The First English Parliament?

Many people will be claiming that today is a red-letter day for democracy – the 750th anniversary of the occasion when Simon de Montfort summoned 'the first English parliament'. Which would be great, were it in any way true.

The famous earl of Leicester did summon a parliament, and it did begin on 20 January 1265. Beyond that, it's pretty much all myth.

The trouble is that the parliament of 1265 was by no means the first such assembly. The kings of England had been in the habit of consulting their subjects en masse since well before the Norman Conquest, and the term 'parliament' had been used to describe such meetings for at least a generation before 1265 – the earliest use of the term in an official government document occurs in 1236.

But weren't these earlier meetings just barons and bishops? Surely it was Simon de Montfort who struck a blow for democracy in 1265 by introducing representation, summoning knights from the shires and burgesses from the towns?

Well, yes, Montfort did do that in 1265. But, again, this had been going on for years. Knights had been attending parliament for decades – the earliest evidence that they did so as elected representatives occurs in 1254. There is also evidence to suggest that townsmen had been present in parliament before 1265. Montfort was doing nothing new in 1265 by summoning either group.

It can be argued that in earlier parliaments representatives had been summoned simply to gain their assent to taxation, whereas Montfort sought their opinion on political issues too. But since we don't know much about what went on in these early parliaments, that seems to be an argument from silence.

Moreover, it's hard to sustain the idea that Montfort was extending the role of these men because he was a prototype social democrat. The earl was in charge of government because he had seized power the previous year by defeating his brother-in-law, King Henry III, in battle. Without any hereditary claim to authority, Montfort was anxious to show that support for his regime was broadly based. Men in search of legitimacy – King Harold in 1066, King Stephen in 1135 – always claim to have the popular vote.

You don't have to take my word for it. Here's John Maddicott (my old doctoral supervisor, and author of the definitive biography of Simon de Montfort), writing in his most recent book, The Origins of the English Parliament, 924-1327 (p. 234):

'Simon de Montfort's summoning of the knights to parliament in June 1264 and of knights and burgesses to parliament in January 1265 is often thought to have marked the beginnings of local representation or even, and more vulgarly, the foundation of parliament by Montfort himself: a popular myth which it is astonishingly difficult to dispel.'

My friend Dr Michael Ray makes the additional point that the 1265 parliament was gerrymandered: Montfort summoned only those magnates and barons who supported him - 23 in all. By contrast he summoned more than 100 clergymen, knowing that they were more likely to back him. York, Lincoln and other unnamed towns were invited to send two burgesses each, but Sandwich and the other Cinque Ports - again, pro-Montfortian - were asked to send four each. The 1265 parliament was 'a more overtly partisan body' designed to give authority to 'Montfort's illegitimate regime'. (Maddicott, Origins of the English Parliament, p. 257)

PS You can read the text of a 2012 lecture by John Maddicott on Montfort, the Battle of Lewes and Parliament here.

The First English Parliament?

Many people will be claiming that tomorrow is a red-letter day for democracy – the occasion when Simon de Montfort summoned 'the first English parliament'. Which would be great, were it in any way true.

The famous earl of Leicester did summon a parliament, and it did begin on 20 January 1265. Beyond that, it's pretty much all myth.

The trouble is that the parliament of 1265 was by no means the first such assembly. The kings of England had been in the habit of consulting their subjects en masse since well before the Norman Conquest, and the term 'parliament' had been used to describe such meetings for at least a generation before 1265 – the earliest use of the term in an official government document occurs in 1236.

But weren't these earlier meetings just barons and bishops? Surely it was Simon de Montfort who struck a blow for democracy in 1265 by introducing representation, summoning knights from the shires and burgesses from the towns?

Well, yes, Montfort did do that in 1265. But, again, this had been going on for years. Knights had been attending parliament for decades – the earliest evidence that they did so as elected representatives occurs in 1254. There is also evidence to suggest that townsmen had been present in parliament before 1265. Montfort was doing nothing new in 1265 by summoning either group.

