EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
1272-1485
In 1265, simultaneously with the appearance of English townsfolk in
parliament, an official document couched in the English tongue appeared
like a first peak above the subsiding flood of foreign language. When,
three generations back, Abbot Samson had preached English sermons, they
were noted as exceptions; but now the vernacular language of the
subject race was forcing its way into higher circles, and even into
literary use. The upper classes were learning English, and those whose
normal tongue was English were thrusting themselves into, or at any
rate upon the notice of, the higher strata of society.
The two normal ranks of feudal society had in England naturally been
French lords and English tillers of the soil; but commerce had never
accommodated itself to this agricultural system, and the growth of
trade, of towns, of other forms of wealth than land, tended
concurrently to break down French and feudal domination. A large number
of towns had been granted, or rather sold, charters by Richard I and
John, not because those monarchs were interested in municipal
development, but because they wanted money, and in their rights of
jurisdiction over towns on the royal domain they possessed a ready
marketable commodity. The body which had the means to pay the king's
price was generally the local merchant guild; and while these
transactions developed local government, they did not necessarily
promote popular self-government, because the merchant guild was a
wealthy oligarchical body, and it might exercise the jurisdiction it
had bought from the king in quite as narrow and harsh a spirit as he
had done. The consequent quarrels between town oligarchies and town
democracies do not, however, justify the common assumption that there
had once been an era of municipal democracy which gradually gave way to
oligarchy and corruption. Nevertheless, these local bodies were
English, and legally their members had been villeins; and their
experience in local government prepared them for admittance to that
share in national government which the development of taxation made
almost necessary.
Henry II's scheme of active and comprehensive administration, indeed,
led by a natural sequence to the parliament of Edward I and further.
The more a government tries to do, the more taxation it must impose;
and the broadening of the basis of taxation led gradually to the
broadening of the basis of representation, for taxation is the mother
of representation. So long as real property only--that is to say, the
ownership of land--was taxed, the great council contained only the
great landowners. But Henry II had found it necessary to tax personalty
as well, both clerical and lay, and so by slow steps his successors in
the thirteenth century were driven to admit payers of taxes on
personalty to the great council. This representative system must not be
regarded as a concession to a popular demand for national self-
government. When in 1791 a beneficent British parliament granted a
popular assembly to the French Canadians, they looked askance and
muttered, "_C'est une machine anglaise pour nous taxer_"; and
Edward I's people would have been justified in entertaining the
suspicion that it was their money he wanted, not their advice, and
still less their control. He wished taxes to be voted in the royal
palace at Westminster, just as Henry I had insisted upon bishops being
elected in the royal chapel. In the royal presence burgesses and
knights of the shire would be more liberal with their constituents'
money than those constituents would be with their own when there were
neighbours to encourage resistance to a merely distant terror.
The representation people had enjoyed in the shire and hundred moots
had been a boon, not because it enabled a few privileged persons to
attend, but because by their attendance the mass were enabled to stay
away. If the lord or his steward would go in person, his attendance
exempted all his tenants; if he would not, the reeve and four "best"
men from each township had to go. The "best," moreover, were not chosen
by election; the duty and burden was attached to the "best" holdings in
the township, and in the thirteenth century the sheriff was hard put to
it to secure an adequate representation. This "suit of court" was, in
fact, an obligatory service, and membership of parliament was long
regarded in a similar light. Parliament did not clamour to be created;
it was forced by an enlightened monarchy on a less enlightened people.
A parliamentary "summons" had the imperative, minatory sound which now
only attaches to its police court use; and centuries later members were
occasionally "bound over" to attend at Westminster, and prosecuted if
they failed. On one occasion the two knights for Oxfordshire fled the
country on hearing of their election, and were proclaimed outlaws.
