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January 2004

Parish History Episode 33

The Edwardian Age

In 1272, Prince Edward, the young warrior who had defeated and killed Simon de Montfort at the Battle of Evesham, succeeded his father, Henry III, as King of England. He was the first of three successive kings, all named Edward, who, between them, were to reign for over a century, until 1377.

These Edwards were to rule over a more definitely English realm than any of their predecessors since 1066. As a consequence of King John’s loss of Normandy to the French, in 1204, England seemed to be growing more distant from France. The English Crown still held suzerainty over extensive lands in South-Western France, but, compared with Normandy, these seemed remote from England. As a consequence, England was becoming more English. The English language revived, though French was still the first language spoken at the English Court. However, Henry III named his children after Saxon kings and queens, the eldest taking the name of Edward the Confessor. Oddly enough, he became known to history as King Edward I, the three Saxon King Edwards (the Elder, the Martyr, and the Confessor) being ignored in the numbering of our monarchs.

The three King Edwards of the Plantagenet House are to-day chiefly remembered for their wars. Edward I (1272-1307) conquered first Wales, and then Scotland; Edward II (1307-1327) then managed to lose Scotland; and Edward III (1327-1377) began a series of wars with France, now remembered as the Hundred Years’ War.

Of these foreign wars, the ones which chiefly affected our area were, naturally, the wars with Scotland. These wars were to bring death and destruction to much of Scotland, but also to wide areas of Northern England - including our village, which would once again be burnt by the Scots. These wars would also to some extent bring improvements to the commercial infrastructure of our region, particularly through the building of bridges and the improvement of roads, undertaken to ease the problems of transport for King Edward’s Commissariat. For instance, the wooden bridge across the Tyne, between Newcastle and Gateshead, seems to have been replaced, about 1290, by a stone bridge, presumably capable of carrying heavier traffic. Equally important to Houghton, a new bridge across the Wear, close to the present bridge by Lumley Castle, was built to replace a crossing by a muddy ford, and this put Houghton on the main road between Newcastle and Hartlepool, the two main seaports in the North-East, and that ensured that, when war came, Houghton would be on the track of the armies, and would certainly be destroyed.

In order to raise money to pay for his wars, Edward I found it desirable, as mentioned last month, to adopt Simon de Montfort’s plan of calling a parliament, so that he could influence the knights and burgesses who attended, and could persuade them to vote in favour of taxes to pay for the “defence” of the Realm. “I have taught thee that, Lord Edward”, Simon is reputed to have exclaimed, as Prince Edward’s army enveloped his flanks at the Battle of Evesham, in an almost exact replica of the strategy Simon himself had used against the King at Lewes. Edward had learned more than tactics from his enemy.

While the people of Houghton would have been most aware of the progress of the wars with Scotland - of the profits made by army contractors, and the dangers of enemy raids - some people, including Robert of Beckenham, who, in 1294, had succeeded Mansell as Rector of Houghton, might have been more disturbed by signs of weakening in the authority of the Church. The successors of Pope Innocent III had been unable to retain the authority he had exercised over almost all of Christendom. The Crusades against the Saracens had failed, and the gains won by the Fourth Crusade against Constantinople had withered away : the Greeks retook that city in 1261, and expelled the Latin Emperor and Patriarch. It is true that the Christian advance against the Moors continued in Spain, and German and Swedish “crusaders” were over•running the lands of Finland, Estonia and Latvia, but such conquests did not, in the popular mind, compensate for the losses in the Levant.

Even at home, the Church seemed to be in decline. Saints have felt that in many ages, but now, possibly, the English had become disillusioned in their long love affair with Rome, and their age-old sustenance of the Papacy with chests of “Peter’s Pence”. Rome, men felt, had taken advantage of King John’s weakness and King Henry’s piety by forcing England into vassalage, and using her as a cow to be regularly milked of money for the benefit of the Roman treasury. Now, at last, England had a warrior king, and it would not be so easy to impose upon King Edward.

Rome, of course, saw things differently. The Church not only gave men Salvation, but also Law, Learning, and a code of life to live by. And it all took money. And Rector Robert found that it was his duty to raise that money from the peasants of Houghton.

