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| 1347–55 |
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| A series of truces with France was ended by the expedition of Edward's son, the Black Prince (so called because of the color of his armor), to Bordeaux, followed by ruthless plundering raids using Bordeaux as a base, which enriched the English and alienated the populace. | 1 |
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| 1356, Sept. 19 |
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| Battle of Poitiers. The Black Prince, using the tactics of Crécy, defeated King John, capturing him, his son, and the king of Bohemia, as well as the flower of French chivalry. | 2 |
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| 1359–60 |
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| Edward's last expedition to France penetrated to the walls of Paris; the south had been so devastated that the English could hardly find food. | 3 |
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| 1360 |
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| Peace of Bretigny, ending the first period of the war (See 1360); the war was resumed in 1369. | 4 |
| After the hideous sack of Limoges (1370), the Black Prince returned to England (1371) and was replaced (1372–74) by his brother, John of Gaunt, the duke of Lancaster and an incompetent soldier, who lost town after town until only Calais, Cherbourg, Brest, Bayonne, and Bordeaux remained in English hands (1375). | 5 |
| Edward's personal rule and domestic developments in England. Edward, a majestic, affable man, opened his reign with generous concessions to the baronage and a courteous welcome to the complaints of the middle class. He grew steadily in popularity. He was fond of war and the war was popular; the nation backed him. | 6 |
| Growth of Parliament. Medieval people believed, in the words of historian Charles Howard McIlwain, that “to kings belong government, to subjects property.” Since ecclesiastical organizations, local communites, and private individuals provided all social services, “good” governments did not tax, except in the case of a just war. The necessities of war financing over the long span of the Hundred Years' War had, in retrospect, profound consequences for the development of the English Parliament. First, it met frequently. Edward III's need for money to pay for the war forced him to call not only the great barons and bishops but also knights of the shires and burgesses from the towns. He called them 27 times between 1337 and his death in 1377; in Edward's 50-year reign, Parliament met 37 times. It was becoming a habit. Second, the knights and burgesses soon realized that they held the purse strings: the Second Statute of 14 Edward III (1341), sometimes called the Statute de Tallagio non Concedendo (“no taxation without representation”) required that all nonfeudal levies receive parliamentary approval. In return for a grant, Parliament increasingly asked for royal redress of grievances. These requests were framed as petitions (or billa, from which derives the modern bill) which, when supported by the lords and approved by the king, became statutes—laws enacted by the legislative branch. Most petitions or bills in the 14th and 15th centuries supported the interests of individuals, corporations (such as a university or guild), or local communities; they had no broad “national” significance. Third, by 1340 the knights and burgesses were meeting apart from the magnates, frequently in the monks' Chapter House at Westminster Abbey. In the late 15th century, the term Commons' House, or House of Commons, came into use; the phrase House of Lords appeared first in the reign of Henry VIII. In the 14th century, the Commons developed its organization, with a speaker to preside over debates and to represent the Commons' interests before the House of Lords and the king, and clerks began to keep records of discussions. The first speaker for whom evidence survives was Peter de la Mare (1376). In the 15th century, Parliament met frequently and for longer sessions (than in the 14th century), but it was still more of an occasional gathering than an institution. Only at the time of Parliament were petitions presented, kings deposed (e.g., Richard II), new rulers legalized (e.g., Henry IV), and popular support sought. But Parliament remained the king's servant; it met for an ad hoc purpose and when it had fulfilled the king's wishes, it was dismissed. It was not a continuing body. Actual power remained in the hands of the king and his council. | 7 |
| Development of justices of the peace. The conservators of the peace established under Henry III to keep the peace had no judicial powers; the statute of 1327 allowed them to receive indictments for trial before the itinerant judges. In 1332 their jurisdiction was made to include felonies and trespass. Established as police judges in each county (1360), they were also charged with price and labor regulation. By 1485 they had absorbed most of the functions of the sheriffs. Chosen from the local gentry, under royal commission, they constituted an amateur body of administrators who carried on local government in England until well into the 19th century. | 8 |
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| 1348–49 |
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| The ravages of the Black Death probably reduced the population by one-third. (Some scholars argue that food poisoning, especially from cereals—the bulk of most people's diet—infected with toxins, had weakened people's immune systems and thus contributed to the occurrence of the disease.) The population loss, coupled with the tremendous war prosperity, dislocated the wage and price structure and produced economic chaos. The Statute of Laborers (1351) attempted to fix wages and prices and to compel able-bodied unemployed to accept work when offered. The labor shortage accelerated the transition (already begun) from servile to free tenures and fluid labor; the statute in practice destroyed English social unity without markedly arresting servile emancipation or diminishing the crisis. | 9 |