Members of parliament were, in fact, the scapegoats for the people, who
were all "intended" or understood to be present in parliament, but
enjoyed the privilege of absence through representation. The greater
barons never secured this privilege; they had to come in person when
summoned, just as they had to serve in person when the king went to the
wars. Gradually, of course, this attitude towards representation
changed as parliament grasped control of the public purse, and with it
the power of taxing its foes and sparing its friends. In other than
financial matters it began to pay to be a member; and then it suited
magnates not only to come in person but to represent the people in the
Lower House, the social quality of which developed with the growth of
its power. Only in very recent times has the House of Commons again
included such representatives as these whose names are taken from the
official returns for the parliaments of Edward I: John the Baker,
William the Tailor, Thomas the Summoner, Andrew the Piper, Walter the
Spicer, Roger the Draper, Richard the Dyer, Henry the Butcher, Durant
the Cordwainer, John the Taverner, William the Red of Bideford, Citizen
Richard (Ricardus Civis), and William the priest's son.
The appearance of emancipated villeins side by side with earls and
prelates in the great council of the realm is the most significant fact
of thirteenth-century English history. The people of England were
beginning to have a history which was not merely that of an alien
government; and their emergence is traceable not only in language,
literature, and local and national politics, but also in the art of
war. Edward I discovered in his Welsh wars that the long-bow was more
efficient than the weapons of the knight; and his grandson won English
victories at Crecy and Poitiers with a weapon which was within the
reach of the simple yeoman. The discovery of gunpowder and development
of artillery soon proved as fatal to the feudal castle as the long-bow
had to the mailed knight; and when the feudal classes had lost their
predominance in the art of war, and with it their monopoly of the power
of protection, both the reasons for their existence and their capacity
to maintain it were undermined. They took to trade, or, at least, to
money-making out of land, like ordinary citizens, and thus entered into
a competition in which they had not the same assurance of success.
Edward I's greatness consists mainly in his practical appreciation of
these tendencies. He was less original, but more fortunate in his
opportunity, than Henry II. The time had come to set limits to the
encroachments of feudalism and of the church, and Edward was able to
impose them because, unlike Henry II, he had the elements of a nation
at his back. He was not able to sweep back these inroads, but he placed
high-water marks along the frontiers of the state, and saw that they
were not transgressed. He inquired into the titles by which the great
lords held those portions of sovereign authority which they called
their liberties; but he could take no further action when Earl Warenne
produced a rusty sword as his effective title-deeds. He prohibited
further subinfeudation by enacting that when an estate was sold, the
purchaser should become the vassal of the vendor's lord and not of the
vendor himself; and the social pyramid was thus rendered more stable,
because its base was broadened instead of its height being increased.
He expelled the Jews as aliens, in spite of their usefulness to the
crown; he encouraged commerce by making profits from land liable to
seizure for debt; and he defined the jurisdiction of the church, though
he had to leave it authority over all matters relating to marriage,
wills, perjury, tithes, offences against the clergy, and ecclesiastical
buildings. He succeeded, however, in defiance of its opposition, in
making church property liable to temporal taxation, and in passing a
Mortmain Act which prohibited the giving of land to monasteries or
other corporations without the royal licence.
By thus increasing the national control over the church in England, he
made the church itself more national. It is sometimes implied that the
church was equally national throughout the Middle Ages; but it is
difficult to speak of a national church before there was a nation, or
to see that there was anything really English in a church ruled by
Lanfranc or Anselm, when there was not an Englishman on the bishops'
bench, when the vast majority of Englishmen were legally incapable as
villeins of even taking orders in the church, and when the vernacular
language had been ousted from its services. But with the English nation
grew an English church; Grosseteste denounced the dominance of aliens
in the church, while Simon de Montfort denounced it in the state. It
was, however, by secular authority that the English church was
differentiated from the church abroad. It was the barons and not the
bishops who had resisted the assimilation of English to Roman canon
law, and it was Edward I, and not Archbishops Peckham and Winchilsey,
who defied Pope Boniface VIII. Archbishops, indeed, still placed their
allegiance to the pope above that to their king.
