HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE AGES. CHAPTER XXVIII. INTERNAL HISTORY OF FRANCE AND ENGLAND DURING THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR.

A. Early Phases of the War.

Rarely have civilized people submitted to so much evil as. did the French during the Hundred Years’ War.

France was depopulated, some of her centres of population were destroyed for centuries, many churches, monasteries, public and private buildings, were annihilated. Some of these material things could be replaced but the demoralizing influence on the people, resulting in the persistence of a powerful criminal class and in the perversion of Christian sentiment, was of a more profound and more far-reaching character. The people of France never enjoyed any repose and even when they expected to have a little rest, they lived in a sort of precarious surety.

1. Frightful Ravages.

It was in the fourteenth century, from about 1355 to 1370, that the war was most cruel. The period from 1355 to 1364 distinguishes itself above all others for its frightful ravages. The most essential element in the practice of war then was fire. The Marquis Albert Achille of Brandebourg is quoted as having said that fire is for war, what the Magnificat is for Vespers.

Whatever it was called, fire was the general device of every soldier during the Hundred Years’ War. The activity of the soldiers during this epoch is almost unbelievable when one considers the bad road conditions and the difficulties encountered in travelling.

Almost every part of France was the scene of an English invasion. From the very beginning of the war, the English soldiers were ruthless in the destruction of everything whether worth plundering or not. Anything of any value was carried off to England. So great was the desolation from these plundering raids that some of the later English armies found themselves in danger of starving.

Desecration of Monasteries.

Ecclesiastical establishments were objects of attack from the very first of the invasions, then the city of Blaye was taken at the beginning of the year 1399, the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Sauveur and that of Saint-Romain, of the Canons regular, were damaged. From the first abbey, all the treasures, bocks, charters, documents, relics and ornaments were plundered and stolen. At the same time the edifices, the mills, and the village grouped around the monastery were totally destroyed and burned. The resources were so exhausted that the monks could no longer live nor dwell in the monastery. The religious of the other abbey were hardly better treated.

2. The Black Death.

After the English victory at Crécy in 1346, and the capture of Calais in 1347, the war was interrupted by that terrible pestilence, the Black Death, which made fighting impossible for almost a decade.

3. Poitiers and Afterwards.

In 1350, Philip VI died and was succeeded by John the Good who was so enamored of chivalry that his forces, fighting in feudal array, were defeated by a smaller force under the Black Prince in 1356 at Poitiers, John himself being captured and at the end of the day ’’there lay dead all the flower of French chivalry”.

After the battle of Poitiers, the provinces of France being abandoned to themselves, without defense, without a head, there was an epoch of devastation, of defeat, and even, here and there, of anarchy and revolution. The whole of France was profoundly desolated, even the provinces which had been spared”.

About four or five years after Poitiers, Petrarch wrote of the universal desolation which confronted him:

“In my youth, the English passed for the most timid of barbarians; now they are a very warlike nation. They have overturned the old military glory of the French by victories so numerous and so unexpected that those who, not long since, were inferior to the miserable Scotch, have now so crushed by fire and by sword the entire kingdom, that I, who have lately travelled there on business, could hardly persuade myself that it was the same country which I had seen in times gone by. Nothing presented itself to my eyes but a fearful solitude, an extreme poverty, land uncultivated, homes in ruins, even the neighborhood of Paris manifested everywhere marks of destruction and conflagration. The streets are deserted; the roads overgrown with weeds, the whole is a vast solitude”.

4. Constitutional Upheaval.

While King John was held prisoner, the Dauphin Charles, Duke of Normandy, sadly entered Paris in order to take over the reins of the government. Under the Dauphin, the demands of the Estates General, which had been steadily increasing, reached their climax. Before this time, as the necessities of the war placed so great a financial burden on the French Government that it was unable to meet it with the ordinary resources of the state, appeal had been made to the Estates General to secure the consent of those upon whom the taxes would fall. This body, strangely indifferent to the financial needs of the king, occupied itself in demanding reforms and changes in the methods of government as conditions of grants of taxes. In 1355 the Estates General demanded that the tax which they voted should be collected and paid out by officers responsible to them alone, end that they should meet in the following year to control the collection and to examine the accounts. They demanded further that the army should be organised and paid by their representatives, that the currency should be reformed, and that the people should have the right of resisting with force even the royal officers, if they attempted any unauthorized acts.

The assemblies became even more revolutionary after the battle of Poitiers, and the people of Paris, swayed by the provost of the merchants, Etienne Marcel, clamored for reforms. The demands of these assemblies, which were accepted by the Dauphin, were embodied in the “Great Ordinance” of 1357. By this ordinance, a tax, which was to be collected and expended under the direction of the Estates, was granted upon all orders for a year. The Estates were to meet three times a year, even without the royal summons; members of the assembly were to reinforce the king’s council; the royal domain was to be restored to its condition under Philip IV, and further alienations were forbidden; the law courts were to be reformed and justice better administered, private war was to be suppressed and all classes allowed to bear arms; and no changes were to be made in the currency without the approval of the Estates. This ordinance represents the highest point of success reached by this movement.

A. Influence of Estates General lessened by Alliance with the Jacquerie.

The influence of the Estates General as a national body was reduced in the popular respect by their frequent meetings end their alliance with the Parisian populace, an element even more revolutionary than themselves. The reappearance on the scene of Charles the Bad, who, imprisoned for treason by King John, was released by Marcel’s party, enkindled a civil war. The heads of the movement to enthrone Charles the Bad were Robert le Coq, bishop of Laon, and Etienne Marcel. They allied themselves with the peasants who, overburdened by the extortion of money from them to pay the ransom of the lords after Crecy and Poitiers, had revolted. This insurrection of the Jacquerie, inspired with a blind passion for wholesale destruction and for vengeance on the upper classes, resulted in the butchering of many of the lords and in the firing of their castles. The outbreak was finally suppressed by the nobles with a ferocity equal to that displayed by the peasants an d Marcel was murdered in 1358.

Thus the Dauphin was able to regain possession of the capital and one of the worst constitutional upheavals ever undergone in France failed.

5. France on the eve of Bretigny

On the eve of the Peace of Bretigny (1360), France was in a terrible condition. Had she only been a prisoner, France could have borne the strain, but she was weighted down by torture. Churches were deserted and ruined, the parish priests and parishioners had fled or had been imprisoned or massacred, their houses aid cottages were pillaged or burned, the cattle had been carried away by the enemy, and the fields were uncultivated. Many cities of the realm were burned, many old men had been decapitated; numbers of young people had been pierced by swords, children had been strangled, priests had been massacred, horses were stabled near the altars in some of the churches, the relics of the saints had been thrown to the winds. Such is the picture painted by a certain Francis of Montebelluna who may have tended slightly to exaggeration but whose description, nevertheless, is not too inaccurate.

Denifle believes that the worst of all the disasters for the French was that no one could foresee the end of the war which had lasted so long and all of it had been on the soil of France. A decisive victory would have changed the face of things but since the disaster of Poitiers, no French army was able to make any headway against that of the enemy. People saw no hope for the future and asked each other why their terror was so terrible that they fled when they numbered a thousand and were pursued by only one man or none at all.

6. Temporary Suspension of War.

The exhaustion was mutual at this time and, in 1360, the Peace of Bretigny, which was only a truce, was arranged. King John was to be released on the payment of a ransom and Edward III renounced any claims to the French throne. This truce put an end for a time to the war with England but did not bring peace to France whose return to prosperity was retarded by the free companies of soldiers who had been discharged from both armies and who now supported themselves by pillage and exactions in peaceful districts.

7. The Free Companies.

The free companies were known before 1360 but their appearance was only transitory and sporadic, and their force insignificant, in comparison with what they became in their new formation, after the peace of Bretigny. The greatest part of Edward’s army followed him to England but those who remained behind were soon swelled by the addition of the men from the English garrisons who were obliged to evacuate their former strongholds. All these troops, thus exposed, receiving no more pay, resolved to seek compensation in pillage, in imitation of the old French soldiers and the hired Gascons, Bretons, Flemish, and Germans who had disbanded after war. The exploits and the success of the companies are explained by the fact that he had been clever and daring warriors.

For the companies, fighting was only a means; their end was to acquire money and supplies, to enrich themselves, in a word. When the companies seized a chateau or a town, it was to plunder, to extort money from or to occupy a place from which they could satisfy their passions; from that position they often menaced and terrified a rich neighbor and forced him to buy his freedom with a large sum of money. Some of them took up their stand near Avignon to menace the Holy Father, regarded in the middle Ages as one of the richest sovereigns, and were firmly resolved to evacuate only after having received from the Pope a large sum besides the ransom of the city.

The heads of the companies were often bastards of great families who, abandoned without name and without fortune, sought to create a fortune at the expense of the people. The reins once slackened to avarice, the other passions ran wild.

Sometimes it is believed that these companies were only bands of pillagers and robbers, enemies of all discipline. They were undisciplined as to the ravages, the crimes, and the excesses which they committed, but as to their military union, their tactics, their manner of surprising the enemy and of seising places, they were not less disciplined than the regular troops of whom they had been a part before, and in which they often enrolled later, a second time. The chiefs around whom were formed the companies retained the organization of the regular troops: foot-soldiers, cavalry, chiefs and captains, corporals, officers and privates. Some of these chiefs were excellent tacticians as, for example, John Hawskwood, who, later in Italy, proved to be one of the most skilful and most intelligent captains of the Middle Ages. Another element of discipline was the oath by which the members of the companies were linked among themselves and with their chiefs. As Urban V notes in his bull, in 1367, the members of the companies were people in whom could be found neither goodness nor faith.

