ENGLAND 



2920 



ENGLAND 



spearmen to defy the shock of 

 the charge of mailed cavalry. The 

 two principles were combined by 

 Edward III and his son, the Black 

 Prince. The English archery and 

 dismounted men-at-arms shattered 

 superior forces at the battles of 

 Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356). 

 King Edward captured Calais in 

 1347, to remain as a gateway to 

 France for 200 years. In 1360 he 

 forced on the French the treaty 

 of Bretigny, which conceded to 

 him a quarter of France in full 

 sovereignty. 



Twelve years later all that had 

 been won was practically lost ; 

 England retained only a pre- 

 carious hold upon a part of Guienne 

 and Gascony, as well as Calais. 

 The war was enormously costly, 

 and its costliness developed the 

 power of the Parliament, which was 

 now strong enough to forbid the 

 imposition of taxes, other than 

 those formally sanctioned in the 

 reign of Edward I, except by its 

 own vote. The power of the purse 

 passed definitely into the hands 

 of Parliament, and with it a cer- 

 tain limited control of policy ; the 

 royal revenues were insufficient, at 

 least for war programmes, unless 

 supplemented by the land and 

 property taxes, known as tenths 

 and fifteenths, and afterwards as 

 subsidies, which the lords and 

 commons voted. 



The Black Death 



The general prosperity was 

 checked by the tremendous visita- 

 tion of the Black Death in 1348. 

 A third of the rural population is 

 said to have perished ; for lack of 

 labour the harvest was left to rot 

 and the fields were left untilled, 

 while famine followed upon the 

 plague. The landholders sought 

 to revive all their old powers of 

 enforcing service ; the peasantry 

 refused to work except at very 

 high wages, and the government 

 stepped in with the Statute of 

 Labourers, vainly attempting to 

 fix a standard wage. A class ani- 

 mosity was born, quite different 

 from the bygone hostility between 

 the English occupants of the soil 

 and their Norman conquerors. 

 This bore fruit in the peasant revolt 

 of 1381. The revolt was crushed, 

 but was not followed by any en- 

 actments for the removal of griev- 

 ances ; the system of villeinage, 

 forced agricultural services, and 

 restrictions upon rural wages re- 

 mained. 



Edward III in the pursuit of 

 revenue had grasped the advan- 

 tages of encouraging and organiz- 

 ing trade under state supervision. 

 The export of staple goods, wool, 

 hides, etc., was restricted to the 

 Company of the Merchants of the 



Staple, trading only in authorised 

 localities, known "as the staple 

 towns; the import of manufac- 

 tured goods was mainly in the 

 hands of foreign trading societies, 

 notably the German Hanse ; both 

 groups paid for their privileges and 

 enjoyed powers of regulating the 

 traffic. But at the same time the 

 process of manufacture in England 

 itself advanced greatly, and English 

 cloth goods began to compete in 

 foreign markets as well as in 

 England. Although a gloomy pic- 

 ture of rural life is presented in 

 Langland's Vision of Piers Plow- 

 man, the pages of Geoffrey Chaucer 

 convey an altogether convincing 

 impression of an England ma- 

 terially prosperous, genial, and 

 light-hearted, and full of a robust 

 kindliness. 



Rule of the Lancastrians 



Richard II (1377-99) found him- 

 self much in the hands of a fac- 

 tion of the nobility, who, however, 

 could no longer usurp the functions 

 now acknowledged to lie in Parlia- 

 ment. Soon after coming of age, 

 he succeeded in recovering the 

 royal authority, but though he 

 ruled well for several years, he 

 was unhappily nursing vindictive 

 schemes and plans of arbitrary 

 rule. He turned suddenly upon 

 the nobles who had once held him 

 in restraint, put some of them to 

 death, banished others, and imag- 

 ined himself undisputed master of 

 the kingdom. But in 1399 his 

 banished cousin, Henry of Lancas- 

 ter, returned to England. The dis- 

 contented nobles rallied to Henry's 

 standard, Richard was deserted 

 arid brought a prisoner to London, 

 a parliament was called, Richard 

 was compelled to abdicate, and the 

 parliament declared Henry king of 

 England by lawful descent. 



With Henry IV began the rule 

 of the Lancastrian branch of the 

 house of Plantagenet. Raised to 

 the throne of the cousin who was 

 done to death soon afterwards, 

 while yet another cousin, the child 

 Edmund Mortimer, had a better 

 claim than his own to the succes- 

 sion as descending from an elder 

 son of Edward III, Henry knew 

 that he ruled by a parliamentary 

 title. Parliament knew it, too, and 

 the result was that the Lancastrian 

 kings were very much at the mercy 

 of their parliaments. Also, as 

 clerical influences had been vigor- 

 ously applied on Henry's behalf, 

 the house of Lancaster was com- 

 pelled to conciliate the clergy. 

 Hence Henry was led to a rigorous 

 suppression of the Lollards. The 

 teaching of Wycliffe, about the 

 end of the reign of Edward III, had 

 attained considerable popularity 

 during the reign of Richard II in a 



country where the anti-clerical 

 sentiment was always strong, until 

 it began to be applied as a sort of 

 communistic propaganda ; but 

 burning at the stake as the punish- 

 ment for the unrepentant heretics 

 first became the law of the land in 

 the reign of Henry IV. 



That monarch's uneasy rule of 

 fourteen years was followed by the 

 brilliant reign of his son Henry V. 

 In the anarchy which had over- 

 taken the French kingdom, Henry 

 found occasion for a preposterous 

 revival of the claim of Edward III 

 to the French crown. In 1415 he 

 invaded France, captured Harfleur, 

 and at the head of no more than 

 8,000 men won the victory of 

 Agincourt. Three years later he 

 returned to France and set about 

 a systematic and organized con- 

 quest. The factions of French 

 politics brought over to his side 

 the powerful duke of Burgundy 

 and the French queen, when all 

 Normandy was already in his 

 possession. The king of France 

 was compelled to acknowledge 

 Henry as his heir, while the 

 dauphin Charles and the greater 

 part of France remained defiant. 

 Inch by inch Henry made himself 

 master of N. France, but in 1422 

 he died, leaving the English crown 

 and the French succession to his 

 infant son, Henry VI, and the 

 government of the country to a 

 council of regency. 



Loss of Burgundy and Guienne 

 The resources of England were 

 not equal to a conquest of France. 

 In spite of the abilities of Henry's 

 brother, John, duke of Bedford, 

 the subjugation proceeded slowly, 

 and was stopped altogether by the 

 extraordinary interposition of Joan 

 of Arc. The death of Bedford him- 

 self in 1435 was fatal to English 

 ambitions ; the defection of Bur- 

 gundy was still more decisive, and [ 

 from that time the record of the 

 French war was one of almost 

 continuous defeat ; until in 1453 

 even Guienne was lost, and Calais 

 was the only foothold left to the 

 English in France. 



The usurpation of Henry IV 

 and the aggression of Henry V 

 brought their Nemesis. Popular 

 disgust was kindled against the 

 faction who exercised control over 

 the imbecile Henry VI as being 

 responsible for the disastrous mis- 

 management of the war and the 

 feeble government at home. The 

 opposition was led by Riohard of 

 York, representative of a branch 

 of the descendants of Edward III 

 senior to the house of Lancaster. 

 Richard claimed to be the effective 

 head of the government. The 

 rebellion of Jack Cade in 1450 was 

 not, as is commonly supposed, an 



