023 The Empire Of King Henry V

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The arrow struck him just below the eye, by his nose.

Prince Henry was sixteen years old. It was July 1403, and he was standing in a field a few miles north of Shrewsbury, in the middle of the first great battle of his life. One of the thousands of arrows that fell that day found the prince’s face and drove deep into the bone.

His companions wanted to carry him away. The story goes that he refused, because a prince taken off the field would make his men lose heart. So he stayed and fought on until the battle was one, all the while with the arrow still in the face.

Afterwards, the doctors tried to pull it out. The wooden shaft snapped off in their hands, and the iron head stayed where it was, buried about six inches deep into his skull.

Help came from a London surgeon called John Bradmore. He invented a tool for the job: a pair of small hollow tongs with a screw running down the middle. Over several days he gently widened the wound with little plugs of elder pith soaked in honey of roses. Then he slid the tongs into the hole, found the socket of the arrowhead and turned the screw. The tongs opened inside the socket and gripped. Slowly, a little at a time, Bradmore drew the arrowhead out.

He washed the wound with white wine and dressed it with honey, and he changed the dressings every day for twenty days until the wound closed. Honey fights infection, although in 1403 nobody knew why. The prince lived, and because Bradmore wrote the treatment down, we know how it was done.

This was the same boy King Richard II had knighted in Ireland four years before. His father, Henry Bolingbroke, had taken Richard’s crown and become King Henry IV, and Richard had died a prisoner in Pontefract Castle. Nobody knows how or why he died, but many people believed the new king was a thief.

A crown taken by force is hard to keep. The problems began in Wales. A lord called Owain Glyndŵr led his people in a long uprising against the king. Then the Percys, the great family of the north who had helped Henry IV to his throne, turned against him too. The Earl of Northumberland’s son, Harry Percy, was so quick to come to the fight that people called him Hotspur. It was Hotspur’s army that Prince Henry faced at Shrewsbury, and by the end of that hot July day, Hotspur lay dead.

The battle of Shrewsbury was only the beginning. Once his face had healed, the prince spent years fighting in the hills of Wales. It was a hard fight, but he learned. He learned how to besiege a castle and how to feed an army in wild, empty country, but most importantly, he learned how to be patient. Wars, he discovered, are won by carts of bread and careful planning as much as they are by battle.

Nearly two hundred years later, Shakespeare wrote about a wild young Prince Hal who drank in London taverns with a fat old knight called Falstaff. While there may be a grain of truth in that tale, the real Prince Henry had spent most of his youth in army camps and council chambers, carrying more responsibility than most grown men.

In March 1410 Prince Henry was at Smithfield, just outside the walls of London, when a Worcestershire craftsman called John Badby was brought out to die. Badby was put inside a large empty barrel and the fire was lit around it. When he cried out, the prince ordered the fire put out. He promised Badby his life, and money from the royal treasury every year for as long as he lived, if only he would take back what he had said.

Badby was a Lollard. The Lollards followed the teaching of John Wycliffe, an Oxford scholar. They wanted the Bible in English, so that ordinary people could read it for themselves, and they also said that the Church had grown far too rich. Most shocking of all, they said that the bread blessed by the priest at Mass was still only bread. To most people in England this was a terrible sin, and in 1401 a law was passed that heretics who would not give up such beliefs should be burned alive.

Badby refused. The prince had him put back into the barrel, and the fire was lit again.

People who watched that day did not know which to wonder at more, the prince’s mercy or Badby’s courage.

Meanwhile his father was growing ill. King Henry IV’s skin broke out in a disfiguring disease, and he began to suffer fits that left him helpless. As the king weakened, the prince took more and more of the government into his own hands, until in 1411 father and son quarrelled and the prince was sent away from the King’s Council.

King Henry IV had always dreamed of going on crusade to Jerusalem, and an old story says he had been told he would die there. In March 1413 he collapsed while praying in Westminster Abbey and was carried into the abbot’s house. When he came round, he asked the name of the room. It was called the Jerusalem Chamber. Then he knew, he said, that he would die there. And so he did.

His son, Prince Henry, was crowned a few weeks later while snow fell over Westminster. By now, the prince who had received an arrow to the face was twenty-six years old. People who knew him described a slender young man, strong and quick, with a long straight nose, a ruddy face and smooth dark hair. His eyes, they said, were as gentle as a dove’s until he was angry, and then they were a lion’s. The best-known portrait of him shows him from the side. Some historians wonder whether that hid the scar Bradmore’s tongs had left behind.

The new King Henry began his rule gently. He pardoned old enemies, and he gave Hotspur’s son back his father’s lands. And, as you may remember, he had King Richard’s body carried to Westminster Abbey and laid beside Queen Anne, as Richard had wished. But then he went to war.

France was a rich and proud kingdom with a troubled king. King Charles VI suffered from bouts of madness that came and went for thirty years. A pope who wrote about him later said that Charles sometimes believed he was made of glass, and had iron rods put into his clothes so that he would not shatter if he fell.

With their king so often helpless, the great lords of France fought each other for power. In 1407 the king’s brother, the Duke of Orleans, was murdered in a Paris street on the orders of his cousin, the Duke of Burgundy. After that France split into two bitter parties, and each was ready to bargain with the English against the other.

King Henry V saw his chance. His great-grandfather Edward III had claimed to be the rightful King of France through his French mother, and Henry pursued that claim again. He asked for the French crown or, failing that, great lands in France, a fortune in gold and the hand of King Charles’s daughter, Catherine, in marriage. In reply, the French offered a good deal, but it was not enough.

All through 1414 and the spring of 1415, England prepared for war. Henry built warships, among them a great ship called the Trinity Royal, and he gathered hundreds more. He collected guns big enough to batter stone walls. Above all, he gathered archers. Of the 12,000 or so men who sailed with him, about four in every five carried a longbow.

On 11 August 1415 the fleet sailed from the Solent. Two days later the army began coming ashore at the mouth of the river Seine, close to the port of Harfleur.

Henry expected Harfleur to fall quickly. It did not. For five weeks his guns pounded the walls, and every night the townspeople patched the holes with timber and earth. The English camp lay in low, wet ground in the heat of late summer. The water was foul, the food went bad, and then the sickness came.

It was dysentery, a disease of the gut that spreads through dirty water. Men called it the bloody flux. Nobody knows how many died, but many more were too ill to fight and had to be shipped home. Among the dead were the Earl of Suffolk and Richard Courtenay, Bishop of Norwich, one of the king’s closest friends, and King Henry ordered that the bishop be buried in Westminster Abbey, among the kings.

Eventually Harfleur surrendered on 22 September 1415. Four days later the king sent a challenge to the Dauphin, as the French king’s eldest son was called, offering to settle the whole war by fighting him man to man. The Dauphin did not reply.

It was autumn now, and Henry’s army was smaller and sick. His captains told him the sensible thing was to sail home. Henry would not go home with one small town to show for it all. Instead he decided to march overland to Calais, the English town on the French coast that Edward III had captured almost seventy years before. It was more than a hundred miles away, and each man was told to carry food for eight days.

King Henry planned to cross the river Somme at Blanchetaque, the tidal ford where Edward III’s army had crossed just before the battle of Crécy. But as they drew near, they heard that a French army was waiting on the far bank. Instead, they turned inland and marched upriver, looking for another way across, while the French kept pace with them on the other side of the water.

It rained almost every day. The eight days’ food ran out. Day after day the men trudged on through the mud, soaked and hungry and often sick, deeper and deeper into France.

A priest who travelled with the army wrote down what he saw. When one soldier stole a pyx, the small box that held the holy bread in church, King Henry had him hanged from a tree.

On 19 October they found two places where they could cross, at the villages of Béthencourt and Voyennes. The causeways over the marshes had been broken, so the English mended them with timber pulled from nearby houses, and by nightfall the whole English army had crossed over.

King Henry had already given an order that would matter more than any other. Every archer was to cut a stake about as long as a man is tall and sharpen it at both ends. If the French horsemen charged, the archers would drive their stakes into the ground in front of them, points slanting outwards, so that the horses would run onto them.

A few days later, French heralds rode into the English camp and asked, very politely, which road the king meant to take.

‘Straight to Calais,’ said King Henry.

It was not much of an answer, as there was no other road he could take.

On 24 October, as the English came over a rise near the village of Blangy, they saw the French army spread out in front of them, right across the road to Calais.

How many were there? Nobody knows for certain. Some historians today think the French had around 12,000 fighting men against nearly 9,000 English. Others think the English had only about 6,000, and the French two or three times as many. Either way, King Henry’s men were outnumbered and a long way from home. They would have to fight their way through or surrender.

One of the king’s knights, Sir Walter Hungerford, said aloud that he wished they had another ten thousand English archers with them. The king rounded on him. ‘Don’t you know,’ he said, ‘that the Lord, with these few, can overthrow the pride of the French?’ Shakespeare later turned that moment into the speech in which Henry calls his men ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.’

That night the English camped around the village of Maisoncelles, and King Henry ordered complete silence. Anyone who made a noise could lose an ear. The men made their confessions to the priests. Across the dark fields, the French camp was full of noise. It was said afterwards that the French lords spent the night throwing dice for the prisoners they expected to take.

Friday 25 October was the feast of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian, two brothers who had worked as shoemakers. Between the armies lay a long, narrow field of soft earth, newly ploughed and soaked with rain, with the wood of Agincourt on one side and the wood of Tramecourt on the other.

Henry rode along his line on a small grey horse. Over his armour he wore a coat that bore the golden lions of England and the golden lilies of France, and on his helmet he wore a crown. Everyone on that field, friend or enemy, could see exactly where the King of England was.

The English stood in one long, thin line, the men-at-arms on foot in the middle and most of the archers at either end. All morning, nothing happened. The French saw no reason to hurry, but King Henry could not wait, because his men had almost nothing left to eat.

At about eleven o’clock, King Henry gave the order to advance the banners. The archers knelt, made the sign of the cross and kissed the ground, and some, it is said, put a little earth in their mouths. Then the whole English army walked forward across the mud. The archers pulled up their stakes, carried them closer and hammered them in again within bowshot of the French. Far behind them, among the baggage carts, the priest who was keeping the record sat on his horse and prayed, and then the English archers began to shoot.

Thousands and thousands of arrows fell on the crowded French ranks. The French horsemen on the wings charged, but there were fewer of them than had been planned, and the woods on either side kept them from riding round behind the English. The English archers aimed at the horses, and the maddened animals turned and bolted, straight back into their own men-at-arms coming forward on foot.

Then came the main French attack. Thousands of knights and men-at-arms in plate armour trudged forward across the ploughed field. The mud sucked at their feet, and it grew deeper with every step, churned up by the horses. Worst of all was the crush. The field was narrow, and more and more men were pressing on from behind, until the front ranks were squeezed so tightly together that some could hardly raise their arms to swing a sword.

When they reached the English line, the first Frenchmen fell, and the men behind stumbled over them and fell too. Soon there were heaps of men in armour lying in the mud, some dead, some wounded and some simply unable to get up again while others trampled over them.

Then the English archers threw down their bows. They were lightly dressed and quick on their feet, and they ran out among the struggling knights with hatchets and swords and the heavy wooden mallets they had used to drive in their stakes, killing whoever they came upon.

King Henry was in the thick of it. His youngest brother, Humphrey, was wounded and fell, and the king stood over him to protect him until he could be dragged clear. During the fight, a blow from an axe struck the king’s helmet so hard that it broke off a piece of his crown. Some writers said the blow came from the Duke of Alençon, one of the greatest lords of France, who fought his way to the king before he was cut down.

By early afternoon the first two French lines were broken, and a great many French lords had surrendered.

One French lord had led a band of horsemen and peasants round behind the English lines to raid the baggage carts, and they carried off one of the king’s crowns. At some point in the afternoon, King Henry believed he was being attacked from behind, while the last French line, still fresh and unbroken, seemed to be getting ready to charge. The English had more prisoners than they could guard, and the field was littered with weapons the prisoners could pick up, so King Henry gave the order to kill all the French prisoners.

His knights refused. To kill a man who had surrendered was shameful, and a captured lord was worth a fortune in ransom. So the king sent archers to do it. No one knows how many prisoners died before the last French line drew back and King Henry called off the killing. It may have been fewer than people afterwards believed. But men who had given themselves up, trusting that their lives would be spared, were killed in cold blood. People argued about that order then, and they argue about it still today.

The battle was over in about three hours. Perhaps six thousand Frenchmen had been killed, among them three dukes, nine counts and around a hundred of the greatest lords in France. The English records name a little over a hundred of their own dead, though the true number may have been several times that. Among them were the king’s cousin, the Duke of York, and the young Earl of Suffolk, whose father had died of the flux at Harfleur only five weeks before.

That evening, the story goes, King Henry asked the French herald the name of the castle he could see nearby. Azincourt, he was told. Then the battle would be called Agincourt.

Azincourt is still a small village, and the battlefield is still farmland. In autumn the fields are ploughed, and when it rains the earth turns to the same heavy, clinging mud.

A few days later the English army limped into Calais. In November King Henry arrived home in London, and the whole city turned out to see him. There were giant figures on London Bridge and children dressed as angels singing in the streets. King Henry rode through the crowds in a plain gown. According to the chroniclers, he would not let his battered helmet and bent sword be carried before him. The glory, he said, belonged to God.

But a battle does not win a kingdom. King Henry returned to France in 1417 with a larger army, and one by one the towns and castles of Normandy fell to him. In the summer of 1418, King Henry laid siege to Rouen, the capital of Normandy. Food inside the walls ran so short that the people of Rouen pushed more than 12,000 of their poorest neighbours out of the gates, but King Henry would not let them through his lines. They were trapped in the ditch below the walls, between the two opposing armies, as winter came on. On Christmas Day the king allowed two priests to bring them food. The next day it stopped. Many of those people died in that ditch, and in January 1419, Rouen surrendered.

Meanwhile the French were still at each other’s throats. Later in 1419, the Duke of Burgundy, the same man who had ordered the murder of the Duke of Orleans in Paris twelve years before, went to a peace meeting on a bridge at Montereau with the new Dauphin, Charles, who had become the king’s heir after his two elder brothers died. While they talked, the Dauphin’s men cut the duke down with an axe. His son was so furious that he joined the English.

Now France had nowhere left to turn. In May 1420, in the city of Troyes, poor mad King Charles signed a treaty. He would keep his crown for the rest of his life, but when he died it would pass to King Henry and Henry’s children, and never to his own son, the Dauphin. Less than two weeks later, King Henry married Charles’s daughter, Catherine, in the cathedral at Troyes.

There was one more change, quieter than any battle, that has lasted far longer. From 1417, King Henry began writing his letters in English. Kings since the Norman Conquest had written in French or Latin, the languages of lords and churchmen, but King Henry started writing in the language of his archers and soldiers. His clerks followed his lead, and many historians think the way they wrote helped shape the English language we write today.

For a moment, King Henry V stood higher than any English king before him. He was King of England, master of Normandy and heir to the crown of France, and there was talk of him leading all the kings of western Europe on a crusade to win back Jerusalem.

King Henry did not rule his empire for long. In the cold, damp siege camp at Meaux, east of Paris, he probably caught the same sickness that had killed so many of his men at Harfleur. He died in the castle of Vincennes, near Paris, on the last day of August 1422. He was thirty-five years old.

As the priests read the psalms beside his bed, they came to the words ‘Build thou the walls of Jerusalem.’ The king stopped them. He said he had always meant, if God let him live, to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. They were almost his last words.

Charles VI died seven weeks later. If Henry had lived just two months longer, he would have been King of France. Instead both crowns passed to his son, Henry VI, then a baby only nine months old.

King Henry’s body was brought home and buried in Westminster Abbey, and you can still visit him there. His tomb lies at the eastern end of the chapel of Edward the Confessor, under a little stone chapel. On the tomb lies his likeness, a figure carved in oak. Once it had a head of silver. But one night in 1546 thieves stole it, and for more than four hundred years the tomb of King Henry V lay headless. The head he has now was made in 1971.

A few steps away lie Richard II and Queen Anne, in the tomb where King Henry laid Richard beside his queen. And a few yards from King Henry, under the floor, lies Richard Courtenay, the bishop who died of the flux at Harfleur and was buried among the kings because King Henry wished it. His grave was never marked, and it was not found again until 1953.

King Henry had spent his life winning a kingdom in France, and he left it to a baby who could not yet walk.

But King Charles’s son, also called Charles and known as the Dauphin, had never accepted the treaty. He still held the lands south of the River Loire, and he called himself King of France. The war would go on, fought by grown men in a baby’s name.

Meanwhile, far away in the east of France, in a village called Domrémy, a girl of about ten was helping to look after her father’s animals. Her name was Joan. Today we call her Joan of Arc. In a few years she would begin to hear voices, and the voices would tell her to drive the English out of France.

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022 The King Who Waited

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On the third of May 1389, the great council of England met at Westminster. The bishops, lords and clerks took their places, and the business of the day began. Then King Richard II interrupted them.

He wanted to know, he said, how old he was.

It was an odd question, because everyone in the room knew the answer, King Richard included. They told him anyway. He was twenty-two.

‘Then I am a grown man,’ said Richard. Any heir in England could take charge of his own lands once he came of age. Was the King to be the only man in the kingdom who could not? For twelve years other people had ruled for him. From now on he would choose his own advisers, and he would be king in more than name.

Before the great council was over, King Richard had asked for the Great Seal, two metal discs that pressed the King’s picture into wax on the most important documents in the kingdom, to show they carried his authority. The Chancellor who kept it was Archbishop Thomas Arundel, whose own brother had helped to humble the King the year before. The Archbishop handed it over.

Nobody tried to stop King Richard. Some of the men in that room had come close to taking Richard’s crown less than eighteen months earlier, and they had put his friends to death. The young king was calm and polite and pleasant. He also did not look like a man who had forgotten anything, and he hadn’t.

To understand what lay behind that pleasant face, we have to go back a few years.

Richard had been King since he was ten. His father, Edward the Black Prince, the famous soldier who had won the battle of Poitiers, died a year before the old King, Edward III, and so the crown passed straight to the old King’s grandson. Richard had been born in Bordeaux, in the part of France the English kings still ruled, and he grew up clever, quick and very sure of what a king should be.

At fourteen, he had ridden out at Smithfield to face Wat Tyler’s rebels and turned them away with a few words. It was the bravest thing he ever did. It may also have taught him something dangerous, that a king who spoke for himself could do what a room full of councillors never would.

After Smithfield the grown-ups took charge again. The real power lay with Richard’s uncles. The greatest of them was John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who held more land than any other lord in England and took his odd name from Ghent, the Flemish city where he was born. The youngest was Thomas of Woodstock, later Duke of Gloucester, a fierce, proud man who longed for glory in France.

King Richard chose friends of his own. Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was charming, good company and not especially wise, and Richard heaped gifts on him until he was Duke of Ireland. Michael de la Pole, the son of a rich merchant from Hull, became Chancellor and Earl of Suffolk. Sir Simon Burley had fought beside the Black Prince and been Richard’s tutor when he was a boy. Richard trusted him more than anyone alive.

The great lords could not stand any of them. Worse, Richard did not want to fight the French. The war that his father and grandfather had won so gloriously at Crécy and Poitiers was going badly now, and Richard thought it cost a great deal and won very little. To the lords, a king who would not fight was hardly a king at all. One chronicler sneered that the knights around Richard were knights of Venus, the goddess of love, rather than of Bellona, the goddess of war.

In the winter after Smithfield, Richard married Anne of Bohemia, the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, from Prague, a city in the middle of Europe. They were both fifteen. It was a marriage of state, but they grew to love each other. More than once, when King Richard was angry with somebody, it was Anne who pleaded with him for mercy.

The marriage also opened a road between England and Bohemia, and in time scholars would travel along it to Oxford to read the books of a priest called John Wyclif.

Wyclif believed that the Church had grown too rich and too proud, and that ordinary people had a right to read the Bible for themselves. The Bible in England was in Latin, which few people outside the Church could understand, and Wyclif’s followers set to work translating it into English, so that a ploughman or a weaver could hear the Gospels in the language he spoke at home.

In May 1382 the new Archbishop of Canterbury, William Courtenay, gathered a council of churchmen at the Blackfriars in London to condemn Wyclif’s ideas. While they were meeting, the ground began to shake. An earthquake rolled under London and the south-east that day, and some of the churchmen were frightened and wanted to stop. Courtenay told them it was a good sign. The earth, he said, was casting out foul air, just as their council would cast out false teaching. Wyclif’s friends said the earthquake was God’s anger at the council. The council carried on, and Wyclif’s teaching was condemned.

Wyclif left Oxford for his parish of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, and he died there at the end of 1384. Years later the Church had his bones dug up and burned, and the ashes were thrown into the River Swift. But it was too late. The scholars from Bohemia had carried Wyclif’s books home to Prague, where a preacher called Jan Hus took up his ideas, and the arguments Wyclif had started would one day help to split the Church of western Europe in two.

In the autumn of 1386, the storm broke. John of Gaunt had sailed for Spain to try to win the crown of Castile, and with him out of the way, Gloucester moved against King Richard. At his side was the Earl of Arundel, whose great castle stands above the River Arun in Sussex. Arundel was a hard, proud soldier, and he never troubled to hide how little he thought of Richard.

Parliament demanded that Richard dismiss his Chancellor, Michael de la Pole. Richard refused. According to one chronicler, he said he would not dismiss so much as a scullion from his kitchen because Parliament asked him to.

So Gloucester and the Earl’s brother, Thomas Arundel, who was then a bishop, rode out to the King’s palace at Eltham in Kent and reminded him of a story. There had once been a king who would not listen to his lords, they said. His name was Edward II, and his people had taken his crown away.

Edward II was Richard’s great-grandfather, and Richard knew how that story ended. He gave way. De la Pole lost his office, and a council of lords was set over the King for a year to run the kingdom in his place.

Even a poet felt the change. Geoffrey Chaucer, who checked the taxes on wool in the port of London and lived in rooms over the city gate at Aldgate, lost his home that autumn and gave up his post in December. It was probably in the quieter years that followed that he began to write The Canterbury Tales.

However, King Richard did not sit quietly. For most of 1387 he kept away from London, gathering men in the Midlands and the north and in his own earldom of Chester, which was famous for its archers. In August he called his judges to Nottingham, and there the Chief Justice, Sir Robert Tresilian, the same judge who had tried the rebels after Smithfield, gave the King the answer he wanted. The council forced on him was against the law, the judges declared, and the men who had forced it on him were traitors.

Many historians think the judges were right about the law. Right or not, it was a declaration of war.

Gloucester, Arundel and the Earl of Warwick gathered their men and marched on London. They became known as the Lords Appellant, because they appealed the King’s friends, which meant that they formally accused them of treason. Two younger lords joined them, Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham, and Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby.

Henry was John of Gaunt’s son and King Richard’s first cousin. He was born at Bolingbroke Castle in Lincolnshire, probably within a few months of Richard, and as boys the two of them had been named to the Order of the Garter on the same day. But Henry was everything the lords wished King Richard would be, a champion in the jousting lists who would later go crusading in the forests of Lithuania. Now he had chosen a side against the King.

In December 1387, Robert de Vere marched south from Cheshire with an army to rescue King Richard. Just before Christmas, at Radcot Bridge on the upper Thames, he found one bridge broken down and Henry’s men holding the other. De Vere’s army was routed. He spurred his horse into the river, and as night came on he slipped from the saddle, pulled off his armour and swam for his life.

His horse and armour were found by the water next morning, and many thought he had drowned, but he had not. He had escaped overseas, and five years later a wild boar killed him while he was out hunting.

Now King Richard was alone. The Appellants surrounded him in the Tower of London and argued among themselves about whether to take his crown away altogether. The older men were for it. Henry and the younger lords were against it, and in the end the lords drew back. King Richard kept his crown, but he was allowed to keep very little else.

In February 1388 Parliament met to try the King’s friends. When Richard spoke up for one of them, the Appellants threw down their gauntlets in challenge, and some three hundred others threw theirs down too. People afterwards called it the Merciless Parliament, and it earned its name.

De Vere and de la Pole had already fled abroad, and they were condemned to death without being there. Tresilian had not got away. He was found hiding in the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey, dragged out and hanged at Tyburn the same day.

The death that hurt most was Simon Burley’s. Richard pleaded for him. So did another of his uncles, Edmund, Duke of York, and even Henry and Mowbray argued that Burley should be spared. Queen Anne, it is said, went down on her knees before the Appellants to beg for his life. They would not listen. In May, Burley was beheaded on Tower Hill.

King Richard was twenty-one. He had been made to stand by while the man who had taught him and the friends he loved were killed one after another, all in the name of the law. Afterwards he made his peace with the lords, swore new oaths, and waited.

That vengeful wait is what lay behind the pleasant face in the council chamber a year later.

For eight years after that May morning, King Richard ruled carefully and well. He made his peace with his uncle Gaunt, who came home from Spain that autumn. He took no revenge on anybody, and in time he even let Gloucester and Arundel back onto his council.

King Richard loved beautiful things as few English kings had before him. In October 1390 he held a great tournament at Smithfield, on the same field where he had faced Wat Tyler, and the King’s knights wore a badge that, as far as we know, nobody had seen before. It was a white hart, a pure white stag, with a golden crown around its neck and a golden chain hanging from it. From then on it was Richard’s own sign. His richest friends wore it in gold and white enamel, and his soldiers wore it on their coats.

One of his household accounts even records little pieces of cloth made for the King to carry in his hand, to wipe and clean his nose. People have claimed ever since that Richard invented the handkerchief. He almost certainly did not, but it seems he did not care to use his sleeve to wipe his nose.

And in 1393 he began the work on a building that you can still visit today. Westminster Hall, the enormous hall beside the palace where kings held their feasts and the law courts sat, was three hundred years old, and its roof had probably rested on rows of pillars running down the hall. Richard ordered a new roof that would cover the whole hall in a single span.

The man who built the new roof was Hugh Herland, the King’s master carpenter. Oaks from the royal forests were shaped and fitted together in a yard near Farnham in Surrey, then brought to Westminster by cart and by barge, some 660 tons of them. Great oak beams reach out from the tops of the walls, one above another, and on the end of each of the lowest beams the carvers set a wooden angel with spread wings and holding a shield. Along the walls below, the masons carved King Richard’s white hart again and again.

In June 1394, Queen Anne died at the palace of Sheen, beside the Thames, probably of plague. She was twenty-eight. Richard was wild with grief, and he ordered the palace where she had died to be pulled down.

At her funeral in Westminster Abbey, the Earl of Arundel arrived late. For a moment the mask slipped. King Richard snatched a staff from one of the attendants and struck Arundel across the face, so hard that he drew blood. The monks were horrified that blood had been spilled in their church, but a few weeks later, the King and the Earl appeared to be friends again.

King Richard ordered a tomb for Queen Anne and himself in the abbey, close to the shrine of King Edward the Confessor. Their figures were to be cast in gilded bronze, with their hands joined, and when he died he would lie beside her.

After a campaign in Ireland, Richard married again in 1396. His new bride was Isabelle, the daughter of the King of France. She was six years old. The marriage came with a truce between England and France that was meant to last twenty-eight years, and it meant Richard no longer had to beg Parliament for money to pay for a war.

Then, in the summer of 1397, King Richard carried out his revenge.

In July he invited Gloucester, Arundel and Warwick to a feast. Only Warwick came, and he was arrested. A chronicler tells us that Richard then rode out by night to Gloucester’s castle at Pleshey in Essex and arrested his uncle himself. Arundel gave himself up a few days later.

Gloucester was taken across the sea to Calais, which was then an English town, and in September it was announced that he had died. He had almost certainly been murdered on King Richard’s orders, probably smothered under a mattress.

Parliament met that same month. Westminster Hall was full of scaffolding, so it met in a great timber building in the palace yard, open at the sides, with a company of archers from Cheshire standing all around it with their bows ready. Inside, Parliament gave King Richard everything he asked for. Arundel was condemned and beheaded on the same day. Warwick pleaded guilty and threw himself on the King’s mercy, and was imprisoned on the Isle of Man for life. Archbishop Arundel was sent abroad.

