An English Empire The Plantagenets

Caversham Manor in Berkshire.

The year is 1219.

William Marshall is the most powerful knight in the land

and Regent of England.

The 11-year-old boy at his bedside

is the fourth Plantagenet king to rule England -

Henry III.

The Plantagenets were a French Dynasty, who ruled England

and much of France for 50 years.

But Henry's father, King John, had lost most of their lands in France.

And when Henry came to the throne at the age of nine,

half of England was under French occupation.

William Marshall had sworn to protect the young king.

"Even if the whole world abandons the boy," he said,

"I will not fail him."

William Marshall kept his word. He defeated the French,

fought off the rebellious English barons, and ensured

that the young Plantagenet would hold on to his crown.

But now, William Marshall was dying

and the fate of the Plantagenets rested on the shoulders of a child.

Many predicted disaster.

Instead, something remarkable happened.

The Plantagenet dynasty not only survived, it grew stronger.

Under their rule, over the next 150 years,

medieval England reached its peak.

Parliament was born

and a clear sense of national identity emerged.

Their roots were in France, French was their language,

but the Plantagenet family helped foster

a new sense of English nationhood.

Out of their dynastic ambitions would grow an English empire.

For the first 50 years of Plantagenet rule,

the English Channel acted as a bridge,

connecting the king and his barons to the lands they owned in France.

But, by the reign of Henry III,

most of their ancestral homelands in France had been lost.

The English barons were forced to make a commitment

to one side of the Channel or the other.

The kings of England and France

presented the barons with a stark choice -

give up their lands in England and do homage to the King of France

or give up their lands in France

and swear allegiance to the King of England.

The Channel was no longer a bridge,

but a barrier between competing powers.

Possession of French lands always drove the Plantagenet dynasty

but, for now, they turned their energies to the country

they still ruled - to England.

Henry III was not by nature a warrior.

The Boy King grew up to be a pious ruler,

devoted to pilgrimage and prayer.

In 1245, he began rebuilding Westminster Abbey,

a project that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

The old Romanesque Basilica

was replaced with an immense gothic structure.

This was an architecture of light and sophistication.

The style was French

but it was dedicated to the memory of an English king.

The majesty of Westminster Abbey today

is the result of Henry III's devotion to Edward the Confessor

and his desire to glorify him.

Henry saw Westminster as the centre of the Plantagenet kingdom,

and in the heart of the abbey itself, he constructed

an elaborate new shrine to the saintly Anglo-Saxon king.

Edward the Confessor is the only English king to have been canonised.

Henry was aligning himself with both God and England.

Edward's golden coffin sat on base of Purbeck marble.

These niches were carved for pilgrims to kneel in prayer.

But the Abbey also served a worldly purpose.

Henry's piety hadn't extinguished his dynastic ambition.

He wanted Westminster Abbey

to rival the great churches of the French Kings.

His vision of the Abbey was as the place of coronation

and burial for all future Plantagenet kings.

Westminster Abbey would be forever associated with Henry,

as his crowning achievement.

But Plantagenet ambition came at a price.

Its rebuilding cost more than twice Henry's annual royal income.

And he had other expensive plans.

Like all his predecessors, Henry was determined to expand

his Plantagenet empire, whatever the cost.

Henry wasn't a warrior king, but he could use

the revenues of England to add to the Plantagenet dominions.

The Pope was inviting Henry to purchase the rights

to the Kingdom of Sicily,

and he couldn't refuse the chance to add to the family's lands.

He accepted on behalf of his younger son, Edmund.

The only snag was the price tag.

We know what happened next,

because of a contemporary account of Henry's reign.

Kept at Corpus Christi College Cambridge is a manuscript

written and illustrated by a St Albans monk, Matthew Paris.

It's called the Chronica Majora, The Great Chronicle.

He tells us Henry agreed to pay the Pope

three times his annual income,

for the chance to secure Sicily as a Plantagenet land.

It was a huge sum of money, and a great risk.

If Henry defaulted on payment,

he faced excommunication from the Church.

