A coup at Nottingham Castle, a party of young men entering by a secret passage to seize the man who ruled in his name (1330)
Roger Mortimer was arrested in October 1330 and hanged at Tyburn; the queen mother was retired to Castle Rising.
Monarchs · Plantagenet
Edward III
1312–1377
House of Plantagenet — the Hundred Years' War and the Order of the Garter
In office: 1327–1377
Placed on the throne at fourteen after his father's deposition, Edward III seized power himself in 1330 by arresting Roger Mortimer at Nottingham Castle. In 1337 he claimed the French crown through his mother and began the Hundred Years' War, winning at Sluys, Crécy and Poitiers and taking Calais after an eleven-month siege. He founded the Order of the Garter, presided over an England reshaped by the Black Death and the Statute of Labourers, and reigned fifty years, dying in 1377 to be succeeded by his grandson.
How to spot them
- ▸Claimed the French crown through his mother Isabella; quartered the fleurs-de-lis with the leopards
- ▸Sluys 1340, Crécy 1346, Calais 1347, Poitiers 1356, Treaty of Brétigny 1360
- ▸Founded the Order of the Garter, motto Honi soit qui mal y pense, based at St George's Chapel, Windsor
- ▸The Black Death and the Statute of Labourers; the Good Parliament of 1376 and the first Speaker
In the reign
A naval victory in the Zwin estuary that destroyed a French fleet and gave England command of the Channel (1340)
The Battle of Sluys, 24 June 1340.
A victory in Picardy in which dismounted men-at-arms and massed longbowmen broke the flower of French chivalry (1346)
Crécy; his sixteen-year-old son won his spurs there.
Six leading citizens offering the keys of their town with nooses round their necks after an eleven-month siege, later sculpted by Rodin (1347)
The Burghers of Calais; the town stayed English until 1558.
A chivalric order of the sovereign and twenty-four knights, its badge a blue garter and its motto a rebuke to anyone who thinks ill of it (1348)
The Order of the Garter, the senior order of chivalry in England, based at St George's Chapel, Windsor.
A claim to a neighbouring crown through the female line, marked by quartering another kingdom's lilies with the English leopards (1337)
The claim through his mother Isabella opened the Hundred Years' War; the French invoked Salic law against it.
A statute of 1351 fixing wages and prices at pre-plague levels because labour had become scarce and expensive (1351)
The Statute of Labourers, a long-term cause of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.
A parliament that impeached royal ministers, drove the king's mistress from court and chose the first Speaker of the Commons (1376)
The Good Parliament; Peter de la Mare was the first Speaker, and Alice Perrers was banished.
Quick-fire facts
- •He was crowned in January 1327 aged fourteen and took personal power in October 1330
- •He married Philippa of Hainault in 1328; their children included Edward the Black Prince and John of Gaunt
- •The Black Death reached England in 1348 and killed perhaps a third to a half of the population
- •David II of Scotland was captured at Neville's Cross in 1346 and John II of France at Poitiers in 1356
- •The Treaty of Brétigny (1360) gave him enlarged French lands in full sovereignty in return for renouncing the French crown, though it was never fully executed
- •His gold noble, struck from 1344, showed the king in a ship, commemorating Sluys
- •The Statute of Pleading (1362) required court pleadings to be in English rather than French
- •The Black Prince died in 1376 and the king in June 1377, so the throne passed to his grandson Richard II; he is buried at Westminster Abbey
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Sources
- The Royal Household — Edward III (r. 1327–1377)
- Ian Mortimer — The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III