From now on King Richard went nowhere without his Cheshire archers. They spoke to him in their own broad northern speech and called him Dickon. At night, another chronicler tells us, they kept watch outside his chamber and told him, ‘Dickon, sleep securely while we wake.’

That Parliament gave King Richard more power than any king of England had held for generations, then handed its unfinished business to a small committee of the King’s friends and went home. King Richard was master at last.

Only two of the Appellants were left, Henry and Mowbray, and Richard had made both of them dukes. But in December 1397, as the two of them rode together from Brentford to London, Mowbray said something he should have kept to himself. The King, he said, had never forgiven Radcot Bridge. Sooner or later he would come for them too.

Henry repeated it to the King. Each man said the other was lying, and it was decided that the quarrel should be settled the old way, by trial by battle.

A trial by battle looked very much like a joust. It took place in the lists, a long, flat stretch of ground closed in by a wooden fence, with a gate at each end for the fighters to ride in and stands along the sides for the people watching. The two men would charge at each other on horseback with lances, just as knights did in a tournament. But a joust was a game, fought for sport and prizes. A trial by battle could be a fight to the death. When the lances broke, the two men fought on with swords, and they kept fighting until one of them was killed or gave in. Everyone believed that God would give the victory to the one who was telling the truth, and the loser, if he lived, could expect to die as a traitor.

The fight was fixed for September 1398 at Gosford Green outside Coventry, and thousands came to watch. Lists had been built on the green, with a raised stand for the King and his lords. Both men rode in wearing full armour. They took their places at either end with their lances ready, the trumpets sounded, and Henry began to move forward.

He had gone only a few paces when King Richard threw down his staff, the signal to stop. The fight was over before a single blow had been struck.

There then followed two hours of talking, after which Richard gave his judgment. Both men would leave England. Mowbray was banished for life, and he died in Venice a year later. Henry was banished for ten years, which Richard then reduced to six.

Then in February 1399, John of Gaunt died. Henry should have inherited the great lands of Lancaster, the richest inheritance in England. Instead, in March, King Richard took them for himself and made Henry’s exile last for life.

Every lord in England understood what that meant. If the King could take the Duke of Lancaster’s lands, he could take anybody’s.

At the end of May 1399, Richard sailed for Ireland again, taking his Cheshire archers and many of his most loyal lords with him. He left his uncle Edmund of York to look after the kingdom.

At the beginning of July, Henry landed at Ravenspur, a little port at the mouth of the Humber that the sea has long since swallowed. He had only a small band of men with him, and he swore that he had come for nothing but his father’s lands. The great lords of the north soon joined him, led by Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and his son Harry, whose fiery temper had earned him the name Hotspur. At Bristol he caught three of Richard’s ministers and had their heads cut off.

King Richard came back too late. He landed in south Wales towards the end of July, and his army melted away. With a handful of followers he hurried north to the great castle at Conwy. There the Earl of Northumberland came to him and swore on the holy sacrament that Henry wanted only his own lands, and that Richard would keep his crown.

Richard believed him and came out. On the road, Northumberland’s soldiers closed around him, and he was taken to Flint Castle on the estuary of the River Dee.

Henry came to Flint on the nineteenth of August. A French squire called Jean Creton was there, and he wrote down what happened. Henry, in armour, bowed low to the ground, then bowed again with his cap in his hand.

‘Fair cousin of Lancaster,’ said King Richard, ‘you are right welcome.’

‘My lord,’ said Henry, ‘I am come sooner than you sent for me.’ The people of England complained, he said, that Richard had ruled them harshly. ‘But if it please our Lord, I will help you to govern them better than they have been governed in time past.’

Both men knew what those words meant. Another chronicler, Jean Froissart, tells a story about Richard’s greyhound, Math, who would let no one fondle him but the King. That day, Froissart says, Math left Richard’s side and went to fawn on Henry instead.

King Richard rode into London as a prisoner and was shut in the Tower. On the twenty-ninth of September, under pressure we can only guess at, he gave up his crown. The next day the lords and commons gathered in Westminster Hall, under the great new roof he had built. The throne stood empty, covered with cloth of gold. The charges against Richard were read aloud, and the assembly agreed that he should be deposed. Then Henry stood up and claimed the crown, speaking in English, and Archbishop Arundel, home again from exile, took him by the hand and led him to the empty throne.

Richard, no longer king, was moved in secret to Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire, one of the strongholds of Lancaster. In January 1400 some of his old friends plotted to kill King Henry and set Richard free. They failed, and their plot sealed Richard’s fate. By the middle of February he was dead. He was thirty-three.

Nobody knows exactly how he died. Henry’s people said that Richard had refused to eat out of grief. Others said his guards had starved him. Most historians think he died of starvation, whether or not he chose it.

Henry had the body laid out in St Paul’s Cathedral, with the face uncovered from the forehead to the throat, so that everyone could see Richard was really dead. Then he was buried quietly at King’s Langley in Hertfordshire, far from the tomb he had made for himself.

For years afterwards there were stories that Richard was alive and hiding in Scotland. Many of the poor people of England remembered him as the boy who had ridden out to meet them at Smithfield, and they believed he had been their friend. Whether he ever truly was is a question nobody can answer.

King Henry IV kept the crown he had taken, but he never wore it easily. Within a year Owain Glyndŵr had raised Wales against him, and within four years the Percys who had helped him to the throne were fighting to pull him off it. All the while his eldest son, another Henry, was growing up.

Richard had kept that boy close. In the summer of 1399, while the boy’s father was in exile, Richard took him to Ireland, perhaps partly to make sure his father behaved, and knighted him there. When young Henry became King in 1413, one of the first things he did was to bring Richard’s body to Westminster Abbey and lay it in the tomb beside Anne, where Richard had asked to lie.

You can still see them there, two figures in gilded bronze lying side by side under a painted wooden canopy. The hands that Richard asked to be joined broke away long ago.

Go across the road into Westminster Hall and look up. The angels are still there, holding out their shields beneath the dark oak, and Richard’s white hart still lies chained and crowned along the walls. He built that roof to show the world what a king should be. Before the carpenters had even finished it, it was the place where his crown was taken away.

The boy he knighted in Ireland would wear that crown next, and he would carry it to France as King Henry V.

Heritage Workbook 003 Richard Trevithick

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Heritage Workbook 002 William Marshal

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Heritage Workbook 001 The Jet Engine

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This publication used to be called Flint & Fable, but now it’s called Horse Guard, and it’s heading in a new direction.

Britain: The Story of an Island for Young Readers – the serialised narrative history that follows Churchill’s account of the British Isles, written for children, continues exactly as before. Twenty articles are already published and more are coming, and this will not change until the series is complete.

What has changed is that Horse Guard is becoming broader. Alongside The Story of an Island, there will be new content.

What are the Horse Guard Heritage Workbooks?

The Heritage Workbooks are free printable PDFs, with each one covering a single subject – a person, an invention, a place, a craft, a folktale, or a tradition – each one comes with everything you need to turn it into a lesson, teaching aid, and keepsake.

Inside each workbook you will find:

• A brief introductory story.

• Key facts

• Comprehension questions and discussion questions

• Further reading, and places you can actually visit

• A page or two of cut-outs: photographs, diagrams, portraits, and maps

The workbooks are meant to be cut up.

Print the pages, read the story together, work through the questions, and then get the scissors out. The entire workbook is intended to be taken apart and cut up.

Some children may want to create a neat notebook with everything squared off and labelled. Others will build something closer to a junk journal – layered, overlapping, stuffed with torn paper, string, stamps, tickets, pressed leaves and whatever else they’ve collected. There is no right or wrong way of approaching it. The point is that the child chooses what to keep and how to arrange it, and in doing so they learn, and over time, the notebook becomes their own book of British heritage that they have made themselves.

A word on who it’s for.

The content leans towards what interests boys. This isn’t accidental. Boys are falling behind in reading and attainment, and there appears to be very little out there that grabs their interest. But nothing in the workbooks is exclusively for boys. Girls will find plenty to interest them as well, and the workbooks are being created for families to use together, across a range of ages.

The first workbook is attached below. It tells the story of Frank Whittle, the mechanic’s son from Coventry who invented the jet engine. Many British children have never heard of him.

Heritage Workbook 001 The Jet Engine

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More will follow. They’re FREE, and if you find them useful, please subscribe.

Best wishes Vincent Shaw

021 The Peasants Revolt

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On the last Thursday in May 1381, a royal commissioner called John Bampton sat down at Brentwood in Essex with his clerks and his lists, and sent for the men of three villages.

The villages were Fobbing, Corringham and Stanford, small places on the edge of the Thames estuary, where the land runs flat down to the mud and the sheep graze out on the marshes. Bampton had come about money. According to his lists, these villages owed the King tax, and had not paid it.

The men of Fobbing sent a spokesman, a man called Thomas Baker. He told the commissioner that Fobbing had paid already, and that it would not be paying again. Bampton was used to being obeyed. He ordered his sergeants to arrest them.

It did not go the way he expected. The villagers had come armed, and some of them had brought bows. Within a very short time the King’s commissioner was on his horse and riding hard for London, and the men of Fobbing had gone back into the country, knowing exactly what they had done. That was the beginning.

The tax was a poll tax. ‘Poll’ was an old word for the top of your head, and a poll tax was paid by every person, counted one head at a time.

It was the third in four years. The first, in 1377, had asked a groat, a silver coin worth fourpence, from everyone over fourteen. The second had been graded, so that a duke paid more than a ploughman. The third was the heaviest of all. It worked out at a shilling a head for everyone over fifteen, three times as much as the first, and a shilling was several days’ wages for a working man. The richer people in each village were supposed to help the poorer ones pay. In villages where nobody was rich, everybody paid in full.

The money was for the war with France, which had been going on for more than forty years and was no longer going well.

So the villages did what people have always done with a tax they cannot pay. They made people disappear. When the collectors came to count heads, daughters and widows and old servants were somehow not at home, and did not exist. On paper, England seemed to lose about a third of its grown-up population between the first tax and the third. In Essex, nearly 48,000 people had paid in 1377. In 1381 the county found only a little over 30,000.

The King’s Council was not fooled. In the spring of 1381 it sent commissioners out into the counties to go village by village and find the missing people, and the missing shillings. John Bampton was one of them.

The villages had seen men like him before. For thirty years local justices had enforced the Statute of Labourers, fining ploughmen for asking too much and servants for leaving their masters, and every fine was remembered. Now the same kind of men were back, with the same kind of lists.

A few days after Brentwood the government sent somebody more important. Sir Robert Belknap was the Chief Justice, one of the most senior judges in England, and he came into Essex to find the troublemakers and punish them. The villagers chased him out too. Some of the men who had been helping him were killed, and one chronicler says Belknap himself was made to swear on the Bible that he would never sit in judgement on them again.

After that there was no going back, and everybody knew it.

Messengers went from village to village. Church bells were rung to call people out. Across the estuary in Kent the same thing was happening, and the two counties were in touch almost from the first day. It happened too quickly to have been an accident. Men on trial afterwards spoke of a ‘great society’ that had organised it all, meeting in secret, though nobody has ever discovered whether it was real.

In Kent the spark was one man’s freedom. A knight of the King’s household, Sir Simon Burley, came to Gravesend and claimed that a man living in the town was his serf. He had the man locked up in Rochester Castle, and to understand why that mattered so much, you need to know what a serf was.

A serf, or villein, belonged to a manor. He was not a slave, but he was not free either. He could not leave the manor without his lord’s permission. He owed his lord days of unpaid work every year, ploughing and reaping the lord’s fields before he could see to his own. When his daughter married he paid a fee, and when he died his family paid another, often his best animal. His children were born serfs, and so were theirs.

All of this was written down. Every manor kept court rolls, long strips of parchment stitched end to end and rolled up tight, and on them the lord’s steward recorded the names of his serfs and what each of them owed. If you wanted to know whether a man was free, you looked at the rolls, so wherever the rebels went, they found the rolls and burned them.

Early in June the men of Kent took Rochester Castle with hardly a fight and let the prisoners go, Burley’s man among them. At Maidstone they chose a leader, a man called Wat Tyler, and broke open the Archbishop of Canterbury’s prison, where they found a priest called John Ball.

Almost nothing is known about Wat Tyler before that summer. His name suggests that he, or his father, laid roof tiles for a living, but nobody is sure even of that, or of where he came from. Some historians have guessed that he had been a soldier in France, because he knew so well how to lead men. What everybody agrees on is that he was quick and bold, and that within a few days thousands of people were doing what he said.

They marched to Canterbury and walked into the cathedral in the middle of the service. According to one chronicler, they told the monks to choose a new Archbishop, because the present one was a traitor and would soon be dead.

That Archbishop was Simon Sudbury. He was also Chancellor of England, the King’s chief minister, and it was Sudbury who had stood up in Parliament the winter before and asked for the third poll tax. Sudbury had another reason to fear the men of Kent. The priest they had let out of his prison at Maidstone was one of his own prisoners. The Archbishop had locked him up that spring for preaching without permission, and it was not the first time. His name was John Ball.

John Ball had been in trouble with the Church for twenty years. He had no parish of his own. He wandered the countryside preaching in churchyards and on village greens, wherever people would stop to listen, and what he preached made bishops very uneasy. He said that the rich had too much and the poor too little, and that God had never meant it to be so. He had been thrown into prison for it more than once, and each time he came out he started again.

On the twelfth of June the rebels of Kent camped on Blackheath, a wide open common on the high ground a few miles south-east of London. Imagine it that evening: the smoke of hundreds of cooking fires, tired feet, the noise of a crowd that has walked a long way, and the city spread out below them across the river.

John Ball stood up in front of them and preached. He began with a rhyme that people may well have known already.

‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’

To delve is to dig. To span is to spin wool. In the beginning, Ball said, when Adam dug the earth and Eve spun the thread, there were no lords and there were no serfs. God had made everyone alike. Serfdom had come afterwards, the work of wicked men, and now the time had come to throw it off.

It was a dangerous question. It was also a very simple one, and once it had been asked out loud in front of thousands of people, it could not be unasked.

We know what Ball said because a monk of St Albans Abbey called Thomas Walsingham wrote it down, and his own abbey was attacked by rebels that same week. Almost everything we know about the rising comes from men like him: monks, clerks, royal officials, and a French chronicler who spent his life among lords and kings. They were frightened and angry, and they were on the other side. The rebels left almost nothing in their own words, only a handful of short, puzzling letters in rhyme that were passed from hand to hand and that nobody has ever fully understood.

So when the chroniclers call the rebels a mob of drunken thieves, it helps to remember who was holding the pen. When they say the rebels did terrible things, it also helps to remember that some of them did.

The strangest thing about the rebels is that they loved the King. When they stopped travellers on the road, they asked them a question. ‘With whom hold you?’ The right answer was ‘With King Richard and the true commons.’ They did not believe the King was their enemy. They believed he had been surrounded by bad advisers, and that if they could only reach him and explain, he would put everything right, but the King was only fourteen years old.

King Richard was the son of the Black Prince, the great soldier of Crécy and Poitiers, who had died before he could become king. When King Richard’s grandfather, old King Edward the Third, died in 1377, the boy was crowned at the age of ten, and powerful uncles ran the kingdom around him. The most powerful of them was John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the richest man in England and the man the rebels hated most. That June he was far away in Scotland.

Now King Richard was in the Tower of London with his mother, his Archbishop, his Treasurer and a few hundred soldiers, watching smoke rise on the far side of the river.

On the morning of the thirteenth of June, which was the feast of Corpus Christi, he went down the Thames in the royal barge to meet the rebels at Rotherhithe. They were waiting on the bank in their thousands, and when they saw him they set up such a roar that his advisers took fright. The barge stayed out on the water. The King did not land, or was not allowed to, and after a little while the oarsmen turned it round and took him back to the Tower.

If the King would not come to the rebels, they would go to him.

London Bridge was the only bridge across the Thames, and in the middle of it was a drawbridge. That afternoon somebody on the city side let it down, and the men of Kent poured across. On the other side of London, somebody opened Aldgate to the men of Essex. Plenty of Londoners had grievances of their own, and a great many of them joined in.

One of the first places they went was the Savoy.

The Savoy was John of Gaunt’s palace on the Strand, beside the river, and it was said there was no finer house in England. The rebels set it on fire. They had made a rule among themselves that nothing was to be stolen, because they were not thieves, so they carried out the treasures and destroyed them instead. They smashed the silver plate and broke up the jewels and threw the pieces into the Thames. Tapestries and fine clothes were set on fire. According to one chronicler, a man caught hiding a silver cup inside his coat was thrown into the flames after it. Some barrels were rolled onto the fire in the belief that they were full of gold. They were full of gunpowder.

They went on to the Temple, where the lawyers lived and worked, and carried the lawyers’ books and papers out into the street and burned them. They broke open the prisons and let everybody out.

There was worse. In the Vintry, the riverside quarter where the wine merchants traded, rebels and Londoners together hunted down Flemish men and women. Weavers from Flanders had been invited to England by the old King and given special protection, and some Londoners had resented them for years. The rebels dragged a group of Flemings out of the church where they had taken shelter and killed them in the street, only because they were foreign.

By nightfall London was in the hands of the rebels, and the King sat in the Tower and watched it burn.

The next morning King Richard rode out to Mile End, a stretch of open fields a mile beyond the city wall to the east, where the men of Essex were waiting for him. They had brought with them a list of what they wanted, and now they put it to the King as a petition..

They asked that nobody in England should be a serf any longer. They asked to rent their land for fourpence an acre a year, paid in money, instead of paying with days of unpaid work. They asked to be free to buy and sell in any market in the country. They asked that no man should have to serve another except by his own agreement. They asked for a pardon for everything they had done.

King Richard said yes, and he said yes to all of it.

Clerks were set to work at once, writing out charters of freedom, each one sealed with the King’s own seal. Men from each village waited for theirs, and then, holding their parchments, many of them turned for home.

However, not everybody went. While the King was at Mile End, a crowd of rebels went back to the Tower, and this time the gates were not shut against them. They found Archbishop Sudbury in the chapel, where he had been praying. They found Sir Robert Hales, the Treasurer, who looked after the King’s money. They dragged both men out to Tower Hill and cut off their heads, and set the heads on poles above the gate of London Bridge.

King Richard could not go back to the Tower that night. The next day, Saturday the fifteenth of June, he went to Westminster Abbey and prayed at the shrine of Edward the Confessor. Then, in the afternoon, he rode out to Smithfield to meet Wat Tyler.

There are two Smithfields in London, and they are easy to muddle. East Smithfield lies beside the Tower, and it was there, thirty-two years earlier, that the plague dead of 1349 had been laid in their long rows. West Smithfield is on the other side of the city, just outside the old wall to the north-west. It was a wide, flat field where horses were sold on Fridays and where traitors were sometimes put to death, with the priory and hospital of St Bartholomew along one side.

So on a June afternoon, the sons and grandsons of the people who had buried the dead at one Smithfield came to stand on the other.

The rebels drew up in ranks on the west side of the field. The King and his party waited on the east side, in front of St Bartholomew’s. The Mayor of London, a fishmonger called William Walworth, rode across to fetch Tyler, and Tyler came over on a small horse with a dagger in his hand.

What happened next was written down by a chronicler who seems to have been there, or to have talked to somebody who was.

Tyler got down from his horse, half bent his knee, and took the King’s hand and shook it hard. ‘Brother,’ he said, ‘be of good comfort and joyful.’ Within a fortnight, he told King Richard, the commons would think better of him than ever, and they would be good companions.

Then he set out new demands, bigger than the ones at Mile End. No lord should have power over other men, and all people should be equal, except for the King. The Church’s wealth should be taken and shared among the people of each parish. There should be only one bishop in all England. There should be no more serfs anywhere, and every man should be free.

King Richard answered carefully. They should have everything he could fairly grant, he said, saving the rights of his crown.

Tyler was hot, the chronicler tells us. He called for a jug of water and rinsed out his mouth in front of the King, very rudely. Then he called for ale, drank a long draught, and climbed back onto his horse.

At that moment a young man from Kent in the King’s party said, loudly, that he knew this Wat Tyler, and that he was the greatest thief and robber in all Kent.

Tyler went for him with the dagger. Walworth rode in and tried to arrest him. Tyler struck at the Mayor, but Walworth was wearing armour under his gown and the blade did not go through. Walworth drew his own sword and cut Tyler across the neck and the head, and one of the King’s squires, usually named as Ralph Standish, ran him through.

Tyler turned his horse and rode a short way towards his own people, calling on them to avenge him. Then he fell to the ground.

Across the field the rebels saw it. Many of them had been archers in the French wars, and they drew their bows and aimed them at the King’s party.

King Richard put spurs to his horse and rode out towards them, across the open ground.

The chroniclers remember his words differently. In one account he calls out, ‘Sirs, will you shoot your King? I will be your captain.’ In another he tells them they shall have from him all that they seek, and that they must follow him.

And they did. The rebels lowered their bows and followed a fourteen-year-old boy on a horse out of Smithfield to the open fields at Clerkenwell.

While they were there, Walworth galloped back into the city and raised the armed men of the London wards, and before long the rebels found themselves surrounded, penned in, the chronicler says, like sheep.

Then Walworth went back to Smithfield to finish what he had started. Wat Tyler was no longer lying on the grass. His friends had carried him into the hospital of St Bartholomew and put him to bed in the master’s own room. Walworth had him brought out into the middle of Smithfield and cut off his head, and carried it on a pole to the King in the fields at Clerkenwell.

When the rebels saw it, they knew it was over. They went down on their knees among the wheat and begged for mercy. They could have been cut down where they stood, but the King would not allow it. He let them go home, and sent two knights to lead the men of Kent safely back through London and over the bridge.

Walworth was knighted before the day was out. Tyler’s head was later set on London Bridge.

For the men walking home, it looked as though they had won. They had their charters. They had the King’s word, given twice, but it only lasted about a week.

On the twenty-second of June, at Waltham in Essex, a group of rebels came to ask the King to confirm what he had promised at Mile End. According to Walsingham, Richard gave them their answer to their faces. ‘Villeins ye are still, and villeins ye shall remain.’ Promises made under threat, he said, counted for nothing. At the beginning of July the charters were cancelled.

Then came the judges. The new Chief Justice, Sir Robert Tresilian, went through Essex and Hertfordshire trying rebels, and the King rode with him. Out in the eastern counties, where the rising had spread as far as Norfolk, the Bishop of Norwich put it down with armed men. Thomas Baker of Fobbing, who had faced the commissioner at Brentwood, was hanged. John Ball was caught at Coventry and brought to St Albans, and there, in the middle of July, with the King in the town, he was hanged, drawn and quartered.

The surviving records name around a hundred and fifty men put to death in the months that followed, and there were very likely more. In December the King and Parliament granted a pardon to almost everyone else, and the country went quiet.

The rebels had lost. Yet the poll tax was dropped, and it was more than a hundred years before an English government dared to try another. Serfdom, which Richard had refused to end, went on dying anyway. Over the next hundred years or so, lords found it easier to take rent in money from free tenants than to force unpaid work out of people who could simply walk off down the road. Nobody ever signed an end to it. It faded away, one manor at a time, until the rolls had no serfs left to record.

If you go to West Smithfield today, you will find the great Victorian market halls, with the City’s dragons standing guard over the gateways. Across the road is the long wall of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, which has stood on that spot since 1123 and is still a hospital. On that wall there are memorials. One remembers William Wallace, the Scottish leader, put to death at Smithfield in 1305. Another remembers the Protestants burned here in the reign of Queen Mary. The newest, a carved stone put up in 2015, says that at this place Wat Tyler, John Ball and the representatives of the Great Rising met King Richard, and that the King agreed to what they asked, and afterwards went back on his word.

The boy who turned his horse towards the archers that afternoon would be king for another eighteen years. He never forgot Smithfield, and neither did the men who had watched him there. What he made of it is the next story.

The quay at Melcombe.

Melcombe was a small port in the county of Dorset, on the south coast of England. It was situated on the eastern side of a narrow harbour mouth, and across the water sat its rival, Weymouth. The population of the two towns hated one another, but today the two are one town and nobody remembers the quarrel. In 1348 they were separate places with separate quays.

Ships came from Bordeaux in France and from the Channel Islands and from other English ports, and almost every week, so when two ships came alongside before Midsummer, nobody thought anything of it. One of them had sailed from Bristol. The other had come from Gascony, the English-held wine country in the south-west of France, and crucially one of the sailors aboard was unwell.

That was not unusual. Men often stepped off a ship after weeks at sea with bad water and bad food inside them, and they might be sick for a day or two and then be fine.

A Franciscan friar at King’s Lynn, writing his chronicle some years afterwards, set the story down. Two ships had come in, and a sailor had carried something infectious with him from Gascony. And the men of Melcombe, he wrote, were the first in England to become ill, and those first Melcombe men died within three days.

That is the story as it has been told for six hundred years, and there is a plaque on the quay at Weymouth today that commemorates it. But the friar was writing years afterwards, and he was not the only man writing about this strange sickness that had appeared in England. Other chroniclers said the sickness came ashore first at Southampton, or Bristol, and they gave the date as July, or August, or as late as the end of September. One modern historian has been through every royal and manorial account that survives and found that not one of them mentions pestilence anywhere in England before October.

Nobody was keeping a record at the time, because nobody knew yet that there was anything yet to record. What everyone agrees on is that in the second half of 1348 plague came to England and it arrived on a ship.

It was not called the Black Death then. That name was invented in Scandinavia two centuries later and only became common in English in the eighteen hundreds. To the people who lived through it, it was the pestilence.

To understand what had come ashore, you have to go a very long way to the east of England, and back ten years.

In the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains, in what is now Kyrgyzstan, there was a trading settlement in the Chu valley, on one of the great roads that carried silk and silver west towards the Black Sea. In the years 1338 and 1339 its people began to die in numbers far beyond anything normal, and their graves were cut and their headstones carved in the Syriac script they used. One of those stones can still be read. It says that this is the tomb of Sanmaq, and that he died of pestilence.

For six hundred years nobody could prove what had killed Sanmaq. Historians argued about it, and most of them said the sickness must have begun in China. Then in 2022, a team of historians and geneticists took ancient DNA from the teeth of seven people buried in those graveyards, and found the plague bacterium in three of them. Its name is Yersinia pestis. The strain they recovered turned out to be the direct ancestor of the plague that swept the world in the years that followed.

The disease lives naturally in wild rodents, and in the Tian Shan the rodents that carry it are marmots, fat grass-eating creatures that whistle at each other across the high slopes. Something in those years pushed it out of the marmot burrows and into people. Once it was in people, it travelled the way people travelled, which by then meant everywhere.

The plague reached the Crimea in 1346, when Caffa, a Genoese trading town was under siege. There is a famous story, that the besieging army caught the plague and flung their own dead over the walls with siege engines. The story may or may not be true, as it was told by an Italian lawyer who was not there. What is certain is that the Genoese ships sailed home, that plague came ashore at Messina in Sicily in October 1347, and that by the following summer it had gone through Italy, southern France and Spain and was killing people in Bordeaux and Paris.

England knew the plague was coming. That is easy to forget, because we imagine that the pestilence arrived like weather – out of nowhere. News of the plague arrived via merchants and pilgrims returning from Rome. The King’s envoys at Avignon wrote to the Pope in May 1348 that the English embassy would come at Michaelmas unless the epidemic prevented it.

By high summer the bishops were writing to each other in real fear. On the twenty-eighth of July, William Zouche, Archbishop of York, told his officials that nobody could still be ignorant of what was coming, and ordered processions and prayers twice a week in every church in his diocese. Three weeks later Ralph of Shrewsbury, Bishop of Bath and Wells, warned his clergy that a catastrophic pestilence had reached a neighbouring kingdom, and that unless they prayed without ceasing, it would reach England.

