Arise, England (eBook)

Caroline Burt, Richard Partington (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
480 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-31200-9 (ISBN)

Infos

'An absorbing and eye-opening account of what the Plantagenets did for us.' - HELEN CASTOR 'Burt and Partington show precisely and engagingly why the Middle Ages matter.' - DAN JONES Between 1199 and 1399, English politics was high drama. These two centuries witnessed savage political blood-letting - including civil war, deposition, the murder of kings and the ruthless execution of rebel lords - as well as international warfare, devastating national pandemic, economic crisis and the first major peasant uprising in English history. Arise, England uses the six Plantagenet kings who ruled during these two centuries to explore England's emergent statehood. Drawing on original accounts and arresting new research, it draws resonances between government, international relations, and the abilities, egos and ambitions of political actors, then and now. Colourful and complicated, and by turns impressive and hateful, the six kings stride through the story; but arguably the greatest character is the emerging English state itself.

Dr Caroline Burt is a medieval historian and college lecturer at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Richard Partington is Senior Tutor at St. John's College, Cambridge. Arise, England is their first trade publication.

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INTRODUCTION

In 1199 John ‘Lackland’, the youngest son of Henry II, seized the English throne following the death of his brother, Richard the Lionheart. The accession of the infamous ‘bad king John’ ushered in a dramatic, definitive reign, and with it two of the most tumultuous centuries in English history – centuries whose impact upon England and its neighbours, and more widely upon British and European history, is hard to overstate. Between them, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw numerous political crises, including three civil wars and the depositions of two anointed kings. Social upheaval was almost as dramatic, with rapid and near-catastrophic population loss in the first outbreak of a new pandemic known as the ‘Black Death’, large-scale popular rebellion in the Peasants’ Revolt and the emergence of a religious movement known as Lollardy.

Crisis, though, also brought momentous advances: Magna Carta, which placed the monarch under the law and thereby confirmed English and – in time – arguably the Western world’s liberties; the extraordinary development of English royal government and the unique ‘common law’, its centrally organised and managed legal system; and the striking advance of English foreign policy, military organisation and feats of arms. All these contributed to the rise of Parliament, so central to our modern sense of Englishness (and even Britishness); the genesis of a system of national taxation; massive growth in the reach of the king’s authority; the conquest of Wales and the attempted conquest of Scotland under Edward I; and, under Edward III, dominance of the European political stage as England’s armies swept all before them on the field of battle.

The State in 1199: A Precocious Child

In 1199, many features of what we can identify as the state were already present in England: the realm was defined and the country had long recognised the sovereignty of a single king, responsible for its internal order and external defence. There was a substantially centralised and relatively sophisticated government bureaucracy: extensive royal financial accounts were kept in the Exchequer, and the Chancery, or king’s writing office, was well established, issuing government instructions. A single legal system, the common law, accessible to all free men and women, had existed since the mid-twelfth century, and was unique to England. In no other European realm did a king’s writ run so unfettered across his lands; and nowhere else had his people such ready access to royal justice. While it was not the only available source of redress, regulation or dispute resolution in the realm (manorial courts held by greater landholders provided immediate justice to tenants; church courts regulated moral behaviour; and arbitration could settle disputes), it was by far the most important means by which justice was done and order maintained. This was particularly the case in relation to criminality, and the vital social and economic building block of landed property.

From its inception, the common law enabled the king to fulfil, as never before, his central duty to protect life, limb and property throughout England. It did this by creating an infrastructure of royal courts acting locally, serviced by a cadre of justices and clerks. The common law served the king’s needs, too, by providing him with a way to ensure that his royal rights were maintained and that the pecuniary profits that came with those rights kept flowing into the royal coffers. Even in the small number of areas where independent judicial liberties still existed, lordly justice increasingly aped the king’s courts.

