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Documentary, The Plantagenets - Part 2 - An English Empire
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00:00Caversham Manor in Berkshire.
00:22The year is 1219.
00:24William Marshall is the most powerful knight in the land and regent of England.
00:34The 11-year-old boy at his bedside is the fourth Plantagenet king to rule England, Henry III.
00:46The Plantagenets were a French dynasty who'd ruled England and much of France for 50 years.
00:52But Henry's father, King John, had lost most of their lands in France.
01:01And when Henry came to the throne at the age of nine, half of England was under French occupation.
01:10William Marshall had sworn to protect the young king.
01:15Even if the whole world abandons the boy, he said, I will not fail him.
01:22William Marshall kept his word.
01:24He defeated the French, fought off the rebellious English barons, and ensured that the young
01:29Plantagenet would hold on to his crown.
01:35But now, William Marshall was dying.
01:40And the fate of the Plantagenets rested on the shoulders of a child.
01:47Many predicted disaster.
01:50Instead, something remarkable happened.
01:58The Plantagenet dynasty not only survived, it grew stronger.
02:03Under their rule, over the next 150 years, medieval England reached its peak.
02:12Their roots were in France, French was their language, but the Plantagenet family helped foster
02:26a new sense of English nationhood.
02:29Out of their dynastic ambitions would grow an English empire.
02:33For the first 50 years of Plantagenet rule, the English Channel acted as a bridge, connecting
03:02the king and his barons to the lands they owned in France.
03:09But by the reign of Henry III, most of their ancestral homelands in France had been lost.
03:17The English barons were forced to make a commitment to one side of the Channel or the other.
03:24The kings of England and France presented the barons with a stark choice.
03:32Give up their lands in England and do homage to the King of France, or give up their lands
03:36in France and swear allegiance to the King of England.
03:40The Channel was no longer a bridge, but a barrier between competing powers.
03:45Possession of French lands always drove the Plantagenet dynasty, but for now, they turned
03:51their energies to the country they still ruled, to England.
04:03Henry III was not by nature a warrior.
04:07The boy king grew up to be a pious ruler, devoted to pilgrimage and prayer.
04:16In 1245, he began rebuilding Westminster Abbey, a project that would occupy him for the rest
04:23of his life.
04:29The old Romanesque basilica was replaced with an immense Gothic structure.
04:39This was an architecture of light and sophistication.
04:43The style was French, but it was dedicated to the memory of an English king.
04:56The Majesty of Westminster Abbey today is the result of Henry III's devotion to Edward the
05:01Confessor and his desire to glorify him.
05:04Henry saw Westminster as the centre of the Plantagenet Kingdom, and in the heart of the
05:10Abbey itself, he constructed an elaborate new shrine to the saintly Anglo-Saxon king.
05:26Edward the Confessor is the only English king to have been canonised.
05:31Henry was aligning himself with both God and England.
05:43Edward's golden coffin sat on a base of purbeck marble.
05:48These niches were carved for pilgrims to kneel in prayer.
05:55But the Abbey also served a worldly purpose.
06:01Henry's piety hadn't extinguished his dynastic ambition.
06:06He wanted Westminster Abbey to rival the great churches of the French kings.
06:11His vision of the Abbey was as the place of coronation and burial for all future Plantagenet kings.
06:22Westminster Abbey would be forever associated with Henry as his crowning achievement.
06:28But Plantagenet ambition came at a price.
06:32Its rebuilding cost more than twice Henry's annual royal income, and he had other expensive plans.
06:41Like all his predecessors, Henry was determined to expand his Plantagenet empire, whatever the cost.
06:49Henry wasn't a warrior king, but he could use the revenues of England to add to the Plantagenet dominions.
06:58The Pope was inviting Henry to purchase the rights to the Kingdom of Sicily, and he couldn't refuse the chance to add to the family's lands.
07:06He accepted on behalf of his younger son, Edmund.
07:11The only snag was the price tag.
07:13We know what happened next because of a contemporary account of Henry's reign.
07:26Kept at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, is a manuscript written and illustrated by a St. Albans monk, Matthew Paris.
07:39It's called the Chronica Maiora, the Great Chronicle.
07:46He tells us Henry agreed to pay the Pope three times his annual income for the chance to secure Sicily as a Plantagenet land.
07:56It was a huge sum of money and a great risk.
08:01If Henry defaulted on payment, he faced excommunication from the Church.