A. Efforts to Dissolve the Companies.

Steps against the companies were taken by Charles V who chose Bertrand Du Guesclin to collect the brigands and to pay them. When a succession dispute arose in Castile between Pedro the Cruel and his brother Henry of Trastamara, Charles conceived the idea of sending the free companies there to assist in the dethronement of Pedro, whom he detested, and in the consequent enthronement of Henry. This proved, however, only a temporary expedient and it was not until many years later that Charles III, in 1439, put an end to the excess men of arms of his time, by enrolling them in his service, thus freeing France of the companies and, at the same time, establishing a permanent military force.

The reign of Charles V was an interlude between two periods of disaster. As we have seen, Charles organized the free companies into an army under Du Guesclin and it was this army which was to defeat the English when war was renewed in 1369.

As a single illustration of the devastation wrought by the Hundred Years’ War, and of the barbarity of the commanders and troops engaged in it, Froissart’s well-known description of the sack of Limoges in 1370 by the army of the Black Prince is of no small interest. The Black Prince was enraged by the surrender of Limoges to the duke of Berry and Bertrand du Guesclin and the treaty entered into by them with the bishop and citizens of Limoges, whereby the inhabitants recognized the sovereignty of the French king. He determined to retake Limoges. The prince, the duke of Lancaster, the earls of Cambridge and Pembroke, with Guiscard d’Angle and the others, with their men, rushed into the town. You would then have seen pillagers, active to do mischief, running through the town, slaying men, women, and children, according to their orders. It was a most melancholy business; for all ranks, ages, and sexes cast themselves on their knees before the prince, begging for mercy; but he was so inflamed with passion and revenge that he listened to none. But all were put to the sword, wherever they could be found, even those who were not guilty. For I know not why the poor were not spared, who could not have had any part in the treason; but they suffered for it, and indeed more than those who had been the leaders of the treachery.

There was not that day in Limoges any heart so hardened, or that had any sense of religion, that did not deeply bewail the unfortunate events passing before men’s eyes; for upwards of three thousand men, women, and children were put to death that day. God have mercy on their souls, for they were truly martyrs....The entire town was pillaged, burred, and totally destroyed. The English then departed, carrying with them their booty and prisoners”.

8. Development of a National System of Taxation.

By the end of the reign of Charles V (1380), France had recovered much of its territory. In developing a national system of taxation, Charles acted upon the principle that ”a single grant of a tax conveyed a perpetual right of collecting it, and so prepared the way for the independence of the king, in the matter of taxation, of all control by the national legislature”.

B. A Period of Comparative Peace.

All the advantages gained by France were to be lost during the next thirty-five years of comparative inactivity when Charles VI, who early became insane, could not give the kingdom consistent administration. The country was rent by civil strife between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs. The former intrigued and allied themselves with the English who returned to France under Henry V in 1415.

C. The English Invasion.

The devastation wrought by the English invasion may be seen in the damage done to Rouen in 1416. In the city of Rouen, the misery was very great. The rich and powerful chapterhouse could hardly nourish itself. Donkeys and horses were pounced upon and eaten. Bread was made from bran and crushed oats; the people ate dogs, cats, rats, mice, old parings, and rotten things; they drank water and vinegar. All were sold at exorbitant prices; a lean, gaunt horse at 1280 francs, a dog at from 48 to 96 francs, a mouse at 8 francs. To prolong the resistance, twelve thousand women, children, and old men were conducted outside the walls.

Henry V did not wish these to die nor did he wish to nourish these unfortunate ones; they took refuge in the ditches of the city and remained there during the month of December, in the mud and water, living on frozen herbs.

By the Treaty of Troyes (1420), Charles VI was declared a rebel; Henry V was recognized as the heir to the French throne and was married to Catherine, the daughter of Charles VI. Worn out by incessant campaigning, Henry V died in 1422 and was soon followed to the grave by Charles VI. With the secession of the infant Henry VI, the position of the English invaders was weakened, yet their fortunes rose steadily higher on account of the skilful diplomacy of the regent at Paris, the Puke of Bedford, and the weakness of the exiled Dauphin, Charles VII, the Roi de Bourges.

1. Frightful State of France.

The state of France was frightful. From king to peasant all were alike miserable. As a symptom of the prevalent dissolution, outlandish cults, wild superstitions, and incongruous practices sprang up. For fourteen or fifteen years the Danse Macabre, the dolorous dance of history, had been going on. It was seen in the Cemetery of the Innocents at Paris which was crammed with pestilential dead.

2. National Feeling Aroused by Joan of Arc.

With the English before Orleans in 1429 and the Dauphin cowering miserably at Chinon, the national leadership, which Charles VII had refused to assume, was provided by Joan of Arc, theMaid of Orleans.

It was this which France was waiting for, leadership; something which would restore confidence and merely start the stream of success. The popular feeling was already prepared for it. Many signs had been seen of late that the inhabitants of those parts of France which the English held were ready to strike for deliverance. It was the beginning of a truly national feeling, of patriotism, of the consciousness that all France was one, and that the Frenchman could not submit to any foreign control. The birth of a genuine national feeling was a greater achievement in the making of the French nation than any which the Capetian kings had yet accomplished, but it was their work, the bringing of the fragments together under a single government, which had rendered it possible, and it was the effort of their most dangerous foe to undo this work, and to restore the old condition of disunion, which called forth the first strong outburst of this which is henceforth the deepest of all French feelings, the love of the nation and pride in its achievements. And this it was which gave to Joan the success which she attained, the new feeling of confidence and determination, and enthusiasm which her leadership aroused, the belief that God was once more on their side. She simply led and France freed herself.

3. Expulsion of the English.

Vast French territories still remained in the hands of the English at the time of Joan of Arc’s death in 1431, but the memory of her valorous deeds and the confidence which she had inspired encouraged the French armies until their success was complete.

Civil war was brought to an end when the Burgundians made peace with Charles V1I in 1435 and, henceforward, a united France faced the invaders. From then on the expulsion of the English was only a question of time. Normandy and Aquitaine were conquered and finally, in 1453, Bordeaux capitulated. The Hundred Years’ War was at an end without a formal treaty of peace. France had undergone fearful devastation and suffered untold misery, but bought at that price her political independence and national unity. The triumph of the old Capetian dynasty was feted by all the provinces of France and was the work of all; the attachment to the legitimate king and the common misfortune made of France a nation”.

D. State of Society at the End of the War.

In what condition was this nation at the end of the Hundred Years’ War? Let us look at the various classes of society and see how they were affected.

1. The Lowest Classes.

There had always been in France such members of society as vagabonds, beggars, swindlers and brigands, but the War immeasurably increased their number. Thousands of peasants seeing their crops periodically ravaged, artisans condemned to unemployment by the general misery, merchants plundered on their journeys, left their fields, their tools, and their business to become beggars or bandits. Great numbers of students were turned out on the roads because, although the Universities flourished in the fifteenth century, the Colleges, founded to shelter the poor scholars, were ruined. At the end of the reign of Charles VII, the army of slothful vagabonds and criminals joined with the “Flayers” who sprang from the most diverse classes. Demoralized by a career pf idleness and pillaging, it is not surprising that they refused to work for a regular existence but, without having to change their mode of life, became brigands.

2. The Laboring Classes, Peasants, and Landed Proprietors.

The organization of the rural classes had been changing prior to the English invasion. A more free class than the ordinary tenants had been created, farmers who discussed periodically with their landlords such questions as the terms of their lease. The immense majority of the rural population, however, was still composed of tenants attached hereditarily to the soil and it was they, without any doubt, who drew the most benefit from the transformation of the landed property and from the ruin of the lords.

The immediate effects of the War upon the rural population were an atrocious misery, a perpetual insecurity, famine, depopulation, and emigration. The reduced population concentrated itself around Chateaux or in the fortified villages.

When a band of soldiers could not be seen on the horizon, they went out hastily to plow the neighboring fields. The rest of the soil was abandoned. Thomas Basin, writing of this lack of cultivation, said, “I, myself, have seen vast regions in central and northern France almost completely deserted uncultivated, wild, denuded of inhabitants, and grown up to weeds and thickets...If any land at all was to be seen under cultivation, it was only in the vicinity of cities, towns or castle and near enough to the walls for a sentinel to keep watch over the fields. This watchman would be stationed on a high tower and on the approach of robbers would give warning to the workers in the fields and vineyards by ringing a bell or blowing a horn. On hearing the sound the peasants would flee quickly to a place of safety. In many districts this happened so often that the very oxen learned the meaning of the signal and as soon as they were unyoked would run in terror to their accustomed places of refuge. Even the sheep and pigs learned to do the same....Owing to the constant plundering and devastation of the country not many cities or fortified places were left in these regions, so that the small amount of ground furtively cultivated in their neighborhood seemed minute and almost nothing by comparison with the vast extent of uninhabited territory lying practically deserted".

France had been reconquered by forest, brush, and desert. Flocks of domestic animals, often returned to the savage state, wandered about and were destroyed in great numbers by howling wolves. Breeding of animals, so prosperous at the beginning of the fourteenth century, was no longer possible. Many lords and ecclesiastics were deprived of their rents. Certain places, prosperous and well populated before the War, took several centuries to recover their prosperity. For a long time the people of Saintonge repeated this saying,

“The woods have come to France through the English”. A striking example of the effects of this great cataclysm may be found in La Dombes which was depopulated as a consequence of the war. The inhabitants who remained sought to utilize the immense spaces left uncultivated and, in order to have fish, created ponds. Each hollow of the ground was closed by a dike which kept in the winter waters and thus became a fish pond but it also became a bog when the heat dried it up, and to this day La Dombes is an unhealthy and almost deserted region.

