HOW SIX PLANTAGENET KINGS MADE THE ENGLISH MEDIEVAL 'STATE'

What did King John, Henry III, three Edwards and a Richard ever do for us?

Approximately one million years ago, I enjoyed the privilege of studying English medieval history at Cambridge University. This was not all I studied, but it was the stuff that really got my juices flowing in the right direction. I found then - as I have ever since - that the story of the Plantagenet dynasty is fascinating in human terms. But it also shines a light on an important age in the development of the English state.

This week a new book comes out which explains rather brilliantly how the Plantagenet state emerged. It is authored by two leading Cambridge scholars - Caroline Burt and Richard Partington - who are both central figures in the school of medieval history that produced me (and Helen Castor, among others).

The book is called Arise, England and it has already attracted rave reviews in The Sunday Times and Telegraph.

To give you an flavour of its content, I got in touch with Caroline and Richard for a chat about some of the themes their book touches on. Below you can read our conversation - published here exclusively for you, my lovely Substack subscribers.

Oh, and as a bonus - if you are a young - or even non-young - person thinking that you would like to study history at university, Caroline Burt has a YouTube channel full of helpful advice. Check it out here.

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DJ: In Arise, England, you describe the emergence of the medieval English state under the Plantagenets. It’s a fascinating story, and there are some wild characters along the way. It has always struck me that for the most part, the most important constitutional developments in this period come about in reaction kings getting things wrong - whether that’s John and Magna Carta, Henry III and the Provisions of Oxford, or Edward II and Richard II losing the crown itself. Is that how you see it?

CB/RP: You are quite right that important political and constitutional developments emerged from crisis, much of which was generated by kingly failure – typified by the cruelty of John and the tyrannies of Edward II and Richard II – or because of failures of leadership and judgement, such as those under Henry III.

Had John not been so brutal, arbitrary and determined in taking his people’s money to pay for his wars, for example, Magna Carta – which established definitively that kings had to obey the law – wouldn’t have come into being. Similarly, no king could exclude the gentry from Parliament after the Provisions of Oxford of 1258, which were a reaction to the incompetence of Henry III.

But at the same time, some important developments had an internal and positive dynamic that did not depend upon crisis as a driver. Perhaps the most important political change in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was the growth of the law and its increasing pre-eminence in ordinary people’s lives. Some of this did relate to crisis, for instance, during periods of post-war demobilisation, when disorder created by former troops was feared, but much of it was fostered by demand from below – by people asking for greater access to more specialist legal mechanisms, because such access made their lives better.

What made kings like Edward I and Edward III great leaders was that they were able to marry their own interests with those of the people, and it was this instinct, perhaps as much as anything, that produced the development of Parliament.

DJ: Some people will raise an eyebrow at the use of the word ‘state’ to describe a pre-modern English polity… what does the state in medieval England consist of? Is it just a collection of institutions - law courts, parliament, Exchequer etc? Or is there some greater, abstract way that people saw the state? 

CB/RP: This was a difficult one for us when we were writing the book. If you are being technically strict in your definition, then you have to accept that the terminology of the ‘state’ is not medieval; it is from the early modern period.

However, while the term itself is therefore anachronistic, the entity that is being described in our period had the key characteristics of a state. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. If a state was an organised political community under one government, with a monopoly over legitimate violence, established borders, foreign policy and a military, a single legal system applicable to the large bulk of the population, representative institutions (such as Parliament), national taxation and substantial ‘buy-in’ from ordinary people (e.g. as jurors or constables), then what existed and developed in the period 1199-1399 was definitely a state.

And we think people identified with that as an entity in itself, not just as a collection of institutions. In Parliament, people spoke of the possessions of the English Crown at home and abroad, not simply of what belonged to the king personally or dynastically. The Crown conceptualised public rights and possessions, and English kings in their diplomacy distinguished between their possessions as individuals and their possessions as the king of England. They did not regard the latter as being within their gift of negotiation. They belonged to the realm, publicly defined.

DJ: How powerful do you think the king was in medieval England? We’re so used to a state today that has vast powers of compulsion and coercion over citizens’ lives, and where it’s normal for the government to be up in pretty much all of your business from cradle to grave. Plainly that’s not how it was in, say, the fourteenth century. Surely being king was in large part a gigantic confidence trick…

CB/RP: Well, all leadership, to some extent, even now, is about maintaining confidence in the ability to get a job done so that people will follow you or obey you, etc. 

It’s easy to assume that where bureaucracy is extensive, as, for example, in modern Britain, the ability of an individual leader will be less critical, but that's not the case. Of course more might happen automatically, like taxation, but now, just as in the Middle Ages, political leadership is still hugely important alongside political mores and circumstances. Just think about the extent to which governments across the world differed in their approaches to COVID-19, and how far that was affected by individual leaders. And think also of the patterns of ideas that have emerged and still do emerge across borders – right- or left-wing populism, fascism, communism, liberalism, for example.

Leaders are proponents of those ideas, but they are also shaped by them, just as medieval leaders were. And leaders now and then are constrained by ideology and circumstances: what is politically acceptable and what is politically possible.

