Kingdom of England (Norman and Plantagenet)

A thousand square miles made a desert

formationDrafted from Adams, The Political History of England, vol. II (1905)

William's coronation at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066 did not settle England. For three years the north kept rising against him - Norman garrisons massacred at Durham, castles attacked at York, exiles returning from Scotland to stir fresh revolt - and in 1069 the danger nearly became fatal. A Danish fleet under Sweyn's brothers landed at the Humber, joined the English rebels, and took York itself, burning much of the city, including its cathedral, in the process. It was the most serious threat William had faced since Hastings.

Adams, The Political History of England, vol. II (1905) · Steven Fruitsmaak · Public domain

An army returns to the north

William drove the Danes back to their ships and put down a scatter of risings in the west, but it was what he did next in the north that would be remembered longest. Returning from a campaign in the west with little delay, he marched his army through the country between York and Durham and laid it waste with deliberate, methodical cruelty. Fugitives were hunted down and killed; houses burned; livestock slaughtered; stores of food and farm tools destroyed so thoroughly that survival across roughly a thousand square miles became physically impossible. Even contemporary Norman writers, generally favourable to William, were troubled by what they described - one noted that conquerors and conquered alike suffered under the resulting war, famine and plague.

What obedience actually cost

The country did not recover for a generation. What the Harrying achieved, in narrowly military terms, was final: no army rose again in Northumbria to seriously contest Norman rule. But it set the pattern for how the Conquest would be secured more broadly - not through negotiated submission alone, as at Berkhamstead in 1066, but through a readiness, when resistance persisted, to make an example severe enough that no one dared repeat it.

A book with no appeal

formationDrafted from Adams, The Political History of England, vol. II (1905)

Seventeen years after Hastings, William's government still did not have a full written record of what it actually ruled. At the Christmas court of 1085, after debate that probably centred on the land tax inherited from the old English geld, the king ordered a complete survey of the kingdom's occupied land - who held it, what it was worth, and what it had been worth under Edward the Confessor.

Juries under oath, not a royal guess

The method was as notable as the result. Royal commissioners rode a circuit of counties, summoning each shire court to meet them; within each hundred, a sworn local jury answered a fixed set of questions about every manor - its holders past and present, its ploughs, its population, its value - with testimony reinforced where necessary by the men of the vill or the whole shire. It was an early and strikingly thorough use of the sworn inquest, an institution the Conquest itself had introduced to England, and a rehearsal, though no one at the time could have known it, for the itinerant justice and jury system a great-grandson of William's would later build into common law.

Domesday

The finished record was kept in the royal treasury and treated almost immediately as conclusive in disputed cases - within a century a writer on the exchequer explained its popular name by comparing its verdicts to those of the Last Judgment, final and without appeal. No earlier English king had commanded anything like it. Domesday Book gave the Norman crown a working knowledge of its own kingdom's resources that made the elaborate feudal and fiscal machinery of the next two centuries possible - not a static portrait of 1086 so much as the foundation stone of how England would be governed for generations afterward.

The National Archives, Kew · Adams, The Political History of England, vol. II (1905) · Domesday Book · Public domain

A crown with two claimants

formationDrafted from Adams, The Political History of England, vol. II (1905)

Henry I left no surviving legitimate son, only a daughter, Matilda, whom he had made his barons swear to accept as his heir. When he died in 1135 many of the same barons instead accepted his nephew Stephen, who moved fast enough to be crowned before opposition could organize. The result was nineteen years of civil war between Stephen's party and Matilda's, fought less through pitched battles than through castles built without royal licence and a countryside fought over piecemeal by whichever local lord could hold it.

Yorkshire Museum · Adams, The Political History of England, vol. II (1905) · York Museums Trust · CC BY-SA 4.0

An ending nobody had planned

The war's resolution came almost by accident. Stephen had spent 1153 trying to secure the succession for his son Eustace, only to be refused by the church leadership on the grounds of an earlier papal prohibition. Then, in the middle of a siege at Wallingford that had drawn Matilda's son Henry of Anjou back into England, Eustace died suddenly in August - struck, chroniclers said, with madness after plundering the lands of a saint known for avenging such offences. Stephen, his own wife already dead and his surviving son uninterested in the throne, had nothing left to fight for.

