An Introduction to the History of Western Europe Part 29

We turn first to England. The English kings who preceded Edward I had ruled over only a portion of the island of Great Britain. To the west of their kingdom lay the mountainous district of Wales, inhabited by that remnant of the original Britons which the German invaders had been unable to conquer. To the north of England was the kingdom of Scotland, which was quite independent except for an occasional vague recognition on the part of its rulers of the English kings as their feudal superiors. Edward I, however, succeeded in conquering Wales permanently and Scotland temporarily.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BRITISH ISLES]

[Sidenote: The Welsh and their bards.]

For centuries a border warfare had been carried on between the English and the Welsh. William the Conqueror had found it necessary to establish a chain of earldoms on the Welsh frontier, and Chester, Shrewsbury, and Monmouth became the outposts of the Normans. While the raids of the Welsh constantly provoked the English kings to invade Wales, no permanent conquest was possible, for the enemy retreated into the mountains about Snowdon and the English soldiers were left to starve in the wild regions into which they had ventured. The long and successful resistance which the Welsh made against the English must be attributed not only to their inaccessible retreats but also to the patriotic inspiration of their bards. These fondly believed that their people would sometime reconquer the whole of England, which they had possessed before the coming of the Angles and Saxons.[176]

[Sidenote: Edward I conquers Wales.]

[Sidenote: The t.i.tle of 'Prince of Wales.']

When Edward I came to the throne he demanded that Llewelyn, Prince of Wales, as the head of the Welsh clans was called, should do him homage.

Llewelyn, who was a man of ability and energy, refused the king's summons, and Edward marched into Wales. Two campaigns were necessary before the Welsh finally succ.u.mbed. Llewelyn was killed (1282), and with him expired the independence of the Welsh people. Edward divided the country into shires and introduced English laws and customs, and his policy of conciliation was so successful that there was but a single rising in the country for a whole century. He later presented his son to the Welsh as their prince, and from that time down to the present the t.i.tle of "Prince of Wales" has usually been conferred upon the heir to the English throne.

[Sidenote: Scotland before Edward I.]

[Sidenote: The Highlands and Lowlands.]

The conquest of Scotland proved a far more difficult matter than that of Wales. The early history of the kingdom of Scotland is a complicated one. When the Angles and Saxons landed in Britain, a great part of the mountainous region north of the Firth of Forth was inhabited by a Celtic tribe, the Picts. There was, however, on the west coast a little kingdom of the Irish Celts, who were then called Scots. By the opening of the tenth century the Picts had accepted the king of the Scots as their ruler, and the annalists begin to refer to the highland region as the land of the Scots. As time went on the English kings found it to their advantage to grant to the Scottish rulers certain border districts, including the Lowlands, between the river Tweed and the Firth of Forth.

This region was English in race and speech, while the Celts in the Highlands spoke, and still speak, Gaelic.

[Sidenote: Character of the inhabitants of the Lowlands.]

It was very important in the history of Scotland that its kings chose to dwell in the Lowlands rather than in the Highlands, and made Edinburgh, with its fortress, their chief town. With the coming of William the Conqueror many Englishmen, and also a number of discontented Norman n.o.bles, fled across the border to the Lowlands of Scotland, and founded some of the great families, like those of Balliol and Bruce, who later fought for Scottish liberty. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the country, especially in the south, developed rapidly under the influence of the neighboring Anglo-Norman civilization, and the towns increased in size and importance.

[Sidenote: Edward intervenes in Scotch affairs.]

[Sidenote: Alliance between Scotland and France.]

It was not until the time of Edward I that the long series of troubles between England and Scotland began. The death of the last representative of the old line of Scotch kings in 1290 was followed by the appearance of a number of claimants to the crown. In order to avoid civil war, Edward was asked to decide who should be king. He agreed to make the decision on condition that the one whom he selected should hold Scotland as a fief from the English king. This arrangement was adopted, and the crown was given to Robert Balliol. But Edward unwisely made demands upon the Scots which aroused their anger, and their king renounced his homage to the king of England. The Scotch, moreover, formed an alliance with Edward's enemy, Philip the Fair of France; thenceforth, in all the difficulties between England and France, the English kings had always to reckon with the disaffected Scotch, who were glad to aid England's enemies.

[Sidenote: Edward attempts to incorporate Scotland with England.]

