Of course the friars went the way of all flesh; they became successful and popular; they attracted patrons who endowed them richly; they built friaries and priories that rivalled the monasteries in comfort and prosperity. They became confessors to the great. Anyone who has read the Canterbury Tales will know that, 150 years after their arrival, they had become a byword for worldliness and even licentiousness. Their decline is a measure of the decay of all human institutions, sacred and secular.
On 29 July 1232, Hubert de Burgh was dismissed from the court and the king’s presence. He was accused of stirring up attacks on Italian clergy and expropriating their property. The pope had been making enquiries into the baron’s third marriage, and de Burgh wanted revenge. He miscalculated the depth of the young king’s devotion to the papacy. So the king, on the advice of ‘certain men of good faith’, dismissed him. One of those men of good faith was of course, Peter des Roches; as de Burgh fell, des Roches rose. Within a short time the bishop of Winchester brought in his nephew – or perhaps it was his son, no one was quite sure – as treasurer and head of the royal household. Peter des Rivaux was, like Peter des Roches, from Poitou. This was the king’s maternal homeland. Other Poitevins joined them. A strong affinity existed between them all and it was generally believed at the time that the king preferred their company – and their abilities – over his compatriots.
Yet England was an intrinsic part of a larger European order. Henry’s sister Isabella had married Frederick, the Holy Roman Emperor, known as stupor mundi, or the astonishment of the world. Henry himself married Eleanor of Provence in 1236, and her relatives played a large role in the king’s court. Eleanor’s sister had married King Louis IX of France. Those happy few who had inherited royal blood married one another, so that a network of relatives controlled the fates of kingdoms. But this extended family was not necessarily a happy one, and almost by default Henry became engaged in the endless broils of France and Italy. Europe was a nest of warring principalities, none of which had the internal coherence of England. The king of France, the pope and the emperor were ever vigilant and ever suspicious, ready to take advantage of one another at any opportunity.
Henry’s relationship with France was in any case strained and uncertain. His father had effectively lost the Angevin Empire and, despite his preference for peace, he was determined to retrieve it. But he had a formidable enemy. King Louis had taken over the whole of Poitou. Another part of the erstwhile empire, Gascony, was threatened by Louis and the kings of Castile, Navarre and Avignon. An expedition under the command of the king’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, saved the duchy – if ‘saved’ is the word for precarious Angevin authority over self-assertive local lords. Very little else was achieved. Henry sailed to Normandy, hoping that it would rise in his favour. This did not happen. The king marched about a bit, but there were no battles. Then Henry sailed back. It had been a most ineffectual invasion. It was said that the commanders of the king’s forces had behaved as if they were taking part in a Christmas game.
The king returned to France twelve years later, but his army was routed; Henry was forced to retreat into Bordeaux, the administrative centre of Gascony, and arrange a truce. This second expedition is remarkable for one reason, apart from its failure. The English barons were most unwilling to trust their money, or their men, to Henry’s campaign. They considered that an English king should no longer fight for supposed ancestral lands in France. Normandy or Poitou or Gascony were no longer to be viewed as an extension of England. The island was pre-eminently an island. That is why Henry’s son, Edward I, was more intent upon the conquest of Scotland and of Wales
It was also clear that the Angevin Empire, once broken, could not be put back together again. Only Gascony remained, to provide England with much of its wine. The vintages of Bordeaux are still very popular, and so the Angevin Empire can be said to remain in the wine racks of England. But Gascony provided more forbidding fruit: as the price of his title to the duchy Henry pledged fealty to the king of France. But how can one king be the vassal of another? The uncertain status of the area, poised between France and England, was to become an occasion for the Hundred Years War.
It is a commonplace of English history that Henry III was an ineffectual king. When the royal seal was changed, in the middle of the reign, he was portrayed as bearing a sceptre rather than the original sword. But in the course of his life the economy of the country improved, with the absence of war playing some part in this general prosperity. The lords and tenants of the land were not removed to fight in foreign territories, and were allowed to concentrate upon the condition of their estates. The surviving documents suggest that there was increased traffic in the sale and purchase of land. A vogue for manuals of estate management soon followed, with advice on matters from dung to dairy production. 14 gallons (63.6 litres) of cow’s milk should produce 14 pounds (6.3 kilos) of cheese and 2 pounds (0.9 kilo) of butter. There had not been such a profitable farming industry since the days of Roman England.
The king exacted fewer taxes from his subjects than any of his predecessors and so encouraged the flow of wealth about the realm. Henry relied upon the exploitation of his royal lands, and on the profits to be gained from justice. Richard and John had open mouths, swallowing England’s silver; Henry, partly under the strictures of the Magna Carta, was obliged to hold back.
Other reasons for prosperity can be found. The uncertain relations of England with both France and Flanders were eased by the late 1230s, allowing a great increase in the export of wool to those countries. A threefold increase in overseas trade took place in the course of the thirteenth century; this was the age of road-building, easing the routes of commerce. The silver poured in, much to the advantage of the merchants in the towns and ports. The ‘marble of Corfe’ and the ‘scarlet of Lincoln’, the ‘iron of Gloucester’ and the ‘cod of Grimsby’, were celebrated in doggerel rhyme. They provide the context in which we may best understand the king’s programme of church-and chapel-building.
Some unknowable bond exists between the economic and physical health of the nation, marked by the fact that in the period of Henry’s rule the population began to rise ever more rapidly. As a result demand at home grew for corn, cheese and wool; the economy expanded together with the number of people who took part in it. There were 5 million inhabitants and 8 million sheep. Yet growth is not always or necessarily benign. Prices were rising as a result of increased demand; the consequence of a larger working population was that wages could be kept low. While the more efficient or prosperous farmers flourished, and enlarged their properties, their poorer neighbours were generally left with smaller and smaller plots of land.
The king once remarked that there were no more than 200 men in England who mattered, and that he was familiar with all of them. Many of them were bound together by ties of marriage or of tenure; many of them were associated in local administration and local justice. They were all in kinship and alliance, one with another. They were bound within regional as well as courtly groupings; and there were times, as Henry soon learned to his cost, when they could act together.
The problem was that the majority of these significant lords were distrustful of a king who surrounded himself with his advisers from Poitou, the greatest of whom were Peter des Roches and Peter des Rivaux. The issue was, in part, their foreignness. The English lords were by the thirteenth century all native-born, and in written documents professed their affection for ‘native ground’ or ‘native soil’. In the sixth year of Henry’s reign the feast of St George had been turned into a national holiday. The monkish chronicler of St Albans recorded that those people who did not speak English were ‘held in contempt’.