3. Medieval britain: norman conquest. Wars abroad and at home

For a hundred and fifty tears after the time of Alfred the Great people were continually fighting one another all over England. What the country needed was a strong king who could keep order.

In France there was a young boy named William, who was the son of the Duke of Normandy. This was the boy who in the year 1066 came and conquered England.

William the Conqueror organized his English kingdom according to the feudal system which had already begun to develop in Europe. The central idea of feudal society was that all land was owned by the king but it was held by others, called vassals, in return for services and goods. The king gave large estates to his main nobles in return for a promise to serve him in war. The nobles also had to give him part of the produce of the land. The greater nobles gave part of their lands to lesser nobles, called knights, and other freemen. Some freemen paid for the land by doing military service, while others paid rent. The noble kept serfs to work on his land. These serfs were not free to leave the estate and were often little better than slaves.

There were two basic principles to feudalism: every man had a lord, and every lord had land and vassals. At each level a man had to promise loyalty and service to his lord. On the other hand, each lord had responsibilities to his vassals. He had to give them land and protection.

After William the Conqueror's death in 1087, three more kings of the Norman dynasty ruled England: his two sons, William II (1087-1100) and Henry I (100-1135), and his grandson, the son of his daughter, Stephen (1135-1154). After Stephen's death, the English throne passed to the Plantagenet dynasty.

William the Conqueror's son Henry I had a daughter Matilda, who was married to the French count Anjou, Geoffrey Plantagenet. Their son Henry Plantagenet was made King of England after Stephen's death in 1154.

Richard I the Lion-Heart (Richard Coeur de Lion) (1189-1199) was the second king of the Plantagenet dynasty. He was famous for his good education (he knew Latin and was fond of music and poetry) and courage. His contemporaries described him as a man of excellent manners, kind to his friends and cruel and merciless to his enemies. Richard was seldom seen in England, spending most of his time taking part in crusades in Palestine. At home the barons, in the king’s absence strengthened their castles and acted like little kings. Prince John, the king’s brother, with the help of the barons, tried to seize the English throne. Common people were cruelly oppressed.

Richard the Lion-Heart was killed in one of the battles in France, and the English throne passed to his brother John.

At that time great territories in France belonged to England. Naturally, the French kings and noble did not like it and wanted to win back these lands, so the English and the French waged continuous wan in France. King John wanted a lot of money to wag these wars. He made the barons give him that money, and the barons did not like it. There was constant struggle for power between the king and the barons Finally the barons organized an open rebellion. I 1215 the king was made to sign a document called the Great Charter* (Magna Carta in Latin). For the first time in the history of England, the Great Charter officially stated certain rights and liberties of the people, which the king had to respect.

Bу the 14^th century the process of centralization of the king's power was completing. The same methods of government were applied to all parts of England. The old contradictions between the Normans and Saxons were gradually disappearing.

The Norman kings made London their residence It became the largest town in England. The London dialect of the English language became the central dialect and was understood throughout the country It was the London dialect from which the nation language developed.

Other towns were also growing. The townspeople that is the craftsmen and tradesmen, who later forming the class of bourgeoisie, were becoming an important social force. They became rich by trading with Flanders (a country across the English Channel that now called Belgium¹). The English traders shipped wool to Flanders, where it was sold as raw material Flanders had busy towns, and the weavers who lived and worked there, produced the finest cloth. Flemish ports were the world market of northern Europe and commercial rivals of England. Flemish weavers were even invited to England to teach the English their trade.

In the first half of the 14^th century the king of England was Edward III. He was a powerful king, and he wanted to become King of France as well, because some of the French provinces, such as Normandy, had once belonged to England and others had been the property of Edward's mother, a French princess. Meanwhile the feudal lords in France were making plans to seize the free towns of Flanders. For England it would mean losing its wool market. Saying that he wished to defend English trade, Edward III declared war on France in 1337. This war is now called the Hundred Years' War because it lasted over a hundred years.

At first England was successful in the war. The English fleet defeated the French fleet in the English Channel. Then the English also won battles on land. Tin English had certain advantages over the French. They had cannons, which had just been invented and which the French army did not have. Besides, the English archers could shoot their arrows from a distance, where as the French knights, armed with swords, could only fight in hand-to-hand combats. When the thunder of the first cannons had scared the horses of the enemy the arrows of the English archers reached the French knights before they could use their broad swords.

The ruin of France and the famine that followed caused an epidemic of the plague. It was so infectious there was no escape from it. People died in twenty-four hours. From France the epidemic brought over to England. The English soldiers called it the Black Death. By the year 1348 one-third of England's population had perished.

The position of the peasants was very hard. They had to give part of their harvest to the lord. They also had to work on the lord's fields regularly. After the epidemic of the Black Death, when the population of England had diminished by one-third, there were not enough labourers to work on the lords' fields. So the surviving peasants were made to work on the lords’ fields much more. They were paid for their work, but the payment was very little.

As years went by, the French feudals united against their enemy, and the English were beginning to lose their advantage. As the king needed money for the war, Parliament voted for extra taxes, which made which made the life of peasants still harder. In 1381 the peasants revolted. Sixty thousand people from the counties of Essex and Kent marched to London led by Wat Tyler and Jack Straw. In London they broke open the prisons, destroyed many buildings and killed many royal officials. They came to the royal palace and demanded to see the king. The king of England Richard II was then a 14-year-old boy. He boldly appeared before the crowd of rebels, listened to them and promised to fulfill their demands. But the king did not keep his promise. Wat Tyler was treacherously murdered and the rebellion was suppressed.

The Hundred Years' War, in which England lost practically all itslands in France, ended in 1453, but there was no peace in the country. Long before the lid of this war, a feudal struggle had broken out between the descendants of Edward III. Whenthe Magna Carta was signed in 1215, the Norman barons were united with the Saxon nobles lid the growing bourgeoisie of the big towns, and they took part in governing the country. During the Hundred Years' War some of the barons, who were professional soldiers, built castles with high walls (I kept private armies of thousands of men. They i lied to lead their armies over to France to seize lands there. These big barons formed a small group of their own. They thought more about their "family politics" than about national politics and were a real threat to the king's power. Realizing the danger which these big barons represented to the Crown, Edward III tried to marry his sons to their daughters, the heiresses of these Houses. Thus representatives of the royal family became relatives of many big barons. But that did not help to strengthen the position of the House of Plantagenets. During the reign of Richard II (1377-1399), the last king of the Plantagenet dynasty, Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, seized the crown and became the first king of I lie Lancaster dynasty, Henry IV (1399-1413).

The interests of the House of Lancaster supports by the big barons collided with the interests of the lesser barons and merchants of the towns, who supportи the House of York¹. The feudal struggle grew into u open war between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists. The Lancasters had a red rose in their coat of arms, the Yorkists had a white rose. That's why the war between them got the name of the War of the Roses. The war, which lasted for thirty years (1455-1485), turned into a bitter struggle for the Crown, in which each party murdered every likely heir to the throne of the opposite party. It was a dark time for England, a time of anarchy, when the kings and nobles were busy fighting and murdering each other and had no time to take care of the common people, who suffered greatly.

The War of the Roses ended with the battle оf Bosworth in 1485. King Richard III of the House of York was killed in the battle, and, right in the field Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, was proclaimed Kin of England. The war was over at last, and everybody sighed with relief.

Henry Tudor was head of the House of Lancaster, A year later, in 1486, he married the Yorkist heiress Princess Elizabeth of York. This marriage was of great political importance. It meant the union of the red rose of the House of Lancaster with the white rose of the House of York.