The crisis of kings and nobles

The crisis of kingship

During the fourteenth century, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there was a continuous struggle between the king and his nobles. The first crisis came in 1327 when Edward II was deposed and cruelly murdered. His eleven-year-old son, Edward III, became king, and punished those responsible. The end of the fourteenth century his grandson Richard II had made himself extremely unpopular by his choice of advisers. Then Richard quarrelled with these nobles in 1388, and used his authority to humble them. He imprisoned his uncle John of Gaunt (3d son of Edward III), the most powerful and wealthy noble of his time died in prison. John of Gaunt's son, Henry duke of Lancaster, in 1399 raised an army and deposed Richard II.

Richard II had no children. There were two possible successors: the earl of March, the seven-year-old grandson of Edward III's second son and Henry of Lancaster. Henry won the support of other powerful nobles and took the crown by force. Henry IV spent the rest of his reign establishing his royal authority. But half a century later the nobility would be divided between those who supported his family, the "Lancastrians", and those who supported the family of the earl of March, the "Yorkists".

Wales in revolt

Edward I had conquered Wales in the 1280s, and colonised it. He brought English people to enlarge small towns like Pembrokeshire, in the far southwest. Edward's officers gave land of the Welsh to English farmers. Many Welsh were forced to join the English army, fighting in Scotland and in France with the longbow, because they had lost their land and needed to live.

A century later the Welsh found a man, Owain Glyndwr, who was ready to rebel against the English king, and whom they were willing to follow. He joined the revolt of Norman-Welsh border lords who had always tried to be free of royal control. After ten years rebellion had developed into a national war, and in 1400 he was proclaimed Prince of Wales by his supporters. However, Glyndwr was not strong enough to defeat the English armies but he continued to fight that made the control of Wales extremely expensive. In 1410 Glyndwr lost all his support as Welsh people realized that it is impossible to become free of the English. But he create a feeling of national identity.

The struggle in France

By the end of the fourteenth century, the long war with France, known as the Hundred Years War, had already been going on for over fifty years. But there had been long periods without actual fighting.

When Henry IV died in 1413 he passed on to his son Henry V a kingdom that was peaceful and united. So Henry V felt able to begin fighting the French again in 1415. Henry had a great advantage because the king of France was mad, and his nobles were quarrelsome. Burgundy again supported England. The English were more skilful, and had better weapons. Between 1417 and 1420 Henry managed to capture most of Normandy and the nearby areas. By the treaty of Troyes in 1420 Henry was recognised as heir to the mad king, and he married Katherine of Valois, the king's daughter. But Henry V died a few months before the French king in 1422. His nine-month-old son, Henry VI, inherited the thrones of England and France.

As with Scotland and Wales, England found it was easier to conquer France than to keep it. At first Henry V's brother, John duke of Bedford, continued to enlarge the area under English control. The English army was twice defeated by the French, inspired by a mysterious peasant girl called Joan of Arc, captured by the Burgundians and given to the English.

In 1435 England's best general, John of Bedford, died. Then England's Breton and Burgundian allies lost confidence. With the loss of Gascony in 1453, the Hundred Years War was over. England had lost everything except the port of Calais.

The Wars of the Roses

Henry VI hated the warlike nobles, and was an unsuitable king for such a violent society. He founded two places of learning that still exist, Eton College not far from London, and King's College in Cambridge. England had lost a war and was ruled by a mentally ill king who was bad at choosing advisers. The nobles began to ask questions about who should be ruling the country. The discontented nobility were divided between those who remained loyal to Henry VI, the "Lancastrians", and those who supported the duke of York, the "Yorkists". In 1460 the duke of York claimed the throne for himself. After his death in battle, his son Edward took up the struggle and won the throne in 1461. Edward IV put Henry into the Tower of London, but nine years later a new Lancastrian army rescued Henry and chased Edward out of the country. Edward returned to England in 1471, defeated the Lancastrians and was safe on the throne. Henry VI died in the Tower soon after.

When Edward IV died in 1483, his two sons, the twelve-year-old Edward V and his younger brother, were put in the Tower by Richard of Gloucester, Edward's brother. Richard took the Crown and became King Richard III. Two princes were murdered.

In 1485 Henry Tudor, duke of Richmond, half Welsh, landed in England with Breton soldiers to claim the throne. Both Lancastrians and Yorkists joined him. Half of Richard's army changed sides and the battle of Bosworth quickly ended in his defeat and death. Henry Tudor was crowned king immediately, on the battlefield.

Scotland

Scotland experienced many of the disasters that affected England at this time. The Scots did not escape the Black Death or the other plagues, and they also suffered from repeated wars. Scotland paid heavily for its "Auld Alliance" with France, it supported France during the Hundred Years War, the English repeatedly invaded the Scottish. England renewed its claim to overlordship of Scotland, and Edward IV's army occupied Edinburgh in 1482.

Like the English kings, the Scottish kings were involved in long struggles with their nobles. Support for France turned attention away from establishing a strong state at home. The early death of so many Scots kings left government in the hands of powerful nobles. They kept "clans" that meant groups of people occupying an area of land and following a particular chief. The most powerful of the Highland clans by the fifteenth century was Clan Donald.

From 1399 the Scots demanded that a parliament should meet once a year, and kings often gathered together leading citizens to discuss matters of government. Towns grew in importance, because of the wool trade which grew thanks to the help of Flemish settlers. There was a large export trade in wool, leather and fish, mostly to the Netherlands.

The connection with France helped to find work as soldiers for the French king and to develop education in Scotland when much of the farmland was destroyed by English armies. Following the example of Paris, universities were founded in Scotland at St Andrews in 1412, Glasgow in 1451 and at Aberdeen in 1495. By the end of the fifteenth century it was obvious that Scotland was a separate country from England.