That was all they could do. There was no way to close a coastline that had a hundred harbours and lived by trade, so all they could do was pray and go on with their lives. Meanwhile, King Edward III knew what the pestilence could do. It had already killed his daughter.

Princess Joan was fourteen, King Edward and Philippa’s second daughter, and she had left England in the spring to be married to Pedro, heir to Castile. She travelled with four ships, a hundred men-at-arms, and a wedding wardrobe designed to impress the Spanish court, along with plate, saddles, tapestries, and a gown of cloth of gold. When her fleet reached Bordeaux they were warned not to land, because the plague was in the town. They landed anyway.

Within a fortnight her people began to die. The knight commanding her escort died on the twentieth of August. Princess Joan was moved out to a village in the countryside for cleaner air, but the plague followed her there, and she died on the second of September, having never met the boy she was going to marry. Her body was never brought home.

King Edward wrote to her intended father-in-law in October. It is a strange letter, because you can see a father and a king fighting each other inside the same sentences. He calls Death a destroyer who takes young and old alike and levels rich and poor together. He says no fellow human being should be surprised that he was desolated by grief, since he is human too. Yet this was also the king who had stood outside Calais just over a year earlier, deciding whether to hang six burghers.

So what was bubonic plague?

It is a bacterium that travels in the bite of a flea. Fleas live on rats, and rats lived in every barn and ship and thatched roof in Europe, but fleas live very comfortably on people too, and in their clothing and bedding. The old picture of a black rat scuttling down a mooring rope off an infected ship is probably too simple. The pestilence moved faster than rats move, and it kept moving through communities across the winter. In all likelihood the infection passed from person to person in a household via the fleas and lice that everyone carried on their own bodies.

The flea bite raised a lump. Within a day or two the glands in the groin, the armpit or the neck swelled into a hard and agonising swelling the size of an egg. That swelling was called a bubo, and it is where the word bubonic comes from. Then came fever, thirst, black and purple blotches under the skin where the small blood vessels had burst, and, near the end, a wandering of the mind that the chroniclers called madness. It took three days, sometimes fewer. A man could be well at breakfast and dead before the same time the next day.

There was a second form, worse. If the infection reached the lungs, the sufferer coughed blood and could pass the sickness straight to anyone close enough to breathe it in. That form of plague killed almost everyone who caught it. How much of the mortality it accounts for is still argued over, and over the winter of 1348 into 1349, England was devastated.

What did people think was happening?

The medical faculty at Paris investigated and reported that a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the sign of Aquarius three years earlier had corrupted the air, and that the corruption was now moving about the world in the air. If bad air was the cause, then smells were the defence. People carried herbs and posies, burned juniper and rosemary indoors, lit fires in the street. And since it was widely observed that the men who cleaned the latrines never seemed to catch it, some took the opposite view and stood over the cesspits on purpose, breathing deeply. Doctors advised against baths, which opened the pores and let the badness in.

None of it worked, though the herbs at least made a sickroom easier to sit in.

In any event, most people believed that the bad air had been sent by God.

This sounds odd, given modern medical understanding, but the men and women of 1348 lived inside a world that made sense as everything was due to the will of God. All this suffering had a purpose, God’s purpose. Then the pestilence came, and it took the wicked and the good, the old and the newborn, the drunkard in the ditch and the nun in the infirmary, and it took the priest who came to hear the confession of the dying and the gravedigger who buried them both. If a merciful God ruled the world, then why was he inflicting such suffering, and that question tore through Europe.

In Kilkenny, a Franciscan friar named John Clyn kept writing his annals while his brothers died around him, eight of them in a single day in March. At the end of his entry for the year he wrote that he was leaving parchment behind, in case anyone should still be alive to carry the work on. Another hand added a note underneath, later, recording that the man who wrote this had died. Nobody filled in the parchment.

From Dorset the pestilence spread along the coast and inland, following the roads and the rivers and the carters and the pack-ponies. Bristol was struck hard and early. Henry Knighton, a canon at the abbey in Leicester who wrote a long chronicle of these years, said that at Bristol almost the entire population died, and that most of the sick died within three days.

The plague reached London in the autumn of 1348. Robert of Avesbury, a clerk at Lambeth and the most reliable eyewitness the city has, dates the first visible signs to All Saints’ Day on the first of November. London then held perhaps sixty thousand people inside its walls and suburbs, and it had no more idea of what to do than Melcombe had. Between February and May of 1349 the epidemic was at its worst. Then the plague spread north and west, into the Midlands, into Wales, into the north country, into Ireland and Scotland, and by 1350 there was hardly a parish that had been spared.

The Scots, according to canon Knighton, watched England suffering and thought their moment had come. They gathered an army in Selkirk Forest, laughing about the foul death of the English, and while they were mustering, the pestilence came into the camp. The camp broke and the Scots ran for home, carrying the infection into Lowland Scotland. However canon Henry Knighton was English, and it is exactly the story an English chronicler would enjoy telling, so his account should be read accordingly.

Historians who have counted parish records and manor rolls and lists of tenants now think England had roughly five million people before the pestilence and something over two and a half million after it. On some manors the losses were lower. On others, in Hampshire and Wiltshire and Oxfordshire, two-thirds of the tenants were gone. It would be three hundred years before the country held as many people as it had held in the spring of 1348.

Numbers on that scale stop meaning very much. So look instead at just one letter.

In January 1349, Ralph of Shrewsbury, the same bishop who had written the warning in August, sat down at the manor house at Wiveliscombe, where he had gone to sit out the crisis, and wrote to every priest in his diocese. His parishes, he told them, were being left with no parson and no priest to care for anybody, and no replacements could be found. Some of the priests would not go near the sick, for fear of infection, and the result was that people were dying without confession, which to a fourteenth-century Christian meant dying alone and unprepared before God.

So the bishop, a careful and conservative man and a doctor of canon law, wrote something that would have been unthinkable eighteen months earlier. If no priest could be got, the dying should confess to any layman. And if no man was to be had, then to a woman.

The Church took a terrible blow. Across the English dioceses something close to half the parish clergy had died, which is not surprising, since their work was to sit at the bedsides of the dying. John Stratford, the Archbishop of Canterbury, died at his Sussex manor at Mayfield in August 1348, before the pestilence even reached Kent, but of what, nobody knows. The man chosen to replace him, John Ufford, caught the plague and died in May 1349 before he could even be consecrated. The man chosen to replace him, Thomas Bradwardine, a mathematician born in Chichester and one of the finest minds in Europe, was consecrated at the papal court in Avignon in July, came home, and was dead of plague before the end of August. Three archbishops in twelve months.

In London, the situation was getting desperate. They were running out of room to bury the dead.

The churchyards were full, so Ralph Stratford, the Bishop of London and kinsman of the dead archbishop, bought land at East Smithfield outside the walls, near the Tower, and a second graveyard was opened by Walter Manny, a soldier and a friend of the King. Over the centuries since, it has always been assumed that the dead were simply dumped into great pits, but in the 1980s, archaeologists excavated the East Smithfield ground, and found something else. There were mass trenches, and in places the dead lay five deep. They had not been thrown in. They had been laid out in rows, side by side, each one placed.

In one of those graves lay a woman with a hundred and eighty-one coins still in the purse at her waist. Nobody had taken them. It is very rare to find coins in a medieval burial, and the likeliest reason they were there is that nobody was willing to undress her. She went into the ground with everything she had.

Elsewhere in Europe, fear turned outward. Through the winter of 1348 and the spring of 1349 the story spread along the Rhine that the Jews had poisoned the wells, and Jewish communities in Strasbourg, Basel, Mainz and dozens of other towns were murdered by their neighbours in numbers running into thousands. Pope Clement VI had already issued a bull that July forbidding it, and issued another, and pointed out that Jews were dying of the pestilence exactly like everybody else. He was ignored. In England the same horror did not happen, for a bleak reason. Fifty-eight years earlier King Edward I had expelled the Jews from the country altogether, so there was nobody left to accuse.

What England did see, briefly, was the flagellants. Around Michaelmas in 1349 a company of penitents crossed from Flanders, Zeeland and Holland, and appeared in London, stripped to the waist, wearing caps marked front and back with a red cross, walking in single file and beating their bare backs with knotted three-tailed scourges, all of them chanting. They believed that if they punished themselves hard enough God might be satisfied and lift the pestilence. Londoners came out and watched, but did not join in, and after a while the penitents went home. It was the only time the flagellant movement ever reached England.

The plague loosened its grip on England through the winter of 1349, though it came back in 1361, and again in 1369, and kept coming back for three hundred years.

What it left behind was quiet.

Henry Knighton wrote about the fields. Sheep and cattle wandered through standing crops with nobody to drive them out. In one pasture, he said, more than five thousand sheep died and lay rotting, and no beast and no bird would touch them. Harvests stood ripe and were not cut, because there was nobody to cut them, and a reaper who had once worked for a few pence a day could now name his price and get it.

And some places never came back at all. At Tusmore in Oxfordshire every one of the tenants died. Years afterwards the landowner, Roger de Cottisford, petitioned the King, and a royal enquiry set it down. Before the pestilence Tusmore had been fully inhabited, since the death of those men it had been empty, it remained empty, and it was expected to remain empty in future. He was given leave to enclose the ground and make a park of it. There is a lake there now, and a house, but no village.

That flat little phrase, before the pestilence, began to turn up everywhere. It became a legal date. Because here is what the men who governed England noticed, once the epidemic passed. There was as much land as there had ever been, and as many sheep and as many mills and as much wool, but there were only half as many people to work it all.

A man who owned nothing but his own labour was suddenly worth something. Ploughmen asked for more and got it. Servants walked off manors where their families had worked for two hundred years and hired themselves out down the road for double. Landlords who had spent their lives being obeyed found themselves haggling with their own peasants.

So in June 1349, with the dead still being buried, the King and his Council issued the Ordinance of Labourers, and in 1351 Parliament turned it into the Statute of Labourers. Every able-bodied man and woman under sixty who held no land must work for anyone who asked. No one might refuse work. No one might leave a master for a better offer. And wages were fixed by law at what they had been before the pestilence.

It was an attempt to hold the world still with a piece of parchment. It did not work, and it was never going to, but it was enforced hard enough to be hated, and it was remembered. The men who came up the road to London in the summer of 1381, thirty-two years later, with a list of things they wanted from a boy king, were the sons and grandsons of the people who had done the burying in 1349.

If you go to the town of Weymouth today you will find a seafront, a long pale beach, gulls, chips, and the harbour full of little boats. On Custom House Quay, where the wool used to be loaded, there is a plaque on the wall. It records, in a few lines that most people walk straight past on their way to the ferry, that the Black Death came into England here in 1348.

And in London, east of the Tower, under the ground where the Royal Mint used to stand, the woman with the purse is still lying in her row, with the others laid out beside her.

019 The Longbow

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Behind a church, on a Sunday afternoon, a man picked up a bow that was taller than he was and went off to practise. The bow was a longbow.

It was made from a single piece of yew, and it was extremely powerful. The arrows it fired were a yard long, and tipped with a slim iron point, and made for one purpose only – to go through armour.

To bend this incredibly powerful bow the archer did not pull with his arm. He laid his whole body into it, pushing with the left hand and hauling with the right, and the effort came up through his back and his shoulders. The men who did this could do it time and time again, perhaps ten times in a minute and for as long as their arrows lasted.

How did these men become strong enough to draw those bows? The law said that a free man of a certain amount of property must keep a bow and arrows in his house, and be ready to bring and use them when the king called, which meant he had to know how to shoot, and be strong enough to do so. So archery practice became a Sunday afternoon pastime. In villages all over England, in fields behind churchyards and wherever else there was room, generation after generation of ordinary men grew crooked shoulders and thickened arm bones and became incredibly strong and expert in the use of the longbow.

This was England in the 1330s. A country that had spent fifty years fighting in the mountains of Wales and the hills of Scotland, whilst in France, the finest heavy cavalry and mounted knights in Europe had ruled every battlefield they had ridden onto for three hundred years, and who regarded foot soldiers as the lowest sort of soldier, but they had never yet encountered the English longbow.

Yet what the English archers could do was not a secret. News of them had crossed the water to France again and again, but it made no difference because the men who ran France were knights, and a knight thought that battles were decided by the charge.

The king who would prove otherwise was a complete surprise. His father, King Edward the Second, had been a disaster: beaten by the Scots at Bannockburn, ruled by his favourites, despised by his barons, and finally pushed off the throne by his own wife. Queen Isabella came back from France with an army and a lover, a Marcher lord named Roger Mortimer, and between them they took the crown and gave it to her fourteen year old son. In September 1327 the old king died in Berkeley Castle. He was almost certainly murdered, but nothing has ever proved.

For three years Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer ruled England in the boy’s name. However, Scotland was a problem. They could not beat the Scots, so they paid them instead, recognising Robert Bruce as king north of the Tweed in a treaty people were calling shameful before the ink was dry. Effectively they gave Scotland away.

In October 1330 the young King Edward took his kingdom back. Nottingham Castle sits on rock, and under the rock there is a passage that comes up inside. A small band of men went up it in the dark and took Roger Mortimer in his room, and he was hanged in November.

King Edward the Third was seventeen, and what he wanted was everything his grandfather had wanted. King Edward the First had hammered at Scotland for a decade, and his grandson picked that hammer back up to continue.

He did it carefully, and at first through somebody else. Robert Bruce had died in 1329 leaving a son of five, and the Scots who had lost when Bruce won had been living in England ever since, calling themselves the disinherited and asking anybody who would listen for their lands back. They were listened to by Edward Balliol.

In August 1332 he landed in Fife with fifteen hundred men and marched on Perth, and the Scottish army that came to meet him was ten times that size. Its commander, the Earl of Mar, had been made Regent nine days earlier and was so certain of winning that he set no proper watch, and in the night the English crossed the river below him unopposed. In the morning the Scots army meet the English at Dupplin Moor. The English archers shot into them from both flanks, and the army could not go forward and could not get out or go back. Mar was killed and Balliol was crowned at Scone in September. However, before the year was out, he was surprised at Annan and chased back over the border.

In 1333 King Edward III came north himself to besiege Berwick, the Scots came down to relieve it, and the two armies met at Halidon Hill.

Bannockburn, nineteen years earlier, had been a disaster for the English. The Scots had stood in their schiltrons, tight blocks of men with long spears, hedgehogs of iron that no horse would go near, and the English had thrown cavalry at them until there was nothing left to throw. At Halidon the schiltrons formed up again and came on across boggy ground and up a slope, but this time the archers were placed where they could shoot into them, and they did. The blocks fell apart before they ever reached the English line.

In Scotland it was noticed. In France it was filed away as something that had happened a long way off, to people who did not matter.

Then King Edward pressed too hard, as he often did, and made Balliol hand over the eight counties of south-eastern Scotland, which finished Balliol in the eyes of every Scot alive and sent the followers of Bruce across the sea to ask France for help. France gave it. That, more than any claim to any throne, is what turned England and France against each other.

Although there was already a claim to the French throne. The King of France had died in 1328 without a son, and King Edward’s mother was a French king’s daughter, so he could argue a thin case that the crown could be allowed to pass through a woman, and he would raise the case when it was useful and drop it when it wasn’t.

A claim a king picks up and puts down a claim is not the reason he goes to war. The real reason was wool. English wool was the best in Europe and it went across the Channel to the weaving towns of Flanders, which depended on it for their living. But the lords who ruled those towns looked to France, and it was the lords Edward meant to hurt. In 1336 he stopped the wool. All of it.

He hurt the towns instead. Looms stood still, weavers had no work and no bread, and the townspeople rose against their lords. Within two years a merchant of Ghent named Jacob van Artevelde was governing much of Flanders in all but name, and the Flemish, thrown into a fight with France and surrounded by enemies, looked across the water for a friend. England was delighted to be asked.

So when King Edward asked Parliament for money he did not have to argue. The wool merchants wanted the war because their trade depended on it, and the knights of the shires wanted it because there was profit and ransom in it. Parliament said yes.

In May 1337 King Philip declared King Edward’s lands in Gascony forfeit, that autumn King Edward renounced his homage, and the war began. No treaty ever ended it. English kings went on calling themselves kings of France, on paper, until the first day of 1801.

King Philip’s answer was the sea. Stop the English crossing and there would be no war on French soil. He gathered every ship in France, hired galleys from Genoa, and in Normandy men began talking cheerfully about doing to England what William the Conqueror had done. The fleets met in June 1340 in the crowded harbour of Sluys. Sea fighting then was land fighting on unsteady ground: ships lashed together, grappled and boarded, nine hours of it, watched from the shore by Flemish townsmen who made sure that any Frenchman who swam for it did not get far. Jean Froissart, the chronicler who wrote down more of this war than anyone, said battles at sea are worse than battles on land because there is nowhere to run.

The French admirals had been told they would lose their heads if the English got across. They fought well and were beaten anyway, and the Channel belonged to England.

What followed was a lesson in the difference between winning a battle and winning a war. King Edward landed, joined his allies, and besieged the walled city of Tournai. He could not get in. The city held, and while it held, everything behind him came apart. The great tax he had raised on wool brought in a fraction of what he had promised his allies, and men who are not paid stop being allies. King Philip brought his army up in September, looked at the situation, and refused to fight, because he could see that King Edward’s coalition was falling to pieces without any help from him.

Unexpectedly, the fighting stopped with a family visit. King Edward’s mother-in-law, Jeanne of Valois, was King Philip’s sister, and she was a nun. She came out of her convent, went to her brother and then to her son-in-law in his tent, and asked them both to stop. On the twenty-fifth of September 1340 they signed a truce and everybody went home. The first invasion of France had achieved nothing at all.

It took six years before King Edward could try again, and the six years went on finding the money, which came, as English money did, out of sheep. Every sack of wool that left the country was taxed on its way through the port. Kinng Edward revived a system called the Staple to control it, in which a favoured group of merchants held the sole right to export through one town of his choosing. He taxed what passed through and they lent him money in return for being favoured, which Parliament disliked intensely, because a king with his own income is a king who does not need to ask.

However, in the spring of 1346 a French army came down into Gascony and laid siege to the town of Aiguillon, and the English commander there was writing home for help. Parliament agreed to the raising of money for the men. But the army that gathered was something new: not a feudal levy, the old system where lords owed the king so many days of service by the men on their land. This was a paid force of chosen men. Twenty-four hundred cavalry, thousands of archers, and a body of other foot soldiers boarded ships to cross the Channel, and on the twelfth of July 1346 the army came ashore, unopposed, at St Vaast on the Normandy coast.

Whether King Edward ever seriously meant to take Paris is argued about to this day, and there is a good case that he had chosen Normandy in advance precisely because it would force King Philip to come out and fight him somewhere in the north. What is certain is that he went east and he went fast. Caen fell in July, with the army burning its way through the Norman countryside until it was close enough for people on the walls of Paris to see the smoke rising up from the villages.

And then the whole strength of France came upon King Edward. An army perhaps three times the size of Edward’s, every knight in the kingdom, gathering north of the city. King Philip sent a message inviting the King of England to choose which bank of the river he would like to be destroyed on.

King Edward turned and ran for the coast. Sixty miles in four days, with the French army marching on a line beside him, and keeping between him and the crossings.

Ahead lay the river Somme. It is a name that would become well known again, but for different reasons, and in 1916. In 1346 the river ran out to the sea through wide marshes, crossable only at bridges and causeways, and every bridge and causeway was broken or held by the French. Four times the English tried to cross and four times they were turned back. Part of the French army reached Amiens behind them. Now there was the river in front, the sea on the left, and the French army closing in on the right.

And then the English were saved by a prisoner. Somewhere in the countryside the English army had picked up a Frenchman who knew the coast, and he told them, in exchange for his freedom, about a ford near the river’s mouth called Blanchetaque: a long shallow crossing over hard sand that could be used for a few hours at low tide, but at no other time.

The next day the English army was on the move before dawn and they reached the ford at sunrise, but the tide was in, and they had to wait for the tide to go out.

When the water finally dropped, King Edward ordered his men to cross. On the opposite side, three and a half thousand Frenchmen held the far bank, and the knights of Picardy came out to meet the English in the shallows in chain mail, which is a terrible thing to be wearing when you fall over in water. Also, from the French side, Genoese crossbowmen shot into the English column as it tried to cross, holding it up. But then on the English bank, the archers, armed with longbows, came into range and shot the crossbowmen off the bank. French horsemen came down into the water to drive the archers back, and English knights waded up through their own men to meet them, and for a while the fighting was in the river itself, in a foot of water and moving sand, with more English crossing behind all the time. Then the French broke and ran for Abbeville, and by the time King Philip arrived the tide was in again and the English army were across.

Up to the ford, King Edward had been running, but once he was on the far bank he stopped running. He regrouped and rested and fed his army. Then the English army marched through the forest of Crécy and assembled on a slope, waiting for King Philip and the French army to come to them.

The next morning, on Saturday the twenty-sixth of August 1346, King Edward drew up about eleven thousand men on the open downland outside the village of Crécy. He ensured that the wood was behind them, so that if the battle went badly there was somewhere for them to make a last stand. The English king then rode along the line on a small horse with a white stick in his hand, and wearing crimson and gold over his armour, and he asked his men to look after his honour. Then he told them all to sit down, eat and rest so they would be fresh for when the French arrived.

Then the French army arrived, but it was tired.

King Philip had begun the day by sending out four knights to see what the English were doing. When they came back and told him the English had stopped running and meant to fight, he gave the order to halt, close up the army, and attack in the morning.

But nobody obeyed the order. The roads from Abbeville were thick with men who had been chasing King Edward and his army for weeks and they were not going to be told to wait another night in case he slipped away again. Those at the back pushed the ones in front, and the ones in front could not stop, and the whole enormous army poured up to within sight of the English lines and stood there in the late afternoon, tired, unfed and in disarray.

At the head of the French were the Genoese crossbowmen. The crossbow is a fine weapon. It punches harder than a longbow, it can be aimed by a man with little training, but it is slow, because after every shot the string must be hauled back with a hook or a windlass. Crossbowmen normally sheltered behind a pavise, a tall shield propped on the ground whilst they reloaded, but the shields were somewhere in the baggage train, miles back down the road.

Not unreasonably, the Genoese said that they had marched all day under the weight of their weapons and were tired and in no state to fight, but the Count of Alençon, the French king’s brother, who had made the journey on a horse, said something cutting about hiring scoundrels who fall away the moment there is work to be done, and sent them forward.

As they threaded through the horsemen the sky went dark and a short heavy rainstorm came over, soaking the crossbow strings, which, now wet, stretched. The English archers, so the story goes, had taken their strings off and put them under their hats to keep them dry. When the storm cleared, the sun, now low in the sky, was at the backs of the English and in the faces of the French and Genoese crossbowmen.

The crossbowmen shouted, advanced, shouted again, advanced again, and then shot. Their bolts fell short.

The English lines, however, didn’t make a sound. On the army’s flanks six to seven thousand archers took one step forward, drew their longbows and let fly a storm of arrows. They did not fall short.

In minutes thousands of Genoese crossbowmen were killed, and the survivors turned and ran back into the ranks of French cavalry waiting behind them. King Philip, watching his own front line dissolve, shouted at his knights to kill the scoundrels who were blocking the road.

So the flower of French chivalry rode down its own crossbowmen with swords, and in doing so came inside the deadly range of the English archers, and so another storm of arrows fell on them.

After that it stopped being a battle. Squadron after squadron of men came up into the arrow storm. Horses screamed and reared with arrows in them, men in mail going down under the flailing hooves, and behind them more men riding forward into the same place because they could not see and would not stop. Welsh and Cornish foot soldiers slipped out between the ranks of archers with long knives and went among the fallen, killing earls and barons and knights on the ground. King Edward was furious about it afterwards. A live nobleman was worth a fortune in ransom and a dead one was worth nothing, and as far as he was concerned, a great deal of money was thrown away in the mud that evening.

Among the dead was the King of Bohemia, who was blind. He had come to fight for King Philip, and when he understood how the day was going he asked his knights to tie their bridles to his so that he could strike one blow with his own hand. They did it. The next morning the bodies were found still tied together.

The French charges went on after dark, men groping forward through the night to strike their blow, and being killed for it, because the English were in no mood to take prisoners whatever their king wanted. When the fighting finally stopped, King Philip of France had sixty knights left around him, an arrow wound, and a dead horse. One of his commanders took his bridle and led him off the field by force, on the sound principle that a live king can fight another day. King Philip reached Amiens the next morning with five barons.

The next day, Sunday, there was a fog. King Edward sent out a strong force to see what was in front of him, and he found the rest of the French army, the columns still marching up from Rouen and Beauvais who had not heard that there had been a battle. They were destroyed piecemeal in the mist. Froissart was told that more foot soldiers from the French towns died that Sunday morning than in the whole of Saturday’s fighting.

Then the English army marched north, through Montreuil and Étaples and Boulogne and the forest of Hardelot, and on the fourth of September they arrived in Calais.

Calais was a nest of privateers. It was the port that had fitted out the raiders who had preyed on English shipping and burned English coastal towns, and King Edward had wanted it for years, but it was also a walled town with the sea on one side and marsh on the others, held by a garrison under an experienced soldier called Jean de Vienne, who had no intention of opening the town gates.

The English longbowmen had decimated an army in an afternoon, but they could not knock a hole in a stone wall. King Edward tried the walls more than once, from the land and from the sea, and failed, so the army sat down outside and waited for the people inside to run out of food. That would take eleven months.

In the meantime they built a town of their own and called it Villeneuve-la-Hardie. Timber houses laid out in streets, with market halls, so that an army could live through a winter in the mud. They dragged up bombards, the early cannon, which were loud, but otherwise ineffective. They also drove lines of piles into the sea bed so that French supply boats could not creep out along the coast under the cover of darkness.

And the army stayed. Through the autumn, through the winter, through the spring, through the following summer. In that time, the English soldiers wanted to go home, and they came close to mutiny, but they held.

The Scots had promised France that they would help, and in October 1346, with King Edward stuck outside Calais, King David the Second of Scotland brought an army over the border, but the English had expected it. He was met and beaten at Neville’s Cross, just outside Durham, and taken prisoner, and spent the next eleven years in England until an enormous ransom was raised for him.

Meanwhile inside Calais, food was running out, and Jean de Vienne put out the people who could not fight and could not stop eating: the old, the sick, the women, the children, about seventeen hundred of them, driven out of the gates into the open ground between the walls and the English lines. King Edward would not let them through. They had what they could carry and then they had nothing, and they began to die where they sat, in sight of both armies. Then he changed his mind and let them pass, and they were fed and sent on their way.

Months later it happened again, but this time those people stayed under the walls until they were dead.

By the summer of 1347 the people still inside had eaten the horses and the dogs and the rats. Jean de Vienne wrote to his king to say so, and to say that when those were gone there would be nothing left to eat but each other. The letter got out through the English lines and to King Philip, and in July King Philip finally came with an army, and camped within sight of the town, but he did not attack. He thought about what to do for a few days, and let it be known that he preferred to be careful. Then he took his army away again.

The men on the walls of Calais watched their king leave and that was the end. On the third of August they opened the gates.

King Edward, after eleven months in a hut in the mud, was in no mood to be generous. He said he would spare the town if six of its leading citizens came out to him bareheaded and barefoot in their shirts with ropes round their necks, carrying the town keys. They were to be executed as he pleased.

Six of them came. The chronicle names the first as Eustache de Saint-Pierre.

King Edward ordered them beheaded. His own commanders argued with him and told him plainly that history would remember it, but he would not be moved. Then, Froissart the chronicler says, Queen Philippa, who had followed him to the war and was expecting a child, went down on her knees in front of the whole company and begged for their lives. He gave them to her. Whether the two of them had arranged the scene beforehand is a question that has been asked for six hundred years, and most historians now think they probably had. It is also possible that a man who had been cold and angry for eleven months needed a way to stop being angry without losing face, and his wife knew it.

