Who plucked the little dog?

Edward​ III liked to dress up as a bird. In 1348, at a tournament in Bury St Edmunds, he revealed himself as a gleaming pheasant with copper-pipe wings and real feathers. The next year, celebrating Christmas with the archbishop of Canterbury, he wore a white buckram harness spangled with three hundred leaves of silver, adorned with one of his mottoes: ‘Hay hay the wythe swan/by godes soule I am thy man.’ Troupes of wodewose (green men) were arranged around him in a pageant, complete with virgins, elephants and bats – a spectacle of sovereign marvels. Another of Edward’s mottoes was ‘it is as it is.’ He loved to play pretend. Sometimes he dressed as a commoner and mingled with the crowd; at Calais, he fought incognito alongside his men, inhabiting the chivalric ideal of the mysterious hero distinguished only by his feats of arms. In another pageant he appeared as the pope, surrounded by household knights got up as cardinals. For a royal tournament at Cheapside, participants were ‘veiled in the likeness of the Tartars’, mimicking the distinctive headdresses of Mongol warriors.

Arise, England promises us that kings were ‘real people, not pasteboard caricatures’. But medieval kingship was always a parade of masks, disguising the mortal man who wore the crown. It was the fortune of just one person to be a cipher for the realm; others might fantasise about what it was like, but to go further was dangerous. In 1318, a man called John, perhaps the son of an Exeter tanner, appeared at Oxford’s north gate claiming that he was the rightful king of England. John said that he was Edward I’s true first-born son, swapped out in the cradle by a negligent nurse. He was brought before Edward II who sarcastically greeted him, ‘Welcome, my brother,’ and intended to keep him as a fool. But who was fooling whom? Edward changed his mind and John was tried for treason, condemned, drawn through the streets and hanged, his corpse left on display so long that ‘bones … clung to bones’. Most chroniclers agreed that the pretender had been inspired by the devil. The imposture had been plausible, one added, because Edward II was so disappointingly unlike his father.

The political theorist Ernst Kantorowicz, writing in the 1950s, argued that the king had ‘two bodies’: a natural body that lived and died, and a symbolic body that ensured the ‘continuous personality’ of the crown. Hence the cry: ‘The king is dead; long live the king.’ There is no extra breath, no quantum of kinglessness in the interval. The sovereign exists in ceaseless succession. It’s a nice theory because it speaks to the fundamental weirdness of hereditary kingship, a political system that enthrones one soft, breakable body, only to transcend it. What if Edward II had simply handed over his crown and sceptre to John the tanner’s son and walked off into the sunset? Things certainly would have turned out better for Edward, whose disastrous reign ended with his deposition less than a decade later, when a long-simmering conflict with Roger Mortimer spilled into open war. According to conventional accounts, he was captured by his enemies in the winter of 1326, shuffled around a bit while the nobility decided what to do with him, and then quietly murdered at Berkeley Castle in the late summer of 1327.

But he kept reappearing, doomed to haunt the realm in the form of his imposters. Around 1337, a bizarre letter from a papal notary called Manuele di Fieschi reported that Edward was still alive. Apparently he had disguised himself as a servant, killed his sleeping jailer (the dead body then presented as Edward’s own), before escaping, dressed as a hermit, via Ireland, France and the Holy Roman Empire to Cecima in Lombardy, where he was living out his days as a pious recluse. The next year, a man called ‘William le Galeys’ was picked up by Edward III’s court as it progressed through northwestern Germany on its way to the imperial court of the Holy Roman Emperor. William also claimed to be Edward II, but only dined at the king’s expense for a few weeks before disappearing from the records. A small minority of historians think there is some substance to these stories. Perhaps Edward is still out there somewhere, like Elvis.

Arise, England chronicles the six kings whose reigns spanned the 13th and 14th centuries. There is certainly a pleasing dynastic rationale for grouping the years between 1199, when John I took the throne, and 1399, the end of the reign of his great-great-great-great grandson, Richard II. Whether it represents a discrete era of political history is less clear. John is traditionally considered the last ‘Angevin’ king: he was not only king of England, but duke of Normandy, count of Maine, of Poitou and of Anjou; he lost these territories for good in 1214 after being diplomatically and militarily outwitted by Philip II of France. In one view, John’s reign makes more sense as an ending of the cosmopolitan political settlement, sometimes called the ‘Angevin empire’, in which English kings also controlled territory in nearly half of France.