Edward marched in person against the Scotch (1296) and speedily put down what he regarded as a rebellion. He declared that Balliol had forfeited his fief through treason, and that consequently the English king had become the immediate lord of the Scotch n.o.bles, whom he forced to do him homage. He emphasized his claim by carrying off the famous Stone of Scone, upon which the kings of Scotland had been crowned for ages.

Continued resistance led Edward to attempt to incorporate Scotland with England in the same way that he had treated Wales. This was the beginning of three hundred years of intermittent war between England and Scotland, which ended only when a Scotch king, James VI, succeeded to the English throne in 1603 as James I.

[Sidenote: Scotland gains its independence under Robert Bruce.]

[Sidenote: Battle of Bannockburn, 1314.]

That Scotland was able to maintain her independence was mainly due to Robert Bruce, a national hero who succeeded in bringing both the n.o.bility and the people under his leadership. Edward I died, old and worn out, in 1307, when on his way north to put down a rising under Bruce, and left the task of dealing with the Scotch to his incompetent son, Edward II. The Scotch acknowledged Bruce as their king and decisively defeated Edward II in the great battle of Bannockburn, the most famous conflict in Scottish history. Nevertheless, the English refused to acknowledge the independence of Scotland until forced to do so in 1328.

[Sidenote: The Scottish nation differs from the English.]

In the course of their struggles with England the Scotch people of the Lowlands had become more closely welded together, and the independence of Scotland, although it caused much bloodshed, first and last, served to develop certain permanent differences between the little Scotch nation and the rest of the English race. The peculiarities of the people north of the Tweed have been made familiar by the writings of gifted Scotchmen like Burns, Scott, and Stevenson.

[Sidenote: Growth of the power of Parliament.]

Edward II's numerous enemies took advantage of his weakness to bring about his downfall, but it is noteworthy that they worked through Parliament and in that way strengthened that fundamental national inst.i.tution. We have seen how Edward I called representatives of the townspeople, as well as the n.o.bles and prelates, to the Model Parliament of 1295.[177] This important innovation was formally ratified by his son, who solemnly promised that all questions relating to his realm and its people should be settled in parliaments in which the commons should be included. Thereafter no statute could be legally pa.s.sed without their consent. In 1327 Parliament showed its power by forcing Edward II to abdicate in favor of his son, and thereby established the principle that the representatives of the nation might even go so far as to depose their ruler, should he show himself clearly unfit for his high duties.

About this time Parliament began to meet in two distinct divisions, which later became the House of Lords and the House of Commons. In modern times this form of legislative a.s.sembly has been imitated by most of the countries of Europe.

[Sidenote: Cause of the Hundred Years' War.]

106. The so-called Hundred Years' War, which we must now review, was a long but frequently interrupted series of conflicts between the English and the French kings. It began in the following manner. The king of England, through John's misconduct, had lost Normandy and other portions of the great Plantagenet realm on the continent.[178] He still retained, however, the extensive duchy of Guienne, for which he did homage to the king of France, whose most powerful va.s.sal he was. This arrangement was bound to produce constant difficulty, especially as the French kings were, as we have discovered, bent upon destroying as fast as possible the influence of their va.s.sals, so that the royal power should everywhere take the place of that of the feudal lords. It was obviously out of the question for the king of England meekly to permit the French monarch to extend his control directly over the people of Guienne, and yet this was the constant aim of Philip the Fair[179] and his successors.

THE FRENCH KINGS DURING THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES

Louis IX (Saint Louis) (1226-1270) | Philip III (1270-1285) | +-------------+--------------------------------+ | | | | Philip IV, the Fair Charles of Valois, (1285-1314) ancestor of the house of Valois | | +-----+--------+-------------+------------+ | | | | | | Louis X Isabella, m. Philip V Charles IV | (1314-1316) Edward II (1316-1322) (1322-1328) | | | | | | +--+----+ | | | | | | Edward daughters daughter | daughter | III of Philip VI | England (1328-1350) John | (1316), | an | infant John II who died (1350-1364) when but | a few | days old +------------+ | | Charles V Philip, (1364-1380) founder of | the powerful Charles VI house (1380-1422) of Burgundy | Charles VII (1422-1461) | Louis XI (1461-1483) | Charles VIII (1483-1498)

[Sidenote: The French succession in 1328.]