The burghers lived. The rest of the town did not do so well. Almost the whole French population was turned out and Calais was resettled with English families, a wool port and a garrison town on French soil, and it stayed in English hands for two hundred and eleven years.

Then, in the summer of 1348 a ship arrived on the Dorset coast carrying something that no wall and no bowman could stop. The plague.

018 Two Men From Every Town

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The fire had been burning in the church since first light, and a man stood beside it and watched the iron get hotter and hotter. The man had eaten nothing for three days. He had heard mass that morning, and sworn before God that he had not done it. Then the priest sprinkled holy water over the coals and asked God to make the truth plain.

A man had been found dead on the road below the village that spring, and the dead man’s brother had stood up in the county court and named the man for it, but there was no proof either way. So the question of guilt had been given to God.

When the iron glowed red hot, it would be put into the man’s bare hand, and he would carry it three paces across the flagstones and set it down. Then his terribly burned hand would be bound at once and the linen sealed. Nobody would touch it for three days, and on the third day, the priest would break the seal, unwind the bandage and look at the wound. If the burn was clean and beginning to heal, God had spoken for the man and he was innocent. If the wound was swollen and weeping, God had spoken against him, and he would hang for murder.

The ordeal was called the judgement of God, and for centuries it was how a serious accusation ended in England when there was no convincing evidence either one way or another, and it was one man’s word against another. There were other forms of the ordeal. A man could be lowered on the end of a rope into a pool of blessed water, and if he sank the water had accepted him and he was innocent. But if he floated, it had rejected him and he was guilty. And there was trial by battle, which the Normans brought over, in which two men fought until one of them could not stand, on the belief that God would strengthen the honest man and weaken the guilty.

None of this left much room for arguing about law, or proof, or justice, but then a king offered people something else.

King Henry the Second, the red-haired, restless Frenchman who spent thirty-five years putting England back in order, had built a system of royal courts and sent his judges into the countryside to hold them. But how to get people to use them. He could not simply order men to bring their quarrels to him, because the great lords had held courts of their own for generations and their right to do so was ancient and untouchable. So he did not order. He advertised.

The advertisement was the jury.

Henry did not invent the jury. It began as a tool of government rather than of justice. A king could call local men together and put them on oath to tell the truth about anything that touched his own interests, which is how William the Conqueror found out what England was worth when he ordered the Domesday survey. Twelve men from a neighbourhood could say who held which field, and be made to swear to it.

What King Henry offered was this. A man who came to the king’s court in a quarrel over land need not physically fight for it. He could have twelve men of the neighbourhood swear an oath and declare who had the better right. The lawyer who wrote the first book of English law called it a royal boon, a gift from the crown, and said it spared men from a sudden and early death, because the outcome of combat depended on the strength of two men where the new procedure asked the oaths of twelve and was more likely to reveal the truth.

But nobody wanted those twelve to be strangers. They were chosen because they knew the area and the people who lived there. Those men were more likely to have heard any argument or to know more of the history behind a dispute. Those twelve men were both witnesses and judges. The juror we have today who knows nothing about a case until it is proved in court would not arrive for centuries.

And only the king could grant permission to form a jury. King Henry made sure of that. He would not give it to a lord’s court, only to his own court, so every man who wanted the better kind of justice had to come to him for it.

The ordeal itself he left alone. A man presented by his neighbours for murder still went to the water, a man accused by name still carried the glowing hot iron, and that did not change in Henry’s lifetime or his sons’.

Importantly, to get your case heard in one of his royal courts you needed a writ.

A writ was a small strip of parchment, written out by one of the king’s clerks and sealed with wax, and it carried a precise set of words. There was one set of words for a man who claimed he had been put out of his land, another for a debt, another for an inheritance. The words were fixed and unchangeable. If your dispute or problem did not fit the wording of any writ that existed, you had no case at all, and if you bought the wrong writ you lost, however much you were in the right.

In the years around 1190 there were fewer than forty writs, but by the reign of Henry’s great-grandson, King Edward the First, Edward Longshanks, there were several hundred writs, and every new one took another quarrel out of the lords’ courts and into the king’s.

So a justice mechanism had been built, and it gave England better justice than anything the country had known before. But it was the crown’s machinery. It ran on the king’s writs, in the king’s courts, under the king’s judges, and it passed down with the crown from one man to the next. No part of it could be turned against the man at the top. A bad king could be resisted, or endured, or rebelled against, but he could not be taken to law, because the law was his.

That was the flaw, and nobody had found a way round it. What happened next was that England stumbled into one by accident.

It was the Church that ended it, not a king. In 1215, at a great council in Rome, the Pope forbade any priest to bless the iron or the water, and without a priest the ceremony was only a burn and a ducking, which settled nothing.

That was the year the barons cornered King John at Runnymede and made him seal the Great Charter. Within weeks he had persuaded the Pope to cancel it, and the barons, who had run out of patience with him entirely, offered the crown of England to Louis, son of the King of France. Louis came, and brought an army, and by the autumn of the following year he held London and the Cinque Ports and half the country was against its own king.

That was where matters stood in October 1216, when John died of dysentery at Newark, worn out and still fighting. Much of the royal baggage, and by tradition the crown jewels with it, had gone into the mud of the Wash a few days before.

King John’s heir was nine years old. They crowned the boy at Gloucester nine days after John’s death, in an abbey church a long way from Westminster, because Westminster was in enemy hands. Also the Archbishop of Canterbury was abroad. There was no crown, so the boy’s mother gave up a plain gold circlet of her own and they used that. William Marshal, the greatest knight in Europe and seventy years old, knighted the child before the ceremony began, and then agreed, without much enthusiasm, to govern the country as regent until he grew up. The boy was King Henry III.

Three years later, a letter went out to the royal judges telling them to find some other way of trying men accused of serious crime, because the ordeal was finished. It was the sort of decision that changes how justice works in a country, and it was issued in the name of a boy of eleven who had never yet made a decision in his life.

And that time period was pivotal. For ten years England was governed in the name of a king who did not govern. The judges conducted the local courts, the writs went out, the sheriffs answered for their shires, and a regent and a council ran the country. The men who ran England in 1258 had grown up knowing that England could be governed by a council, and not by the king, because they had watched it happen.

William Marshal, the regent, used the years well. His first act was the shrewdest thing anyone did in that whole miserable war. He reissued the Great Charter, the same charter the rebels were supposedly fighting for, in the boy’s name. It cut the ground from under them. They could not continue to fight, as what they were fighting John for was granted by his heir, the nine-year-old King Henry III.

Some rebels remained, but they were beaten on the streets of Lincoln in May 1217. In August the fleet coming to relieve them was caught off the Kent coast near Sandwich. The English ships worked upwind of the French ships and threw pots of powdered lime into the air so that the wind carried it into the faces of the French. They then attacked the half blind sailors. After that Louis of France went home. The Charter was issued again to mark it, and again in 1225 in the form it kept from that day on. Because of those reissues, Magna Carta became part of the law of England.

King Henry the Third grew up gentle, devout and interested in beautiful things. He rebuilt Westminster Abbey, the church you can walk into today, and it was the great work of his life. He was also, as a ruler, a disaster with money.

The trouble was mainly that he loved giving it away. He married Eleanor of Provence, and her uncles came with her and were given lands and offices, and his half-brothers arrived from France and were given more. English barons who had waited years for a wardship or a manor watched them go to charming strangers from Poitou and Savoy who could not be bothered to learn the language of the country that was paying for them. Then in 1254 the Pope offered Henry the crown of Sicily for his younger son Edmund, and Henry accepted, agreeing to send an army and to stand surety for papal debts of some ninety thousand pounds, but King Henry had neither.

So he sold plate, jewels, rights and privileges to anyone who would buy them, and when the barons and the bishops told him he could not have their money, he told them that servants do not judge their master and vassals do not bind their prince with conditions.

They bound him anyway.

In the spring of 1258 he had to summon a great council and ask for money, and the answer he got was a price. Twenty-four men would be chosen to reform the government of England, twelve named by the king and twelve by his opponents. They met at Oxford that June, and what came out of it was the most radical document England had yet produced. Later generations called that meeting the Mad Parliament, which tells you what the people who lost thought of it.

The Provisions of Oxford put the king under a council of fifteen. The chancellor and the treasurer and the justiciar were to answer to that council rather than to King Henry. A parliament was to meet three times a year, and whether the king wanted them to meet or not. In every county four knights were to be elected to sit in the county court and write down complaints from anyone who had been wronged by a sheriff or a bailiff. And the chancellor was forbidden to seal any new writ on the king’s word alone.

That last clause is easy to read past. It meant that the machinery the second King Henry had built was no longer entirely the king’s to alter. The law had grown up around royal writs for a hundred years, and now the men who lived under it had a hand in their writing.

The proclamation announcing the new arrangements was sent to every sheriff in England, and it went out in English as well as in Latin and French. No royal document had been issued in English since the Norman Conquest, nearly two hundred years before. Somebody had worked out that this one needed to be understood by people who had never learned French.

It was around this time that a new word began to attach itself to these meetings. The old name was a colloquy, a talking-together, which is what the chroniclers called it when William the Conqueror took deep speech with his wise men before the Domesday survey. The new word came from the French for speaking. Parliament.

The man who drove it all was not English. Simon de Montfort was born in France, a younger son of a crusading father, and came to England as a young man to claim the earldom of Leicester through his grandmother. He married the king’s sister in secret, which caused a scandal, governed Gascony for Henry, quarrelled bitterly with him about it, was put on trial and acquitted, and forgave none of it. He was hard, devout, impatient and entirely certain of himself, which is a dangerous combination in a man who is usually right.

What made him more than another angry earl was what he did next. Having forced the king to answer to a council, he turned round and told the barons that the same rules applied to them. He took up the cause of the lesser knights, the landholding gentlemen who actually ran the shires and who had banded together under the name of the Community of the Bachelors of England, and he began rebuking great lords for the way they treated their own people. That was the moment the baronial party split, and it never properly came back together.

In 1261 the Pope released King Henry from his oath to keep the Provisions, and Henry threw out the officials the barons had appointed. For a while there were two governments in England, each cancelling the other’s orders, and both of them sent for representatives of the shires, the barons summoning them to St Albans and the king to Windsor on the same day.

In the end the quarrel was put to Louis of France, who was famously just and would in time be made a saint. In January 1264, at Amiens, he found for King Henry on every point and declared the Provisions void. He was a king, and he did not believe a king should answer to a council.

So it came to war, and the war was ugly. Along the Welsh border Simon’s sons burned out the lands of men who had sided with the king. In London and Worcester and other towns his supporters attacked the Jewish communities, killing people and destroying the written records of debts owed to them, and Simon did not stop it. That belongs in the same story as the parliament, and it should not be left out of it.

Then the war came to Sussex.

On the morning of the fourteenth of May 1264 the royal army was quartered at Lewes, in the castle and the priory below it, and Simon’s army came over the downs before dawn and drew up on Offham Hill above the town. His left was made up of Londoners, volunteers with little armour and less training. Prince Edward, the king’s son, took the royal cavalry straight through them, rode them down, and then, boiling with an old grudge against the city, chased the survivors for miles instead of turning back. By the time he came back his father had been driven down into the town and taken, along with the king’s brother, and there was nothing left to rescue.

Simon had been thrown from his horse some weeks earlier and had travelled to Sussex in a covered litter. However, he was well enough to fight by the morning of the battle, and he left the litter standing on the hill with his banners on it, and shut the royalist hostages inside for safekeeping. Edward’s men found it, took it for Simon’s command post, and killed the men they found within. Those men were on their side.

By nightfall Simon de Montfort held the King of England, the king’s brother and the king’s son. For fifteen months he ran the country in Henry’s name, and Henry, treated throughout with elaborate courtesy, went where he was taken and put his seal to what he was given.

Which brings us to the writs that went out on the fourteenth of December 1264.

They summoned a parliament to Westminster for the twentieth of January. Bishops and abbots were called, and the earls and barons Simon could trust, which was not many, twenty-three in all. Two knights were to be elected in every shire. And two men were to come from each of the larger towns, from York and Lincoln and Sandwich, and four from each of the Cinque Ports, chosen by the townsmen themselves.

That last part had never been done before.

Knights of the shire had been summoned before, usually when a king wanted a tax and needed the counties to agree to it. Townsmen had not. A burgess was a man of business, a wool merchant or a draper, who owed his standing to trade rather than to land or blood, and the crown had never had any reason to want him in the room. Now the writs went out in the depths of winter at five weeks’ notice, and the townsmen who had rarely ridden beyond the next market town rode to Westminster to sit amongst earls.

It would be pleasant to say this was done out of principle. It was not, or not only, done out of principle. Simon summoned the towns because he needed friends and the barons were deserting him, and everybody at the time understood that perfectly well. The parliament dutifully approved what he had already decided.

But the writs had been sent, and a thing that has been done once can be done again.

By the summer it was over. Edward escaped his guards at Hereford at the end of May, on the pretext of trying out horses, riding each one until it tired and then going off on the last fresh one. He gathered the Marcher lords, cut Simon off from the east, and caught his son’s army sleeping in the town below Kenilworth Castle. Simon, penned in the west and knowing nothing of it, crossed the Severn and marched for Evesham.

On the morning of the fourth of August 1265 the watchmen saw banners coming down from the north and cheered, because they were the banners of Simon’s son. They had been taken at Kenilworth three days before. Edward was flying them deliberately.

It was remembered afterwards that Simon looked at the army on the hill, twice the size of his own, and said that they were coming on well, and that they had learned it from him, and that they had better commend their souls to God because their bodies were Edward’s. He offered any man who wanted to go the chance to leave. Then he took the bishop’s blessing and rode up Green Hill into a thunderstorm.

It lasted a couple of hours and was not a battle so much as a slaughter. Edward had picked twelve men and told them to find Simon, kill him, and take no ransom, which broke every rule of war those men had been raised on. They killed his eldest son in front of him. They killed his horse under him and he fought on foot until they beat him down. Afterwards his body was hacked apart and the pieces sent about the country as trophies. A chronicler who lived through it wrote that it was the murder of Evesham.

The old king was on the field, dressed in his captors’ colours and half forgotten, and was nearly cut down by his own son’s knights before he pulled off his helmet and shouted that he was Henry of Winchester, their king, and they were not to kill him. Somebody recognised him and got him out.

What followed was two years of misery. Simon’s followers were stripped of their lands, which left them nothing to lose, and the fighting went on in the woods and the fens. Kenilworth Castle held out for six months. But Edward, who was ruthless and not at all stupid, worked out that hanging every rebel in England would not leave him a country worth ruling. In 1266 the disinherited were offered their lands back at a price they could pay, and in 1267 a parliament at Marlborough re-enacted the best of the reforms Simon had fought for. Four of its clauses are still on the statute book today, the oldest working law in the country.

The monks of Evesham buried what was left of the earl in their abbey church, and people began arriving at the grave. They came from all over England for fifteen years, and the monks wrote down every cure and every wonder reported there until the crown made it too dangerous to go on. He had been a hard man and a proud one, he had helped himself to a good deal of confiscated property, and he had let terrible things be done in his name. But the poor had understood him to be on their side, and they did not forget it.

Henry the Third died in November 1272, having reigned for fifty-six years, and was buried in the abbey he had spent his life rebuilding. He had been a bad king and an unlucky one, and the two things from his reign that still matter both came out of his failures.

In the meantime, his son was on his way home from crusade and took two years to arrive. Edward the First was everything his father was not, and he had personally destroyed the man who first thought of calling ordinary men to Westminster.

He used the idea anyway.

In November 1295, needing money for wars in Wales, Scotland and France at once, King Edward, Edward Longshanks, sent out writs summoning knights from every shire and burgesses from every borough, and the writ carried a line of old Roman law his clerks had dug out that has been quoted ever since. What touches all should be approved by all. He did not mean it as a principle of liberty. He meant that if he was going to tax the whole kingdom it was easier to have the whole kingdom in the room when he asked.

Two years later the sentence was taken out of his hands. By the autumn of 1297 he had taxed so hard and so often that his barons were armed, his clergy were refusing him and the wool trade was in revolt. To avoid another civil war he sealed a confirmation of the Charters, granting for himself and his heirs that he would take no such tax again except by the common assent of the realm.

That is the bargain the rest of this story turns on. The king had the crown, and the crown needed money, and the money now had a price, and the price was asking.

You can walk up Offham Hill above Lewes on a spring morning and look down on the town the way Simon’s men did, at the castle and the roofs and the river going out towards the sea. At Evesham the abbey is gone and only the bell tower is left standing in the grass, with a spring called Battle Well below the hill where the last of his knights were cut down. Nothing there tells you that anything had begun. But what had begun was that the king had to ask Parliament for money.

The next king but one, King Edward the Third, would want a great deal of money, and by then there was only one way to get it – to ask Parliament. He wanted the money for a war in France, and that war would begin with a claim to the French throne and lead, within ten years, to English archers standing in the mud at a place called Crécy.

017 Robert The Bruce

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For the last years of the thirteenth century, and the beginning of the fourteenth, William Wallace had shown Scotland that England under Edward Longshanks could be beaten.

On the tenth of February 1306, less than six months after William Wallace was put to death at Smithfield, in London, two Scottish noblemen met in Greyfriars Church in Dumfries.

The two men were Robert Bruce and John Comyn, and they were the two most powerful men left in Scotland. They were rivals for the Scottish Crown, and they hated each other, but they had agreed to talk, and talk in a church, a sanctuary and a place where no man could lawfully draw a weapon against another.

Nobody knows what was said between them, and only one man came back out of the church – Robert the Bruce. To the men waiting outside for him he said, in the flat voice of somebody who could not believe what they had done, that he doubted he had killed John Comyn. One of Robert’s followers, Roger Kirkpatrick, said that he would make sure of it, and went back inside with a knife.

John Comyn was dead. It was sacrilege, a murder carried out in front of the high altar of a church. Repercussions were soon to follow. The Pope would excommunicate him, and the Comyn family would never forgive him. Their kinsmen spent the next twenty years looking for chances to bring Robert the Bruce down.

It was also, from that moment onwards, impossible for Robert to turn back. He had murdered the leader of a rival faction in a church. And on top of this, there would be no pardon from King Edward, no quiet return to his estates, no waiting to see how things turned out. He had one road left, and it went straight to the throne of Scotland.

He took it – fast.

The reason for the speed was that he knew the excommunication was coming and could not be stopped, and an excommunicated man cannot be crowned King. But a papal bull (an official public decree), had to be written in Rome and then carried all the way to Scotland, and that took time. If Bruce could get a crown on his head before the document arrived, he would be King of Scotland, and that could not easily be undone.

Seven weeks after the murder of John Comyn, on the twenty-fifth of March 1306, Robert Bruce was crowned King of Scotland at Scone.

It was a strange coronation. The Stone of Destiny was gone, taken to Westminster by King Edward ten years earlier, so he was crowned without it. The ceremony was performed by bishops who knew perfectly well they were defying an excommunication. And the man whose hereditary right it was to place the crown on a Scottish king’s head, the Earl of Fife, was a boy in English custody and could not come.

His sister Isabella came instead. She was married to a Comyn, she had taken her husband’s warhorses and had arrived at Scone a day late and missed the whole thing. Robert thought her presence mattered enough that he went through the entire coronation a second time, so that a MacDuff could put the crown on his head as a MacDuff always had crowned all the Scottish kings.

It cost her four years of her life, though nobody in the abbey at Scone knew that yet.

The rapid crowning of Robert the Bruce was an act of desperation dressed up as a coronation. And within four months, it had completely fallen apart.

To understand what Robert did next, you have to understand who he was, because he was not William Wallace and it does him no favours to pretend otherwise.

William Wallace was minor gentry with nothing to lose, and Robert was one of the greatest landowners in Britain, Earl of Carrick, lord of vast estates in Scotland and substantial ones in England, grandson of the Robert Bruce who had competed for the crown in 1290. He had been raised to inherit, to calculate, to survive.

And for the eight years before the murder in Dumfries, he had done exactly that. He had changed sides repeatedly. He had sworn loyalty to King Edward, broken it, and sworn it again. He had fought for the Scots, then submitted to King Edward, then been pardoned, then submitted again. When Wallace was Guardian of Scotland, Bruce was not at his side. When Wallace was hunted through the years of defeat, Bruce was making his peace with the English king.

This was normal conduct for a medieval nobleman and carried no particular shame. But it does mean that the man who was crowned at Scone in 1306 had no great record of loyalty behind him, and everybody knew it.

What Robert had instead was something Scotland had not yet had – authority. Wallace had been a soldier of genius who never held political power. The Scottish nobles had held political power and never fought. Bruce was a great lord who was prepared to fight, and that combination, once he committed to it, turned out to be the thing that mattered.

But first he had to survive.

King Edward I was sixty-six years old and frail, and the news from Scone of Robert the Bruce’s coronation made him incandescent with rage.

He sent an army north under Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, a cousin of the King and one of the greatest men in England. He was also the murdered John Comyn’s brother-in-law. Edward had chosen him deliberately, the one commander in the country with a private reason to want Bruce dead, and he sent him north with orders that were unusually explicit. Valence was to raise the dragon banner, which meant that the ordinary conventions of war were suspended and no quarter would be given to anyone, and Bruce’s supporters were not to be treated as enemies. They were to be treated as criminals.

In June of 1306, at the village of Methven, six miles west of Perth, Valence caught Bruce’s small army in a surprise attack and destroyed it. Bruce escaped with a handful of men. A few weeks later, at Dalrigh, he was attacked again by the MacDougalls of Lorn, who were John Comyn’s kinsmen, and he was beaten again.

What followed was the worst period of Bruce’s life, and it was worse for the people around him than it was for him.

His sister Mary, and the Countess Isabella, who had put the crown on his head, were each shut in what the records call a cage, Mary at Roxburgh and Isabella at Berwick. They were not the open birdcages of later storytelling. Each was a small chamber of timber lattice and iron, about eight feet across, built onto the castle wall with a privy in the corner. The cage and chamber had been designed that way because it was meant to be lived in for a long time.

Edward’s written order about Isabella survives. She had not struck with a sword, he said, so she would not die by one. But because of her unlawful crowning of Robert, she was to be kept at Berwick where everyone who passed could see her and know what she had done. She was fed, she had a servant, and she was not going to be killed, because a dead hostage is worth nothing. She was simply put where the entire town could look at her, and she was left there for four years.

Also, three of Robert’s brothers were caught and executed. The Earl of Atholl was hanged in London, and because he was a nobleman related to the royal house, Edward granted him the privilege of a higher gallows than the others.

Bruce himself vanished. In the autumn of 1306 he crossed to Rathlin Island, off the coast of Antrim, and spent the winter there, a crowned king with no kingdom, no army, and most of his family dead or in cages.

This is where the story of the spider belongs. Robert, at his lowest point, watching a spider try and fail and try again to swing its thread across a gap. What Robert learned from the spider was to keep going and not give up. It is a wonderful story, but of course there is no evidence at all that it happened. It first turns up five hundred years afterwards, in Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, a history of Scotland he wrote for his young grandson and published in 1828. It was in a history book, aimed at children, by the most famous Scotsman alive, which is how a good story becomes a fact. Scotland has kept it because it is the right story for the moment, but it is not the same as being true.

What is true is that Robert spent that winter somewhere alone, with every reason to give up, but he didn’t.

He came back from Rathlin in the spring of 1307 with a very small force, landing on the Ayrshire coast at Turnberry, where he had been born and where his family’s castle now held an English garrison. And this time he did not repeat Wallace’s mistake.

William Wallace had won at Stirling Bridge and then, at Falkirk, had let himself be brought to a pitched battle against an army built to destroy him. Robert the Bruce had watched that happen, and for the next seven years he refused to fight any battle he had not chosen.

Instead he fought another kind of war, a guerrilla war. He moved constantly and lived rough. He struck at night, in small numbers, against isolated garrisons, and vanished before a response could be organised. He drove cattle away and burned the grass so English armies marching north would find nothing to eat, which was Wallace’s strategy at Falkirk, but Bruce made it the whole war rather than a prelude to one.

He had two lieutenants who made this possible. Thomas Randolph, his nephew, ran campaigns and took cities. Sir James Douglas ran the border.

Douglas was a small, dark man with a lisp, courteous and quiet in company, and by common account of the people who fought alongside him quite unrecognisable once a fight started. He raided English-held country for twenty years without ever really stopping. He took his own family castle back from the English on three separate occasions. The Scots called him the Good Sir James and the English called him the Black Douglas.

Robert also dealt with his enemies at home, and he did it with a cold efficiency. The Comyn lands in the north-east had never accepted Robert as King, and in the winter of 1308 he went through Buchan and destroyed it, burning the crops, the barns, the houses and the people’s means of living. The herschip of Buchan, it was called, the harrying, and the district was still visibly impoverished fifty years later.

Then he began taking castles, and the way he took them tells you how his mind worked.

The English held Scotland through a chain of stone fortresses, each with a garrison, each impossible to storm by an army without siege engines, which Bruce did not have. So he did not storm them. He took them by trickery, at night, by climbing.

The stories of how he did it came down to us from a poem written by a Scottish priest called John Barbour, but it was sixty years after the events, so they have had time to be improved in the telling. But they are the only account there is, and they are wonderful.

At Linlithgow a local farmer named William Bunnock, who supplied the garrison with hay, drove his cart into the gateway and stopped it dead under the portcullis so it could not be lowered, and armed men came out of the hay. At Roxburgh, Douglas’s men crawled up to the walls on their hands and knees at dusk with black cloaks over their armour, and the sentries above took them for cattle in the field. At Edinburgh, Randolph found a man in his own force whose father had served in the castle garrison, and who as a young man had climbed down the north face of the rock at night to visit a girl in the town. The man remembered the route. Thirty men went up the cliff in the dark behind him.

And then, every time, Bruce pulled the castle down. He did not garrison them. He destroyed them so that the English could never use them again, and no future Scottish lord could hold one against his king. By 1314 almost every major fortress in Scotland was either in Scottish hands or in ruins.

Stirling was one of the last castles to hold out.

The English governor of Stirling Castle had made an agreement with Robert the Bruce’s brother Edward, and it was the kind of agreement medieval knights found honourable and Robert found infuriating. If no English army came to relieve the castle by midsummer 1314, it would be surrendered.

It was chivalrous. It was also a public invitation to invade, with a date attached, and it handed the English exactly the thing Bruce had spent seven years avoiding, which was a fixed place and a fixed time to bring their full strength against him.

King Edward had died in 1307 on the road north, still trying to reach Scotland, and had asked his son to carry his bones at the head of the army until the Scots were beaten. His son did not. Edward II was a very different man from his father, and he came north seven years later in the summer of 1314 with an army that reflected it: enormous, magnificent, but badly led.

Approximately twenty-five thousand men crossed the Tweed, with at least three thousand armoured knights and men-at-arms. Against it Robert had perhaps ten thousand, mostly the same hard spearmen who had fought at Falkirk with William Wallace, along with a small cavalry force and few archers.

Robert had every reason to withdraw, and he very nearly did. But he had spent seven years thinking about Falkirk, and he had worked out three things.

The first was ground. He chose a position where his flanks were protected by dense woodland on one side and boggy carseland on the other, so that the English could not get round him. At Falkirk the archers had been walked into position and allowed to shoot at their leisure. Here there was nowhere for them to stand.

The second was the ground itself. Across his front, where the English cavalry would have to charge, Bruce’s men dug hundreds of small round holes about a foot deep, and covered them over with branches and turf so that they were invisible. A galloping horse that puts a foot in one goes down and brings its rider with it. They were called pottes, and they worked so well that English archers copied the idea at Crécy thirty-two years later.

The third was the one that mattered most. Robert kept his small force of mounted knights back, out of the fight, waiting. They had only one job, and it was not to charge the enemy. It was to wait for the English archers to be moved into a position where they could shoot into the schiltrons – the great rings of spearmen, packed shoulder to shoulder and bristling outwards in every direction – and then to ride them down before they could start.

