Politics and the People in Thirteenth-Century England

Summary

Amorphous though they may seem, ‘the people’ of our title are easy enough to define. They comprised the peasants of the countryside, both free and villein, and most of those living in the towns, below the level of the loose oligarchies which generally controlled town government: in other words, the great bulk of the population, excluding the governing elite of churchmen, nobles and the knightly class. In what follows we shall ask, and try to answer, a series of questions about this large and socially disparate group. How familiar were its members with national affairs and national politics? How was political information transmitted to them and disseminated by them? Why did kings seek to inform them about their policies and to demand their support? And what was the particular importance of the thirteenth century in these processes?

This formidable agenda might start with a single more limited and less portentous question. Would most English people, say, in 1250, have known who the king was? The answer, which we might at first be inclined to reject, is almost certainly ‘yes’. The majority of the king's subjects would by that date have had in their purses the new ‘long cross’ pennies of Henry III, with the king titled ‘Rex Henricus’ and identified by his crown and in some cases by his sceptre as well; and it is striking that historians of the central Middle Ages, unlike their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, have made so little of the coinage as a means of communication and an expression of royal authority.