It can be argued that in earlier parliaments representatives had been summoned simply to gain their assent to taxation, whereas Montfort sought their opinion on political issues too. But since we don't know much about what went on in these early parliaments, that seems to be an argument from silence.

Moreover, it's hard to sustain the idea that Montfort was extending the role of these men because he was a prototype social democrat. The earl was in charge of government because he had seized power the previous year by defeating his brother-in-law, King Henry III, in battle. Without any hereditary claim to authority, Montfort was anxious to show that support for his regime was broadly based. Men in search of legitimacy – King Harold in 1066, King Stephen in 1135 – always claim to have the popular vote.

You don't have to take my word for it. Here's John Maddicott (my old doctoral supervisor, and author of the definitive biography of Simon de Montfort), writing in his most recent book, The Origins of the English Parliament, 924-1327 (p. 234):

'Simon de Montfort's summoning of the knights to parliament in June 1264 and of knights and burgesses to parliament in January 1265 is often thought to have marked the beginnings of local representation or even, and more vulgarly, the foundation of parliament by Montfort himself: a popular myth which it is astonishingly difficult to dispel.'

My friend Dr Michael Ray makes the additional point that the 1265 parliament was gerrymandered: Montfort summoned only those magnates and barons who supported him - 23 in all. By contrast he summoned more than 100 clergymen, knowing that they were more likely to back him. York, Lincoln and other unnamed towns were invited to send two burgesses each, but Sandwich and the other Cinque Ports - again, pro-Montfortian - were asked to send four each. The 1265 parliament was 'a more overtly partisan body' designed to give authority to 'Montfort's illegitimate regime'. (Maddicott, Origins of the English Parliament, p. 257)

PS You can read the text of a 2012 lecture by John Maddicott on Montfort, the Battle of Lewes and Parliament here.

King John at New Year

Where did King John see in the New Year?

1199 Normandy, precise location unknown, possibly Caen.

1200 Woodstock, Oxfordshire

1201 Montmorrillon, Poitou

1202 Lisieux, Nornandy.

1203 Brill, Buckinghamshire

1204 Clarendon, Wiltshire

1205 Clarendon, Wiltshire

1206 Unknown, probably Guildford, Surrey

1207 Winchester

1208 Winchester

1209 Guildford

1210 Unknown, possibly Nottingham

1211 Unknown

1212 Havering, Essex

1213 Waltham, Essex

1214 Temple Guiting, Gloucestershire

1215 Newark, Nottinghamshire

The Death of King Harold

Another year, another crackpot Battle of Hastings theory. Last year it was 'the battle was fought somewhere else'. This year it's 'King Harold survived the battle'. This one is, if anything, even more feeble and confused, so let's put it to bed as soon as possible.

Evidence for Harold's death:

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, D version (English, contemporary)
'King Harold was slain, and Leofwine, his brother, and Earl Gyrth, his brother, and many good men'.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, E version (English, contemporary)
'Harold marched from the north, and fought against him [William] before all his host came up; and there he fell with his two brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine.'

William of Poitiers (Norman, contemporary)
'The king himself and his brothers and not a few of the nobles of the kingdom had perished'.

William of Jumieges (Norman, contemporary)
'Harold was slain, pierced with mortal wounds, during the first assault'

The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio (French, contemporary, before 1068)
'The first, cleaving his [Harold's] breast through the shield with his point, drenched the earth with a gushing torrent of blood; the second smote off his head below the protection of the helmet, and the third pierced his innards with his lance'

The Bayeux Tapestry (Anglo-Norman, contemporary, before 1082)
HERE KING HAROLD IS KILLED

Eadmer of Canterbury (English, 1090s)
'Harold fell in the thick of the fray'

Baudri of Bourgeuil (French, before 1102)
'A shaft pierces Harold with deadly doom'

Henry of Huntingdon (Anglo-Norman, 1120s)
'Meanwhile the whole shower sent by the archers fell around King Harold, and he himself sank to the ground, struck in the eye. A host of knights broke through and killed the wounded king.'