Falkirk had been lost because the schiltrons could not answer the archer. Bruce had spent seven years designing the answer.

On the twenty-third of June 1314, the day before the battle, the English vanguard came up towards the Scottish position, but something happened that Scotland has never stopped talking about.

Robert was out in front of his lines on a small horse, a light horse rather than his heavy war-horse, wearing a gold circlet over his helmet so his men could see him. An English knight named Henry de Bohun saw the circlet, recognised what it meant, lowered his lance, and charged him.

It was a reasonable decision. Bohun was in full armour on a destrier war-horse, at the gallop, with a twelve-foot lance. Robert was on a pony with a battle-axe. Every man on both sides watched them come together.

At the last possible moment, Robert stood in his stirrups, turned his horse aside so the lance went past him, and then brought the axe down on Bohun’s head as he passed. It split the helmet and the skull beneath it, and Bohun was dead before he hit the ground.

Robert’s commanders, when they reached him, were furious with him for risking everything on a stunt. Bruce is said to have looked at the broken shaft in his hand and remarked that he was sorry about the axe.

The battle proper began the next morning, the twenty-fourth of June 1314, and it went exactly as Robert had planned it.

The English heavy cavalry came down the slope, across the Bannock Burn, and charged uphill towards the schiltrons. The pottes, the holes in the ground, broke up the charge before it arrived. What was left of it hit the spear points and stopped dead.

A contemporary account describes the noise of that first collision, the great horses driving into the Scottish pikes as into a thick wood, and the crash of splintering lances and screaming horses, and the two armies locked together and neither giving way.

And then, for a long time, nothing moved. Which was the point.

Because behind the fighting line, the rest of that enormous English army was arriving on a front barely two thousand yards wide, with a stream behind it and marshy ground on either side, and there was nowhere for it to go. Men kept coming forward into a battle they could not reach. The English archers tried to shoot over the top and hit their own men, exactly as the Norman archers had at Hastings. The most powerful army in Europe was jammed into a space too small to fight in.

Then somebody thought to move some of the archers around to the Scottish left flank, where they could shoot into the schiltrons from the side.

That was the moment Bruce had been waiting seven years for. He sent in the cavalry he had been holding back, and they rode straight through the archers before a single volley could be organised and drove the survivors back into the mass of their own army, which was already beginning to lose its shape.

After that, the battle came apart quite quickly. Somewhere on the hills to the English right, Robert’s camp followers, the servants and drivers and boys who had been left with the baggage, came over the crest waving whatever they had and yelling, and the exhausted English army took them for a fresh Scottish army. Edward II’s personal guard led him off the field. Once the King had gone, the army broke.

The schiltrons, which had spent the whole battle standing still, now walked forward down the slope into a mass of men who could not run, and the killing went on all the way back to the Bannock Burn and beyond it. Churchill’s judgement is that no worse slaughter of English chivalry ever took place in a single day, and that a Scottish army of spearmen destroying an army of cavalry and archers must be counted a prodigy of war.

The Scots claimed thirty thousand dead or captured, which was more men than the English army contained. But the scale of the exaggeration is itself evidence of the overwhelming victory, but winning the battle of Bannockburn did not win the war.

The battle was fought in 1314, but it took another fourteen years for England to admit Scotland was independent.

Robert spent those years making it impossible for the English to do anything else. He raided northern England until the northern counties were paying him protection money to be left alone. He sent his brother Edward to Ireland with an army of Bannockburn veterans, hoping to open a second front and export the whole model of resistance to another Celtic country under English rule. Edward Bruce was crowned King of Ireland in 1316, but the Irish chiefs would not unite behind him. Then a famine ruined the country he was trying to hold, and Robert’s brother Edward was defeated and killed at Dundalk in 1318.

And then in 1320, the barons and freeholders of Scotland sent a letter to the Pope.

They were trying to get Robert’s excommunication lifted and Scotland’s independence acknowledged. The letter was drafted at Arbroath Abbey by men making a legal argument. But somewhere in the middle of it they wrote a sentence that has outlived every other document of the period. They told the Pope that they were not fighting for glory or riches or honours, but for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up except with his life.

In the letter, called the Declaration of Arbroath, they also said something that is still being argued about today. They told the Pope that if Robert the Bruce ever submitted to the English crown, then they themselves would drive him out and choose another king. The letter was written to defend Robert’s kingship, and it contains the conditions under which his own subjects would be able to remove him. A king, it says, holds his crown from the community of the realm, and holds it only as long as he defends them.

Nobody in Europe was writing sentences like that in 1320.

Peace came in the end, and it came because Edward II fell. He was deposed by his own wife and her lover in 1327 and murdered at Berkeley Castle. The regency that governed on behalf of his young son had no appetite for the Scottish war, and in 1328 the Treaty of Northampton acknowledged what the Battle of Bannockburn had established fourteen years earlier: Scotland was an independent kingdom, and Robert the Bruce was its lawful king.

He had been fighting for Scottish freedom for twenty-two years.

Robert the Bruce died the following June, in 1329, at Cardross on the Clyde, of an illness the chroniclers called leprosy, although modern doctors reading the accounts are not convinced. He was fifty-four.

He had asked, since he had never managed to go on crusade as he had vowed to, that his heart be taken to the Holy Land after his death. So they opened his chest, took out his heart, sealed it in a silver casket, and gave it to Sir James Douglas.

Douglas set off in 1330 with a company of Scottish knights and the casket hung around his neck. Passing through Spain, he found a Christian army fighting the Moors at Teba and joined it, because that was the kind of thing Douglas did. He was cut off in the fighting, surrounded, and finished.

The story that has come down, from the French author Jean Froissart and through every Scottish schoolroom since, is that Douglas took the casket from his neck and threw it into the enemy ranks ahead of him, and shouted at it to go forward as it had always gone before, and that Douglas would follow it or die.

Douglas died. The heart was recovered from the field afterwards and carried home, and it lies at Melrose Abbey. Robert the Bruce’s body lies at Dunfermline.

His heart never made it to the Holy Land. But Scotland has kept the story alive for seven hundred years.

What William Wallace had proved was that the English could be beaten once. What Bruce proved, over twenty-two years of murder and exile and patience and burnt fields and stolen castles, was that they could be beaten permanently.

Scotland would not be conquered again for another three hundred years, and when the two kingdoms finally came together it would not be because of an English army attacking it, it would be because a Scottish king rode south to be crowned king of both Scotland and England.

016 William Wallace

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In May 1297, in the small settlement of Lanark in the Scottish lowlands, a young man walked into the house of the English sheriff and killed him, but nobody knows exactly why. Later stories said it was revenge, because the sheriff had murdered a woman the young man loved. Now the story may be true, or it may have been invented afterwards by people who wanted a reason for what came next, which was an uprising.

The reason for the uprising? Scotland’s lords had surrendered, but nobody had thought to ask the Scottish people what they thought about surrendering sovereignty.

Within weeks, men were coming down out of the hills, out of the woods, and the market towns of southern Scotland to join forces with this young man. Within months, the English administration of Scotland had begun to come apart, and inside a year, King Edward I had been forced to abandon his war in France and come north to deal with a man he had never heard of. That young man was William Wallace.

And to understand why the uprising happened, you have to understand what had happened in Scotland in the previous year.

In 1296, King Edward I of England had marched north and taken the country apart. He had destroyed the great trading town of Berwick and killed thousands of its people. He then went on to defeat the Scottish army at Dunbar, and had forced King John Balliol to surrender his crown. Then he had stripped King Ballioil of his royal arms in a humiliating public ceremony that earned the deposed king the mocking nickname ‘Toom Tabard’, the empty coat.

After that, King Edward I started to organise Scotland. He replaced Scottish sheriffs with English ones. English garrisons occupied Scottish castles, and English clerks began the work of assessment and taxation. All Scottish landowners were required to sign a document acknowledging King Edward I as their rightful king, and most of them signed it. Then King Edward stole the Stone of Destiny, the ancient stone on which Scottish kings had been crowned for centuries, from the village of Scone, and took it back to Westminster Abbey. He then had a chair built to hold it, so he could sit on top of it

It was, on paper, a complete conquest, and King Edward had every reason to believe the Scottish matter was closed. He went home, appointed officials to run Scotland and England, and then turned his attention to his war with France.

But a conquest is only complete when the conquered agree and cooperate. The Scottish people didn’t agree and they were not about to cooperate, even though the Scottish lords and nobles had given in, and now had estates on both sides of the border, along with family connections in England, and they had a great deal to lose. But the Scottish people had no estates to lose. All they had was the Scottish land under their feet and an English tax to pay.

So when the uprising came, it did not come from the council chambers or the Scottish lords and nobles. It came out of the farms and the small settlements, down from the mountains, and out of the forests, and the man who lead it came from the same place, which is probably why so little is known about him.

Almost everything we know about William Wallace comes to us either through chroniclers who hated him or through poets who loved him, and neither group was very concerned with accuracy.

William Wallace was probably born around 1270, somewhere in the west of Scotland. His family were minor gentry, one of the lower rungs of the knightly classes, which meant he had been trained to fight and to ride but he had no wealth, no title, and no political importance. He was not a lord, and was not summoned to councils. When the great men of Scotland gathered to argue about the succession, nobody sent for William Wallace.

By all accounts he was physically a very big man, but this may have been an exaggeration of the chroniclers and poets. What is not in doubt is that he was a soldier of extraordinary ability, and even though he had never been in command of anyone until the uprising, when he was handed an army of untrained farmers and townsmen, he knew exactly how to lead them.

He was also, from the very beginning, uninterested in compromise of any kind.

This was the thing that made him different, and dangerous. Scotland’s nobles were negotiators. They had spent generations balancing their loyalties, taking oaths and finding reasons to break them, playing England and Scotland against one another to their own advantage. William Wallace did not negotiate. His goal was simple, the English out of Scotland – permanently, and at no point in his life did he ever indicate that he would settle for anything less.

And he was not alone. In the north, at almost the same moment, another uprising had begun, lead by Andrew Moray.

Andrew Moray was a young nobleman from Moray in the far north-east, the son of a Scottish knight who had been captured at Dunbar and was rotting in an English prison. Andrew had been captured too, but he had escaped. He went home, raised his father’s tenants in rebellion, and began systematically taking English-held castles across the north, one after another, in a campaign of remarkable skill.

By late summer of 1297 the two uprisings had joined together. Moray from the north. Wallace from the south. Together they had something that had not existed a year earlier, a Scottish army.

The English response was slow and contemptuous, which is the response that experienced armies usually give to peasant uprisings, and it is usually correct. Peasant uprisings are typically crushed when the professionals arrive, and the mob discovers that courage is not the same as training, and it always ends badly.

That is what everyone expected to happen at the Scottish town of Stirling.

In the east of Scotland, the sea cuts deep into the country, the Firth of Forth, a great tidal barrier splitting the lowlands of the south from the north. To get an army across it, you had to go inland, right to the head of the estuary, where the river narrowed enough to be bridged. That crossing was at the town of Stirling, watched over by its castle on its volcanic crag. Whoever held Stirling controlled the road north. There was no other way through to the north.

In September 1297, an English army came up the road to take Stirling.

It was commanded by John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, an experienced soldier who had beaten the Scots comprehensively at Dunbar the year before and had no reason to expect a different outcome this time. With him was Hugh de Cressingham, the Treasurer of the English administration in Scotland, a heavy, unpopular man whose job was collecting the money and who was anxious that this campaign should not cost more of it than necessary.

Wallace and Moray were watching and waiting for the English on the far bank, on the Abbey Craig hill.

The bridge across the river at Stirling was made of wood, and it was narrow. Two horsemen could cross it side by side, but no more. Beyond it, on the northern bank, the ground was a loop of soft flat marshy ground enclosed by a bend in the river. It was a place where an army coming over the bridge would arrive slowly, in small numbers, with water on three sides and nowhere to go.

At least one man in the English camp could see this perfectly clearly. A Scottish knight in English service, Sir Richard Lundie. He told John de Warenne plainly what would happen. It would take eleven hours, he said, to move the whole army across that bridge. What did the Earl imagine the Scots would be doing during those eleven hours? He knew of a ford further upstream where sixty horsemen could cross abreast. Give him a force, and he would go around and come at the Scottish position from the flank.

It was excellent advice, but Hugh de Cressingham refused it. Every delay cost money, and the Treasurer had had enough of the expense. The army would cross the bridge at Stirling.

So they began to cross, two by two, and William Wallace stood on the slope above and watched them come.

Wallace was not in a hurry. This is the thing that is genuinely remarkable about Stirling Bridge, and the thing that tells you Wallace was not simply a brave man with a grievance, he was clever and calculating. He let the English army come. He let the vanguard cross and form up on the meadow below him. He let more follow. He waited while the column crawled over the narrow timbers and spread out on ground it could not get off, and he kept waiting until precisely the moment when there were enough Englishmen across the bridge to be worth destroying and not yet enough to fight back.

At the right moment he sent his spearmen down the hill to take the bridgehead.

What happened next was not a battle. It was an annihilation. The Scots drove straight for the northern end of the bridge and seized it, and the moment they held it the trap closed. The English on the north bank were cut off from their own army. They could not retreat, because the way back was in Scottish hands. They could not be reinforced, because nothing could get across. They could not manoeuvre, because the river was behind them and the ground was soft and marshy under the horses.

Hugh de Cressingham was among them. He was killed in the press on the meadow, and the Scots, who hated him more than they hated any other Englishman in Scotland, did something to his body afterwards that is impossible to justify. They flayed the skin from his corpse and legend says that William Wallace took a strip and made it into a belt for his sword.

That detail is worth pausing on, because it tells you what kind of war this had become. It was a war without limits, in which ordinary decencies had stopped applying on either side, and it would get worse before it got better.

John de Warenne, watching from the south bank, could do nothing. When the slaughter was over he ordered the bridge destroyed and rode for the border, and he did not stop until he reached the town of Berwick. Behind him, the English garrisons across Scotland began to fall one by one. By the end of the year the English held almost nothing north of the river Tweed.

After the battle of Stirling, Andrew Moray was carried from the field badly wounded, and he died some weeks later, and Scotland lost the other half of its command at the very moment of its greatest victory, which left William Wallace entirely in charge.

He was knighted, probably by one of the Scottish earls, and appointed Guardian of Scotland. It is worth stopping to appreciate how extraordinary this was. A man of no rank, no lands and no name had been made ruler of a kingdom, entirely on the strength of having won a battle nobody thought he could win. There is no other example quite like it in medieval British history.

William Wallace governed in the name of King John Balliol, the deposed king, who was at that point a prisoner in England and had no prospect of ever returning. Wallace never claimed the crown for himself, never showed the slightest interest in it, and never wavered on this point. He was fighting for his country and not to enrich himself.

He then did the thing that guaranteed King Edward I would come for him personally.

In the winter of 1297, Wallace led the Scottish army south across the border into Northumberland and Cumberland, and burned everything he found. Mills, barns, villages, churches. A chronicler writing at the time recorded that between Newcastle and Carlisle the church services simply stopped, because the priests had gone and so had almost everybody else. It was a deliberate, systematic devastation of the northern English counties, retaliation for what had been done to Berwick and to Scotland, and it was carried out with a thoroughness that emptied whole districts. Refugees fled south. Fields went unsown, and the north of England was still recovering from it years afterwards.

Wallace was not a gentle man and this was not a gentle war, and it does no service to him or to the reader to pretend otherwise. He did to England something close to what England had done to Scotland, and he did it because he believed it was the only language King Edward I understood.

He may have been right, as it certainly got King Edward’s attention.

The King came north in the summer of 1298 with an army unlike anything Scotland had ever faced before. It had one purpose, to utterly destroy the Scottish army.

King Edward had learned something during his wars in Wales. He had seen what massed archery could do, and he had spent years recruiting and training longbowmen, and he brought them with him now in numbers no Scottish commander had ever faced. He also brought the full heavy cavalry of England, thousands of armoured knights. He had assembled the most expensive and formidable striking force in Europe.

Wallace tried to avoid him. He knew perfectly well that his army could not beat King Edward’s in open battle, and his strategy was the correct one for a weaker force facing a stronger, which was to withdraw, burn the country behind him, and let hunger do the work.

It nearly succeeded. King Edward’s army, marching through a deliberately stripped landscape, came close to starving. The supply ships did not arrive, and there was nothing left in the fields to take, because the Scots had already taken it. And when the King gave his Welsh infantry wine instead of the food he did not have, they drank it and then fought a pitched brawl with his English troops in which men were killed. The Welsh threatened to change sides altogether. King Edward, who was not easily rattled, said he would be glad if they did, since he could then beat the whole lot of them at once.

But he was beaten, and he knew it, so he gave the order to fall back towards Edinburgh.

Then two Scottish earls rode into his camp, betraying Wallace and telling King Edward where he was, twenty miles away, near Falkirk, and everything changed.

Now Wallace had to fight. Not because he wanted to, but because he no longer had a choice. His army was infantry. Edward’s was cavalry. Men on foot cannot outrun men on horses, and the moment the English knew where the Scots were camped, withdrawing was no longer an option, as they would simply be ridden down and crushed in the open.

So William Wallace chose his ground instead. He drew up his men on rising ground with a wood behind them and boggy ground in front, and he arranged his spearmen in the formation Scotland had made its own, the schiltron.

A schiltron was a great ring of men, hundreds strong, packed shoulder to shoulder and bristling outwards with twelve-foot spears in every direction. Against cavalry it was very nearly perfect. A horse will not run onto a wall of spear points, whatever its rider wants, and a schiltron that held its nerve simply could not be broken by a mounted charge. It was a hedgehog made of men.

It had one weakness, and Edward found it inside an hour.

The English knights charged first, and the schiltrons stopped them exactly as they were designed to. The cavalry came on in successive waves, hit the spear points, and were flung back with heavy losses, and for a while it looked as though Wallace’s formations might hold all day.

Then Edward pulled his cavalry back and brought up the archers.

A schiltron cannot move quickly and cannot spread out. It is, from the point of view of an archer, an enormous stationary target packed so tightly that every arrow that falls into it hits somebody. Edward’s longbowmen were placed in the gaps between his horsemen and told to shoot into particular points in the Scottish schiltrons. They did so, and for as long as it took.

Wallace and his army had nothing to fight back with. The Scots had few archers of their own and almost no cavalry, so there was no way to drive the bowmen off and no way to close the distance. The schiltrons could only stand and endure it. And they did stand, for a long time, while the arrows came down and the rings of men grew thinner and thinner, until in places there were more dead and wounded men than living ones. Gaps began to open in the wall of spears.

Then the English knights charged through the gaps, and it was all over.

The Scottish army broke and ran for the woods, but thousands were killed in the pursuit. William Wallace escaped, but everything he had built at Stirling Bridge was destroyed in an afternoon, and the reputation that had carried him to the Guardianship went with it. Within months he had resigned, or been removed, and the Scottish nobles took the leadership back into their own hands.

What Wallace did for the next seven years is largely unknown. It is thought he went abroad for some of it. There is good evidence that he travelled to France and possibly to Rome, trying to win diplomatic support for Scotland from the French king and the Pope, which suggests a man with a considerably better grasp of the wider world than the wild highland outlaw of later legend suggests.

And he came back, and he fought on. Not as a commander of armies now, but in the older, harder way, in small bands ambushing and raiding and vanishing, while the war ground on year after year. The Scots called it a war in which every winter undid every summer’s work. King Edward would come north in the campaigning season, take castles, receive submissions, and go home. The moment he left, it would all come apart again.

Most of the great men of Scotland made their peace with King Edward during those years, at one time or another. Robert Bruce did. John Comyn did. They submitted, were pardoned, and rebelled again when it suited them, which was the normal conduct of medieval politics and carried no particular shame.

But William Wallace never did. In seven years of defeat and exile and hiding, in a cause that any sensible man could see was lost, he never once submitted. It is the single most important fact about him.

Eventually he was betrayed, near Glasgow, in August 1305, by a Scottish knight in English service. He was captured and taken south in chains.

He was tried in Westminster Hall, in London, and it was not a trial in any sense we would recognise.

William Wallace was charged with treason, and Wallace made the only defence available to him. He could not be a traitor to King Edward, he said, because he had never sworn allegiance to him. He had never signed the roll, he had never taken the oath.

The court did not engage with the argument, because the verdict had been decided before Wallace arrived. He was crowned with a wreath of oak leaves in mockery, on the grounds that he had called himself king of outlaws, and condemned.

William Wallace was then dragged through the streets of London to Smithfield and put to death that same day, on the twenty-third of August 1305. It was a terrible death, a punishment reserved for traitors. It was designed to be as prolonged and as public and as humiliating as human ingenuity could arrange, and it was carried out in front of a crowd. He was hanged, drawn and quartered.

Afterwards his body was cut into four parts and sent to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth, to be displayed in each. His head was set on a spike on London Bridge.

The message was crystal clear. King Edward wanted Scotland to see what happened to men who would not submit to his rule, but it did not work. What King Edward had actually done was take a defeated guerrilla leader, a man the Scottish nobility had quietly discarded, and handed him back to Scotland as a martyr. The pieces of him nailed up in four Scottish towns did not serve as a warning, all they did was galvanise an already angry people.

William Wallace had lost every battle but one, and he had held power for less than a year, and he died beaten, betrayed, and alone, and for a cause he refused to abandon, but he had shown the Scottish people something that its lords and nobles, with all their lands and their titles had never managed to show them. He had shown them the English army could be beaten. He had shown them that a country did not have to consent to its own conquest simply because the people at the top had already agreed to it, and the revolution William Wallace started did not end with his execution at Smithfield, it continued under the leadership of Robert the Bruce.

015 King Edward 1st

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The great grey horse surged through the trees, its rider low in the saddle, cloak streaming behind him. Ahead, the stag was tiring, its breath coming in ragged gasps, its hooves slipping on the wet ground. Most kings would have reined back and left the kill to the hounds, or at the very least to the hunting spear. Not this one. King Edward I spurred forward, drew alongside the exhausted animal, and cut it down from the saddle with his own sword.

That was how King Edward I did everything.

Edward I of England was thirty-three years old when his father, the weak and hapless Henry III, died in November 1272. By that age he had already lived through a civil war, fought against the brilliant rebel Simon de Montfort at the battles of Lewes and Evesham, and learned, through bitter defeat and hard-won victory, what it took to hold a kingdom together. He had carried his father’s government on his own shoulders for years, doing the work Henry could not or would not do, and waiting for the crown with a patience that surprised everyone.

When the news of Henry’s death reached him, Edward was not even in England. He was in Sicily, on his long way home from crusading in the Holy Land, where he had fought with courage and nearly died from a wound that some said was from a poisoned blade. Without waiting for him, the great magnates of England, along with the whole country, proclaimed him king at once. It tells you something about the man, and about the country’s desperate need for him.

He was enormously tall, a head and shoulders above most men, and his long legs gripped the saddle so tightly that he earned the nickname ‘Longshanks’. His arms were sinewy and powerful, a swordsman’s arms, and his hair, which had been yellow as a boy and jet black as a young man, would eventually turn snow-white. He had his father’s drooping left eyelid, and he stammered slightly, though when he chose to speak he could be devastating. The motto he chose for himself was ‘To each his own’, and he meant it. Justice, as Edward understood it, was not a gentle thing. It was something to be measured, weighed, and enforced, and it applied to everyone, including the greatest lords in the land.

His first great act as king was to find out what was wrong with England, and to fix it.

Within weeks of his return in 1274, Edward sent commissioners riding out across the land armed with a list of forty questions. They were to visit every county, every town, every corner of the realm, and to ask: what are the King’s rights here, and who has stolen them? Which officials are corrupt? Which sheriffs have taken bribes, or turned a blind eye to crime ‘for prayer, price, or favour’? The questions were blunt, and the answers, when they came back, were damning.

What followed was an extraordinary period of lawmaking. Over the next eighteen years, year after year, statute after statute, Edward reshaped the government of England. He was not, for the most part, inventing anything new. He was sorting out what previous reigns had left in chaos. He told his barons, through the writs of Quo Warranto, to prove their right to hold their own courts and dispense their own justice, or lose the privilege. He told the Church, through the Statute of Mortmain, that it could no longer quietly swallow up English land through gifts and bequests without the King’s permission. He told the whole country, through law after law, that there was a rule above any lord’s whim, and that he intended to enforce it.

This was not tyranny. Edward was not seizing power for himself. He was building a broader foundation for the crown, one that rested not on the loyalty of a handful of great barons but on the interests of the whole people. The merchants, the lesser landowners, the ordinary folk who had spent generations being ground between a grasping Church above and predatory lords below, found in Edward a king who noticed they existed.

His officials and inspectors were everywhere. He travelled the country ceaselessly himself, arriving in towns unannounced, asking questions, writing things down in careful, legalistic detail. If you were a corrupt sheriff in 1280, the sound you dreaded most was hoofbeats.

Behind Edward, the king lawmaker and soldier, there was a marriage.

Eleanor of Castile had come to England from Spain as a girl of around thirteen to marry the young prince Edward, and for thirty-six years she was at his side. She travelled with him to the Holy Land on crusade. She bore him at least fourteen children, and endured the grief of burying most of them in infancy. She was, by every account, the centre of his world.

In the autumn of 1290, while the court was travelling through the Midlands, Eleanor fell ill, and Edward stayed with her. She died around the age of 48 in the village of Harby, near Lincoln, on the twenty-eighth of November, and King Edward was devestated

What followed tells you more about King Edward than any statute or any battle.

The Queen’s body was carried in a slow funeral procession from Lincoln to Westminster, a journey of nearly two hundred miles through the grey of an English winter. At every place where the procession stopped for the night, Edward ordered a magnificent stone cross to be raised in her memory. Twelve crosses in all, marking the twelve resting places of her last journey south. At Lincoln, Grantham, Stamford, Geddington. At Northampton, Stony Stratford, Dunstable, St Albans. At Waltham. And finally, at the village of Charing, just outside the walls of London, where the last cross stood at what we now call Charing Cross.

Most of those crosses are gone now. Three survive, weathered and worn, at Geddington, Hardingstone, and Waltham. But the grief that raised them has never quite faded from the English landscape.

In the same year that Eleanor died, King Edward committed what may be the darkest act of his reign.

For generations, the Jewish community in England had occupied an impossible position. They were forbidden from owning land. They were forbidden from entering most trades. What they were permitted to do, and what made them useful to kings and lords who needed ready money, was lend. And lend they did, filling a role that the Church forbade Christians from performing, and being despised for it.

As land began to change hands more freely in England, some of it had passed to Jewish moneylenders through mortgages and debts. It was not a great deal of land, but it was enough to be noticed, and enough to make people angry. Small landowners struggling under mortgages, nobles who had borrowed recklessly and did not wish to repay, and everyone found it easier to blame Jewish money lenders than themselves.

King Edward saw his opportunity. Italian bankers had arrived in England who could serve the same financial purpose, and the King had awkward debts of his own that might quietly disappear. In 1290, he ordered every Jewish man, woman, and child expelled from England. They were stripped of almost everything they owned and driven from the country, taking with them only what they could carry.

The expelled families made their way to France, to Spain, to North Africa, beginning again with nothing. It was a pattern that had repeated itself across Europe and would go on repeating for centuries to come. England’s doors would not reopen to Jews again for over three hundred and fifty years, until Oliver Cromwell quietly allowed their return in the 1650s.

Churchill called it ‘the simple and well-trodden path of anti-Semitism’. Unfortunately, even today, it is all too familiar.

In any event, King Edward had come to the throne with unfinished business in the west.

Wales had never been truly conquered. Not by the Romans in any lasting way, not by the Saxons, and not by the Normans. For centuries the Welsh princes had held their mountain country against all comers, raiding when they were strong, retreating into the hills when they were pressed, and emerging again as soon as the pressure eased. The current prince, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, grandson of the great Llywelyn, had caused serious trouble during King Henry III’s reign, and King Edward I was not a man who left problems unsolved.