| War prosperity affected everybody and led to a general surge of luxury (e.g., the new and generous proportions of contemporary Perpendicular Gothic architecture). Landowners, confronted with a labor shortage, began to enclose land for sheep raising, and the accumulation of capital and landholdings founded great fortunes, which soon altered the political and social position of the baronage. The yeomanry, exhilarated by their joint military achievement with the aristocracy and their share of war plunder, lost their traditional passivity, and a new ferment began among the lower sections of society. | 10 |
| Growth of national and anticlerical (antipapal) feeling. Hostility to the francophile papacy at Avignon: statute of Provisors (1351), an effort to stem the influx of alien clergy under papal provisions (widely ignored); statute of Praemunire (1353), forbidding appeals to courts (i.e., Avignon) outside England (widely ignored). | 11 |
| The vernacular. English became, by statute (1362), the language of pleading and judgment in the courts (legal French retained in documents). English began to be taught in the schools (1375). Parliament was opened (1399) with a speech in English. | 12 |
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| c. 1362 |
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| Growth of social tension. William Langland's Piers Plowman, a vernacular indictment of governmental and ecclesiastical corruption and an appeal (unique in Europe) on behalf of the poor peasant. Langland, a poor country priest, typical of the section of the church directly in contact with public opinion, was the voice of the old-fashioned godly England, bewildered and angered by a new epoch. Preaching of scriptural equalitarianism by various itinerant preachers (e.g., John Ball); growing bitterness against landlords and lawyers. | 13 |
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| c. 1376 |
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| JOHN WICLIF, an Oxford don and chaplain of Edward, already employed (1374) by the government in negotiations with the papacy over provisions, published his Civil Dominion, asserting that, as Christians hold all things of God under a contract to be virtuous, sin violates this contract and destroys title to goods and offices. Wiclif insisted that his doctrine was a philosophical and theological theory, not a political concept, but extremists ignored this point. A precursor of the Reformation, Wiclif advocated a propertyless Church, emphasizing its purely spiritual function; attacked the clergy; and insisted on the direct access of the individual to God (e.g., reduction of the importance of the sacraments, notably auricular confession) and the right of individual judgment. He also was responsible (with Purvey and Nicholas of Hereford) for the first complete, vernacular English Bible. He wrote pamphlets, both in Latin and English, and carried on a wide agitation through his poor priests for his doctrines (Lollardy), until it was said every fourth man was a Lollard. | 14 |
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| 1369–77 |
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| Edward's great prestige had rested on a successful foreign war; once England ceased to be victorious in the French war (after 1369), Edward's ascendancy declined and baronial influence increased. | 15 |
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| 1371 |
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| William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, requested that Parliament grant supply (revenue) for the war and provoked great anticlerical opposition: Parliament petitioned the king that, since most high royal officials were ecclesiastics and thus could not be held accountable in secular courts such as Parliament, only laymen should be appointed. John of Gaunt supported this anticlerical feeling and the social unrest that accompanied it. | 16 |
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| 1376 |
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| The Black Prince led the Good Parliament (the best reported assembly thus far) in a series of reforms: the Commons refused supply until given an audit of accounts; two notorious war profiteers, Latimer and Lyons, were impeached—that is, accused of serious crimes with the full Parliament sitting as a court of law. This was the first impeachment of officials by Parliament in English history. | 17 |
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| 1377 |
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| After the death of the Black Prince (1376), John of Gaunt's packed Parliament undid the reforms and passed a general poll tax. | 18 |
| Art, Literature, and Science. Perpendicular Gothic: Gloucester, transepts and choir (1331–35); cloisters (1351–1412). Minor arts: Louterell Psalter (opening of the 14th century), illuminations. English influence on craftsmen of the Rhineland, Paris, Lorraine. | 19 |
| Historical writing: Higden's Polychronicon (before 1363), a brilliant universal history in Latin; Walsingham of St. Albans's (end of the 14th century) Chronicle, in Latin, rivaling Froissart in brilliance of description. | 20 |
| Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400), the son of a London burgher, a layman, a diplomat, active at court, later a member of Parliament, combined observation with learning. Representative of the new cosmopolitanism of English society, he was under Italian and French influences and probably knew Petrarch. Translator of Boethius's Consolatio; creator of English versification; recaster of the English vocabulary by adding Continental grace to the ruder Anglo-Saxon word treasury. The influence of Wiclif, Oxford, Cambridge, the court, and, above all, Chaucer fixed Midland English as the language of the English people. The Canterbury Tales offer a witty, sympathetic, sophisticated, realistic picture of contemporary society (omitting the aristocracy). | 21 |
| Foundation of Winchester College (St. Mary's College) and New College, Oxford, by William of Wykeham (1393). Merton College, Oxford, became a center for scientific investigations, especially in mechanics. Robert Grossteste, Roger Bacon, Richard Swineshead, and Thomas of Bradwardine began a tradition of logical analysis and experiment that remained influential until the Renaissance. | 22 |
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| 1377–99 |
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| RICHARD II (son of the Black Prince, age 10 at his accession). | 23 |
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