The same sense of national and insular solidarity which led Edward to
defy the papacy also inspired his efforts to conquer Wales and
Scotland. Indeed, it was the refusal of the church to pay taxes in the
crisis of the Scottish war that provoked the quarrel with Boniface.
But, while Edward was successful in Wales, he encountered in Scotland a
growing national spirit not altogether unlike that upon which Edward
himself relied in England. Nor was English patriotism sufficiently
developed to counteract the sectional feelings which took advantage of
the king's embarrassments. The king's necessity was his subjects'
opportunity, and the Confirmation of Charters extorted from him in 1297
stands, it is said, to the Great Charter of 1215 in the relation of
substance to shadow, of achievement to promise. Edward, however, gave
away much less than has often been imagined; he certainly did not
abandon his right to tallage the towns, and the lustre of his motto,
"Keep troth," is tarnished by his application to the pope for
absolution from his promises. Still, he was a great king who served
England well by his efforts to eliminate feudalism from the sphere of
government, and by his insistence on the doctrine that what touches all
should be approved by all. If to some catholic medievalists his reign
seems a climax in the ascent of the English people, a climax to be
followed by a prolonged recessional, it is because the national forces
which he fostered were soon to make irreparable breaches in the
superficial unity of Christendom.
The miserable reign of his worthless successor, Edward II, illustrated
the importance of the personal factor in the monarchy, and also showed
how incapable the barons were of supplying the place of the feeblest
king. Both parties failed because they took no account of the commons
of England or of national interests. The leading baron, Thomas of
Lancaster, was executed; Edward II was murdered; and his assassin,
Mortimer, was put to death by Edward III, who grasped some of the
significance of his grandfather's success and his father's failure. He
felt the national impulse, but he twisted it to serve a selfish and
dynastic end. It must not, however, be supposed that the Hundred Years'
War originated in Edward's claim to the French throne; that claim was
invented to provide a colourable pretext for French feudatories to
fight their sovereign in a war which was due to other causes. There was
Scotland, for instance, which France wished to save from Edward's
clutches; there were the English possessions in Gascony and Guienne,
from which the French king hoped to oust his rival; there were
bickerings about the lordship of the Narrow Seas which England claimed
under Edward II; and there was the wool-market in the Netherlands which
England wanted to control. The French nation, in fact, was feeling its
feet as well as the English; and a collision was only natural,
especially in Guienne and Gascony. Henry II had been as natural a
sovereign in France as in England, because he was quite as much a
Frenchman as an Englishman. But since then the kings of England had
grown English, and their dominion over soil which was growing French
became more and more unnatural. The claim to the throne, however, gave
the struggle a bitter and fruitless character; and the national means,
which Edward employed to maintain the war, only delayed its inevitably
futile end. It was supported by wealth derived from national commerce
with Flanders and Gascony; national armies were raised by enlistment to
replace the feudal levy; the national long-bow and not the feudal war-
horse won the battles of Crecy and Poitiers; and command of the sea
secured by a national navy enabled Edward to win the victory of Sluys
and complete the reduction of Calais. War, moreover, required extra
supplies in unprecedented amounts, and they took the form of national
taxes, voted by the House of Commons, which supplemented and then
supplanted the feudal aids as the mainstay of royal finance.
Control of these supplies brought the House of Commons into
constitutional prominence. It was no mere Third Estate after the
continental model, for knights of the shire sat side by side with
burgesses and citizens; and knights of the shire were the lesser
barons, who, receiving no special writ of summons, cast in their lot
with the Lower and not with the Upper House. Parliament had separated
into two Houses in the reign of Edward II--for Edward I's Model
Parliament had been a Single Chamber, though doubtless it voted by
classes--but the House of Commons represented the _communities_ of
the realm, and not its lower orders; or rather, it concentrated all
these communities--shires, cities, and boroughs--and welded them into a
single community of the realm. It thus created a nucleus for national
feeling, which gradually cured the localism of early England and the
sectionalism of feudal society; and it developed an _esprit de
corps_ which counteracted the influence of the court. The advantages
which the crown may have hoped to secure by bringing representatives up
to Westminster, and thus detaching them from their basis of local
resistance, were frustrated by the solidarity and consistency which
grew up among members of parliament; and this growing national
consciousness supplanted local consciousness as the safeguard of
constitutional liberty.