For a pious man like Henry,

excommunication would be unbearable, but still he pursued the policy.

Even his own brother thought he'd gone mad.

He compared the Pope's offer to a man saying,

"I sell you the moon, now climb up and take it."

It was an ambitious plan to expand Plantagenet power,

but it placed royal family interests against those of the barons,

and it backfired badly.

The barons were the land-owning nobility of England.

They provided the King with armies to fight his wars.

And he needed their agreement to raise taxes to fund his ambitions.

Yet Henry was alienating his barons by pursuing Sicily.

And they held another grievance against the King.

Henry had filled his court with foreign-born relatives

from Savoy and Poitou.

The barons bitterly resented them.

French remained the language of court,

but there was a growing suspicion of all things foreign.

Plantagenet dynastic ambitions were still international, but

they increasingly came up against a new force - national feeling.

You can see it in the works of Matthew Paris.

Here he shows a French invasion fleet

being defeated by English forces.

While the bishops bless those who are fighting, as it says,

"for the liberation of England".

And here he praises a patriotic baron,

who would struggle to preserve Anglia Anglis.

England for the English.

National feeling was a growing force Henry couldn't ignore.

He'd taken a huge risk in mortgaging his kingdom

to expand a Plantagenet empire in the Mediterranean.

But now, he was bankrupt

and the English barons were on the point of rebellion.

Things came to a head one April morning in 1258.

Seven barons in full armour confronted Henry,

here in Westminster Hall.

The King was startled, "What is this, my Lords, am I your captive?"

They reassured him that they were not rebels,

but friends of the Crown, but they insisted that the King

dismiss his foreign relatives and take back their castle and lands.

The King's relatives protested noisily,

but the barons warned them, "Know for a fact

"that you will either return the castles or lose your head."

Henry had little choice but to agree.

The King's submission to the barons

triggered a chain of reforming legislation

that would transform the way England was governed.

The reforms would be agreed by a committee of 24,

12 chosen by the King and 12 by the barons.

For the first time in English history,

power would be shared by the King with a 15-member council.

These historic reforms are known as the Provisions of Oxford.

Medieval kings had always claimed to rule by the grace of God,

but Henry now reluctantly swore an oath

to share power with the barons,

in the name of le Commune d'Angleterre,

the Community of England.

Provoked by Plantagenet extravagance,

the Provisions of Oxford mark an important moment

in the history of England, and of the limitation of royal power.

For 20 years, the assemblies where the King consulted

with his bishops and barons

had been known by a term derived from the French, "parler", to talk.

This gave us the name of a new institution, Parliament.

Henry appealed to the Pope to extricate himself

from the Provisions of Oxford.

But his own brother-in-law, Simon De Montford,

condemned Henry as a king who had lost touch with his people.

De Montfort saw himself as England's saviour.

The King knew he was in danger.

He told De Montfort,

"I fear thunder and lightning beyond measure, but by God's head

"I dread you more than all the thunder and lightning in the world."

He was right to be afraid.

From his base here in Kenilworth Castle,

De Montfort raised an army against the King.

In 1264, Simon De Montfort confronted royal troops,

led by the King and his son Prince Edward, outside Lewes.

De Montfort's men were outnumbered,

but they inflicted a humiliating defeat on Henry,

and took Prince Edward prisoner.

Henry remained king in name only.

For the next 15 months, England was ruled, not by a Plantagenet,

but by Simon De Montfort.

And he did so through Parliament.

De Montfort's Parliament of 1265 is often regarded

as the forerunner of the modern Parliament.

As always, it included barons and bishops,

who sit nowadays as the House of Lords.

But for the first time,

knights and burgesses were sent from the Shires and from the Boroughs,

elected to Parliament by the property owners of England.

Parliament now had the beginnings of a second House,

later to be known as The Commons.

Henry III seemed to be a spent force,

but his son Edward was a warrior,

prepared to defend his Plantagenet birthright to the death.