08:09For a pious man like Henry, excommunication would be unbearable, but still he pursued the policy.
08:15Even his own brother thought he'd gone mad.
08:18He compared the Pope's offer to a man saying,
08:21I sell you the moon, now climb up and take it.
08:25It was an ambitious plan to expand Plantagenet power, but it placed royal family interests against those of the barons, and it backfired badly.
08:38The barons were the land-owning nobility of England.
08:42They provided the king with armies to fight his wars, and he needed their agreement to raise taxes to fund his ambitions.
08:52Yet Henry was alienating his barons by pursuing Sicily.
08:58And they held another grievance against the king.
09:03Henry had filled his court with foreign-born relatives from Savoy and Poitou.
09:09The barons bitterly resented them.
09:13French remained the language of court, but there was a growing suspicion of all things foreign.
09:21Plantagenet dynastic ambitions were still international, but they increasingly came up against a new force, national feeling.
09:30You can see it in the works of Matthew Paris.
09:33Here he shows a French invasion fleet being defeated by English forces.
09:39While the bishops bless those who are fighting, as it says, for the liberation of England.
09:46And here he praises a patriotic baron who had struggled to preserve Anglia Anglis.
09:56England for the English.
10:01National feeling was a growing force Henry couldn't ignore.
10:05He'd taken a huge risk in mortgaging his kingdom to expand the Plantagenet Empire in the Mediterranean.
10:14But now he was bankrupt, and the English barons were on the point of rebellion.
10:20Things came to a head one April morning in 1258.
10:31Seven barons in full armour confronted Henry here in Westminster Hall.
10:35The king was startled.
10:36What is this, my lords? Am I your captive?
10:39They reassured him that they were not rebels but friends of the crown.
10:43But they insisted that the king dismiss his foreign relatives and take back their castles and lands.
10:48The king's relatives protested noisily, but the barons warned them,
10:54know for a fact that you will either return the castles or lose your head.
10:59Henry had little choice but to agree.
11:08The king's submission to the barons triggered a chain of reforming legislation
11:13that would transform the way England was governed.
11:19The reforms would be agreed by a committee of 24.
11:2312 chosen by the king and 12 by the barons.
11:27For the first time in English history, power would be shared by the king with a 15 member council.
11:37These historic reforms are known as the provisions of Oxford.
11:47Medieval kings had always claimed to rule by the grace of God.
11:50But Henry now reluctantly swore an oath to share power with the barons
11:55in the name of the commune d'Angleterre, the community of England.
12:00Provoked by Plantagenet extravagance, the provisions of Oxford mark an important moment
12:05in the history of England and of the limitation of royal power.
12:09For 20 years, the assemblies where the king consulted with his bishops and barons
12:14have been known by a term derived from the French parlais, to talk.
12:19This gave us the name of a new institution, Parliament.
12:31Henry appealed to the Pope to extricate himself from the provisions of Oxford.
12:37But his own brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, condemned Henry as a king who had lost touch with his people.
12:47De Montfort saw himself as England's saviour.
12:50The king knew he was in danger.
12:56He told de Montfort, I fear thunder and lightning beyond measure.
13:00But by God's head, I dread you more than all the thunder and lightning in the world.
13:08He was right to be afraid.
13:10From his base here in Kenilworth Castle, de Montfort raised an army against the king.
13:15In 1264, Simon de Montfort confronted royal troops, led by the king and his son Prince Edward, outside Lewes.
13:32De Montfort's men were outnumbered.
13:35But they inflicted a humiliating defeat on Henry, and took Prince Edward prisoner.
13:40Henry remained king in name only.
13:47For the next 15 months, England was ruled, not by a Plantagenet, but by Simon de Montfort.
13:55And he did so through Parliament.
14:01De Montfort's Parliament of 1265 is often regarded as the forerunner of the modern Parliament.
14:06As always, it included barons and bishops, who sit nowadays as the House of Lords.
14:13But for the first time, knights and burgesses were sent from the shires and from the boroughs,
14:19elected to Parliament by the property owners of England.
14:23Parliament now had the beginnings of a second house, later to be known as the Commons.
14:28Henry III seemed to be a spent force.
14:41But his son Edward was a warrior, prepared to defend his Plantagenet birthright to the death.
14:47With the help of men loyal to his cause, Edward escaped his captivity in Hereford.
14:57He raised an army, and confronted de Montfort at Evesham.