King Edward went about it with cold, methodical patience. Over several years of persistent campaigning, using Welsh soldiers in his own pay alongside regular troops and one of the last musters of the old feudal levy, he wore the Welsh resistance down. His most devastating weapon was time. While previous kings had fought the Welsh in summer and gone home when the weather turned, Edward kept his armies in the field through the brutal mountain winters, cutting roads through frozen forests, hauling supplies along muddy tracks, and denying the Welsh the breathing space they had always depended on. It was miserable work for the soldiers who had to do it, sleeping in the open in December with the rain driving sideways off the mountains. But it was effective, and KIng Edward was not a man who counted the cost in other people’s comfort.

When the fighting was done, King Edward built castles. Not the simple motte-and-bailey fortifications of the early Normans, but enormous stone fortresses with towered walls and sea-supplied garrisons, designed to hold down a conquered people permanently. Caernarfon, with its banded masonry and eagle-topped towers. Conwy, perched above its river. Harlech, on its rocky outcrop. Beaumaris, the last and most perfectly symmetrical castle of them all. They ringed the Welsh heartland like a chain of iron, and several of them still stand, more than seven hundred years later, and they are amongst the most formidable military buildings in Europe.

At Caernarfon, in 1284, the King’s son Edward was born, and he was proclaimed the first English Prince of Wales, a title that has been given to the heir to the English throne ever since.

But something else came out of the Welsh wars, something that would change the nature of warfare itself. In South Wales, the English encountered the longbow.

The Welsh had been using it for generations. It was drawn not to the chest, as other archers drew their shorter bows, but all the way back to the ear, unleashing an arrow with tremendous force over a great distance. One of the English Marcher lords left a record of what the weapon could do. A Welsh arrow, he wrote, had pierced a knight’s mailed shirt, then his mailed breeches, then his thigh, then the wooden frame of his saddle, and finally buried itself deep in the flank of his horse. A single arrow, through five layers of protection.

Nothing like it had been seen in warfare since the fall of Rome. For the first time, ordinary foot soldiers possessed a weapon that could punch through the armour of mounted knights. King Edward recognised what he was looking at – a powerful new weapon. He recruited Welsh longbowmen into his own armies and began training English archers in the same technique. The longbow would not reach its full devastating glory until the next century, at the great battles of Crécy and Poitiers. But it was King Edward who understood its power first, and it was King Edward who made it an English weapon.

Then came Scotland, and the tragedy that would define the rest of his reign.

For as long as anyone could remember, England and Scotland had lived in peace. The border was quiet. The two kingdoms traded freely, and their royal families were linked by marriage and alliance. It was the longest unbroken peace the island had known, but in in March 1286, it ended with a stumble in the dark.

Alexander III, King of Scotland, had dined that evening at Edinburgh Castle. Against the advice of his companions, who warned him that the night was wild, he insisted on riding home to his young wife at Kinghorn, across the Firth of Forth. The storm was fierce, and somewhere along the cliff path on the Fife coast, in the wind and the blackness, his horse missed its footing. The King’s body was found on the beach the next morning, his neck broken.

King Alexander left behind a single heir: his granddaughter Margaret, a little girl of three, known as the Maid of Norway because her mother had married the Norwegian king.

A bright and hopeful idea took shape. Margaret would inherit the Scottish throne, and she would marry King Edward’s son, the young Prince of Wales. The two kingdoms would be joined in peace, by marriage rather than by war, and the ancient quarrel between England and Scotland would be laid to rest. Almost everyone agreed it was a fine plan. The Scottish lords accepted it, King Edward accepted it, and the Pope approved of it.

Margaret, the Maid of Norway set sail in 1290. She was seven years old, but she never reached Scotland. Somewhere on that crossing, in rough autumn seas, the little girl died, and the dream of a peaceful union between Scotland and England died with her.

Scotland was left with no clear heir, and the question of who should be king threatened to tear the country apart. From a crowd of claimants, two men stood out: John Balliol and Robert Bruce. Balliol had the stronger legal claim through primogeniture – firstborn child inheritance. And Rober Bruce argued that he was closer in blood to the old royal line. Neither man would yield, and behind each stood a powerful faction of Scottish lords ready to fight for their candidate.

King Edward stepped forward. His reputation as a lawmaker was unmatched in Europe. He had already arbitrated a succession dispute between Aragon and Anjou, and the Scots, seeing no better option than civil war, agreed to accept his judgement. King Edward consented, but only after extracting a formal acknowledgement that the English crown held overlordship of Scotland. The Scots, in their desperation, agreed.

In 1292, King Edward pronounced in favour of John Balliol. It was the right decision. Later scholars have not seriously disputed it, but unfortunately King Edward had not settled the issue of the Scottish crown, he had inadvertently made matters worse.

Now King John Balliol owed his crown to King Edward, but Edward treated him not as a fellow king but as a servant, summoning him to English courts, overriding Scottish law, and making plain at every turn that Scotland’s independence was finished. The Scottish lords were furious, and appointed a council of twelve to govern alongside King John Balliol and protect their country’s rights.

And then Scotland made the move that brought King Edwards fury upon them. Faced with an impossible position, the Scots allied themselves with France, England’s great rival, whose king Philip the Fair was already at war with King Edward over the English territories in Gascony.

King Edward was enraged, and he summoned King Balliol to answer for it, but the Scottish lords refused to let their king go, and from that moment, the talking was over.

King Edward struck Berwick first.

Berwick-upon-Tweed was, in 1296, one of the great trading towns of northern Europe. It was rich, busy, and prosperous, and it was entirely unprepared for what was fell upon it. A century of peace had left it without proper defences. When King Edward’s army appeared before its walls, the townspeople threw up wooden palisades and grabbed whatever weapons they could find, but it was not enough.

The English swept through the makeshift defences within hours, and what followed was a slaughter that shocked even that brutal medieval age. Thousands of men, women, and children were killed, and the most determined resistance came from only thirty Flemish merchants who had barricaded themselves inside their trading depot, a building called the Red Hall. The merchants fought until the building was burned down around them.

Berwick, which that morning had been one of the busiest ports in Britain, was destroyed. It never recovered, and the prosperous medieval town became the quiet border settlement that exists today.

And then, with the blood barely dry, King Edward changed his manner entirely. To every Scottish town and lord that now came forward to submit, he offered forgiveness, easy terms, and gentle treatment. Perth surrendered. Stirling surrendered. Edinburgh surrendered. King John Balliol gave up his throne and English officials moved in. English law replaced Scottish custom. The conquest of Sccotland, King Edward believed, was complete.

He was wrong.

Scotland’s nobles had failed, and its king had been humiliated, but the people of Scotland had not surrendered. They had watched the slaughter at Berwick. They had watched their lords give in. And somewhere underneath, out of sight, in the forests and glens of the south-west, where the English writ did not run and the wild country offered shelter, something else was stirring. A figure was rising, an outlaw knight with a burning hatred of English rule and a gift for war that nobody had yet suspected.

His name was William Wallace.

014 King John And Magna Carta

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When the news came that King Richard the Lionheart was dead, his brother John was in Brittany, deep in enemy country, and he knew at once that his life was in danger.

He was at the court of his nephew Arthur, a boy of twelve, and Arthur’s people had no love for John. The men around him, the Breton lords who had backed Arthur’s claim to the English throne for years, now had every reason to seize John and the throne, and John did not wait to find out whether they would. He left, rode hard and fast, and did not stop until he was out of Brittany and back amongst friends.

It was a telling start.

King Richard, the Lionheart, had named his brother John as his successor. But there was another candidate, and the question of who had the better claim would tear the family, and the empire, apart. Geoffrey, John’s elder brother, was dead, but he had left behind a son, young Arthur, Prince of Brittany. By one reading of the law, Arthur’s claim was stronger than John’s. He was the son of an elder brother. If primogeniture, the principle that inheritance passes through the eldest line, was the rule, then Arthur should be king.

But primogeniture was not yet settled into law. The old Archbishop of Canterbury and William the Marshal, the greatest knight in England, talked over the issue and decided in favour of John. So did Queen Eleanor, now in her late seventies, who stood by her surviving son against a grandson whose mother she had never liked. England accepted King John without argument, but in France, where it mattered just as much, the opposite view prevailed. Brittany rallied behind Arthur. The King of France, Philip Augustus, who had been circling the Plantagenet empire for years, watching for the moment to strike, saw his chance and took it.

No one would have envied the man who now sat on the English throne. King John had inherited a vast empire, but he had inherited it without the thing that had held it together – his brother, King Richard the Lionheart’s reputation.

He was not King Richard. Everyone knew it, and everyone felt it, and it influenced everything that followed.

What kind of man was King John? The honest answer is that nobody, either then or today, has been able to agree. He could be patient and cunning, coldly intelligent, and sometimes even generous. He had a restless, inquiring mind and loved his books, carrying a small library with him as he travelled, which was unusual for a king of that age. King John was a capable administrator and, when cornered, a capable soldier. But he was also ruthless, suspicious, and possessed a violent temper that could flash into cruelty without warning. The monks who wrote the chronicles of his reign hated him, and they had reason to. The picture they painted was of a man consumed by greed, treachery, and malice. It was not the whole truth, but it was not a lie either.

John showed his nature early. At Rouen, when they handed him the symbolic lance of the Dukes of Normandy, the new duke turned to whisper some joke to the men standing behind him and dropped it on the floor. The people watching thought it was an omen. They were not wrong.

The war with King Philip Augustus and with Arthur dragged on through the fitful pattern of the age, raids and truces, sieges and negotiations, but without the Lionheart to frighten the French it was a losing fight. In 1202, King Philip, as King John’s overlord for his French territories, summoned King John to appear before his court in Paris to answer charges brought against him by the barons of Poitou. King John refused. King Philip said he was summoned as Count of Poitou, but John said the King of England could not submit to such a trial. King Philip replied that the King of France could not lose his rights over a vassal simply because that vassal happened to have become a king as well. When King John still refused to attend, King Philip declared him stripped of all his French lands and invaded Normandy.

At the same time, Arthur made a mistake. He was fifteen now, knighted by King Philip, and given the Plantagenet lands that King Philip had taken from King John. Arthur was also betrothed to King Philip’s daughter. Hearing that his grandmother, old Queen Eleanor, was at the castle of Mirabeau in Poitou with only a small guard, Arthur marched south, surrounded the castle, and stormed the outer walls. Soon, he was within hours of capturing the most important woman in the family.

However, Queen Eleanor just managed to get word to King John. And King John, for once, moved like his brother. With a full army behind him, he covered eighty miles in forty-eight hours, fell on Arthur and his men at daybreak, and took them all. Arthur, two hundred knights, the rebel lords, the whole lot.

Arthur was taken to the castle of Falaise, and then to Rouen, and everyone knew he was in mortal danger. The barons of Brittany begged King John to release the boy. King John refused. He knew, and it was true, that he would never be safe as long as Arthur lived. King Philip would always use the boy against him. Arthur, caught in open war, besieging his own grandmother, was a prisoner who could never be set free without becoming a weapon again.

No one knows exactly what happened at Rouen. The commander of the castle, a man named Hubert de Burgh, gave out that King John had sent men to castrate the boy, and that Arthur had died of the shock. Later, Hubert changed his story and said Arthur was still alive. King John said he was glad his orders had been disobeyed. But Arthur was never seen again. It was believed at the time that King John had ordered his murder, and it has been believed ever since. How Arthur died, whether he was blinded, mutilated, or simply killed, remains unknown to this day.

This all happened at a time when kings and princes were put to death for reasons of policy, and no one was greatly surprised. But the murder of a nephew, a boy of fifteen, by a king who was already distrusted, confirmed the worst that everyone believed about King John. And it did not even achieve what King John had hoped. Arthur was gone, but King Philip Augustus was still there, and King Philip did not need a puppet. He needed a cause, and King John had given him one.

Over time, Normandy crumbled. Province by province, and fortress by fortress, the great Plantagenet empire fell apart. King John poured in money and supplies, but his nerve failed him, and in the end he abandoned Normandy altogether, taking a ship for England and leaving the French to pick up the pieces. In March 1204, the great Château Gaillard that King Richard himself had built, the fortress he had loved and called his own, fell to King Philip’s army, and the road to Rouen lay open. Three months later the capital surrendered, and Normandy, after a hundred and thirty-eight years under the English crown, became French.

It was a humiliation, and King John bore the blame.

But the loss of Normandy, in the long run, did England a favour. It forced the English nobility to look inward. The great lords who had held land on both sides of the Channel now had to choose, and most of them chose England. The ruling class, which for a century and a half had been half Norman and half English, with their eyes always turned towards France, now became, for the first time, simply English. The dangerous, expensive, distracting business of holding a foreign empire was over. England would have to learn to be a country on its own.

King John was not a man to sit quietly after defeat. He schemed for years to build a Continental alliance against Philip, sending money and ambassadors across Europe, courting the Emperor and the counts of Flanders and Toulouse. But before he could launch his grand counter-attack, he picked a fight much closer to home that would prove far more costly.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, died in 1205, and the question of who would replace him brought King John into conflict with the most powerful Pope of the Middle Ages – Innocent III. Both the king and the monks of Canterbury put forward their own candidates, but Pope Innocent rejected them both and, to John’s fury, installed his own man, an English cardinal named Stephen Langton, a scholar of the highest reputation who had spent his career to date in Paris and Rome.

King John was outraged. He had agreed in advance to accept the Pope’s decision, expecting his own candidate to win, but he had been outmanoeuvred. He refused to accept Langton and began a campaign of harassment against the English Church, seizing property and driving monks from their monasteries.

Pope Innocent struck back with the heaviest weapon the medieval Church possessed. In March 1208 he placed all of England under an interdict.

The effect was devastating, not to King John, who cared nothing for it, but to ordinary people. The church bells fell silent. The doors of every church in the country were barred shut. No one could be married in church, or buried in consecrated ground, or receive the last rites of the dying. For more than six years, across the whole of England, the spiritual life of the nation was suspended. Think of what that meant to people who believed completely, that their immortal souls depended upon the grace of the Church. A child could still be baptised, and the dying could still confess, but everything else, every wedding, every funeral, every Sunday that gave shape and comfort to ordinary people, was gone. People went to their graves in fear of damnation, and they blamed their king.

When King John only hardened, Pope Innocent went further. In 1209 he excommunicated the king himself, releasing all John’s subjects from their oaths of loyalty and inviting his enemies to overthrow him as a holy act. But King John did not flinch. He seized the empty bishoprics and abbeys and pocketed the revenue, and his treasury overflowed with the spoils of the Church, and for a time, it looked like he might get away with it.

He didn’t. By 1213, King Philip Augustus was assembling an invasion fleet, with the Pope’s blessing and the Church’s full backing, and King John was cornered. He could not fight France and the Pope at the same time, so he did something extraordinary – he completely submitted. And then went further than anyone expected. He offered to make England a fief of the Papacy, handing his entire kingdom to the Pope and receiving it back as a vassal. It was an act of abject surrender, or, looked at another way, a stroke of cold genius. Innocent, who could never resist an addition to his worldly power, accepted with delight. Overnight, King John went from excommunicate to the Pope’s favourite. King Philip, who had been preparing to invade England as a holy crusade, found that the ground had been pulled from under his feet. The Pope was now King John’s protector.

It was clever, even brilliant, but it solved nothing at home.

The English barons had grievances that went far deeper than the Church quarrel. King John had taxed them relentlessly to pay for his wars in France. He had abused his feudal powers, charging outrageous fees for inheritances, wardships, and marriages. He had used the efficient machinery of government that his father King Henry II had built, the courts, the sheriffs, the Exchequer, not to serve justice but to squeeze money and crush opposition. Everything King Henry had created to bring order, King John had turned into an instrument of oppression. The travelling judges, the efficient Exchequer, the network of sheriffs, all of the machinery that had once been England’s strength, now served a king who used it not for justice, but for control. The barons had endured it while there was hope of recovering Normandy. When that hope died, their patience died with it.

In 1214, King John’s grand plan finally came together. The idea was a pincer movement. He himself would sail to Poitou and attack King Philip from the south, stirring up rebellion among the French barons. Meanwhile, a great allied army led by his nephew Otto IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, along with the Earl of Salisbury would march on King Philip from the north, catching the French king between two forces.

The southern campaign failed first. King John landed in Poitou but could not hold his ground, and when a French army advanced against him he withdrew without a fight. That left the northern allies to face King Philip alone.

They met at Bouvines, in northern France, on a hot Sunday in late July. It did not last long. King Philip crushed them. Emperor Otto fled the field, and the Earl of Salisbury was taken prisoner. And with that single afternoon’s fighting, every hope King John had placed in years of diplomacy and borrowed money was gone. He returned to England a beaten man.

The barons saw their moment. They came together, armed and angry, and demanded terms. Left to themselves they might have demanded nothing more than the protection of their own privileges and the settling of their own scores, but they had a powerful supporter – Stephen Langton. Langton was the archbishop King John had fought so hard to keep out of Canterbury, and now he stood with the barons, and he gave them something larger than their own grievances to fight for. Archbishop Langton persuaded the barons to base their demands not on personal resentment, but on the old laws and customs of the realm, the principle that there was a law that stood above the king, and that even the king must obey it.

It was not a new idea. It reached back through King Henry’s Common Law, through King Alfred’s code, to the oldest understanding the English had of what a king was for. But no one had ever written it down, made it a contract, and forced a king to agree to it, this was the baron’s chance to do so.

On a Monday morning in June 1215, on the great flat meadow at Runnymede, between Staines and Windsor, the barons and churchmen gathered and waited. They had set up a small throne and a tent. Their armed retainers stood at a distance, because armed rebellion against the crown was the supreme crime of the feudal world, and no one wanted to make it look worse than it was.

Then a small group of riders appeared from the direction of Windsor. King John, the Papal legate, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, along with several bishops. They dismounted without ceremony, and the process began. Someone, probably Langton, stated the terms and John agreed at once, sealing and confirming his agreement in a single document.

The document is called Magna Carta, and it is not what you might expect.

It is not a ringing declaration of human rights or democratic principles. It is a long, detailed legal contract of sixty-three clauses, most of them dealing with the particular complaints of the feudal barons, matters of taxation, inheritance fees, wardships, and the procedures of the royal courts. The word ‘freeman’ in its pages was a technical feudal term that probably did not include even the richer merchants, let alone the ordinary people of England. It was a deal struck between a king and his nobility, and the nobility took care of themselves first.

And yet what Magna Carta said, beneath the feudal detail, was something that had never been said quite so plainly before. It said that there was a law above the king. That the king was not free to do whatever he pleased. That even a crowned and anointed sovereign was bound by rules he could not simply ignore. The idea was not invented at Runnymede, it was already old, buried deep in the customs and traditions of the English people. But at Runnymede, for the first time, it was written down, sealed by the king himself, and made into a promise that could be held up and pointed to whenever a future king tried to ride roughshod over the rights of his people.

But Magna Carta was just the seed, and what grew from it, over the centuries, was almost everything we now mean by freedom under law: Parliament, trial by jury, the idea that a government answers to its people. But that was a long way off, and the barons who stood on that meadow would not have recognised it. They were not democrats, and they were not thinking about the rights of common men and women. They were thinking about their own land, their own money, and their own power. But the principle they forced King John to accept, that government must mean something more than the will of one man, that custom and law must stand even above the throne, proved impossible to put back in the box once it was out.

King John died the following year, still fighting, still scheming and never reconciled to his nobles. He is buried in Worcester Cathedral, and his tomb effigy, carved in Purbeck marble and said to be a true likeness of the man. It can still be seen there today, and is the oldest royal effigy in England.

The meadow at Runnymede is still there too. It is a quiet place now, flat and green, with the Thames running beside it and the trees standing where they have always stood. There is a memorial there, paid for not by the British but by the American Bar Association, because the lawyers of America understood, perhaps more clearly than anyone, what had begun in that field. When the men who wrote the American Constitution sat down to build the governing laws of the United States, they were building on a foundation that was laid on a June morning more than five hundred years before, by a handful of angry and frightened barons who forced the worst king England ever had to put his seal to a document he had no intention of honouring.

In the year before his death, King John did not honour Magna Carta, but it outlived him and the age that created it. And the idea at its heart, that no one, not even a king, is above the law, is one of the foundations of freedom under law in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

013 King Richard The Lionheart

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In the summer of 1189, Richard, the eldest surviving son of King Henry II, went to war against his own father.

He was not the first of King Henry’s sons to rebel. His brothers had done it before him, encouraged by the King of France, who understood that the easiest way to destroy the great Angevin empire was to set its heirs against each other. But Richard’s rebellion was the last, and the worst. Allied with King Philip of France, he attacked King Henry’s lands in the Loire, and at Le Mans he routed the old king’s army and sent it fleeing.

King Henry ran. Behind him, covering the retreat, rode one of his most loyal knights, a man named William Marshal. And it was Marshal, stationed in the rearguard with the dust of the fleeing army still hanging in the air, who looked up and saw Prince Richard thundering toward him at the head of the pursuing cavalry.

Richard was not even wearing his mail. He was reckless, furious, and utterly exposed. Marshal, mounted and armed, could have killed him in a heartbeat. But killing a prince who was almost certainly about to become king was not the same as killing an enemy. It was a decision that would follow a man for the rest of his life, one way or the other.

Richard saw the lance. ‘Spare me,’ he cried out.

Marshal turned his lance and drove it into the prince’s horse instead. The animal went down. Richard crashed to the ground in a tangle of dust and reins while Marshal looked down at him.

‘I will not slay you,’ Marshal said. ‘The Devil may slay you.’

Then he rode away.

The insult was worse than death. To be unhorsed and spared, publicly, by a man who could have ended you, was a humiliation that most princes would have remembered with a burning desire for revenge. However, when King Henry died a few weeks later and Richard became king, Marshal and his friends waited with real anxiety to discover what the new ruler would do to them.

What the new King Richard did surprised everyone. He summoned Marshal, spoke calmly and even with admiration about the incident at Le Mans, confirmed him in every office and honour, and sent him to England as his representative. Then he gave Marshal a rich heiress in marriage, making him one of the most powerful barons in the country.

It was quietly noticed, that the new king’s favour fell most warmly upon those who had stood loyally by his father against him, even at the expense of those who had been Richard’s own allies in the rebellion.

This was the kind of man King Richard was. Grand. Generous. Surprising. And almost entirely uninterested in the kingdom he had just inherited.

King Henry II, the restless, brilliant, rough-handed king who had rebuilt English law and quarrelled with Thomas Becket, died at Chinon in Anjou on the sixth of July 1189. He was fifty-six years old, exhausted, and broken. His sons had rebelled against him, one after another, encouraged by the King of France. His wife Eleanor had supported her sons and spent sixteen years in captivity for it. The great Angevin empire King Henry II had spent his life holding together was cracking under the pressure of its own contradictions, exactly as the patient French king had always hoped it would.

At the end, so the story goes, King Henry turned his face to the wall and said, ‘Shame, shame on a vanquished king.’

Richard knelt beside his father’s body no longer than it would have taken to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Then he stood up and turned to the business of being king.

He was crowned at Westminster Abbey on the third of September 1189. He was thirty-one years old, and he would reign for ten years. In that time he would become the most famous warrior in Christendom, fight a crusade that would echo through the centuries, spend a fortune that would bleed England dry, and set foot in his own kingdom only twice, for a few months each time.

Yet somehow, against all reason, the English never stopped loving him.

What did this new king look like?

He was tall and well-proportioned, long-limbed and strong, with reddish-gold hair and a bearing that made people look twice. He was a superb horseman, a devastating fighter in single combat, and he moved with the easy confidence of a man who had never doubted, for one moment of his life, that he was born to lead armies. He loved war the way some men love music, not just the strategy and the grand sweep of it, but the physical business of fighting, the weight of a sword, the shock of impact, the roar and chaos of a cavalry charge. He wrote poetry and sang well. He spoke French and the language of southern France, and Latin too, and he had a sharp, restless intelligence that could turn cruel when he was bored or crossed.

He was, in short, everything a medieval king was supposed to be. His contemporaries called him Cœur de Lion, the Lionheart, and they meant it as the highest compliment they knew. In those days the lion was the most admired creature in heraldry, and more than one king tried to claim a connection with it. When they gave the name to Richard, it stuck, because everyone who saw him in battle knew it was true.

But the people of England barely knew him. He had grown up in France, in his mother Eleanor’s warm, cultured duchy of Aquitaine, surrounded by troubadours (travelling poet musicians), southern sunshine and the soft vowels of the langue d’oc. England was cold, wet, and far away. He had no attachment to it. He did not speak English. What England had, and what King Richard wanted, was money because he was going on a crusade.

Three years before Richard became king, something had happened in the east that sent a shudder through every Christian country in Europe – Jerusalem had fallen.

The Christian kingdom that the First Crusade had established nearly a century earlier had always been fragile, a narrow strip of coastline held together by fortified castles, military orders, and the disunity of the surrounding Muslim powers. That disunity ended when a Kurdish-born general named Saladin rose to become Sultan of Egypt and then took Damascus and Aleppo, encircling the Christian territories from every side.

In 1187, Saladin proclaimed a jihad, a holy war. At the Battle of Hattin – a rocky hilltop in the waterless hills above the Sea of Galilee – his forces destroyed the Christian army. The Crusader knights, weighed down by armour in the terrible heat, gasping for water that did not exist, were surrounded and cut to pieces. The King of Jerusalem was captured, and the Grand Master of the Templars was taken. In October of that year, Saladin entered Jerusalem.

The shock was enormous, and the Pope’s legates raced across Europe demanding that Christian princes stop fighting each other and fight the infidel instead. Pictures were shown of the Holy Sepulchre defiled by the horses of Saracen cavalry. A special tax, the Saladin Tithe, was levied on everyone who did not take the Cross. The three greatest kings of the West, the rulers of England, France, and Germany, pledged themselves to the rescue.

King Richard, newly crowned, threw himself into the crusade with a single-mindedness that was breathtaking. He sold everything he could lay his hands on. Offices, castles, lordships, entire towns, all went to the highest bidder. He sold the right to govern whole counties. He released the King of Scotland from his oath of allegiance in exchange for ten thousand marks. He is supposed to have said, ‘I would sell London itself if I could find a buyer.’

England, which had only just recovered from the long bleeding of King Henry II’s reign, was bled again. The shires that had been patiently rebuilt, the courts that had been carefully restored, the treasury that had been slowly refilled, all of it was raided to pay for a war in a country most English people could not have found on a map, had maps existed for them to look at.

But Richard did not care about any of that. He had a war to fight, and it was the only thing that mattered to him.

King Richard the Lionheart left England in December 1189 and would not return for more than four years.

The Third Crusade was the greatest military expedition of the Middle Ages. King Richard sailed with a fleet of over a hundred ships, carrying a vast force of knights, men-at-arms, and siege engineers. He stopped in Sicily, where he quarrelled spectacularly with the local king and took the city of Messina almost as an afterthought. He conquered Cyprus on his way past, deposing its ruler in a matter of weeks, and arrived at the siege of Acre in June 1191. The war that had been dragging on for two years suddenly caught fire.

Acre was a walled port city on the coast of what is now Israel, and the Christian forces had been besieging it without success since 1189. King Richard’s arrival changed everything. He brought men, money, siege engines, and above all he brought himself, a commander of ferocious energy who drove his troops forward by sheer force of will. Even when he fell ill with a fever so bad that his hair and nails began to fall out, he had himself carried to the front on a litter and went on directing the siege from his stretcher, choosing positions for his crossbowmen and watching the bombardment through the tent flaps.

Acre fell in July 1191. It was the first great Christian victory in the Holy Land for a generation.

What followed was one of the most famous military marches in history. Richard led his army south along the coast toward the port of Jaffa, the gateway to Jerusalem. The column moved slowly through the scorching heat of a Palestinian summer, the men drenched in sweat inside their armour, flies blackening every wound. Saladin shadowed them the entire way, sending his cavalry in wave after wave against the Christian flank, probing for a gap, trying to break the formation apart.

