CROWN AND PEOPLE ( 1215 – 1381 )

Despite the importance subsequently attached to the Magna Carta both in Britain and the United States, the doc­ument was less the declaration of human rights it has often been supposed to be than a statement of the feudal and legal relationship between the Crown and the barons, a guaran­tee of the freedom of the Church and a limitation of the powers of the King. There are, however, clauses which promised more general rights. One in particular proclaimed that ‘to none will we sell, to none will we refuse or delay right or justice’; another declared, ‘No freeman shall be arrested or imprisoned ... or outlawed or exiled ... except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the laws of the land.’ But virtually nothing was said about serfs.

Enraged by his having to sign the Charter, King John immediately denied its validity and, declaring that it had been wrung from him under duress, he prepared to fight the barons, while they, pretending to hold a tournament at Staines, assembled their own army and called upon the King of France to assist them. A French army landed in Kent and marched towards London; and John, ransacking castles and churches and burning crops on the way, withdrew north­east into East Anglia. While his army was crossing the neck of the Wash the tide came in and all his treasures and loot were lost. Distraught by this misfortune he went on discon­solately to the abbey of Swineshead, which had been founded by the Cistercians, an order of monks, an offshoot of the Benedictines, one of the several monastic orders which had established abbeys in England since the founda­tion of St Augustine’s monastery at Canterbury towards the end of the sixth century. Here, after finishing one of his habitually heavy meals with a surfeit of peaches and sweet ale, John contracted dysentery, became feverish and died at Newark on 19 October 1216 at the age of fifty.

His nine-year-old son and heir, who was taken to Gloucester to be crowned as King Henry III, was then a tractable boy under the tutelage of Hubert de Burgh, the chief justiciar or principal minister in the kingdom, who fulfilled the duties which might roughly be compared to those of a prime minister today. After successfully defend­ing Dover Castle, which he called ‘the Key of England’, from the French army, Hubert de Burgh won a notable naval victory in the Channel against a far greater number of French ships, whose commander and crews were all slaugh­tered except for those from whom ransoms might be extracted. Deprived by this defeat of his expected reinforce­ments, the French King agreed to withdraw from England upon the payment of a large sum of money, giving an under­taking, not fulfilled, to return Normandy to the English Crown. After the withdrawal of the French, order was restored; Stephen Langton, who had left the country in King John’s reign, returned to Canterbury; and Hubert de Burgh administered the kingdom in the name of the young King.

As he grew up, however, Henry became more and more disinclined to take the advice of his English advisers, listen­ing rather to his mother, Queen Isabella of Angoulême, to his wife, Eleanor, daughter of the Count of Provence, and to other foreign advisers in whose company he felt more at ease than he did with Englishmen. By the time of Hubert de Burgh’s death in 1243, Henry was as much at odds with his barons as his father had been. He had grown into a shiftless and extravagant man, incompetent as a soldier and politi­cian, and incapable of arousing respect or even much affec­tion. He was extremely pious, attending Mass three times a day, taking great pleasure in religious ceremonies and lav­ishing money upon religious foundations, including Netley Abbey, overlooking Southampton Water, Westminster Abbey which was largely rebuilt in his reign, and the Domus Conversorum, a hostel for converted Jews, monu­ments from whose chapel are now in the Public Record Office which was built on its site.

For a time one of his particular favourites was Simon de Montfort, a Norman nobleman who had inherited the earldom of Leicester and had married the Queen’s sister. Simon soon annoyed the King, however, by pressing for the same reforms as had been urged upon his father, and then exasperated him by presuming, although a Frenchman by birth, not only to become the acknowledged leiider of the English barons — who were now meeting together more fre­quently than they had done in the past to discuss shared problems and affairs of state — but also to advocate the rights of less privileged classes. The King’s demands for money to enable his son to be crowned King of Sicily and his brother to become King of the Romans brought matters to a head; and in 1258 it was demanded of Henry that he should appoint a new Great Council of twenty-four members, half of whom were to be nominated by the barons themselves. The members of this Council made their way with their armed retinues to Oxford where they called upon the King to rule with the advice of a smaller Council of fifteen nobles and bishops to be appointed by the recently created Great Council.

