Handbook

Chapter 3: History

Covers

about 1100–1485

Reading

about 15 min

Quizzes

12 questions

The Middle Ages: Magna Carta, the Black Death and the Wars of the Roses

This chapter covers nearly 400 years. You'll meet a document that worked for only ten weeks but went on to change the world, a plague that killed one person in three, a language the nobles ignored for 300 years before it made a comeback, and a war between two roses.

Wars without end: Wales, Scotland and Ireland

In the widest sense, the Middle Ages, or the medieval period, stretch across about a thousand years: from AD 476, when the Roman Empire came to an end, until 1485. This chapter picks up the story after the Norman Conquest. England's medieval kings were hardly ever at peace. They fought the lords of Wales, Scotland and Ireland for land, and each of these stories had a different ending.

Wales: a land held down by castles

In 1284 King Edward I issued the Statute of Rhuddlan (a statute is a written law). It put Wales under the rule of the English Crown. To hold on to his new land, Edward built a chain of enormous castles across north Wales, such as Conwy and Caernarvon (spelled Caernarfon today). The last Welsh revolts were put down by the mid-1400s, and after that English law and the English language were brought into Wales.

Scotland: one blow at Bannockburn

England wanted Scotland as well, but it never managed to take it. In 1314 the Scottish king Robert the Bruce beat the army of the English king Edward II at the Battle of Bannockburn. The English never conquered Scotland.

The battle opened with a duel. On the first day, an English knight called Henry de Bohun recognised Robert the Bruce and charged straight at him with a long spear. Robert stepped his horse aside and swung his axe down on the knight's helmet, splitting it in two. The Scottish soldiers were thrilled, and the next day they won.

Ireland: they came to help, and stayed

In the early Middle Ages, Ireland was its own independent country. English troops first arrived there because an Irish king had asked them for help. Then they decided to stay. By 1200 the English were ruling a piece of land around Dublin called the Pale, and in other parts of Ireland some powerful lords agreed that the English king was in charge.

Fighting abroad: the Crusades and the Hundred Years War

The English fought overseas too. Many knights joined the Crusades, wars in which Christians from across Europe tried to take control of the Holy Land.

English kings also fought France in the Hundred Years War. Don't be fooled by the name: it really went on for 116 years. Its most famous battle came in 1415 at Agincourt. There, King Henry V won even though the French army was far bigger than his. Even so, by the 1450s the English had more or less pulled out of France.

Nobody at the time called it the Hundred Years War. French writers only came up with that name in the 19th century, and "the Wars of the Roses" was also named long afterwards; people living through them simply felt the fighting would never stop. You may also have read online that the rude two-finger "V" sign began with English archers, waving the fingers the French supposedly cut off captured archers. It's a popular story, but no record from the time backs it up, so it is most likely a later legend.

Feudalism: land in return for loyalty

All these wars needed soldiers, and the king found them through the way land was held. In this period, society was built around land. The Normans brought a land system called feudalism. The king handed out land to his lords, and in exchange the lords had to support him when he went to war. Everyone who held land had to supply a fixed number of men to fight. A few peasants owned land of their own, but the majority were serfs. A serf got a small strip of the lord's land to grow food on. In return, he had to work for the lord, and he wasn't free to leave.

The same system grew up in the south of Scotland. But in the north of Scotland and in Ireland, land belonged to members of clans (large, important families).

The Black Death: one person in three

For a long time this order of lords and serfs seemed fixed, but in the middle of the 14th century a disaster shook it. In 1348 a plague arrived in Britain. Later it came to be called the Black Death. Roughly one in three people in England died, and Scotland and Wales lost about the same share. It was one of the worst disasters in British history.

Survived

Survived

Died of the Black Death

With so many people suddenly gone, society changed:

• There were fewer mouths to feed, so farmers needed to grow less grain.
• There were fewer workers, so peasants started asking for more pay.
• New groups in society appeared, like people who owned big estates. They were later known as the gentry.
• Many people moved from the countryside into the towns. The towns grew richer, and a strong middle class developed.

