ten years in France, were not likely to be peaceful when they came home. So they used to attach themselves to some great lord or baron, who would employ them in his private quarrels. The numbers of the barons were now very small, but each was proportionately more powerful; and a great man might perhaps hold four or five earldoms. The younger sons of the kings held many of these, and were often the worst rowdies at the fashionable game of ‘beggar-my-neighbour’ and ‘king of the castle’. In my schoolboy days, when we were asked what we knew of any particular baron in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, we usually thought it safe to answer, ‘He was the King’s uncle and was put to death.’ Most of the King’s uncles and cousins were put to death, and more of them deserved to be.
As regards the mere ‘politics’ and wars of the hundred and eight years from the accession of Richard Il to the death of Richard III, there is little that you need remember.
Richard II, 1377–99; his character.Richard II had many good qualities, but he was rash and hot-headed, while he was a boy his uncles and some four or five other great barons were always trying to rule in his name; when they found this difficult, they conspired against him and killed his best friends. When he came of age they despised him because he kept the peace with France, whereas they and their plundering followers had enjoyed the war. Richard, however, was no coward, and when he was not yet fifteen he had a fine opportunity of showing his pluck. In 1381 the question of the wages of farm labourers, which had been so much upset by the Black Death in 1348, led to a fearful outbreak called the ‘Peasant Revolt’ (1381) all