The inevitable struggle between England and France was rendered the more serious by the claim made by Edward III that he was himself the rightful king of France. He based his pretensions upon the fact that his mother Isabella was the daughter of Philip the Fair. Philip, who died in 1314, had been followed by his three sons in succession, none of whom had left a male heir, so that the direct male line of the Capetians was extinguished in 1328. The lawyers thereupon declared that it was a venerable law in France that no woman should succeed to the throne. The principle was also a.s.serted that a woman could not even transmit the crown to her son. Consequently Edward III appeared to be definitely excluded, and Philip VI of Valois, a nephew of Philip the Fair, became king.

[Sidenote: Edward III claims the French crown.]

At first Edward III, who was a mere boy in 1328, appeared to recognize the propriety of this settlement and did qualified homage to Philip VI for Guienne. But when it became apparent later that Philip was not only encroaching upon Edward's prerogatives in Guienne but had sent French troops to aid the Scotch, the English king bethought him of his neglected claim to the French crown.

[Sidenote: The Flemish towns.]

The advantage of publicly declaring himself the rightful king of France was increased by the att.i.tude of the flourishing towns of Flanders.

Philip VI had a.s.sisted the count of Flanders in a bitter struggle to prevent the towns from establishing their independence. Consequently the Flemish burghers now announced their willingness to desert Philip and acknowledge and aid Edward as their king.

[Sidenote: Commercial relations between the Flemish towns and England.]

[Sidenote: English wool.]

Flanders at this period was the most important trading and manufacturing country in western Europe. Ghent was a great manufacturing town, like Manchester to-day, and Bruges a busy port, like modern Antwerp or Liverpool. All this prosperity was largely dependent upon England, for it was from there that the Flemish manufacturers procured the fine, long wool which they wove on their looms into cloth and spun into yarn. In 1336 the count of Flanders, perhaps at Philip's suggestion, ordered the imprisonment of all the Englishmen in Flanders. Edward promptly retaliated by prohibiting the export of wool from England and the importation of cloth. At the same time he protected and encouraged the Flemish artisans who had emigrated across the Channel and were carrying on their industry in the county of Norfolk.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Royal Arms of Edward III]

It is clear, then, that the Flemish burghers had good reason for wishing Edward to become their king, so that their relations with England might not be broken off. They did their part in inducing him to undertake the conquest of France, and (in 1340) we find him adding the _fleur de lis_ of France to the lions of the English royal arms.

[Sidenote: Edward III invades France, 1346.]

[Sidenote: The English victory at the battle of Crecy, 1346.]

Edward did not invade France for some years, but his sailors destroyed the French fleet and began to show themselves able to maintain their king's claim to be lord of the English seas upon every side. In 1346 Edward himself landed in Normandy, devastated the country, and marched up the Seine almost to Paris, but was then obliged to retreat northward before a large army which Philip had collected. Edward made a halt at Crecy, and here one of the most celebrated battles of history took place. It taught the world a great lesson in warfare by proving once more, as the battle of Bannockburn had already done, that foot soldiers, properly armed and trained to act in concert, could defeat the feudal cavaliers in spite of their lances and heavy armor. The proud mounted knights of France performed prodigies of valor, each for himself, but they did not act together and could not hold their ground against the deadly shower of arrows poured into their midst from the long bows of the English archers. The flower of French chivalry was routed with terrible slaughter by the serried ranks of the humble English foot soldiers.[180] It was at Crecy that Edward's son, the Black Prince,--so named from his black armor,--won his spurs.[181]

[Sidenote: The English take Calais.]

[Sidenote: The Black Prince wins a second great victory at Poitiers, 1356.]

After this great victory the English king proceeded to lay siege to Calais, the French coast town nearest England. This he took, drove out a great part of the inhabitants, and subst.i.tuted Englishmen for them. The town remained subject to England for two centuries. When the war was renewed the Black Prince, now at the height of his fame, was able to deal the enemy a still more crushing blow than at Crecy. He again put the French knights to flight in the battle of Poitiers; he even captured the French king, John, and carried him off to London.

[Sidenote: The Estates General attempt to control the king and reform the government.]

107. The French quite properly attributed the signal disasters of Crecy and Poitiers to the inefficiency of their king and his advisers.