3. The War and Commerce.

The trades suffered much from the war. Although the cities were less unfortunate than the country places, they consumed nothing but a small amount of local goods thus ruining the French merchants and driving the foreign merchants entirely away.

It was not safe for them to travel the routes which were infested by brigands and cut by bogs. Rivers filled with mud and the tells were arbitrarily multiplied by the lords and the royal officers. The markets of cities fell in ruins. At the time of the English domination, the fair of Lendit ceased to be held. Commence between Flanders and Italy was carried on by way of the Alps and the Rhine. The fairs of Geneva inherited the clientele that Beaucaire and the other market-places of southern France lost.

4. Survival of the Guilds.

Thanks to the solidarity which it created among its members, the guild system survived the cataclysm, even being noted for its charity in preventing many artisans from dying of hunger during the crisis. As soon as peace was established, the old sworn trades were re-organized and demanded new statutes. Many new trades entered into the plans of the guild system.

Thus, in the fifteenth century, there tended to grow up an oligarchy of employers in each trade. A proletariat of wage-earners was torn, a social question was laid”. The familiarity between the masters and workers who lived side by side, worked close together in the shop, had their meals in common, and were brought closer together by the ceremonies of the brotherhood, did not prevent the adverse interests from clashing.

The employers reproached the workers for their bad work and denounced the coalitions which the wage-earners formed, in spite of all the rules, to obtain an increased amount for their labor or a reduction in the hours of work. On their side, the workers complained of being exploited as the price of merchandise rose and their salaries were maintained at the old rate. In the brotherhoods, the employers aspired to dominate and to dispose, at their will, of the funds for mutual aid.

5. Results of the Misunderstanding between Masters and Workers.

Two important consequences of the growing misunderstanding between masters and workers were that the wage-earners changed their places of employment more often and that they sought to form among themselves associations from which their masters were excluded. Frequently workers did not renew their contracts but abandoned the guild and the city in which they had been working. The war, by the ruins and miseries that it provoked, greatly contributed to the dissemination of such habits. The artisans, who could emigrate more easily than the peasants, went from village to village seeking work.

The sudden catastrophies, the pillaging of cities, and the devastation of towns, which deprived them of certain industries, such as painting, provoked veritable exoduses of workers. Thus, exchanges of the industrial population between the cities and the provinces, were brought about by the public misfortunes. Happy effects were not produced as many local manufacturing secrets were divulged to all of France. Once peace was renewed, these customs of nomad life continued.

6. Hazardous Existence of the Traveling Workers.

For the origin of the celebrated “Tour de France” it is necessary, then, to go back to the time of the English invasion. The workers created for themselves a more free and varied life when they detached themselves from their birthplaces and from the guild where they were apprentices. Their existence became almost as hazardous as that of the poor wretches who never learned methodically any trade but wandered in search for some sort of easy work. It is not astonishing that they sought to enter into partnership with each other in order to lend mutual aid. Thus was formed an association which developed during the war, not only because the workers no longer found in the guilds a protection sufficient for their own interests, but also because they were frequently traveling, exposed to all the risks and perils of the great roads. From the fourteenth century on, the workers formed vast associations of companions, which did not have the local character of the guilds. These associations, ill looked upon by the employers and the authorities, were essentially secret.

At the resumption of industrial work at the end of the reign of Charles VII, the king did not play a very active role in the vigorous resurrection of the guild system. He wished only to supervise the guilds and to draw some money from them. The king confirmed their statutes on condition of their insertion of certain clauses which fortified his authority and enriched his treasury. The autonomy of the guilds was not yet threatened.

E. Political Results of the War for France.

In spite of all the frightful devastation inflicted upon it3 people and itself, France emerged from the Hundred Years¹ War a nation with complete political independence. No longer did the French king have to submit to the anomaly of having a rival king among his vassals. No longer did he need to fear any decrease in his power for the French people, who had secured liberties during the time of misery, preferred to lose them rather than to disturb their tranquil life after over a century of horror. The king became an absolute monarch, around whom was grouped the immense majority of the nation, for it had been the king, not the Estates General nor the lords nor the people of the cities, who had accomplished the feat of expelling the invader and of drawing France from anarchy and misery.

At the time of the death of Edward I (1307), England was in a prosperous condition. Material and intellectual progress had been made, the population was advancing, law was wisely administered, commerce was growing and the coarseness which had hitherto prevailed among the people was being obliterated by a growing refinement evidenced in their taste for stately ecclesiastical and other buildings. The instability of this material wealth and prosperity was, however, quite evident when, within a few years, the nation was plunged into war with France and England gave way to extravagance and licentiousness. We have 3een what suffering the Hundred Years' War brought to France and its people and new we turn to its social effects in England.

A. Early Effect of the War on English Life

At first glance, the middle of the fourteenth century appears as the time of England’s greatest glory. When Edward III fresh from his triumphs at Crecy and Calais, returned to England in 1347, he was at the very height of his renown. England was intoxicated by his glory and with the hope of plunder. ”A new sun”, says the chronicler Walsingham, ’’seemed to have arisen over the people, in the perfect peace, in the plenty of all things, and in the glory of such victories. There was hardly a woman of any name who had not got garments, furs, feather-beds, and utensils from the spoils of Caen, Calais, and other foreign cities”. This new taste for articles of luxury and extravagance expressed itself in the rich dresses worn by the English matrons. They were of great length, trimmed with furs and embroideries, with hanging sleeves so long that they could be tied behind the back. Shoes had wonderful pointed toes that had to be fastened to the knees with silver chains.

1. The Golden Era of Chivalry

This was the golden era of chivalry when throughout the country tournaments celebrated with exceptional pomp the establishment of the Order of the Garter, instituted by Edward III to perpetuate the memory of his martial successes. The gay and frivolous court flocked to the tournaments in gay attire as a chronicler of the time tells us. In those days, arose a clamor and rumor among the people that wherever there was a tournament there came a great concourse of ladies, of the most costly and beautiful out not of the best in the kingdom, sometimes forty or fifty in number, as if they were a part of the tournament; ladies clad in diverse and wonderful male apparel, in parti-coloured tunics, with short caps and bands wound cord-wise around their heads, and girdles bound with gold and silver and daggers in pouches across their body. And thus they rode on choice coursers to the place of tourney; and so spent and wasted their bodies with scurrilous wantonness that the murmurs of the people sounded everywhere. But they neither feared God nor blushed at the chaste voice of the people”.

B. Appearance of the Black Death.

The whole color of Edward III’s reign was suddenly changed by the appearance of the great pestilence, the Black Death, which swept England in 1348 and 1349, having been brought over from France by the soldiers returning from their victories.

This terrible plague was to have such far-reaching social results that it merits rather close attention. The disease swept away fully half the population of England and Wales. This great mortality brought about a complete social revolution, the poor being the chief sufferers although the well-to-do people were, of course, not exempt from the contagion. ”It is well known”, says Mr. Thorold Rogers, ’’that the Black Death, in England at least, spared the rich and took the poor. And no wonder. Living as the peasantry did in close, unclean huts, with no rooms above ground, without windows, artificial light, soap, linen; ignorant of certain vegetables, constrained to live half the year on salt meat; scurvy; leprosy, and other diseases, which are engendered by hard living and the neglect of sanitary precaution, were endemic among the population”.

1. Premium upon Services of Surviving Labourers.

The obvious effect of the great mortality among the working classes was to put a premium upon the services of those that survived. From all parts of England comes the same cry for workers to till the ground, to gather in the harvests, and to guard the cattle. For years the same demands are re-echoed until the landowners learned from experience that the old methods of cultivation, and the old tenures of land, had been rendered impossible by the great scourge that had swept over all the land.

2. Sufferings of the Landowners.

It was a hard time for the landowners, who up to this time had had it, comparatively speaking, all their own way. With rents falling to half their value, with thousands of acres of land lying untilled and valueless, with cottages, mills, and houses without tenants, and orchards, gardens, and fields waste and desolate, there came a corresponding rise in the prices of commodities. Iron, salt, and clothing doubled in value, and fish and in particular herrings, which formed so considerable a part of the food of that generation became dear beyond the reach of the multitude.

“At that time”, writes William Dene, the contemporary monk of Rochester, “there was such a dearth and want of fish that people were obliged to eat meat on the Wednesdays, and a command was issued that four herrings should be sold for a penny. But in Lent there was still such a want of fish that many, who had been wont to live well, had to content themselves with bread and pottage”.

Soon that which had been specially the scourge of the people at large began to be looked upon as likely to prove a blessing in disguise. The landowner’s need was recognized as the labourers’ opportunity, upon which they were not slow to seize. Wages everywhere rose to double the previous rate and more. In vain did the King and Council strive to prevent this by legislation, forbidding either the labourer to demand, or the master to pay, more than the previous wage for work done. From the first the Act was inoperative, and the constant repetition of the royal commands, addressed to all parts of the country, as well as the frequent complaints of non-compliance with the regulations, are evidence, even if none other existed, of the futility of the legislation.

Masters generally pleaded the excessive wages they were called upon to pay as an excuse for not finding money to meet the royal demands, and it was for this reason rather than out of consideration for the pockets of the better classes that Edward issued his proclamation to restrain the rise of wages. But he was quickly forced to understand “that workmen, servants, and labourers publicly disregarded his ordinances as to wages and payments, and demanded in spite of them, prices for their services as great as during the pestilence and after it, and even higher. For disobedience to the royal orders regulating wages, the King charged his judges to imprison all whom they might find guilty. Even this coercion was found to be no real remedy, but rather a means of aggravating the evil, since districts where his policy was carried out were quickly found to be plunged in greater poverty by the imprisonment of those who could work, and of those who dared to pay the market price for labour.