With the help of men loyal to his cause,

Edward escaped his captivity in Hereford.

He raised an army and confronted De Montfort at Evesham.

At the battle of Evesham,

Edward re-asserted Plantagenet rule in England.

De Montfort's supporters were slaughtered

and De Montfort himself killed in the battle.

His hands and feet were cut off.

His testicles severed and hung scornfully over his nose.

Then his head was sent to the wife of one of his chief enemies.

De Montfort's rule was over.

But the English Parliament lived on,

and future Plantagenet kings would ignore it at their peril.

Henry had had a lucky escape.

He returned to the life of religious devotion and pilgrimage.

He'd gambled with the Plantagenet crown,

and his actions had provoked the opening up of Parliament

to elected representatives of the English people.

Henry's England had a growing sense of national spirit.

But when he died, Henry revealed his own true allegiance.

Henry's body was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey,

to spend eternity alongside his beloved Anglo-Saxon hero,

Edward the Confessor.

But his heart was sent to be buried with his Plantagenet ancestors,

at the Abbey of Fontevraud in Anjou.

An English King, but a French heart,

a Plantagenet to the last.

Edward, the warrior prince,

now became King Edward I of England.

Tall and intimidating, with a mop of curly hair,

Edward was known as Longshanks.

He inherited a country recovering from turmoil.

Edward also inherited the famous Plantagenet temper.

Reputedly he once frightened an unfortunate Archbishop of York,

literally to death.

But he'd learned two things from his father's mistakes -

to keep the barons happy, and not to run out of money.

And he sought to find ways to attain both those goals.

Like his ancestors, Edward encouraged the planning

of new towns to generate wealth and taxes.

Towns like Hull and Winchelsea

nurtured a new society based on trade,

and trade became the lifeblood of the Plantagenet dynasty.

Medieval England reached its economic peak under Edward I.

But there was a darker side to its growing sense of national identity.

England's Jewish population had arrived from France

shortly after the Norman Conquest.

The Pope had decreed that lending money at interest was a sin for Christians,

so the Jews became the chief source of credit

for the King and his barons.

Jews were often resented, they were frequently persecuted

and attacked. And by the reign of Edward I, in this age of crusades,

England had become an increasingly militant Christian nation.

The King himself was a conventional Christian

with no sympathy for the plight of the Jews.

At a time when English national feeling was growing,

Edward's vision of England was a fiercely Christian one -

this England had no place for the Jews.

With the support of his barons, Edward decided to expel

the entire Jewish population from his realm.

Some 2,000-3,000 Jews departed from the shores of England.

There was to be no resident Jewish population in the country

for the next 370 years.

Yet Plantagenet ambitions always extended beyond England.

Edward was inspired by King Arthur, a popular figure in folklore,

who was said to have once ruled over a united Britain.

Edward wanted to align the Plantagenet dynasty

with this legendary, all-conquering leader.

And he had the conquest of Wales in his sights.

Wales had troubled the Plantagenet kings for generations,

its rugged terrain made it hard to conquer and control,

and they regarded its inhabitants as little more than barbarians.

But Edward I was a man who never gave up what he saw as his rights.

And these included, in his eyes, overlordship of Wales.

But a rival dynasty stood in the way of Plantagenet ambition.

The Princes of Gwynedd had ruled here for centuries.

Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, and his younger brother Dyfed,

were the latest in a long line of warrior leaders

who held a crown said to be King Arthur's.

Edward's father Henry, recognised Llywelyn

as Prince of Wales, as long as he paid homage to the English crown.

But when Edward took the throne, Llywelyn refused to pay homage.

Edward declared Llywelyn a rebel and a disturber of the peace.

And in 1277 set off westward from Chester

at the head of a powerful army

of 800 knights, crossbow men from Gascony and 16,000 infantry.

Along the way, they were supplied by a fleet of ships

sent up from the royal ports of the south coast, like Winchelsea.

The Welsh were hopelessly outnumbered.

Edward's army captured Anglesey, the bread basket of Wales.