Most of the principles and expedients of representative government were
adumbrated during this first flush of English nationalism, which has
been called "the age of the Commons." The petitions, by which alone
parliament had been able to express its grievances, were turned into
bills which the crown had to answer, not evasively, but by a thinly
veiled "yes" or "no." The granting of taxes was made conditional upon
the redress of grievances; the crown finally lost its right to tallage;
and its powers of independent taxation were restricted to the levying
of the "ancient customs" upon dry goods and wines. If it required more
than these and than the proceeds from the royal domains, royal
jurisdiction, and diminishing feudal aids, it had to apply to
parliament. The expense of the Hundred Years' War rendered such
applications frequent; and they were used by the Commons to increase
their constitutional power. Attempts were made with varying success to
assert that the ministers of the crown, both local and national, were
responsible to parliament, and that money-grants could only originate
in the House of Commons, which might appropriate taxes to specific
objects and audit accounts so as to see that the appropriation was
carried out.
The growth of national feeling led also to limitations of papal power.
Early in Edward III's reign a claim was made that the king, in virtue
of his anointing at coronation, could exercise spiritual jurisdiction,
and the statutes of _Praemunire_ and _Provisors_ prohibited the
exercise in England of the pope's powers of judicature and appointment
to benefices without the royal licence, though royal connivance and
popular acquiescence enabled the papacy to enjoy these privileges for
nearly two centuries longer. National feeling was particularly inflamed
against the papacy because the "Babylonish captivity" of the pope at
Avignon made him appear an instrument in the hands of England's enemy,
the king of France; and that captivity was followed by the "Great
Schism," during which the quarrels of two, and then three, popes,
simultaneously claiming to be the only head of the church on earth,
undermined respect for their office. These circumstances combined with
the wealth and corruption of the church to provoke the Lollard
movement, which was the ecclesiastical aspect of the democratic
tendencies of the age.
One of the most striking illustrations of popular development was the
demand for vernacular versions of the Scriptures, which Wycliffe met by
his translation of the Bible. At the same time Langland made literature
for the common people out of their common lot, a fact that can hardly
be understood unless we remember that villeins, although they might be
fined by their lords for so doing, were sending their sons in
increasing numbers to schools, which were eventually thrown open to
them by the Statute of Labourers in 1406. The fact that Chaucer wrote
in English shows how the popular tongue was becoming the language of
the court and educated classes. Town chronicles and the records of
guilds and companies began to be written in English; legal proceedings
are taken in the same tongue, though the law-reports continued to be
written in French; and after a struggle between French and Latin, even
the laws are drawn up in English. That the church persisted, naturally
enough, in its usage of catholic Latin, tended to increase its
alienation from popular sympathies. Wycliffe represented this national
feeling when he appealed to national authority to reform a corrupt
Catholic church, and when he finally denied that power of miraculous
transubstantiation, upon which ultimately was based the claim of the
priesthood to special privileges and estimation. But his association
with the extreme forms of social agitation, which accompanied the
Lollard movement, is less clear.
