke up in wild

confusion, and the riot spread from church to city. Next day Percy's

house was pillaged, and John's palace of the Savoy attacked. The duke

and the marshal were forced to seek the protection of their opponent,

the Princess of Wales, at Kennington. The followers of Lancaster could

only escape rough treatment by hiding away their lord's badges. The

citizens cried that the Bishop of Winchester and Peter de la Mare

should have a fair trial. At last the personal authority of Bishop

Courtenay restored his unruly flock to order. The old king performed

his last public act by soothing the spokesmen of the citizens with the

pleasant words and easy grace of which he still was master. The

Princess of Wales used her influence for peace, and matters were

smoothed over.

At some risk of personal humiliation, Lancaster secured a substantial

triumph. Convocation followed the lead of parliament and gave an ample

subsidy. William of Wykeham purchased the restoration of his

temporalities by an unworthy deference to Alice Perrers. Wycliffe

remained powerful, flattered, and consulted, though his enemies had

already drawn up secret articles against him, which they had forwarded

to the papal _curia_. Perhaps in the rapidly declining health of the

king all parties saw that their real interest lay in the postponement

of a crisis.

In June Edward lay on his deathbed at Sheen. To the last his talk was

all of hawking and hunting, and his mistress carefully kept from him

all knowledge of his desperate condition. When he sank into his last

lethargy, his courtiers deserted him, and Alice Perrers took to flight

after robbing him of the very rings on his fingers. A simple priest,

brought to the bedside by pity, performed for the half-conscious king

the last offices of religion. Edward was just able to kiss the cross

and murmur "Jesus have mercy". On June 21, 1377, he breathed his last.

With Edward's death we break off a narrative whose course is but half

run. John of Gaunt's rule was not over; Wycliffe was advancing from

discontent to revolt; Chaucer was yet to rise for a higher flight;

Langland had not yet put his complaint into its permanent form; the

French war was renewed almost on the day of Edward's death; popular

irritation against bad government, and social and economic repression

were still preparing for the revolt of 1381. With all its defects the

age of Edward is preeminently a strong age. Greedy, self-seeking,

rough, and violent it may be; its passions and rivalries combined to

make futile the exercise of its strength; it sounded the revolutionary

note of all abrupt ages of transition, and it ends in disaster and

demoralisation at home and abroad. But government is not everything,

and least of all in the Middle Ages when what was then thought vigorous

government appears miserably weak to modern notions. The strong rule

decayed with the failure of the king's personal vigour. The ministers

of Edward's dotage could not hold France nor even keep England quiet.

England had grown impatient of the rule of a despot, though she was not

yet able to govern herself after a constitutional fashion. It is in the

incompatibility of the political ideals of royal authority and

constitutional control, not less than in the want of purpose of her

ruler and in the factions of her nobles that the explanation of the

period must be sought. The age of Edward III. has been alternatively

decried and exalted. Both verdicts are true, but neither contains the

whole truth. The explanation of both is to be found in the annals of a

later age.

APPENDIX.

ON AUTHORITIES.

(1216-1377.)

Our two main sources of knowledge for medieval history are records and

chronicles. Chronicles are more accessible, easier to study, more

continuous, readable, and coloured than records can generally be. Yet

the record far excels the chronicle in scope, authority, and

objectivity, and a prime characteristic of modern research is the

increasing reliance on the record rather than the chronicle as the

sounder basis of historical investigation. The medieval archives of

England, now mainly collected in the Public Record Office, are

unrivalled by those of any other country. From the accession of Henry

III. several of the more important classes of records have become

copious and continuous, while in the course of the reign nearly all the

chief groups of documents have made a beginning. The whole of the

period 1216 to 1377 can therefore be well studied in them.

A large proportion of our archives is taken up with common forms,

technicalities, and petty detail. It will never be either possible or

desirable to print the mass of them _in extenso_, and most of the

efforts made to render them accessible have taken the form of

calendars, catalogues, and inventories. Such attempts began with the

costly and unsatisfactory labours of the Record Commission (dissolved

in 1836); and in recent years the work has again been taken up and

pursued on better lines. The folio volumes of the Record Commission

only remain so far of value as they have not been superseded by the

more scholarly octavo calendars which are now being issued under the

direction of the deputy-keeper of the records. These latter are all

accompanied by copious indices which, though not always to be trusted

implicitly, immensely facilitate the use of them. The records were

preserved by the various royal courts. Of special importance for the

political historian are the records of the Chancery and Exchequer.

Prominent among the Chancery records are the PATENT ROLLS, strips of

parchment sewn together continuously for each regnal year, whereon are

inscribed copies of the letters patent of the sovereign, so called

because they were sent out open, with the great seal pendent. Beginning

in 1200, they present a continuous series throughout all our period,

except for 23 and 24 Henry III. The publication of the complete Latin

text of the _Patent Rolls of Henry III._ is now in progress, and two

volumes have been issued, including respectively the years 1216-1225

and 1225-1232. From the accession of Edward I. onwards the bulk of the

rolls renders the method of a calendar in English more desirable. The

_Calendars of the Patent Rolls_ are now complete from 1272 to 1324 and

from 1327 to 1348 (Edward I., 4 vols.; Edward II., 4 vols.; Edward

III., 7 vols.). For the years not thus yet dealt with the

unsatisfactory _Calendarium Rotulorum Patentium_ (1802, fol.) may still

sometimes be of service.

The letters close, or sealed letters addressed to individuals, usually

of inferior public interest to the letters patent are preserved in the

CLOSE ROLLS, compiled in the same fashion as the Patent Rolls. The

whole extant rolls from 1204 to 1227 are printed in _Rotuli Literarum

Clausarum_ (2 vols. fol., 1833 and 1844, Rec. corn.), and it is

proposed to continue the integral publication of the text for the rest

of Henry III.'s reign on the same plan as that of the Patent Rolls. One

volume of this continuation, 1227-1231 (8vo, 1902), has been issued.

For the subsequent periods a calendar in English is being prepared

similar in type to the _Calendar of Patent Rolls_. The periods at

present covered by the _Calendar of Close Rolls_ (1892-1905) are,

Edward I., 1272-1296 (3 vols.): Edward II., the whole of the reign (4

vols.), and Edward III., 1327-1349 (8 vols.).

A third series of records preserved by the Chancery officials is the

ROLLS OF PARLIAMENT, including the petitions, pleas, and other

parliamentary proceedings. None of these are extant before 1278, and

the series for the succeeding century is often interrupted. Many of

them are printed in the first two folios (vol. i., Edward I. and II.;

vol. ii., Edward III.) of _Rotuli Parliamentorum_ (1767-1777). A

copious index volume was issued in 1832. A specimen of what may still

be looked for is to be found in Professor Maitland's edition of one of

the earliest rolls of parliament in _Memoranda de Parliamento_ (1305)

(Rolls series, 1893) with an admirable introduction. For the reigns of

Edward I. and II. the deficiencies of the published rolls are

supplemented by SIR F. PALGRAVE'S _Parliamentary Writs and Writs of

Military Service_ (vol. i., 1827, Edward I.; vol. ii., 1834, Edward

II., fol., Rec. Corn.) with alphabetical digests and indices.

Formal grants under the great seal called _Charters_, characterised by

a "salutation" clause, the names of attesting witnesses, and, under

Henry III. after 1227, by the final formula _data per manum nostram

apud_, etc., and implying normally the presence of the king, are

contained in the CHARTER ROLLS, extant from the reign of John onwards.

They are roughly analysed in the _Calendarium Rotulorum Chartarum_

(1803, Rec. Com.); and the _Rotuli Chartarum_ (fol., 1837, Rec. Corn.)

contains the rolls _in extenso_ up to 1216, Vol. i., 1226-1257, of an

English _Calendar of Charter Rolls_, printing some of the documents in

full, was published in 1903.

The documents formerly known as ESCHEAT ROLLS, or INQUISITIONES POST

MORTEM, are concerned with the inquiries made by the Crown on the death

of every landholder as to the extent and character of his holding. Some

of the information contained in these inquests was made accessible in

the _Calendarium Inquisitionum sive Eschætarum_ (vol. i., Henry III.,

Edward I. and II., 1806; vol. ii., Edward III., 1808, fol., Rec.

Corn.). The errors and omissions of these volumes were partially

remedied for the reigns of Henry III. and Edward I. by C. ROBERTS'S

_Calendarium Genealogicum_ (2 vols. 8vo, 1865). A scholarly guide to

all this class of documents has been begun in the new _Calendar of

Inquisitions Post Mortem and other Analogous Documents_, of which vol.

i. (Henry III.) was issued in 1904. The first volume of a separate list

of the analogous inquisitions _Ad pod damnum_ is also announced.

Of the FINE ROLLS containing the records of fines[1] made with the Crown

for licence to alienate, exemption from service, wardships, pardons,

etc., those of Henry III. have been made accessible in C. ROBERTS'S

_Excerpta e Rotulis Finium_, 1216-1272 (1835-36, 8vo). Other rolls such

as the LIBERATE ROLLS have not yet been published for the reigns here

treated.

[1] A _fine_ in this technical sense is an agreement arrived at

by a money transaction.

Of special or local rolls, preserved in the Chancery, the most

important for our period are the GASCON ROLLS. The earlier documents

called by this name are not exclusively concerned with the affairs of

Gascony; they are miscellaneous documents enrolled for convenience in

common parchments by reason of the presence of the king in his

Aquitanian dominions. Of these are F. MICHEL'S _Roles Gascons_, vol.

i., published in the French government series of _Documents Inédits sur

l'Histoire de France_ (1885), including a "fragmentum rotuli

Vasconiæ," 1242-1243, and "patentes littere facte in Wasconia,"

1253-1254, years in which Henry III. was actually in Gascony. This

publication was resumed in 1896 by M. CHARLES BÉMONT'S _Supplément_ to

Michel's imperfect volume, containing innumerable corrections, an

index, introduction, and some additional rolls of 1254 and 1259-1260.

