The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

Edward was wealthy with the spoils of war, and safely at peace with his diminished neighbors. He continued his program of lavish public events. He made popular legal and symbolic changes, creating a statutory limit on royal purveyances (wartime seizures) and changing the language of parliamentary legal proceedings from the Norman conquerors’ French to the native English, as vernacular English literature began flourishing. He gifted his sons important titles in different parts of his territories, giving them resources and responsibilities that did not compete but could form a coalition.

In the 1360s, two of Edward’s daughters, his wife, and his son, Lionel, died of sickness, Lionel having failed to Anglicize Ireland. The new French king stopped ransom payments to Edward and aimed to reassert French dominance. In 1367, Prince Edward (now governing Aquitaine) won an impressive victory at Najera, but the campaign brought bankruptcy and disease. Chronically sick, he returned to England. In 1370, an aging Edward and France were again at war.

In the early 1370s, military disasters depleted Edward’s continental territories. Pirates impacted trade. Economic stability and law and order deteriorated. Edward and Prince Edward were physically weak; John of Gaunt (Edward’s third son) tried to offer mediation as corruption and discontent abounded.