As long as the war was being prosecuted successfully, the magnates took the side of the king; but in periods of failure or indecision the huge sums of taxation that the wars incurred became a matter of considerable concern. The king was, as always, untrustworthy; he tried various means of evading the provisions of the Magna Carta to which he had assented. He was so convinced of his rectitude that any means of attaining his ends was considered acceptable. That is the point – in all his demands and exactions, the king never thought that he was doing anything wrong. He was behaving only as a king ought to behave. He was raising his money from his country in order to wage war against those who threatened him. That was his duty. The magnates were suspicious and resentful, but they did not rebel. They harried him, and chided him, but they did not seek to overthrow him. He was now growing old as well as stubborn and irate. They waited for his death, and the reign of his son. An unfinished war, combined with a rapidly growing debt, were the two stones against which the last ten years of Edward were ground. The king’s finances were in disorder, with all the prudent measures of previous years discarded or ignored. Edward had been made by war, and would be broken by war.
In 1307 Robert Bruce appeared at the head of an army, ready to claim his rights as the crowned king of Scotland, and at Loudoun Hill in Ayrshire defeated an English force that had been ordered to hunt him down. Edward decided to march north, with the settled purpose of destroying Scottish royal ambitions for good, but even the best-laid plans are never perfect. In the summer of 1307, at the age of sixty-eight, Edward I died at Burgh-by-Sands on the Solway.
We may grow weary of the life and death of kings but in truth, for an historical account of medieval England, there is no other sure or certain touchstone. The general current of the nation persists beneath the surface of action and event but, as a result, it is not susceptible to chronology. The institutions of the state are similarly outside the historical record. They can be inferred and described, at rough intervals, but there is really no appropriate timescale. Administrative history has no proper narrative. This is also the case with the life and development of the English towns. As for the English people themselves, they can be glimpsed fleetingly in political ballads and in court records. Of their suffering, and of their pleasures, little is known. They are largely absent from the written record simply because they were not considered important; they were not worthy of representation.
They emerge, however, in certain manorial accounts. We may read for example, in the accounts of the manor of Sutton, of Stephen Puttock. He was a nativus who, at the end of the thirteenth century, lived and worked on the prior of Ely’s land in that manor. He owed labour services to his lord and was obliged to pay certain fines or taxes at the ritual moments of his family’s life. He had to pay a fine, for example, when he married each of his two wives; his sister was similarly taxed when she was married. He was also fined when he failed to carry out his labour services; he may have been negligent in planting or harvesting his lord’s crops. Yet he was a significant man in his own village. He had a large holding of his own land, and was appointed both as reeve and as ale-taster in his community; he was also frequently selected as a juryman. He was an acquisitive purchaser of land, buying it in parcels of several acres at a time. Stephen Puttock was a man of his time, taking part in an unconscious life of custom and tradition. He was unfree, but he was prosperous; he was a labourer, but he was also a landowner. He was part of a nexus of duties and obligations, but he was also a prominent part of his community. He has now returned to the soil of England.
Another means of access to the general life of the period comes in the now voluminous court reports. They provide of course a haphazard account, based upon civic or criminal offences, but they are suggestive. The fowler, Robert, spends a great deal of money but no one knows how he earns it; he wanders abroad at night, so he is suspected. John Voxe was fined fourpence for cutting down two ash trees on his land. Another man was fined for fishing in his lord’s pool. Ranulph, the fishmonger, goes out to the oyster boats in order to buy up their catch before it reaches the market. Three men were arrested as ‘common breakers of hedges to the common harm’. The butchers of Sprowston bought infirm pigs cheaply, and then sold sausages unfit for human consumption. John Foxe, a chaplain, was fined one penny for attacking William Pounchon with a knife. Walter of Maidstone, a carpenter, brought together an assembly or parliament of carpenters at Mile End in order to agree on a policy to defy the mayor. The butchers of Peterborough were reminded that they must cleanse the churchyard of all filth and bones that their dogs brought into it. Certain people made ‘a great roistering with unknown minstrels, tabor-players and trumpeters’ to the grave disquiet of the entire neighbourhood.
Here is another vignette of medieval England. John and Agnes Page, from a village in Kent, took John Pistor to the manor court. Agnes Page had purchased John Pistor’s wife in exchange for a pig worth 3 shillings; John Pistor was happy with the arrangement for a while, but eventually he asked that his wife be returned to him on payment of 2 shillings. The bargain was agreed, but Pistor did not pay the sum. The jury found against him.
We may sense here a life more intense and more arduous than our own; it was at once more sensitive and more irritable. The contrasts of life were more violent, and the insecurities more palpable. This evidence is all of a piece with a strident and often violent society where the growing number of people provoked collision and unrest.
It has been estimated that by the beginning of the fourteenth century the population had reached in excess of 6 million. The figure, in isolation, means nothing at all. But it is salutary to realize that it was not matched again until the latter part of the eighteenth century. The England of Edward I was more populous than that of Elizabeth I or of George II. So in the relatively crowded conditions of the early fourteenth century, land was at a premium. The woods and underwoods were cleared. Farming land was often divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller parcels, owned by men who also earned their living as carpenters or shoemakers. But many landless men were also available for hire; wages, therefore, were not ordinarily very high. Great pressure, and competition, existed within all sectors of the economy. The first ‘strike fund’, to support workers who refused to do mowing services, was organized in 1300.
The condition of England was made infinitely worse by a series of harvest failures from 1315. The price of bread, and other essential commodities, rose and rose. ‘Alas, poor England!’ one chronicler of the time wrote. ‘You who once helped other lands from your abundance, now poor and needy are forced to beg.’ This was one of the worst periods of English social history, and may act as a suitably troubled context for the last years of the reign of Edward I as well as the unhappy reign of Edward II. It might have been said at the time – the kings of England do nothing but harm.
20
The hammer
Edward was known as ‘the hammer of the Scots’ but he could more pertinently be known as the hammer of the Jews. He exploited them and harassed them; finally he expelled them. Their crime was to become superfluous to his requirements. The history of the Jews in medieval England is an unhappy and even bloody one. They had arrived, from Rouen, in the last decades of the eleventh century; they were first only settled in London across a broad band of nine parishes but in the course of the next few decades they also removed to York, Winchester, Bristol and other market towns. The previous rulers of England, in the ninth and tenth centuries, had not welcomed them; Jewish merchants would have provided too much competition for Anglo-Saxon traders.