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This chapter assesses the impact of the baronial reform movement of 1258–65 on the development of parliament. It argues that the reforming barons saw parliament as a public forum and the appropriate setting for political decision‐making. The extensive legislative programme through which reform was enacted also served to establish parliament as the proper venue for large‐scale legislation, foreshadowing the parliamentary legislation of Edward I. In another major development the knights whose support was needed by Simon de Montfort, the reformers' leader, began to play a central part in parliamentary business, not in consenting to taxation, as hitherto, but in general discussion of political matters. Although the reforming enterprise was overthrown in 1265, Henry III continued the reformers' policy of working through parliament and continued too to respect the newfound place of the knights in parliamentary life.

This chapter considers how around half of the episcopate came to support Simon de Montfort, beginning with the king’s muster in March 1264, when several bishops declared their loyalty to Montfort. It argues that a key force in deciding their allegiance was Montfort’s charisma: the belief that he was uncommonly virtuous, and his cause divinely sanctioned. This force was so powerful as to realign the bishops’ values. The chapter then examines the portrayal of Montfort in the Song of Lewes, which describes Montfort in terms that demonstrate the depth of devotion that he inspired, and suggests how his persona evoked the model of sanctity inspired by Thomas Becket, as well as how the transformation of his cause into a crusade encouraged support. The chapter then goes on to survey the activities that the Montfortian bishops and other clergy undertook as part of and on behalf of the Montfortian regime.

This chapter explores how the rhetoric of crusading shaped the literature of baronial revolt in thirteenth-century England, concentrating particularly on the Second Barons’ War of 1263–1267. It argues that crusading not only provided a template for polemical argument but also inflected the ways that participants understood Anglia as a territory and an idea. From the time of the early Latin histories of the First Crusade, a rhetorically amplified style had been crucial to promulgating Christian jurisdictional claims to the Holy Land. This chapter examines the legacy of this “crusading style” within insular revolts of the thirteenth century, focusing on the ephemeral verse that emerged alongside civil war. Poems such as the ornately Latinate Song of Lewes reveal the poetic and political sophistication of baronial partisans. In their triumphalism, such works also obscure the violence visited upon communities across England—especially Jewish communities, who became targets of attacks at once anti-royalist and anti-Semitic in tenor.

This chapter explores post-Lateran IV ecclesiastical reformism, focusing on the ecclesiology and pastoral theology of Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln. Grosseteste understood pastoral care not only as the clergy’s most vital responsibility to the laity but also as a form of participation in the divinely ordered natural universe. His pastoral and estate management writings to women accordingly reveal the degree to which this ecclesiology finds inspiration in the ideal of the justly governed estate. This chapter reads Grosseteste’s Anglo-French soteriological allegory, the Château d’Amour, alongside his writings to and for women, showing how the logic of secular property law becomes a means of narrating Christian time from the Creation through the Redemption to the Final Judgment. Grosseteste’s larger corpus, however, also reveals the extent to which his vision of Christian history is premised on Jewish exclusion, not only in theological but legal and practical terms.

This chapter examines the process by which the Montfortian bishops were reconciled with king and pope (Clement IV, Gui Foulquois: the papal legate who had met the Montfortian bishops in the summer of 1264) after the downfall of Simon de Montfort at the Battle of Evesham in August 1265, before exploring a funeral sermon preached at the papal court by Eudes de Châteauroux for John Gervase, bishop of Winchester, in January 1268. The sermon considers how it was possible that a man of such learning and background as Gervase could err in such a way, in supporting Montfort, suggesting that he believed that he was doing the right thing, and thus counselling understanding and reconciliation.

This chapter discusses the rise of conflicted, multilingual ideas of Englishness and nationhood in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Extended discussion is offered of the Middle English romance Havelok, in terms of its representations of power and justice; the French and English Brut histories, and their vernacular views of the recent past; philosophies of kingship and their role in the Barons’ Wars and the deposition of Edward II; the rise of parliament, the importance of Magna Carta, and the idea of constitutional government; the role of the vernaculars in spreading critical and historical ideas; a rise in class conflict, and social and public discourse of complaint.