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The English Church and Royal Propaganda During the Hundred Years War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

W.R. Jones
W.R. Jones*
Affiliation:
University of New Hampshire
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Extract

The main force shaping English institutional development during the late middle ages was the intermittent but seemingly endless war with France—a war that was occasionally expanded to include the struggle with France's enthusiastic Scottish ally. Hardly an aspect of English society remained unaffected by these conflicts: the crown was obliged to organize and manage the war effort; the nobility and many freemen had to fight; and most of the population, with few exceptions of class or status, bore the cost. Even if the average Englishman had been able momentarily to forget the continuing state of emergency prevailing in his country, such things as commissions of array, requests for subsidies, seizures of goods and services, alerts and alarms against invasion, and barrages of propaganda and counter-propaganda would have reminded him of the burdens of war. Especially after the formal beginning of the Hundred Years War in 1338, enormous pressures were placed on the institutions of English public administration by the demands of a war waged simultaneously on several fronts.

Associated with the expansion of the wartime activities and needs of royal government was the emergence both in England and France of an official mentality attuned to the importance of public opinion for facilitating the exploitation of community resources for military purposes. The inherent nature of feudal monarchy, which was heavily dependent on the cooperation and voluntary service of the governed, had always obliged medieval kings to recognize and respect the vox populi; but official awareness of the value of favorable publicity for conducting the domestic and foreign affairs of the crown increased notably from the late thirteenth century as a result of the French and Scottish wars.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , Fall 1979 , pp. 18 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1979

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References

Versions of this paper were read at the 1976 annual meeting of the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University and the spring 1976 meeting of the New England Historical Association.

1 We now have excellent general accounts of the histories of crown-community negotiations over taxation in England and France in Harriss, G.L., King, Parliament, and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369 (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar; and Henneman, John Bell, Royal Taxation in Fourteenth Century France (Princeton, 1971)Google Scholar.

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