Before the end of Edward III's reign the French war had produced a crop
of disgrace, disorder, and discontent. Heavy taxation had not availed
to retain the provinces ceded to England at the Treaty of Bretigny in
1360, and hordes of disbanded soldiery exploited the social
disorganization produced by the Black Death; a third of the population
was swept away, and many villeins deserted their land to take up the
more attractive labour provided in towns by growing crafts and
manufactures. The lords tried by drastic measures to exact the services
from villeins which there were not enough villeins to perform; and the
imposition of a poll-tax was the signal for a comprehensive revolt of
town artisans and agricultural labourers in 1381. Its failure did not
long impede their emancipation, and the process of commuting services
for rent seems to have gone on more rapidly in the first half of the
fifteenth than in the fourteenth century. But the passionate preaching
of social equality which inflamed the minds of the insurgents produced
no further results; in their existing condition of political education,
the peasant and artisan had perforce to be content with watching the
struggles of higher classes for power.
Richard II, who had succeeded his grandfather in 1377, reaped the
whirlwind of Edward's sowing, not so much in the consequences of the
war as in the fruits of his peerage policy. The fourteenth century
which nationalized the Commons, isolated the Lords; and the baronage
shrank into the peerage. The word "peer" is not of English origin, nor
has it any real English meaning. Its etymological meaning of "equal"
does not carry us very far; for a peer may be equal to anything. But
the peers, consisting as they do of archbishops, dukes, marquises,
earls, viscounts, bishops, and barons, of peers who are lords of
parliament and of peers who are neither lords of parliament nor
electors to the House of Commons, are not even equal to one another;
and certainly they would deny that other people were equal to them. The
use of the word in its modern sense was borrowed from France in the
fourteenth century; but in France it had a meaning which it could not
have in England. A peer in France claimed equality with the crown; that
is to say, he was the ruler of one of the great fiefs which had been
equal to the county of Paris when the count of Paris had been elected
by his equals king of France. If the king of Wessex had been elected
king of England by the other kings of the Heptarchy, and if those other
kings had left successors, those successors might have claimed to be
peers in a real sense. But they had no such pretensions; they were
simply greater barons, who had been the tenants-at-will of their king.
The barons, however, of William I or Henry II had been a large class of
comparatively small men, while the peers of Richard II were a small
class of big men. The mass of lesser barons had been separated from the
greater barons, and had been merged in the landed gentry who were
represented by the knights of the shire in the House of Commons. The
greater barons were summoned by special and individual writs to the
House of Lords; but there was nothing to fetter the crown in its issue
of these writs. The fact that a great baron was summoned once, did not
mean that he need be summoned again, and the summons of the father did
not involve the summons of his eldest son and successor. But gradually
the greater barons made this summons hereditary and robbed the crown of
all discretion in the matter, though it was not till the reign of
Charles I that the House of Lords decided in its own favour the
question whether the crown had the power to refuse a writ of summons to
a peer who had once received one.
With this narrowing of the baronage, the barons lost the position they
had held in the thirteenth century as leaders of constitutional reform,
and this part was played in the fourteenth century by the knights of
the shire. The greater barons devoted themselves rather to family than
to national politics; and a system of breeding-in amalgamated many
small houses into a few great ones. Thomas of Lancaster held five
earldoms; he was the rival of Edward II, and might well be called a
peer of the crown. Edward III, perceiving the menace of these great
houses to the crown, tried to capture them in its interests by means of
marriages between his sons and great heiresses. The Black Prince
married the daughter of the Earl of Kent; Lionel became Earl of Ulster
in the right of his wife; John of Gaunt married the heiress of
Lancaster and became Duke of Lancaster; Thomas of Woodstock married the
heiress of the Bohuns, Earls of Essex and of Hereford; the descendants
of Edmund, Duke of York, absorbed the great rival house of Mortimer;
and other great houses were brought within the royal family circle. New
titles were imported from abroad to emphasize the new dignity of the
greater barons. Hitherto there had been barons only, and a few earls
whose dignity was an office; now by Edward III and Richard II there
were added dukes, marquises, and viscounts, and England might boast of
a peerage nearly, if not quite, as dangerous to the crown as that of
France. For Edward's policy failed: instead of securing the great
houses in the interests of the crown, it degraded the crown to the
arena of peerage rivalries, and ultimately made it the prize of noble
factions.