But King Richard’s discipline held. He kept his army in tight formation, the infantry on the landward side absorbing the Saracen arrows and charges, the knights in reserve, forbidden to break ranks until the moment was right. Men fell and the column kept moving. Horses screamed and the column kept moving. The Saracen arrows came so thick at times that the infantrymen looked, according to one chronicler, like porcupines bristling with shafts, and still the column kept moving.

At the Battle of Arsuf, when Saladin committed his full force, King Richard launched his cavalry in a devastating counter-charge that broke the Muslim line and sent them streaming from the field. It was a textbook victory, perfectly timed, and it confirmed what every soldier in the Holy Land already knew. In battle, King Richard was extraordinary.

But battles are not the same as wars.

King Richard advanced to within a day’s march of Jerusalem. Twice he brought his army close enough that the soldiers could feel the prize within reach. But he knew, with the hard clarity of a professional soldier, that he could not take the city and hold it. His army was too small, the supply lines too long, the desert too unforgiving. If he stormed the walls and won, Saladin’s vastly larger forces would simply encircle him and starve him out. The Christian army at Hattin had been destroyed because it was surrounded and cut off from water in open country. Richard could see that the same thing would happen to him inside Jerusalem, only worse, because walls that keep an enemy out also keep an army in.

He turned back. It was the right decision, militarily. It may have been the hardest decision of his life. The whole purpose of the crusade, the thing he had sold half his kingdom to achieve, stood shimmering on the horizon, and he rode away from it.

In September 1192, Richard and Saladin agreed a truce. Christian pilgrims would be allowed to visit the holy places in Jerusalem. The coastal cities would remain in Christian hands. It was something, but it was not what the crusade had set out to achieve. Jerusalem remained under Muslim rule. It would not return to Christian hands in Richard’s lifetime, or in any lifetime after.

There is a tradition that Saladin sent Richard a gift of fruit and snow to cool his fever during the campaign, and that the two men, who never met face to face, developed a grudging mutual respect. Whether or not every detail is true, it captures something real about both of them. Saladin was a man of genuine honour and considerable magnanimity, and Richard, for all his violence, recognised quality when he saw it.

King Richard the Lionheart left the Holy Land in October 1192. He would never return, but his journey home became a disaster.

Richard’s ship was driven ashore in the Adriatic, and he was forced to travel overland through territories ruled by men he had offended during the crusade. He tried to pass through Austria in disguise, but the disguise was poor and the grudge was deep. Duke Leopold of Austria, whom Richard had publicly humiliated at the siege of Acre by tearing down his banner from the walls, had him seized near Vienna just before Christmas 1192.

Leopold handed his prisoner over to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI, who locked King Richard away in a castle and demanded a ransom so enormous that it beggared belief. One hundred and fifty thousand marks of silver, roughly two to three times the entire annual revenue of the English crown, and England was stripped bare to pay it.

A special tax was levied on every free man in the country. The churches gave up their plate. The Cistercian monks, who owned no gold or silver because their rule forbade it, handed over their wool clip, the only wealth they possessed. Farmers and merchants who had never left their own county, who had never seen the king and never would, reached into whatever they had and gave, because the alternative was a kingdom with no ruler and the chaos that would follow. Richard’s mother Eleanor, now seventy years old and released from her own long captivity, drove the collection with fierce determination.

It took more than a year to raise the money. In February 1194, after fifteen months in prison, King Richard was released. He returned briefly to England, showed himself to his subjects, raised yet more money, and left again within weeks.

He had unfinished business in France. While King Richard had been rotting in a German cell, King Philip of France had been busily seizing his territories, and King Richard’s own brother John had been scheming to take the English throne. King Richard dealt with John contemptuously, calling him a child who had been led astray by bad advisers, and turned his full attention to Philip.

The last five years of his life were spent in a grinding war across Normandy and the Loire valley. King Richard fought Philip with the same energy and tactical brilliance he had shown against Saladin, and he was winning. He built a great fortress on the Seine, Château Gaillard, the most advanced castle in Europe, and boasted that he could hold it even if its walls were made of butter. It was a masterpiece of military engineering, and it was also a statement. King Richard was not going to lose France.

Then, in the spring of 1199, he besieged a small, insignificant castle called Châlus-Chabrol in the Limousin. The garrison was tiny. The castle was nothing. There was a rumour, probably false, that a peasant had found a hoard of Roman gold and the local lord had refused to hand it over. It was the kind of petty quarrel King Richard would normally have settled in an afternoon.

On the evening of the twenty-fifth of March, King Richard was riding around the castle walls inspecting the siege works. He was carrying a shield but wearing no armour. A crossbowman on the battlements, a man some sources call Pierre Basile, took aim and shot him in the left shoulder, near the neck.

Unfortunately, after the bolt was removed, the wound turned gangrenous. Quite soon, King Richard knew he was dying. He sent for the crossbowman and, according to the chroniclers, forgave him. ‘Live on,’ he is supposed to have said, ‘and by my bounty behold the light of day.’

Whether the crossbowman actually survived King Richard’s mercy is another question. Some accounts say that after the king died, his mercenary captain, Mercadier, had the man flayed alive. The age of chivalry had its limits.

Richard I, King Richard the Lionheart of England, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Count of Anjou, Cœur de Lion, died on the sixth of April 1199. He was forty-one years old. His mother Eleanor was at his bedside.

He had been King of England for ten years and had spent barely six months of those years in his own kingdom. He had taxed the English mercilessly, first to pay for his crusade, then to pay for his ransom, then to pay for his wars in France. He had given them nothing in return except a name, a legend, and the memory of a man who had fought like a lion and lived like one too, restless, magnificent, and always somewhere else.

His bronze statue stands today in Old Palace Yard, outside the Houses of Parliament in London. King Richard on a horse with sword raised. It was placed there in 1860, nearly seven centuries after his death, because by then it was the legend that mattered, not the ledger.

What King Richard left behind, was a kingdom drained of money and patience, and a younger brother who had already shown, during King Richard’s captivity, exactly how much trouble he was capable of causing.

His brother’s name was John.

012 Murder In The Cathedral

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They were the strangest pair in Christendom.

King Henry, with his rough hands and cracked voice and plain clothes, riding hard through the rain from one end of England to the other. And beside him, as often as not, his Chancellor, Thomas Becket, dressed in silk and fur, laughing easily, keeping up with the king on horseback as though he had been born to it.

They hunted together, they ate together, they argued about law and money and bishops, and then went hawking together as though none of it mattered. The king’s own son, the young prince Henry, lived in Becket’s household, and it was Becket who oversaw his education. People at court said the two men were closer than brothers.

It was a friendship that would end in blood on the stone floor of a cathedral. But in the early years of King Henry’s reign, nobody could have seen it coming.

Thomas Becket was not born to greatness. His father, Gilbert, was a merchant in London, a Norman who had settled in Cheapside, and done well enough for himself without ever becoming truly rich. Thomas grew up sharp, charming, and ambitious. He had a gift for making people like him and a talent for getting things done. As a young man he entered the household of Theobald, the Archbishop of Canterbury, where he quickly made himself so useful that the old archbishop began sending him on important missions, including trips to Rome. When King Henry needed a Chancellor in 1155, Theobald recommended Becket. It was the best advice the archbishop ever gave, and the worst.

Becket took to the Chancellor’s office like a man who had been waiting for it all his life. He ran the royal household, managed the king’s money, oversaw the courts, led embassies abroad, and even commanded troops in battle. He was brilliant at it. He was also, without apology, spectacularly extravagant. His household was one of the largest in the kingdom. He threw lavish dinners, wore magnificent clothes, and travelled with a train of servants and horses that made foreign courts stare. When he went as ambassador to Paris, he took twenty-four changes of clothing with him. He was, in every way that mattered, the king’s right hand. He enforced the king’s will, collected the king’s money, and backed the king’s authority over the Church without a second thought.

King Henry loved him for it.

And then Theobald died.

The Archbishop of Canterbury was the most powerful churchman in England. He crowned kings. He answered to the Pope. He controlled a vast web of Church courts, Church lands, and Church wealth. And when Theobald died in 1161, King Henry saw an opportunity that seemed almost too good to be true.

He would make Thomas Becket the new Archbishop.

Think about what Henry was trying to do. He was building a system of law that would cover the whole kingdom, from the Common Law and the travelling judges we heard about in the last chapter to the Exchequer that counted every penny. But there was one great flaw in that system. The Church ran its own courts under its own rules, and those courts answered not to the king but to the Pope in Rome. If a priest committed a crime, even a serious one, he could not be tried in the king’s court. He was sent to a Church court, where the punishments were far lighter. A man who would have been hanged or mutilated under the king’s justice might face nothing worse than a penance or the loss of his position.

King Henry thought this was outrageous. Stories circulated of more than a hundred cases of murder by members of the clergy that had gone effectively unpunished. The king wanted the Church to hand over these criminal clerics to his courts for proper punishment. The Church refused. Its courts were sacred, its clergy answerable only to God and the Pope. No king, however powerful, could change that.

Unless, of course, the Archbishop of Canterbury was your closest friend.

That was the plan. With Becket in Canterbury, Henry would have an ally at the very heart of the Church. Together they would bring the Church courts under the king’s law and close the gap in the system. It was clever. It was bold. And it was a catastrophic misjudgement of the man Henry thought he knew.

Becket did not want the job. He is said to have warned the king, looking down at his own fine clothes, that Henry would soon come to hate him as much as he loved him now. Whether he truly said this, or whether the story was exaggerated after everything that followed, nobody can be sure. But in June of 1162, Thomas Becket was ordained a priest one day and consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury the next. He was, overnight, the highest churchman in England.

And overnight, he became a different man.

The silk and fur vanished. The lavish dinners stopped. The magnificent household was stripped bare. Becket put on the plain black robes of a monk. Beneath them, against his skin, he wore a hair shirt, a coarse, scratchy garment deliberately uncomfortable, crawling with lice, worn as a private act of penance. Nobody saw it while he lived. He rose before dawn to pray. He washed the feet of the poor. He ate simply, drank little, and threw himself into the duties of his office with the same fierce energy he had once given to the king’s business.

He resigned as Chancellor.

The transformation stunned everyone, the king most of all. Whether Becket’s change of heart was a genuine spiritual awakening, or whether he simply threw himself into his new role as completely as he had thrown himself into his old one, is a question that people have argued about ever since. What mattered was the result. The man King Henry had appointed to be his obedient servant in Canterbury had become the most determined defender of the Church’s independence in all of Europe.

The quarrel between King Henry and Becket started with small things. Becket reclaimed lands and rights he said had been taken from Canterbury. He clashed with the king’s officials. He opposed Henry publicly at a council at Woodstock, embarrassing the king in front of his own court. And then the great issue, the one that had been simmering from the beginning, came to a head over the criminal clerics.

In January 1164, at a royal hunting lodge called Clarendon Palace, near Salisbury, King Henry summoned his bishops and presented them with a set of sixteen rules that he called the Constitutions of Clarendon. These were meant to spell out, clearly and in writing, the old customs that governed the relationship between the crown and the Church. The most controversial rule was the one about clerics who committed serious crimes. They would be tried first in a Church court, but if found guilty, they would be handed over to the king’s court for punishment. No more hiding behind a bishop’s robes after committing murder.

Some of the bishops were willing to agree. Becket, at first, reluctantly accepted the Constitutions. But then, almost immediately, he changed his mind. Pope Alexander III condemned them. Becket, bound by his loyalty to Rome, refused to sign. He said the Constitutions violated the ancient freedoms of the Church. He would not put his seal to them, no matter what the king demanded.

King Henry was furious. He had expected obedience from his old friend, and what he got was open defiance. In October 1164, he summoned Becket to Northampton Castle and put him on trial, not for the Church dispute itself, but for financial irregularities during his time as Chancellor, charges that many people believed were invented simply to bring Becket down.

The trial was a humiliation. Becket was found guilty. His property was forfeit. The king demanded his submission.

Becket refused. Instead, in the middle of the night, he fled. He crossed the Channel in secret, slipped into France, and threw himself on the protection of King Henry’s great rival, King Louis VII. For six years, the Archbishop of Canterbury lived in exile, moving between French monasteries, kept alive by the grudging support of Louis and the distant, cautious sympathy of the Pope, who needed King Henry’s support too much to risk taking Becket’s side openly.

For six years, the quarrel festered.

It was a strange kind of war. No armies marched. No battles were fought. But across the Channel, letters flew back and forth, bitter and accusing. Becket threatened to excommunicate the king. Henry threatened to seize all of Canterbury’s property. Papal legates travelled between the two men, trying to broker a peace that neither truly wanted. The Pope urged compromise. Becket refused to bend. Henry refused to give way. Year after year, the impasse dragged on.

Then, in the summer of 1170, King Henry did something that broke the deadlock, though not in the way he intended.

He had his eldest son, Henry the Young King, crowned as joint ruler of England. It was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s ancient right to crown English kings, and everyone knew it. But Becket was in exile, so Henry had the Archbishop of York perform the ceremony instead.

It was a calculated insult, and it worked. Becket was enraged. The Pope, too, was furious at the violation of Canterbury’s privileges, and threatened to place all of England under an interdict, a punishment that would close every church in the kingdom. Under this pressure, King Henry was forced to negotiate.

In July 1170, King Henry and Becket met in France and spoke privately for the first time in six years, and they agreed to a peace – of sorts. Becket would return to England, and his rights as Archbishop would be restored. Whatever passed between them, it was enough for Becket to believe it was safe to go home.

He crossed the Channel in early December 1170. Crowds lined the roads to welcome him back. Monks wept with joy. The people of Kent came out in their hundreds to see the Archbishop restored to Canterbury at last.

But before he left France, Becket had done something that would cost him his life.

He had excommunicated three of the most powerful churchmen in England, the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of London and Salisbury, for their part in the unauthorised coronation of the young king. It was within his rights as Archbishop. It was also, given the fragile state of the peace, spectacularly provocative.

The three excommunicated churchmen crossed immediately to Normandy and reported what Becket had done to King Henry, who was spending Christmas at his court near Bayeux. Henry, who had thought the quarrel was finally over, exploded.

What he said next has been repeated for more than eight hundred years. No one knows his exact words. The version most people remember is ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ But the earliest account, written by a man who was there, gives something rather different. Henry raged at his household, calling them miserable cowards and traitors who stood by while a low-born cleric treated their king with contempt.

Whatever the words, four knights heard them.

Their names were Reginald Fitzurse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Breton. They were men of Henry’s own household, eager to prove their loyalty. Without telling the king what they intended, they slipped away from the court, rode for the coast, and crossed the Channel to England.

On the twenty-ninth of December, 1170, the four knights arrived at Canterbury.

They found Becket in his palace, beside the cathedral. They told him he must come with them to the king and answer for his actions. Becket refused. The argument grew heated. The knights left, and Becket’s monks, terrified, urged him to take shelter inside the cathedral, where Vespers, the evening prayers, were already being sung.

Becket walked through the cloister and into the great dark church. The monks tried to bar the doors behind him, but Becket stopped them. ‘It is not right,’ he said, ‘to make a fortress out of the house of prayer.’ He ordered the doors left open.

The four knights came back. They had put on their armour and drawn their swords. The cathedral was dim, lit by candles, full of shadows and the sound of chanting. The knights pushed through the darkness, shouting for the traitor.

‘Where is Thomas Becket, traitor to the king and country?’

No answer came. They shouted again.

‘Where is the Archbishop?’

Becket stepped forward out of the knot of monks who had gathered around him.

‘Here I am,’ he said quietly. ‘Not a traitor to the king, but a priest.’

What happened next was swift and savage. The knights seized him, tried to drag him outside. Becket clung to a pillar. A sword came down. Edward Grim, a visiting cleric who was standing beside the Archbishop and who later wrote down what he saw, tried to shield Becket with his arm and was badly wounded. Another blow struck the Archbishop’s head. A third sent him to the ground. A fourth sliced away the crown of his skull. His blood and brains spilled across the cold stone floor.

A fifth man, not a knight but a clerk who had followed them in, stepped forward and set his foot on the dead Archbishop’s neck. ‘He will not get up again,’ he said.

It was dark by then. The twenty-ninth of December, four days after Christmas.

The news spread across Europe like fire.

King Henry, when he heard what his knights had done, is said to have been overwhelmed with horror and grief. Whether he had truly meant for Becket to be killed, or whether his angry outburst had been taken further than he ever intended, no one has ever been able to say for certain. But it did not matter. His words had set the four knights in motion, and now the most famous churchman in England lay murdered on the floor of his own cathedral, and the blood was on the king’s hands.

The monks of Canterbury prepared Becket’s body for burial. When they stripped away his robes, they found the hair shirt beneath them, crawling with lice, and they understood what kind of man he had been in secret. The story of the hair shirt spread quickly, and it sealed his reputation. Within days, people were coming to touch the place where he had fallen. They reported miracles. The sick were healed. The blind could see.

On the twenty-first of February, 1173, barely two years after his death, Pope Alexander III declared Thomas Becket a saint. It was one of the fastest canonisations in the history of the Church.

King Henry moved quickly to limit the damaging fallout from the murder. He negotiated with the Pope. He agreed to a formal settlement at Avranches in Normandy, where he swore that he had not ordered the murder, though he admitted that his angry words had caused it. He made concessions and was absolved.

But he did not go to Canterbury. He did not kneel at the tomb of the man who had once been his closest friend. That, he could not bring himself to do, but this was not enough, so his own family then tore his world apart.

In 1173, Henry’s wife Eleanor, proud and bitter after years of being pushed aside, encouraged their elder sons to rise against him. The Young King Henry, who had been crowned but given no real power, and his brother Richard both demanded a share of the kingdom their father refused to let go. They found allies everywhere. Louis VII of France, who had waited a generation for this moment, joined them eagerly. William the Lion, King of Scotland, invaded from the north. Rebels rose across England and Normandy. The empire Henry had held together by sheer force of will was coming apart, and his own sons were pulling it to pieces.

People whispered that they knew the reason. God was punishing the king. The man who had caused the death of a saint was being destroyed through his own blood, and no settlement with the Pope, no formal absolution, could save him. Only one thing could. He had to go to Canterbury, to the tomb itself, and beg forgiveness from the friend he had betrayed.

So in the summer of 1174, and with enemies pressing in from all sides, King Henry went to Canterbury. He walked barefoot through the streets of the city, wearing sackcloth instead of his royal robes. At the cathedral he knelt before the tomb of the man who had once been his closest friend, and submitted to a scourging, which meant that every monk in the priory could and did strike the king with a rod. He spent the night in prayer and fasting on the cold stone floor beside the grave of Thomas Becket.

The very next day, by an extraordinary coincidence that people at the time took as a sign from God, news arrived that the King of Scotland, who had invaded the north, had been captured. Immediately, King Henry’s fortunes turned.

Meanwhile, Becket’s tomb became the most famous pilgrimage site in England. For three and a half centuries, people came from all over Europe to pray at the shrine of Saint Thomas. The cathedral grew rich on the offerings of the faithful. Two hundred years after the murder, a poet named Geoffrey Chaucer imagined a group of pilgrims riding from London to Canterbury to visit the saint’s tomb, and the stories they told each other along the way became one of the greatest books in the English language, The Canterbury Tales.

Then, in 1538, another King Henry – the eighth, who had his own quarrel with the Church and his own reasons for despising a churchman – sent his men to Canterbury. They destroyed the shrine, scattered the bones, and seized the treasure. The pilgrims stopped coming. The candles went out.

But the cathedral still stands.

You can walk into it today, through the same door the monks tried to bar on that December evening more than eight hundred and fifty years ago. You can stand in the place where Becket fell, where a single candle burns in the north-west transept and the stone floor is worn smooth by the feet of all the people who have come, over all the centuries, to remember what happened there. The knights are gone. The king is gone. The silk and the hair shirt and the argument about who should judge a priest who committed murder, all of it is gone.

What remains is the story. A friendship that turned to hatred. A stubborn king and a stubborn priest, each of them certain he was right. And a question that still has no easy answer, even now: when a king and a church disagree, who has the final word?

011 King Henry Plantagenet

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The civil war was over.

For nineteen years, since King Stephen had seized the crown that the great lords had sworn to Matilda, England had been tearing itself apart. Castles sprang up without permission, barons stole what they pleased, and ordinary people suffered so terribly that it was said Christ and his saints slept. But now King Stephen was dead, and the country that had been falling to pieces was about to be put back together by the most restless pair of hands it had ever known – Henry of Anjou, who only six weeks after the death of King Stephen would cross from France to England.

In December of 1154, in a courtyard of a castle in Normandy, in the grey half-light before dawn, the wagons were loaded, the horses saddled, and the whole court was ready to leave, exactly as Duke Henry had ordered.

There was just one problem. The Duke was still in bed.

This was what it was like to serve him. One morning he would announce an early departure and then sleep until noon, while his entire household stood around in the cold with the pack-horses steaming and stamping and the heavy rolls of parchment that served as his office already lashed to the wagons. The next morning, without warning, he would be up and gone hours before the appointed time, riding hard into the dark, and everyone from his treasurer to his chaplain would have to scramble after him as best they could.

Nobody knew which morning it would be. Nobody dared ask.

Duke Henry was twenty-one years old when he was crowned King of England, and he would become known as Henry II – King Henry Plantagenet, and he would rule for thirty-five years. In that time he would govern more of France than the King of France, reform English law so thoroughly that its outline still stands today, and quarrel so bitterly with his closest friend that the quarrel would end in murder on the stone floor of a cathedral. But all of that was ahead of him. For now, in the cold December of 1154, he was still in bed.

So how did a twenty-one-year-old Frenchman come to be King of England?

Matilda, King Henry I’s daughter, the woman the great lords had sworn to accept and then betrayed, had lost the war with Stephen. But she had one thing he did not. She had a son.

His name was Henry, and he was the child of her second marriage, to a French count named Geoffrey of Anjou. Geoffrey was a handsome, energetic man who, the story goes, had a habit of wearing a sprig of yellow broom flower in his hat, a plant the French called planta genista. From that bright little flower came the family name that would mark one of the most powerful dynasties in English history. The Plantagenets.

Young Henry grew up in France, restless and ambitious. While still a teenager he had already crossed the Channel more than once to fight against Stephen’s forces. He was not yet king, but everyone could see what was coming. Stephen’s own son Eustace died suddenly in 1153, and with that death the last real obstacle fell away. Stephen, old and tired, agreed to a deal. He would remain king for the rest of his life, but when he died the crown would pass to Matilda’s son, Henry. It was called the Treaty of Winchester, and it was the price of peace after nineteen years of misery.

Stephen died the following year, in October 1154. Henry crossed the Channel and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on the nineteenth of December, and a new age began.

What did this new king look like? The people who knew him left a vivid picture, and it is not the picture you might expect of the most powerful ruler in western Europe.

He was not tall, but he was powerfully built, square and thick-set, with a bull neck and strong arms. His hands were coarse and rough, the hands of a man who spent his life outdoors. His legs were bandy from so many years in the saddle that he looked as though he had been shaped by the horse. He had a large, round head, closely cropped red hair, and a freckled face. His voice was harsh and cracked. He dressed plainly, ate simply, and cared nothing for the fine robes and elaborate feasts that other kings enjoyed.

What he cared about was work, and hunting, and power, roughly in that order.

King Henry was always moving. He rode from one end of his territories to the other with a restlessness that wore out everyone around him, arriving without warning in places where he was not expected, turning up in England when people were certain he was still in the south of France. Behind him, strung out along whatever road he happened to be on, came the heavy wagons loaded with the rolls of parchment that were his government. His court and household gasped and stumbled in his wake. The servants dreaded him, and the nobles complained. Nobody could keep up.

His moods were as unpredictable as his schedule. In times of real danger he was calm, steady, even gentle. But when the crisis passed and the pressure lifted, he became bad-tempered and impossible, snapping at anyone who came near. He had a fierce energy that needed something to push against, and when there was nothing to push against, he pushed against the people closest to him.

Yet for all his roughness, Henry was no brute. He was very well educated, sharp-witted, and genuinely interested in ideas. He spoke French and Latin, and was said to understand several other languages, though he never spoke English. He was the Lord’s Anointed, a Christian king who feared damnation and hoped for heaven, and who swung between worldly ambition and sudden, violent fits of remorse. He could be generous and warm, but he could also be coldly ruthless. He was, in short, a complicated man, and he had inherited a complicated world.

His kingdom was enormous.

Through his mother Matilda he held England and Normandy. Through his father Geoffrey he held the county of Anjou and its neighbouring lands. And through his wife, he held more of France than any man alive.

His wife was Eleanor of Aquitaine, and she was one of the most remarkable women of the Middle Ages. She had been Queen of France, married to the cautious and pious Louis VII, and had accompanied him on the disastrous Second Crusade. The marriage was unhappy. Eleanor was clever, proud, strong-willed, and bored stiff by a husband who seemed more monk than king. She bore Louis only daughters, and in 1152 the marriage was annulled.

Within eight weeks, to the fury and astonishment of the French court, Eleanor married Henry of Anjou, who was eleven years her junior. She brought with her the vast duchy of Aquitaine, the richest territory in France, and suddenly Henry, who was not yet even King of England, controlled more French land than the King of France himself.

When Henry was crowned in December 1154, his subjects boasted that his authority ran from the Arctic Ocean to the Pyrenees. It was an exaggeration, but not by much. He was Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou, Lord of Aquitaine, Brittany, Poitou, Maine, and Guienne. He held territory from the borders of Scotland to the foothills of the Pyrenees. After the Holy Roman Emperor, he was the most powerful ruler in Christendom.

But this vast empire was not as strong as it looked.

It was a patchwork, stitched together by marriage, inheritance, and luck, and it had no real unity. There was no common government, no shared law, no single treasury. The only thing holding it together was Henry himself, his energy, his will, and his ceaseless, exhausting travel. The empire existed because Henry existed. Without him, it would fall to pieces, and one day, that is exactly what happened.

The King of France understood this perfectly well. Louis VII was not a strong king, but he was a patient one, and he knew that the best way to fight King Henry was not to meet him on the battlefield but to encourage every quarrel, every grudge, every petty rebellion within Henry’s sprawling dominions. If he could not destroy the empire from outside, he could pick at it from within. He set one local lord against another, fed old resentments, and waited. It was a strategy that would take a generation to succeed, but in the end, with the help of Henry’s own sons, it would succeed.

Henry, however, was not a man who worried about things a generation away. He had a ruined country to fix.

The England he inherited in 1154 was in a wretched state. For nineteen years the law had meant nothing. Barons had built castles wherever they pleased, taxed the people however they chose, and answered to no one. The old system of royal justice, which Henry’s grandfather had carefully built up, had collapsed. If you were wronged, you could not look to the king’s court for help. You could only look to your local lord, and your local lord was very likely the one who had wronged you.

Henry set about changing this with extraordinary speed. He tore down the hundreds of unlicensed castles across the country. He dismissed the sheriffs who had grown fat and corrupt under Stephen and replaced them with men he trusted. He sent the foreign mercenaries who had terrorised the countryside packing. Within months, the country felt the grip of a real king again.

But tearing down castles and sacking bad sheriffs was only the beginning. What Henry did next was far more important, and far less glamorous, and it changed the world.

He began to build a system of law.

Before Henry, justice in England was a patchwork of local customs. Every manor, every lordship, every town had its own courts and its own rules. If you had a dispute with your neighbour over a strip of ploughland, you went to your lord’s court, and the judgement depended on whatever local tradition happened to apply in that place. There was no consistency, no appeal, and no guarantee that the same dispute would receive the same judgement twenty miles down the road.

King Henry changed this. He sent his judges out from the royal court to travel the country on regular circuits, holding courts in fixed places at fixed times. These travelling courts were called assizes, and the judges who ran them applied the king’s law, the same law applied in the same way wherever they went. For the first time, a farmer in Yorkshire and a merchant in Devon could expect the same justice for the same offence. The law was common to everyone.