Kings do hate to give up their claims, however. Well into the middle of the 13th century, John’s son Henry III was still insisting that he was the rightful duke of Normandy. And in a longer perspective, Henry’s reign, and those of his son and grandson, the first two Edwards, represent a mere century’s intermission during England’s protracted entwinement with French suzerainty. In 1340, Henry’s great-grandson Edward III asserted that he was king of France – a statement that helped catalyse the Hundred Years’ War. As temporal units of political history, reigns don’t necessarily explain all that much.

Across this period the most remarkable change was in the nature of government. At the beginning of John’s reign, there was little in the way of bureaucracy. There was the king and his household, there were some county officials such as sheriffs and coroners, and there was a small cadre of bureaucrats who ran the three offices of state: the exchequer, the chancery and the curia regis: what we might anachronistically call the fiscal, administrative and legal branches of executive power. But this form of rule was still significantly dependent on the king’s own household, called the chamber, through which his resources as a feudal landlord were funnelled towards government. A straightforward case can be made that John’s personal failings as a ruler, his basic inability to get on with other powerful men, led to some of the political crises he faced. The text of Magna Carta is clear that it represents a settlement to a ‘quarrel’ between the king and his barons. Many other people inserted their grievances into the conversation, however. As well as hallowing the principle that no freeman could be imprisoned except by the lawful judgment of his peers, Magna Carta promised to remove all fish-weirs from the Thames and Medway. In John’s reign, the king, to a large extent, was government: politics could be as simple as trying to get him (or alternatively, one of his powerful enemies) to heed your complaints.

By the time Richard II came to the throne in 1377, aged ten, government had developed into an array of institutions whose power extended throughout the realm. The royal courts had become increasingly specialised, with a professional judiciary that staffed two national courts at Westminster as well as maintaining a series of regular peace sessions, criminal courts and civil assizes in each county. Parliament had gone from an ad hoc gathering of major landowners to a regular forum of public debate; it now included a stratum of men drawn from local society, represented in the House of Commons, and it had to be consulted on all major decisions – most critically, on the imposition of new taxes. To publicise and enforce government decisions, the chancery was now at the centre of a huge royal bureaucracy that transmitted proclamations to, and collected information from, every vill in the realm. The office of the exchequer had expanded to take charge of the national revenue; this included the royal chamber itself, which was now forced to account for most of its receipts. Most strikingly, the reach and reliability of the exchequer’s money-raising capacity meant that tax could serve as security for regular advances of credit to the Crown. In 1275, Edward I instituted a new customs duty on every sack of wool leaving the kingdom; it was done at the behest of the Ricciardi of Lucca, who offered a huge loan in exchange for the right to collect this duty for the next two decades.

From the 1340s, tax was demanded for the defence of the realm even during years of peace, in order to fund the ‘protection of the coast’ (in fact, it funded aggressive privateering against the French). It became a permanent feature of political life, supporting what the historian Richard Kaeuper has called ‘the war state’. In 1200, the king’s wars were waged by men obliged to fight because they owed fealty to a lord; in 1400, armies were composed of professional soldiers contracted by specialist commanders. They were paid wages raised from a national debt supported by networks of international credit and managed by financiers relying on the collection of regular taxes. By every measure, government had become more complex and diffuse. The king-magnate relationship once central to medieval politics was now one among several of equal importance. The bankers and merchants had to be appeased; so did the squires who staffed the peace commissions in the counties, and the urban elites who governed cities and provided soldiers and ships; so did the village tax collectors, tasked with the unenviable job of getting everyone else to hand over their money.

During Richard II’s reign, major political crises were almost always caused by a rupture somewhere along the government’s overextended ligaments. (One of several unintentionally funny details in Arise, England is a subsection titled ‘The Common Law: The State’s Most Vigorous Limb’.) A few years into his reign, still barely a teenager, Richard was forced to confront the largest popular uprising in English history. The revolt of 1381 was the result of a series of inept short-term political decisions – military failures, financial corruption and the imposition of a third poll tax in four years – but it became a national emergency because of the extent to which government now intruded into its subjects’ lives. Often characterised as a ‘peasant’s revolt’, it might better be understood as a rebellion of taxpayers: even the king’s humblest subjects had come to see themselves as having a direct stake in the ruling of the kingdom.

It is apt that Richard, unwitting heir to these deep-rooted structural changes, was besieged in the Tower by a crowd claiming to be angry not with him but with a failure of government. The Savoy Palace was burned to the ground and the lord chancellor’s head was placed on a spike over London Bridge. Yet it was a bit of royal flash that put an end to the revolt. Richard was able to palm off the rebels with vague promises of pardons and reform, before confronting Wat Tyler during negotiations at Smithfield. The Lord Mayor of London and other household guards provoked a brawl, in the course of which Tyler was murdered. Even after this violent betrayal, the young king was able to convince the gathered crowds to disperse back to their villages. The crown still glittered.

