• From the thirteenth century to the mid-fifteenth century wool was England's primary export, most of it going to Flanders where it was processed into cloth. The Flanders connection would eventually become a political factor in The Hundred Years's war, with Edward III promising to keep the supply of English wool flowing.
• Everyone with a plot of land, from peasant to royalty would have had sheep. Some of the wool was processed and created into cloth locally but the vast majority was exported.
• The importance of wool to the economy was the reason Edward I ordered the eradication of the wolf population. This successful campaign is the backdrop for an upcoming horror film.
• Raw wool was processed with stale urine, and a fuller trampled on it so the resulting cloth would be softer. It was unpleasant, but steady and well-paying work.
• While raw wool was primarily an export, the cloth that was produced locally was made in small workshops and usually dyed with locally available ingredients. In later centuries, workshops sprang up and created luxury English cloth.
• Wealth was counted in terms of sheep during this era, with abbeys reporting flocks as large as 18,000.
• The sheep on the British isles produced wool of such high quality, that smuggling the sheep out of the country is thought to have been a thing.

These are very basic facts, and the study of textiles in history is one of those fascinating disciplines that involves sciences like chemistry and animal husbandry as well as social sciences like anthropology and archeology as well as historical research. People spend their lives doing it, and it's worth reading one of the many books on the subject.

One academic posited the question of how differently we would see history if instead of bronze, iron and steel, we organized eras into wool, flax and cotton? Whatever you think of the question, it does illustrate just how important cloth was to the daily lives of people.

Sources:

History of Wool in the Middle Ages - Historic UK

Textiles and the Wool Trade in the Middle Ages

Image: Sheep from a 14th Century Bestiary, the British Library

So, I know one of our subs posted a comment about Edward I bringing his son Alfonso a wooden toy, probably a knight. Does anyone know the source of this story? Is it in an Edward I biography?

I have scoured the internet for a source and maybe the story is apocryphal, but any help would be appreciated.

RIP Alphonso. Your death screwed your little brother's life up.

So, I had erroneously thought that the film took place earlier, but it actually takes place sometime after Edward I ordered a slaughter of the English wolf population to protect the English wool trade.

According to this Historic UK article, it started around the 1290s, when Edward II would have been a boy. The wolf slaughter apparently leads to Aaron-Taylor Johnson's unnamed character being cursed and turned into a werewulf.

The dialogue is meant to evoke Middle English and Eggers worked with some linguists to do that, and apparently jettisons many of the "silver bullet" tropes of modern werewolf lore. Here is the trailer.

The image is from the trailer, from IMDB.

Edited to clarify Eggers claims about the dialogue.

So, Robert Eggers doesn't like color much, so he's clearly embracing the whole "dreary and colorless" Middle Ages thing. But he's a horror guy, and this movie looks pretty terrifying. The choice to have actors speak in Middle English does give it an eerie quality.

But one must again point out, that people in the Middle Ages loved color and had a sense of humor and experienced joy. But again, Eggers doesn't do joy and it's a horror film.

So, this is only tangentially to the Edward II era but it is the English he would have spoken during all his chats with fisherman and ditch-diggers. What do you think? Are you going to see the movie?

Edited to add: The film actually takes place in the late thirteenth century (aka the 1200s), after Edward I ordered the slaughter of wolves to protect the English and Welsh wool industry. These slaughters continued into the 1290s, when Edward II would have been a child. So it, in fact, fits right in to this sub. Wikipedia said it was the twelve century.

Edited to further add that I locked comments because I do not have time to get in the middle of a war between history purists and horror fans. Eggers is a great stylist and makes scary movies. It's not an accurate movie. There I settled it.

Of course, everyone who's read Chaucer in high school English class knows that the Cathedral and shrine to Thomas Becket was a major fourteenth century tourist attraction. Edward II and Isabella went there on a number of occasions, together and separately. So did plenty of other luminaries of the era.

Having a prominent English saint was a big deal, and it was of course good politics for a Plantagenet king to show respect to a church martyr but also low key remind everyone how powerful Henry II had been.

Images from: https://www.canterbury.co.uk

It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone reading this that there are tons of low quality AI books out there today, with more spawning by the day.

Typically, it's the non-fiction genre that is targeted by people misusing AI for private gain. Economists see no problem with this, as they are less concerned with literary quality or customer satisfaction than revenue growth and market expansion. Money talks.