As consequence of the great mortality among small tenant farmers and the labouring classes generally, and forced by the failure of the legislation to cope practically with the strike organized by the survivors, the landowners quickly despaired of carrying on the traditional system of cultivation with their own stock under bailiffs. A few landowners tried to continue the old system but by the beginning of the next century the whole tenure of land had been changed in England by the great mortality of 1349, and by the operation of the “trades unions”, which sprang up at once among the survivors, and which are designated, in the statute against them, as “alliances, covines, congregations, chapters, ordinances and oaths”.

To render the lands profitable, under the new system of farming, tracts of country had to be divided up by the plantation of hedges, which form now so distinguished a mark of the English landscape as compared with that of foreign countries. In contrast to other countries, too, the liberation of the serfs did not result in the establishment of a large class of peasant proprietors, but in that of a small body of large landowners since the population had been detached from the soil by the operation of the great mortality.

3. Effect on the Church.

Another effect of the pestilence was the sudden removal of a large proportion of the clerical body of the Church, The result was a breach in the continuity of the best traditions of ecclesiastical usage and teaching. Absolute necessity compelled the bishops to institute young and inexperienced, if not entirely uneducated clerics, to the vacant livings, and this cannot but have had an effect upon succeeding generations. The Archbishop of York sought and obtained permission from the Pope to ordain at any time, and to dispense with the usual intervals between the sacred orders. Notwithstanding all the great difficulties which beset the Church in England in consequence of the great mortality, there is abundant evidence of untiring efforts on the part of the leading ecclesiastics to bring back observance to its normal level. This is evidenced in the institution of so many pious confraternities and guilds, and in a profuse liberality to churches and sacred places.

4. Moral Effects.

The scourge must have been most demoralizing to discipline, destructive to traditional practice, and fatal to observance. "It is a well-ascertained fact, strange though it may seem, that men are not as a rule made better by great and universal visitations of Providence. It has been noticed that this is the evident result of all scourges, or, as Procopius puts it, speaking of the great plague in the reign of the Emperor Justinian, “whether by chance or Providential design it strictly spared the most wicked”. So in this visitation, from Italy to England, the universal testimony of those who lived through it is that it seemed to rouse up the worst passions of the human heart, and to dull the spiritual senses of the soul.

As Dr. Cunningham puts it, “it is important to notice that the steady progress of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was suddenly checked in the fourteenth, the strain of the Hundred Years’ War would have been exhausting in any case, but the nation had to bear it when the Black Death had swept off half the population and the whole social structure was disorganized.”

C. Disappearance of Serfdom hastened by the Development of Sheep Raising

Another stimulus which, in addition to the Black Death, hastened the disappearance of serfdom and the appearance of a modern, free labor system was the development of sheep raising in England. To carry out sheep farming, it was necessary for the lord to withdraw his share in the common fields from tillage and to grass it over, while he further not infrequently was tempted to enclose the whole of the manor wastes without sufficiently compensating his tenants for the loss of their rights of pasture which ensued. Both these measures, by interfering with their customary means of gaining a livelihood, tended to disorganize the peasants’s agriculture besides greatly restricting their chance of obtaining employment .

“Letting the demesne on lease was of great importance in helping to break down the personal dependence of the tenantry on their lords, on which feudalism was based, and set up a new middle class who had to trust to themselves and who, in time as they grew in wealth, gradually rose to a position not so vary inferior to that of their former masters”.

A fierce spirit of resistance had sprung up among the peasants. Very little was needed to set them in motion against their employers, and this little was quickly supplied by the excessive taxation which had to be laid upon the country to repair the growing disasters of the Hundred Years’ War.

D. Anti-Papal Feeling.

But this social rift was not the only rift which was opening amidst the distress and misery of the time. The way for a religious revolution was being prepared by the growing bitterness between England and the Papacy. When England went to war with France, it began to treat the Papacy as a French ally and to protest the payment of a tribute to the Pope at Avignon, which was French territory. This anti-papal feeling was expressed through the English Parliament which, in 1351, passed the Statute of Provisors which was directed against the papal practice of appointing members of the Papal Curia to English benefices. This statute directed that the Pope could not in the future nominate any of the English clerical officials. In 1353, the Statute of Praemunire, passed by parliament, directed that henceforth no appeals could be carried out of an English court to a foreign court without the royal consent. In 1362, Parliament stated that it flatly refused to pay its tribute as a fief of the Papacy any more.

A member of the Parliament of 1362 was John Wycliff, an Oxford scholar, who began to attack the right of the Papacy to control over the Church in England.

Wyclif’s followers became numerous and were called Lollards or babblers since they went around the country preaching the new doctrines to the common people in their own tongue. By their declamations against existing conditions, they were partly responsible for the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The identification of Wyclifism with the Revolt killed Wyclifism.

2. Discontent During the Last Years of Edward III’s Reign.

The last years of Edward III’s reign were full of disaster abroad and discontent and intrigue at home. Suffering and defeat had stripped of the veil which hid from the nation the shallow and selfish temper of Edward III. His profligacy was now bringing him to a premature old age. He was sinking into the tool of his ministers and his mistresses. The glitter and profusion of his court, his splendid tournaments, his feasts, his Round Table, his new order of chivalry, the exquisite chapel of St. Stephen whose frescoed walls were the glory of his palace at Westminster, the vast keep which crowned the hill of Windsor, had ceased to throw their glamour round a king who tricked his Parliament and swindled his creditors. ’’Edward paid no debts. He had ruined the wealthiest bankers of Florence by a cool act of bankruptcy. The sturdier Flemish burghers only wrested payment from him by holding his royal person as their security. His own subjects fared no better than foreigners. The prerogative of ’’purveyance” by which the King, in his progresses through the country, had the right of first purchase of all that he needed at a fair market place became a galling oppression in the hands of a bankrupt King who was always moving from place to place”.

An example of what Edward III did to make a splendid show was the marrying of his four sons to the heiresses of the great English families, thus initiating a new domestic policy for the Crown. This proved the ruin of his posterity for, with the great fiefs, he brought into the royal house their unquenchable feuds. Thus to Edward III’s policy must be traced back the full disastrousness of the Wars of the Roses.

1. The Good Parliament.

Mismanagement, extravagance, overwhelming failure, the scandals of the court, and the evident helplessness of the king at last brought on the inevitable result of the Good Parliament. Its action marked a new period in English Parliamentary history, as it marked a new stage in the character of the national opposition to the misrule of the Crown. Hitherto the task of resistance had devolved on the baronage, and had been carried out through risings of its feudal tenantry. But the misgovernment was now that of a main part of the baronage itself in actual conjunction with the Crown. Only in the power of the Commons lay any adequate means of peaceful redress. The old reluctance of the Lower House to meddle with matters of state was roughly swept away by the pressure of the time. The presentation of a hundred and sixty petitions of grievances precluded a bold attack on the Royal Council.

A. Type of Membership.

At the next meeting of the Parliament, in the autumn 1377, the Commons were in a strong position, owing to the disaster and bankruptcy caused by the Hundred Years’ War to which the Government had to confess. The members came up to Westminster prepared to revive the aggressive policy of the Good Parliament. Trevelyan says that nothing could have so broken the continuity of parliamentary effort as a change of personnel almost every year. The county members in the fourteenth century were knights or franklins who regarded parliamentary duties as a burden. If they consented to take their turn once and again at doing the business of the country at Westminster some spring or autumn, they insisted on going back to spend the rest of their lives in war abroad or local affairs at home. For this reason there did not exist a class of leaders of the Commons such as grew up in the days of the Stuarts, when the same Parliament sat for years together, and a member became a public man by profession. It is necessary to bear in mind this difference between the medieval and modern House of Commons. ”Yet in October, 1377, so great was the eagerness of the country to renew the policy of the Good Parliament that, out of seventy-four knights of the shire elected, as many as twenty-three were veterans of that body”.

2. The Poll Tax System.

Just before Edward III died, in 1377, the financial position of the kingdom had become so bad that a new expedient had to be invented, and parliament voted a poll tax of a groat or four-pence, on all over the age of fourteen, both men and women, excepting veritable beggars. But the last straw which broke down the patience of the peasantry altogether did not come until 1380, when the graduation system was abandoned, and a new tax of three groats laid on every person of whatever age or condition he might be who had passed the age of fifteen.

There was much justice in this plea for a new method of taxation to fall more generally on all wealth. A poll tax raised from all classes really capable of paying might have been a useful way out of England’s difficulties. But, unfortunately, the Parliament taxed not only wealth, hut poverty. The rulers of the country were, as usual, taking a leap in the dark. They had no statistics, they had no knowledge of the lower classes. Ko distinction was made between those of the peasantry who could pay some slight taxes and those who could tear none at all. Although the richer were made to pay in proportion to their wealth, even the poorest was assessed at a great level (before the additional tax of 1380). Labor disputes had for a generation disorganized the country, social discontent was rife, the government was unpopular, and the war a disgraceful failure. ”It was unwise to choose such a time as this to bring all the lower orders under direct taxation by the State. Whatever other causes helped to produce the Peasants’ Rising, the poll tax policy was ore; and whatever other effects the rising had, it certainly put a step to this new financial system.