John of Worcester (Anglo-Norman, 1130s, and very pro-English)
'But afterwards, when very many had fallen on both sides, he [Harold] himself fell, alas, at dusk'

Simeon of Durham (Anglo-Norman, 1130s)
'In that battle he [Harold] fell with almost the whole English army'

And [NB], The Waltham Abbey Chronicle (Anglo-Norman, post 1177)
'The king.... was slain by his fierce foe'


'Evidence' that Harold survived:

The Vita Haroldi, a work of fantasy written at Waltham Abbey in the early thirteenth century, 150+ years after the event. (And available in print since 1885).

Eleanor of Castile arrives in England, 1255

On this day (or thereabouts) in 1255 Eleanor of Castile, the new wife of the future Edward I, arrived in England for the first time. The young couple had been married in Burgos, Spain, the previous November, when Edward was fifteen and Eleanor just twelve. The contemporary chronicler and monk of St Albans, Matthew Paris, saw it as yet more evidence that his country was going to the dogs...

'About the time of the feast of St Denis [9 October], when the king [Henry III] was returning from the north of England to London, in order to be present for the feast of St Edward, Eleanor, the sister of the king of Spain and wife of Edward, arrived in Dover in great pomp, and with such a numerous revenue that their arrival was looked upon with suspicion by all England, and fears were entertained that the country would be forcibly taken by possession of them.

 

The king thereupon gave orders that she should be received with the greatest honour and reverence at London as well as at other places; but especially London, where her arrival was celebrated by processions, illuminations, ringing of bells, songs and other special demonstrations of joy and festivity. On her approaching that city, therefore, the citizens went to meet her dressed in holiday clothes, and mounted on richly caparisoned horses.

 

And when the noble daughter-in-law of the king arrived at the place of abode assigned to her, she found it, like the dwelling of the bishop of Toledo, hung with palls of silk and tapestry, like a temple, and even the floor was covered with arras. This was done by the Spaniards, it being in accordance with the custom of their country; but this excessive pride excited the laughter and derision of the people. Serious and prudent persons, pondering over future events, were deeply grieved on a careful consideration of the pleasure manifested by the king at the presence of any foreigners. Indeed, the honours shown to the Spaniards, excited the wonder and astonishment of all, and no wonder. The English, therefore, lamented that they were held in less esteem than the people of any other nation by their own king, and with sorrow perceived that their irreparable ruin was imminent.'

On This Day 1265: The Battle of Evesham and the Death of Simon de Montfort

Simon de Montfort was one of a group of barons who confronted the incompetent King Henry III in 1258 and took over royal government. Their aim was reform but ultimately their good intentions foundered over political and personal divisions; like a lot of revolutions, it ended in civil war. Montfort was the most die-hard reformer, and had a number of personal grudges against Henry III, who was his brother-in-law. In May 1264 he defeated Henry's forces in battle at Lewes in Sussex, capturing both the king and his son, the future Edward I, after which he ruled England for over a year. But in May 1265 Edward escaped from captivity and led a well co-ordinated royalist fight-back, which soon had Montfort on the run. By the start of August Edward's forces had the earl and his small army of supporters cornered near Worcester. Montfort was waiting for reinforcements led by his namesake son, but Edward had just led a surprise attack on them at Kenilworth. Here's how I wrote up the end of the story in A Great and Terrible King:

But by this time Montfort had crossed the Severn. Having seized the opportunity presented by his enemies’ temporary absence, the earl was now camped on the river’s eastern shore. He was, in fact, only a few miles south of Worcester, but Edward, after his exhausting dash through the night, was unable to contemplate pushing himself of his forces any further. Both armies therefore spent an uneasy twenty-four hours resting in close proximity. During this time, Montfort heard the news from Kenilworth, and not all of it was bad. In spite of its losses, his son’s army was still intact. The hope of uniting their two forces therefore remained undimmed, and with this end in mind the earl began to move his army on the evening of 3 August. Marching under cover of darkness, he aimed to give his enemies the slip for a final time. At dawn the next day, which broke around 5am, his forces arrived in Evesham, and there they paused for breakfast.