It became known as the Common Law.

King Henry reformed the way disputes were settled too. Under the old system, arguments over land were often decided by trial by battle, where each side put forward a champion and the winner was assumed to have God’s support. King Henry replaced this, for some types of case, with a new method. Twelve local men, people who actually knew the facts of the dispute, were brought together to examine the evidence and give their verdict under oath. It was called a sworn inquest, and it was the seed of something that would grow, over the centuries, into the jury.

He reorganised the Exchequer, the royal treasury, until it became the most efficient system of taxation in Europe. Through his government, and through the work of his brilliant Chancellor Thomas Becket, the old tax of scutage was expanded and enforced as never before. Scutage allowed a lord to pay money instead of serving in person as a soldier. It sounded like a small change, a matter of convenience. In practice, it quietly undermined the whole feudal system from within. A lord who paid money instead of bringing his knights was a lord who mattered a little less to the crown with every passing year. The king no longer needed him in quite the same way. Henry may not have planned it as an act of revolution, but that is what it became.

And he did something else, something less dramatic but equally important. He gathered up the old Anglo-Saxon traditions of local self-government, the shire courts and borough courts that had existed long before the Normans came, and wove them into his new system. King Henry did not sweep away everything that had come before him. He took what worked, from Saxon and Norman alike, and built something new from both. The Anglo-Saxon idea that free men had a right to govern themselves in their own communities, under the king’s authority, survived because King Henry Plantagenet chose to keep it alive.

None of this sounds exciting. There are no battles, no arrows, no ships going down in the dark. But it mattered more than almost anything else in this story.

King Alfred, three hundred years earlier, had gathered together the old laws and written them down. That was the foundation. King Henry Plantagenet built the structure that stood upon it. What he created with his assizes, his travelling judges, and his Common Law was a system of justice that would spread, in time, to every corner of the earth where English is spoken. When the American colonists wrote their Constitution, they built it on foundations that a red-haired Frenchman had laid six centuries earlier. When a court sits today in Sydney or Toronto, it works on principles that trace their origins to a king who created an English justice system in the twelfth century.

It is one of the great quiet facts of history that almost everyone in the English-speaking world lives under the law he built.

King Henry could not have known any of this, of course. He was not thinking about centuries to come. He was thinking about the next county to ride to, the next dispute to settle, the next lord to bring into line. He was thinking about his French territories, which needed constant attention, and about the watchful King of France, who never stopped probing for weaknesses. He was thinking about Ireland, which he brought under English lordship in 1171 and added to his already staggering collection of lands and titles.

And he was thinking, increasingly, about a problem that no amount of energy or legal cleverness could solve.

The Church.

In medieval England, the Church was not simply a place where people went to pray. It was a power. It owned vast estates and collected enormous wealth. The Church ran its own courts under its own laws, answering not to the king but to the Pope in Rome. A bishop was not just a man of prayer. He was a great landowner, a political figure, someone who could raise soldiers and excommunicate his enemies. The question of who truly controlled the Church, the king or the Pope, was the most dangerous question in all of Europe, and it had no easy answer.

King Henry believed, as his grandfather had believed, that the king was master of everything in his realm, including the Church in its worldly affairs. He did not want to destroy the Church or deny its spiritual authority. But he wanted its courts to answer to his law, and its bishops to obey the crown. He saw the Church’s independence not as a sacred principle but as a gap in the system he was building, a hole in the Common Law through which powerful men could escape the king’s justice.

He needed someone in Canterbury, as Archbishop, who understood this. Someone who would work with him. Someone he trusted completely.

He thought he had exactly the right man. A friend. A companion. The cleverest, most capable, most loyal servant in his whole kingdom. A man named Thomas Becket.

What happened next would become the most famous story of the English Middle Ages.

But that is for next time.

010 Sons Of The Conqueror

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In the early autumn of 1087, in a priory on the edge of the French city of Rouen, the most powerful man in the western world lay dying, and he could not decide what to do with all that he had won.

He was William the Conqueror, King of England, the man who twenty-one years before had crossed the sea and taken a whole kingdom at the point of a sword. King William had held it in an iron grip ever since, but even an iron grip cannot last forever. That summer, riding through the burning town of Mantes in a quarrel with the King of France, King William’s horse had stumbled, and the heavy old king had been thrown hard against the front of his saddle. He was badly hurt, and for six weeks he lay in pain, growing weaker, while the question that troubled him more than the pain, went round and around in his mind. He had two great possessions: England and Normandy. He had three living sons. And he did not love all three of them equally.

His eldest son was Robert. Men called him Curthose, which meant something like ‘short boots’, a teasing name for his short legs, and it was the kind of name you give to someone you are fond of but do not quite take seriously. Robert was brave, generous, and good company. He was also lazy, easily led, and hopeless at saying no. He and his father had quarrelled bitterly for years, and more than once they had faced each other on opposite sides of a battlefield. Even now, with his father dying, Robert was far away and sulking, in the court of the King of France.

There had been a fourth son too, Richard, but he had died years before in a hunting accident, in the great forest his father had made in the south of England, known today as the New Forest.

So the king’s favourite, and the one he chose to inherit the English crown, was his third son, another William. Because of his red face, which grew even redder when he was angry, everyone called him William Rufus, which simply meant William the Red.

And the youngest? His name was Henry. To Henry, the dying king left no land at all. He left him five thousand pounds of silver and the cold comfort that one day, perhaps, he might come into greatness of his own. Henry was the cleverest of the three brothers and the most patient, and patience, as it turned out, was the most dangerous weapon in the whole family. He took the silver and waited.

William died on the morning of the ninth of September, 1087. And the moment he died, something unusual happened. The great men who had stood around his bed did not weep, or pray, or keep watch over their dead king. They ran. Each of them bolted for his horse and rode for home as fast as he could, desperate to guard his own lands and castles now that the hand which had controlled everything lay still. The servants left behind stripped the room. They took the hangings, the silver, and the clothes of the dead king, and left the body of William, the Conqueror of England, lying on the floor.

In the end a humble knight, out of plain decency, paid to have the King’s body taken down the river to the city of Caen, and the great abbey church the king himself had built. Even the funeral went wrong. As the bishops were speaking, a man pushed forward out of the crowd and shouted that the church stood on land that had been stolen from his father, and the whole service had to stop while the matter was looked into. He was right, as it happened, and had to be paid. Then came the worst of it. The stone coffin had been made too short. The body, swollen and rotten after weeks of summer heat, would not fit, and when the monks pressed it down to force it in, they released a smell so foul that the mourners fled into the open air.

It was not a dignified end for the mightiest man of his age. All his life King William had held his kingdom together by the sheer force of will, and the moment that will was gone, everything started to unravel. The looting, the bolting nobles, the squabble over the church for his funeral, were small signs of a far bigger problem. His sons would fight over what King William had left behind.

So the inheritance was split. Robert, the eldest, was given Normandy, the French dukedom, and William Rufus was given England and its crown. And almost at once the trouble began, because there were already powerful barons in place who held land on both sides of the Channel, and they did not at all like serving two masters. Better, they thought, to have one. The very next year a group of them rose in revolt, led by the dead king’s own half-brother, a fighting bishop named Odo, with a plan to push King Rufus off the throne and hand the whole inheritance, England and Normandy together, to easy-going Robert.

It might have worked. But it depended on Robert, and Robert, true to form, never came. He stayed in Normandy, the ships never sailed, and the rebellion crumbled without him. King Rufus kept his crown.

Rufus was not a king easy to love, and the men who later wrote the history of his reign were monks, who loved him least of all. King Rufus was greedy. He taxed hard, seized land where he could, and quarrelled furiously with the Church, leaving bishoprics, ( areas of land and the revenue it generated) empty so that he might pocket the bishop’s wealth. He had no patience for holy men or their warnings, and when monks came to tell him of dreams that foretold his death, he laughed in their faces. Yet King Rufus was no coward, and he thought big. In London he raised a hall so vast that men came to simply stare at it. You can stand in it yourself today, for it became the heart of the Houses of Parliament, and is called Westminster Hall. When someone told Rufus the hall was too large, he answered that it was not half large enough, and was a mere bedchamber compared to what he meant to build one day.

For years the two brothers, Robert and King Rufus, circled each other, one moment fighting, the next patching up an uneasy peace. Then, in 1096, the whole of Christendom caught fire with the call to go on a Crusade, and to march east and take the holy city of Jerusalem from those who held it. Robert, who could never resist an adventure, was desperate to go. But Crusades cost money, and money was the one thing Robert never had. So he did something that tells you everything about him. He pawned his dukedom. He handed Normandy over to his brother Rufus to look after, in return for ten thousand marks of silver to pay for the journey, and rode off to the wars in the East. For the moment, King Rufus held both England and Normandy – almost the whole of his father’s inheritance, while the rightful duke of Normandy was a thousand miles away.

Now for the New Forest.

When King William the Conqueror had wanted somewhere to hunt, he created a place. In the south of England he threw whole villages off their land, pulled down houses and even churches, and let the woods and heath grow back over the ploughed fields, so that he and his sons could ride after deer in peace. The people who had been driven from their homes called it the New Forest, and they hated it, and the cruel laws that guarded the king’s deer more fiercely than they guarded ordinary men. It was a beautiful place built on other people’s grief. And it was already known to be unlucky for the Conqueror’s family, for it was here that King William’s son Richard had met his death.

On the morning of the second of August, 1100, King Rufus rode out into the New Forest to hunt. With him went a small party of nobles, and among them his youngest brother, Henry. As the long summer evening drew on, the hunters spread out through the trees. Rufus and a French lord named Walter Tirel, who had a name as a deadly shot, found themselves alone in a clearing as the light began to fail. A stag broke from cover. The king loosed an arrow and missed. And then a second arrow flew, and it struck the king full in the chest. No one knew where the arrow had come from.

Rufus fell without a word, and within moments he was dead.

What happened next, happened fast. Walter Tirel did not stop to help, or to explain. He leapt on his horse, galloped for the coast, took ship to France, and never came back to England. The other nobles scattered to look to their own affairs, exactly as the men around the Conqueror’s deathbed had done thirteen years before. The dead King Rufus was left lying on the forest floor until a local charcoal-burner named Purkis loaded the body onto his cart and trundled it all the way to Winchester.

Was it an accident? A stray arrow at dusk, a piece of terrible bad luck? Or was it murder? People asked the question at the time, and they have never stopped asking it, because no one, even today, can prove the answer either way. But there is one fact that has always made people suspicious. Of all the men in that forest, one knew exactly what to do, and did it without a moment’s hesitation. Henry, the patient youngest brother, did not ride to his brother’s body, or see to his funeral, or grieve. He spurred his horse straight for Winchester, where the royal treasure was kept, and seized it. From there he rode hard for London, and within three days, before his brother Robert could so much as hear that the throne stood empty, Henry had himself crowned King of England.

Whether he had planned the whole thing, or simply snatched a chance that fell into his lap, no one can say. What is certain is that the cleverest of the Conqueror’s sons was now the king.

And here is the strange thing about King Henry. The same coldness that makes him a prime suspect in the death of his brother Rufus, made him a very good king for England. After years of King Rufus, the country was weary of greed and lawlessness, and King Henry gave it order. He was clever and well educated, so much so that men nicknamed him Beauclerc, meaning ‘the fine scholar’. He wrote things down. He sent his judges out across the land to settle quarrels and punish wrongdoers, so that an ordinary man might hope for fair dealing and not merely rely on the will of the strongest baron nearby. King Henry built up a careful system for gathering the king’s money and keeping account of every penny of it, the beginnings of real, organised government. He could be hard, even brutal, but he kept the peace, and a hard king who keeps the peace is worth a great deal to people who have to plough fields and raise children, neither of which they can do in the middle of a war. Later ages would call him the Lion of Justice.

He did one more thing that mattered more than he perhaps knew. He married a princess of the old English royal house, a descendant of the line of King Alfred the Great, the very line the Normans had swept aside at Hastings. Their children would carry in their blood both the Norman conquerors and the old kings of England, the winners and the beaten joined at last in a single family. After more than thirty years in which the English had been treated as a defeated people in their own country, it was a small, quiet sign that the two peoples might one day simply become one.

There was still the matter of his brother. Robert came home from the Crusade at last, a hero of the fighting in the East, expecting to take up again his Normandy dukedom . Instead he found his clever little brother on the throne of England and in no mood at all to share. For a few years the two of them manoeuvred and bargained. Then King Henry crossed the sea with an army, and on the twenty-eighth of September, 1106, the brothers met in battle at a place in Normandy called Tinchebrai.

It did not last long, perhaps an hour. King Henry won. And when it was over, he had his own brother in chains. Robert Curthose, eldest son of the Conqueror, the brave, foolish, open-handed man who had pawned a dukedom to ride to the wars, spent the rest of his life as his brother’s prisoner. He was shut away in Cardiff Castle, and there he stayed for twenty-eight years, until he died an old, old man who had outlived almost everyone he had ever known.

So it was done. King Henry now held everything, both England and Normandy, the great inheritance gathered up again under one of the Conqueror’s sons. The turmoil of the brothers was over. After all the fighting, the family had come through to firm ground. Henry had a strong kingdom, a wise and careful government, and, best of all, a son to leave it to, a boy named William, like his grandfather, growing up to be the next king. Everything the old Conqueror had fretted over on his deathbed had, in the end, come right.

And then, on a cold November night, the sea took it all away.

In the autumn of 1120, King Henry and his court were at the port of Barfleur, on the coast of Normandy, waiting to sail home to England. The king’s son William was seventeen now, almost grown, the bright centre of everything that was still to come. As Henry’s own ship was making ready, a sea-captain came to him with an offer. His name was Thomas, and his father, he said proudly, had captained the very ship that carried William the Conqueror across the Channel in the great year of 1066. Now Thomas had a fine new vessel of his own, the fastest afloat, and she was called the White Ship. Would the king do him the honour of sailing in her?

The king had already arranged his own passage. But he let his son go aboard the White Ship instead, along with a great crowd of the young lords and ladies of the court. It must have seemed a fine idea, all the young people together in the newest, swiftest ship in the fleet, free of their parents for one night.

It was a disaster from the very start. Wine was carried aboard, and the young nobles and the crew drank wine right into the night. When priests came down to the harbour to bless the ship before it sailed, as was the custom, the laughing, drunken company waved them away. It was nearly midnight of a bitterly cold night by the time the White Ship sailed. The passengers, full of wine and high spirits, called out to the oarsmen to row hard and overtake the king’s ship, which had sailed hours before. The crew, just as drunk, bent to the oars and drove her forward into the dark at full speed.

A mile out of the harbour, going fast, the White Ship struck a rock.

The hull tore open. The sea poured in. In the panic and the dark and the freezing water, almost everyone aboard was lost within minutes. The crew did manage to get young William, the king’s son, the heir to England and Normandy, down into a small boat, and pushed it clear of the wreck, saving his life.

And then, across the black sea, he heard a voice. It was his half-sister, still clinging to the sinking ship, crying out to him not to leave her. William ordered the little boat round and rowed back for her. But as it drew close to the wreck, the people still struggling in the water flung themselves onto it, and the small boat, swamped under the weight of too many people – sank. William drowned, and his sister with him, and very nearly every soul who had stepped aboard the White Ship.

When the sun came up, the fishermen of Barfleur found a single living man. He was a butcher from the city of Rouen named Berold, who had come aboard only to chase up some money he was owed. He had clung all night to a piece of the broken mast in the icy water, while one by one the others who clung beside him lost their strength and slipped away into the sea. He was the only one to survive out of around three hundred people.

No one dared tell King Henry. For a whole day the court at Barfleur knew, and could not bring themselves to tell the king. In the end it was a small, trembling boy, who told King Henry that his son was dead. They say the king fell to the floor as though he had been struck down, and for the rest of his life, he never smiled again. A monk writing soon afterwards put it more plainly than anyone has managed since. No ship, he wrote, had ever brought England so much sorrow.

Think for a moment of all that was lost on that rock in the dark. Not only a boy of seventeen and his sister, although that was grief enough for any father. The whole careful work of King Henry’s life went down with them. He had schemed and fought and imprisoned his own brother to gather the great inheritance into one safe pair of hands, and now there was no one to pass it on to. King Henry was an old man now, and his wife had died some years earlier. So in hope Henry married again, but no more children came.

In the end he did the only thing left to him. He had one other true-born child, a daughter named Matilda, a proud and able woman who had been married to the Emperor in Germany and was now a widow. Henry named her his heir, and made all the great lords of England swear a solemn oath to accept her as their queen when he was gone. They swore, and Henry must have hoped that an oath would be enough.

It was not. When King Henry died in the winter of 1135, after, the story goes, greedily eating a dish of lampreys (a fish), the lords who had sworn their oath to Matilda, broke their word. King Henry’s nephew Stephen moved fast, exactly as Henry himself had once moved faster than his brother Robert, and snatched the crown before Matilda could reach it. At that moment, England fell into nearly twenty years of the cruellest civil war it had ever known, a time so dark that people said openly that Christ and his saints slept. But that is a story for another day.

King William the Conqueror had taken England, he once boasted, with both his hands. He had held it, and Normandy too, in a grip that nothing could loosen while he lived. But no man’s hands can grip for ever. Within the lifetime of those who had known him, two of his sons and his best-loved grandson had come to grief by an arrow in his New Forest and a rock in his sea, and the great inheritance he had fought so hard and so cruelly to win had slipped, in the end, clean through his children’s fingers.

The New Forest is still there. You can walk in it today, out on the heath and under the old oaks, in the forest William the Conqueror created. Somewhere among the trees a stone still marks the place where, they say, a king fell with an arrow in his chest on a summer evening more than nine hundred years ago – The Rufus Stone. The forest keeps its secret, and it will not say whether what happened there was an accident, or something darker, or simply the price that is always paid, in the end, for a crown.

009 The Conquerors Peace

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It was Christmas Day, 1066. Westminster Abbey smelled of candle smoke and damp stone and the icy breath of winter coming through the great door. Outside, London waited in uneasy silence. The battle at Hastings had been in October, less than three months before, and the streets were still in shock, the city still trying to understand what had happened. Men who had been Englishmen when they woke up in September had found themselves, by November, living under foreign rule.

Inside the Abbey, the most powerful man in England was about to be crowned.

William, Duke of Normandy, knelt before the altar as Archbishop Ealdred of York placed the crown of England upon his head. It was the same crown that had sat on King Harold’s head in the same place barely a year before. The Norman knights standing in the abbey were armed, their hands on their sword hilts, their eyes scanning the crowd. They had fought their way here, and they were not yet sure the fight was over.

When the congregation were asked to shout their assent, their approval, to the coronation – in the Norman manner, the sound startled the Norman guards outside. They heard what sounded like a commotion inside the Abbey and panicked. Within minutes, the houses around Westminster were burning, and frightened Londoners were running into the streets. Inside the Abbey, the ceremony continued as smoke began to drift in, and the congregation scattered.

William was crowned King in a half-empty church, with his new capital city on fire outside. It was not the most promising beginning.

William was forty years old when he took England and became king, give or take a year, and he had been fighting for most of his life. He had survived a childhood in which three of his guardians were murdered in quick succession. He had fought off a rebellion when he was barely twenty, riding for his life through the night, and then turning to smash his enemies before they could regroup. He had conquered the county of Maine, on Normandy’s southern border, beaten back the King of France, invaded England with a borrowed army, and killed his rival King Harold. William was not a man who stopped to rest when there was still work to be done. And there was plenty of work to be done.

England in 1066 was not a kingdom that had simply switched rulers at the top and would now carry on as before. What the newly crowned King William had won was a country in shock, a country with powerful earls in every corner who had spent years fighting each other and were not necessarily willing to stop fighting just because a new Norman King had taken power. King Harold was defeated and dead, but England was still England. Its people still spoke English, its laws still Saxon laws, and its great landowners still powerful men with armed followers who had not been asked whether they wanted to be conquered and ruled by a foreign king.

King William’s first moves were careful ones. He kept some of the old Saxon earls in their positions, at least for a while. He kept the old Saxon laws in place, at least officially. He promised to govern as King Edward the Confessor had governed, and he wanted England to understand that this was not destruction but replacement, and that life would go on. Powerful Saxon men could remain powerful if they behaved themselves. It was a sensible plan, but it only lasted about three years.

The rebellions began in the west, in the north, and in the east. Some were led by Saxon earls who had submitted after the Battle of Hastings but could not stomach the reality of Norman overlordship. Some rebellions were stoked by the Danes, who were watching events in England with hungry interest, remembering the days when their own king had ruled the island. In 1069, a Danish fleet sent by King Sweyn of Denmark sailed into the north of England, and the whole of Northumbria erupted into open revolt.

It was the rebellion in the north that brought out the worst in King William, and the worst of what a conquest can become when a king decides that the only way to keep order is to make sure there is nothing left to support a rebellion.

King William marched north in the winter of 1069, into the coldest months, when no sensible army went to war. His men moved through Yorkshire in the snow, and wherever they went they burned. Not just settlements that had harboured rebels. All of them. The crops in the fields were set alight, though there was little left by winter. The livestock were slaughtered. The ploughs and tools were destroyed. The stores of grain that families had gathered to see them through the winter were tipped into the mud or taken. Village after village was left as a smear of ash on frozen ground.

It was thorough. It was deliberate. And it was terrible.

An early twelfth-century chronicler named Orderic Vitalis, himself half-Norman, wrote about it with horror. He recorded that King William’s campaign killed more than a hundred thousand men, women and children, most of them not through the sword, but through the famine that followed. Modern historians treat that figure as an exaggeration from a chronicler writing a generation after the event, but even so, there is agreement that the death toll ran into the tens of thousands, in a country whose entire population numbered no more than two million people. The Domesday Book, compiled sixteen years later, still recorded vast stretches of Yorkshire as wasteland, empty and untaxed, too sparse to count.

Even Orderic, who admired much of what King William had done, could not bring himself to defend the Harrying of the North – as it came to be called. He wrote that in his dying weeks, King William himself repented of it. Whether that is true, no one can say. But the fact that a loyal Norman writer felt the need to say it, tells you something about what the Harrying looked like to those who lived through it, and to those who came after. After the north was broken, there were no more rebellions.

England was now truly conquered, and King William set about remaking it from the ground up. The change began with the land.

In the old Saxon system, great earls had held their estates by tradition and inheritance, owing the king service and loyalty but otherwise ruling their own lands in their own way. King William swept almost all of that away. He distributed the land of England as he saw fit, and he saw fit to give most of it to other Normans.

Not just any Normans, his Normans. The men who had crossed the Channel with him, who had fought at Hastings in the October rain, who had marched north in the winter cold. These men were now rewarded with something more lasting than silver. They were given England itself, in pieces, to hold as their lord’s tenants in return for military service.

This was feudalism, (society structured around a strict hierarchy of land ownership and reciprocal obligations to the king) and King William understood it with a soldier’s clarity. The king was lord of all. Below him, the barons held their allotted portion of land, gifted to them by the king. In turn, the barons owed the king a fixed number of knights for when the king called for them. Below the barons, the knights held their own portions of the barons’ land and owed arms and men to the baron in turn. Below the knights, the peasants worked the land, and owed their labour and a portion of their harvest to whoever sat above them in the chain.

It was a pyramid, and William sat at the top of it.

By the time his survey was completed, (the Domesday Book) the land of England looked like this: where two thousand Saxon thanes and landowners had held estates in 1066, around two hundred Norman barons held all the estates by 1086. The old Saxon aristocracy had not merely lost power. It had almost ceased to exist.

The new Norman lords started to build in stone right across England. Castles went up, first in wood on earthen mounds, then in stone, as time and money allowed. They were not houses. They were statements of power, and amongst England’s first stone castles since the Romans. Every Norman castle said the same thing to the population around it: we, the Normans, are here. We are the new masters of England, and we are not leaving. By the end of King William’s reign, more than eighty castles had been built across his new kingdom, each one the centre of a lord’s authority, each one a garrison from which the surrounding land could be controlled. The villages that lay in the shadow of those castles did not easily become rebellious again.

Norman French was the language of power now. It was spoken at the royal court, in the law courts, and in the great Norman households. English went on being spoken, of course, in the fields and the markets and the homes of ordinary people, because you cannot conquer a language any more than you can conquer the weather. But the English who wanted to rise in the new order would have to learn French, and over the next two centuries the two languages pressed against each other and mingled, until the language that came out on the other side, was something new and strange and rather wonderful, full of Old English bluntness and Norman elegance, of Saxon words for the animals in the field and French words for the meat on the plate. The modern English we speak today carries both of those languages inside it.

The Church changed too. King William brought in Norman bishops and abbots to replace the English ones, slowly but deliberately. He was a religious man in the practical Norman way, building churches and abbeys, observing the forms. He was a king who understood that the Pope and the Church was a power he needed to keep on his side.

In 1085, a threat from Denmark reminded King William that England was only as secure as he kept it. King Canute IV of Denmark was raising a fleet and an army with the intention of pressing an old claim to the English throne. But King Canute IV never sailed. He was murdered by his own men, who were less enthusiastic about the venture than he was. But the threat from across the sea had been real, and it reminded King William of something he already knew: that he could not defend his kingdom if he did not know what it contained.

In December of 1085, King William called a great council at Gloucester and gave an order that had never been given before in the history of England. He wanted to know everything.

Not just which lord held which estate. Everything. A complete survey of the entire kingdom. Every farmer, every mill, every fishpond. Every ox, every cow, every pig. Who had held it before the Conquest, and who held it now. What it had been worth in King Edward the Confessor’s day, what it was worth when the surveyors arrived, and what it might be worth if it were properly managed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded the scope of the thing with barely disguised indignation, noting that King William’s surveyors left nothing out, not a single yard of land, ox, cow, nor pig.

Commissioners — the surveyors — rode out across England early in 1086, divided into circuits, each circuit covering a region. They called the local people before them, the barons and the priests and the village reeves, and questioned them under oath. The information flowed back to Winchester, where clerks compiled it into a vast written record.

They called it the king’s survey. The people of England, knowing that it was final and beyond appeal, called it the Domesday Book. Doomsday, the day of judgement, when everything is known and nothing can be hidden. The name has lasted.

The Domesday Book was finished in 1086, all of it compiled in a single year. It remains one of the most extraordinary feats of medieval administration ever attempted. The book records over thirteen thousand places across England, though it left out some significant gaps: London and Winchester were not included, probably due to their size and complexity, and the far north, still raw from the Harrying, barely appears. But for everything else, it is there, every field and mill and villager, a frozen snapshot of a single year, but King William did not live to make much use of it.

In the summer of 1087, King William was campaigning in France, in the border region between Normandy and the French royal lands, and he attacked the town of Mantes in the Seine valley. The town burned, and as he rode through the smouldering ruins, his horse stumbled over debris in the ashes and lurched forward, throwing King William hard against the pommel of his saddle, hurting him internally. Injured and unable to continue, King William was carried to the priory of Saint Gervase outside Rouen and put to bed, and there he stayed, growing more ill through August and into September.

King William died on the ninth of September, 1087, aged about fifty-nine, having reigned in England for twenty-one years.

His end was not dignified. The men who had attended him at his deathbed, servants and courtiers alike, left the moment he died, stripping the room and taking everything they could carry. King William’s body had to be carried to Caen for burial at the abbey he had built there, and the ceremony went wrong. The grave was too small for a man who had grown very big and heavy in his later years, and those present had to press the body down into it. The smell of the king’s decaying body on that warm September day was never forgotten.

History judges William the Conqueror as a great and terrible man in the same breath. When he became King, William found England to be a country of competing powers. On his death, England was a unified feudal kingdom under a single crown. King William brought architecture, administration, and a new language. He also brought devastation, dispossession, and the Harrying of the North.

The Domesday Book is his most famous legacy. The original two volumes of the book still exist, and its home is the National Archives in Kew. The entries for English towns or villages, if they existed in 1086, can still be read in the original Latin today.