15:02At the Battle of Evesham, Edward reasserted Plantagenet rule in England.
15:14De Montfort's supporters were slaughtered, and de Montfort himself killed in the battle.
15:20His hands and feet were cut off.
15:25His testicles severed and hung scornfully over his nose.
15:31Then his head was sent to the wife of one of his chief enemies.
15:35De Montfort's rule was over.
15:38But the English Parliament lived on, and future Plantagenet kings would ignore it at their peril.
15:43Henry had had a lucky escape.
15:52He returned to the life of religious devotion and pilgrimage.
15:59He gambled with the Plantagenet crown.
16:03And his actions had provoked the opening up of Parliament to elected representatives of the English people.
16:13Henry's England had a growing sense of national spirit.
16:17But when he died, Henry revealed his own true allegiance.
16:25Henry's body was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey,
16:29to spend eternity alongside his beloved Anglo-Saxon hero, Edward the Confessor.
16:35But his heart was sent to be buried with his Plantagenet ancestors at the Abbey of Fontevro in Anjou.
16:41An English king, but a French heart.
16:45A Plantagenet to the last.
17:03Edward, the warrior prince, now became King Edward I of England.
17:07Tall and intimidating, with a mop of curly hair, Edward was known as Longshanks.
17:18He inherited a country recovering from turmoil.
17:27Edward also inherited the famous Plantagenet temper.
17:29Reputedly, he once frightened an unfortunate Archbishop of York literally to death.
17:36But he'd learned two things from his father's mistakes.
17:39To keep the barons happy and not to run out of money.
17:42And he sought to find ways to attain both those goals.
17:45Like his ancestors, Edward encouraged the planning of new towns to generate wealth and taxes.
17:57Towns like Hull and Winchelsea nurtured a new society based on trade.
18:04And trade became the lifeblood of the Plantagenet dynasty.
18:08Medieval England reached its economic peak under Edward I.
18:18But there was a darker side to its growing sense of national identity.
18:24England's Jewish population had arrived from France shortly after the Norman Conquest.
18:34The Pope had decreed that lending money at interest was a sin for Christians.
18:41So the Jews became the chief source of credit for the King and his barons.
18:46Jews were often resented. They were frequently persecuted and attacked.
18:55And by the reign of Edward I in this age of Crusades, England had become an increasingly militant Christian nation.
19:06The King himself was a conventional Christian with no sympathy for the plight of the Jews.
19:11At a time when English national feeling was growing, Edward's vision of England was a fiercely Christian one.
19:18This England had no place for the Jews.
19:26With the support of his barons, Edward decided to expel the entire Jewish population from his realm.
19:33Some two to three thousand Jews departed from the shores of England.
19:36There was to be no resident Jewish population in the country for the next three hundred and seventy years.
19:53Yet Plantagenet ambitions always extended beyond England.
19:57Edward was inspired by King Arthur, a popular figure in folklore who was said to have once ruled over a united Britain.
20:12Edward wanted to align the Plantagenet dynasty with this legendary all-conquering leader.
20:18And he had the conquest of Wales in his sights.
20:24Wales had troubled the Plantagenet kings for generations.
20:35Its rugged terrain made it hard to conquer and control.
20:39And they regarded its inhabitants as little more than barbarians.
20:42But Edward I was a man who never gave up what he saw as his rights.
20:47And these included, in his eyes, overlordship of Wales.
20:50But a rival dynasty stood in the way of Plantagenet ambition.
21:06The princes of Gwynedd had ruled here for centuries.
21:09Gwynedd at Griffith and his younger brother Davith were the latest in a long line of warrior leaders who held a crown said to be King Arthur's.
21:25Edward's father, Henry, recognised Gwynedd as Prince of Wales, as long as he paid homage to the English crown.
21:32But when Edward took the throne, Gwynedd refused to pay homage.
21:42Edward declared Gwynedd a rebel and a disturber of the peace.
21:46And in 1277 set off westward from Chester at the head of a powerful army of 800 knights, crossbowmen from Gascony and 16,000 infantry.
21:55Along the way, they were supplied by a fleet of ships sent up from the royal ports of the south coast, like Winchelsea.
22:03The Welsh were hopelessly outnumbered.
22:10Edward's army captured Anglesea, the breadbasket of Wales.
22:15At a stroke, this provided food for his own men and cut off supplies to the Welsh.
22:19Gwynedd had no choice but to surrender and pay homage to Edward.
22:35An uneasy truce followed.