Adams, The Political History of England, vol. II (1905) · C. L. Stainer · Public domain

The Treaty of Winchester

At Winchester that November the two men and their supporters met before what may have been the first full council of the realm in over a decade. Stephen formally recognized Henry's hereditary right to the kingdom; Henry agreed Stephen should keep the throne for the rest of his life; and both sides swore to destroy the "adulterine" castles raised during the war, numbered by contemporaries anywhere from 375 to over a thousand. Stephen died the following October, and Henry succeeded exactly as the treaty had promised - the crown's authority badly weakened by two decades of disorder, but a single line of succession restored where two had spent a generation contesting it.

Four knights and a word

expansionDrafted from Adams, The Political History of England, vol. II (1905)

Henry II's quarrel with Thomas Becket, his own former chancellor and the archbishop he had promoted expecting a loyal ally, was fundamentally a dispute over jurisdiction: whether clergy accused of crimes should answer to the church's own courts or the king's. Years of confrontation and an uneasy reconciliation had settled nothing by the time Becket returned from exile in December 1170, and he returned bringing conflict rather than peace - excommunicating bishops who had taken part in crowning Henry's son without his own participation as archbishop, and refusing any concession short of unconditional royal submission to the pope's judgment.

Words spoken in anger

News of Becket's Christmas excommunications, or possibly of reports brought by the bishops he had struck at, reached Henry in Normandy and provoked a furious outburst against a man he had once trusted and promoted, blaming his own household for failing to rid him of the priest. Four knights - Reginald Fitz Urse, William of Tracy, Hugh of Morville and Richard le Breton - took the words as authorization enough. They crossed to England, confronted Becket in his own cathedral, and when he refused to yield ground, cut him down within the church's doors on 29 December.

British Library · Adams, The Political History of England, vol. II (1905) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A murder that outgrew its cause

The killing of an archbishop inside his own cathedral shocked Latin Christendom in a way the underlying jurisdictional dispute never could have on its own. Henry, whose words had provoked the act even if he had never ordered it, was forced into public penance at Becket's tomb, and the murdered archbishop was canonized within three years, his shrine at Canterbury becoming one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in Europe. The argument over criminous clergy that had started it all was, in the end, barely settled either way - what outlasted it was the memory of the murder itself, and the church's own enhanced standing that came from having produced a martyr a king's own men had killed.

Old law written down

expansionDrafted from Adams, The Political History of England, vol. II (1905)

By the spring of 1215 King John had exhausted whatever goodwill his barons still had for him. Years of heavy taxation to fund failed wars in France, arbitrary justice, and a running dispute with the pope had left him with almost no support outside the garrisons his foreign mercenaries held for him. In May the rebel barons entered London itself, and the machinery of royal government effectively stopped - the exchequer's ordinary business ceased, sheriffs found no one willing to pay the king anything or obey him at all.

Runnymede

With no real alternative, John granted the barons a safe conduct to negotiate and met their representatives at Staines in June; the barons themselves camped in the meadow of Runnymede nearby. Terms already drafted as a set of "Articles" were presented, accepted, and worked up into the Great Charter, sealed on 15 June 1215.

British Library · Adams, The Political History of England, vol. II (1905) · Unknown scribe · Public domain

What the charter actually claimed

Read against later ideas of liberty, Magna Carta's specific clauses disappoint: no consent to taxation in any modern sense, no jury trial as a check on royal power, nothing resembling Parliament. It was, in its own century, a feudal document through and through, drawing its substance from the existing law governing king and barons rather than inventing new rights - a selective codification of points the king had persistently violated, restated so his pledge to observe them, and a means of enforcing that pledge, could be secured in writing. What gave it lasting weight was not any individual provision but the single principle running under all of them: that the king was bound by the same law as his subjects, and could be compelled to keep it. The charter settled nothing in the short term - war between John and the barons resumed within weeks, and John died the following year with the kingdom still in arms - but the principle itself proved harder to kill than the crisis that produced it.

The last prince of Wales

expansionDrafted from Tout, The Political History of England, vol. III (1905)

Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had spent years trying to build, in Wales, a position comparable to what the king of Scots held in the north - a native ruler acknowledged as overlord of his own country rather than simply one baron among many. Edward I would not accept the arrangement, and a war that began in 1282 ended that December when Llywelyn, hurrying to rejoin his own scattered forces, was killed by a Shropshire veteran who did not recognize him until papers on the body revealed his rank.

