The Peasants’ Rising under the leadership of Wat Tyler.

Medieval England experienced few revolts but the most serious was the Peasants’ Revolt which took place in June 1381. A violent system of punishments for offenders (преступники) was usually enough to put off peasants from causing trouble. Most areas in England also had castles in which soldiers were garrisoned, and these were usually enough to guarantee reasonable behaviour among medieval peasants.

An army of peasants from Kent and Essex marched on London. They did something no-one had done before or since - they captured the Tower of London. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the King’s Treasurer were killed. The king, Richard II, was only 14 at the time but despite his youth, he agreed to meet the peasants at a place called Mile End.

What were the peasants angry about and why had they come to London?

1. After the Black Death, many manors(усадьбы) were left short of workers (не хватало рабочих). To encourage those who had survived to stay on their manor, many lords had given the peasants on their estates(владениях) their freedom and paid them to work on their land. Now, nearly 35 years after the Black Death, many peasants feared that the lords would take back these privileges and they were prepared to fight for them.

2. Many peasants had to work for free on church land, sometimes up to two days in the week. This meant that they could not work on their own land which made it difficult to grow enough food for their families.

3. There had been a long war with France. Wars cost money and that money usually came from the peasants through the taxes that they paid. In 1380, Richard II introduced a new tax called the Poll Tax. If they could not pay in cash, they could pay in kind, such as seeds, tools etc., anything that could be vital to survival in the coming year.

In May 1381, a tax collector arrived at the Essex village of Fobbing to find out why the people there had not paid their poll tax. He was thrown out by the villagers. In June, soldiers arrived to establish law and order. They too were thrown out as the villagers of Fobbing had now organised themselves and many other local villages in Essex had joined them. After doing this, the villagers went to London to talk to the young king to hear their complaints.

One man had emerged as the leader of the peasants - Wat Tyler from Kent By mid-June the discipline of the peasants was starting to go. Many got drunk in London and began to steal. It is known that foreigners were murdered by the peasants. Wat Tyler had asked for discipline amongst those who looked up to him as their leader. He did not get it.

On June 14th, the king met the rebels at Mile End. At this meeting, Richard II gave the peasants all that they asked for and asked that they go home in peace. Some did. Others returned to the city and murdered the archbishop and Treasurer - their heads were cut off on Tower Hill by the Tower of London. Richard II spent the night in hiding in fear of his life. On June 15th, he met the rebels again at Smithfield outside of the city’s walls. At this meeting, the Lord Mayor killed Wat Tyler. We are not sure what happened at this meeting as the only people who could write about it were on the side of the king and their evidence might not be accurate. The death of Tyler and another promise by Richard to give the peasants what they asked for, was enough to send them home. By the summer of 1381, the revolt was over. Richard did not keep any of his promises claiming that they were made under threat and were therefore not valid in law. Pesants were again under the control of their lords.

 

The Wars of the Roses.

There were not more than sixty noble families controlling England at this time. Most of them were related to each other through marriage. Some of the nobles were extremely powerful. The discontented nobility were divided between those who remained loyal to Henry VI, the "Lancastrians", and those who supported the duke of York, the "Yorkisrs".

Edward IV put Henry into the Tower of London, but nine years later a new Lancastrian army rescued Henry and chased Edward out of the country. Like the Lancastrians, Edward was able to raise another

army.

 The war between York and Lancaster would probably have stopped then if Edward 's son had been old enough to rule, and if Edward 's brother, Richard of Gloucester, had not been so ambitious.

But when Edward IV died in 1483, hi s own two sons, the twelve-year -old Edward V and his younger

brother, were put in the Tower by Richard of Gloucester. Richard took the Crown and became

King Richard Ill. A month later the two princes were murdered.

