The execution of Gaveston was according to precedent unlawful, since as earl of Cornwall he should have been judged by his peers, but it had the effect of bringing to a summary end the threat of civil war. The gratuitousness of the deed seems to have surprised everyone. Some of the rebel barons returned to the king. If there were a civil war, only the Scots would benefit. The prospect of further hostilities, and the threat of an enemy on the border, concentrated the minds of the lords. Negotiations, in and out of parliament, took place for the best part of two years. In October 1313 the rebel lords made a public apology in Westminster Hall, and the king resumed his powers very little affected by the ordinances of 1311. He had won a marginal, and provisional, victory that was compounded by the birth of a son that guaranteed the continuation of his dynasty. His hatred, for the murderers of his ‘minion’, smouldered.
But his power soon fell apart once more. He took an army into the north, finally to dispose of Robert Bruce, but at Bannockburn he suffered a mighty defeat. The battle was fought in what was called ‘an evil, deep and wet marsh’ wholly unsuited to the English cavalry but more amenable to the Scottish infantry; the earl of Gloucester led a charge into the Scottish ranks, but was cut down. The army of the Scots then attacked the horsemen, crying out ‘On them! On them! On them! They fail!’ The English were massacred, their bodies lying in the marsh or in the river Bannock. The king fled for his life and, with a few followers, sailed to Berwick where he hoped to find safety. He had lost Scotland. The battle of Bannockburn ensured the independence of that country, and was perhaps the worst military disaster of any medieval English king.
It is difficult for a sovereign to survive the shame of defeat. It implies the forfeiture of his single most important duty, that of protecting his realm. Edward I had been known as ‘the most victorious king’ and ‘the conqueror of lands and the flower of chivalry’. His son bore no such titles. When Edward eventually arrived in York he was in disgrace. Thomas of Lancaster insisted that once again he should be bound to the ordinances of 1311. A contemporary chronicle reports that ‘the king granted their execution, and denied the earls nothing’.
Lancaster at this juncture took effective control of the kingdom, but he proved no more popular or effective than his cousin; he was considered to be arrogant and overbearing. He stayed on his estates, and was loath to attend councils or parliaments. He did not take advice. It was also rumoured that he was in secret contact with Robert Bruce on the principle that the king’s enemies might become his own friends. The king stirred himself out of his weakness or incapacity, and began to gather his supporters. Two centres of power and of patronage existed, with the retainers of the king and the earl vying for mastery. There cannot be two suns in the sky.
A weak king seems always to presage, or to represent, a weak country. In the medieval period there is some strange alchemy between the state of the nation and the state of the monarch. The harvests of three successive years from 1314 failed, as a result of prolonged and torrential rain, and according to one chronicler there ensued misery ‘such as our age has never seen’. It became known as the ‘Great Famine’, and from that period we can date the continual fall in the English population throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the summer of 1315 the archbishop of Canterbury ordered that every parish perform solemn processions; the clergy were to walk barefoot, surrounded by the sound of bells and by chanting, in order to implore mercy from God.
But God was not listening. The cost of wheat rose from 5 shillings to 40 shillings a quarter (28 pounds or 12.7 kilograms). Often there was no bread to buy. The prices of the basic commodities rose to a level higher than any previously recorded. The cattle and the sheep were destroyed by outbreaks of murrain. The population itself, laid low by starvation, was attacked by various forms of enteric fever that often proved fatal. Rumours of cannibalism abounded, but they were plausible rather than probable. The situation of the English garrison at Berwick, however, is instructive; as the horses began to die the cavalrymen boiled their carcases in order to eat the meat, and then left the bones to the infantry.
In northern England as a whole the situation was rendered increasingly desperate by the raids of Scottish gangs. The incidence of violent crime also increased, as the hungry and the dispossessed looked for relief. There are records of gangs of ‘vagabonds’ perpetrating robberies and assaults. Reports of ‘corrupted air’, and of strange alterations in the atmosphere, were frequent. Human beings were, as always, powerless in the face of great natural disasters. The bodies of the dead were lying in the streets. According to the Brut chronicle, ‘so miche and so faste folc deiden, that unnethes [scarcely] men might ham bury’. Life for the majority of the English people was nasty, brutish and short.
Yet this was the period when, for two years, direct taxes were levied upon the people to pay for the Scottish wars and the royal household. Twelve thousand quarters (336,000 pounds or 152,480 kilograms) of corn and malt were needed to feed the armies, further depriving the people of their necessary food. The king and the noble lords were not particularly interested in the sufferings of the English, despite their claims to represent ‘the community of the realm’; they were concerned only with their own wealth and power. The citizens of Bristol rose up in their despair and occupied the castle. It was written that ‘to seek silver for the king, I sold my seed’.
By 1318 the worst of the famine was over, the spectre of starvation banished by a bountiful harvest. Prices steadied, and then fell. But signs of overall decline were still in evidence, with the spread of disease among cattle and a general contraction of agricultural production. There would be really no sustained recovery for a hundred years.
The king always relied upon a strong confidant to deal with the business of the realm; he could not of course put his faith in Thomas of Lancaster, because his cousin was implacably opposed to him. So he placed his trust in a new favourite. The successor to Gaveston was Hugh le Despenser who, together with his father of the same name, gained a considerable hold over the irresolute king. Despenser soon acquired lands and castles, particularly in Wales where the family was already strong, and as a result he alienated all the other lords of the principality. His officers assaulted or threatened anyone who stood in their way; they burned down barns, and laid false charges against prominent landowners.
Despenser, as the king’s chamberlain, tried to conceal his thefts and extortions under the guise of constitutional propriety; it was his duty and responsibility to bring order to Wales. But everyone knew that his case was fraudulent. The king’s favourite had once more become arrogant and over-mighty at the expense of the barons. Thomas of Lancaster then stepped forward, and announced that no reliance could be placed in the king or his courtiers. In the spring of 1321 the land and property of the Despensers were attacked by those whom they had disinherited; it was a form of revenge that came perilously close to civil war. One chronicler, Robert of Reading, wrote that now the king’s ‘infamy began to be notorious, his torpor, his cowardice, his indifference to his great inheritance’.
At the beginning of August in the same year the great lords of the north and the west came to London with their armed retinues, and insisted that the Despensers be expelled from the realm. They were accused of ‘encroaching’ upon royal power, and of controlling access to the king’s presence. They had perverted the law and illegally gained custody of lands. Edward, faced with the solid phalanx of their enemies, yielded. The Despensers were banished from England.
Yet this was only the beginning of what turned into a general civil war. The king had decided that it was better to remove his opponents one by one. He besieged Leeds Castle, the home of one malcontent, and executed its garrison. These executions were not part of the chivalric code, and were met with widespread disapproval. They demonstrated, however, that the king was in earnest. He then recalled the Despensers, and began to organize a military campaign to defeat those whom he considered to be rebels against his power. Having mustered his forces at the beginning of March 1322, he defeated Thomas of Lancaster in battle. He had cornered his old enemy at last and, after a summary trial, he executed him. It was the first time that a sentence of death, on the charge of treason, had ever been directed at a member of the royal family. Lancaster had cut off the head of Piers Gaveston; Edward, long meditating his revenge, beheaded Lancaster.