Encouraged by his wife and the Pope to defy the barons, Henry claimed that the Provisions of Oxford, which were a clear usurpation of royal power, had been forced upon him under duress. One day that summer, while the King was being rowed down the Thames in London, a storm broke out overhead, obliging him to seek shelter in Durham House, then occupied by Simon de Montfort who came out to greet him at the river steps and to assure him that the storm was over. ‘I fear thunder and lightning exceedingly,’ the King replied, ‘but by God’s head, I fear thee more than all the thunder and lightning in the world.’

He had good reason to do so; for when the inevitable civil war broke out between the King’s supporters, mostly foreign mercenaries, and the baronial army led by Simon de Montfort, Henry was decisively beaten at Lewes in Sussex in May 1264, despite the routing on the left wing of the cit­izens of London by the King’s son, Edward.

After this battle, while the King and Prince Edward were kept in prison, Simon de Montfort, Edward’s godfather, summoned the Great Council to meet at Westminster together with representatives from every shire and nearly all the larger towns, a meeting which has been seen as that of the earliest parliament, a word not then in use in this sense, but one which later came to mean the supreme legislature of the country, comprising the sovereign, the Lords and Commons assembled in Westminster.

 The new Constitution, however, was premature. Simon• de Montfort’s successes, his fiery temper and autocratic manner, the power he now wielded and the excesses of some of his adherents in their attacks upon royalists had made him many enemies. And when Prince Edward escape from his captors, he was soon able to raise a formidable royal army far larger than that which Simon could bring against it. The two armies met at Evesham in August 1265. ‘Let us commend our souls to God,’ Simon declared when he saw the size of the enemy host, ‘for our bodies are theirs.’ So it proved to be. The resultant clash was a massacre rather than a battle; and Simon himself was hacked to pieces, the dismembered parts of his body being despatched for public display in towns which had supported him. Prince Edward, now twenty-six years old, took over the administration of the realm from his father who had been wounded in the shoulder at Evesham, where, held as a hostage on the battlefield, he had not been recognized by his son’s men.  Edward was a tall and commanding figure who ate spar­ingly and drank little but water. He was said to have been capable in his youth of acts of wanton cruelty, once helping  his bodyguard to torture and mutilate a peasant whom they had come across on the road. But in recent years, while often merciless in dealing with defeated rebels, he had gained a reputation for courtesy and fair dealing, high intel­ligence and untiring energy. Devoted to his wife, he was deeply distressed when she died in Nottinghamshire and having ordered that her body should be brought south to Westminster for burial, he asked that memorial crosses should be erected in all the towns in which the funeral cortege rested on the way. The last of these was put up in the small hamlet of Charing, now the busy London area of Charing Cross where a replica, based on drawings of the original cross — long since broken up for use as paving stones and knife handles — was placed in the railway station forecourt in 1865.

Edward, who had taken the cross on the Eighth Crusade, was in Sicily when news reached him of his father’s death in 1272; but since the realm was reportedly tranquil and in good hands, he made no haste in his journey home, sending couriers to England with his instructions and arriving himself at Dover on 2 August 1274.

Shrewd and painstaking, with an instinctive understand­ing of political possibilities, Edward presided over the con­tinuing development of Parliament and the reform of the law, insisting upon the predominance of public over private jurisdiction, and making it clear that such baronial courts as still existed only did so by royal consent. He also became identified with the new spirit of aggressive nationalism, expelling from the country the Jews — who were already required to wear a distinguishing badge when walking the streets and forbidden to employ Christian servants — and marching at the head of armies intent upon the conquest of Wales and the subjugation of Scotland.

            Northern and western Wales had long resisted penetra­tion, the Celtic lords jealously retaining their old language and fostering amongst their people a profound dislike and distrust of English and Norman alike. The most gifted and powerful of these leaders, Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, who called himself Prince of Wales, maintained a long resistance to Edward’s armies, but he was eventually killed in battle and Welsh independence was lost. To keep control over the Welsh people, a strong chain of castles was built, from Caerphilly Castle in the south to Beaumaris and Conway in the north and Harlech in the west. At one of the largest of these strongholds, Caernarfon Castle, Edward’s heir was born and in 1301 created Prince of Wales, the title ever afterwards borne by the male heir to the English throne.