Government and society

Government and society

The year 1485 has usually been taken to mark the end of the Middle Ages in England. Society was still based upon rank. At the top were dukes, earls and other lords, although there were far fewer as a result of war. Below lords were knights. Most knights were no longer heavily armed fighters on horses, they were "gentlemen farmers". Edward I had ordered that all those with an income of £20 a year must be made knights. This meant that even some of the yeoman farmers became knights.

By the end of the Middle Ages, it was possible for a serf from the countryside to work for seven years in a town craft guild, and to become a "freeman" controlling the life of the town where he lived. Towns offered to poor men the chance to become rich and successful through trade. The poorer skilled workers tried to join together to form a trade union.

During the fourteenth century a number of English merchants established trading stations, "factories", in different places in Europe. It became important at a national level, and began to replace the old town guilds as the most powerful trading institutions. One of the most important of these factories was the "Company of the Staple" in Calais. The "staple" was an international term meaning that certain goods could only be sold in particulate places. Calais became the "staple" for all English wool. During the fourteenth century there had been the other important company Merchant Adventurers' with several factories in a number of foreign towns. The one factory in Antwerp, Flanders, survived because of its sole control of cloth exports, a fact recognised by royal charter.

Wages for farmworkers and for skilled townspeople rose faster than the price of goods in the fifteenth century. But there were warning signs of problems ahead. More and more good land was being used for sheep instead of food crops. In the sixteenth century this led to social and economic crisis.

By the fifteenth century most merchants were well educated, and considered themselves to be the equals of the esquires. The lawyers, another class of city people, in London were considered equal to the big merchants and cloth manufacturers. By the end of the Middle Ages the more successful of these lawyers, merchants, cloth manufacturers, exporters, esquires, gentlemen and yeoman farmers were increasingly forming a single class of people with interests in both town and country. The growth of this new middle class created a new atmosphere in Britain partly because of the increase in literacy.

During the time of Edward III's reign Parliament became organised in two parts: the Lords, and the Commons, which represented the middle class. The poor had no voice of their own in Parliament until the middle of the nineteenth century. The alliance between esquires and merchants made Parliament more powerful, and separated the Commons more and more from the Lords. There was another important change that had taken place in the country. Kings had been taking law cases away from local lords' courts. In 1363 Edward III appointed "justices of the peace" to deal with smaller crimes and offences.

The condition of women

The Church taught that women should obey their husbands. Women should be pure and holy like the Virgin Mary; and like Eve, they could not be trusted and were a moral danger to men. Marriage was usually the single most important event in their lives. But the decision was made by the family because by marriage a family could improve its wealth and social position. Once married, a woman had to accept her husband as her master. The first duty of every wife was to give her husband children, preferably sons. This was the future for every wife from twenty or younger until she was forty. The wife of a noble had other responsibilities. When her lord was away, she was in charge of the manor and the village lands. She had to defend the manor if it was attacked. She had to run the household, welcome visitors, and store enough food. She was expected to have enough knowledge to make medicines for those in the village who were sick. She visited the poor and the sick in the village, showing that the rulers "cared" for them. She had little time for her own children, who in any case were often sent away at the age of eight to another manor. Most women, of course, were peasants, busy making food, making cloth and making clothes from the cloth. They worked in the fields, looked after the children. The family home was dark and smelly. A woman's position improved if her husband died. She could get control of the money her family had given the husband at the time of marriage, usually about one-third of his total land and wealth. But she might have to marry again: men wanted her land, and it was difficult to look after it without the help of a man.

Language and culture

With the spread of literacy, cultural life in Britain naturally developed also. In the cities some guilds made plays that were performed at important religious festivals, which became traditional yearly events.

The language itself was changing. Edward III had actually forbidden the speaking of French in his army. It was a way of making the whole army aware of its Englishness. By the end of the fourteenth century English was a written language. But "Middle English", was very different from Anglo-Saxon partly because it had borrowed so much from Norman French.

Two writers, William Langland, a mid-fourteenth century priest, with his poem Piers Plowman and Geoffrey Chaucer with Canterbury Tales helped in the rebirth of English literature. One gives a powerful description of the times in which he lived. The other describe a group of pilgrims travelling from London to the tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, each character tells a story.

By the end of the Middle Ages, English as well as Latin was being used in legal writing, and also in elementary schools. Education developed enormously because there was a growing need for educated people who could administer the government, the Church, the law and trade. Many schools were founded by powerful men such as William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor of England, who founded both Winchester School, in 1382, and New College, Oxford.

The Middle Ages ended with a major technical development: William Caxton's first English printing press, set up in 1476. Caxton had learnt the skill of printing in Germany. At first he printed popular books, such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Malory's Morte d'Arthur. Books suddenly became cheaper and more plentiful, as the quicker printing process replaced slow and expensive copywriting by hand. Printing began to standardise spelling and grammar, though this process was a long one.

Vocabulary:

- plague – эпидемия, чума

- merchants – купец, торговец

- gentry - джентри, нетитулованное мелкопоместное дворянство

- noble – дворянство, знать, элита

- setback – отступление

- overlordship – господствование

- ally – союзник

- weapon - оружие

- footsoldiers – пехота

- raid – внезапно напасть

- looting – мародёрство

- chivalry – рыцарство, благородство

- reign – правление

- landlord – арендодатель, домовладелец

- serf labour – крепостной труд

- peasant – крестьянин

- revolt – бунт

- rebel – повстанец

- discontent - недовольство

- bishop – епископ

- priest – священник

- pope – папа римский

- clergy – духовенство

- prayer – молитва

- struggle – борьба

- treaty – соглашение, конвенция

- heir – наследник

- invade – захватить, вторгнуться

- duke - герцог

- earl – граф

The Tudors (1485-1603)