22:40But it was broken when Davith at Griffith led a new rebellion against English rule.
22:45For over a year, the Plantagenet army clashed with Welsh defenders.
22:54But in 1282, disaster struck for the Welsh dynasty.
23:00Plywelyn was killed in battle.
23:06His head cut off and sent to London.
23:09Davith at Griffith held out here, at Dolbaddon Castle, for a few months more.
23:16Finally, he was captured and tried by the English.
23:20Condemned to death as the last survivor of a family of traitors.
23:24He was hanged and then cut down and disembowelled.
23:27His entrails were burned in front of him.
23:29His body was quartered.
23:30And then his head was cut off and sent to the Tower of London to be displayed alongside that of his brother.
23:37As a final act of ritual humiliation, the Welsh surrendered to the English king the crown of King Arthur.
23:44Wales was now a Plantagenet Dominion.
23:46Edward had confronted a rival dynasty and emerged victorious.
24:03Now, to stamp his authority, he began building and repairing a chain of castles across North Wales.
24:11These fortresses represent the peak of medieval castle building.
24:18Edward personally chose the site for each of his castles.
24:22And the most impressive of all arose above the River Siont at Carnarvon.
24:26This twin-towered gatehouse, known as the King's Gate, was built according to the designs of King Edward himself.
24:44The approach to the castle was guarded by arrow slits and by spy holes.
24:50And once here, you would have been confronted with a drawbridge, six portcullises and five sets of gates.
25:06This was Plantagenet military architecture at its most intimidating.
25:10Edward engaged the most famous castle architect in Europe, Master James of St George.
25:32King Edward was keen to associate the Plantagenet dynasty with the glories of the Christian Roman Empire.
25:37And so he commanded Master James to base his designs on the great walls of Constantinople.
25:43This meant building many-sided towers instead of the more usual round ones.
25:48The walls are up to 20 feet thick and patterned with bands of coloured stone.
25:53A Byzantine design not previously seen in the British Isles.
25:56Carnarvon Castle was a bold statement of Plantagenet domination.
26:10For the Welsh, it was a painful reminder of conquest and oppression.
26:15Edward was also preparing for the future and laying a Plantagenet dynastic claim to Wales.
26:26In 1284, the King's 11th child, a son named Edward, was born here.
26:31At the age of 16, Edward of Carnarvon would be declared Prince of Wales,
26:35a title stolen from Thlewellyn at Griffith, which has been born by the eldest son of the English sovereign ever since.
26:44It looked at one point as though Scotland would go the way of Wales, swallowed up by the English kingdom.
27:06But a different dynastic problem had arisen there.
27:18When the King of Scotland died in 1286, he left no male heir.
27:23The bloodline of Scottish kings was broken.
27:29The dead king's three-year-old granddaughter, Margaret of Norway, was next in line for the throne.
27:37Edward came up with a neat Plantagenet solution.
27:43Margaret would return to Scotland to marry his own infant son.
27:53The situation would be resolved by diplomacy and marriage, not by war.
27:59And Britain would be united under the Plantagenets.
28:02It remains one of the great what-ifs of British history.
28:07No marriage took place.
28:09Little Margaret died in Orkney on her way to Scotland.
28:13And with her died Edward's plan for a bloodless Plantagenet takeover of Scotland.
28:19After the death of Margaret, Edward agreed to tolerate a subordinate king in Scotland.
28:27But as soon as he showed signs of independence, Edward reacted with typical Plantagenet brutality.
28:35His troops sacked Berwick and defeated a Scottish army at Dunbar.
28:43English garrisons and officials were installed across Scotland to intimidate and control.
28:50For Edward, the Kingdom of Scotland had ceased to exist.
29:00As he handed the Royal Seal of Scotland to one of his barons, he said,
29:03A man does good business when he rids himself of a turd.
29:08But Scotland did not go the way of Wales.
29:12This wasn't a battle between dynasties, but between two countries with a growing sense of national identity and pride.
29:19No one displayed this more than one of the Scottish resistance leaders, William Wallace.
29:31Wallace was a proud and charismatic figure.
29:34He refused to pay homage to Edward.
29:41To crush Wallace, the English army had to cross the river Forth.
29:49On a 13th century map of Britain by Matthew Parris, Scotland is shown dramatically divided by the river Forth.
29:59And the only place to cross was the bridge at Stirling.
30:06It was here that William Wallace confronted the English army to preserve Scotland s freedom.
