A Knight There Was by Mary Ellen Johnson

Author:Mary Ellen Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ePublishing Works!
Published: 2017-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

London, 1359

In 1358, King Edward's mother, Isabella, once called the she-wolf of France, died peacefully at Hertford Castle. She had requested burial in her wedding dress beside her husband, Edward II, whom she and her lover were said to have murdered some thirty years past. His Grace ordered London's streets cleaned for Isabella's funeral. As her procession crept through the city, bells tolled and people prayed for a woman they could scarce remember. Isabella was a remnant from a bad time long ago, when England had been in chaos—a time that, like the Death, was best forgotten.

Edward III's perennially popular reign—the chronicler Froissart would later write about the king that 'His like had not been seen since the days of King Arthur'—enjoyed several quiet, peaceful and prosperous seasons. Unlike his father, Edward II, who would have preferred being a gentleman farmer to a warrior king, his son was both a brilliant tactician and knight nonpareil. By mid-century, thanks to Edward and his able councilors, England was in command of both sea and land. Recently, the ever troublesome Scots had accepted a ten year truce and France's dauphin had his hands full battling foreign marauders and his own rebellious paysans, leaving Edward III free to attend to domestic matters. He expanded Windsor Castle, home of his Order of the Garter, and built or renovated holdings throughout the kingdom. Domestic and foreign trade flourished, leading to overflowing money chests and an increase in the number of wealthy merchants, particularly those engaged in the wool trade. Parliament remained in an uncommonly mellow mood; England's civil servants performed their services so efficiently that even the most critical found little to complain about.

If a certain amount of unrest existed among the lower classes or those permanently displaced following the 1349 pestilence, few heard and even fewer took note. Only men like John Ball decried such injustices as Parliament's Statute of Laborers which decreed that a man was bound to his employer in the same manner as before the Death, and at the same wage. Some subjects who declined to be thus indentured formed criminal bands to rob their betters traveling the king's highways and byways. Others pointed to the closing of so many churches, which had subsequently fallen into disrepair, for what they lamented was an alarming increase in immorality.

"Things were better in the old days," they said, "In the days before the Death."

But with up to half of England's men, women, and children moldering in plague pits, who could actually even remember those "old days?"

For the royal family, the months passed in a pleasant haze of pageantry and tournaments. On May 19, 1359, eighteen-year-old John of Gaunt married Blanche of Lancaster, Henry, duke of Lancaster's thirteen-year-old daughter. King Edward and Queen Philippa were ecstatic with the match, not only because their son was clearly smitten with the pious and beautiful Blanche, but because she was heir to a fortune that would someday make John the richest man in England. Furthermore, though the king

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