Kings and Castles by Marc Morris Read Free Book Online Page B

came to Britain, they were a folk led by as
many as forty sovereigns; only after a long time fighting among themselves did
they agree to put themselves under the rule of a single king, whom they elected
and crowned. The forty sovereigns, the author then explained, settled down to
govern and defend individual districts, which were known as counties, so-called
because the sovereigns were the king’s companions. From all this nonsense a
powerful conclusion flowed: namely, that it was the special job of the earls to
bring the king to book if he should govern badly.
    Frustratingly, we do not know who wrote The Mirror of
Justices, or for whom it was written. It is interesting to note, however, that
in its detestation for royal justices and its appeal to an imagined past in
which the king and earls were partners, the Mirror chimes very well with the
views famously put into the mouth of John de Warenne ,
earl of Surrey in precisely the same period. According to a later chronicler, Warenne reacted angrily when called before the king’s
justices to defend his rights. When asked ‘by what warrant’ (quo warranto ) he held his lands, the earl produced an ancient
and rusty sword, and said ‘Look
at this, my lords: this is my warrant! For my ancestors came
with William the Bastard and conquered their lands with the sword, and by the
sword I will defend them from anyone intending to seize them. The king
did not conquer and subject the land by himself, but our forebears were sharers
and partners with him.’
    It is unlikely that appeals to history of this kind would have convinced
Edward I to share more of his authority with his earls, or to allow that they
had the right to correct his actions. This was, after all, a king who regarded
history as yet another weapon in his own armoury ; who
ordered every monastery in England to search their chronicles for historical
precedents that would justify his superior lordship of Scotland, and who had
dug up King Arthur at Glastonbury to prove to the Welsh that their legendary
leader was not coming back to save them. When, in 1297, the earl of Norfolk chose to make a
stand against Edward, he appealed to the rights of the community as set down in
Magna Carta , and what he called ‘human and divine
reason’. It was only after the king’s death that the theories that had been
germinating in his reign began to be advanced as political argument. During the
reign of Edward II (1307–27) there was far less talk of community, and much
greater emphasis on the importance of earls. Chroniclers who otherwise lamented
the behaviour of certain individual earls
nevertheless claimed that England’s
woes – especially its embarrassing defeats in Scotland – were caused by their
insufficiency. ‘There was a time,’ opined one anonymous writer, ‘when
fifteen earls or more were wont to follow the standard of English kings to
battle. But now only five or six earls bear help to our king.’ Such sentiments
caught on fast, to the extent that by the beginning of the next reign the
necessity of having more earls was accepted as self-evident truth even by the
king himself. In 1337, Edward III declared that royalty worked best when ‘ buttressed by wise counsels and fortified by
mighty powers’, expressed regret at the ‘serious
decline in names, honours and ranks of dignity’, and aimed to set things
right by the simultaneous creation of no less than six new earldoms. It was the
first deliberate attempt to increase the numbers of earls since the reign of
King Stephen two hundred years before.
    Fortunately, much had changed in that time: England’s
aristocracy now had a much greater sense of themselves as the leading members
of a united kingdom.
When Hugh de Courtenay, created earl of Devon
by Edward III in 1335, went around boasting that his new title made him the
king’s equal and gave him the right to make laws, there was little cause for
genuine alarm. Courtenay had been a victim of Edward I’s masterful