As Llewelyn’s Opposition had provided Edward with an excuse to subdue Wales, so the refusal of John de Baliol, who had recently become King of Scotland, to accept the overlordship of England gave him an excuse to march against the Scots. His army, thirty-five thousand strong, crossed the Tweed in March 1296 and, with the help of the long bow which Llewelyn’s archers had used so effectively against them in Wales, defeated the Scots, took Baliol pris­oner and forced him to surrender his crown. Edward returned in triumph to England carrying with him the Stone of Scone on which the Kings of Scotland had long been crowned. He took it to Westminster Abbey where it can still be seen beneath the Coronation Chair which Edward had constructed to enclose it and which has been used for every coronation performed in the Abbey since his time.

    The Scots, however, were not yet subdued. First under Sir William Wallace, who declared himself Guardian of Scotland, and was hanged, drawn and quartered after his defeat, then under Robert Bruce, who was crowned King of Scotland by the Bishop of St Andrew’s at Scone, resistance  continued long after the death of Edward I who requested in his last hours that his bones should be carried from place to place wherever his army marched against the Scots so that he might, even in death, be said to have led it to victory. He asked also that beside his motto Pactum Serva, Keep Faith, there should be inscribed on his tombstone the words Scotorum Malleus, the Hammer of the Scots.

Edward’s expensive campaigns necessitated his summon­ing his Council, now more generally known as Parliament, from time to time in order to raise money to pay for them, since the ordinary revenues of the Crown were insufficient for the waging of war and extraordinary taxation could not be levied without Parliamentary approval. Concerned to have the votes of rich merchants and of the burgesses of the towns, he saw to it that they were represented at these meet­ings as well as nobles and prelates. At the Parliament of 1295 — later known as the Model Parliament because it was more representative than any of its predecessors — there were, for instance, among the earls and barons, the arch­bishops, bishops and heads of religious houses, two knights from each shire and two delegates from each city and borough. These men, representing the ordinary citizens of the towns, did not attend with any enthusiasm, knowing that their presence was required merely for financial reasons. Indeed, they had to be coerced by the threat of fines for non-attendance; but gradually they became more and more important as Parliament extended its control over taxation, and eventually sat separately from the nobles and upper clergy in their own chamber, the recently constructed Chapter House of Westminster Abbey, before occupying the chamber that was especially built for them, the House of Commons, sometimes also now known as the Lower House, distinguishing it from the Upper House — the meeting place of the assembly of nobles which still includes bishops as well as peers — the House of Lords.

Despite unrest at home and costly wars abroad, the thir­teenth century was, as a whole, a golden age for building. The Romanesque style had given way to the first phase of Gothic, a word which, as applied pejoratively to a suppos­edly barbarous architectural style, came into use in the sev­enteenth century. This first phase of Gothic became known as Early English, a style characterized by narrow lancet windows terminating in a pointed arch, by circular, or occa­sionally octagonal pillars and by moulded capitals, some­times carved with foliage. It is seen at its most resplendent in Salisbury Cathedral, the west front of Wells Cathedral, the Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral — ‘out and out,’ in Ruskin’s words, ‘the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles’ — and, more restrainedly, at York Minster where the stained glass is of an unsurpassed beauty.

Nor was it only an age of ecclesiastical building. At Oxford, where a University had been established around the church of St Mary the Virgin, three colleges, University, Balliol and Merton College, had been founded before the

end of the thirteenth century and four more, Exeter, Oriel, Queen’s and New College, were shortly to follow them. Here Robert Grosseteste, the great Bishop of Lincoln, in whose huge diocese Oxford then lay, was appointed Chancellor in about 1223; and Roger Bacon, the philoso­pher and one of the foremost experimental scientists of his time, had a study on a tower on Folly Bridge. At Cambridge also a University was established, and St Peter’s College or Peterhouse, the oldest of its colleges, was founded by the Bishop of Ely in 1281.

Law was not then taught at either Oxford or Cambridge, where the teaching was largely of grammar, philosophy and theology, the lectures being given in Latin, and this led to the establishment of hostels or inns for students of law in what are still the Inns of Court in London, namely Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, the Middle Temple and the Inner Temple, the names of the last two Inns being derived from the Knights Templar, a brotherhood in arms devoted to the protection of pilgrims in the Holy Land. Their church here, Temple Church, is a fine example of the Transitional style between Romanesque and Early English, a style which can also be seen in the nave of Fountains Abbey and the retro­choir of Chichester Cathedral.

