ONE OF THE DOWNSIDES of advanced old age, in the Middle Ages as today, is that one gradually outlives family and friends. Though not old by modern standards, upon his death at 65 in June 1377, Edward III had survived his wife, Queen Philippa (d. 1369), and his siblings, namely his brother (John of Eltham, earl of Cornwall (d. 1336)) and two sisters (Eleanor of Woodstock, countess of Guelders (d. 1355) and Joan of the Tower, Queen of the Scots (d. 1362)). Similarly, along with three children who died very young, five of his nine offspring living past infancy also predeceased him: Joan of the Tower (d. 1348); Margaret of Windsor, countess of Pembroke (d. 1361); Mary of Waltham, duchess of Brittany (d. 1362); Lionel of Antwerp, duke of Clarence (d. 1368); and most famously, Edward, the Black Prince, his son and heir designate (d. 1376). All of these children, whether they had lived past infancy or not, are commemorated on the side of Edward's tomb monument in Westminster Abbey. Edward also outlived many close companions of his prime – William Montagu, earl of Salisbury (d. 1344), Henry Grosmont, duke of Lancaster (d. 1361), and Walter Mauny (d. 1372), to name but those closest to him – men who had helped the king seize power in 1330 and/or hold onto it thereafter, whether through support at home or military activities abroad. Mark Ormrod has often noted the importance of death in Edward III's life, his ‘sheer capacity for survival’ being beaten only by King George III, Queen Victoria and the present queen, Elizabeth II. This essay examines how Edward reacted to these deaths, as husband, brother, father, and friend, but also as the primary representative of a royal dynasty which had seen such a fundamental crisis at the beginning of the reign, namely the deposition of his father, Edward II. Moreover, the events of the previous reign left problematic legacies not just in terms of the forced end of a monarch's tenure. There were also the issues of both Edward II and Queen Isabella's familial, aristocratic and wider European relationships, including lovers for both king and queen (Piers Gaveston, Roger Mortimer, and possibly Hugh Despenser the Younger), armed revolts against each as governors of the realm, and problems with France, Scotland and Ireland.

Leicestershire has often been considered something of a backwater when it comes to the 1381 revolt. In most modern work on the rebellion, when the county is mentioned at all, it is usually only to note that, around 17 or 18 June, some 1,200 inhabitants of Leicester assembled south-east of the town at Gartree Hill. Once gathered, they prepared to repel insurgent peasants rumoured to be marching from the south, bent on destroying the Leicestershire possessions of their local lord, the duke of Lancaster, a well-known focus of rebel hatred. Though the confrontation between the townspeople and the rebels never came to pass, this brief drama remains our main impression of the part the town and the county played in the rising. Unsurprisingly, then, the events in Leicester and its environs have sat more comfortably in Lancastrian historiography, especially the life of John of Gaunt, than in that of the revolt per se. Aside from this non-event, only a couple of other disturbances in Leicestershire are mentioned in modern discussions of the revolt, and usually in quite dismissive language. Such commentaries almost always base their discussion of events in the county on Knighton's Chronicle, a source which, as we will see, has its weaknesses. In other words, due to an embedded historiographical tradition and the considerable reliance on one narrative source, most modern accounts of Leicestershire's connection with the Great Rising are generalized, shop worn and tell only a small part of the county's story.

Yet Leicestershire's neighbours did take part in the uprising, sometimes with considerable vigour. Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire witnessed disturbances of varying degrees of severity, with Northampton, Cambridge, Ely and Peterborough all providing ‘stages for violent display’. Nonetheless, most of the Midlands has been written out of the modern history of the revolt. Over a century ago, Charles Oman made Lincolnshire, along with Leicestershire, a minor footnote in the events of 1381, and downgraded the situation in the county to ‘village ruffianism’, while also claiming that ‘The whole of the West Midlands, from Gloucestershire to Derby and Nottingham, seem to have been practically undisturbed by the insurrection.’ It was not for another eighty years, even with much publication for the revolt's 600th anniversary in the early 1980s, that the geography of the rebellion was substantially expanded to include Leicestershire's north-western neighbour, Derbyshire.

By the late fourteenth century, the idea of the English earldom was well established in the collective political, social and administrative mind. By this point the title had been defined to such a degree that it would retain the same fundamental characteristics for the rest of the Middle Ages and beyond. In 1300, ideas of both earls and earldoms had been considerably less defined, and it was processes and events taking place primarily in the mid-fourteenth century, and in particular Edward III's reign, which substantially clarified the title's position within the English social and political hierarchy. This chapter will examine the earls and earldoms of Edward's reign in three sections, never before studied as a set of interconnected developments: the identity of those holding the title during Edward's reign; the processes – both external and integral to the concept of the earldom – which had an impact on the title's development; and the events which encouraged these processes. It will also consider a different way of interpreting Edward's treatment of the title. Earls were the building blocks of the medieval elite, being the oldest, lowest and most numerous titled nobles present at any given time in England. As a result, the title's increased delineation during the fourteenth century had considerable consequences for the political and social elite. Perhaps most importantly, this sharpened definition would help decide how monarchs treated the title of earl for the remainder of the Middle Ages.