Three hours later, their spirits suddenly soared: on the horizon were spotted the advancing banners of young Simon’s army. Their stealthy night-time manoeuvres, it seemed, had been a success. With these reinforcements, they would stand a fighting chance. But then, with equal suddenness, all hope evaporated. From the top of the tower of Evesham Abbey, the lookout called down to Montfort in despair. ‘We are all dead men, for it is not your son, as you believed’.

It was Edward. The royalist army had not been given the slip at all. On the contrary, they had silently shadowed their opponents throughout the night, all the while remaining undetected. Playing the advantage of surprise for all it was worth, they had advanced the last few miles under the banners captured at Kenilworth two days before. Now, at last, the lengthy game of cat-and-mouse of the past two months was over: Montfort was trapped. Evesham lies in a loop of the River Avon, closed in from every direction except the north, and it was here, at the top of the hill, that Edward and Gloucester lined up their army.

The old sorcerer had been out-generalled by both his former apprentices, and he knew it. ‘How skilfully they are advancing’, he exclaimed, before adding, with characteristic arrogance, ‘they learned that from me!’. His only possible escape route was the bridge at southern end of the town, but there was not nearly enough time to get a whole army across it. The earl and his cavalry might flee and leave the others to their fate, but the loss of prestige would spell the end of his career. In any case, flight was hardly Montfort’s style. Instead, he rallied his forces for a final time and marched northwards out of Evesham, up the hill, to face his foes. The sky darkened and a thunderstorm broke.

Montfort’s chances at Evesham were terrible. The element of surprise and the command of the high ground, both so useful to him at Lewes, had this time been seized by his enemies. Once again, the earl’s forces were outnumbered three to one. When the two sides engaged, the wide royalist frontline quickly absorbed and enveloped the smaller Montfortian force. Defeat was inevitable.

So too was death. Well before the first blow had been struck, Edward had let it be known that, on this occasion, the normal rules of chivalric warfare were to be suspended. No quarter was to be given, no surrender accepted. Consequently, as the royalists closed in, the killing began. Montfort’s young knights were dragged from their horses, stripped of their armour, and stabbed. At least thirty of them perished in this way, an orgy of blood-letting not seen for centuries. Montfort himself, meanwhile, had received the special honour of a dedicated death-squad – a dozen men, ‘the strongest and most intrepid in arms’, chosen by Edward and Gloucester on the eve of battle, whose sole task was to find the earl and kill him. Yet in the end it was Roger Mortimer, the pugnacious marcher lord with the personal grudge, who struck the killer blow, running Montfort through the neck with his lance. Others then fell on the earl’s lifeless body, hacking off his hands, feet and head. In a final piece of grotesque savagery, his genitals were cut off and placed in his mouth, and the severed head was dispatched to Mortimer’s wife as a grisly token of her husband’s triumph.

Amidst such brutal carnage, there were few survivors. One man dressed in Montfortian armour had a miraculous escape, but not before he had been wounded in the shoulder. ‘I am Henry of Winchester, your king!’, he cried. ‘Do not kill me!’. Roger Leybourne immediately intervened and saved the stricken monarch, but it was Edward himself who led his father away from the battlefield.

Meanwhile, all around them, the killing continued to rage. Those fleeing across the fields were cut down as they ran. In the town, too, the streets were thick with the slaughtered. Even those who sought sanctuary in the abbey church were not spared. ‘The choir, the walls, the cross, the statues and the altars were sprayed with the blood of the wounded and the dead’, wrote one horrified eye-witness. ‘From the bodies around the high altar, a stream of blood ran right down into the crypts’.

‘The murder of Evesham’, wrote another, ‘for battle it was none’.

