A romp through early English history ...
Written by a Frenchman, almost 100 years ago ... what's not to like.
Notes from a partial rereading of Andre Maurois’ The Miracle of England … a gloriously dated but articulate history of what we now call Brexit Britain. These notes stop at the start of the Hundred Years War but will soon continue to a closure marked by the static of modernity.
England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland … islands of Celts until the Romans arrived. The Celt world would vanish in England but would linger in Ireland and Wales. Gaelic Ireland is a hybrid of the original Celtic world. The Welsh and Irish languages today reflect that. England is the true mutt of the group.
Caesar failed in his first attempt. The island would not be truly “Roman” until Hadrian. Latin left only a minor legacy in the language of the English … soon to be overwhelmed by Germanic tongues and then French. Rome never conquered Wales or Scotland and intentionally stayed far away from the Irish.
After Rome, the invasions began … mostly Saxons and Angles from the north and northwest coasts of Europe. Chaos ruled with the Arthurian legend arising from the efforts to resist the invaders and bring peace.
The Danes (Vikings) would overwhelm England and Ireland. It was, for a moment, the tenuous makings of a Scandinavian empire with England at its center.
Alfred the Great, however, would organize the Saxons … he was the great Saxon king. The Danegeld (property tax) would stay in place and pay for a “modern fleet” and an organized army. The baronial council called the Witan elected Alfred - no dynastic kings yet. England then was a Christian but entirely illiterate society. All through this period of invasion and Saxon resistance, Wales and, to a lesser extent, Scotland would be separate from the affairs of England.
The Danes return in part due to a Norwegian Viking separatist revolt from Denmark. They would violently reconquer England. The Dane Canute takes over and evolves into an enlightened king embracing much of Alfred’s Saxon world in order.
After Canute, Edward the Confessor takes over. Deeply pious and more a monk than a king, Edward, without an heir, promises England to everyone ranging from his brother-in-law Harold to the Danes to William the Bastard in Normandy. He also builds the first version of Westminster Abbey. Throughout the early history of England, clear up to the Tudors, no matter the violence or disruption, churches and, later universities, were being built.
William the Conqueror from Normandy fills Edward’s vacuum. He, like is clan, is in lineage an ex-Danish Viking who quickly and deeply assimilated a French Norman identity. A similar Norman crew with a similar knack for violence and assimilation would conquer Sicily at the same William invaded England. The Norman influence on Western civilization is one of the most overlooked of stories in part because of their gifts of assimilation and leadership.
William had to defeat another claimant to the throne, the hapless Harold. Harold would be the first to make a break for the throne. The Bayeux Tapestry tells the whole story of his ill-fated effort: his capture by William, his oath to William, his breaking the oath … then William building a fleet, hiring mercenary knights (by promising land in England) and defeating Harold at Hastings in 1066. This victory was far from a given. Harold’s formidable soldiers were exhausted from just thwarting a Danish invasion in the North a month earlier.
William’s success was a military one - he conquered England (not Scotland & Wales). He made himself king based on pure power and distributed to his knights and supporters the many manors of England. He rearranged ownership and privilege and laid a firm foundation for both his kingship and the future aristocracy of England. He took control of the Church. There was no separation of Church and State. Most importantly, Rome did not, from the beginning, have as much influence with the English monarch as it did in the rest of Europe. William built both citadels and cathedrals and had firm control of both the military and the courts.
French was the language of the court, but English was going through a 300-year assimilation with both the French language, the people’s own use of it and the many strains of the Old Saxon English. Its Germanic origins were gradually smoothed away by the people creating a dynamic, poetic language that contained an extraordinary number of simple words.
William’s son Rufus takes over and is no William, but things hang together. This would be the beginning of the rise of feudalism in England. Like life on the Continent, feudal England was organized around a manor that the king gave a vassal in return for knights. The peasant is only marginally free with no markets to sell the fruits of his labor to except his lord. Yet, and this matters, he is secure in his place. This hierarchical world will lay the groundwork for monarchical kingdoms and the divine right that buttressed them. The biggest issue was the Conflict of Investiture. A bishop serves two “Gods” - the Pope and the King. The first invests him with spiritual power while the later supplies land, a congregation, a church, and money. Thus, who invests the bishop? If the former, then the Church is separate from the king. If the latter, the king is defacto the spiritual font of the church. Endlessly difficult … one can trace it to Henry VIII in the 16th century all the way to the increasingly controversial tax free status of American churches. Norman kings seize up to a third of England’s forests for royal hunts. Almost half of all serious criminal cases for hundreds of years will involve trespassing or poaching on these grounds … penalties often included death.