Arise, England is a book bedazzled by the figure of the monarch. The authors, Caroline Burt and Richard Partington, historians at Cambridge, insist that stories about kings, ‘with all their drama, intrigue, personal triumph and tragedy, are inextricably intertwined with the grand narrative of the emergence of the English state’. This is true, but only in its weakest formulation. Kings made many decisions, and some of them set some policy or precedent that had institutional ramifications, ‘deliberately or accidentally’, as the authors concede. As a matter of historical craft, ‘intrigue’ does not easily contribute to explaining the development of a complex state. This book illustrates how difficult it is to balance two very different – in fact competing – views of what medieval political history is about.

Burt and Partington are well aware that for the past thirty years most serious scholarship has sought to move beyond superficial discussions of kingly personality. Christine Carpenter (who taught both authors as undergraduates) argued in 1992 that ‘there has been too much concentration on the personal politics of kings and noblemen and … too little investigation of the roots and uses of power’; what historians needed to understand were ‘the largely unspoken assumptions of the politically aware about what may or may not be done’. This ‘new constitutional history’, as it is sometimes called, has become the dominant academic paradigm for understanding medieval politics: historians now take it for granted that the possibilities of power were shaped by available political languages and concepts, and especially by the development of institutions.

Popular history is another matter. The appetite among outwardly normal adults for storybooks about kings and queens is as voracious as ever. In the past couple of decades authors such as Ian Mortimer and Alison Weir have been bashing out books at a furious pace, including The Perfect King (yes, it was Edward III) and Queens of the Age of Chivalry. In the last few years, publishers have jumped on the Game of Thrones bandwagon, peddling titles such as The Song of Simon de Montfort: England’s First Revolutionary. And this is before we get to the cottage industry turning out books about the Crusades and the Tudors, the versions of Merrie England that stir the blood of Middle England. These books tend to be written by popularisers such as Dan Jones, and seem designed to tie in with TV shows and podcasts. Jones, like Weir and Mortimer, also has a major side-hustle in historical fiction, where the drama and intrigue can be fully uncoupled from evidence. There is an inherent conservatism to all this, sometimes cross-fertilising with actual Conservatism. One recent book – Richard III: Brother, Protector, King – was written by Chris Skidmore, universities minister under Johnson and co-author of the neo-Thatcherite manifesto Britannia Unchained.

Arise, England, with its orotund comma, has been carefully designed to compete for the attention of uncles who like history. Six sombre Victorian portraits of the kings adorn the front cover, in the colours of a washed-out Union Jack; Dan Jones provides a blurb. Burt and Partington seem to have understood the brief. On the first page they assert that Magna Carta confirmed English and ‘arguably the Western world’s’ liberties. Arguably. We are told that ‘the parallels between this period over seven hundred years ago and 1939-45 are striking.’ The domestic disorder during Edward I’s wars of the 1290s is apparently reminiscent of looting during the Blitz. Edward III’s replacement of his military commanders in the 1340s was a bit like Churchill replacing Auchinleck with Montgomery during the North African campaign of 1942.

Most of the time, however, the kings seem more like drab regional managers of Medieval England PLC. Collectively, they ‘were able to harness the resources of their subjects to the national interest and then increase the effectiveness of provision with professionalisation’. Each king is given a progress review, with a special focus on character. John: ‘such a personality is hardly suited to any sort of leadership, let alone kingship.’ Edward II: ‘irresponsible, extravagant, lazy, and stubborn’. Henry III: ‘relatively malleable … not an especially imposing figure physically’. Good kings are leadership material, praised for their management skills.

At one point, describing Edward II’s struggles with Thomas of Lancaster in the 1310s, even the authors get bored: ‘Such was the constancy of the political music that individual years seem almost interchangeable.’ But in their conclusion, they suddenly remember their subtitle and present a short, skilful survey of political culture in this period, ending with the reflection that kings ‘were swept along by near irresistible political currents – with which they mostly swam’. So why is the book about the kings and not the currents? Why have Burt and Partington not tried to make all these recent scholarly developments accessible and intelligible to a lay audience? Why not take our eyes off the kings for once? The bathos lies in the authors’ justification for the book, which seems connected to their own experience of social mobility. In the acknowledgments, they identify themselves as first-generation students from the North-West of England who made it to Cambridge and address readers looking for inspiration: ‘To young people from backgrounds like ours … have confidence in your ability, worth and value; aim as high as you can.’ Such sentiments sit uneasily in a book obsessed with hereditary privilege.