Identities and family backgrounds

Edward III's earls were a surprisingly heterogeneous group. In terms of the established nobility, though including individuals from important thirteenthand in some cases twelfth-century families, many of these men started getting individual parliamentary summons as earls only in the decades before Edward's reign. Of the truly ‘old’ nobility, those dating back before the Barons’ Wars of the 1260s, there were the Bohun earls of Hereford and Essex, de Vere earls of Oxford, and Warenne earls of Surrey. The Bohuns had held the earldom of Hereford since 1200, but were nonetheless often in opposition to the existing royal administration, whether during the events of 1215 or 1258–65, the crisis of 1297, the Contrariant rising of 1321–2 or the Nottingham Coup of 1330.

Until relatively recently, the fourteenth century in England was considered something of a no man's land, caught between the intellectual and political turbulence of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the upheavals and remakings of the fifteenth and sixteenth. The Norman Conquest, the Anarchy, Magna Carta, the Barons’ Wars, the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors, and the Reformation were all important foci for those interested in leadership and authority. By contrast, the study of the governance and the exercise of power in the fourteenth century was overshadowed: unsurprising considering the comparatively brief amount of time spent engaged in civil war over the course of the century, and the relatively laconic contemporary record of more developed political ideas. There were, of course, the ground-breaking modern studies by the likes of Thomas Frederick Tout, Maude Clarke and Bertie Wilkinson on government and administration, but their work tended to look back to the twelfth and thirteenth century for its inspiration, and they were, of course, of a much earlier generation of historians – one could argue the surveyors of fourteenth-century power dynamics, rather than the settlers.

Instead, the most notable topics for scholarly and popular attention in the century tended to be connected with the economy and society, especially the effects of recurrent outbreaks of the Black Death starting in 1348, and the origins and impact of the Rising of 1381. Both attracted scholars due to their importance for medieval society as a whole, and had inbuilt debates which would guarantee their relevance for years to come. Even when theories involving politics and the exercise of power in the study of fourteenth-century England did emerge, they tended to look inward for their relevance, with their importance arising from events and personalities rather than wider ranging processes. The most notable of these, the depositions of 1327 and 1399, while sparking interest in ideas of fourteenth-century kingship, were more often than not isolated within the reigns they brought to an end. On a larger stage, the Hundred Years War held the attention of scholars and the wider public in part because of the fame of the victories at Crecy and Poitiers, but also because of the strength of characters such as the Black Prince and Edward III.

During the Middle Ages, the English upper classes and those in power over them used geographical movement as a key index by which they could register their respective concerns. We see this most clearly in those who were either forced to leave, or who left by choice, the English king's dominions during the later medieval period. From the earl of Norfolk fleeing England after the 1075 revolt to the duke of Exeter's escape to the Continent in the early 1460s, voluntary or forced foreign exile was a powerful statement either of the intent of the individual or of those in charge. However, there is an equally potent, though far less well examined, form of ‘geographical statement’ connected with the later medieval nobility and gentry: the situation arising when an individual fell out of favour with the king, court and/or those in power, but remained, or had to remain, in the area under the English king's control – either in England itself or in lands the king ruled elsewhere. After all, though a few high-profile nobles – most notably, Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV – successfully returned from foreign exile, most of those returning found their felicity transient at best. Whether Thomas Becket's return to Canterbury in 1170, or Henry VI's reappearance during the Adeption crisis in 1470–1, most such homecomings contained a rather obvious ‘worm in the bud’, which soon broke out. That said, if by the exercise of free will, by necessity or by force, those outside royal, governmental and/ or political favour remained within the king's dominions (if not always England itself), things could be quite different. While in some ways such individuals had publically ‘opted out’, or been forced out, of the right to help govern the kingdom, they were still on the stage, or at least in the wings, and therefore could never be entirely discounted.

The fourteenth century offers a useful case study of the idea of ‘internal exile’ in the later Middle Ages. During this period there were an unusually large number of cases of official and unofficial internal exile, often due to the changing fortunes of the various factions within the royal court (e.g. 1308, 1310, 1312, 1316, 1318, 1322, 1326–7, 1328, 1330, 1340–1, 1376–7, 1388, 1389, 1397, 1399);