The later of these, the roll of Edward's delegated administration, is

the first exclusively devoted to the concerns of Gascony. "Gascon

Rolls" in this later sense begin with Edward I.'s accession, and M.

Bémont has undertaken their publication for the whole of Edward's reign

from photographs of the records supplied by the English to the French

government. In 1900 vol. ii. of the _Roles Gascons,_ containing the

years 1273-1290, was issued. Other classes of Chancery Rolls accessible

in print are _Rotuli Scotiæ,_ 1291-1516 (2 vols., 1814-1819, Rec.

Corn.), and _Rotuli Walliæ_, 5-9 Edward I., privately printed by Sir

Thomas Phillipps (1865). Among isolated Chancery records the _Rotuli

Hundredorum_ (Rec. Corn., 2 vols. fol., 1812-1818), containing the very

important inquests made by Edward I.'s commissioners into the

franchises of the barons, may specially be noticed here.

Of not less importance than the Chancery records are those handed down

from the Court of Exchequer. The most famous of these, the PIPE ROLLS,

which, unlike the Chancery Enrolments, were "filed" or sewn skin by

skin, are decreasingly important from the thirteenth century onwards as

compared with their value for the twelfth. For this reason the Pipe

Roll Society, founded in 1883, only undertook their publication up to

1200. Fragments of Pipe Rolls for our period can be seen in print in

various local histories and transactions, as e.g., "Pipe Rolls of

Northumberland" up to 1272 in HODGSON-HINDE'S History of

Northumberland, pt. iii., vol. iii., and 1273-1284, ed. Dickson

(Newcastle, 1854-60), and of Notts and Derby (translated extracts) in

YEATMAN's _History of Derby_ (1886). The only gap in our series is for

Henry III. Of other Exchequer records we may mention: (i) the

ORIGINALIA ROLLS, containing the estreats or documents from the

Chancery informing the Exchequer of moneys due to it, beginning in 20

Henry III., a summary of which is published in _Rotulorum Originalium_

in Curia _Scaccarii Abbreviatio,_ 20 Henry III,-51 Edward III (2 vols.

fol., Rec. Corn., 1805-1810); (2) the MEMORANDA ROLLS, containing

records of charges upon the Exchequer, etc., are complete for this

period. They were kept by the king's and the treasurer's remembrancer,

and are illustrated in print by extracts from the Memoranda Rolls,

1297, in _Transactions of the Royal Hist. Soc.,_ new series, iii.,

281-291(1886), and by the roll of 3 Henry III. in COOPER'S _Proceedings

of the Record Commissioners_ (1833); (3) MINISTERS ACCOUNTS, i.e.,

accounts of royal bailiffs, etc., for royal manors, etc., not included

in the sheriffs' accounts, beginning with Edward I., of which a list is

given in the _P.R.O. Lists and Indexes_, Nos. v. and viii.; (4) of the

PELL RECORDS, recording issues and payments, samples given in DEVON'S

_Issues of the Exchequer_ (Rec. Corn., 8vo, 1837), DEVON'S _Issue Roll

of Thomas of Brantingham in_ 1370 (Rec. Corn., 8vo, 1835). The pells of

receipt were entered on the (5) RECEIPT ROLLS, specimens of which,

along with the corresponding issues, are to be found in SIR JAMES

RAMSAY'S abstracts of issue and receipt rolls for certain years of

Edward III. in the _Antiquary_(1880-1888); (6) SUBSIDY ROLLS of various

types, illustrated by _Nonarum Inquisitiones tempore Edwardi ZZZ._

(Rec. Corn., 1807), the record of a subsidy of a ninth collected by

Edward III. in 1340-1341; (7) WARDROBE and HOUSEHOLD ACCOUNTS

containing for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries information on

national as well as private royal finance; specimens in print include

the important _Liber Quotidianus Contra-rotulatoris Garderobæ_, 28

_Ed. I._(1299-1300), (1787, Soc. Antiq.).

From the Exchequer records come also the following: (1) _Testa de

Neville sive Liber Feodorum temp. Hen. ZZZ. et Edw. I._ (Rec. Corn.,

fol., 1807), a miscellaneous and ill-digested but valuable collection of

thirteenth century inquisitions; (2) _Nomina Villarum, g_ Ed. II.,

published in PALGRAVE'S _Parl. Writs_, ii., iii., 301-416; (3)

_Kirkby's Quest, a_ survey made by Bishop Kirkby, the treasurer, in

1284-85, of which the Yorkshire portion has been printed by the Surtees

Soc., ea. Skaife (1867), and other portions elsewhere; (4) _Taxatio

Ecclesiastica Angliæ et Walliæ_, 1291 (Rec. Corn., 1802), the

taxation of benefices by Nicholas IV. by which assessments of papal and

ecclesiastical taxes were long made. A very useful compilation,

recently undertaken under the direction of the deputy-keeper, is

_Inquisitions and Assessments relating to Feudal Aids_, 1284-1431, of

which three volumes, dealing in alphabetical order with the shires from

Bedford to Norfolk, are published Cheshire and Durham are entirely

omitted and Lancashire very scantily dealt with as exceptional

jurisdictions. The work is based upon the various lay records

enumerated above and other analogous inquests. Ancient compilations of

miscellaneous documents by officials of the Exchequer are exemplified

in _Liber Niger Scaccarii_ (ed. Hearne, 2 vols., 1774), and in the _Red

Book of the Exchequer_ (ed. H. Hall, 3 vols., Rolls ser., 1896).

The records of the common law courts, the King's Bench and the Court of

Common Pleas, are of less direct historical value than those of the

Chancery and the Exchequer. Extraordinarily bulky, they require a good

deal of sifting to sort the wheat from the chaff. As yet a very small

proportion of them has been printed, and few have even been calendared.

A brief index of them has been compiled in the useful _List of Plea

Rolls_ (1894, _P.R.O. Lists and Indexes_, No. iv.). Of the various

types of these records the FEET OF FINES have been largely used by the

topographer and genealogist, and the feet of fines for many counties

during this period have been calendared, summarised, excerpted, and

printed, wholly or in part, by local archaeological societies, as for

example, W. FARRER'S _Lancashire Final Concords till 1307_ (Rec. Soc.

for Lancashire and Cheshire, 1899), and many others. The PLEA ROLLS are

of wider importance. For the days of Henry III. _Placita Coram Rege_

(_i.e._, of the King's Bench) and the _Placita de Banco_ (_i.e._, of

the Common Pleas in later phrase) are classified as _Rotuli Curiæ

Regis_, while the rolls of the local eyres for the same period are

called _Assize Rolls_. Separate series for each court begin with Edward

I. Specimens of most of these types have been printed. _Placitorum

Abbreviatio Ric. I.--Edw. II._ (Rec. Com., fol., 1811) is a careless

seventeenth century abstract. _Placita de Quo Warranto_, Edward I. to

Edward III. (Rec. Com., fol., 1818), is a record of local eyres of

particular importance for the reign of Edward I. as the corollary of

the Hundred Rolls and the attack on the local franchises. HUNTER'S

_Rotuli Selecti_ (Rec. Com., 1834) contains pleas of the reign of Henry

III. A typical year's pleadings of the King's Bench for 1297 is given

in full in PHILLIMORE's _Placita coram rege_, 25 Edward I. (1898,

British Rec. Soc.). Selections from the proceedings of the commission

appointed by Edward I. in 1289 to hear complaints against judges and

officials will shortly be published by Miss Hilda Johnstone and myself

for the Royal Historical Society. Of special importance are the plea

rolls issued by the Selden Society, which include for our period F.W.

MAITLAND'S _Select Pleas of the Crown_, 1200-1225; BAILDON'S _Select

Chancery Pleas_, 1364-1471; J.M. RIGG'S _Select Pleas of the Jewish

Exchequer_; and G.J. TURNER'S _Select Pleas of the Forest_; all have

translations and introductions, of which those of Professor Maitland

are of exceptional value.

To these types must be added the records of the local courts, now

largely also in the Public Record Office, though vast numbers of court

rolls and manorial documents are still in private hands, and among the

archives of ecclesiastical and secular corporations. The Selden Society

has done excellent work in publishing such muniments; as in particular,

MAITLAND'S _Select Pleas in Manorial Courts_, vol. i., Henry III. and

Edward I., illustrating the social and legal life of a medieval

village; MAITLAND and BAILDON'S _Court Baron_; HUNTER' s _Leet

Jurisdiction of Norwich_; C. GROSS's _Select Cases from the Coroners'

Rolls_, 1265-1413. The records of the Bishopric of Durham, the County

Palatine of Chester, the Principality of Wales, and the Duchy of

Lancaster are deposited in the Public Record Office, and calendars and

lists scattered over the _Deputy-Keeper of the Records' Reports_ throw

some light on their contents. Unluckily these records of franchise are

incompletely preserved and often in bad condition. The best preserved

for our period are the Durham records, described in LAPSLEY'S County

_Palatine of Durham_, pp. 327-337 (Harvard Historical Studies); some of

the most important are printed in _Registrum Palatinum Dunelmense_, ed.

Hardy (Rolls Series, 4 vols.), which is also an Episcopal register.

Welsh records may be illustrated by the _Record of Carnarvon_ (Rec.