While the masons were at work at Chichester, Edward l’s son and heir, Edward 11, was crowned at Westminster. Ill-educated and indiscreet, Edward II affected the manners of the grooms of his stables whose company he preferred to that of his father’s ministers, most of whom he dismissed from office. An excessively heavy drinker, he had a petulant temper and would often strike across the face members of his household who offended him. He was frequently to be found engaged in amateur theatricals when affairs of state awaited his attention or in the company of his intimate friend and presumed lover, Piers Gaveston, the grasping, insolent son of a Gascon knight whom his father had ban­ished but whom he now recalled and created Earl of Cornwall to the fury of the English barons. The barons were not, however, prepared to tolerate Gaveston for long: in 1312 a group of them carried him away a prisoner and cut his head off.

The problem of Scotland could not be settled so expedi­tiously. Robert Bruce was still at large in command of a formidable army north of the border, capturing one by one the castles still in English hands; and when a large English army, at least three times the size of his own, marched against him he skillfully outmanoeuvred it, trapped it in a bog beside the Bannock Burn on 24 June 1314 and over­whelmed it, sending King Edward, who had remained at the rear with attendant bishops, flying for his life to Dunbar and driving his surviving soldiers after him.

More despised than ever, Edward returned to England where he solaced himself with his new favourites, the Despensers, father and son, men as avaricious and grasping as Gaveston had ever been. The history of the rest of Edward’s reign is a tale of blood and betrayal. The barons rose up against the King and the Despensers and were defeated in 1322 at Boroughbridge in Yorkshire where the leader of the baronial party, the Earl of Lancaster, was taken prisoner and later beheaded; Edward’s wife left him and took their son to France where the rebel exile, Roger Mortimer, eighth Baron of Wigmore and owner of large estates on the Welsh Marches, became her lover. He and the Queen returned to England in 1326 with a force of merce­naries, soon to be joined by numbers of English supporters of all classes as anxious to see an end to Edward’s rule as were the Queen and Mortimer. They defeated the King’s forces and forced him to abdicate in favour of his son, now fourteen years old. Both Despensers were forced to suffer a traitor’s death; and Edward was imprisoned in Berkeley Castle north of Bristol. Held in a dark cell over a charnel-house, it was hoped he would contract some fatal disease. but surviving this treatment he was murdered, traditionally by having a red-hot spit thrust up his anus into his entrails, an end, so it was said, befitting so shameless a sodomite. His apparently unharmed body, displayed for a time as evi­dence of his death from natural causes, was taken for burial to the Abbey of St Peter, now Gloucester Cathedral where the effigy upon his tomb beneath a finely carved and many-pinnacled canopy is one of the most beautiful alabaster figures made in the fourteenth century.

The King’s son who ordered the making of this tomb and came to the throne as Edward III in 1327 seemed to be in many ways the very antithesis of his father. Like him he was extravagant, ostentatious and intemperate; but, whereas the father was craven, the son was extravagantly brave; and, while Edward II had been an actor manqué, Edward ~ h thought of himself as an Arthurian knight, living in a lost world of romantic chivalry. After a brief foray into Scotland, he turned his attention to France, partly to provide exciting and profitable adventures for those who might otherwise make trouble at home, partly because the Scots were turning increasingly to France for help against the English, and partly to thwart French moves against the cities of Flanders with which the by now extremely pros­perous English wool trade was so closely connected. Claiming the French throne through his mother, Isabella, daughter of Philip IV, he declared a war that was to last for a hundred years. At first he was brilliantly successful: he won a great naval victory at Sluys on 24 June 1340, then an equally decisive land battle near Calais at Crécy where his sixteen-year-old son, soon to be known as the Black Prince because of his unusually dark armour, greatly distinguished himself and, so it is said, by adopting as his own the crest of three feathers and the maxim ‘Ich dien’ (‘I serve’) of the blind King of Bohemia, who had been slain in the opposing army, provided a badge and motto for all future Princes of Wales.