F. The Peasants’ Revolt.

The Hundred Years’ War, then, was an indirect cause of the Peasants’ Revolt since it was to meet the expenses of war that the poll tax, which was the spark which set fire to the smouldering mass of discontent, was levied. The restlessness of the peasants spread from the eastern and midland counties to all England south of the Thames. The grounds of discontent seem to have varied in every district.

The actual outbreak began on the fifth of June at Dartford, where a tiler killed one of the collectors of the poll tax in vengeance for a brutal outrage on his daughter. The county at once rose in arms(thus a personal grievance precipitated the rising which, of course, was not caused by it but had been long in preparation). Canterbury, where “the whole town was of their mind”, threw open its gates to the insurgents who plundered the Archbishop’s palace and dragged John Ball from his prison. A hundred thousand Kentishmen gathered round Walter Tyler of Essex and John Hales of Hailing to march upon London. Their grievance was mainly a political one as villeinage was unknown in Kent. As the peasants poured towards Blackheath, every lawyer who fell into their hands was put to death; “not till all these were killed would the land enjoy its old freedom again”, the Kentishmen shouted as they fired the houses of stewards and flung the rolls of the manor-courts into the flajr.es. The discontent of this group was simply political; they demanded the suppression of the poll tax and better government; their aim was to slay the nobles and wealthier clergy to take the King into their own hands, and pass laws which should seem good to the Commons of the realm. On the thirteenth of June, the gates of London were flung open to tie insurgents by the poorer artisans within the city.

In Essex and the eastern counties the popular discontent was mere special than political. The demands of the peasants were that bondage should be abolished, that tolls and imposts on trade should be done away with, that no acre of land which is held in bondage or villeinage be held at higher rate than fourpence a year, in other words for e money commutation of all villein services.

The leaders soon lost all control of their followers who gladly believed the promise of Richard II that he would redress their wrongs, and, carrying certificates of manumission, they went home. Despite the king’s promise of immunity to the insurrectionists, many of them were executed on the scaffold.

1. Its Aftermath.

No sweeping changes followed the revolt. At the most, it only accelerated changes already in progress and assured for good and all their final triumph. It was the first struggle on a large scale between capital and labour in England.

Summing up the rising, Dr. Cunningham says, “the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 was the overt expression of the disintegrating influences which were affecting every side of social life; though the outbreak was repressed, there is no reason to believe that the old institutions which had maintained order and enforced morality recovered an effective sway. Alike in town and country the foundations of their influence were sapped. The manorial system was doomed at the time of the Black Death, and an agricultural revolution was spreading slowly but surely throughout England. When Richard II ascended the throne a large proportion of the English peasant population were serfs; when Henry of Richmond defeatedthe third Richard serfdom was fast becoming extinct”.

From the moment when Walter Tyler was struck down, and his followers were dispersed and punished, the large landowners hastened to adjust the rights of the tenants and their own claims by means of acts of Parliament. It is to the legislation of 1388 that England ewes her first glimpse apparently of a law of settlement and organized relief. The act by which the Statute of Labourers was confirmed and amended contained a clause which forbade the labourer to leave his place of service or to move about the country without a passport. Another clause directed that impotent beggars should remain in the places where they were at the passing of the statute, and that if those places would not provide nor them they were to seek a maintenance in other townships within the hundred, or in the places where they were born, within forty days after the proclamation of the statutes, there to remain during their lives.

A. Disregard for Manorial Customs.

Soon after the suppression of the rising of 1381, the manorial courts began to lose much of their former vigor, and manorial customs, especially those which concerned the personal obligations of the copyholders were more commonly disregarded than they had been at the beginning of the fourteenth century. There were row more frequent instances of the villein tenants sending their sons and daughters to service beyond the bounds of the manor without regard to the customary court or waiting for the lords’ license, and their sons were ordained and their daughters were married without their first obtaining permission for such purposes. Tenants now quitted the manor without leave, and their land reverted to the lord; taxes were frequently refused to the lord, and if he pressed for their payment the land was thrown upon his hands, and he lost the services of the tenants. “In the surveys of manors now occur the record of manorial dues formerly paid, together with the sums which ought to have been received at the later period, with the significant note, “and now they pay nothing”. Surrender of land at this date grew to be frequently neglected, and the heirs of copyholders sometimes succeeded to their lands without this formality. As the tenants of a manor strayed away from their tenancies, so vagrants from other manors came and were engaged in their place, contrary to the old manorial customs”.

G. Increase in the Use of the English Language.

Despite so many adverse effects of the Hundred Years’ War in England during the fourteenth century, there were other effects of immeasurable importance. One of these was the growth of English national self-consciousness. That which was incipient at the beginning of the War soon developed into a bitter animosity of the English toward the French people. This hostility to the French was most noticeable in the increased use of the English language during the fourteenth century. Hitherto, since the Norman Conquest, the French language was predominant in good society in England. The lower classes, hoewever, had kept up a long-despised jargon called Anglo-Saxon. From the beginning of the War the use of the French language had rapidly fallen off. English knights, travelling in France during truces, found that their French was different from that spoken in France. Consequently, the French language began to lose prestige in England. In 1362, Edward III invoked Parliament in an English speech for the first time. At the same time, a statute declared that henceforth the law courts were to conduct their proceedings in the English tongue. The first petition to Parliament in the English language was not presented until 1386 but by the end of the century English was in such general use that French had to be learned as a foreign tongue with the aid of dictionaries, grammars and phrase books.

This vigourous turning to the English tongue is illustrated in the literature of the last half of the fourteenth century. Wyclif translated the Bible into simple and chaste English in order to reach the common people. ”The Vision of Piers Plowman” by William Langland besides being in English reveals the desire for reform which had permeated the lower classes. It has a swing and rhythm which seemed to catch the ear as well as the heart of the people. Chaucer, the poet of the court, reveals in his works no sympathy for the lower classes as he wished to reach a fashionable audience. His characters in the “Canterbury Tales” are, however, the real men and women cf the England about which he was writing.

H. Industry and Commerce.

The Hundred Years’ War was not an unmixed evil so far as commerce was concerned. The wool subsidies, the purveyance of ships, the subordination of trade to the exigencies of foreign diplomacy, the insecurity of travelling for the disturbances in France rendered the old route from the Rhone valley northwards impracticable for merchants, and the great fairs of Burgundy ceased to exist, thus destroying the old lines of communication and places of intercourse), the withdrawal of skilled artisans from the exercise of their trades at home, no doubt operated as a serious check on economic progress. But indirectly the country gained. The Flemings would, probably, not have so readily accepted Edward’s invitation if Weir own country had not been involved in civil dissensions, and if England had not been relatively a place of safety. It is possible that the same causes left the way more open for the development of the English cloth manufacture. By the capture of Calais (August, 1347), followed by the defeat of the pirates in the Channel, England secured commercial advantages which, to some extent, outweighed the evils of the War.

One of the greatest difficulties in the way of foreign commerce was the insecurity of the Channel owing to the ravages of pirates. It was no slight gain to convert the home of sone of the worst of these robbers into a staple for English goods. The risks of trading were diminished and English merchants enjoyed by one route comparatively secure access to Continental markets. Edward’s constant need of money for carrying on the war had consequences of great importance in the economic sphere. It impressed upon him, in regard to the collection of the customs, the necessity of an effective organization, the advantages of which were great, although his exactions were a severe strain upon the resources of the country. ”It made him more and more dependent upon his people; and whether or not he cared for the development of commerce, he was obliged to pay more regard to the interests of the trading classes. On the whole, therefore, it is probable that the Hundred Years’ War hastened a commercial development which, in the ordinary course of events, would have been long delayed” .

1. Signs of Prosperity.

At the end of the fourteenth century, when industry and commerce were alike depressed, the gloom was by no means unrelieved. There were two directions in which, despite the general distress, signs of new prosperity may be found. In many parts of the country the cloth trade was developing, and all those who were connected with industry in any way as in growing wool, or manufacturing cloth, or exporting it were flourishing greatly. The commercial and financial business of the country had been partly and was being increasingly transferred from the hands of aliens to those of Englishmen; the wealthy burgesses who had taken the places of the Jews and Lombards, were able to organize themselves in important companies and to build magnificent Halls both in London and ether towns. The English capitalist was conducting in English towns much of the business which had hitherto been done by aliens at fairs".

2. Beginnings of a National Economic Policy.

In the legislation of Richard II’s reign may be seen the germs of economic ideas which were destined to have most important results in the subsequent history of the country. The commercial policy which had harmonized with Edward III’s political aims was discredited by failure, and a new scheme, pushed on with the approval of London merchants, began to appear. It was a policy of encouraging native shipping which had been neglected by Edward III; it favoured native merchants, and subsequently artisans, in opposition to aliens, and at the possible expense of consumers; there were deliberate endeavours to encourage the agricultural interest and especially the corn grower; part of the scheme was an attempt to attract the importation of bullion for the accumulation of treasure and not merely with a view to the maintenance of the purity of the coinage. In all these respects the legislation of Richard II’s parliaments is very different from that which held sway during the greater part of the reign of Edward III; the commercial policy was definitely reversed.... The keystone of the mercantile system, the desire of national power, was not altogether wanting in Richard’s reign, though it was not so forceful as it afterwards became; but we may certainly feel that an age which took a new departure in so many directions and with such far-reaching results, is not without great constructive importance in the story of English commerce. The history of after times throws a strong reflected light on the maxims of commercial policy which were coming into operation from the time of Richard II.

A vast amount of experience as to the possibility of regulating industry and the best methods of promoting commerce had been acquired. Dr. Cunningham says that ’when we see how intimately the great industrial and commercial code of Elizabeth is connected with previous attempts at legislation, we can judge better of the real advance which was made during the long period of depression and transition".