The Battle of Falkirk

[On this day in 1298 the Battle of Falkirk was fought between Edward I and William Wallace]

 It was not, in fact, until the dawn of the next day that the king finally caught up with his quarry, whose spears were spotted on high ground close to the town of Falkirk. For the English this brought a welcome end to weeks of uncertainty, and an especially restless twenty-four hours. They had spent the previous night camped at nearby Linlithgow in fearful expectation of a Scottish ambush: every rider – including Edward himself – had slept on the ground next to his standing horse (‘with their shields as pillows,’ said Guisborough, ‘and their armour as bedclothes’). For one fraught moment, it had seemed that their foes were indeed upon them; a rumour that the king had been wounded had caused an abortive rush to arms. Edward, it turned out, had been hurt in the night, but by rather more prosaic means. His horse, carelessly kept by its groom, had trodden on him.

Now, in the clear light of day, it was apparent that the Scots had abandoned all thought of ambush; in the distance they could be seen arraying themselves ready for battle. To compensate for his inferior numbers, Wallace had adopted a defensive strategy. His army was drawn up on the side of a small hill, at the foot of which ran an insubstantial stream. His greatest asset, the massed pikemen of his infantry, were arranged in four great circular brigades, or ‘schiltroms’, as the Scots called them. With their bristling spears turned outwards, these giant hedgehogs would give the footsoldiers a fighting chance against a cavalry charge. Nestled between them for protection were the archers of Selkirk Forest, while the Scottish cavalry were stationed at the rear. Both these contingents, however, were tiny in comparison with their English counterparts.

The strength of Wallace’s formation is well attested by the reaction of his opponent. Edward, when advised of it, was inclined to be cautious: superiority in numbers only counted for so much. The last time he had charged uphill at a supposedly inferior foe, the result had been a disastrous defeat. That, of course, had been at Lewes, well over three decades earlier, and was, to be fair, his first taste of battle. But when one remembers that the king’s most recent battlefield experience was the almost equally distant engagement at Evesham, the reason for his caution becomes even more apparent. Edward was now in his sixtieth year; his hair, once blond, had turned to snowy white. In general terms he was in remarkably robust health, but on this particular morning, thanks to his night-time mishap, he was nursing two broken ribs. Having arrived at Falkirk, he proposed pitching camp, and allowing his tired and hungry troops to feed themselves and their horses. His commanders, however, would have none of it: hesitation, they argued, would leave them once again exposed to attack. The king in due course agreed. The order to advance was given, and the battle of Falkirk began.

At first, Wallace’s strategy seemed as if it might well work. The first line of the English cavalry, led by the earls of Norfolk, Hereford and Lincoln, thundered towards the Scots, but immediately ran into difficulty. The little stream they had dismissed as an insubstantial obstacle in fact fed a much larger area of boggy marsh, which halted their headlong charge and sent them veering to the left. The second line, commanded by the bishop of Durham, swerved right to avoid the same pitfall. It soon became apparent, however, that these initial diversions had done the Scots no favours. The marsh, while protecting them from a frontal assault, had merely forced their opponents to attack from the sides, and the Scots now found themselves caught in a pincer. Their schiltroms, as expected, were highly successful in deterring the English cavalry, but this simply meant that the cavalry concentrated on the softer target presented by the Scottish archers. Eventually the schiltroms stood alone, at which point the English infantry unleashed a hail of stones and arrows, which ultimately caused so many casualties among the spearmen that they broke ranks. Seeing that their enemies had lost their defensive advantage, the English cavalry rode back in, and the Scottish slaughter was complete.

The Scottish cavalry – that is, the Scottish nobility – had fled at the start of the battle. (‘Without a sword’s blow’, said Guisborough, derisively). This has given rise to the pernicious but persistent myth that they secretly despised Wallace as a common upstart, and were actually in league with Edward I. As we have already seen, nothing could be further from the truth. The nobles of Scotland had from the first defied the English king and were quite ready to resist him. What separated them from the unfortunate archers and infantry at Falkirk was not their commitment to the patriotic cause, but their ability to flee when they realized that defeat was inevitable. We should not be too quick to condemn as cowards men who faced such overwhelming odds: it was massive numbers and superior firepower, not treachery, that led to the English victory. Nor should we pretend that the behaviour of the Scottish cavalry in any way divided them from their general. Wallace too escaped from Falkirk – presumably on the back of a horse.

A Great and Terrible King, 311-14