Corn., fol., 1838). Academic records are illustrated by the Oxford

_Munimenta Academica_ (ed. Anstey), Rolls Series. Municipal records are

very numerous and important; full particulars as to them can be found

in C. Gross's _Bibliography of British Municipal History_ (Harvard

Hist. Studies). Admirably edited examples of our wealth of municipal

records for this period are to be found in _Records of the Borough of

Nottingham_ (ed. W.H. Stevenson), vol. i. (1882); _Records of the

Borough of Leicester_ (ed. Mary Bateson), vols. i. and ii. (1899 and

1901); and _Munimenta Gildhallæ Londoniensis_ (ed. H.T. Riley), Rolls

Series. The _Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission_ afford

much information as to every type of document in private or local

custody. Ireland and Scotland have archives of their own; but there are

no systematic records in the Register House at Edinburgh before the War

of Independence. Among the enterprises now abandoned of the Public

Record Office were _Calendars of Documents relating to Scotland and

Ireland_. The Scottish series covers all this period (vols. i.-iv.),

the Irish was stopped at 1307. They are derived, by a rather arbitrary

selection, from various classes of English records, but contain much

valuable material. JOSEPH STEVENSON'S _Documents illustrating the

History of Scotland_ (1286-1306) (Scot. Rec. Publications, 1870), and

PALGRAVE'S Documents _and Records illustrating the History of Scotland_

(Rec. Corn., 1837), are useful for the reign of Edward I. as are for

limited periods of it the _Wallace Papers_ (Maitland Club, 1841) and

_Scotland in 1298_ (ed. Gough, 1888).

A new class of records begins in the thirteenth century with BISHOPS'

REGISTERS. These, so far as they survive, are preserved in the diocesan

registries. Of printed registers for this period the most important is

MARTIN'S _Registrum Epistolarum J. Peckham_ (3 vols., Rolls Series,

1882-1886), the earliest surviving Canterbury register. Other registers

printed or calendared are HINGESTON-RANDOLPH'S _Exeter Registers_,

1257-1291, 1307-1326, and 1327-1369 (5 vols., 1889, etc.); excerpts,

particularly from the York registers, in RAINE'S _Letters from the

Northern Registers,_ Rolls Series; the two oldest York _Registers_ of

ARCHBISHOPS WALTER GREY (1215-1255) and WALTER GIFFARD (1266-1279),

both in Surtees Society; the Wells _Registers_ of BPS. DROKENSFORD,

1309-1329, and RALPH OF SHREWSBURY, 1329-1363 (Somerset Record

Society); the Worcester _Register_ of BP. GIFFARD, 1268-1302 (Worcester

Historical Society); the Winchester _Registers_ of BISHOPS SANDALE and

RIGAUD, 1316-1323, and WYKEHAM, 1366-1404 (Hampshire Record Society). A

society called the Canterbury and York Society has recently been

started to set forth episcopal registers systematically in print. It

has begun to publish the earliest Lincoln _Register_ extant, that of

Hugh of Wells, bishop of Lincoln, 1209-1235, whose _Liber Antiquus de

Ordinatione Vicariorum_ was printed in 1888. Analogous documents are

LUARD'S _Rob. Grosseteste Epistola_ (Roll Series, 1861), and the like.

Monastic CARTULARIES are less important for general history in this

than in previous periods; large masses of monastic records of this age

have survived, not a tithe of which is to be found in DUGDALE'S

_Monasticon_. Some monastic records illustrate the domestic economy or

religious life of the house as KIRK'S _Accounts of the Obedientiaries

of Abingdon,_ 1322-1479 (Camden Soc.); J.W. CLARK's _Observances in use

at Barnwell Priory,_ 1295-1296(1897), and the like.

For this period by far the most important series of foreign records is

the magnificent collections of the papacy. A summary of many of these

is to be found in BLISS, JOHNSON, and TWEMLOW's _Calendars of Papal

Registers illustrating the History of Great Britain and Ireland; Papal

Letters_ (vols. i.-iv., 1198-1404), and _Petitions to the Pope_ (vol.

i., 1342-1419), of special importance for the fourteenth century. These

useful calendars, however, do not always dispense us from consulting

the grand series of papal records published or analysed under the care

of the French School of Rome, which has not yet sufficiently been

studied in this country. This enterprise is divided into two sections.

In the first the _Registers from Gregory IX. to Benedict XI._ are in

course of publication; in the second the letters of the Avignon popes

relating to France are printed or analysed. Portions of the letters of

John XXII, Benedict XII, and Clement VI, are already issued. PRESSUTI

has published one volume of the _Registers of Honorius III_ (1888).

From the Vatican archives also comes THEINER'S _Vetera Monumenta Hib.

et Scot. Historiam illustrantia_ (1864), beginning in 1216.

Extracts from various archives are found in such collections as RYMER's

_Foedera_ of which the Record Commission's edition in folio reaches

just beyond the end of this period; WILKINS'S _Concilia_ (1737),

containing many extracts from episcopal registers and canons of

councils; HADDAN and STUBBS'S _Councils_, vol. i. (for the thirteenth

century Welsh Church); CHAMPOLLION-FIGEAC'S _Lettres des Rois et des

Reines d'Angleterre_ (2 vols., 1847, _Doc. Inédits_); STUBBS'S _Select

Charters_ (Henry III. and Edward I.), and BÉMONT'S excellent _Chartes

des Libertés anglaises_ in the _Collection de Textes pour l'Étude et

l'Enseignement de l'Histoire_. Equally useful is COSNEAU'S _Grands

Traités de la Guerre de Cent Ans_ also in the same _Collection de

Textes_. The _Statutes of the Realm_ (vol. i., fol., 1810) contains the

text of the laws and of the great charters of this period.

Chronicles, with all their deficiencies, must ever be largely used as

sources of continuous historical narrative. For the thirteenth century

our chief reliance must still be placed upon the annals drawn up in

various monasteries, some based upon little more than gossip or

hearsay, others showing real efforts to acquire authentic information.

The greatest centre of historical composition in thirteenth-century

England was the Abbey of St. Alban's, whose chronicles form so

important a series that they may appropriately be considered as a

whole, before the other chroniclers are dealt with in approximately

chronological order. The fame of St. Alban's as a school of history had

its origin in the order of Abbot Simon (d. 1183) that the house should

always appoint a special historiographer. The first of these whose work

is now extant is ROGER OF WENDOVER (d. 1236), whose _Flores

Historiarum_ (ed. H.O. Coxe, Engl. Hist. Soc., 1842, or ed. Hewlett,

Rolls Series, 1886-89--this latter edition is unscholarly) becomes

original in 1216 and remains a chief source, copious and interesting,

if not always precise, until 1235. On Wendover's death, MATTHEW PARIS,

who took the monastic habit in 1217, became the official St. Alban's

chronicler. His great work, the _Chronica Majora_, is, up to 1235,

little more than an expansion and embellishment of Wendover. He

re-edited Wendover's work with a patriotic and anti-curialist bias

quite alien to the spirit of the earlier writer, whose version should

preferably be followed. Paris's book is a first-hand source from 1235

to 1259. The narrative of the years 1254-1259 is considerably later in

composition to the history of the period 1235-1253, since on reaching

1253 Paris devoted himself to an abridgment of what he had already

written, called the _Historia Minor_. On completing this he resumed his

earlier book, and carried it on to the eve of his death in 1259, though

he did not live to complete its final revision; that was the work of

another monk who added a picture of his death-bed. The _Chronica

Majora_ has been excellently edited by Dr. H.R. Luard in seven volumes

for the Rolls Series, with elaborate introductions tracing the literary

history of the work and a magnificent index. The _Historia Minor_ has

been published in three volumes by Sir F. Madden in the Rolls Series.

Paris also wrote the lives of the abbots of his house up to 1255, a

work not now extant, and the basis of the later _Gesta Abbatum S.

Albani_, compiled by Thomas Walsingham (d. 1422?) and likewise issued

in the Rolls Series. The thirteenth century biographies have some

original value. Paris's _Life_ of _Stephen Langton_ is printed in

LIEBERMANN'S _Ungedruckte Anglo-Normannische Geschichtsquellen_ (1870).

Paris, perhaps the greatest historian of the Middle Ages, has literary

skill, a vivid though prolix style, a keen eye for the picturesque,

bold and independent judgment, wonderful breadth and range, and an

insatiable curiosity. He was a man of the world, a courtier and a

scholar; he took immense pains to collect his facts from documents and

eye-witnesses, and had great advantages in this respect through the

intimate relations between his house and the court. Henry III himself

contributed many items of information to him. His details are

extraordinarily full, and he tells us almost as much about continental

affairs as about those of his own country. He wrote with too flowing a

pen to be careful about precision, and had too much love of the

picturesque to resist the temptation of embellishing a good story. His

narrative of continental transactions is in particular extremely

inexact. But the chief cause of his offending also gives special value

to his work; he was a man of strong views and his sympathies and

prejudices colour every line he wrote. His standpoint is that of a

patriotic Englishman, indignant at the alien invasions, at the

misgovernment of the king, the greed of the curialists and the

Poitevins, and with a professional bias against the mendicants. His

writings make his age live.

