The Middle Ages, 1066 to 1485

8 stops32 facts

Four centuries of fighting on three borders — Wales, Scotland and France — and in the middle of it the two things that outlasted the fighting. In 1215 Magna Carta puts a limit on what a king may do, and the council of advisers around the king slowly becomes a Parliament with two houses. In 1348 plague arrives and kills about a third of the people of England. English, pushed aside by a Norman court, comes back as the language of the courts and of official documents. The era closes in 1485 at Bosworth Field, where a war between two royal houses ends with a third of them on the throne.

What is in this era

  1. Wars with Wales and ScotlandThe Statute of Rhuddlan, the Battle of Bannockburn, English rule over the Pale in Ireland, and the Battle of Agincourt.
  2. The Hundred Years WarA war with France that actually lasted 116 years, Henry V at Agincourt, the castles at Conwy and Caernarvon, and what the Middle Ages means.
  3. The Black DeathThe plague of 1348, the third of England it killed, and the gentry: the new class of landowners that appeared in its wake.
  4. How Parliament beganMagna Carta limits the king's power in 1215, and medieval Parliament divides into the Lords, the Commons and Scotland's three Estates.
  5. Councils, Charters and Scots LawThe king's council of advisers that Parliament grew from, why Magna Carta is also called the Great Charter, and how Scots law was codified.
  6. English takes holdThe Wars of the Roses, the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, and the century in which English became the language of the courts.
  7. One English languageNorman French and Anglo-Saxon combine into one language, William Caxton prints the first books in England, and skilled workers come from Germany and Holland.
  8. Lancaster, York and TudorThe three royal houses of the Wars of the Roses and the roses they are remembered by — the red, the white, and the one that joined them.

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