England in the Thirteenth Century

Cambridge Medieval Textbooks

by Alan Harding

This is a comprehensive account of politics, government and society in thirteenth-century England. Three episodes stand out: the revolt of the barons against King John in 1215, the protest against the misgovernment of Henry III which began in 1258, and the resistance to the demands of Edward I on the resources of the land that came to a head in 1297. These political events are placed in the context of social and economic change, in order to provide a rounded account of the century. The introduction demonstrates the constitutional importance given by past historians to the period that saw the framing of Magna Carta and the beginnings of Parliament and statute law. The central chapters describe the developing social structure of peasants, townsmen and professional people, knights, clergy and lay magnates. The book finally sees the politics of the century in terms of royal ambitions to dominate Britain and to play a leading role in Europe.

Genres: History

368 pages, Hardcover

First published July 30, 1993

Reviews

[David Warner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very valuable analytical textbook, but with one caveat. What Alan Harding has successfully done with this volume is provide a fine overview of thirteenth century England which manages to connect and correlate political and constitutional developments with legal and jurisdictional ones, while placing them within the economic and social context of rising prices, relative land hunger, and demographic expansion, and thereby drawing a satisfyingly realistic picture of how lay society and administration functioned in the reigns of Henry III and Edward I. However, this comes at the cost of marginalising the importance of the Church, with the exception of the part played by abbots and bishops as magnates, both as institution and body of believers, parochial life, the increasingly interventionist role of the papacy within English ecclesiastical jurisdiction (the last flourish of the Gregorian movement), and concomitant develops in theology and intellectual thought, meaning this must remain only a partial history of the period.
Harding's overall approach is very sensible, as he first outlines in an extremely good first historiographical chapter the primary sources upon which study of this period are based, before delineating the structures of society, viewed predominantly through interactions within the emerging common law and courts, the field of his expertise, beginning with the peasantry, and moving through the towns, the knights, and onto the magnates, before only in his final chapter addressing political events. This 'Annalist' methodology, a reversal of long traditional practice whereby politics and the constitution are placed first, is most effective in that it embeds the actions of elite political and social actors, such as kings and greater landlords, within the society in which they lived, and so provides a far more satisfactory sociopolitical explanatory framework than that provided by simple political narrative, a reason why this approach is now so widely adopted, and not only by Marxists and structuralists.
For Harding, the thirteenth century is the period when the feudal society of post-Conquest landholding based upon military obligation and service evolved into the more sophisticated law and financial transaction based society of the later middle ages, a transitionary period between an age when social bonds were founded upon personal service and one based upon impersonal contract, a process most apparent in the evolution of knights from horsed warriors at the service of their liege lords into the county administrators of the grand and petty shire assizes and the providers of jurisdictional and economic lordship over manorial estates, the local basis for their public office, and as such the precursors of the gentry and gentlemen of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries.
As the knights' social role became focused more upon administration than upon military service, so did the importance of shire courts and the common law grow, and with them the necessity to involve the local landowners who administered these more in the government of the realm, so leading to the formation of Parliament, first as a consultative body as well as a court, but from 1294-7 with the acute financial strain of Scottish and French wars, increasingly, as the importance of the Commons evolved, as the best means of securing consent to taxation by those who would both pay and collect taxes, while, in parallel, convocation emerged separately as a similar representative body of the clergy capable of consenting to financial demands.
What Harding propounds is that in this age of transition, it was not so much that the old feudal system based upon the honour and knight's fee and secured by personal bonds of fealty disappeared to be replaced by the later contractual system of indentures and money payments, so-called 'bastard feudalism', but rather that the traditional basis of society based upon possession of land in exchange for military obligation was augmented by new ways of forming civil associations through the increasing importance of royal and noble households and their retainers, and the legal obligations that were justifiable at common law or subject to the expanding royal courts, whose assizes were administered by local landowners in association with the exercise of central authority through justices on eyre and commissions of trailbaston. For example, Harding traces the descent of the seventeen earldoms extant at Magna Carta, and shows how twelve remained largely intact in 1307, although only three were outside of ties to the king's family, and that only two 'new men' held reactivated earldoms to which they had no lineal ties. So, at the accession of Edward II, twelve earls could still claim direct descent from the tenants-in-chief whose baronies had been originally endowed after the Conquest, and these still retained the predominant political role in the realm as chief supporters and counsellors of the king in war and in peace. What the thirteenth century saw, however, was in addition the co-opting of knights and burgesses into the administration of government and justice and their increasing involvement alongside the holders of lay and ecclesiastical baronies in the formulation of policy itself, marking an expansion not only in the purview of government but also in the numbers of those who exercised and administered it in their localities.
The principle social change is that beneath the great lords, the non-magnates no longer had the same connections to and dependence upon their feudal superiors through knight service as in the previous centuries, but were rather an aristocracy of landholders with heritable lands whose socio-political relations were based less upon a hierarchy of feudal service and more upon the necessities of local and provincial personal relations formed by geographical and familial proximity and associations - an armigerous possessor of land would hold his lands from several other lords, but could only enter service with one, that being the lord most advantageous or most dominant with regard to him. This alteration in the function of land tenure is also revealed by the decline in the knight's fee itself, as even great lords who had owed over a hundred knights' service to the king at the beginning of the century would by its end only owe around five, these being based on the land they held in demesne, since their tenants were more and more independent of their direct lordship, often holding only partial fees of them among an agglomeration of estates, while they could no longer destrain their tenants of heritable lands for which they received rents without lawful judgement and could not prevent the descent of these lands to legitimate heirs, or their sub-infeudation, or the increasing applications of enfoeffments to use and protections provided by common law and the assizes of mort d'ancestor and novel disseisin. In effect, their tenants had become a landholding class with rights over their estates distinct from the will of their feudal superior and justifiable at law.
As well as the emergence of the common law and the greater importance of its courts and those of king's bench, and the development of Parliament as the supreme judicial and representative body by which the community of the realm outside of the tenants-in-chief and holders of great ecclesiastical and lay baronies were associated with government, the thirteenth century also marked the beginning of statue law, usually dated from the reissuing of Magna Carta and the Forest Charter by Henry III's government in 1225, which inculcated into practice that wrongdoings for which the common law was inadequate could be addressed by royal statute, provided with the advice of the community of the realm, and the evolution of a more centralised and personal royal government when, while the exchequer and chancery developed as permanent administrative bodies at Westminster outside of the household, the privy seal and the wardrobe emerged as efficient administrative and financial organs of executive government within the household directly under the control of the king and his household officers.
Whatever the political crises of the thirteenth century, which Harding sketches in his final chapter, they and the needs of the knights, townsmen, and free peasants of the localities led to important administrative reforms, which while not radical in themselves, were to provide the foundations for the sophisticated state based upon war and its concomitant financial demands that was to come into being in the reign of Edward III, making possible the armies of the Hundred Years War and the increasingly integrated administrative state of the later middle ages. For anyone wanting an accessible and integrated political, constitutional, legal, and social analytical survey of this process, who is already familiar with the narrative history of the period and prepared to look elsewhere for a study of the contemporary Church, this book is a solid and useful study.