The falling off in the St. Alban's work of the next generation is

characteristic of the decay of colour and detail which makes the

chroniclers of the age of Edward I. inferior to those of his father's

reign. The years after 1259 were briefly chronicled by uninspired

continuators of Matthew Paris, and the reputation of St. Alban's as a

school of history led to the frequent transference of their annals to

other religious houses, where they were written up by local pens. This

led to the dissemination of the series of jejune compilations which in

the ages of Edward I. and II. were widely spread under the name of

_Flores Historiarum_. Dr. Luard has published a critical edition of

these _Flores_ in three volumes of the Rolls Series, which range from

the creation to 1326, with an introduction determining their

complicated relations to each other. They are of no real value before

1259, and for the next sixty-seven years are only important by reason

of the defects of our other sources. No unity or colour can be expected

in books handed from house to house and kept up to date by jottings by

different hands. The ascription of these _Flores_ to a conjectural

Matthew of Westminster by earlier editors is groundless. Dr. C.

Horstmann, _Nova Legenda Anglie_, i., pp. xlix. _seq._(1901), maintains

that John of Tynemouth's _Historia Aurea_, still in manuscript, is the

official St. Alban's history from 1327 to 1377.

In the reign of Edward I. the credit of the school of St. Alban's was

revived to some extent by WILLIAM RISHANGER, who made his profession in

1271 and died early in the reign of Edward II. To him is assigned a

chronicle ranging from 1259 to 1306 published by H.T. Riley in the

volume _Willelmi Rishanger et Anonymorum Chronica et Annales_ (Rolls

Series). Rishanger's authorship of the portion 1259-1272 is more

probable than that of the section 1272-1306, which, not compiled before

1327, is almost certainly by another hand, and the attribution of even

the earlier section to Rishanger is doubted by so competent an

authority as M. Bémont. The compilation is frigid and unequal. Of the

miscellaneous contents of Mr. Riley's volume, the short _Gesta Edwardi

I._ (pp. 411-423), of no great value, is clearly Rishanger's work. We

may also ascribe to Rishanger the _Narratio de Bellis apud Lewes et

Evesham_ (ed. Halliwell, Camden Soc., 1840), which tells the story of

the Barons' Wars with vigour, detail, and insight. Written by a true

inheritor of the prejudices of Matthew Paris, this chronicle is a

eulogy of Montfort. It was put together not before 1312.

Another volume of _Chroniclers of St. Alban's_ was edited by Mr. Riley

for the Rolls Series in 1860. Three of its chronicles concern our

period. These are: (1) _Opus Chronicorum_, 1259-1296, a source of

"Rishanger's" chronicle; (2) J. DE TROKELOWE'S _Annales_, 1307-1322;

(3) H. DE BLANEFORDE'S _Chronica_ (1323). These last two are important

for Edward II.'s reign. After these works, historical writing further

declined at St. Alban's. At the end of our period, however, another

true disciple of Matthew Paris was found in the St. Alban's monk who

added to a jejune compilation for the years 1328 to 1370 a vivid and

personal narrative of the years 1376-1388, our chief source for the

history of the last year of Edward III.'s reign. In his bitter

prejudice against John of Gaunt and his clerical allies, such as

Wychffe and the mendicants, the monk is so outspoken that his book was

suppressed, and most manuscripts leave out the more offensive passages.

It has been edited by Sir E. Maunde Thompson as _Chronicon Angliæ_,

1328-1388 (Rolls Series). Before that its contents, like that of other

St. Alban's annals, were partially known through the fifteenth century

compilation under the name of a St. Alban's monk, THOMAS OF WALSINGHAM,

whose _Historia Anglicana_ (2 vols., Rolls Series, ed. Riley) is not an

authority for our period.

For the early years of Henry III. we have besides Wendover's _Flores_:

(i) The CANON OF BARNWELL'S continuation of Howden published in

STUBBS'S _Memoriale Fratris Walteri de Coventria_ (Rolls Series),

written in 1227 and copious for the years 1216-1225. (2) RALPH OF

COGGESHALL's _Chronicon Anglicanum_ (ed. Stevenson, Rolls Series),

ending at 1227 and important for its last twelve years. (3) The

_Histoire des Ducs de Normandie et des Rois d'Angleterre_, which,

published by F. Michel in 1840 (Soc. de l'histoire de France), was

first appreciated at its full value by M. Petit-Dutaillis in the _Revue

Historique_. tome 2 (1892). (4) The _Chronique de l'Anonyme de Béthune_

printed in 1904 in vol. xxiv. of the _Recueil des Historiens de la

France_. (5) A French rhyming chronicle, the _Histoire de Guillaume le

Maréchal_, discovered and edited by P. Meyer for the Soc. de l'histoire

de France. Written by a minstrel of the younger Marshal from materials

supplied by the regent's favourite squire, it is, though poetry and

panegyric, an important source for Marshal's regency.

St. Alban's was not the only religious house that concerned itself with

the production of chronicles. Other _Annales Monastici_ have been

edited in five volumes (Rolls Series, vol. v. is the index) by Dr.

Luard. They are of special importance for the reign of Henry III. In

vol. i. the meagre annals of the Glamorganshire abbey of Margam only

extend to 1232. The _Annals of Tewkesbury_ are useful from 1200 to

1263, and specially for the history of the Clares, the patrons of that

house. The Annals of Burton-upon-Trent illustrate the years 1211 to

1261 with somewhat intermittent light, and are of unique value for the

period of the Provisions of Oxford, containing many official documents.

Vol. ii. includes the _Annals_ of _Winchester_ and _Waverley_. The

former, extending to 1277, though mainly concerned with local affairs

are useful for certain parts of the reign of Henry III., and

particularly for the years 1267-1277. The annals of the Cistercian

house of Waverley, near Farnham, go down to 1291. From 1259 to 1266 the

narrative is contemporary and valuable; from 1266 to 1275, and partly

from 1275 to 1277 it is borrowed from the Winchester Annals; from 1277

to its abrupt end it is again of importance. The _Annals of Bermondsey_

in vol. iii. are a fifteenth century compilation. The _Annals_ of the

Austin canons of _Dunstable_ are of great value, especially from the

year 1201, when they become original, down to 1242. This section is

written by RICHARD DE MORINS, prior of Dunstable from 1202 to 1242.

After his death the annals become more local, though they give a clear

narrative of the puzzling period 1258-1267. They stop in 1297. The

chief contents of vol. iv, are the parallel _Annals of Oseney_ and the

_Chronicle_ of THOMAS WYKES, a canon of that house, who took the

religious habit in 1282. To 1258 the two histories are very similar,

that of Wykes being slightly fuller. They then remain distinct until

1278, and again from 1280 to 1284 and 1285-1289. In the latter year

Wykes stops, while Oseney goes on with independent value until 1293,

and as a useless compilation till 1346. Wykes is of unique interest for

the Barons' Wars, as he is the only competent chronicler who takes the

royalist side. The Oseney writer, much less full and interesting,

represents the ordinary baronial standpoint. Wykes is occasionally

useful for the first years of Edward I.; after 1288 his importance

becomes small. The _Annals of Worcester_ are largely a compilation from

the Winchester Annals and the _Flores_; the local insertions have some

value for the period 1216-1258, and more for the latter part of the

reign of Edward I., at whose death they end.

Other monastic chronicles of the thirteenth century, of small

importance, enumerated by Dr. Luard (_Ann. Mon._, iv., liii.) are not

yet printed in full. Extracts from many are given in PERTZ'S _Monumenta

Germaniæ Hist. Scriptores_, vols. xxvii. and xxviii. The _Annales

Cestrienses_ (to 1297) have been edited by R.C. Christie (Record Soc.

of Lancashire and Cheshire); EDMUND OF HADENHAM'S _Chronicle_ (down to

1307) is given in part in WHARTON'S _Anglia Sacra_, and M. Bémont

publishes in an appendix to his _Simon de Montfort_ (pp. 373-380) a

valuable fragment of a _Chronicle_ of _Battle Abbey_ on the Barons'

Wars, 1258-1265. For the latter part of that period we have some useful

notices in HENRY OF SILEGRAVE's brief _Chronicle_ (ed. Hook, Caxton

Soc., 1849), whose close relationship to the _Battle Chronicle_ M.

Bémont has first indicated. To these may be added the _Annals of

Stanley Abbey_ (1202-1271) in vol. ii. of _Chronicles of Stephen, Henry

II. and Richard I._ (ed. Hewlett, Rolls Series, 1885), and the

_Chronicle_ of the Bury monk, JOHN OF TAXSTER or TAYSTER, which becomes

copious from the middle of the thirteenth century and ends in 1265; it

was partly printed in 1849 by Benjamin Thorpe as a continuation of

Florence of Worcester (English Historical Society), and the years

1258-1262 are best read in Luard's edition of Bartholomew Cotton (Rolls

Series). Taxster's work became the basis of several later compilations

of the eastern counties, including: (i) JOHN OF EVERSDEN, another Bury

monk, independent from 1265 to 1301, also printed without his name by

Thorpe, up to 1295, as a further continuation of Florence. (2) JOHN OF

OXNEAD, a monk of St. Benet's, Hulme, a reputed continuator of Taxster

and Eversden up to 1280, who adds a good deal of his own for the years

1280-1293, edited somewhat carelessly by Sir Henry Ellis as _Chronica

J. de Oxenedes_ (Rolls Series). (3) BARTHOLOMEW COTTON, a monk of

Norwich, whose _Historia Anglicana_, original from 1291 to 1298, and

specially important from 1285 to 1291, is edited by Luard (Rolls

Series). Some thirteenth and early fourteenth century Bury chronicles

are also in _Memorials_ of _St. Edmund's Abbey_, ed. T. Arnold (vols.

ii. and iii., Rolls Series). The _Chronicon de Mailros_ (Bannatyne

Club), from the Cistercian abbey of Melrose, goes to 1270; though

utterly untrustworthy, it may be noticed as almost the only Scottish

chronicle before the war of independence, and as containing a curious

record of the miracles of Simon de Montfort.

