Edward III of England

Edward III ruled England for fifty years, from 1327 to 1377, and turned a kingdom humiliated under his father into one of the strongest military powers in Europe. By claiming the French crown he began the Hundred Years' War, and his reign also saw the Black Death, the growth of Parliament's power and a revival of English as the language of public life.

Edward was born at Windsor Castle on 13 November 1312, the son of Edward II and Isabella of France. His father's reliance on unpopular favourites alienated most of the nobility. In 1325 the prince went to France with his mother, who there allied with the exiled baron Roger Mortimer; they invaded England, Edward II was forced to give up the crown, and the fourteen-year-old was proclaimed king in January 1327. Real power lay with Mortimer. In January 1328 Edward married Philippa of Hainault, and in October 1330, aged seventeen, he and a few companions seized Mortimer at Nottingham Castle. Mortimer was executed and Edward began to rule in person.

Edward first intervened in Scotland, besieging Berwick, defeating a Scottish relief army at Halidon Hill and backing Edward Balliol as king, though these gains slipped away. In 1337 Philip VI of France confiscated Edward's duchy of Aquitaine. Edward answered by claiming the French throne as a grandson of Philip IV, and so opened the long conflict with the Kingdom of France. At first his costly continental alliances achieved little beyond the naval victory at Sluys in June 1340, and money troubles led to a bitter quarrel at home.

The war turned in 1346. Edward landed in Normandy, sacked Caen and on 26 August crushed a much larger French army at the Battle of Crécy. That October the Scottish king David II was captured at Neville's Cross. After a siege of almost a year, Calais surrendered in August 1347. In 1356 Edward's eldest son, the Black Prince, won at Poitiers and captured King John II of France. By the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360 Edward gave up his claim to the French crown in exchange for full sovereignty over greatly enlarged lands in France.

The Black Death reached England in 1348 and killed a third or more of the people. Edward's government tried to hold wages down with the Ordinance and Statute of Labourers, laws that bred lasting resentment. Constant demands for war taxes strengthened the House of Commons, and in the 1350s statutes defined treason and limited papal power in England. Edward bound the nobility to the crown by creating new earls and the first English dukes, and around 1348 he founded the Order of the Garter. In 1362 English was ordered to be used in the law courts.

Edward's later years were less successful. War with France resumed in 1369, and by 1375 the English held little beyond Calais, Bordeaux and Bayonne. The ageing king withdrew from government, and his mistress Alice Perrers and his advisers were attacked in the Good Parliament of 1376, which produced the first impeachments and the first Speaker of the Commons. The Black Prince died in June 1376, and Edward died at Sheen on 21 June 1377. He was succeeded by his ten-year-old grandson, Richard II. Rival claims among the descendants of his sons are often seen as laying the ground for the Wars of the Roses.

Our 1300 map shows the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland just before his reign; the nearest later map, for 1400, shows England's French holdings reduced after the second phase of the war.