Magna Carta: the king must obey the law too

Lords owed the king soldiers, but they also expected him to respect their rights. To see how that idea was first written down, we need to go back more than a century before the Black Death. In 1215 King John fell out badly with his nobles. (There has only ever been one King John, which is why he has no number after his name.) He kept raising taxes and losing wars, and in the end the nobles had had enough. At Runnymede, a meadow beside the River Thames west of London, they made him accept a document called Magna Carta. The name is Latin for "Great Charter". Until then, almost nothing officially limited what a king could do.

The big idea behind it was simple: even the king has to follow the law. It protected the nobles' rights and stopped the king from raising taxes, or making and changing laws, just as he pleased.

In practice, Magna Carta lasted only about ten weeks. That August the Pope declared it invalid, and the king and the nobles were soon at war again; later kings issued several new versions, and only slowly did it become one of the foundations of English law. King John never actually signed it, either: his royal seal was attached instead. Only four copies from 1215 survive, two in the British Library and two belonging to the cathedrals of Lincoln and Salisbury.

The birth of Parliament

Kings had always had a circle of advisers, including powerful nobles and leaders of the Church. Whenever the king needed money, he called them together for a meeting. That is how Parliament began. Over time it divided into two parts, or "Houses":

Only a tiny number of people could vote for members of the House of Commons, though. Scotland's Parliament was made up of three groups, called the Estates: the lords, the commons and the clergy (church leaders).

In this period the idea that judges should be independent of the government also started to take shape. In England, judges settled cases by following earlier decisions and old traditions, and this built up into the common law. In Scotland the law was "codified", which means it was written down as a set of rules.

English makes a comeback: Chaucer and Caxton

In the last chapter you saw that after the Norman Conquest the nobles spoke French while the peasants spoke Old English. Three hundred years later the situation had turned round. By 1400, government papers in England were written in English, and the royal court and Parliament now chose English over French.

The most famous writer of the time was Geoffrey Chaucer. He wrote a collection of poems in English called The Canterbury Tales. In it, a group of pilgrims (people making a religious journey) travel together to Canterbury, and to pass the time on the road they take turns telling stories.

Writing wasn't Chaucer's day job. He was a royal official in charge of the king's building works, and when he died in 1400 it was this job that earned him a grave in Westminster Abbey. Later, more and more poets were buried close to him, and that part of the Abbey became the famous Poets' Corner.

Later, William Caxton became the first person in England to produce books with a printing press, and The Canterbury Tales was one of the very first books he printed. Before this, every book had to be copied out by hand, word by word. The printing press meant that books in English could at last be made in large numbers.

In Scotland, many people still spoke Gaelic, while the Scots language was also growing. The poet John Barbour wrote a long poem in Scots called The Bruce, which tells the story of the Battle of Bannockburn.

Castles, cathedrals and skilled workers from abroad

Lots of castles were built in the Middle Ages, and some of them are still in use, such as Windsor and Edinburgh. Great cathedrals went up too, like Lincoln. Their windows were often made of stained glass that told stories from the Bible and about the saints. York Minster is a well-known example.

England made a lot of money by selling wool abroad. It also drew in skilled workers from other countries: weavers from France, engineers from Germany, glass makers from Italy, and people from Holland who knew how to build canals.

The Wars of the Roses: red and white become one rose

Losing the war in France left England's nobles angry and divided, and the king, Henry VI, was weak and at times mentally ill. In 1455 a civil war broke out between two noble families, each of which wanted the English crown:

• the House of Lancaster, whose symbol was a red rose
• the House of York, whose symbol was a white rose

This war is known as the Wars of the Roses. At the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, the Yorkist king Richard III was killed. The leader of the Lancaster side, Henry Tudor, took the throne as Henry VII.

Richard III was buried in a hurry in a monastery church in Leicester, and over the centuries people forgot exactly where. In 2012 archaeologists found his skeleton under a car park in the centre of Leicester, and in 2015 he was buried again, this time in Leicester Cathedral.

Henry VII was a smart man. He married Elizabeth of York, Richard III's niece, so the two rival families became one. He became the first monarch of the House of Tudor. His family badge showed a white rose sitting inside a red one, and it was called the Tudor rose. It told everyone that York and Lancaster were now on the same side.

Bosworth is often taken as the end of the Middle Ages in England. Henry VII's family, the Tudors, would rule for more than a hundred years and give the country a new church, as the next chapter tells.

Chapter summary

Back to History