At a stroke, this provided food for his own men

and cut off supplies to the Welsh.

Llywelyn had no choice but to surrender and pay homage to Edward.

An uneasy truce followed.

But it was broken,

when Dafydd ap Gruffydd led a new rebellion against English rule.

For over a year, the Plantagenet army clashed with Welsh defenders.

But in 1282, disaster struck for the Welsh dynasty.

Llywelyn was killed in battle.

His head cut off and sent to London.

Dafydd ap Gruffydd held out here at Dolbadarn Castle

for a few months more.

Finally he was captured and tried by the English.

Condemned to death as the last survivor of a family of traitors,

he was hanged and then cut down and disembowelled,

his entrails were burned in front of him,

his body was quartered and then his head was cut off

and sent to the Tower of London

to be displayed alongside that of his brother.

As a final act of ritual humiliation

the Welsh surrendered to the English King the crown of King Arthur.

Wales was now a Plantagenet dominion.

Edward had confronted a rival dynasty, and emerged victorious.

Now, to stamp his authority, he began building

and repairing a chain of castles across North Wales.

These fortresses represent the peak of medieval castle building.

Edward personally chose the site for each of his castles,

and the most impressive of all

arose above the River Seiont at Caernarfon.

This twin-towered gatehouse, known as the King's Gate,

was built according to the designs of King Edward himself.

The approach to the castle was guarded by arrow slits,

and by spy holes.

And once here, you would have been confronted with a drawbridge,

six portcullises and five sets of gates.

This was Plantagenet military architecture

at its most intimidating.

Edward engaged the most famous castle architect in Europe.

Master James of St George.

King Edward was keen to associate the Plantagenet dynasty

with the glories of the Christian Roman empire.

And so he commanded Master James to base his designs

on the great walls of Constantinople.

This meant building many-sided towers

instead of the more usual round ones.

The walls are up to 20-feet thick,

and patterned with bands of coloured stone,

a byzantine design not previously seen in the British Isles.

Caernarfon Castle was a bold statement of Plantagenet domination.

For the Welsh it was a painful reminder of conquest and oppression.

Edward was also preparing for the future,

and laying a Plantagenet dynastic claim to Wales.

In 1284, the King's 11th child, a son named Edward, was born here.

At the age of 16, Edward of Caernarfon

would be declared Prince of Wales,

a title stolen from Llywelyn ap Gruffydd,

which has been borne by the eldest son

of the English sovereign ever since.

It looked at one point as though Scotland would go the way of Wales,

swallowed up by the English kingdom.

But a different dynastic problem had arisen there.

When the King of Scotland died in 1286, he left no male heir.

The bloodline of Scottish kings was broken.

The dead king's three-year-old granddaughter,

Margaret of Norway, was next in line for the throne.

Edward came up with a neat Plantagenet solution.

Margaret would return to Scotland to marry his own infant son.

The situation would be resolved by diplomacy in marriage, not by war.

And Britain would be united under the Plantagenets.

It remains one of the great "what ifs" of British history.

No marriage took place, little Margaret died in Orkney

on her way to Scotland, and with her,

died Edward's plan for a bloodless Plantagenet takeover of Scotland.

After the death of Margaret, Edward agreed to tolerate

a subordinate king in Scotland.

But as soon as he showed signs of independence,

Edward reacted with typical Plantagenet brutality.

His troops sacked Berwick and defeated a Scottish army at Dunbar.

English garrisons and officials

were installed across Scotland to intimidate and control.

For Edward, the Kingdom of Scotland had ceased to exist.

As he handed the royal seal of Scotland to one of his barons

he said, "A man does good business when he rids himself of a turd."

But Scotland did not go the way of Wales.

This wasn't a battle between dynasties,

but between two countries

with a growing sense of national identity and pride.

No-one displayed this more than one of the Scottish resistance leaders,

William Wallace.

Wallace was a proud and charismatic figure.

He refused to pay homage to Edward.

To crush Wallace, the English army had to cross the River Forth.