A war that outlived its prince

Llywelyn's death simplified the war without ending it. His brother David tried to hold out as Prince of Wales from the mountains of Snowdonia, retreating from stronghold to stronghold as Edward's forces, reinforced by hired chivalry from Gascony and Ponthieu, tracked him down. Betrayed in June 1283 by men of his own tongue, David was tried at Shrewsbury that autumn and executed as a traitor - the last native Prince of Wales to hold the title before the English crown claimed it for itself.

Castles, shires, and a birth at Caernarfon

Edward spent the following months settling the government of his conquest rather than simply garrisoning it. Fortresses ringed Snowdonia, each with a new town attached, English traders and settlers drawn in by privilege, and the castle's own constable serving as the town's mayor by design. The Statute of Wales, issued at Rhuddlan in 1284, extended English shire government formally over the conquered land, organizing Gwynedd into the counties of Anglesey, Carnarvon and Merioneth. At Caernarfon itself, the new capital of Gwynedd, a son was born to Edward that April - a boy who, seventeen years later, would become the first English Prince of Wales, the title itself now a permanent fixture of the English crown rather than a native one it had just extinguished.

Tout, The Political History of England, vol. III (1905) · Herbert Ortner · CC BY 4.0

The gentle earl

peakDrafted from Tout, The Political History of England, vol. III (1905)

Edward II's reign opened with a favourite the baronage could not stomach. Peter of Gaveston, a Gascon knight Edward's own father had once exiled for his corrupting influence over the prince, was recalled within days of the old king's death and made Earl of Cornwall - a title the barons regarded as a crown jewel handed to a foreign upstart. Vain, ostentatious, and given to mocking his enemies by nicknames, Gaveston made powerful men his enemies faster than Edward could protect him, and three exiles and returns later the magnates forced the king to accept a standing council, the Lords Ordainers, empowered to reform the royal household over his head.

A gospel oath broken within weeks

Gaveston's fourth return proved fatal. Besieged at Scarborough, he surrendered on the earls' sworn promise, taken on the Gospels, that he would come to no harm before Parliament decided his fate. The Earl of Pembroke, entrusted with his custody, left him resting at Deddington in Oxfordshire while attending to business elsewhere - and at sunrise the Earl of Warwick, "the black dog of Arden" by his own family's old nickname, burst into the bedchamber with an armed party and declared him a traitor taken. Marched before Lancaster at Blacklow Hill, Gaveston knelt and begged the "gentle earl" for mercy; the three earls withdrew a short distance, and two Welshmen in Lancaster's service ran him through and struck off his head. It was, even by the standards of the age, a plain breach of a sworn oath, and it left Edward with a grievance against Lancaster that neither man ever set aside.

Tout, The Political History of England, vol. III (1905) · AJD · CC BY-SA 2.0

An unhappier attachment, and a queen who would not forgive it

The dead favourite was replaced, over the following decade, by two more - Hugh Despenser, father and son - whose greed for confiscated estates provoked a fresh baronial revolt that ended with Lancaster's own capture and execution in 1322, an unmistakable act of revenge for Blacklow Hill. But Edward's queen, Isabella of France, had by then turned irrevocably against her husband and his favourites. Sent to Paris on a diplomatic mission in 1325, she formed an alliance - and, the chroniclers agreed, an affair - with the exiled baron Roger Mortimer, and the following September the two landed in England with a small mercenary force. Resistance collapsed almost at once; the elder Despenser was executed within weeks, and the king and the younger Despenser were captured in November trying to escape by sea from Wales.

A resignation extracted from a fainting king

Rather than risk the odium of formally deposing an anointed king, Isabella's party sent a delegation to Kenilworth to receive Edward's own resignation in favour of his fourteen-year-old son. Dressed in black, the king collapsed in a swoon at the delegates' feet when told his people wished him gone; revived, he agreed to yield the crown "lest the estates should choose someone not of the royal line." Edward III was proclaimed within days. His father, moved under guard from castle to castle and finally immured at Berkeley, proved too robust a constitution to die quietly of neglect. On the night of 21 September 1327, the peasantry near the castle heard piercing shrieks from within its walls; Edward of Carnarvon was announced the next day to have died naturally, his body displayed to still the rumors that followed him into the same abbey church at Gloucester where his tomb would soon draw pilgrims of its own.