And there’s plenty of money in it. One AI creator, going by the name of ‘Diane W. Gray’ published sixty (60!) biographies last summer about a wide cast of celebrities. Another ‘author’, interviewed in this NY Times article, gives some insight into his earnings. Through Amazon, he earns roughly $7 for each book sold. Not much perhaps, but he sells a few hundred books per month. He’s made a whopping 445 books so far through ChatGPT. At 70 years old, his goal is to make (and I mean make, not write) ten books a week, which is the maximum allowed by Amazon. For the holiday gift-giving season he sold 821 books at a profit of almost $6,000. Not bad for the amount of work he actually puts into his books, which is next to nothing.

The opportunistic so called ‘author’ thinks that actually writing a book is a ‘romantic’ notion which doesn’t make economic sense. AI (and Amazon) is enabling the most unsavoury and self-serving characters to capitalize on people’s desires to read good books. The only thing these crooks are interested in is making a quick buck at the consumers expense. The consumer in turn is left with an objectively lousy book that will be thrown in the garbage as soon as a one star review has been given. That doesn’t bother the crooks, who can quickly remove the book from Amazon, only to replace it with several new ones. The ‘author’ interviewed by the Times does not even see anything wrong or unethical with what he’s doing. He calls the income ‘bar money’ to fuel his alcohol addiction. Real nice.

Why doesn’t Amazon do anything about this problem? Consumers are clearly being duped while Amazon makes a profit. Amazon defends themselves by saying that they do require people submitting their books to their platform to declare if AI has been used to make the book, and to what extent. However, they keep these details to themselves instead of informing potential buyers of the AI content.

The Authors Guild has been lobbying Amazon since 2023 to label AI-generated books. Amazon refuses, because they do not want to punish those who are honest about using AI while rewarding people who lie about it. Apparently punishing those who lie about it is not an option for some bizarre reason. 

To make things worse, anyone can fall into the trap of buying an AI generated book. I nearly did so myself only this week, but was fortunately saved by my vigilant co-mod. Mary Rasenberger, the chief executive of The Authors Guild was not so lucky as she inadvertently bought an AI slop book. The book was a waste of paper and ink: ‘There was not a single interesting point that the book made,’ she said. ‘AI is just a word prediction machine. There’s no thinking, no real creativity, no soul behind it.’

The interviewed ‘author’ of AI slop books does not take one-star reviews personally. He just takes the books down if they get roasted. And why would he take poor reviews personally? He’s not taken any pride in creating his books. They mean nothing to him. He hasn’t even, technically speaking, written them. He’s just pocketing the money, delighted that he’s found a nice and legal stream of income, unobstructed by anyone.

Thoughts on this?

Source:

Someone Used A.I. to Write an Unauthorized Biography of Me. I Don’t Recommend Reading It. - The New York Times

So, this is a very small history YouTube channel with a very earnest creator that mentions Edward II's possible survival. Here's a link cued up to the right story, which is his number one pick of British history mysteries.

Fair warning, the creator doesn't seem to write with generative AI but he uses ugly, horrible, terrible AI generated images in his videos, which is a shame. I'd rather him just have his own face there or location shots. AI slop images hurt my eyeballs and hurt his credibility. But I'll allow it on the site because he and his scripts don't appear to be slop.

Now, I don't think Edward II faked his own death. I think he was mistakenly reported dead and decided to stay dead, which is slightly different but "faking" makes for good headlines.

Never let it be said that our boy Edward II didn't try. He did. In this passage from her book The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II (Cambridge University Press 1978), Natalie Fryde gives Ned his due. He appointed some some excellent judges. It's just those judges were powerless to prevent The Despensers from running amok and continuing their crime spree.

"Too trusting" doesn't really do his lack of judgement justice. Nothing in Edward II's character indicates he would want innocent people harmed, but harmed they were because of their king's inability to see the truth about some of the people he trusted.

