nothing left. And the new monarch was not the man to sort out the country’s woes. Scared of thunder and ‘as wise now as when he was a little child’, as one jester pointed out, the droopy-eyed king was also religious to a tedious degree. When Henry made a trip to Paris, the King of France ordered all churches on the route closed because the English king had insisted on visiting every one for a Mass and was taking an age to reach the city.
Short of money, Henry III began to meet the most powerful subjects in the Realm for informal meetings, where they would discuss their problems and in return grant him money. The meetings were given the formal name of ‘parliament’ in 1236, but between 1248 and 1249, four such parliaments refused Henry a grant of money. They complained about corruption, and the influence of foreigners.
Despite ill-fated attempts to distract attention by embarking on crusade, which only resulted in the king being conned by the pope into buying Sicily for a huge sum, things came to a head in 1258, the year of a famine, when the barons met at Oxford in what became known as the ‘Mad Parliament’, so called because of their document the Provisions of Oxford. In it they demanded that each county and each city should nominate two knights for Parliament, and that this talking shop should choose half a council of 15 to rule the land. Copies of the Provisions were sent to every sheriff, not just in Latin and French, but also in English, the first legal document in the language since 1066.
The barons were led by the king’s brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, a French nobleman who had arrived in England at the age of 22 to claim his peerage after a childhood spent fighting a particularly bloodthirsty and insane crusade, this one against heretics in the south of France. Even compared to the other barons, he was incredibly rich; in one week in 1265 some 3,700 eggs were served at the house he shared with wife Eleanor, the king’s sister.
Despite his own origins, he was able to exploit the xenophobia directed at the family of Queen Eleanor of Provence. The queen was hated; in 1263 she sailed on a barge past the city of London, where the grateful citizens greeted her by throwing manure. It was not a happy time: five years earlier the country was devastated by famine and disease, and visitors to London would have been met by the sight of rotting corpses lying in the gutter, with not enough healthy men to bury them. And to add to the people’s misery, order seemed to breaking down.
Crime was endemic in the Realm at the best of times. In the 13th and 14th centuries the murder rate was proportionally at least ten times higher than that of the early 21st; killers were rarely caught and punished, and those that were identified fled to the forests to become outlaws. During the following years crime became noticeably worse as the country was torn between the king and barons. In the 1260s a brigand took over Bristol and ruled for several years, effectively setting himself up as local ruler. An army 300-strong marched around Norfolk causing havoc and doing whatever they pleased. A band of 50 men, including the Abbots of Sherbourne and Middleton, raided the Countess of Lincoln’s home at Kingston Lacy and took everything. While the Prior of Bristol was even worse: his gang invaded an estate in Wiltshire and murdered all the men and raped the lady of the house.
Under de Montfort’s radical proposals, Parliament would meet annually, and would not need to be summoned by the king. These terms were unacceptable, and in 1260 the conflict descended into full-on civil war, the ‘Second Barons War’, and the two sides met at Lewes four years later. There, de Montfort gave a moving speech in which he said they were fighting ‘for England, God, the Virgin Mary, the saints and the Church’. They called themselves the Army of God, and although the anarchy horrified people and they wished for a strong king, de Montfort may
Short of money, Henry III began to meet the most powerful subjects in the Realm for informal meetings, where they would discuss their problems and in return grant him money. The meetings were given the formal name of ‘parliament’ in 1236, but between 1248 and 1249, four such parliaments refused Henry a grant of money. They complained about corruption, and the influence of foreigners.
Despite ill-fated attempts to distract attention by embarking on crusade, which only resulted in the king being conned by the pope into buying Sicily for a huge sum, things came to a head in 1258, the year of a famine, when the barons met at Oxford in what became known as the ‘Mad Parliament’, so called because of their document the Provisions of Oxford. In it they demanded that each county and each city should nominate two knights for Parliament, and that this talking shop should choose half a council of 15 to rule the land. Copies of the Provisions were sent to every sheriff, not just in Latin and French, but also in English, the first legal document in the language since 1066.
The barons were led by the king’s brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, a French nobleman who had arrived in England at the age of 22 to claim his peerage after a childhood spent fighting a particularly bloodthirsty and insane crusade, this one against heretics in the south of France. Even compared to the other barons, he was incredibly rich; in one week in 1265 some 3,700 eggs were served at the house he shared with wife Eleanor, the king’s sister.
Despite his own origins, he was able to exploit the xenophobia directed at the family of Queen Eleanor of Provence. The queen was hated; in 1263 she sailed on a barge past the city of London, where the grateful citizens greeted her by throwing manure. It was not a happy time: five years earlier the country was devastated by famine and disease, and visitors to London would have been met by the sight of rotting corpses lying in the gutter, with not enough healthy men to bury them. And to add to the people’s misery, order seemed to breaking down.
Crime was endemic in the Realm at the best of times. In the 13th and 14th centuries the murder rate was proportionally at least ten times higher than that of the early 21st; killers were rarely caught and punished, and those that were identified fled to the forests to become outlaws. During the following years crime became noticeably worse as the country was torn between the king and barons. In the 1260s a brigand took over Bristol and ruled for several years, effectively setting himself up as local ruler. An army 300-strong marched around Norfolk causing havoc and doing whatever they pleased. A band of 50 men, including the Abbots of Sherbourne and Middleton, raided the Countess of Lincoln’s home at Kingston Lacy and took everything. While the Prior of Bristol was even worse: his gang invaded an estate in Wiltshire and murdered all the men and raped the lady of the house.
Under de Montfort’s radical proposals, Parliament would meet annually, and would not need to be summoned by the king. These terms were unacceptable, and in 1260 the conflict descended into full-on civil war, the ‘Second Barons War’, and the two sides met at Lewes four years later. There, de Montfort gave a moving speech in which he said they were fighting ‘for England, God, the Virgin Mary, the saints and the Church’. They called themselves the Army of God, and although the anarchy horrified people and they wished for a strong king, de Montfort may
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