The Isles
Metadata
- Author: Norman Davies
- ASIN: B003GK22Z2
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B003GK22Z2
- Kindle link
Highlights
A knight’s knight, and a lady’s man, he possessed all the chivalrous virtues and vices which his wretched bisexual father had lacked. — location: 6780
er wtf
His amorous depredations, which in a later age might have given him the label of ‘rapist’, came as welcome relief to a court scandalized in the previous reign by the King’s gay dalliances and by the suppression of the Templars on false charges of heresy, wizardry, and pederasty. — location: 6781
All English monarchs up to Queen Anne, and all British monarchs up to George III, were to bear the French title among their honours. — location: 6863
Eh?
But it killed all ideas in France for a major cross-Channel expedition. It largely determined that the Hundred Years War would be fought on French territory and not in the Isles. — location: 6890
Why was the 100 years war fought on french soil and not that of the British isles.
By the end of 1340, however, Edouard III was bankrupt. He had debts to the tune of £300,000 – a sum equal to perhaps ten times his annual income. He could not return from the Continent until he had sold part of the crown jewels to pay the troops. Yet this early financial crisis had long-term benefits. It forced him to match his ambitions to his means; and it encouraged the ever closer partnership of King and Parliament that was to become the hallmark of English governance. — location: 6891
What was one of the early defining events that defined British governance?
chivalrous instincts. In 1344, after a tournament at Windsor, he staged a re-enactment of King Arthur’s Round Table, — location: 6920
In that same year, 1360, Master John Wyclif (c. 1329–84) was appointed Master of Balliol College, Oxford. — location: 7011
The prisoner was one Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400). — location: 7014
To rede and drive the night away. — location: 7018
Elsewhere in England, an obscure priest called William Langland (c. 1330–86) was about to complete his Vision of Piers Plowman, whose earliest known text is dated to 1362. — location: 7019
Richard II was said to have addressed Jack Cade’s rebels in their native tongue. — location: 7047
In 1363, for example, the Lord Chancellor was said to have opened a parliamentary session for the first time in English. That same session passed the so-called Statue of Pleadings: ‘The King has ordained … that all pleas which shall be pleaded in any court whatsoever … shall be pleaded, shown, defended, answered, debated and judged in the English tongue, and that they shall be entered and enrolled in Latin.’ — location: 7050
But by the time in the 1380s when he was vicar of Berkeley in Gloucestershire and working on Higden’s text, he says that all the grammar schools were using English as the language of instruction. Indeed they no longer appear to have seen the need to teach French even as a second language. If Trevisa was right, that last generation of fourteenth-century schoolchildren was the first both to speak and to learn in some form of English. — location: 7111
The reign of Louis XI, ‘the Universal Spider’ (r. 1461–83), saw the wiles of diplomacy flourish whilst the sinews of war were trained and tautened. — location: 7236