English III

Who Were the English?

The England that emerged from the Norman conquest was a hybrid. William the Conqueror replaced the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy almost entirely, installing French-speaking lords in castles built to overawe a sullen population. The new ruling class spoke Norman French, held lands on both sides of the Channel, and regarded England as one component of a cross-Channel domain. But the Anglo-Saxon administrative machinery was too useful to discard. The shire courts, the tax system, the parish network, and the written record-keeping that made England uniquely governable all survived.

Over two centuries the two cultures merged. The French-speaking lords married English-speaking women, their children grew up bilingual, and by the fourteenth century English had reasserted itself as the language of court and literature. Chaucer wrote in English. Parliament debated in English. The fusion produced something new: not Saxon, not Norman, but English.

Homeland and Way of Life

England's wealth was wool. The sheep that grazed the Cotswold hills, the Yorkshire dales, and the Lincolnshire marshes produced a fleece that Flemish and Italian weavers prized above all others. Wool exports funded the crown, enriched merchants, and built the great perpendicular churches of East Anglia whose size still astonishes visitors in villages of a few hundred people. A wool merchant in fourteenth-century Chipping Campden, negotiating the sale of his clip to an Italian buyer, dealt in a commodity that was literally worth its weight in silver.

Agriculture remained the foundation. The open-field system persisted across the midlands, though enclosure was beginning in some regions. Towns grew steadily, and London emerged as one of Europe's great cities, its population reaching perhaps 80,000 before the Black Death cut it nearly in half. The plague of 1348-1349 killed a third of England's population and transformed the labor market permanently: surviving peasants demanded higher wages and greater freedom, and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, however quickly suppressed, demonstrated that the old feudal certainties were crumbling.

Warfare, Power, and Limits

English military power in this period peaked during the Hundred Years' War with France. The longbow, wielded by commoner archers rather than aristocratic knights, proved devastating at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, where disciplined volleys of arrows shredded French cavalry charges. An archer at Agincourt, drawing his six-foot yew bow to his ear and loosing arrows at a rate of ten per minute into the advancing French men-at-arms, belonged to a military system that valued skill and discipline over noble birth.

The English could win battles but not hold France. Henry V's conquests after Agincourt collapsed within a generation of his death, and by 1453 England had lost everything on the continent except Calais. The Wars of the Roses that followed turned English military energy inward, as Yorkist and Lancastrian factions fought over a crown that neither side could hold securely. The medieval English kingdom ended as it had begun, with a battle: Bosworth Field in 1485, where Henry Tudor defeated Richard III and founded a new dynasty.

Beliefs, Customs, and Society

The English church was part of the universal Catholic structure but increasingly national in character. The dispute between Henry II and Thomas Becket, which ended with Becket's murder in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, established the principle that even kings could not freely control the church, though they never stopped trying. Canterbury became one of the great pilgrimage sites of medieval Europe, and Chaucer's pilgrims, riding to Becket's shrine in the Canterbury Tales, represent every level of English society from knight to plowman.

English common law, developing through the decisions of royal judges traveling on circuit, created a legal system distinct from the Roman law that prevailed on the continent. Magna Carta, forced on King John in 1215, established the principle that even the monarch was subject to law. Parliament, evolving from a feudal assembly into a bicameral legislature with real power over taxation, gave England a political institution that would prove more durable than any dynasty. A knight of the shire, riding to Westminster to sit in Parliament and argue about the king's latest tax demand, participated in the creation of representative government.

Contacts, Conflicts, and Legacy

England's medieval connections were primarily with France, Flanders, and the papacy. The wool trade tied England to Flemish weaving towns so tightly that economic disruption in one caused unemployment in the other. English kings held French territories, married French princesses, and fought French wars for three centuries. The cultural traffic went both ways: English Gothic architecture drew on French models, while English legal and parliamentary traditions influenced continental thinking about governance.

The medieval English kingdom bequeathed to the modern world a language, a legal system, and a parliamentary tradition that would eventually spread across every continent. The common law, Magna Carta, and the principle of no taxation without representation all have their roots in the quarrels of medieval English barons with their kings. A thirteenth-century baron demanding that the king respect the charter was not thinking about the future of democracy, but the precedent he set would outlast everything else his century produced.