The religion of Mani was founded on clear universalist principles. His travels to Upper Mesopotamia, Iran and India would have brought him in contact with Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism; and what struck him most about these established earlier religions was their apparent cultural and geographical boundaries. In a Middle Persian fragment which is probably derived from the semi-canonical Šābuhragān (a summary of his religion which he had translated into Middle Persian for the reigning Shahanshah Shapur I), Mani tells one of his disciples that the most important proof of the truth of his new revelation is its success as a universalist religion which would transcend geographical and national barriers:

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

The term ‘Manichaean’ is here used in its primary sense, with reference to the religion that was founded by Mani (or Manichaios, that is Mani ‘the living’ as the original Syriac was transmitted into Greek) in the early Sassanian empire during the third century of the common era. Mani was a visionary, for he was a mystic and a painter; he was an intellectual, with a passion for understanding all aspects of the natural world and integrating them into a coherent system; but he was also intensely practical in his approach to this divine revelation and this knowledge. We might say that Manichaeism is the first real ‘religion’ in the modern sense, because Mani established it directly and deliberately, with its scriptures and its rituals and its organisation all in place. A principal aspect of his purpose was that this teaching and this practice and this community would be universal, and would supersede all previous faiths (which indeed were understood to reach their true culmination here). Mani himself travelled widely to preach, heal, convert and establish communities; and he dispatched missionaries in all directions. This book is concerned with the religion's spread and success and ultimate demise to the west of its homeland, that is in the world of the later Roman Empire.

It has become almost axiomatic to point out that the political life and aspirations of John of Gaunt were, in an English context, quite singular. His life and career have, over the past decade, been the subject of much interest by students of later medieval English politics. First as earl of Richmond, then as duke of Lancaster, Gaunt’s relentless political machinations were the genesis of a distinct, Lancastrian ‘party’. This in turn provided him with a power base of great regional authority, which was capable of serving not only his own changing interests, but also of providing his son the one great treasure that the duke never allowed himself: the throne of England. The origins of Gaunt’s political circle, and of Lancastrian polity generally, begin with the French campaigns of his youth, and with the assembly in his retinue of a close-knit group of soldier-politicians. This group of knights, barons and magnates – many his tenants or neighbours in the north – was initially assembled for war in France but became, for him and his son, an important basis for domestic political power.

John of Gaunt thus made a formative contribution to Lancastrian government through the creation of a large, durable, flexible and effective political organisation, which we might term his affinity. Its most prominent early members – quite apart from those involved in routine estate management and functions of local governance within his English dominions – were those originally assembled for military service abroad. Over time, however, his pattern of retaining shifted, reflecting his new-found interest in domestic political affairs following the death of his father. He quickly became the leader of the north’s political community, cemented by his appointment as royal lieutenant of the Scottish Marches, a position which was probably modelled on those held by his brothers, Lionel and Edward, in Ireland, Wales and Aquitaine. As John’s interests shifted from the Continent back to England, so too did many leading northerners not already in his service gravitate toward him. These men, who were valuable in part because they wielded influence of their own, in turn received patronage and offices from both the crown and the duchy of Lancaster. It is these men who would later prove to be instrumental in Henry Bolingbroke’s coup, and who would assume important positions in his government.

In the fourteenth century Westminster Abbey fulfilled the double function of coronation church and mausoleum for the kings of England, a combination rare among the royal churches of medieval Europe. By tradition, the two functions had been combined from a very early period, even from the Abbey’s distant origins. ‘From the era of its first foundation’, claimed Prior John Flete in the fifteenth century, ‘this has been the place of royal consecration, the burial place of kings [regum sepultura], and the repository of the royal insignia.’ In fact, however, the systematic combination of functions came much later than Flete implied. Coronations were held there almost without exception from 1066, but it was not until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that it became the usual regum sepultura. Why was this? How far did it represent a royal cult of the Confessor, and how far the growing importance of London-Westminster as a capital? And once the tradition was established, why were some monarchs buried elsewhere, whether through choice or circumstance? The royal connections with the Abbey have been extensively discussed, most recently and helpfully by Emma Mason, Paul Binski and David Carpenter, but there is more to be said on the wider issues raised by royal choices of burial places.

Between 1066 and 1216 there was apparently no close relationship between Abbey and monarchy, despite the fact that the Confessor had rebuilt it as his mausoleum church. The successive coronations of Harold II (probably) and William I in the newly completed Abbey were surely intended to emphasise their respective legitimacy as heirs to the Confessor’s throne rather than any special regard for his cult or foundation; and both kings chose to be buried elsewhere in churches they had founded or patronised. This was, indeed, the pattern with all the Anglo-Norman kings: ‘each founder intended to be buried alone or, at most, with the immediate members of his family, perhaps in order to ensure an exclusive concentration of monastic intercessions’. No members of the royal family seem to have copied Edward in being buried at Westminster except for his widow Edith and Henry I’s first queen, Matilda, neither of whom may have intended burial there.