30:12At this time, the bridge here was just wide enough for the English forces to cross two abreast.
30:21Once half the army had crossed, the Scots swooped down and cut off the bridge.
30:26The English, stranded on the northern bank, were surrounded.
30:32The result was slaughter.
30:33Around 5,000 English infantrymen died at Stirling Bridge.
30:52The battle didn't decide the issue, but Wallace's defiance shook Edward.
30:59International dynasties like the Plantagenets struggled to understand national feeling.
31:12Edward underestimated the strength of resistance it could produce.
31:17He was riding to confront another Scottish leader, Robert Bruce, when he died in 1307.
31:24Plantagenet determination to subdue Scotland was undiminished.
31:33But Edward II s defeat by Robert Bruce at Bannockburn seven years later set the limits to Plantagenet ambitions in Britain.
31:41They would never conquer the Scots.
31:44And they provoked a deepening of Scottish national pride and a sense of independence that survives to this day.
31:51The new Plantagenet king lacked his father's warrior instincts.
32:04Edward II preferred gardening to fighting.
32:08He would fail to build on his father's legacy and his lapses of judgement would threaten to destroy the Plantagenet dynasty.
32:17Edward's reign began well.
32:27He secured a great prize in the marriage market.
32:31Isabella, daughter of the King of France.
32:34She was just 12 years old, but already considered a beauty of beauties and very wise.
32:40A month after their wedding, Westminster Abbey was the setting for Edward's coronation.
32:51This was his first opportunity to show off his new queen.
32:56Instead, Isabella was upstaged.
32:59As Edward and Isabella walked down the aisle, it wasn t the young queen who caught the eye.
33:09Walking just ahead of them and leading the procession was a young man called Piers Gaveston.
33:14He was dressed in clothes of imperial purple studded with pearls.
33:19And in his hands he cradled the crown of St Edward the Confessor, the most sacred of the royal regalia.
33:23There was no more privileged position in the royal procession.
33:28Gaveston was being honoured as the most important noble in the land.
33:32At the banquet that followed, Edward and Gaveston shocked the guests with their display of affection for each other.
33:47Isabella's uncles walked out in disgust.
33:54Every medieval king had court favourites, but none had ever achieved the power and influence Piers Gaveston exercised over Edward II.
34:04The king claimed he loved him like a brother, but the St Paul's chronicler noted that the king frequented Piers' couch more than the queen's.
34:15We can never know for sure if there was a sexual relationship between Edward II and Piers Gaveston.
34:26But we do know that there are no mentions of homosexuality during their lifetimes, and they had plenty of enemies who would have brought it up.
34:34The earliest references come after Edward's downfall, and from men who were deeply hostile to him.
34:40What can't be doubted is that Edward was infatuated with Gaveston, to a degree that compromised his kingship and provoked the barons' hatred.
34:58But Gaveston displayed no fear of the barons.
35:08Famed for his quick and sarcastic tongue, Gaveston gave the barons nicknames.
35:12The Earl of Lancaster was the Fiddler, the Earl of Lincoln Burst Belly, and the Earl of Warwick, whose seat was here at Warwick Castle, was the Black Dog of Arden.
35:24But this was a dangerous game. The Black Dog could bite.
35:28Once again, Plantagenet rule was under threat because of foreign-born court favourites.
35:38Once again, the barons felt compelled to act.
35:45Gaveston was captured and put in the custody of the Earl of Pembroke, who guaranteed his safety.
35:51But in his absence, the Black Dog pounced.
35:59The Earl of Warwick seized Gaveston.
36:02After a token trial, he was led out on the road to Kenilworth.
36:06When they reached Blacklow Hill, here on the land of the Earl of Lancaster, Gaveston was first stabbed and then beheaded.
36:23His body was left on the hillside until claimed by two Dominican friars.
36:27And that was the end of Piers, commented a contemporary chronicler, who had risen on high, but now fell into nothingness.
36:45If Edward had now concentrated his energies on being king, his infatuation with Gaveston might have been quickly forgotten.
36:53Instead, to Isabella's horror, he began to shower favours on another young noble.
37:06Hugh Dispenser.
37:12Dispenser and Edward became inseparable.
37:15Angry barons said he'd bewitched the king's mind.
37:18But Dispenser made an enemy yet more dangerous than the barons.
37:23Edward's queen, Isabella.