Richard III was not popular. Lancastrians and Yorkists both disliked him. In 1485 a challenger with a very distant claim to royal blood through John of Gaunt landed in England with Breron

soldiers to claim the throne. Many discontented lords, both Lancastrians and Yorkists, joined him. His name was Henry Tudor, duke of Richmond, and he was half Welsh. He met Richard III at Bosworth. Half of Richard's army changed sides, and the battle quickly ended in his defeat and death. Henry Tudor was crowned king immediately, on the battlefield

The Red Rose of Lancaster + The White Rose of York = The Red and White Tudor Rose

 

18.   Tudor Absolutism and Reformation of the Church.

The authority of t he law had been almost completely destroyed by the lawless behaviour of nobles and their armed men. Henry used the "Court of Star Chamber", traditionally the kin g's council chamber, to deal with lawless nobles, Local justice that had broken down during the wars slowly began to operate again. Henry encouraged the use of heavy fines as punishment because this gave the Crown money.

Henry's aim was to make the Crown financially independent, and the lands and the fines he took

from the old nobility helped him do this. Henry also raised taxes for wars which he the n did not

fight. He never spent money unless he had to. Henry VIll was quite unlike h is fat he r. He was

cruel, wasteful with money. and interested in pleasing himself. He wanted to become an important influence in European politics. But much had happened in Europe since England had given up its efforts to defeat France in the Hundred Years War.

The Reformation

Henry VIII was always looking for new sources of money. His father had become powerful by taking over the nobles' land. hut the lands owned by the Church and the monasteries had not been touched. The Church was a huge landowner, and the monasteries were no longer important to economic

and social growth in the way they had been two hundred years earlier. In fact they were unpopular because many monks no longer led a good religious life but lived in wealth and comfort.

In 1510 Henry had married Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his elder brother Arthur. But by 1526 she had still not had a son who survived infancy and was now un likely to do so. Henry tried to persuade the pope to allow him to divorce Catherine.

Henry's break with Rome was purely political. He had simply wanted to control the Church and to

keep its wealth in his own kingdom. He did not approve of the new ideas of Reformation

Protestantism introduced by Mart in Luther in Germany and John Calvin in Geneva. He still believed in the Catholic faith. But when he broke with Rome, he used Parliament to make the break legal. Through several Acts of Parliament between 1532 and 1536, England became politically a Protestant country, even though the popular religion was still Catholic.

 

19.   Elizabethan age.

The Elizabethan era was a time associated with Queen Elizabeth I's reign (1558–1603) and is often considered to be the golden age in English history. It was the height of the English Renaissance and saw the flowering of English poetry, music and literature. This was also the time during which Elizabethan theatre flourished, and William Shakespeare and many others composed plays that broke free of England's past style of plays and theatre. It was an age of exploration and expansion abroad, while back at home, the Protestant Reformation became more acceptable to the people, most certainly after the Spanish Armada was repulsed. It was also the end of the period when England was a separate realm before its royal union with Scotland.

 

The Elizabethan Age is viewed so highly because of the periods before and after. It was a brief period of largely internal peace between the English Reformation and the battles between Protestants and Catholics and the battles between parliamentand the monarchy that engulfed the seventeenth century. The Protestant/Catholic divide was settled, for a time, by the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, and parliament was not yet strong enough to challenge royal absolutism. England was also well-off compared to the other nations of Europe. The Italian Renaissance had come to an end under the weight of foreign domination of the peninsula. France was embroiled in its own religious battles that would only be settled in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes. In part because of this, but also because the English had been expelled from their last outposts on the continent, the centuries long conflict between France and England was largely suspended for most of Elizabeth's reign.

The one great rival was Spain, with which England clashed both in Europe and the Americas in skirmishes that exploded into the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585–1604. An attempt by Philip II of Spain to invade England with the Spanish Armada in 1588 was famously defeated, but the tide of war turned against England with an unsuccessful expedition to Portugal and the Azores, the Drake-Norris Expedition of 1589. Thereafter Spain provided some support for Irish Catholics in a debilitating rebellionagainst English rule, and Spanish naval and land forces inflicted a series of reversals against English offensives. This drained both the English Exchequer and economy that had been so carefully restored under Elizabeth's prudent guidance. English commercial and territorial expansion would be limited until the signing of the Treaty of London the year following Elizabeth's death.

England during this period had a centralised, well-organised, and effective government, largely a result of the reforms of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Economically, the country began to benefit greatly from the new era of trans-Atlantic trade.