But why so much money ?, the Rector and the peasants would both ask. Well, life was growing more complicated, and an increasingly commercial society needed cash in ways that less sophisticated societies did not. “Society” was getting into debt, and heavily indebted people are always prone to blame their creditors for their troubles. This was to lead to some of the most evil deeds in Christian history : but the evil was to be committed not by popes but by kings.

Some of the hated creditors were Jews. The first Jews to settle in England may have arrived shortly after the Norman Conquest. Barred from almost all professions except banking, they soon became hated by English and Normans alike. “Blood libels” were invented, telling of Christian children being killed and eaten by Jewish cannibals, and the cult of some of these juvenile “martyrs” became widely popular. Atrocious pogroms and massacres took place, the worst perhaps being the slaughter of the entire Jewish population of York in 1190. A century later, in 1290, King Edward, indebted to many Jews for the costs of his wars in Wales and Scotland, ordered the confiscation of Jewish wealth, and the expulsion of every Jew from England, thus eliminating his debts. (The Jews would not return until Cromwell’s time.)

But other important creditors were some of the religious Orders - surprising as this may seem, considering that the members of most of these Orders had taken vows of poverty. The most notoriously wealthy was the Order of the Templars, evicted from the Holy Land, where they had formerly established themselves in the Mosque of Omar (from which the Moslem clergy had been evicted), built on the site of Solomon’s Temple. From this base they had fought the Saracens, celebrated Mass (for, as in other Orders, many of these monks were priests), and made themselves wealthy through banking - just like their predecessors on the same site, the Temple authorities in the time of Jesus. Serve God and Mammon ? Why bother with God ?

The Templars possessed no houses in North-Eastern England - the Benedictines of Durham took good care to keep them out. But, since having had to flee from Jerusalem, they held many properties in France and in Southern England.

. The King of France, Philippe IV, was, like Edward I of England, a “strong man”, a man who made sure that he obtained whatever he believed that the king should have. Edward’s wish was to rule over the whole Isle of Britain, and to that end he conquered Wales and Scotland. Philippe’s wish was to consolidate the royal power in France, and to that end he felt that he needed to bring the Church under his control, and to have access to its wealth.

The Pope of Rome, Boniface VIII (1294-1303), also wished to be a “strong man”; and also had need of money. In order to obtain the money, he instituted the first Papal Jubilee, when tens of thousands of pilgrims flocked to Rome for the “Holy Year” of 1300, to purchase indulgences across the counters. In order to project a “strong man” image, he liked to wear a representation of ancient Roman Imperial costume, copied from the statues of emperors still standing in Rome. “I am Pope, I am Caesar”, he is reputed to have said, and he gave audience dressed both in toga and in tiara. In 1302 he issued the bull “Unam Sanctum”, declaring that “outside the Church there is no salvation” (that had long been believed), and that, in order to be inside, “every human creature must be subject to the Roman Pontiff”.

King Philippe IV took this as a denial of his own sovereignty in France, and he despatched ambassadors to Rome to remonstrate with the Pope. These ambassadors, unfortunately, were knights in armour, and their methods of remonstration were similar to those used by the knights of King Henry II of England in dealing with Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. Then, in 1170, Christendom had been outraged at the murder of an archbishop. Now, in 1303, a pope lay dead, and nothing was done.

A successor was elected, of course, but the new pope died almost immediately. The cardinals then elected a French pope, Clement V, possibly hoping that their choice would please King Philippe. They were probably surprised at Clement’s first decision. He moved himself and his whole Court to Avignon - a city in France, though it was nominally a Papal enclave, not subject to the French king. Here he established the Papacy anew. It would remain at Avignon for the next seventy years.

Clement took with him the cash which had flowed in during the Holy Year of 1300, though much of it was to be paid over to the French Crown in return for various favours. But King Philippe then struck an even more evil blow against clerical privilege. He arrested the Grand Master of the Templars, and as many others in the Order as he could find, and confiscated their wealth. Believing that they had additional hidden stores of gold, he had them tortured until they died, in the hope that they would save themselves by revealing where they had concealed their treasure. Pope Clement made no protest against this cruel attack upon a great religious Order.

These events would eventually resonate in Houghton. The seventy years of the Avignon Papacy would prove to be a time when the affairs of Houghton Parish would be very much more closely subject to imposition and control from the Papal Court - a Court rather closer geographically to England than when it had been at Rome.