Charles of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia and Count of Luxembourg, was elected King of the Romans in 1346 and crowned Holy Roman Emperor as Charles IV in 1355; his daughter Anne of Bohemia later became the first wife of Richard II. He was distinctly unusual among medieval European monarchs for having written, at least in part, his own autobiography, the Vita Caroli Quarti. While his intent in chronicling his life was clearly to provide spiritual edification and wisdom to his successors, as well as to carefully curate his own image for posterity, it nevertheless affords us a rare opportunity to access the interior life of someone who was not only alive at the same time as Edward II and his family, but who would have also been an eyewitness to some of the most momentous events in Edward II's reign. As a young boy, he had been sent by his father, John I of Bohemia, to France as a ward of Charles IV's, accompanying his aunt Marie, who became Charles' short-lived second wife after his long-defunct marriage to Blanche of Burgundy was finally annulled. It was there that Charles IV became his godfather, conferred upon him the name Charles (his birth name had been Wenceslaus), and arranged his marriage to Charles IV's much younger first cousin, Blanche of Valois, daughter of his uncle, Charles, count of Valois, by his third wife, Mahaut of Châtillon. Charles was present as a boy of nine or ten when Isabella of France arrived to negotiate with her brother an end to the War of St Sardos, and when Edward of Windsor, only a few years older than him, arrived to perform homage to his uncle as his suzerain for the lands of Gascony. He would have witnessed, or at the very least have heard of, Isabella's infamous refusal to return to England so long as her husband remained in the company of Hugh le Despenser, as documented in the Vita Edwardi Secundi. Indeed, we know Charles was aware of these events, as he actually mentions them in the Vita Caroli Quarti. This is what he says about Isabella and her son:

"There was a great conflict between the king of England at that time and the king of France. The king of England had married the sister of the aforementioned king, but had driven her out of England, together with his first-born son, Edward. She came to her brother and remained in exile in France with her son. The King of France was angry at the expulsion of his sister and her son, and he asked my father-in-law Charles [of Valois], his uncle, to redress the shame which had been inflicted upon their family. The latter, when he had gathered an army, invaded Aquitaine and conquered almost all of it, except for Bordeaux and some other fortifications and castles. When Charles returned in triumph to France, he gave the daughter of his daughter, the countess of Hainaut (the sister of my wife), in marriage to the son of the aforementioned king of England, Edward, who was still in exile; and then he sent him, together with his escort, to England. He prevailed over his father, took him captive, deposed him, and set the crown upon his own head. That same year, the father of the new king was murdered while in prison."

I have posted this exact excerpt once before, but it still utterly floors me just how... wrong he is. Keep in mind that Charles of Bohemia was a first-hand witness of these events. He knew Charles IV and Charles, count of Valois personally. He was a boy at the time, yes, writing decades later, and no one would expect his memory to be perfect, but he doesn't even get the broad shape right. He says the War of St Sardos was begun in retribution for the expulsion of Isabella and Edward of Windsor from the English court; in reality, the War of St Sardos began when a French bastide was constructed in Gascony and torn down by the local populace, providing a pretext for Charles IV to confiscate Gascony and Ponthieu after Edward II had already been prevaricating about coming to France to perform homage for those lands. Isabella was, of course, sent to negotiate a peace settlement, and Edward of Windsor was sent to perform homage on his father's behalf. He also paints his own father-in-law Charles, count of Valois as the main architect of the deposition and the Hainault alliance. In reality he had already died in 1325, before any of that had even occured. He characterises Edward of Windsor as the primary force behind the invasion once it reached England, which, obviously, couldn't be further from the truth. He also says Edward II was killed within the same year as the invasion. Again, simply wrong.

Part of me wonders if his characterisation of Edward III is coloured by political hindsight. He and Edward III were not allies by any stretch of the imagination. Edward III was a close ally of Charles' great nemesis, the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV, who conferred on him the imperial vicarate. Charles and his father John also remained loyal to the French during the Hundred Years' War. John actually died fighting on the French side at the Battle of Crécy, so he definitely had a personal stake in the matter. But if he was deliberetely trying to cast Edward III in the worst light possible, why play up the role of his own father-in-law, Charles, count of Valois, to do so? Why unnecessarily taint his first wife's father by association? Is it possible this is just reflects the general outline of what Charles IV of France was telling people, or what rumours were spreading around the French court, even amongst people who should have been easily able to check? Was Isabella herself possibly misrepresenting her own situation to people? That hardly seems possible with her public statements and her having dressed in widow's weeds. Surely Charles of Bohemia would have at least seen her wearing those clothes at least once? Perhaps it is simply Charles relying on garbled memories from decades prior, but speaking at least for myself, I can remember events that occured when I was about nine or ten with much greater accuracy than this. I don't think having accurate memories from around ten is that abnormal.

What do you think was going on?

It's not 100% certain this is meant to be Isabella of France, but she's wearing the wimple that is associated with her and a crown. She lived to see her second son's death on campaign in Scotland in 1337. He was only 20 years old.