What we are trying to show in the book is that the present and the past, even the distant past, are not so different. At the same time, we should also not downplay the extent to which the king in medieval England had real, practical power and stood at the head of what can be described as a highly sophisticated governmental machine, even by modern standards.

Although there was no police force or standing army, private power was co-opted into royal government, willingly and on a grand scale, in the interests of both, to provide the latent and where necessary actual force on which the system depended. Edward III could order his sergeants-at-arms at Westminster to arrest suspects in Bristol and have the suspects before him to be interrogated two days later. The great state trials of the late thirteenth and mid-fourteenth centuries showed the huge coercive power that medieval English kings could wield through the law.

DJ: How does the medieval English state compare to its neighbours? Was England more developed than France? Scotland? Etc? And what advantages (if any) did the English state confer when it came to foreign affairs?  

CB/RP: This is a really interesting question. For various reasons to do with historical events and geography, England was very centralised compared to a lot of medieval realms. The king of France, for example, would surely have loved to have had as much practical and direct power as his English counterpart, and in David II the Scots had a king who sought to establish in Scotland the sort of centralised rule he had seen in England during his long captivity following his capture at the battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346.

An able and focused king had at his disposal and was able to command a uniquely extensive and cohesive infrastructure through which to maintain law and order domestically; and, following the military reforms of Edward I and Edward III, and lessons learned from Robert Bruce in Scotland, the English king was able to deploy more professional, better equipped and more effective armies and naval forces than any other European power.

All this conferred advantage on the English king, which generally enabled him to prevail in territories with weaker central structures like Wales or Ireland. Somewhere like Scotland was much harder to overrun, for geopolitical reasons and because there was a strong tradition of Scots monarchy increasingly coterminous with Scottish identity and self-determination.

In France, although power was much more dispersed and the French king’s position much less unquestioned, the country’s sheer size and wealth, and the centralisation that did exist, meant that it was usually able to hold its own against the English, though it teetered in the 1340s and 50s, and again after Henry V’s success from 1415.

DJ: Who do you think deserves to be better known from this period? 

CB/RP: Wow, that’s a really good question! The people who get most of the attention are understandably the kings and rebels like Simon de Montfort or Thomas of Lancaster. But there are so many interesting people, some of whom are also unsung heroes.

Take Henry of Grosmont, first duke of Lancaster, who was one of Edward III’s most important lieutenants. He was a deeply committed and highly trusted royal counsellor, justice and diplomat, and was perhaps the most talented and successful (certainly in respect of territory regained) war captain in the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War – no mean feat when other commanders included Edward III, the Black Prince and Bertrand du Guesclin.

His energy was remarkable and his reputation among contemporaries huge: his duel with duke Otto of Brunswick had to be abandoned when Otto fell off his horse in the lists, he was shaking so much with fear; and Henry’s fame was so great that 150,000 French people turned out to see him cross the bridge at Avignon when he arrived to negotiate with the French at the Papal palace in the mid-1350s. But he was also a man of deep faith, shown in his crusading but also in his deeply reflective, self-excoriating devotional treatise, The Book of Holy Medicines.

Then there’s Robert Burnell, Edward I’s great friend and Chancellor, who was actually from relatively humble beginnings in Shropshire, as was the brilliantly named Bogo or Bevis de Knoville, who rose from unknown origins to be the king’s Justiciar of West Wales. The list could become quite long!

DJ: Your book ends in 1399 with the deposition of Richard II. How/why do things change after that? How do the Wars of the Roses shape the English state? 

CB/RP: In certain respects Henry IV faced similar challenges to Richard II, but for very different reasons. Because Richard failed to understand that his position rested upon his authority as an impartial head of state, he tried to increase his ‘power’ by seizing lands from his nobles and keeping them. Being a great landholder was very different from being a king and it was hard to be an impartial king while also possessing great lands.

Henry IV, a rightful duke of Lancaster, was a great landholder first, and, like Richard, at times struggled to reconcile the two positions. His son, the great Henry V, managed to do this more effectively through sheer political intelligence and hard work, and in many ways his reign echoes that of Edward III, in respect of law-giving as well as foreign policy.

What Henry added to the constitutional mix was a very strong focus upon the deep and effective management of the royal finances, a thread picked up again and worked into strong constitutional fabric by Edward IV, especially during his second reign (1471-83).

Edward IV also developed a large royal affinity, a great cadre of retainers among the nobility and gentry, in a way that no other king had managed, and the royal court began to be fundamental to the exercise of rule in the localities as well as at the centre in a manner not before seen, and which prefigured the rule of the Tudors.

In a way, the Wars of the Roses, like the internal wars under Edward II, effected a pause in state development, as actionless political vacuum (under Henry VI) and internecine conflict dominated. But they also created opportunities for succeeding kings to make significant change, because of the extent to which prolonged crisis made later radical initiatives possible.

Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State, by Caroline Burt and Richard Partington (Faber, £25) is published tomorrow.