Richard II was not the man to deal with these over-mighty subjects. He
may perhaps be described as a "New" monarch born before his time. He
had some of the notions which the Tudors subsequently developed with
success; but he had none of their power and self-control, and he was
faced from his accession by a band of insubordinate uncles. Moreover,
it needed the Wars of the Roses finally to convince the country of the
meaning of the independence of the peerage. Richard fell a victim to
his own impatience and their turbulence. Henry IV came to the throne as
the king of the peers, and hardly maintained his uneasy crown against
their rival ambitions. The Commons, by constitutional reform, reduced
almost to insignificance a sovereignty which the Lords could not
overthrow by rebellion; and by insisting that the king should "live of
his own," without taxing the country, deprived him of the means of
orderly government. Their ideal constitution approached so nearly to
anarchy that it is impossible not to suspect collusion between them and
the Lords. The church alone could Henry placate by passing his statute
for burning heretics.
Henry V took refuge from this domestic imbroglio in a spirited foreign
policy, and put forward a claim more hollow than Edward III's to the
throne of France. There were temptations in the hopeless condition of
French affairs which no one but a statesman could have resisted; Henry,
a brilliant soldier and a bigoted churchman, was anything but a
statesman; and the value of his churchmanship may be gauged from the
fact that he assumed the insolence of a crusader against a nation more
catholic than his own. He won a deplorably splendid victory at
Agincourt, married the French king's daughter, and was crowned king of
France. Then he died in 1422, leaving a son nine months old, with
nothing but success in the impossible task of subduing France to save
the Lancastrian dynasty from the nemesis of vaulting ambition abroad
and problems shelved at home.
Step by step the curse of war came home to roost. Henry V's abler but
less brilliant brother, Bedford, stemmed till his death the rising tide
of English faction and French patriotism. Then the expulsion of the
English from France began, and a long tale of failure discredited the
government. The nation had spirit enough to resent defeat, but not the
means to avoid it; and strife between the peace party and the war party
in the government resolved itself into a faction fight between
Lancastrians and Yorkists. The consequent impotence of the government
provoked a bastard feudal anarchy, maintained by hirelings instead of
liegemen. Local factions fought with no respect for the law, which was
administered, if at all, in the interests of one or other of the great
factions at court; and these two great factions fostered and organized
local parties till the strife between them grew into the Wars of the
Roses.
Those wars are perhaps the most puzzling episode in English history.
The action of an organized government is comparatively easy to follow,
but it is impossible to analyze the politics of anarchy. The Yorkist
claim to the throne was not the cause of the war; it was, like Edward
III's claim to the throne of France, merely a matter of tactics, and
was only played as a trump card. No political, constitutional, or
religious principle was at stake; and the more peaceable, organized
parts of the community took little share in the struggle. No great
battle was fought south of the Thames, and no town stood a siege. It
looks as though the great military and feudal specialists, whose power
lay principally on the Borders, were engaged in a final internecine
struggle for the control of England, in somewhat the same way as the
Ostmark or East Border of the Empire became Austria, and the Nordmark
or North Border became Prussia, and in turn dominated Germany.
Certainly the defeat of these forces was a victory for southern and
eastern England, and for the commercial and maritime interests on which
its growing wealth and prosperity hung; and the most important point in
the wars was not the triumph of Edward IV over the Lancastrians in
1461, but his triumph over Warwick, the kingmaker, ten years later. The
New Monarchy has been plausibly dated from 1471; but Edward IV had not
the political genius to work out in detailed administration the results
of the victory which he owed to his military skill, and Richard III,
who possessed the ability, made himself impossible as a king by the
crimes he had to commit in order to reach the throne. The
reconstruction of English government on a broader and firmer national
basis was therefore left to Henry VII and the House of Tudor.