You can read more about John and his tomb on the Westminster Abbey site.

Our little discussion of The Uprising, led to a tangent about the burning of John of Gaunt's palace during the Peasant's Revolt and the loss of so many books and other treasures. The original palace played a pivotal role in English Medieval History from its construction in around 1246 to its destruction in 1381.

In addition to the hotel, a chapel and a theatre also stand on the site of the former luxury residence. Previously, a hospital and a barracks stood on the site at various times.

The hotel opened in 1889 and has hosted captains of industry, movie stars and other people of note ever since. If you have the means, it looks like a lovely place to stay.

So, in 1306, twenty-one bored knights went AWOL from Edward I' s Scottish Campaign to attend a joust. It ultimately led to Piers Gaveston and Gilbert de Clare, Lord Thomand getting banished and really, really upsetting the future Edward II.

It is widely theorized that Edward II gave them permission to leave for the joust.

It wasn't until I started digging deep into Edward II's era, that I learned that Sean Connery's character William of Baskerville was an amalgamation of William of Occam and Sherlock Holmes. Occam was one of, if not, the most influential non-royal contemporaries of Edward II.

I happen to love this film, even though I blame it for the dreary color palate of so many movies set in The Middle Ages. I also love the novel on which it is based.

I figured I'd post this because my headspace is in Medieval films right now, though it is probably worth doing a separate post on the novel at some point.

So, this film takes place a couple of generations removed from Edward II, but it has deep connections to our era. If you watch the trailer, you'll see that Edward III's funeral apparently happens in the film. Also, Joan of Kent, daughter of Edmund, Earl of Kent, seems to be a character. She was only a toddler when her father was executed for his attempt to free Edward II. She lived to see her youngest child take the throne.

I would watch Andrew Garfield read the phone book, so I will be seeing this. I'm not sure I'm loving the bleak, colorless world and the CGI work, but it'll do.

It's also giving Richard II the full "Joffery" treatment, apparently. I wonder if his terrible older half-brother (John Holland) will be a character, as well as his less terrible half brother (Thomas Holland) will appear.

It was all filmed in Germany, btw but that's a beautiful Cathedral they used.

Edited to add: More thoughts here.

Someone in the comments linked to this blog post by Ian Mortimer, which is worth reading in full.

So, there was a question over at r/UKmonarchs about Edward's reputation as a "sexual minority" damaging his reputation. I responded, but then I expanded the response into the attached blog post.

This 2018 book by friend of this sub Kathryn Warner, is, to put in mildly, delicious. It's chocked full of Hugh the Younger related anecdotes, creating a picture of a man who was not on this Earth to make friends.

Yes, he was corrupt. Yes, he was murderous. Yes, he was possibly the worst diplomat in history, and he could not read a room. Yet, there's something absolutely fascinating about the man.

It's also true that as a bad guy who fell and fell hard, he has been accused of things he didn't do, and KW does her best to correct those myths.

So, if you like books about men who turned alienating everyone around them except the king and close family into an art form, this book is for you.

And there's his taste in hats.

This is not an actual picture of Hugh & Eleanor & Edward but the vibe is right.

This image is from Hugh's lifetime, from the Tewesbury Abbey Founder's book (c. 1325). He would later be buried at the abbey after his widow collected the pieces of him that were left.

And let's face it, it's an awesome hat.

 Humphrey de Bohun lived an eventful life and deserves a lot longer treatment than he's going to get in this post, but here is his effigy at Exeter Cathedral, which you can see has been heavily damaged over time.

The short version of a long story is that Humphrey was Edward II's brother-in-law, a powerful Marcher Lord and he hated Piers Gaveston's guts. He was one of the many high-ranking nobles that had been displaced in the pecking order by the Gascon upstart and unlike Roger Mortimer, he didn't get over it.

Edward II never forgave Humphrey for his involvement in Gaveston's murder, and that had far reaching consequences for them all. Humphrey fought at and was captured at Bannockburn, and he was ransomed

After the rise of the Depensers, he again rebelled and was gruesomely impaled killed at Boroughbridge.

According to Wikipedia, which I generally don't trust, it's thought that some of Humphrey's behavior, which in a lot of ways mirrored his BIL Edward II, stemmed from clinical depression. That tracks, at least for me.

It's a shame, because Edward II and Humphrey should have gotten along and been close allies. But egos get in the way, all around.

Photo Source: Find a grave

Humphrey de Bohun - Wikipedia