1. Effect of the Hundred Years’ War on Parliament and the English Constitution.

Under Edward III, Parliament had begun to gain power as the King was compelled to make numerous requests for money in order to pay the English soldiers engaged in the War. There were forty-eight recorded sessions of Parliament for this purpose during the reign of Edward who was compelled to make concessions in order to obtain the necessary funds. The well-known shiftiness of the king, his frequent attempts to secure money contrary to the spirit of the laws as confirmed by Edward I, required the utmost watchfulness and developed a clearness of vision and boldness. Parliament thus developed the bad habit of presenting petitions for the amendment of grievances with the request that they be answered before they would vote the taxes. Richard II, realizing that if the Constitution continued to grow in importance the king would be a mere figure head, destroyed Parliament and established absolutism but for only a short while. His authority was challenged in the name of Parliament by Henry of Bolingbroke who was more powerful than Richard and who succeeded in summoning a Parliament which deposed Richard II in 1399 and elected Henry himself as King. Henceforth Parliament was to proceed rapidly, establishing precedents which put it two hundred years ahead of where it had a right to be.

1. Triumph of Parliament over the Monarchy.

The deposition of a king, the setting aside of one claimant (Edmund Mortimer) and the elevation of another (Henry IV) to the throne, marked the triumph of the English Parliament over the monarchy. The struggle of the Edwards against its gradual advance had culminated in the hold effort of Richard II to supersede it by a commission dependent on the Crown. But the House of Lancaster was prevented by its very position from any renewal of the struggle. It was not merely that the exhaustion of the treasury by the war and revolt which followed Henry’s accession left him even more than the kings who had gone before in the hands of the Estates; it was that his very right to the Crown lay in an acknowledgment of their highest pretensions. He has been raised to the throne by a Parliamentary revolution. His claim to obedience had throughout to rest on a Parliamentary title. ’The tone of Henry IV till the very close of his reign is that of humble compliance in all but ecclesiastical matters with the prayers of Parliament, and even his impervious successor shrank almost with timidity from any conflict with it.

The King was treated with positive discourtesy and was severely criticized by the Parliament of 1404. Its members upbraided the King for the unthriftiness of his government and the ill-success of his expeditions. “The ghost of Richard II would have smiled grimly at hearing every charge that had been made against himself transferred to the account of his successor. One cannot sympathize overmuch with Henry; he had chosen to be king and had to take the consequences, but it is only fair to say that the charges of mismanagement were grossly exaggerated. The business of the realm could not be conducted on the ordinary revenues of the Crown. The complaints of the Commons show that same ignorant impatience of all taxation in a time of great national need which was noted in the time of Richard II. Elaborate modern inquiries into the finances of the king’s household seem to show that his much-abused expenditure was about £36,400 a year and the pensions and grants of 1403-04 made some £6,000 more. Much of this money was spent on outgoings which would now be regarded as public matters and not the king’s personal concerns. Even if the most grinding parsimony had been employed, there was no margin of saving to be obtained in this quarter. The wars and rebellion cut short the receipts of the Crown, the operation of the French pirates in the Channel led to a heavy fall in customs duties, which the Commons ignorantly put down to the fact that the staple was at Calais instead of the English side of the Channel. The rebellion of Glendower had stopped the incoming of all revenue from Wales.. .After many counter accusations between the chancellor and the treasurer on the one side and the speaker as the mouthpiece of the Commons on the other, the result was that the king obtained a liberal grant, but only after he had given solemn pledges *or the reformation of his household, and had solemnly promised to make over the grants voted to be administered by ’treasurers for war appointed by Parliament, a device tried before during the minority of Richard II.

2. Weakness of Parliament.

While the royal power was thus wanting, parliament was not as yet either wise enough or strong enough to provide an effective substitute, or to maintain a strong central government. Though the Commons were able to assert themselves effectively as against the Crown, they had neither the wisdom nor the self-control that was necessary if the realm was to be well governed. ’The Lancastrian parliaments furnished important precedents in regard to constitutional procedure, but they were not altogether deserving of respect, and their influence was not such as to provide the country with a really strong central authority.

3. Precedents Set by the Lancastrian Parliaments.

Some of the parliamentary gains in the Lancastrian period were the practice of the House of Commons voting no taxes until the last day of the session, the appointment of a committee to audit the accounts, and all grants of taxes were to originate in the Commons whose members could speak freely in the House without fear of being questioned in court and who were immune to arrest. The members of Parliament collectively were to be an advisory council without whose consent the king could do nothing.

The Parliaments of this period were composed largely of landlords and knights. The people as a whole were unrepresented and in 1430 the Forty Shilling Freeholder Statute was passed which excluded all but people owning land which brought in an income of at least forty shillings from voting in the county courts for members of Parliament. Thus the Commons did not represent the nation but the aristocracy in the fifteenth century.

J. Renewal of the War with France.

Though at various times during the war with France, Englishmen grew impatient at the heavy taxation which was laid on the country to bear the expenses of the armaments which landed in France, the war itself was popular with almost all who could influence the direction of politics by their opinions. People clamoured, indeed, after every short period of peace for a renewal of hostilities. The prospect of a campaign, and of the plunder which resulted from it, stilled the murmur of party against the sovereign and his advisers. War was resorted to then, as it has been frequently since to divert attention from home politics.

Thus it was a move which met with popular favor, when Henry V renewed the war with France. There were many unemployed fighters who were anxious that hostilities should be renewed and the prospect of booty lured on the barons. No claim could have been more baseless than that of Henry V to the crown of France. The Parliamentary title by which the House of Lancaster held England could give it no right over France and the strict law of hereditary succession, if it could be pleaded at all as Edward had asserted, could be pleaded only by the House of Mortimer. “Not only the claim indeed”, says Green, “but the very nature of the war itself was wholly different from that of Edward HI, who had been forced into the struggle against his will by the ceaseless attacks of France, and his claim of the Crown was little but an afterthought to secure the alliance of Flanders”. The war of Henry on the other hand, though in form a mere renewal of the earlier struggle on the close of the truce made by Richard II, was in fact an aggression on the part of a nation enticed by the helplessness of its opponent and vexed by the memory of former defeat. Its one excuse lay in the attacks which France for the past fifteen years had directed against the Lancastrian throne, its encouragement of every enemy without and of every traitor within. Henry may fairly have regarded such a ceaseless hostility, continued even through years of weakness, as forcing him in sheer self-defence to secure his realm against the weightier attack whichmight be looked for, should France recover her strength.

The popularity of the war, the brilliant victories of Henry who was acknowledged as heir to the French throne, all aided in extinguishing for a time the hopes of the House of York as men no longer gave a thought to the illegality of Henry’s title to the English throne.

At home, Henry V persecuted the Lollards so that they were driven to despair and recklessly planned to put an end to their sufferings by seizing the king and compelling him to relax the persecution. They tried to stir up a popular rising, like that of Wat Tyler, but Henry got timely notice of their plot. When they began to assemble by night in St. Martin’s fields, outside the gates of London, Henry came suddenly upon them with a great body of horsemen and scattered them all. Forty were hung next day as traitors, and for the future they were treated as guilty of treason as well as of heresy, (the Statute against Heretics having been passed by Henry IV in 1401. This act forbade any preaching or religious teaching without the authority of the bishops of the diocese, and any holding of opinions which had been condemned by the Church).

K. Unpopularity of Henry VI .

When he was well on the way to a mastery of European affairs, Henry V was cut short by death from his program which had included a projected crusade against the Turks in the Holy Land. Hopes of far-off conquests found a sudden close when Henry’s son, a child of less than a year old, ascended the throne as Henry VI. He was peacefully recognized as King in his English realm and as heir to the throne of France but his position was a very different one from his father’s. From the first, Henry VI was unpopular with the English people and, as for his position in France, it rapidly became weaker particularly after Joan of Arc roused the national patriotism of her countrymen. Even after her death, Joan’s cause continued to prosper. The spell of the invincibility of the English had been broken, and with their inferior numbers they could no longer resist the French assaults, in which nobles, burghers, and peasants now all united with a single heart. It was in vain that Bedford brought the little ten-year old Henry VI from England and crowned him at Paris (1431). The ceremony was attended by hardly a single Frenchman, even the Burgundian faction in the capital was beginning to doubt and draw apart from its old ally.

1. Growth of a Peace Party.

Meanwhile, in England, the continued ill-success of the war was leading to the growth of a peace party at whose head was Henry Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester. That Beaufort supported any scheme was a sufficient reason for Gloucester to oppose it, end Humphrey (the Regent of England) made himself the mouthpiece of those who pleaded for the continuance of the war. The Cardinal and the uke quarrelled in and out of Parliament, their followers were always brawling and the action of the Royal Council grew weak and divided.

The Duke of Bedford (Regent of France) realised from the time of the pompous coronation of the boy-king Henry at Paris, In 1431, on that the English could not permanently retain France. At home he was backed by Cardinal Beaufort, whose diplomatic ability was seen in his personal efforts to prevent the impending reconciliation of the Duke of Burgundy with the French King. The death of the duke's sister, who was Bedford’s wife, severed the last link which bound Philip to the English cause and he soon deserted to the French side. An even more fatal blow to the English cause was to follow in the death of Bedford. The loss of the Regent was the signal for the loss of Paris. The last French partisans of England threw off their allegiance to Henry VI with one accord. Paris opened its gates to the troops of Charles VII, and the English had soon to stand on the defensive in Normandy and Maine, their last footholds in France.