The King went on to take Calais; and in 1356 at Poitiers his son, the Black Prince, won another victory over the French King who was taken prisoner and held to ransom. By the Treaty of Brétigny, Edward III gained much of what he had fought for, absolute control over great territories in the south-west that stretched almost from the Loire to the Pyrenees and, in the north, Calais and Ponthieu.

After his earlier victories Edward III had returned home in triumph with wagonloads of plunder, clothes and furs, feather beds and the spoils of foreign cities. It was said that ‘all England was filled with the spoils of the King’s expedi­tion, so that there was not a woman who did not wear some ornament, or have in her house fine linen or some goblet, part of the booty’ brought home.

Yet the wild extravagance of the victors’ celebrations seemed to some chroniclers wickedly wanton, in particular the merriment at Windsor whence there came reports of the most prodigal festivities, of ‘feasts complete with richness of fare, variety of dishes, and overflowing abundance of drinks’. In the Upper Ward of the Castle, the King ordered the construction of a magnificent circular stone feasting hall in which would be held the meetings of the knights of a new ‘Round Table in the same manner and conditions as the Lord Arthur, formerly King of England, appointed it’. These knights were to be bound together by ‘a badge of unity and concord’, a garter. The story went — and recent research has indicated that it may we11 be true — that the King was dancing at a ball in the Castle with Joan, Countess of Salisbury, when her garter fell off. Edward stooped and picked it up. Some of the other dancers saw him do so and began to tease him. He replied sharply, speaking in French which was the language he used in ordinary conversation —though he is believed to be the first King of England after the Conquest, with the possible exception of Henry I, to have been able to speak English — ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ (‘shame on him who thinks ill of it’), thus providing the motto of the oldest extant order of knighthood in Europe.

This was in 1348, a year in which the festivities at Windsor seemed all the more reprehensible to the chroni­clers, for it was the dreadful year in which ‘the cruel pesti­lence, terrible to all future ages, came from parts over the sea to the south coast of England, into a port called Melcombe in Dorsetshire’. This plague or Great Mortality, much later to be known as the Black Death, ‘passed most rapidly from place to place,’ recorded the Registrar of the Court of Canterbury, ‘swiftly killing ere mid-day many who in the morning had been well, and without respect of persons’. The first symptoms were swellings in various parts of the body, particularly in the groin and under the arms, then the eruption of black pustules. Delirium soon fol­lowed, and the vomiting of blood. Few who were infected escaped death, and that within a few hours. When the summer of 1348 gave way to colder weather the spread of the plague was halted for a time but when spring came it renewed its course more virulently than ever. The towns were the worst affected places; but small villages did not escape and in some the inhabitants were entirely wiped out. Only the remote areas of the north-west, the mountainous regions of Wales and Scotland and west Cornwall, remained immune.

It has been estimated that almost half the people in the country perished. It does, indeed, seem likely that the popu­lation, which had risen to about 4,250,000 by 1300, had fallen to about 2,500,000 by 1380. The Black Death was not entirely responsible for this sharp fall: there were other outbreaks of plague and occasional famine, while sheep farming, which required a relatively small labour force, was extending over large areas at the expense of corn growing.

 But the Black Death, a fearful visitation which contributed much to the macabre nature of later medieval literature, was undoubtedly the main cause of the dramatic fall in pop­ulation and of the acceleration of far-reaching changes already noticeable in English society.

The sharp decline in the population of England naturally resulted in an acute labour shortage as well as a plentiful supply of land for the surviving peasants. Many peasants were able to increase their holdings by taking over the fields of those who had died; others, who had no land, were able to demand greater rewards for their services and went off to other manors if they did not get them. The King, preoccu­pied with his foreign wars and, in his premature senility, with his rapacious mistress, Alice Perrers, allowed the gov­ernment to fall into the hands of his fourth son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who was thought to be intent on gaining a controlling influence over the King’s grandson, later Richard II, or even to be contriving to gain the crown for himself. In an effort to overcome their financial and social problems the government in 1351 issued a Statute of Labourers which made it a crime for peasants to ask for more wages or for their employers to pay more than the rates laid down by the Justices of the Peace, the local gentry with judicial powers to try cases relating to public order in the counties, the ancestors of the present Justices who still have power to try lesser cases, committing the more serious to a higher court. A later Statute proposed that any labourer who left his place of work to seek higher wages should be branded with the letter F on his forehead as a sign of false­hood. It soon even became a crime for a labourer to dress as though he were a landlord and for ‘common lewd women’ to dress like ‘good noble dames’.