He ‘was yn those quarters a great officer, as steward, surveier or receyver of Richemont landes, whereby he waxid riche and able to build and purchace’. So wrote John Leland, who travelled throughout England in the early sixteenth century recording details about manors and landed estates, concerning Thomas Metcalfe (d.1504), who was in the service of Richard, duke of Gloucester (the future Richard III) and was appointed chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster in 1483. Metcalfe’s building project was Nappa Hall in Yorkshire, which still stands today and whose external features remain remarkably untouched. We are fortunate to have a description of the ‘before and after’ in the true manner of a television make-over programme. Leland informs us that before Metcalfe got to work on Nappa Hall, there was ‘but a cotage or litle better house, ontille this Thomas began ther to build in the which building 2 toures be very fair, beside other logginges’. The two towers are indeed an unusual feature of the hall. Comprising three storeys at the lower end rising to four at the upper, the towers flank the single storey hall, giving it a distinctive character.

The comments made about Metcalfe might be taken as a model for many ‘men of law’ of the time, who were essentially self-made men, rising through the ranks of their profession (perhaps retained in royal and/or noble service) and seeking to invest their newly acquired money in landed estates. Land and property offered the obvious choice for investment. Chaucer describes his ‘serjeant of the lawe’ thus: ‘So greet a purchasour was nowher noon/ Al was fee simple to hym in effect.’ In one reading at least this could mean that the serjeant was almost obsessively concerned with accumulating land: ‘fee simple’ could apply to land title, or more satirically to a lawyer’s grasping desire for money. But this was not necessarily a universal characteristic of the profession: not every lawyer rose through the ranks, nor did those that did necessarily rise that highly. Undoubtedly some lawyers were simply unsuccessful and remained poor and insignificant. However, many men of law can be found to have desired to use their professional expertise to their advantage and to extend their landed base as a consequence.

So wrote the anonymous author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi. He was decrying the fickleness of the earls of Lincoln and Warenne, who, having striven to procure the exile of Piers Gaveston in the spring of 1308, welcomed him back just a year later, when he was recalled from Ireland by Edward II in the summer of 1309. The relationship of Edward to his favourite was to dominate the politics of the first five years of his reign. His first act on becoming king had been to recall Gaveston, who was then in France, having been banished by Edward I. Initially, this had not caused any great resentment; Lincoln and Warrenne, and five of their fellow earls (including Lancaster) were the witnesses to the charter by which Gaveston was created earl of Cornwall, on 6 August 1307. However, Gaveston’s gross arrogance rapidly lost him their goodwill, though perhaps even more objectionable was the undue influence he exercised over royal patronage.

Disaffection was already evident by the beginning of 1308, just seven months after Edward’s accession. In mid-January, Edward and his court crossed to France for his marriage to Isabella, daughter of King Philip IV, leaving Gaveston behind as keeper of the realm. A group of magnates, who accompanied Edward, sealed letters patent at Boulogne on 31 January, pointing out that they were bound by their allegiance to uphold the king’s honour and the rights of his crown, and promising to obtain redress and make amends for ‘the oppressions that have been done and are still being done to his people day in, day out’; this juxtaposition was intended to imply a linkage between the redress of grievances and the upholding of the king’s honour. The group – which included Anthony Bek, bishop of Durham, and the earls of Lincoln, Warenne, Pembroke and Hereford – was made up of courtiers and royal servants; these were therefore men who remained fundamentally loyal to the king, but who realised that reforms were necessary in the face of mounting opposition.

Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich, is generally thought of as one of the most celebrated losers of the Hundred Years War. Ostensibly launching a crusade in 1383 against the heretical followers of the ‘anti-pope’, Clement VII (pope in Avignon), on behalf of the ‘true’ pope, Urban VI (pope in Rome), he is vilified for leading his forces instead against the supporters of Urban in the southern Low Countries, along the coast of Flanders and at Ypres. There he met a quick defeat, first at the hands of the besieged Yprois and then by running away from the opportunity of fighting the Franco–Burgundian armies led by Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy. Norman Housley calls his military actions ‘humiliating’; to May McKisack the crusade was ‘deplorable’, ‘a total failure’; while to George M. Wrong, ‘the crusade settled nothing; no burdens were lightened by it and many were heavier’. This is not to mention the fact that the bishop himself, in defending his actions on the crusade before a tribunal judging his impeachment was unwilling to accept any of the blame for the defeat, dismissing his failure simply with the notion that the Ghentenaars had made him do it: that he bore no responsibility in the matter.

The purpose of this article is not to revise Despenser’s reputation. He was not a good military leader, nor was he tried unjustly. He had not converted a single heretic; he had not punished the French; he had not succeeded in opening the recently closed markets of Flanders to English wool; and, more importantly, he had abused indulgences, had misused funds, and had profited from his willingness to retreat back across the Channel from France without doing battle with Philip the Good, all of the things for which he was put on trial for impeachment. On the other hand, Bishop Henry Despenser has been misjudged by those historians who have dismissed his ‘Ghentenaars made me do it’ trial rationalisation. The following words, the preliminary ideas of a thesis to be worked out in a more lengthy work on the bishop of Norwich’s crusade, take the position that the Ghentenaars really did make Despenser do it, that his actions in Flanders were not at his direction, but at the command of the rebel leadership in Ghent, those seeking sovereignty from the French and Burgundians.