Henry I will grab power from his absent brother Richard when Rufus dies. His will be a long and peaceful reign. The whole concept and ideal known as “the King’s Peace” would begin here. Henry replaced feudal courts with royal courts and accelerates the use of a jury which originated with the Franks and was later embraced by those extraordinary Normans.
Henry’s death will trigger 15 years of anarchy that will be unsteadily settled by a tentative King Stephen who will seek legitimacy by anointing the future Henry II from Anjou as king. Henry II, born of ferocious stock, will be a great English king who spent the vast amount of his long reign in France rather than England. He spoke French and preferred all that was French. His famous marriage to his equally fierce wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (eight years his senior) at age 19, created the Angevin Empire with England occupying more of France than the then French king, Louis. This brief “empire” took shape around 1200 and was doomed from the start. For it to be successful England would have to eventually subordinate itself to the much larger, more populous, and richer France. That and the thorny issue of the English Channel made certain that that was never going to happen. It would take 250 years and a One Hundred Year War to set things straight.
The Thomas Becket affair is shrouded in mythic history. Becket himself chose to be a spiritual leader only after Henry II made him Archbishop despite Becket not being ordained. He did so because Becket was his confidant, his Henry Kissinger, and his brutal warrior, leading his chosen armies into battle. Becket’s spiritual conversion was apparently sincere as was his conviction that the Church had the final say in judicial matters – a position utterly untenable for a sovereign. It was another version of the battle mentioned earlier (Conflict of Investiture) that would plague English history. His storied death was a product of Henry’s wrath but the specifics remain a mystery. Henry’s repentance was profound, but the people never forgave him. Thus, an instructive story about the power of martyrdom in the body politic of a people.
Henry II was the first Plantagenet king. His reign was long and by the standards of the day, peaceful. He reconfigured the feudal justice system, introducing the concept of a grand jury and the position of a circuit judge. The latter went from town to town making rulings along the way without a written code, blending local usage of the law with royal decrees and ecclesiastical precedents in a “circuitous” process that slowly created what is now referred to as Common Law. The relative stability of England during the Middle Ages can be ascribed to geography, a high degree of homogeneity (a still independent Wales & Scotland aside!), a Church not controlled by the Pope and, possibly the most important, a system of justice well beyond her contemporaries.
Henry’s 35-year reign ends in 1189 in chaos – his three sons plotting to get the throne. In the end it was Richard the “Lion Hearted”, the oldest, who would rule from afar – either from is beloved Normandy or on a “crusade”. As romantic as his father was a realist, Richard joined Philip of France in organizing the Third Crusade, paying for it through the first round of non-land related taxes in English history. It is a long story that ended with imprisonment, release, and death. He was both a complete failure and the stuff of legend. His awful brother, John, would take over but a quick note before that. England came late to the Crusades but would benefit from them the same as the rest of Europe. Despite the religious fervor, the slaughter, the little known but genocidal pogroms, and the rampant pillaging, the exposure of the Europeans to the more developed and cultural world of Islam would be one of the triggers for the Renaissance. The Islamic Empire, though fragmented, was the center of the world at this time and had been for hundreds of years and was as brightly lit as Europe was dark. For many Europeans, a glimpse into the Islamic world was like opening the door to Narnia. Once the door was opened, city states like Venice and Genoa rose to imperial heights trafficking the riches of one world to another.
Meanwhile, the despotic King John was king. Despised by the French, John would lose all the English holdings in France. Hated by the barons, John was unable to raise the money to fight France. Ever the popular guy. John was soon excommunicated by the Pope. John sought Papal and baronial forgiveness and getting a little room for maneuver, attacked France, and lost again, badly. To keep his job, he agreed to the Magna Carta in 1215. This document took on much more significance in the last 400 years that it did in its first 400 years. It was only translated into English in the 16th century. It would be utterly dismissed under the Tudors when the “divine right” of kings was at its apogee.
What the Magna Carta did do was drawn the line in the sand when it came to royal prerogatives. While Henry II was maybe as ruthless as his son John, he respected the power of the barons. The Magna Carta documented the feudal rights of the barons and opened the door, albeit barely, to the concept of a Parliament. (NOTE: Feudalism was more than serf and lord. It was an early model of separation of powers … the king, the barons, and the church operated in their own spheres of influence. Representative government is much more a by-product of feudalism than the monarchical systems that replaced it.) The Magna Carta did NOT usher in habeus corpus and only vaguely endorsed “English liberties”. These have been projected onto it over the years as the Magna Carta became a primary source for the slow emergence of representative government and individual protections.