Tout, The Political History of England, vol. III (1905) · Poliphilo · CC0

Two captive kings

peakDrafted from Tout, The Political History of England, vol. III (1905)

Edward III's claim to the French throne, pressed through his mother's descent from the Capetian kings, produced a war whose opening decade gave England a run of victories no earlier English king had come close to matching. At Crécy in August 1346, English and Welsh archers broke a French army built around its own chivalry, the Prince of Wales commanding one wing in his own first major battle; Philip of France's dead included the blind King John of Bohemia, who had ridden into the fighting anyway, his horse's bridle tied to those of his attendants.

Bibliothèque nationale de France · Tout, The Political History of England, vol. III (1905) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Two fronts, one autumn

Barely two months later, while England's fighting men were still occupied in Normandy, David II of Scotland invaded the north in support of his French ally, expecting to find nothing but monks and shepherds behind. He met the levies of the northern border lords instead, drawn up at Neville's Cross outside Durham on 17 October, and was defeated and taken prisoner - joining the Tower's other royal guest a decade later, once the war in France produced a second captive king to match him.

Poitiers

That second capture came at Poitiers in September 1356, where the Black Prince's smaller army destroyed the main French force in a battle contemporaries described as unlike any other in living memory

• neither side's archers or men-at-arms giving way for hours together. King John II of France was taken prisoner fighting to the last, along with his youngest son. Led through the streets of London the following spring, John found in the Tower an old acquaintance: David II of Scotland, still held there from Neville's Cross a decade before. England, for a brief span in the 1350s, held the captured kings of both its neighbours in the same prison at once - a position no English king before or after would ever occupy again.

Bibliothèque nationale de France · Tout, The Political History of England, vol. III (1905) · Rohan Master · Public domain

A king rides into his own capital in disgrace

contractionDrafted from Oman, The Political History of England, vol. IV (1906)

Richard II had confiscated the vast Lancastrian inheritance the moment its owner, his exiled cousin Henry, refused to renounce his claim to it. It was a mistake serious enough to unite much of the kingdom against him: Henry landed to reclaim his lands rather than the crown, by his own declared purpose, but Richard's own support collapsed around him with startling speed. Royal officials were seized and executed without trial at Bristol; the Earl of Salisbury's levies in Wales melted away once Richard's own flight became known; by the time the king reached Conway Castle with a bodyguard reduced to some five score men, there was no army left to fight with.

Surrender at Flint

Richard's own terms for surrender asked only for his life, an honourable income, and safe conduct for the handful of followers still with him. Henry received him at Flint with what the chronicles call hypocritical courtesy, informing him that he had come to help govern England better than it had been ruled for twenty-two years. Richard was then separated from his remaining friends, forced to ride into London on a plain hackney in a common gown while crowds jeered him, and shut up in the Tower while Henry took possession of Westminster.

British Library · Oman, The Political History of England, vol. IV (1906) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A deed read aloud

Parliament had already been summoned in Richard's own name to meet on 30 September. The day before it sat, Richard executed a formal deed of abdication, declaring himself "insufficient and useless" and unworthy to reign, and read it aloud in his Tower chamber before witnesses. His manner, by every account, was calm, even cheerful - an incongruity that puzzled contemporaries as much as it puzzles readers now. It was the first time since the Conquest that a crowned English king had been removed from the throne by a rival claimant rather than dying in office, and it opened a question about the crown's own legitimacy that would not be fully closed for nearly a century.

A clamour in the rear

contractionDrafted from Oman, The Political History of England, vol. IV (1906)

Henry V's invasion of France in 1415 revived a war that had gone largely quiet for a generation, and Agincourt, fought on 25 October, gave England a victory on a scale not seen since Edward III's day. A much larger French force, its knights exhausted by a long advance through deep mud before they ever reached English lines, was cut down in waves; contemporaries described heaps of French dead and dying piled five feet high at points along the front. The Duke of Alençon fought hard enough to fell the king's own brother and clip a piece from Henry's crown before he too was killed.