37:25Isabella came to despise Dispenser, in the words of a contemporary chronicle, with a more than perfect hatred.
37:37But Edward still needed Isabella.
37:39In 1324, the French invaded Gascony, the last of the Plantagenet lands in France.
37:51Isabella's brother was now the king of France.
37:55So Edward asked his wife to travel to Paris to sue for peace.
37:58Isabella's brother welcomed her warmly, and promised to restore Gascony, on condition that Edward did homage for the Duchy.
38:11With his barons threatening rebellion at home, Edward was reluctant to leave England.
38:16But he sent his son in his place.
38:17And so here, at the Chateau de Vincennes outside Paris, in the company of his mother, the young Edward knelt at the feet of Charles IV of France.
38:34But then, instead of returning to England, he remained in France with his mother.
38:39When Edward requested their return, Isabella refused.
38:48And she finally revealed her feelings about her husband's relationship with Hugh Dispenser.
38:57I feel that marriage is a joining together of man and woman.
39:02And someone has come between my husband and me, trying to break this bond.
39:09Edward's letters to his son grew increasingly violent.
39:15We will take such measures that you will feel it all the days of your life,
39:19and all other sons will learn what it means to disobey their lords and fathers.
39:30A Plantagenet family crisis was about to turn into a political disaster.
39:34News reached the king that the rebel baron, Roger Mortimer, was now Isabella's lover.
39:48According to the Bishop of Hereford, Edward determined to strike back with true Plantagenet vindictiveness.
39:54If he had no other weapon, he would crush her with his teeth.
39:57Isabella and Mortimer landed on the Suffolk coast and quickly found support from disaffected barons.
40:09Edward's cause was lost.
40:13Hugh Dispenser paid the price for his closeness to the king.
40:21He was tied to a ladder and his genitals sliced off.
40:26His entrails were removed and along with his heart, thrown into a fire.
40:32The king was taken prisoner.
40:35According to the English chronicler Geoffrey Le Baker, the imprisoned king was told that if he refused to abdicate in favour of his son,
40:47someone other than a Plantagenet would take the throne.
40:50Weeping and barely able to stand, Edward eventually agreed to sacrifice himself for his dynasty.
40:56He stood down in favour of his son, the first abdication of a king of England.
41:00But the Plantagenet bloodline had been protected.
41:09On the 1st of February, 1327, his son, Prince Edward, was crowned.
41:15He was 14 years old.
41:18His mother, Isabella, was appointed regent.
41:22She and Mortimer now ruled England on Edward's behalf.
41:26But a deposed former king was a new dynastic problem.
41:38Edward was brought here to Barclay Castle.
41:42And these are original documents from the castle at that time.
41:46Here we read about the delivery of chickens to the kitchen of the king's father, which is what Edward now was.
41:53And here is a record of his daily expenses, five pounds a day, quite a generous amount.
42:00And here is report of a messenger being sent to Nottingham to inform Isabella concerning morte patris regis.
42:09The death of the king's father.
42:10The death of Edward II solved Isabella and Mortimer's problems.
42:25But there were already questions about how Edward died.
42:30And killing a king was an offence against God and the natural order.
42:35The most plausible cause of death to be suggested was suffocation.
42:43But other more lurid accounts soon circulated.
42:46Within 30 years, Geoffrey the Baker and other chroniclers were writing that Edward had had a red-hot poker inserted into his anus.
42:54It's no surprise which version has caught the public imagination.
42:57No one knows for sure, but with either the red-hot poker or suffocation, no mark would be visible when the king's body was displayed to show that he was truly dead.
43:08To all appearances, Edward II died of natural causes.
43:12The fate of the Plantagenet dynasty now lay in the hands of Isabella and Roger Mortimer.
43:25But three years later, tired of the corrupt rule of his mother and her lover, the young King Edward decided to take action.
43:33One night, in October 1330, two dozen supporters of the young King crept through a secret tunnel.
43:52Above, in Nottingham Castle, slept Isabella and Roger Mortimer.
43:57The leader of the conspirators warned the young King, it is better to eat the dog than to be eaten by the dog.
44:10But Mortimer hadn't got to rule England without a killer's instincts.
44:15The King's supporters knew that if their plans failed, they would be hanged as traitors.
44:20The young conspirators entered the castle and made for the Queen's bedchamber.
44:31As they drew their swords and entered, Edward stood quietly outside the room.
44:37Suspecting her son's presence, Isabella called out,
44:47Good son, good son, have mercy on noble Mortimer.