Such repressive measures, combined with the imposition of a series of taxes known as poll taxes and levied on every­one over fifteen, caused deep and widespread discontent which was exacerbated by resentment against the riches and corruption of the higher clergy. John Wyclif, for a time Master of Balliol College, Oxford, spoke for thousands when he urged the disendowment of the Church and a return to evangelical poverty; and his ‘poor priests’, known as Lollards — a word meaning mumbler of prayers applied to them derisively by William Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury — went about the country preaching Wyclif’s doctrines and condemning the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the material possessions of the Church. Speaking more bluntly and, on occasions, crudely, John Ball, an eloquent and fiery excommunicated priest, marched from market place to churchyard, castigating the ways of the clergy and preaching upon the contentious text:

 When Adam dalf [dug] and Eve span

Who was thanne a gentilman?

 Soon whole districts were in uproar. Manors and reli­gious houses were attacked; lords and priors murdered; and the cry went up, "Death to all lawyers. John Ball hath rungeth your bell!’

Led by one Walter, a man supposed to have been either an ex-soldier or a highwayman but generally known as Wat Tyler because of his trade, the men of Kent and Essex, forming bands of armed villagers and townsmen, descended on London in June 1381, releasing John Ball from Maidstone gaol on the way. They poured into Southwark; ransacked Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s house since the end of the twelfth century; crossed London Bridge between the houses which had been built on it from bank to bank; marched down Fleet Street; burst into the Temple where they burned the lawyers’ rolls; opened the gates of the Fleet prison; attacked the houses of foreign mer­chants; and, ‘like packs of hungry wolves’, made their way to Savoy Palace, the great mansion in the Strand which had been granted by Henry III to his wife’s uncle, the Count of Savoy, and was now occupied by the King’s hated uncle, John of Gaunt.

The Duke escaped but his doctor and sergeant-at-arms were both killed; the palace was ransacked and set alight; the explosion of a box of gunpowder consigned to the flames brought down the Great Hall; and thirty-two men who were drinking the Duke’s wine were trapped when the cellar ceiling collapsed on them.

The mob, ‘howling like men possessed’, now turned their attention to the Tower. Forcing their way across the draw­bridges and through the gates, they dashed through the Great Hall and the Wardrobe into the private apartments of the King’s mother where they tore down her hangings and cut her bedclothes into ribbons. She herself escaped in the confusion; but, in the Chapel of St John, the rebels came upon the Lord Treasurer and the Archbishop of Canterbury ~ praying before the altar. They dragged them out and, with other victims, beheaded them on Tower Hill, parading their heads about the city on spikes. Meanwhile, another rebel leader, Jack Straw, led his men north to attack the Treasurer’s house at Highbury and to burn down the Priory of St John, Clerkenwell.

The next day, 15 June, the fourteen-year-old King Richard met the rebels at Smithfield in an open field where horse sales were held, and there he acceded to most of their requests. Yet Tyler’s arrogant disrespect so enraged theLord Mayor, William Walworth, a fishmonger, that he  lashed out at the man with the flat of his sword, knocking him off his horse to the ground where he was stabbed to death with a dagger which is displayed, with various trea­sures of the Fishmongers’ Company, in Fishmongers’ Hal, King William Street. Brandishing their weapons, the rebels advanced upon the King’s retinue. But Richard rode towards them, calling out, ‘Sirs, will you kill your King? I am your captain. Follow me.’ Responding to this plea, they rode away with him towards Clerkenwell where they dis­persed, trusting him to keep the promises he had made to them. But these were all broken on the grounds that they had been obtained under duress; and, when reminded of his undertakings to abolish feudal services, the King is said to have riposted, ‘Villeins you are, and villeins you will remain.’ Although the poll tax was abandoned, the sur­vivors of the revolt returned to their homes to resume their seemingly immutable lives.

 

        NATIVES                                  ROMAN BRITAIN                      NORMAN RULE             HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET  

        ANGLO-SAXON                         Twilight of Middle Ages     Tudor England          Early Stuart England

            EMPIRE AND INDUSTRY            THE AGE OF REFORM                20th century

 

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