In the meantime, Cardinal Beaufort and the party which opposed Duke Humphrey were always watching for an opportunity of concluding a peace with France. In 1444, the French king signed the compact of Tours, and ratified it in 1445 by giving the hand of his kinswoman, Margaret of Anjou, to the young Henry VI. England ceded Maine, the bulwark of Normandy, to Luke Rene of Anjou, Margaret’s father. The war party, with Gloucester at its head, greeted the treaty with loud cries of wrath. They said that Suffolk, who was raised to the rank of marquis for his part in the negotiation, must have been sold to France and spoke of the surrender of the fortresses of Maine as treason to the English crown. The great er part of the nation believed them to be right for both Humphrey and Richard of York, (who had been recalled from the French Regency just before the truce was concluded), were popular with the masses, and it soon became a matter of faith that the Beauforts and Suffolk had betrayed their young master.

In the instructions given to Cardinal Beaufort to treat of peace with France, it was asserted “that more men have been slain in these wars....than be in both lands, and so much Christian blood shed that it is too great a sorrow and a horror to think or hear of”, and yet the war went on, and the overtures for peace proved abortive.

2. Renewal of Fighting.

Troubles were looked for in the Parliament which met in 1447 but the danger was roughly met. As he rode to Parliament, Gloucester was arrested on a charge of secret conspiracy, and a few days later he was found dead in his lodging. Suspicions of murder were added to the hatred against Suffolk. That which was more fatal to Suffolk was the renewal of the War. This was chiefly due to his own neglect in not paying a band of English soldiers garrisoned in Normandy who mutinied, crossed the border, and sacked Fougeres, a rich town in Brittany. Failing to get restitution from Somerset (Edmund Beaufort), Charles VII declared war. From then on there was a series of French successes. By 1450, not a foot of Norman ground was left to England.

3. Wrath against Henry’s Ministers.

The loss of Normandy was generally laid to the policy of Somerset who was charged with a miserly hoarding of supplies as well as planning in conjunction with Suffolk the fatal sack of Fougeres. His incompetence as a general added to the resentment at his recall of the Duke of York who had been honourably banished as lieutenant of Ireland. But it was this very recall which proved most helpful to York. Had he remained in France he could hardly have averted the loss of Normandy, though he might have delayed it. As it was the shame of the loss fell upon Somerset, while the general hatred of the Beauforts and the growing contempt of the King whom they ruled expressed itself in a sudden rush of popular favour towards the man whom his disgrace had marked out as the object of their ill-will. ’From this moment the hopes of a better and a stronger government centred themselves in the Duke of York. The news of the French successes was at once followed by an outbreak of national wrath....Suffolk was impeached and only saved from condemnation by submitting himself to the King’s mercy. He was sent into exile, but as he crossed the sea he was intercepted by a ship of Kentishmen, beheaded, and his body thrown on the sands of Dover.

4. Cade’s Rebellion.

The centre of the national resentment was Kent where the discontent broke into revolt in 1450. The rising spread over Surrey and Sussex and was well organized at first, The manifestoes of the rebels declaimed against the traitors who had lost France, corrupted the course of justice, murdered Humphrey of Gloucester, wasted the king’s treasures, estranged him from the Duke of York, and generally failed to keep up good governance in the realm. They complained that members of Parliament had been elected by the sheriffs without the proper forms, and that the old abuse of purveyance was practised by the royal household on a shameless scale while the king’s debts went unpaid. Most of these requests were political in character but a social grievance was touched upon in the demand for the abolition of the Statute of Labourers.

The leader of this insurrection which gathered many followers was Jack Cade who advanced to Blackheath and laid the complaints before the Royal Council which refused to receive them. The rebels entered London where disorderly members of the group plundered houses and shops. The men of London rose against the rabble which had committed so many outrages and beat back an attack after closing the bridge against them. Finally the Council agreed to receive the complaints and pardons were granted to all the insurgents who went quietly to their homes. Cade was slain a few weeks later as he had refused to take advantage of the amnesty.

5. Opposition of the Duke of York.

Hardly had Cade fallen when the Duke of York came from Ireland to put himself at the head of the opposition. He held back, however, for a short while lest he should be accused of open treason in requesting the dismissal of Somerset who had been promoted to the captaincy of Calais, the most important military post under the Crown.

In 1452 York marched upon London with an army of twenty thousand men but dismissed the force when Henry promised that Somerset, who was then burdened with the loss of Guienne, should be dismissed and tried before his peers. With a rare want of faith the King refused to put Somerset on trial but retained him as minister endeavoring to distract the nation’s attention from this move, or rather this absence of movement, by proposing that a vigorous attempt should be made to recover Guienne, But fortune had turned against the English and Talbot, the commander of this new expedition, was slain and his army was annihilated at Castillon in 1453. The fall of Talbot was a signal for a general submission and Bordeaux capitulated in October.

6. Final Loss of English Possessions in France.

Thus was lost the last remnant of the inheritance of Eleanor of Aquitaine, after it had remained just three hundred years in the hands of the Plantagenets(1154-1453). England now retained none of her old possessions save Calais and the Channel Islands, a strange surviving fragment of the duchy of Normandy.

“The House of Lancaster and the English nation had sinned in company”, says Oman, “when they embarked so eagerly in 1415 on the wanton invasion of France. They had already paid for their crime by lavish expenditure of life and treasure on foreign battlefields. They were now to incur the worse penalty of a savage and murderous civil war”.

“More than this”, writes Denton, “war begets war. It was the discontent of the nation at the loss of the territories acquired by Henry I at the cost of much treasure and blood which encouraged the House of York and its adherents to put forth their claim to the English throne, to commence the Wars of the Roses, and in the pursuit of that claim to devastate their common country ”.

L. Private Warsi

A fact which is sometimes over-looked is that the Wars of the Roses were only a repetition on a large scale of private wars which had distracted almost every county and, by taking away all sense of security, had disturbed almost every manor and every class of society earlier in the century. For fifteenth-century England was rampant with demoralization. The poison which had been sown by the long-drawn-out Hundred Years’ War was slowly but surely coming to the surface.

1. Livery and Maintenance.

“In the weakening of the central power a bastard feudalism had once more arisen in the great nobles. Their aim was not provincial independence, but personal aggrandisement and profit; and their instruments the vast estates they held, the bands of men they ’maintained in their livery, and the Crown offices of which they acted as brokers. They kept almost royal estate, each with his council, his writs, his assumption of the title of Your Highness”.

The nobles found the tools of their turbulence in the hordes of disbanded fighting men, returned from France, who would sell themselves to be the household bullies of the highest bidder. Thus the barbarous habits contracted by the English during the conquest of France were practised at the expense of England. As to these private wars between the lords, Oman says that “the whole struggle was the just nemesis for the lawless spirit bred in the nation by forty years of unrighteous warfare in France. It was inevitable that magnates who become demoralized by a long career of military adventure should finally turn their swords against each other, since the traditions of faith, loyalty, and moderation had been forgotten in the all-absorbing continental war”.

An idea of the size of the small armies which the lords maintained may be gathered from the number of forces which accompanied the Earl of Devon in 1455 and enabled him to rob the cathedral of Exeter and to put some of the country gentry to ransom. The army which committed ’many great and heinous inconveniences was estimated, in a document addressed to the Commons, to have amounted to eight hundred horsemen and four thousand footmen. The evils of these and similar riots and routs were enumerated to show the necessity of appointing the Duke of York protector to the realm during the illness of Henry VI who was troubled with file of insanity. Whether this was likely to remedy the disorders may be doubted, but that the private warn were evils calling loudly^for a remedy is unquestionable.

The retainers of the lords who were vested with livery and maintained (protected by the magnates if they were brought into court for trouble they had caused), had breakfast and dinner at the table in the lord’s hall whom they also slept on bundles of fem or straw thrown down upon the floor. They wore their lord’s livery and were horsed from his stables to accompany him from one manor house to another. They went armed with him to London when he attended Parliament, unless forbidden by royal proclamation to enter the city in military army. These retainers were always ready to begin a quarrel on their load’s behalf or were able to prevent an old quarrel from dying out for want of fuel. They were ever at hand to vindicate the honour of the any they served by shedding the blood of a rival house, and were encouraged to enrich themselves by the plunder which even the public opinion considered their proper reward.

2. Lawlessness

Public officer were occupied by creatures of the lords. If there was a law case, the sheriff chose a jury whose verdict would please the most powerful party. The letters of the Pastons who lived during the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV, describe a society where force had become the sole guarantee of security. There were many ways of evading the law but perhaps the most common was that indicated by William Paston in a letter to John Pastor, when he quotes at ese, “omrya pro pecunya facta sunt”. “The recognition of this fact”, says Lennett, “is the keynote of much fifteen the century litigation”. But there were many other methods of evading the law besides the bribery of justices, of sheriffs, and of .juries as the subverting or overawing, or perjury of witnesses.

How little control there was at the centre of the government is clear enough from the succession of complaints against robbers, murderers, oppressors and the like from time to time. One of the first important documents relating to the Pastons, entitled “Information against Walter Aslak”, relates the misdeeds of the latter and is a typical account of the wild and boisterous times. On the last day of the year 1423, one John Grys of Wight on had been entertaining company, and was heated with “wassail”, when he was suddenly attacked in his own House. He and his son and a servant were carried a mile from home and led to a pair of gallows where it was intended to hang them. As ropes were not at once to be had, the miscreants feloniously slower and murdered (them) in the most horrible ways that ever you heard spoken of in that county”. While the country still stood aghast at this crimes, Walter Aslak, in revenge for the loss of a suit in court to a client of William Fasten, caused a number of bills to be posted on the gates of Norwich priory, and of the Grey Friars, and some of the city gates, distinctly threatening William. Against such open threats, William Fasten appealed to the law which in those days, however, was a feeble protector. Aslak, who had the powerful support of Sir Thomas Srpinghem, found means to deprive paston of the favor of the duke of Norfolk, had bills introduced in Parliament to his prejudice, and made it unsafe for him to stir abroad. As the century went on, conditions grew more unsettled and people lived in almost daily fear of molestation.

