Edward III and the English Peerage Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART ONE New Parliamentary Peerage Creations, 1330–77: the Sources and Uses of Royal Patronage
- PART TWO The Impact and Rationale of Edward III's Patronage
- 6 Contemporary response
- 7 Distribution of royal favour
- 8 Kings, the parliamentary peerage and royal patronage in the later Middle Ages
- Appendices
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Distribution of royal favour
from PART TWO - The Impact and Rationale of Edward III's Patronage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART ONE New Parliamentary Peerage Creations, 1330–77: the Sources and Uses of Royal Patronage
- PART TWO The Impact and Rationale of Edward III's Patronage
- 6 Contemporary response
- 7 Distribution of royal favour
- 8 Kings, the parliamentary peerage and royal patronage in the later Middle Ages
- Appendices
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
PREVIOUS chapters have looked at Edward III's patronage to a group of ‘new’ supporters and its reception. Unprecedented in its scope and focus, and clearly connected with concurrent or future membership in the parliamentary peerage, it was a massive, if not entirely realised, programme and, as such, was bound to have a considerable impact. Having examined the background, sources, implementation and reaction to Edward's patronage, we are now ready to reanalyse both the motivation and the impact of this king's endowments of his ‘new men’, and place it had within the larger framework of royal patronage to the English peerage as a whole from 1330 to 1377.
The new parliamentary peerage
If creation also involved endowment one may well ask, why did the king wish to create new earls and other peers? If the members of the higher nobility were such obviously bad things, obstacles to good government, natural enemies to the royal authority, why didn't sensible kings let them die out? Why multiply a conspicuous evil, why create obstacles to one's own exercise of power? Was it just blind folly that led Edward III to reverse his grandfather's policy of limitation? To revive the lapsed earldom of Devon for Hugh Courtenay in 1335 and to create six new earldoms on a single day in March 1337? And five more by 1362? If not, then what were his reasons? And for summoning still more new men to his frequent parliaments?
Edward III's goal, in McFarlane's view, was service in peace and war which, along with royal kinship, were ‘the two motives for patronage throughout the centuries’.
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- Information
- Edward III and the English PeerageRoyal Patronage, Social Mobility and Political Control in Fourteenth-Century England, pp. 138 - 153Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004