 

20.   The Home and Foreign Policy of the Stuarts on the British Throne.

The Stuarts were the first kings of the United Kingdom. King James I of England who began the period was also King James VI of Scotland, thus combining the two thrones for the first time.

The Stuart dynasty reigned in England and Scotland from 1603 to 1714, a period which saw a flourishing Court culture but also much upheaval and instability, of plague, fire and war.

It was an age of intense religious debate and radical politics. Both contributed to a bloody civil war in the mid-seventeenth century between Crown and Parliament (the Cavaliers and the Roundheads), resulting in a parliamentary victory for Oliver Cromwell and the dramatic execution of King Charles I.

There was a short-lived republic, the first time that the country had experienced such an event.

The Restoration of the Crown was soon followed by another 'Glorious' Revolution. William and Mary of Orange ascended the throne as joint monarchs and defenders of Protestantism, followed by Queen Anne, the second of James II's daughters.

The end of the Stuart line with the death of Queen Anne led to the drawing up of the Act of Settlement in 1701, which provided that only Protestants could hold the throne.

The next in line according to the provisions of this act was George of Hanover, yet Stuart princes remained in the wings. The Stuart legacy was to linger on in the form of claimants to the Crown for another century.

The Civil War in Britain.

The English Civil Wars (1642-1651) stemmed from conflict between Charles I and Parliament over an Irish insurrection. The first war was settled with Oliver Cromwell’s victory for Parliamentary forces at the 1645 Battle of Naseby. The second phase ended with Charles’ defeat at the Battle of Preston and his subsequent execution in 1649. Charles’ son, Charles, then formed an army of English and Scottish Royalists, which prompted Cromwell to invade Scotland in 1650. The following year, Cromwell shattered the remaining Royalist forces and ended the “wars of the three kingdoms,” though Charles II eventually ascended to the throne in 1660.

The civil wars of seventeenth-century England also involved the two other kingdoms ruled by the Stuart dynasty, Scotland and Ireland. The invasion of England by a Scottish army seeking religious concessions in 1639 and again in 1640 precipitated political deadlock in London, which paved the way for a rebellion by Catholic Ireland (October 1641). The struggle between King Charles I and his Westminster Parliament over who should control the army needed to crush the Irish insurrection in turn provoked the outbreak of civil war in England (August 1642). Initially northern and western England, together with much of Ireland, stood for the king, while the southeast (including London), the Royal Navy, and Scotland fought for Parliament. However, at Marston Moor (July 2, 1644) Charles lost control of the north; and the following year, at Naseby (June 14, 1645) the Parliamentary forces led by Oliver Cromwell routed his main field army.

 

Did You Know?

In May 1660, nearly 20 years after the start of the English Civil Wars, Charles II finally returned to England as king, ushering in a period known as the Restoration.

 

Having pacified all England, Parliament turned to the conquest of Ireland and Scotland. Since 1642 the Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny had controlled Irish affairs and periodically aided Charles. However, any chance of rekindling the Royalist cause in Ireland ended in September 1649, when Oliver Cromwell massacred the combined force of Irish Confederates and Royalists at Drogheda and, the following month, captured the Confederate fleet in Wexford.

 

The Cromwellian reconquest of Ireland dragged on until the fall of Galway in April 1652 because of the outbreak of the third English Civil War. Early in 1650, Charles II, son and heir of the executed Charles I, cobbled together an army of English and Scottish Royalists, which prompted Cromwell to invade Scotland; at the Battle of Dunbar (September 3, 1650) he won control of most of Scotland. The following year at Worcester (September 3, 1651) Cromwell shattered the remaining Royalist forces and ended the “wars of the three kingdoms.”

 

The English conflict left some 34,000 Parliamentarians and 50,000 Royalists dead, while at least 100,000 men and women died from war-related diseases, bringing the total death toll caused by the three civil wars in England to almost 200,000. More died in Scotland, and far more in Ireland. Moreover, the trial and execution of an anointed sovereign and the presence of a standing army throughout the 1650s, combined with the proliferation of radical religious sects, shook the very foundations of British society and ultimately facilitated the restoration of Charles II in 1660. This was the last civil war fought on English—though not Irish and Scottish—soil.