44:50But there was to be no mercy.
44:55Mortimer was taken to the Tower of London and within a few weeks he was hanged like an ordinary criminal.
44:59And out of the shadow of his mother and her lover, stepped the new Plantagenet King, Edward III.
45:08In the uncertain world of medieval politics, people looked to omens and portents for guidance.
45:26One place they found it was in ancient prophecies about the fates and fortunes of kings.
45:32The prophecy of the six kings drew on the legend of King Arthur.
45:41In it, Merlin characterised the future Plantagenet kings as animals.
45:49Henry III was a pious lamb, Edward I a battling dragon.
45:54Edward II was a lascivious goat.
45:56But his son, who would grow up to be Edward III, was a glorious wild boar with the heart of a lion,
46:03who would conquer more than any of his blood in this world.
46:06The message was clear.
46:08England once again had a Plantagenet king to rally behind.
46:21Edward III would not make the mistakes of his father.
46:23He set out to unify the English barons around him.
46:28And at his birthplace, Windsor Castle, he spent a royal fortune transforming it into the heart of his kingdom.
46:36He turned it from a castle into a palace.
46:40It became the most expensive single building project by any Plantagenet king.
46:53And the perfect setting for royal displays of chivalry.
47:01Under Edward III, the rituals of chivalry became central to the Plantagenet court.
47:06Chivalry was a code of behaviour that proudly fused military and Christian ethics.
47:15The word refers to the customs and values of the chevalier, the French term for those who rode into battle, the knights.
47:23And it demanded that these knights be brave, loyal and devoted to their ladies.
47:28Edward III understood the power of chivalry like no one else, and he used it to bind together the knights, the nobles and the Plantagenet crown.
47:38Like his grandfather, Edward I, Edward I, Edward was inspired by the legend of King Arthur.
47:48Lavish Arthurian tournaments were held in the quadrangle of Windsor Castle.
48:04With staged displays of horsemanship and fighting skills.
48:08Windsor Castle became the Plantagenet Camelot.
48:17Along with Arthur, Edward chose a Christian hero to represent his ambition.
48:23Saint George.
48:27Saint George was a warrior saint, and he was the patron of knights throughout Christendom.
48:31But Edward's troops were already marching with the Red Cross of Saint George at their head.
48:36And it flew also from the mast of his ships.
48:39It was becoming a symbol of England and the English king.
48:43And Saint George would be the war cry of the English armies in Edward's next great conflict.
48:48He was determined to win back the old Plantagenet dynastic lands in France.
48:52The French royal family had seen son succeed father for 320 years.
49:05But in 1328, Charles IV of France died without a son to succeed him.
49:14Edward III was the dead king's nephew.
49:16He believed he had as strong a claim to the French throne as anyone.
49:25Could Edward III of England become Edward I of France?
49:29It wasn't so far-fetched.
49:31Ever since King John had lost their old lands in France over a century before,
49:36the Plantagenet kings had nursed the ambition of recovering them.
49:40To acquire the whole of France would be an even greater glory.
49:44Edward saw an opportunity to succeed where his Plantagenet forefathers had failed.
49:57In 1340, he announced his claim to the French throne.
50:03This began an era of slaughter and bloodshed that went on for generations.
50:09In July 1346, an army of around 10,000 men, led by Edward III, landed in Normandy.
50:21Edward may have claimed to be king of France, but this was clearly an English invasion.
50:26The battle was no longer just one between dynasties.
50:30It was now a battle between nations.
50:32The English rampaged unopposed through Normandy.
50:41Finally, the two great armies confronted each other by the forest of Crecy in the Somme.
50:50The English were drawn up on this ridge. The French advanced from that direction.
50:59As the battle began, a great storm broke.
51:04Huge flocks of crows flew into the air above the armies.
51:12Then the English archers stepped forward.
51:16Their longbows had a range of 200 metres and a rate of fire three times that of the crossbow.
51:22The crossbowmen on the French side were routed.
51:33And Edward had another shock in store for the French.
51:37A primitive but spectacular new weapon in his armoury.
51:40For the first time on a European battlefield, the English used gunpowder to fire cannonballs at the French forces.
51:55The French knights now faced volleys of thousands of arrows amidst the crash of cannon.
52:01They had never seen anything like it.
52:15The King's 16-year-old son, Edward Prince of Wales,
52:30later known as the Black Prince,
52:34fought his way to the heart of the battle.