Among the historians of Edward I.'s reign is WALTER OF HEMINGBURGH,

Canon of Guisborough in Cleveland (ed. H.C. Hamilton, 2 vols., Engl.

Hist. Soc.). His account of Henry III.'s reign is worthless, but from

1272 to 1312 his work is of great value, though never precise and full

of gaps. It contains many documents and is remarkable for its stirring

battle pictures. Hemingburgh probably laid down his pen when the

narrative ceases early in the reign of Edward II. Another writer,

identified by Horstmann with John of Tynemouth, carries the story from

1326 to 1346.

In striking contrast to the flowing periods of Hemingburgh is the

well-written and chronologically digested _Annals_ of the Dominican

friar NICHOLAS TREVET or TRIVET, the son of a judge of Henry III.'s

reign (ed. Hog, Engl. Hist. Soc.). Beginning in 1138, his work assumes

independent value for the latter years of Henry III. and is of

first-rate importance for the reign of Edward I., at whose death it

concludes, though Trevet was certainly alive in 1324. It was largely

used by the later St. Alban's chroniclers.

Franciscan historiography begins earlier than Dominican with the

remarkable tract of THOMAS OF ECCLESTON, written about 1260, _De

Adventu Fratrum Minorum in Anglia_, published with other Minorite

documents (including Adam Marsh's letters) in BREWER'S _Monumenta

Franciscana_ (Rolls Series, continued in a second volume by R.

Hewlett). The first important Franciscan chronicle, called the

_Chronicon de Lanercost_ (ed. J. Stevenson, Bannatyne Club, 2 vols.),

really comes from the Minorite convent of Carlisle. It covers the years

1201 to 1346. The early part is derived from the valueless chronicle of

Melrose, and its incoherent cult of the memory of Montfort does not

save it from the grossest errors in dealing with his history. It

becomes important for northern affairs from Edward I. onwards, giving

full details with a strong anti-Scottish bias. Another north-country

chronicle is Sir T. GREY'S _Scalacronica_ (ed. Stevenson, Maitland

Club, 1836), useful for the Scottish wars and for Edward III.'s reign

up to 1362.

A sign of the times is the beginning of civic chronicles. The London

series alone is important for English history. It begins with the

_Liber de Antiquis Legibus_, or _Chronica Majorum et Vicecomitum

Londoniarum_ (1188-1274, ed. T. Stapleton, Camden Soc.). The work of

ARNOLD FITZTHEDMAR, alderman of the German merchants in London, it is

copious for the years 1236 to 1274, and is, with Wykes, the only

chronicle of the Barons' Wars written with a royalist bias. Fourteenth

century civic chronicles, based upon _Flores Historiarum_, and

continued independently, form the main contents of the two volumes of

_Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I. and II._ (ed. by Dr. Stubbs for

the Rolls Series). These are: (1) _Annales Londonienses_, perhaps

written by ANDREW HORN, chamberlain of London, and compiler of the

_Liber Horn_; they have much general value for the period 1301 to 1316,

and deal more narrowly with London history from 1316 to 1330, when they

conclude. (2) _Annales Paulini_, 1307-1341, compiled by one of the

clergy of St. Paul's, but not by Adam Murimuth. These take up Dr.

Stubbs's first volume. The second contains: (1) JOHN OF LONDON'S

_Commendatio Lamentabilis in Transitu magni Regis Edwardi quarti_, a

funeral eulogy containing the most elaborate contemporary analysis of

Edward's character. (2) The CANON OF BRIDLINGTON'S _Gesta Edwardi de

Carnarvon_, with a continuation down to the death of Edward III., of

little value after 1339. It has frequent reference to the vaticinations

of the local prophet, John of Bridlington, and was not put in its

present shape before 1377. Its first part is based on earlier sources,

and it is, for lack of better, a prime authority for north-country

history and Anglo-Scottish relations; the continuation contains the

best account of Edward Balliol's attempts on the Scottish throne. (3)

_Vita Edwardi II._, from 1307 to 1325, attributed by Hearne on slight

grounds to a MONK OF MALMESBURY, with many notices of the history of

Gloucestershire and Bristol, of which the famous rising is described at

length. The writer is the most human of the annalists of the reign,

prolix, self-conscious, moralising, and somewhat incoherent. He is the

most outspoken of all the fourteenth century critics of the Roman

curia, and has more insight than most of his contemporaries.

The following are of primary importance for the early years of Edward

III.; it is significant that they are nearly all secular, not monastic,

in origin. (1) _Continuatio Chronicorum_, 1303-1347, by ADAM MURIMUTH,

a canon of St. Paul's much employed by Edward III. (ed. E.M. Thompson

in Rolls Series), a mere continuation of the _Flores_ until 1325,

thence enlarged from personal sources, but still meagre until 1337,

when it becomes a first-rate authority to 1346. Murimuth's adoption of

Michaelmas day as the beginning of the year has often confused those

who have imitated him. Chief among these is (2) GEOFFREY LE BAKER of

Swinbrooke, an Oxfordshire man, and like Murimuth, a secular clerk,

whose _Chronicon_ (ed. E.M. Thompson), beginning in 1303 on the basis

of Murimuth, has independent value after 1324, and is noteworthy for

its touching details of Edward II.'s fall and death. It ends in 1356

with an excellent account of the battle of Poitiers. The early part of

Baker's chronicle, widely circulated as _Vita et Mors Edwardi II._, was

previously assigned to Sir Thomas de la Moor, and was so edited by

Stubbs, but Sir E.M. Thompson showed clearly that this Oxfordshire

knight was Baker's patron and not the writer of a chronicle. With many

defects, Baker can tell a story picturesquely. (3) ROBERT OF AVESBURY,

a canon lawyer, wrote _De mirabilibus Gestis Edwardi III._, of special

importance for the war from 1339 to 1356, and containing many state

documents. It is edited by E.M. Thompson in the same volume as

Murimuth. (4) HENRY KNIGHTON, Canon of Leicester, wrote a _Chronicle_

about 1366 which is valuable for the period 1336-1366 and includes the

best contemporary account of the Black Death. The latest edition by

Lumby in the Rolls Series is not a scholarly work. (5) _Eulogium

Historiarum_ (ed. Haydon, Rolls Series) is contemporary and valuable

for 1356-1366 only. There is a great dearth of English chronicles for

the latter years of Edward III. The signal exception is the important

St. Alban's _Chronicon Angliæ_ already mentioned.

In the age of Edward III. the _Flores Historiarum_ were superseded by

the _Polychronicon_ (often called the "Brute" after WACE'S _Brut

d'Angleterre_), the voluminous compilation (to 1352) of RANDOLPH

HIGDEN, a monk of Chester (edited by Babington and Lumby, Rolls

Series). ROBERT OF GLOUCESTER, PETER LANGTOFT, and ROBERT MANNYNG have

been referred to elsewhere. The first is of some original value for the

Barons' Wars and Edward I., while Langtoft, a Yorkshire canon specially

interested in the Scottish wars, is a contemporary for all Edward I.'s

reign. Among rhyming chronicles, French in tongue but English in

origin, may be mentioned _Le Siège de Carlaverock_, 1300 (ed. Nicolas,

1828), of value for heraldry, and CHANDOS HERALD'S _Prince Noir_ (ed.

H.O. Coxe, whose edition was pillaged by F. Michel for his more

accessible version of 1883). _L'Histoire de Foulques Fitz Warin_ (d.

1260?), a picturesque marcher hero, a prose romance of the end of the

thirteenth century, can be read in Stevenson's edition of COGGESHALL

(Rolls Series), or Englished by A. Kemp-Welch (1904).

No contemporary Scottish chronicles of importance deal with the War of

Independence, though fairly full Scottish versions of it exist in later

books. The earliest of these is the _Bruce_ of JOHN BARBOUR, Archdeacon

of Aberdeen. Written in 1375 at the instigation of Robert II.,

Barbour's spirited verses are inspired by patriotic rather than

historic motives. His details are minute, but impossible to control by

other sources, and he is more valuable as the epic poet of Scottish

liberty than as an historical authority. He is edited by Skeat (Early

English Text Soc.), Jamieson, and Innes. The earliest prose Scottish

chronicle, that of JOHN FORDUN, who died about 1384 (ed. Skene, in

_Historians of Scotland_), is of value for the fourteenth century.

ANDREW WYNTONN'S _Originale_, a metrical history written in the

fifteenth century, has next to no authority until the end of this

period (ed. Laing, in _Historians of Scotland_), BLIND HARRY'S

_Wallace_, written in 1488, is romance not history.

Wales is more fortunate than Scotland in preserving contemporary

thirteenth century annals, of which a Latin chronicle, _Annales

Cambriæ_, extending to 1288, and a Welsh one, _Brut y Tywysogion_

(i.e., _Chronicle of the Princes_), down to 1278, are edited by J.

Williams in the Rolls Series, the latter with an English translation. A

more critical version of the Welsh text of the _Brut_ is that of J.

RHYS and J.G. EVANS' _Red Book of Hergest_, vol. ii. (1890).