On a 13th century map of Britain, by Matthew Paris,

Scotland is shown dramatically divided by the River Forth.

And the only place to cross was the bridge at Stirling.

It was here that William Wallace confronted the English army,

to preserve Scotland's freedom.

At this time, the bridge here was just wide enough

for the English forces to cross two abreast.

Once half the army had crossed,

the Scots swooped down and cut off the bridge.

SWORDS CLATTER

The English stranded on the Northern bank were surrounded.

The result was slaughter.

Around 5,000 English infantrymen died at Stirling Bridge.

The battle didn't decide the issue, but Wallace's defiance shook Edward.

International dynasties, like the Plantagenets,

struggled to understand national feeling.

Edward underestimated the strength of resistance it could produce.

He was riding to confront another Scottish leader, Robert Bruce,

when he died in 1307.

Plantagenet determination to subdue Scotland was undiminished.

But Edward II's defeat by Robert Bruce at Bannockburn

seven years later, set the limits to Plantagenet ambitions in Britain.

They would never conquer the Scots.

And they provoked a deepening of Scottish national pride,

and a sense of independence that survives to this day.

FEMALE CHORAL SINGING

The new Plantagenet king lacked his father's warrior instincts.

Edward II preferred gardening to fighting.

He would fail to build on his father's legacy,

and his lapses of judgement would threaten to destroy the Plantagenet dynasty.

Edward's reign began well.

He secured a great prize in the marriage market,

Isabella, daughter of the King of France.

She was just 12 years old,

but already considered a beauty of beauties and very wise.

A month after their wedding,

Westminster Abbey was the setting for Edward's coronation.

This was his first opportunity to show off his new Queen.

Instead, Isabella was upstaged.

As Edward and Isabella walked down the aisle,

it wasn't the young Queen who caught the eye.

Walking just ahead of them

and leading the procession was a young man called Piers Gaveston.

He was dressed in clothes of imperial purple,

studded with pearls.

And in his hands he cradled the crown of St Edward the Confessor,

the most sacred of the royal regalia.

There was no more privileged position in the royal procession.

Gaveston was being honoured as the most important noble in the land.

PEACOCK CALLS

At the banquet that followed,

Edward and Gaveston shocked the guests

with their display of affection for each other.

Isabella's uncles walked out in disgust.

Every medieval king had court favourites,

but none had ever achieved the power

and influence Piers Gaveston exercised over Edward II.

The King claimed he loved him like a brother.

But the St Paul's chronicler noted that the King frequented

Piers's couch more than the Queen's.

We can never know for sure if there was a sexual relationship

between Edward II and Piers Gaveston,

but we do know that there are no mentions of homosexuality during their lifetimes,

and they had plenty of enemies who would have brought it up.

The earliest references come after Edward's downfall,

and from men who were deeply hostile to him.

What can't be doubted is that Edward was infatuated with Gaveston,

to a degree that compromised his Kingship,

and provoked the baron's hatred.

But Gaveston displayed no fear of the barons.

Famed for his quick and sarcastic tongue,

Gaveston gave the barons nicknames.

The Earl of Lancaster was The Fiddler.

The Earl of Lincoln, Burstbelly,

And the Earl of Warwick, whose seat was here at Warwick Castle,

was the Black Dog of Arden.

But this was a dangerous game - the Black Dog could bite.

Once again, the Plantagenet rule was under threat

because of foreign-born court favourites.

Once again, the barons felt compelled to act.

Gaveston was captured

and put in the custody of the Earl of Pembroke

who guaranteed his safety.

But in his absence, the Black Dog pounced.

The Earl of Warwick seized Gaveston.

After a token trial, he was led out on the road to Kenilworth.

When they reached Blacklow Hill,

here on the land of the Earl of Lancaster,

Gaveston was first stabbed and then beheaded.

His body was left on the hillside

until claimed by two Dominican friars.

"And that was the end of Piers," commented a contemporary chronicler,

"who had risen on high, but now fell into nothingness."