National Portrait Gallery, London · Oman, The Political History of England, vol. IV (1906) · Unknown artist · Public domain

An order given in fear

Near the battle's end, with much of the English army scattered taking prisoners and a mounted French reserve still forming for a final charge, a clamour broke out behind the English line: raiders had struck the baggage train in the rear. Fearing he might yet lose a battle already half won, Henry ordered every soldier to kill his own captives and return to the ranks. Some refused, and the king sent his own bodyguard to see the order carried out before it became clear the alarm was a false one - a local raid by a handful of camp followers, not a fresh army. Hundreds of prisoners had already been killed by then.

Bibliothèque nationale de France · Oman, The Political History of England, vol. IV (1906) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A victory that reopened a settled question

The immediate cost to England was light; the French dead included much of their own nobility, among them the Duke of York on the English side, who died of exhaustion rather than wounds. What Agincourt achieved was less a lasting conquest than a revival - it put English claims in France back on the same footing they had held under Edward III two generations earlier, and set the stage for Henry's own recognition as heir to the French crown within five years. Whether that revival could actually be sustained was a question Henry did not live to see answered; he died in 1422, and the war he had reopened would end, under his son, in a very different way.

Three centuries in Gascony end in an afternoon

contractionDrafted from Oman, The Political History of England, vol. IV (1906)

By 1453 English rule in Gascony, held in one form or another since the twelfth century, was down to its last defensible positions. When a French army laid siege to Castillon on the Dordogne that July, the aging commander John Talbot marched out with every man, Gascon and English, he could gather to relieve it - and, finding the besiegers too well entrenched to outflank, formed his whole force into a single column and drove straight at their lines.

British Library · Oman, The Political History of England, vol. IV (1906) · Talbot Master · Public domain

Talbot's last charge

The assault crossed the ditch under heavy artillery fire and struggled repeatedly against the French earthworks before outlying French detachments began closing on the English flanks and rear. A cannonball broke Talbot's leg; his sons and household knights fought and died around him one by one until the whole column broke and the French overran the field. Talbot and his companion commander Lisle were found dead side by side. Bordeaux itself, though it knew no relief was coming, held out through an eighty-day siege before finally surrendering that October.

Bibliothèque nationale de France · Oman, The Political History of England, vol. IV (1906) · Unknown artist · Public domain

What ended with it

The defeat at Castillon closed the Hundred Years' War in total French victory and, within a few years, cost England every remaining possession in France but Calais - three centuries of rule in Gascony gone in a single autumn, with towns as far as Bordeaux remembering their old English allegiance for generations afterward without any realistic hope of restoring it. At home the disaster discredited the government that had presided over it beyond any recovery; a parliament that had shown itself compliant right up to Castillon's own eve found, once the news reached England, that a war fought abroad for a century was about to be replaced by one fought at home. Oman's own chapter title for the years that followed says as much as any summary could: the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses.

At least he would die King of England

endDrafted from Oman, The Political History of England, vol. IV (1906)

Richard III came to Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485 having slept badly, his face by every account haggard and pale with what chroniclers called dismal forebodings - yet he promised his doubting captains victory in tones of haughty confidence, and his position on Ambion Hill looked strong. His army, drawn up in three divisions across the higher ground, outnumbered Henry Tudor's invading force substantially. What Richard could not control was how many of his own men actually wanted him to win.

National Portrait Gallery, London · Oman, The Political History of England, vol. IV (1906) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Betrayal in the middle of the fighting

The Earl of Northumberland, commanding Richard's rear guard, held his own division back from the fighting entirely. When Richard, seeing Henry's own position in the opposing line, led a mounted charge directly at him and very nearly broke through - killing Henry's standard-bearer and reaching the pretender himself in close combat - it was Sir William Stanley, who had been edging his own force nearer throughout the battle without committing to either side, who decided the day. Stanley's men fell on Richard's flank and rear, and the royal line broke with cries of treason.

Oman, The Political History of England, vol. IV (1906) · Philip James de Loutherbourg · Public domain

A king who would not run

Richard's own attendants brought him a horse and begged him to flee while they held the enemy back. He refused, saying he would at least die King of England, and rode back into the fighting - cut down at last, his helmet battered through, still shouting accusations of treason as he fell. Even an admiring enemy, a retainer of the very Stanleys who had turned the battle against him, gave Richard's memory some of the finest verse written in England that century. Henry Tudor took the crown from the field. The line that had ruled England, with one nineteen-year interruption, since William's coronation at Westminster four hundred and nineteen years before, ended that afternoon in a Leicestershire field with a usurper's own usurper killed in the mud.