The close relations between England and France for the whole of this

period render the French chronicles by far the most important of

foreign sources for English history. They are enumerated in detail by

Auguste Molinier in vols. iii. (up to 1328) and iv. (after 1328) of the

first part of _Les Sources de l'Histoire de France (Manuels de

Bibliographie historique_). The chief French chronicles of the period

1226-1328 are collected in vols. xx.-xxiv. of the _Recueil des

Historiens de la France_ begun by Dom Bouquet. Some of them are of

special importance for English history. For Anglo-Netherlandish

relations under Edward I. see _Annales Gandenses_ (1296-1310), "la

chronique la plus remarquable de la fin du xiiie siècle," the French

_Chronique Artésienne_ (1295-1304), and the _Chronique Tournaisienne_

(1296-1314), all edited by F. Funck-Brentano in the already mentioned

_Collection de Textes_. For the Hundred Years' War the French

chroniclers are indispensable, especially for military history. The

most famous of these writers, JEAN FROISSART, has been characterised in

my text (p. 419). He can best be studied in Luce and Raynouart's

excellent edition for the Soc. de l'Histoire de France (tomes i.-viii.,

1869-1888) which completes the story up to Edward III.'s death. Luce's

careful "sommaire et commentaire critique" often affords means of

checking Froissart by other sources. The magnificent volumes of indexes

of Kervyn de Lettenhove's complete edition (vols. XX.-XXV.) are still

of immense use, though his text and comments are inferior to those of

Luce, Froissart's spirit may well be caught in Lord Berners's racy

English translation (Tudor Translations), or in G.C. Macaulay's useful

abridgment. The three redactions of Froissart's first book (from 1327

to 1373-1377), which is all that concerns our period, have been clearly

distinguished by Luce. (1) The first edition, written about 1373, at

the request of Count Robert of Namur, is inspired by an English bias.

Up to 1360 it is largely derived from the chronicle of JEAN LE BEL,

Canon of St. Lambert of Liège; after that date it is original. (2) The

second edition, only represented by two MSS., of which one is

incomplete, is a modification of the first with a French bias. The

earlier part is more independent of Jean le Bel. (3) The third edition,

preserved in a single MS., ends with the death of Philip VI in 1350,

and, written after 1400, is even more hostile to England than the

second. The best edition of Jean le Bel is by Polain for the Académie

royale de Belgique.

A few of the more important French chronicles after 1328 may be

mentioned shortly. (1) _Grands Chroniques de France_ (ed. Paulin

Paris). Original from 1350 to 1377, a work of first-rate importance,

where, if truth is altered, it is altered deliberately from political

motives. (2) JEAN DE VENETTE, 1340-1368, written with a popular bias,

and partly favourable to Charles of Navarre (edited as a supplement to

Géraud's edition of Guillaume de Nangis, ii., 178-378, Soc. de l'Hist.

de France). (3) _Chronique Normande du xiv'e siècle_, 1337-1372 (ed.

Molinier, Soc. de l'Hist. de France, 1882), exact and very important

for the wars 1337 to 1372. (4) _Chronique des quatre premiers Valois_

(Soc. de l'Hist. de France). (5) CUVELIER'S poetical _Vie de Bertrand

du Guesclin_ (2 vols., _Doc. inédits_). Further details can be found in

Molinier's bibliography. Netherlandish sources for the Hundred Years'

War are summarised in PIRENNE'S _Bibliographie de l'Histoire de

Belgique_ (1895). Of special importance is JAN VAN KLERK'S _Van den

Derden Edewaert Rym Kronyk_. (1840), useful for 1337-1341, and written

with an English bias.

The unofficial legal literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth

centuries is of exceptional variety and value. Many lawyers' treatises

throw light on matters far beyond legal technicalities. HENRY OF

BRACTON or BRATTON'S _De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliæ_

illustrates the union of English and Roman juridical ideas

characteristic of the age of Henry III. It has been edited badly by Sir

T. Twiss in six volumes (Rolls Series), and some portions well by

Professor Maitland in his _Select passages from Bracton and Azo_

(Selden Soc.). Maitland's _Bracton's Note Book_ includes extracts from

plea rolls seemingly made by Bracton. Bracton's book on the laws was

translated, condensed, and rearranged by a writer of the next

generation called Britton. It may be studied in a modern edition in

NICHOLLS'S _Britton on the laws of England_, while _Fleta_, an almost

contemporary Latin law book, must be read in Selden's seventeenth

century edition. Another thirteenth century law-book, _Le Mirroir des

Justices_, has been edited by Maitland and W.J. Whittaker for the

Selden Society. From Edward I.'s time onwards unofficial reports of

trials called YEAR BOOKS, written in French, become valuable for their

vividness and detail, and for the light which they throw on the more

technical records of the plea rolls. Many of them are printed in

unsatisfactory seventeenth century editions, but the Year Books of five

of Edward I.'s regnal years, between 1292 to 1307, together with the

Year Book of 11-12 Edward III., are accessible in A.J. Horwood's

editions in the Rolls Series. L.O. Pike has also edited in the Rolls

Series the _Year books of Edward III._ from 1338 to 1345, and

Maitland's _Year books of Edward II._ for the Selden Society are the

first two instalments of a scheme for publishing the Year Books of the

reign. Besides their legal value, the Year Books are an almost unworked

mine for social and economic, and often even political and

ecclesiastical, history.

Of literary aids to history T. WRIGHT'S _Political Songs_ (Camden Soc.)

illustrate this period to the reign of Edward II. One of Wright's

pieces has been more elaborately edited in C.L. KINGSFORD'S Song of

_Lewes_ (1890), and C. Hardwick published a _Poem on the Times OF

Edward II._ for the Percy Soc. (1849). With Edward III. such literature

becomes copious. Of special importance are T. Wright's _Political POEMS

and SONGS FROM the accession of Edward III._, vol. i. (Rolls Series,

1859), J. Hall's _Poems of_ LAURENCE MINOT, Skeat's editions of CHAUCER

and LANGLAND, and G.C. Macaulay's edition of GOWER. The Latin works of

Wycliffe, published by the Wycliffe Society, mainly belong to the

succeeding period, but _De Dominio Divino_ and _De Civili Dominio_, as

well as some tracts printed in the appendix to LEWIS'S _Life of Wiclif_

and in Shirley's edition of _Fasciculi Zizanioram_ (Rolls Series), were

written before 1377.

Of modern works treating of this period, many monographs, dealing with

particular points, have been mentioned in notes in the course of the

narrative. Of general guides to the period the best by far are Stubbs

and Pauli. STUBBS'S _Constitutional History_ (vol. ii.) is as valuable

for the chapters summarising the political history as for the more

strictly constitutional matter. R. PAULI'S _Geschichte von England_,

iii., 489-896, and iv., 1-505, 716-741, remains, after half a century,

the fullest and most satisfactory working up in detail of these reigns,

though the great additions to our material make parts of it a somewhat

unsafe guide. It can be supplemented for particular aspects of history

by the following: For legal history, POLLOCK and MAITLAND'S _History of

English Law before the time of Edward I._, especially vol. i., book i.

(chapters iv.-vi.), and book ii.; and most of vol. ii.; to which should

be added the prefaces by Prof. Maitland and others to the volumes of

the Selden Society. MAITLAND'S _Roman Canon Law in the Church of

England_ (1898) is also of great importance. For economic history, W.J.

ASHLEY'S _Economic History_, parts i. and ii.; W. CUNNINGHAM's _Growth

of English Industry and Commerce, Early and Middle Ages_; VINOGRADOFF'S

_Villainage in England_, S. DOWELL'S _History of Taxation_ (2nd

edition), H. HALL'S _Customs Revenue of England_, and, as a collection

of materials, J.E. THOROLD ROGERS' _History of Agriculture and Prices_,

vols. i. and ii. For ecclesiastical history, W.R.W. STEPHENS'S _History

of the English Church, 1066-1272_; W.W. CAPES'S _History of the English

Church in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries_, and F. MAKOWER'S

_The Constitutional History and Constitution of the Church of England_

(translated from the German). For academic history, DENIFLE'S

_Entstehung der Universitäten des Mittelalters bis 1400_, especially

pp. 1-40, 237-251 (Oxford) and pp. 367-376 (Cambridge), HAURÉAU'S

_Histoire de la Philosophie scholastique_ and RASHDALL'S _Universities

of the Middle Ages_, i., 1-74, and ii., part ii. (Oxford and

Cambridge). For military history, KÖHLER'S _Entwickelung des

Kriegswesens in der Ritterzeit_, OMAN'S _History of the Art of War in

the Middle Ages_, CLARK'S _Mediæval Military Architecture_, and (above

all) J.E. MORRIS'S _Welsh Wars of Edward I_. For naval history,

NICOLAS'S _History of the Royal Navy_, and C. DE LA RONCIÈRE'S

_Histoire de la Marine Française_. For particular reigns the following

may be found useful: For Henry III., PETIT-DUTAILLIS'S _Étude sur Louis

VIII._, GASQUET'S _Henry III. and the Church_ (1905), BÉMONT'S _Simon

de Montfort_, PROTHERO'S _Simon de Montfort_, and BLAAUW'S _Barons'

Wars_ (2nd ed., 1871). For the reign of Edward I., SEELEY's _Life and

Reign of Edward I._ (1872), my _Edward I._; GOUGH'S _Itinerary of

Edward I._, MAXWELL'S _Robert the Bruce_ (Heroes of the Nations), and

MORRIS'S above-mentioned _Welsh Wars of Edward I._ For some aspects of

Edward II.'s reign, STUBBS'S prefaces to _Chronicles of Edward I. and

Edward II._ are of special value. For Edward III.'s reign, BARNES's

_History of Edward III._ (1688) is not quite superseded by LONGMAN'S

_Life and Times of Edward III._ (2 vols., 1869), and MACKINNON'S

_History of Edward III._ (1900). For the Hundred Years' War, E.