Men, women, and even children were thrown into gaol without trial, and unless they could find money sufficient to pay their gaoler twenty pence a week for their wretched fare, their lot was one of extreme discomfort and starvation.

Disputants who sought to take the law into their own hands paid little respect to the dignity of a person or to the sanctity of a place... Ecclesiastical dignitaries went molested and arrested without a warrant while performing their sacred duties.

3. Unsafe Travelling.

Travelling was unsafe as bridges were broken and roads were in a rained condition but even more of a hindrance were the robbers and highwaymen who infested the roads and plundered all who were not in sufficient force to resist. Those only were safe who were able to join, a company strong enough to prevent thieves from attempting to molest them. Neither the sacred character of the travellers suspected of carrying money or other valuables, nor the fact that they were messengers or servants of the count was any safeguard. ...This was at least one reason why the large landowners collected their retainers and rode with them, and why men travelling to town waited until a sufficient number of fellowtravellers could be heard of, and a company collected which might defy the robbers who lurked along the road… There was at the close of the fifteenth century, as in the centuries before, and for at least a couple of centuries later, a sort of romance thrown around the career of the highwayman and outlaw, which made their calling almost a creditable or at least an attractive one, and men sang of Robin Hood and of his exploits until it became the fashion to imitate him. Youths of “good family”, when there was no continental war to employ them, joined these bands, “for young men must live”, and were not ashamed to live in this way, and to share in the plunder taken from peaceable travellers. For sometime after the close of the Hundred Years’ War, discharged soldiers, unable to settle down to peaceable labour, or to find any other way of livelihood than by robbing on the high road, resumed what was but a variation of their former life and plundered and murdered travellers, and warred with mankind on their own account, as they had plundered before under the king’s banner.

4. Excesses.

Every opportunity was taken by the people as a whole to indulge in feasting and drinking, both in public and in private. The number of alehouses in almost every village and hamlet was excessive. At these houses gathered the labourers and their wives who passed the long evenings sitting over their ale-pot, and spending their earnings until they had to pledge various articles of clothing until it was necessary for them to ask for credit....Wherever brewed, beer was the favorite beverage of the people who drank it without stint, nor was it disliked by foreigners after they became accustomed to it. Besides the alehouses, there were inns which were for the use of travellers who required stabling for their horse, beds for themselves, end rest at the end of a day’s irksome struggle with the mud and clay of a country road. “They bore”, continues Benton, “an ill reputation in one respect; landlords and ostlers were accused pretty generally of being in league with the highwaymen in their neighborhood, of pointing out the luggage of their guests that was worth plundering, and of sharing in the proceeds of the robbery”

The consequent increase of wealth, which resulted from all this plundering by both robbers and barens, may be seen in the extravagance in dress of all classes and in the multiplication of furniture and of other household implements especially those of a more valuable description. There was an increase in the number and sizes of houses which were built round an interior court and contained whole suites of chambers.

H. Wars of the Roses.

The times were out of joint for all and in the midst of these changing conditions came the Wars of the Roses. As Bennett says, “whether the people took part or not, the same conditions which stirred up the nobles to those battles operated in like manner against the whole nation”. The lack of firm government, which was the plague of England during many years of the fifteenth century, was felt by Hodge, as well as by the King-maker (the Earl of Warwick who was a bigger baron than the King) . That same lack of control, which allowed small gangs and evil ruled fellowships to terrorize Hodge and his friends, also allowed great nobles and their followers to fight at st. Albans.

It was not a difficult task for the Yorkist party to stir up opposition to Henry VI against whom was directed the popular discontent which was the outcome of the long drain of the Hundred Years’ War, its demoralizing influence, and the humiliation of its closing stages. The first battle in the Wars of the Roses was fought at St. Albans in 1454. With the victory of Towton in 1461, the cause of the House of Lancaster was lost and the crown of England passed to Edward of York, the son of the original claimant. In 1471 the battle of Tewkesbury, and the murder the Youthful Prince of Wales, followed by the death or murder of Henry VI, removed every dangerous competitor from the path of Edward IV. The dynasty of York held possession of the throne which had cost so much blood for four and twenty years.

1. Absolutism of Edward IV.

The people of England, exhausted by wars at home and abroad acquiesced in the despotism of Edward IV who plotted out a new royal policy. The King became absolute as the nation, disgusted with the muddle the magnates had made of things, allowed him full rein. Parliament was called only once and that was in order for it to pass statutes suppressing livery, and maintenance. Edward Iv, though a Yorkist, was the first of the Tudors as his policies were continued by those despots.

2. End and Results of the Wars of Roses.

After Edward’s death in 1483, the throne was seized by his younger brother who became Richard III and who was defeated by Henry Richmond at Bosworth in 1485. The Wars of the Roses were over.

They ended in the destruction of almost every scion of the families of Lancaster and of York, as well as the greater part of their followers. The baronage of England was almost exterminated in the course of this war. The slaughter of the people was greater than in any former war on English soil. Many of the inland towns in the line of march of the rival armies were plundered and burnt. Conjectures have been made as to the numbers slain in the long series cf battles, from the first struggle in the streets of St. Albans to that on the field rear Bosworth. From eighty to one hundred thousand soldiers are said to have perished in the strife... Those, however, who lost their lives on the field of battle bear at all times only a small proportion to those who die during a campaign. Want, exposure, and disease carry off more than the murderous weapons of war. The diminution which the population, already sufficiently drained "by the long wars with France and Scotland, suffered from the thirty years’ war of the Roses cannot be estimated at less than a tenth of the whole of the people of England.

The commerce of England had been almost completely destroyed by these incessant wars. There were not enough hands to till much of the land which had to be left waste. Hamlets and villages had disappeared and their sites could only be traced by the remains the grange round which the tenants had once clustered, or by the ruins of the church tower, in which sheep were now folded. The gentry had suffered in common with the yeomen and copyhold tenants, and could not supply a sufficient number of persons qualified to hold the important and honourable post of sheriffs of counties, nor even to serve as jurymen in the courts of law. All the towns in the kingdom, with the exception of London had been well-nigh ruined, and this outer ruin was but a type of a deeper ruin.....The standard of morality could not well have been lower than it was at the close of the fifteenth century. The license encouraged by civil war, and the example set by the dissolute barons, had distinctly lowered the moral tone of the nation.

When Henry VII ascended the throne, the people were so worn out that they were prepared to submit to any ruler who would secure for them the blessings of peace. Thus they yielded readily to the salutary despotism of the Tudors. The country sighed for repose

SUMMARY

For both France and England, the Hundred Years’ War created national consciousnesses. Possibly this, the greatest effect of the War, should overshadow those which wreaked such havoc with their people and their lands. But one cannot help thinking of the misery which the French people underwent when their land was overrun by English soldiers or by the free companies when hostilities ceased for a time. Monasteries were desecrated before their eyes, everything of any value was plundered from all sections of the country, and the people themselves were killed or left to die of starvation. Beside the ravages of war, that terrible pestilence, the Black Death, swept over the country in the middle of the fourteenth century. The whole country was so demoralized that peasants, merchants, and artisans left their occupations and turned to brigandage. The peasants who remained near their once prosperous farms were so cowed with fear at the thought of being attacked by bandits that they let their lands go uncultivated for the most part. France resembled a desert with every tiling striped from its surface.

Trade suffered much from the War as the roads, which were invested with robbers, were not safe for travelling and the sites of the great fairs fell in ruins. Workmen detached themselves from their guilds and joined the army which roved the country seeking anything but an honest living.

Lest we become too steeped in the mire of devastation, let us turn again to the brighter side of the War. In winning the Hundred Years’ War, France acquired political independence. The monarchy was strengthened and the tendency toward absolutism was accelerated. The intense national patriotism which arose during the Hundred Years’ War period has lasted to this very day.

England, too, was to feel the strain of the Hundred Years’ War. After her first orgy of extravagance, she found herself in a condition of demoralization almost equal to that of France. The country was torn by private wars which were an outgrowth of the Hundred Years’ War, none of whose campaigns were fought on English soil. Bands of armed soldiers plundered and ravaged the country either as the tools of the nobles or simply as outright robbers. Although there was from the beginning of the War an outburst of national self-consciousness, the nation certainly did not present a united whole in the fifteenth century, on the contrary, England was the scene of one of the worst anarchies ever recorded, the War of the Roses, which brought her thirty years of devastation and demoralization. This civil war and the Hundred Years’ War of which it was an offshoot lowered the conditions of society so much that it took years for the nation to fully recover from their ravages.

The nation, disgusted with the highhandedness of the barons and with the strife which had marred the record of the Yorkist dynasty, turned with relief to Tudor despotism and to the first of these kings as the savior of society. In England, too, as well ad in France, the monarch became absolute.

CRISTO RAUL.ORG

DURUY'S

HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE AGES

BOOK VIII

RIVALRY BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND. (1066-1453)

CHAPTER XXVIII.

INTERNAL HISTORY OF FRANCE AND ENGLAND DURING THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR.

SOCIAL EFFECTS OF THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND

MARGARET JOSEPHINE ROURKE