King John died from a lunch of too many peaches and too much cider. England then stumble through the thirty-year reign of a religious but simple Henry III. The Magna Carta received annual lip service while the barons viewed with deep suspicion Henry’s increasingly cozy relationship with the Vatican. It reached a breaking point when the Vatican “gave” Henry’s son Sicily – that is, if he could conquer it. Simon de Montfort led a rebellion against the King, captured him and called England’s first de facto “Parliament” – a sociopolitical concept derived from the use of “communes” in French society … later translated in England to “commons” … taking shape eventually in the House of Commons. Montfort was ahead of his time, and his representative experiment would have to wait. The soon to be king, Edward, rallied supporters, slew Montfort, and awaited Henry’s death.
The England that Edward I would inherit and dramatically alter was deeply religious and entirely Catholic. It was shaped by a devotion that embraced the Crusades and would, in 1290, expel the Jews. The Archbishop of Canterbury and his bishops were part of the Rome’s Papal order: however, England distinguished itself from the rest of Europe with its relentless tug-a-war with clerical authority. This was shared by the people themselves who preferred a “mixed” authority in their lives. Nonetheless, God was in the air they breathed and the beer they drank (only the poor drank water). The monasteries and abbeys were the centerpieces of communities where towns were tiny and stores as we know them utterly non-existent. The wealthy and often corrupt monk had been replaced by the pious and tireless friar of the recently organized Franciscan and Dominican orders. It would take many generations before these orders too would succumb to the corruption that discredited their monastic predecessors. While the church’s nemesis, humanism, was still a couple of hundred years away, its birthplaces were taking shape all over Europe and nowhere more than in England. Oxford and latter Cambridge grew as a training ground for learned “clerks” who could serve as administrators for both church and state in a deeply illiterate England. The university “student” (not at all a product of wealth) and his teachers, were now players in an evolving feudal world. The other players who would accelerate the secular changes that lay on the horizon would be the mythic knight and the prosaic burgess.
Edward II was ineffective and very likely gay and utterly uninterested in governing. His wife would try to put her lover, Roger of Mortimer, in power but was later rebuffed by her son Edward III. Edward II was forced by Mortimer to abdicate and was murdered by Tower guards. Having reached maturity, Edward III showed his future mettle by removing and killing Mortimer, much to the relief of most of England.
Edward III and later his son, the Black Prince, would start and prosecute the inevitable Hundred Years War with France. Inevitable because the two countries were so intertwined in every sense ranging from language to commerce to royalty. The kings and queens were often related and only recently was the despised French language losing its grip on England. English wool, the first great “imperial” product of Britain, was sold to French Flanders and was central to the English economy thus making a secure English Channel a priority. Only 150 years earlier, the English occupied, however speciously or unrealistically, most of France.
The war would begin with the Welsh longbow defeating the glorious, knighted cavalry of France at Crecy and later Poitiers. The longbow legend of Agincourt – fought later – is real. The bow was a Welsh creation and Edward III required all households in Wales with males to have one ready for service. The humiliated French retreated into strongholds and remained in them as the English, with no knowledge of siege warfare, plundered France, infuriating the once friendly locals, hauling real treasure back to their homeland while settling for a modest ceasefire where they took Calais and Aquitaine. They will expel all the French from Calais, a vital port in the wool trade, and repopulate it with Englishman and the city will remain in Britain’s hands for over 200 years.
Edward III was a tough nut who worshiped the culture of chivalry unless, like all the knights themselves, it interfered with his self-interest. While there were efforts to restore the mythic Roundtable, what did take firm root was the bubonic plague. Having begun in the steppes of Mongolia ten years earlier, the plague arrived in Britain with a particular vengeance killing up to 50% of the population. Britain with its huge black rat population and no real hot weather, was a perfect place for the plague and it would haunt her as well as much of the world for almost 300 more years. Those who survived, prospered. Desperate lords gave their serfs land in exchange for rent. This monumentally important transition from serf to landowner created the first “farmers” of the Middle Ages – the word farming coming from the word “firm” which was how this new arrangement felt to the peasant. The Black Death in its horror released prosperity and capital and the resultant explosion of trade with the continent can be called the first hint of future empire. Trade, control of the seas on which it relies, and the start of a more worldly mindset all came from surviving these dark times
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