DÉPREZ'S _Préliminaires de la Guerre de Cent Ans_ (1328-1342) (Bibl. de

l'Ecole française de Rome, 1902) for diplomatic history, and DENIFLE's

_Désolation des Églises et Monastères de la France pendant la Guerre de

Cent Ans_ (ii., part i., 1899) for the best general survey of the war

to 1380. See also LUCE'S _La Jeunesse de Bertrand de Guesclin and La

France pendant la Guerre de Cent Ans_, and (for Brittany) A. DE LA

BORDERIE'S _Histoire de Brétagne_ (1899). The end of Edward III.'s

reign is illustrated by S. ARMITAGE SMITH'S _John of Gaunt_ (1904), J.

LECHLER'S _Wiclif und die Vorgeschichte der Reformation_ (2 vols.,

1873), also translated, not very adequately, _Wycliffe and His English

Precursors_ (1878 and 1881), F.D. MATTHEW'S introduction to _Wyclif's

English Works_ (Early English Text Society), and R.L. POOLE'S

_Illustrations of the History of Mediæval Thought_ (1884), and

_Wycliffe_ (1889). G.M. TREVELYAN's _England in the Age of Wycliffe_

(1899) is interesting but not always very scholarly.

Some account of the general foreign history of the period can be found

in LAVISSE and RAMBAUD'S _Histoire générale_ (tomes ii. and iii.),

LOSERTH'S _Geschichte des späteren Mittelalters_ (good bibliographies),

and, briefly, in my _Papacy and Empire_ (up to 1273), and LODGE'S

_Close of the Middle Ages_ (after 1273). For French history of the

period LAVISSE'S _Histoire de France_ (iii., pt. i., 1137-1226, by A.

LUCHAIRE; iii., pt. ii., 1226-1328, by C.V. LANGLOIS, and iv., pt. i.,

1328-1422, by A. COVILLE) cover the whole of the period. More detailed

works are, PETIT-DUTAILLIS'S _Louis VIII._, E. BERGER'S _Blanche de

Castile_, WALLON'S _Louis IX._, BOUTARIC'S _Saint Louis et Alfonse de

Poitiers_, C.V. LANGLOIS'S _Philippe le Hardi_, BOUTARIC'S _France sous

Philippe le Bel_, LEHUGEUR'S _Philippe le Long_, PETIT'S _Charles de

Valois_, FOURNIER'S _Royaume d'Arles et de Vienne_, L. DELISLE'S _Hist.

de Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte_, and (for the south) the new edition of DE

VIC and VAISSÈTE's _Hist. générale de Languedoc_. Much recent work has

been done by French scholars towards the reconstruction of the external

history of England during the whole of our period. For the Low

Countries, PIRENNE'S _Hist. de Belgique_, ii., ASHLEY'S _James and

Philip van Artevelde_, and VANDER KINDERE'S _Le Siècle des Arteveldt_.

PAULI is good for the relations of England and Germany.

Maps illustrating the period are to be found in POOLE'S _Oxford

Historical Atlas_, LONGNON'S _Atlas historique de la France_, and

SPRUNER-MENKE'S _Historischer Hand-Atlas_; special maps of Edward I.'s

Scottish expeditions in GOUGH'S _Itinerary of Edward I._, of Edward

III.'s and the Black Prince's campaigns in THOMPSON'S _Chronicon

Galfridi le Baker_, and KERVYN'S _Froissart_, of John of Gaunt's in

ARMITAGE-SMITH's _John of Gaunt_, and of Wales in the thirteenth

century in _Owens College Historical Essays_. VIDAL DE LA BLACHE'S

_Tableau de la Géographie de la France_ (LAVISSE, _Hist. de France_,

i., pt. i.) is instructive for the physical features of the campaigns

of the Hundred Years' War.

Further details as to English authorities, ancient and modern, can be

found in GROSS'S excellent Sources _and Literature of English History_

(1900). The _Monumenta Germaniæ Historica_, _Scriptores_, vols.

xxvii., xxviii., consist of excerpts from English writers of the

twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the introductions (in Latin) by Pauli

and Liebermann contain noteworthy estimates of the works from which the

extracts are taken.

NOTE TO PAGES 390-92.

My reasons for my account of the battle of Poitiers demand longer

explanation than can be given in a footnote. Like most modern writers,

I have based my narrative on the _Chronicle_ of Geoffrey le Baker as

expounded by Sir E.M. Thompson, though I agree with Professor Oman in

holding that Baker's "ampla profundaque vallis et mariscus, torrente

quodam irriguus," must be the valley of the Miausson. I also, however,

agree with Father Denifle in not setting great store on Chandos Herald,

though I would not reject him altogether, as all prudent writers must

reject Froissart. My conjectural account of the movements of the armies

is an attempt to combine Baker with what may be true in the Herald. I

hope elsewhere to be able to justify my narrative at length.

INDEX.

Aachen.

Abbeville.

Aberconway Abbey.

Aberdeen.

Aberdeen, John Barbout, Archdeacon of. See Barbour, John.

Abergavenny, town, castle and lordship.

Abergavenny, Lords of. See Hastings.

Aberystwyth.

Abingdon.

Abingdon, Edmund of. See Rich, Edmund.

Acre.

Acre, Joan of. See Joan.

Acton Burnell.

Adolf of Nassau, King of the Romans.

Adour, the river.

Agen.

Agenais, the.

Agnelius of Pisa.

Aigueblanche, Peter of, Bishop of Hereford.

Aiguillon.

Albemarle, William of Fors, Earl of.

Albemarle and Devon, Isabella of Fors, Countess of.

Albigenses, the.

Albert the Great.

Albret, Lord of.

Aldgate.

Alencon, Count of.

Alexander II., King-of Scots.

Alexander III., King of Scots.

Alexander, son of Alexander III of Scotland.

Alexander IV., Pope.

Alexander of Hales. See Hales.

Alfonso X., King of Castile.

Alfonse of France, Count of Poitiers.

Alice, Countess of Lancaster.

Alice of Lusignan.

Aliens.

Almaine, Henry of. See Henry of Almaine.

"Almaines, The."

Almond, the river.

Alnwick Castle.

Alton Castle.

Amadeus III., Count of Savoy.

Amesbury.

Amice, mother of the elder Simon de Montfort.

Amiens,

cathedral;

mise of;

treaty of.

Amory, Roger of.

Anagni.

Andrew, St.

Anne of Brittany.

Angers.

Anglesey.

Anglia, East.

Angoulême.

Angoulême, Isabella, Countess of. See Isabella, Queen of England.

Angoumois.

Anjou.

Anjou, Charles of. See Charles.

Anjou, Louis, Duke of. See Louis.

Annandale.

Antrim.

Antwerp.

Apulia.

Aquinas, St. Thomas.

Aquitaine, See also Gascony.

Aquitaine, Dukes of. See under the Kings of England.

Aquitaine, Edward, Prince of. See Edward the Black Prince.

Aquitaine, Eleanor of.

Aragon.

Aragon, James, King of. See James.

Aragon, Peter, King of. See Peter.

Archers,

English;

Welsh;

Scottish.

Architecture,

gothic;

ecclesiastical;

domestic;

military;

"decorated" style, "flamboyant";

"perpendicular";

Norman;

French.

Arden, forest of.

Argenton.

Aristotle.

Armagh, Archbishop of. See Fitzralph, Richard.

Armagnac, Counts of.

Armagnac, John, Count of.

Arnold, T., his edition of _Memorials of St. Edmund's Abbey_.

Art. _See_ also Architecture.

Artevelde, James van.

Arthur I., Count of Brittany.

Arthur II., Duke of Brittany.

Arthur, King.

Arthurian Legend, the _Articuli super cartas_.

Artois.

Artois, Blanche of. See Blanche.

Artois, Maud, Countess of. See Maud.

Artois, Robert of. See Robert.

Arundel, the Countess of.

Arundel, Edmund Fitzalan, Earl of.

Arundel, Richard Fitzalan, Earl of.

Arvon.

Ashley, W.J.,

his _Economic History_;

his _James and Philip van Artevelde_.

Assisi.

Athenry, battle of.

Athis, treaty of.

Athol, David of Strathbolgie, Earl of.

Auberoche, battle of.

Aubigny, Philip of.

Aude, the river.

Audley, Hugh of.

Audley, Earl of Gloucester. See Gloucester.

Audley, James (1258).

Audley, James (d. 1369).

Audleys of Shropshire.

Audrehem, Marshal.

Aumâle, Counts of, See also Albemarle.

Auray;

battle of;

Church of St. Michael.

_Ausculta, Fili_, bull.

Austin Canons of Lanercost.

Austin Friars.

Austria.

Austria, Duke of.

Auvergne.

Auvergne, Counts of.

Auvézère, the river.

Avalon, Hugh of. See Hugh, St.

Avesbury, Robert of, chronicler.

Avesnes;

house of.

Avesnes, William of. See William,

Count of Hainault.

Avignon,

the papal court at;

records of Popes of.

Avon, the river.

Axholme.

Ayermine, William, Bishop of Norwich.

Aymer of Valence, Bishop of Winchester.

Aymer of Valence, Earl of Pembroke. See Pembroke.

Ayr.

"Babylonish Captivity, the."

Bacon, Roger.

Bacon, Robert.

Badenoch, John Comyn, lord of, See Comyn.

Badlesmere, Bartholomew, Lord.

Badlesmere, Lady.

Baker, Geoffrey le, _Chronicle_ of.

"Balance of Power," the.

Baldock (town).

Baldock, Ralph, chancellor and bishop of London.

Baldock, Robert, chancellor.

Baldwin, Count of Flanders, Latin Emperor of the East.