When it comes to the kings, Burt and Partington’s highest praise is naturally reserved for Edward III, who was, it seems, quite literally born to rule: his success ‘may have rested on the genes he inherited via Isabella from his French forebears St Louis and Philip the Fair, to say nothing of his genetic inheritance from the English grandfather whose rule he so admired’. Whether or not you believe in the hereditary superiority of monarchs, it’s clear that Edward III was a charismatic leader. As a young man, amid the turmoil of his father’s deposition, he was bold enough to stage a coup – personally leading a hit squad to assassinate his enemies at Nottingham Castle – and secure his rule, before spending the next few years deftly reconciling a fractured, fractious nobility.

He charmed everyone: contemporary accounts describe him as congenial, straightforward, firm but fair. Most unusually, he was liked by his children. Burt and Partington write that ‘aspects of his personality leap from the pages of the chronicles’, while even ‘dry documents … crackle with his presence’. Best of all, in the view of his contemporaries, he was a warrior who inspired loyalty from his troops and fear in his opponents. He didn’t just win, he won dramatically: in 1340 at Sluys he destroyed the French navy with a fleet half its size; in 1356 at Poitiers his forces captured the French king, Jean II, and carried him back to London. Edward’s victories – the epitaph on his tomb called him ‘the undefeated leopard’ – laid the groundwork for his success in domestic politics. Everyone loves a winner.

But Edward was more complicated, as a person and as a king, than this summary allows. In the words of his best biographer, W. Mark Ormrod, he could also be ‘petulant, wilful, vulgar and boorish’. He committed the kingdom to unwinnable wars in France, Scotland and Castile that would dog his successors. The end of his rule was tainted by favouritism and infighting, and the Good Parliament of 1376, a constitutional landmark for its creation of the impeachment process, demonstrated that Edward’s reign had lost its sparkle. For a king famously committed to the common good, he left most of his subjects poorer and more oppressively governed. In the wake of the Black Death, his government made it a priority to restrict wages, tighten labour legislation and exert ever more control over the lives of its weakest subjects. Sometimes the mask slipped.

By any standard, Edward III was the most successful king of his era. But his reign demonstrates how circumscribed ‘success’ was for a medieval king. As Ormrod has it, Edward’s ‘innate belief in his own destiny’ belied an incapacity ‘to reflect on the deeper implications or repercussions of his ambitions’. Another way of putting this is that his achievements necessarily became his successors’ failures. His armies were expensive, placing future kings in an impossible military-fiscal bind: the need to win wars required professional troops, and paying these troops required new forms of indirect taxation; this required approval from Parliament, which required a winning streak that very few rulers could manage.

Astriking​ pattern emerges in Arise, England: a good king is always followed by a bad king. Not only because of the Oedipal rage presumably bequeathed along with those superior genes, but because the things that made a medieval king effective also wreaked havoc on government. Good kings took up too much room: when they died they left a vacuum, sucking out of place everything that had been delicately arranged around them. But all styles of kingship distorted the shape of the political. What counted as triumph for a king was at best ambivalent for the polity. More war, more law, more parades? For most people this was just more taxes, more fines, more bowing of the head.

Burt and Partington continually affirm that kings’ reigns were predetermined by their character. But ‘personality’ doesn’t really account for what these men did. People change, they grow and shrink, become different versions of themselves for different audiences. Edward III did not dress up in animal outfits because he was a flamboyant character, but because he lived in a political culture where carefully managed spectacle was a means of projecting control. It was still possible to get things wrong, to misread the signs. Edward II was condemned by chroniclers because he liked to spend his free time on rustic tasks: woodworking, hedging and ditching. This was its own kind of performance, a status inversion that was perhaps intended to be funny, or to convey a pious, hardworking austerity. Personality was neither here nor there; persona was everything.

When Burt and Partington come to the missteps made by Edward I at the end of his reign, the best they can do is suggest that he had ‘leader fatigue’: ‘Experienced leaders in any period and any arena can run the risk of failing to listen even where previously they may have been known for their consultative approach.’ Perhaps. But this was a man who died of dysentery on campaign in the Borders at the age of 68, still hammering away at the Scots. His dying wish was reportedly for his corpse to be boiled and the flesh stripped from his bones so that they might be carried into battle ‘every time the Scots should rebel’. This was not managerial ambition gone too far: it was the superhuman fury of the sovereign, a performance that had blended with psyche. Edward could no longer distinguish between his two bodies.

