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June 2004

Parish History Episode 38

The Decline of the Kings

Last month, we learned how, in the Fourteenth Century, the economy of North- Eastern England was steadily growing, and was becoming more export-oriented, as the Flanders wool trade grew more and more important. In consequence, life was beginning to become more sophisticated, and people grew wealthier (including the clergy, who exacted tithes on wool and on all other agricultural produce). There was also, throughout the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, a constant growth in royal power throughout most of Western Europe.

However, the hostile relationship between the English and the Scottish Crowns would retard substantially the development of the Anglo-Scottish Border region. The Kings of England, aware of how nearly they had come, at the end of the Thirteenth Century, to ruling over the whole of the Isle of Britain, resented the necessity of having to recognise the Scottish kings as their equals; while the Scots, for their part, resented the pretensions of the English kings. They also tended to seek alliances with whatever mainland kings (usually the French monarchs) were at odds with the English.

These factors led to continued, but intermittent, warfare along the Border. If the rival kings had committed the full extent of their treasury and their soldiery to these campaigns, one party would presumably have won a decisive victory over the other. But they preferred to leave the skirmishing along the Border to the local families of Lords, who were coming to prominence at this period.

Indeed, in the Border country the power of the kings was actually declining at this time, in contrast to the situation throughout most of Europe. There was a similar decline in the importance of the Prince-Bishops. In the place of kings and bishops, there arose the castles of Border chiefs, who may have been empowered to wield authority, but whose justice was never more than rough and ready; and who were in fact likely to degenerate into cattle reivers if ever they needed to augment their incomes.

One factor in this growing importance in Border life of local families, and in the reduction of the powers of the monarchy, was obviously the remoteness of the seats of power (particularly of the English capital, London) from life along the Border. The later Plantagenet kings of England, and the Lancastrian kings after them, made themselves even more remote by spending much of their time in France, engaged in the campaigns that later became known as the Hundred Years’ War. And then, when that war finally culminated in the expulsion of the English from France, England almost immediately tumbled into a second, long-drawn-out conflict, the Wars of the Roses, between the Houses of Lancaster and York.

Another very serious limitation on the powers of the English and Scottish kings arose from the extraordinary number of Regencies necessitated by the accession of infants to the Thrones of both monarchies. In Scotland, the trend was set by David II, who was only five years old when, in 1329, he succeeded his father as King (and so he was only ten when he attended Bishop Bury’s enthronement in 1334).

David II’s next two successors, Robert II and Robert III, both came to the Throne full-grown, but neither was a particularly effective ruler. But then, after them, there came a long series of kings, all bearing the same name, and all of whom came to the Throne as children: James I in 1406 at eleven; James II in 1437 at six; James III in 1460 at nine; James IV in 1488 at fifteen; James V in 1513 at two; and James VI in 1567 at one. Also, Mary I, who came between James V and VI, was tragically unsuccessful, and also spent much of her reign abroad, in France or England. She was a prisoner in England (and was eventually beheaded), while David II and James I also spent much of their reign in English captivity. It is hardly surprising that the Scottish monarchy was weak, and unable to control its Highland chiefs and Border lairds effectively.

But, while most English kings succeeded in staying alive until their heirs were grown up, there were many royal minorities in England also. Edward III had come to the Throne in 1327 at the age of fifteen (but there was no official Regency, and he did take control of affairs very quickly); while Richard II was eleven when he ascended in 1377; and Henry VI was only one when he became king in 1422; and Edward V thirteen in 1483 (and his reign was brief and, for himself, unpleasant - he became one of the two “Princes in the Tower”); and Edward VI was only ten in 1547, when he ascended the Throne. In addition, too many of these Kings were distracted from the affairs of the Border by the campaigns of the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses.

As royal power withdrew, the Lords of the Marches grew more important; and, on the English side, the most important of these was the Percy family, “the Lions of the North” as they liked to style themselves. Their rise began when a knight called Henry Percy was, in 1309, raised to the baronage as Baron of Alnwick. The Percies were, in succeeding generations, to become Earls, and later Dukes, of Northumberland. Their main strong•holds were the castles of Alnwick, Warkworth and Prudhoe, and they began, during the Fourteenth Century, to replace the Bishops of Durham, in fact if not in name, as the Wardens of the East March. Early in the Fifteenth Century, the First Earl will even make a bid for the Throne, which proved fatal for himself. The Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Earls also all rebelled against the Crown, and died violently, either in battle or on the block. The Tenth Earl also rebelled, but that was in Cromwell’s time, and he did better out of it.

South of the Tyne, their place was taken by the Neville family, “the Wild Bulls of the North”. Their main strongholds were the castles of Raby and Brancepeth, while they possessed a “town house” in Durham Market-Place (now Durham Town Hall). They even chartered and controlled their own market town - Staindrop, a couple of miles from the gates of Raby Castle. Other powerful Lords who resided along the valley of the Wear included the Hiltons of Hylton Castle (near Sunderland), the Lumleys of Lumley Castle, and the Eures of Witton-le-Wear.
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All these great families based themselves on strong stone castles. Built at great expense, and with much labour (the labour being contributed mostly by the peasants, not the barons), they must have appeared in the Fourteenth Century to be the last word in military technology, but in the following century artillery was to begin to make them obsolete.

Some of the families who built them (the Percy Dukes of Northumberland in particular) remain in place as big names in the North-East, while others have declined greatly. But newer families have tended to replace them - the Lambtons, the Stewarts, the Vanes - because these newer families became involved more in coal mining, which replaced cattle-reiving as an important source of wealth. Some of these coal dynasties also rose into the aristocracy. The Lambtons would become Earls of Durham, and the Stewarts Marquesses of Londonderry.

A family of more importance in Houghton and Hetton was that of the Bowes- Lyons, which has surpassed both Lambtons and Stewarts. Elizabeth, one recent daughter of the House of Bowes-Lyon, became the wife of King George VI and the mother of Queen Elizabeth II. Some of her ancestors are buried within our church.