If Edward had now concentrated his energies on being king,

his infatuation with Gaveston might have been quickly forgotten.

Instead, to Isabella's horror,

he began to shower favours on another young noble -

Hugh Dispenser.

Dispenser and Edward became inseparable.

Angry barons said he bewitched the King's mind.

But Dispenser made an enemy yet more dangerous than the barons -

Edward's Queen, Isabella.

Isabella came to despise Dispenser,

in the words of a contemporary chronicle, "with a more than perfect hatred".

But Edward still needed Isabella.

In 1324, the French invaded Gascony,

the last of the Plantagenet lands in France.

Isabella's brother was now the King of France,

so Edward asked his wife to travel to Paris to sue for peace.

Isabella's brother welcomed her warmly,

and promised to restore Gascony

on condition that Edward did homage for the Duchy.

With his barons threatening rebellion at home,

Edward was reluctant to leave England,

but he sent his son in his place.

And so here, at the Chateau de Vincennes outside Paris,

in the company of his mother,

the young Edward knelt at the feet of Charles IV of France.

But then, instead of returning to England,

he remained in France with his mother.

When Edward requested their return, Isabella refused.

She finally revealed her feelings

about her husband's relationship with Hugh Dispenser.

"I feel that marriage is a joining together of man and woman,

"and someone has come between my husband and me,

"trying to break this bond."

Edwards's letters to his son became increasingly violent.

"We will take such measures that you will feel it

"all the days of your life, and all other sons will learn what it means

"to disobey their lords and fathers."

A Plantagenet family crisis

was about to turn into a political disaster.

News reached the king that the rebel baron Roger Mortimer

was now Isabella's lover.

According to the Bishop of Hereford, Edward determined to strike back

with true Plantagenet vindictiveness.

If he had no other weapon, he would crush her with his teeth.

Isabella and Mortimer landed on the Suffolk coast,

and quickly found support from disaffected barons.

Edward's cause was lost.

Hugh Dispenser paid the price for his closeness to the king.

He was tied to a ladder and his genitals sliced off.

His entrails were removed, and along with his heart, thrown into a fire.

The King was taken prisoner.

According to the English chronicler Geoffrey Le Baker,

the imprisoned king was told that

if he refused to abdicate in favour of his son,

someone other than a Plantagenet would take the throne.

Weeping and barely able to stand,

Edward eventually agreed to sacrifice himself for his dynasty.

He stood down in favour of his son,

the first abdication of a King of England.

But the Plantagenet bloodline had been protected.

On the 1st of February, 1327, his son, Prince Edward, was crowned.

He was 14 years old.

His mother, Isabella, was appointed regent.

She and Mortimer now ruled England on Edward's behalf.

But a deposed former king was a new dynastic problem.

Edward was brought here, to Berkeley Castle,

and these are original documents from the castle at that time.

Here we read about the delivery of chickens

to the kitchen of the King's father, which is what Edward now was.

And here is a record of his daily expenses -

£5 a day, quite a generous amount.

And here is a report of a messenger being sent to Nottingham

to inform Isabella concerning "morte patris regis".

The death of the king's father.

The death of Edward II solved Isabella and Mortimer's problems.

But there were already questions about how Edward died.

And killing a king was an offence against God and the natural order.

The most plausible cause of death to be suggested was suffocation,

but other, more lurid accounts soon circulated.

Within 30 years, Geoffrey Le Baker and other chroniclers were writing

that Edward had had a red-hot poker inserted into his anus.

It's no surprise which version has caught the public imagination.

No-one knows for sure, but with either the red-hot poker

or suffocation, no mark would be visible,

when the king's body was displayed to show that he was truly dead.

To all appearances, Edward II died of natural causes.

The fate of the Plantagenet dynasty

now lay in the hands of Isabella and Roger Mortimer.

But three years later, tired of the corrupt rule of his mother

and her lover, the young King Edward decided to take action.

One night in October 1330,

two dozen supporters of the young King crept through a secret tunnel.

Above, in Nottingham castle, slept Isabella and Roger Mortimer.