52:40The Chronicle of Hoissart reports that a man was sent back from the Black Prince's division to the King to ask for help.
52:47Edward III asked him if his son were dead or wounded.
52:51And when he heard that he was not, replied,
52:53Send no more to me today. Let him earn his spurs.
52:56Most of the French knights fought to the death.
53:02They preferred the glory of being killed in action, to the shame of fleeing the battlefield.
53:07Fighting on the French side was John, the blind King of Bohemia.
53:19Despite his blindness, he wanted to strike at least one blow in the battle.
53:24His knights tied the reins of their horses to the reins of his to guide him into the thick of the fighting.
53:29The Black Prince saw him ride to his death.
53:37In order to honour the King's reckless bravery, the Black Prince adopted as his own badge the King's emblem.
53:45That emblem was the ostrich feather, which has been the badge of the Princes of Wales ever since.
53:50Around 2,000 French knights died at Crecy. A whole generation of French noblemen.
54:00In contrast, it's said that as few as 40 English men-at-arms lost their lives.
54:05The battle for the French crown would continue.
54:14But, fighting beneath the flag of St George, the English army was now the most feared in Europe.
54:20At the end of the battle, King Edward embraced the Black Prince.
54:27My son, he said, you have acquitted yourself nobly.
54:31You are worthy to rule a kingdom.
54:35The Black Prince returned to Windsor an English national hero.
54:42But he would never become king.
54:48Like many a Plantagenet warrior, he was later cut down by dysentery.
54:54But Crecy marked a high point of the Plantagenet dynasty.
54:59And its legacy remains.
55:07After their triumphant victory at Crecy,
55:09the King and the Black Prince founded the Order of the Garter.
55:14Its origins were in a great tournament at Windsor.
55:17Two teams of 12 knights took part.
55:19One headed by the King and one by the Prince.
55:22The Order was to meet here in its own chapel every year on St George's Day, the 23rd of April.
55:35The structure of the Order has remained the same to the present day.
55:38The Monarch, the Prince of Wales and 24 knights.
55:42One set of stalls is designated the Kings, the facing set, the Princes.
55:47Many of the original founding members of the Order of the Garter were companions of arms who had fought together at Crecy.
55:55Now, every noble in the land wanted to be bound to the King in this most exclusive of clubs.
56:01The Order of the Garter wasn't just another show of pageantry.
56:11It was also a shrewd Plantagenet tool.
56:14For 200 years, Plantagenet dynastic ambition had often clashed with the interests of the English barons.
56:25Now, Edward III had brought the noblemen of England behind him in his campaign to win the throne of France.
56:31He had harnessed England's growing sense of nationhood to his own Plantagenet dynastic vision to create an extraordinary fighting force.
56:40By 1360, the English army had regained large swathes of the Plantagenet lands in France.
56:51Out of dynastic ambition emerged the foundations of an English empire.
56:58In 1362, Edward celebrated his 50th birthday.
57:11He marked the occasion by introducing one of the Plantagenet's most significant reforms.
57:19It was known as the Statute of Pleading and it formally changed the language spoken in the law courts from French to English.
57:28In the same year, Parliament was opened for the first time with a speech made not in French, but in English.
57:43When Henry II, the first Plantagenet king, took the throne in 1154, he spoke scarcely a word of English.
57:50Two centuries later, a dynasty that had regarded England as a possession rather than a nation,
57:55now saw England as its home and English as its language.
58:00English was no longer spoken just by the peasants who worked the land.
58:04The knights spoke it, the nobles spoke it, even the kings spoke it.
58:08England and the Plantagenets were united as never before.
58:12In the next programme, the death of kings, royal bloodletting divides the dynasty into the warring houses of Lancaster and York.
58:28Henry V fulfills the Plantagenets' greatest ambition at Agincourt.
58:34And Richard III makes the Plantagenets' last stand.
58:37Exploring the incredible life of our greatest knight who saved England from a French revolution.
58:54A rip-roaring adventure, Wednesday at nine, here on BBC Two.
58:57Juggling parish life with parenthood, The Rev is back next, with his own bundle of joy and some explosive nappies.
59:05Stay with BBC Two.
59:06Jds.
59:12Shoulder St.
59:24More than a person.
59:25Yes, we know the Packers Coach work.
59:27Shooter.
59:30Once I have trotonged, Andy,
59:32more than an Wrap like here towards theults.
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