Things were somewhat different in respect of external defence. Henry II had re-established, for the first time since the demise of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom in 1066, a national scheme for defence, but without yet fully harnessing the power of the nation to its own protection. Henry’s Assize of Arms of 1181 had created a hybrid system for raising defensive armies, in which the mounted knights and esquires of the royal household and the king’s mercenaries – often crossbowmen – were backed by infantry recruited nationally for feudal service. As the king’s lieges, able-bodied men were now obliged to equip themselves militarily and serve for up to forty days each year. But while this system provided large numbers of foot soldiers to back the cavalry and archers otherwise engaged by the king, the troops could be poor in quality and unreliable in service. Transportation to the Continent and maintaining military supplies by sea were an ongoing challenge, despite England’s status as a leading maritime nation. Although no royal navy yet existed, Richard the Lionheart (who reigned from 1189) created ‘king’s ships’ – vessels owned or co-owned by the monarch and usually moored at the Tower of London – and instituted regular shipping surveys to establish which merchant vessels were available to be requisitioned (under the king’s feudal prerogative) for royal service.

The king had also to maintain, in the face of French royal aggression, his vast territories in France – the lands of the Angevin or Plantagenet kings. But these lands abroad were a personal matter for him as their lord; they did not concern his English subjects as a point of national interest. At the end of the twelfth century, while a failure of defence in England was certainly a matter for national consternation, questions of foreign policy and war were largely for the king and his greatest landed subjects to ponder. They were not yet the subject of national debate.

The Common Law: The State’s Most Vigorous Limb

While the emergence of Parliament might be widely cited as the key state development of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the state institution that arguably grew most fundamentally – with the greatest impact upon the people – was the common law. From its very inception, it was intended to be accessible to ordinary people across the country. Cases could be brought locally either by the purchase of a judicial writ, which cost sixpence – roughly a day’s wages for a skilled labourer – or by persuading a panel of ‘good and lawful’ local men (a so-called ‘presenting jury’: a lineal ancestor of the grand jury that survives in the US judicial system today) that one was a victim of a crime and that a named person or persons could reasonably be suspected of having committed it. As it developed, the common law continued to be broadly accessible, but by 1399 the number of writs and other procedures available to the aggrieved had grown unrecognisably in response to the clamour of demand for ‘the king’s law’. The effective operation of the law also allowed kings themselves greater capacity to rule – and potentially rule well. It became a vital manifestation of the burgeoning state for the monarch as well as his subjects.

With this expansion, the apparatus carrying the common law to the people also underwent dramatic change. Before 1199, the so-called ‘general eyre’, the great judicial mechanism by which the king’s law was initially transported to the shires, had already seen its most useful functions separated into offshoot judicial commissions of ‘assize’ and ‘gaol delivery’. These were able to deal with property disputes and felonies more quickly than the eyre, which at best visited each county only once every four years. During the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the general eyre fell into abeyance, to be replaced largely by those mechanisms that had originally been created only to supplement its work. The commissions of assize and gaol delivery were regularised and then combined, so that a single set of justices in each region both ‘heard the assizes’ and ‘delivered the gaols’. In the mid-fourteenth century they were effectively merged with another local judicial tribunal, the so-called ‘peace commission’, creating the ‘justices of the peace’ (JPs). Through the ‘quarter sessions’, the JPs provided ready access to the common law, up to four times each year, a sixteen-fold increase in accessibility compared with the general eyre. (Today, the direct descendants of the JPs – the magistrates – remain fundamental to the operation of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland; a central instrument of the modern state was created almost seven hundred years ago.)

For a minority of litigants the common law was also accessed via the great courts at the political centre. Two major courts emerged, by a process that remains somewhat obscure, from the royal court or Curia Regis in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The, first, the court of Common Pleas, was fixed at Westminster by Magna Carta; the second, King’s Bench, initially travelled with the king, but became largely established in the same location – within Westminster Hall – around a century later. The remit of Common Pleas gradually evolved mainly to comprise cases involving significant debts. King’s Bench, as the senior court in the realm, initially sat only when the king was present; but as the common law grew, so did the business of the court, until it became impractical to have the monarch in situ. King’s Bench dealt with cases in which the Crown had an interest,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.4.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• ISBN-10: 0-571-31200-4 / 0571312004
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-31200-9 / 9780571312009