The leader of the conspirators warned the young King,

"It is better to eat the dog than to be eaten by the dog."

But Mortimer hadn't got to rule England

without a killer's instincts.

The King's supporters knew that if their plans failed,

they would be hanged as traitors.

The young conspirators entered the castle

and made for the queen's bedchamber.

As they drew their swords and entered,

Edward stood quietly outside the room.

Suspecting her son's presence, Isabella called out,

"Good son, good son, have mercy on noble Mortimer."

But there was to be no mercy,

Mortimer was taken to the Tower of London,

and within a few weeks he was hanged like an ordinary criminal.

And out of the shadow of his mother and her lover

stepped the new Plantagenet King - Edward III.

In the uncertain world of medieval politics

people looked to omens and portents for guidance.

One place they found it was in ancient prophesies

about the fates and fortunes of kings.

The prophecy of the Six Kings drew on the legend of King Arthur.

In it, Merlin characterised the future Plantagenet Kings as animals.

Henry III was a pious lamb, Edward I a battling dragon,

Edward II was a lascivious goat,

but his son, who would grow up to be Edward III,

was a glorious wild boar with the heart of a lion,

who would conquer more than any of his blood in this world.

The message was clear -

England once again had a Plantagenet king to rally behind.

Edward III would not make the mistakes of his father.

He set out to unify the English barons around him,

and at his birthplace, Windsor Castle, he spent a royal fortune,

transforming it into the heart of his kingdom.

He turned it from a castle into a palace.

It became the most expensive single building project

by any Plantagenet king,

and the perfect setting for royal displays of chivalry.

Under Edward III, the rituals of chivalry became central

to the Plantagenet court.

Chivalry was a code of behaviour

that proudly fused military and Christian ethics.

The word refers to the customs and values of the Chevaliers,

the French term for those who rode into battle, the knights.

And it demanded that these knights be brave,

loyal and devoted to their ladies.

Edward III understood the power of chivalry like no-one else,

and he used it to bind together the knights,

the nobles and the Plantagenet crown.

Like his grandfather, Edward I,

Edward was inspired by the legend of King Arthur.

Lavish Arthurian tournaments were held in the Quadrangle

at Windsor Castle.

With staged displays of horsemanship and fighting skills.

Windsor castle became the Plantagenet Camelot.

Along with Arthur,

Edward chose a Christian hero to represent his ambition -

Saint George.

Saint George was a warrior saint

and he was the patron of knights throughout Christendom.

But Edwards's troops were already marching

with the red cross of Saint George at their head,

and it flew also from the masts of his ships.

It was becoming a symbol of England and the English King.

And Saint George would be the war cry of the English armies

in Edwards's next great conflict.

He was determined to win back

the old Plantagenet dynastic lands in France.

The French royal family had seen son succeed father for 320 years.

But in 1328, Charles IV of France died without a son to succeed him.

Edward III was the dead king's nephew.

He believed he had as strong a claim to the French throne as anyone.

Could Edward III of England become Edward I of France?

It wasn't so far-fetched.

Ever since King John had lost their old lands in France

over a century before,

the Plantagenet kings had nursed the ambition of recovering them.

To acquire the whole of France would be an even greater glory.

Edward saw an opportunity to succeed

where his Plantagenet forefathers had failed.

In 1340, he announced his claim to the French throne.

This began an era of slaughter and bloodshed

that went on for generations.

In July 1346, an army of around 10,000 men, led by Edward III,

landed in Normandy.

Edward may have claimed to be King of France,

but this was clearly an English invasion.

The battle was no longer just one between dynasties,

it was now a battle between nations.

The English rampaged unopposed through Normandy.

Finally the two great armies confronted each other

by the forest of Crecy in the Somme.

The English were drawn up on this ridge.

The French advanced from that direction.

As the battle began, a great storm broke.

Huge flocks of crows flew into the air above the armies.

Then the English archers stepped forward.

Their longbows had a range of 200 metres

and a rate of fire three times that of the crossbow.