Ball, John,

Balliol, Edward, eldest son of King John of Scotland.

Balliol, John (d. 1269).

Balliol, John, lord of Barnard Castle, and of Galloway, son of the above,

See also John, King of Scots.

Balsham, Hugh, Bishop of Ely.

Barnburgh Castle.

Bampton in the Bush.

Banaster, Adam.

Banbury.

Banff.

Bankers,

foreign;

Jewish;

Italian.

Bannatyne club, publications of the.

Bannock, the river.

Bannockburn, battle of.

Bar, Joan of. See Joan.

Bar, Count of.

Barbavera.

Barbezieux.

Barbour, John, _Bruce_.

Bardi, the.

Bardolf, William.

Barfleur.

Bar-gate, the, Lincoln.

Barnard Castle.

Barnes's _History of Edward III_.

Barnwell.

Barnwell, Canon of.

Barons' war, the.

Barres, William des.

Basset, Gilbert.

_Bastides_.

_Bastilles_.

Bath.

Bath and Wells, Bishop of. See Burnell, Robert; Drokensford;

Shrewsbury, Ralph of, and Harewell, John.

Battle Abbey, chronicle of.

Battles of ----

Athenry.

Auberoche.

Auray.

Ayr.

Bannockburn.

Boroughbridge.

Bourgneuf Bay.

Cassel.

Chalon.

Chesterfield.

Cocherel.

Corte Nuova.

Courtrai.

Crecy.

Dupplin Moor.

Dunbar.

Dundalk.

Evesham.

Falkirk.

Halidon Hill.

La Rochelle.

Lewes.

Lincoln.

Lisieux.

Madog's Field.

Maes Madog.

Mauron.

Methven.

Morgarten.

Morlaix.

Myton.

Nájera.

Neville's Cross.

Orewyn Bridge.

Poitiers.

Pontvallain.

Sandwich.

Sluys.

Stirling Bridge.

The Thirty.

Winchelsea.

Bayonne.

Bazas.

Béarn.

Béarn, Gaston, Viscount of. See Gaston.

Beatrice, daughter of Henry III. and wife of John II. of Brittany.

Beatrice, sister of Amadeus III., Count of Savoy, wife of Raymond

Berengar IV., Count of Provence.

Beaucaire.

Beauce, the.

Beauchamp, Thomas. See Warwick, Earl of.

Beauchamp, William. See Warwick, Earl of.

Beauchamps of Warwick, the.

Beaumanoir, commandant at Josselin.

Beaumaris Castle.

Beaumont, Henry de.

Beaumont, Louis de, Bishop of Durham.

Beaumont, Robert of, Earl of Leicester. See Leicester.

Beaumonts, the.

Beauvais.

Becket, Archbishop, St. Thomas.

Bedale, 182.

Bedford, Castle of;

scutage of.

Bedfordshire.

Bégard, Abbey of.

Beghards, the.

Beguines, the.

Béhuchet, Nicholas.

Bek, Anthony, Bishop of Durham.

Bek, Thomas, Bishop of St. David's.

Belleville.

Bembro, Robert.

Bémont, Charles;

his _Rôles Gascons_;

his _Chartes des libertés anglaises_;

his Simon _de Montfort_.

Bénauge.

Béne, Amaury of.

Benedict XI.

Benedict XII.

Bengeworth, near Evesham.

Bentley, Sir Walter.

Bere Castle.

Bereford, Sir Simon.

Berg, Count of.

Berger's _Blanche de Castile_.

Bergerac.

Berkeley Castle.

Berkeleys, the.

Berkhampstead, siege of.

Berkshire.

Berkstead, Stephen, Bishop of Chichester.

Bermingham, John of. See Louth, Earl of.

Bernabò, Visconti, Lord of Milan.

Berners, Lord, translator of Froissart.

Berri, John, Duke of.

Bertrand, Cardinal. See Montfavence.

Berwick.

Béthune,

_Chronique de l'Anonyme de_.

Bibliographies, historical

Bidassoa, the.

Bigod, the house of.

Bigod, Hugh, justiciar.

Bigod, Roger, earl marshal and Earl of Norfolk. See Norfolk, Earl of.

Bigorre, county of.

Biscay, Bay of.

Blaauw's _Barons' Wars_.

Black Prince, the. See Edward, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine.

Black death, the.

Blacklow Hill.

Blanche of Artois, Queen of Navarre.

Blanche of Bourbon, wife of Peter the Great of Castile.

Blanche of Castile, Queen of Louis VIII. and regent of France.

Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster.

Blanche taque, the, in estuary of Somme.

Blaneforde's _Chronicle_

Blankenberghe.

Blavet, the river.

Blaye.

Bliss' _Calendars of Papal Registers_.

Blois.

Blois, Charles of. See Charles.

Blois, Theobald, Count of.

Blount, Sir Thos.,

Blundeville, Randolph of, Earl of Chester. See Chester, Randolph, Earl of.

Boccaccio.

Bohemia.

Bohemia, Ottocar, King of.

Bohun, Humphrey, Earl of Hereford. See Hereford.

Bohun, Humphrey of Brecon, son of the Earl of Hereford.

Bohun, Margaret.

Bohun, William, Earl of Northampton. See Northampton.

Bohuns, the.

Bollers, house of.

Bologna.

Bolton.

Bonhommes, order of.

Boniface VIII., Pope.

Boniface of Savoy, Archbishop of Canterbury.

Bordeaux;

truce of.

Bordeaux, Bertrand de Goth, Archbishop of. See Clement V.

Bordelais, the.

Borderie's _Histoire de Brétagne_.

Boroughbridge; battle of.

Boroughs; growth of; representation of.

Bothwell Castle.

Boulogne.

Bouquet, Dom, his _Recueil des Historiens de la France_.

Bourbon, Blanche of. See Blanche.

Bourbonnais.

Bourchier, Sir Robert.

_Bourg_, of Limoges, the.

Bourg.

Bourgneuf, Bay of.

Bourne.

Boutaric's _St. Louis et Alfonse de Poitiers_;

his _France sous Philippe le Bel_

Bouvines, battle of.

Brabant.

Brabant, Dukes of. See John II., John III., and Wenceslaus.

Brabant, Mary of. See Mary, Queen of France.

Brabazon, Roger de, chief justice after 1295.

Bracton, Henry of,

his book _De Legibus_;

his Note Book.

Bradwardine, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury.

Brandenburg.

Brandenburg, Elector of.

Brantingham, Thomas, treasurer, Bishop of Exeter.

Brantôme.

Braose, house of.

Braose, William de,

his daughter.

Bratton, Henry. See Bracton.

Braybrook, Henry de.

Bréauté, Falkes de.

Brechin.

Brecon.

Bren, Llewelyn. See Llewelyn.

Brentwood.

Bremen.

Brest.

_Brétagne bretonnante, La_.

Brétigni, treaty of, See also Calais, treaty of.

Bretons. See Brittany.

Brewer's _Monumenta Franciscana_.

Bridgnorth.

Bridlington.

Bridlington, Canon of, his _Gesta Edwardi de Carnarvon_.

Bridlington, John of.

Brie.

Brigham, treaty of.

Bristol,

council meets at;

confirmation of the Great Charter at;

castle of;

channel;

disturbances at.

Brittany,

Celtic;

French.

Brittany, Counts, afterwards Dukes, of. See Arthur I., Arthur II.,

John II., John III., John IV., John V., Peter Mauclerc.

Brittany, Constance of, wife of Randolph of Chester.

See Constance of Brittany.

Brittany, John of, Earl of Richmond. See John of Brittany, Earl of

Richmond.

Britton, lawyer,

his treatise _On the Laws of England_.

Bromfield.

Brotherton, Thomas of, Earl of Norfolk. See Thomas of Brotherton.

Bruce, David. See David II., King of Scots.

Bruce, Edward, "King of Ireland."

Bruce, Elizabeth, Queen of Scots. See Elizabeth.

Bruce, Joan, Queen of Scots. See Joan.

Bruce, Robert, Lord of Annandale,

claimant to the Scots throne (d.1295).

Bruce, Robert, Earl of Carrick, son of the above (d. 1304).

Bruce, Robert, Earl of Carrick, son of the above.

See also Robert, King of Scots.

_Bruce_, John Barbour's.

Bruges,

the Matins of.

truce of (1375).

Brussels.

Brut, the Trojan.

_Brut d'Angleterre_, Wace's.

_Brut y Tywysogion_.

Buch, Captal de.

Buchan, Comyn, John, Earl of.

Buchan, Henry de Beaumont, Earl of,

See also Beaumont, Henry de.

Builth, town and castle.

Buironfosse.

Bulgaria.

Burgh, the family of.

Burgh, Elizabeth de, wife of Robert, King of Scots.

See Elizabeth, Queen of Scots.

Burgh, Elizabeth de, wife of Lionel of Clarence.

Burgh, Hubert de, Earl of Kent.

Burgh, Richard de, Earl of Ulster. See Ulster.

Burgh, Richard de, Lord of Connaught.

Burgh, William de, Lord of Connaught and Earl of Ulster,

See Ulster.

Burgh-on-Sands.

Burghersh, Bartholomew, Bishop of Lincoln.

Burgos.

Burgundy.

Burgundy, Duke of. See Philip the Bold and Philip de Rouvres.

Burnell, Robert, Chancellor, and Bishop of Bath and Wells.

Burton-on-Trent.

Bury, Richard of, Bishop of Durham.

Bury St. Edmunds.

Busses, Spanish.

Butler, Edmund.

Butler of Ireland, James, the.

Byland Abbey.

Bytham Castle.