The many anachronisms in Arise, England are cynical, of course, and much of the book is just dreary. But the authors’ insistence that this is all normal leader stuff reveals a depressing lack of imagination – and a lack of faith in their readers. ‘If the behaviour of many of the protagonists of this period seems familiar in the modern period, it should not be surprising, because, while the context is in many ways different, human nature has not greatly changed. The motivations, and the best and worst qualities of political players, have endured.’ But if you think the job of the historian is to communicate sameness, familiarity, unchanging natures bopping against one another – in a royal court, a boardroom, a WWII bunker – then why do history at all? There is a necessary anachronism to all history-writing. It would be hard to write about medieval kings if we had no point of reference; we can’t make sense of them without resorting to comparisons or metaphors that reach beyond their time and enlighten us in the present. If the motivations of medieval political actors are intelligible to us, it’s not because they are familiar. History is produced by the oscillation between the known and the unknown: some of the very strangest things are those that seem, at first glance, to be easily recognisable.

Taxation, for example, was in the 13th century a bewildering array of levies demanded by kings: dona and auxilia, tallage and scutage, purveyance and service, sometimes conceived as gifts, other times as obligations, bargains or forced loans, justified variously by the language of utility, necessity, security, emergency. What was tax? The answer became less clear as the tolls became ever more imaginative. Each ‘subsidy’ dreamed that all moveable goods could be fractioned by the government – a ninth, a tenth, a thirteenth going to the king; the ‘poll’ tax was named for the Middle English word for ‘head’ because it was charged on the whole adult population, men and women – proof that the political imagination was beginning to envisage its constituents as individual agents staring back at the state.

Tax is supposed to be boring. But the ‘Song of the Husbandman’, a poem that ventriloquises the peasant discontent caused by Edward I’s new taxes, suggests the anger they provoked: ‘Now we must work, there is no other way/May I no longer live with my losing/Yet there is a bitterer bite to the bone/For every fourth penny must go to the king.’ The poet captures the psychic drama of tax, as unscrupulous royal officials arrive at the door – ‘cometh the master beadle bristling as a boar’ – bearing the ‘green wax’ seal of the exchequer. You hand over the few coins in your possession, or sell your goods on credit ahead of harvest-time. We cannot really understand medieval taxation and its role in politics without knowing that a document sealed with green wax had been issued to a sheriff ordering him to account for debts arising from the profits of justice (the bristling beadle, further down the chain of command, was trapped by bureaucracy too), or that a ‘tallage’ was a levy arising from the king’s feudal prerogative as a landowner, or indeed that ‘poll’ meant ‘head’. It is complicated, technical, difficult. But that’s what history is, and with a little more thought, it’s what popular history could be: making sense of the technicalities, the insider language, the strangeness of a different political world. Tax is weird. Uncles deserve better.

When Edward III died, a craftsman was commissioned to make a life-sized effigy – ‘an image after the likeness of the king’ – to rest atop his tomb in Westminster Abbey. The mannequin was made from wood and straw and painted with polychrome gesso. Archaeological analysis has since demonstrated that the head was once covered with a wig and crown, the hairs used to feign the eyebrows plucked from a ‘small dog’. The plaster face was hauntingly real because it was a cast taken from the king’s death mask. At the last, Edward’s undying commitment to verisimilitude was made solid: it is as it is. The eyes on the mask were painted open, as if he were still alive, still watching himself being watched. Kings demand interpretation – that is part of their power. As they are transformed into sovereigns, they transform their subjects into helpless connoisseurs, guessing at what goes on in the head beneath the crown. For historians, medieval and modern, this is particularly invidious, because it can straitjacket interpretation into the false binaries of nature or nurture, context or character, leader or loser. In the end every explanation of what a king did limps back to the emptiness of ‘personality’. Who was the king really?

There are no satisfactory answers to such questions. Asking them is the foundational trap of kingship, a means of disguising most of what is really happening politically. Who paid for the pheasant costumes? Who made the death mask? Who plucked the little dog? Who announced the processions, guarded the crowds? Countless bodies were required, a collective undertaking to bear up the crown, whoever happened to be wearing it. If the sparkling costumes were distracting, then they were working. But the stuttering machinery of the medieval state was always more mysterious than the monarch. The courts where judges gathered to solemnly dignify the torture and execution of a confused imposter; the rooms full of hunched clerks copying out tens of thousands of near identical writs in a language almost no one actually spoke; the coins hammered out of their casts under the watchful eyes of the goldsmiths; the villagers muttering as the collector rode away – next time, next time. The spectacle of medieval government was more surreal, more interesting, stranger and bleaker than any peacocked king.