The crossbowmen on the French side were routed.

And Edward had another shock in store for the French,

a primitive but spectacular new weapon in his armoury.

For the first time on a European battlefield,

the English used gunpowder to fire cannonballs at the French forces.

The French knights now faced volleys of thousands of arrows

amidst the crash of cannon.

They had never seen anything like it.

The King's 16-year-old son, Edward Prince of Wales,

later known as the Black Prince...

..fought his way to the heart of the battle.

The chronicler Froissart reports that a man was sent back

from the Black Prince's division to the King to ask for help.

Edward III asked him if his son were dead or wounded,

and when he heard that he was not, replied, "Send no more to me today,

"let him earn his spurs."

Most of the French knights fought to the death,

they preferred the glory of being killed in action

to the shame of fleeing the battlefield.

Fighting on the French side was John,

the blind King of Bohemia. Despite his blindness,

he wanted to strike at least one blow in the battle.

His knights tied the reins of their horses to the reins of his

to guide him into the thick of the fighting.

The Black Prince saw him ride to his death.

In order to honour the King's reckless bravery,

the Black Prince adopted as his own badge, the King's emblem.

That emblem was the ostrich feather,

which has been the badge of the Princes of Wales ever since.

Around 2,000 French knights died at Crecy.

A whole generation of French noblemen.

In contrast, it's said that

as few as 40 English men at arms lost their lives.

The battle for the French crown would continue,

but fighting beneath the flag of Saint George,

the English army was now the most feared in Europe.

At the end of the battle, King Edward embraced the Black Prince,

"My son," he said, "you have acquitted yourself nobly.

"You are worthy to rule a kingdom."

The Black Prince returned to Windsor an English national hero.

But he would never become King.

Like many a Plantagenet warrior, he was later cut down by dysentery.

But Crecy marked a high point of the Plantagenet dynasty,

and its legacy remains.

After their triumphant victory at Crecy,

the king and the Black Prince founded the Order of the Garter.

Its origins were in a great tournament at Windsor.

Two teams of 12 knights took part, one headed by the King,

and one by the Prince.

The Order was to meet here, in its own chapel,

every year on Saint George's Day, the 23rd of April.

The structure of the Order has remained the same to the present day -

the monarch, the Prince of Wales and 24 knights.

One set of stalls is designated the King's,

the facing set, the Prince's.

Many of the original founding members of the Order of the Garter

were companions of arms who had fought together at Crecy.

Now every noble in the land wanted to be bound to the King

in this most exclusive of clubs.

The Order of the Garter wasn't just another show of pageantry,

it was also a shrewd Plantagenet tool.

For 200 years, Plantagenet dynastic ambition had often clashed

with the interests of the English barons.

Now Edward III had brought the noblemen of England behind him

in his campaign to win the throne of France.

He had harnessed England's growing sense of nationhood

to his own Plantagenet dynastic vision,

to create an extraordinary fighting force.

By 1360, the English army had regained large swathes

of the Plantagenet lands in France.

Now, to dynastic ambition,

emerged the foundations of an English empire.

In 1362, Edward celebrated his 50th birthday.

He marked the occasion by introducing

one of the Plantagenets' most significant reforms.

It was known as the Statute of Pleading,

and it formally changed the language spoken in the law courts

from French to English.

In the same year, parliament was opened for the first time,

with a speech made not in French, but in English.

When Henry II, the first Plantagenet King,

took the throne in 1154, he spoke scarcely a word of English.

Two centuries later,

a dynasty that had regarded England as a possession

rather than a nation,

now saw England as its home and English as its language.

English was no longer spoken just by the peasants who worked the land.

The knights spoke it, the nobles spoke it,

even the King spoke it.

England and the Plantagenets were united as never before.

In the next programme,

the death of kings,

royal bloodletting divides the dynasty

into the warring houses of Lancaster and York.

Henry V fulfils the Plantagenets' greatest ambition at Agincourt,

and Richard III makes the Plantagenets' last stand.