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This book presents key texts relating to the political as well as to the broader socio-economic history of the reign of Edward II. Drawing on a wide range of narrative sources, especially the extensive chronicle accounts of the reign, the editors also introduce other important material, including parliamentary rolls, charters, court records and accounts. Together this gathering of sources allows the reader to navigate this troubled and eventful period in English medieval history. The volume is organised chronologically, guiding the reader from the moment of Edward II’s accession in 1307 until his removal from office in 1327 and his supposed death in the same year. The editors also introduce more thematic chapters throughout, addressing such key themes as royal finances and the state of the early fourteenth-century economy, the role of parliament, and political and military engagement with Scotland. In an introductory essay, the editors discuss previous historical work directed at the reign of Edward II and also outline the range of source types available to the historian of the reign. Each section of primary source is also introduced by the editors, who offer a contextual analysis in each instance.
boy who, in the film’s penultimate scene, is shown capering in earrings, lipstick, and high heels to ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’, on top of the cage where Isabella and Mortimer sit like joyless ghosts, covered in white flour and shadowed by the bars of their (heterosexual) prison. Yet despite retaining some of the agitprop gestures of the screenplay, the film finally comes across as something considerably more
reason, has the force of law. 38 (b) Flores Historiarum , pp. 214–15 (1323), 217–19 (1323), 221 (1324), 226 (1324) It has been suggested that this chronicle was written as an apologia for Isabella and Mortimer’s deposition of the king, but this poses problems, since the narrative for the end of the reign and of the deposition itself (where the writer
, it was likely that the common advantages to be derived from maintaining the political concord and social harmony that guaranteed the privileged position of both Crown and nobility would outweigh whatever grievances might be entertained against him. For every baronial rebellion in later medieval England, there was another armed demonstration that failed to attract sufficient support to present a serious threat to the kingdom’s rulers, such as Henry earl of Lancaster’s protest against the rule of Isabella and Mortimer in 1328–29 or Richard duke of York’s march on the
Introduction The deposition was not the end of the story. The major difficulty for Isabella and Mortimer and Edward III’s new government was what to do with Edward. The sentence on him had been perpetual imprisonment and the intention seems to have been to make him reasonably comfortable at Kenilworth Castle with an allowance of £5 a day for his maintenance. 1
position he had the right to repeal them. 134 The genuine concern for precedent among members of the political community met a challenge in the legality and nature of the action to be taken in the wake of Isabella and Mortimer’s successful invasion in 1326 and their presentation of a credible alternative (in the form of the teenage Edward III) to the widely-reviled rule of Edward II. Although deposition
. As a consequence, the ‘oppositional’ element in Edward’s veneration – the degree to which it can be interpreted as a covert criticism of the regime of Isabella and Mortimer – can only have been slight, since Edward III began his personal rule within eighteen months. Indeed, what distinguishes Edward II’s cult from those of either Simon de Montfort or Thomas of Lancaster is the degree to which it was dependent on royal encouragement, whether in the form of the substantial gifts made by Edward III and his family at the shrine in 1343 or in the determined campaign for
, Richard Abberbury, previously only a lowly ‘constable of the King’s peace’, was one of the small group of gentry to whom they turned, as a ‘potential force of county royalists’, 24 in Oxfordshire. Appointed a commissioner of array in April 1325, Abberbury became one of the three keepers of the peace in the county, with wide powers of inquiry and arrest, in the following October. Isabella and Mortimer, in their turn, found him as willing a local administrator as the Despensers had done; his appointment to a commission to supervize the keepers of the peace in November
Isabella and Mortimer, theoretically as many sessions could be held as the chancery clerks could write out commissions for justices to hold. In reality, after an initial explosive interest during the late thirteenth century, the largest numbers of special commissions were issued during the 1310s and 1320s, when annual totals could rise to over 250. 42 In spite of the sporadic survival of proceedings held