archaeogeek
Banned
The fact that you write walls of text on a phone gives me pause.Admittedly I was hurrying somewhat and my words were in a block of text, but mainly because I was writing on my phone on the walk home from work - also why I had little to no capital letters and a lot of misplaced full stops.
A fascinating book. I add to this two excellent academic biographies of the two Tudor Henry, and an overview of the Plantagenet "empire", but sadly it's in french.I will admit I cut some corners and misrepresented, but I stand by the gist of my points. I will also not deny that much of the inspiration for the bureaucracy came from Normandy and Anjou too. But still, the reason the English Kings got away with so much taxation when it was needed to fight France was because Parliament agreed it. I suggest you read 'Agincourt: The King, the Battle' by Juliet Barker to see how much wrangling Henry V needed to achieve with Parliament to get his loans for wars with France, among other books.
The latter was also how the french Jacquerie worked, and is not uniquely english, again. The king was good, his councilors were obviously leading him astray.And yes, England had a lot of rebellions I will grant you, but they didn't tend to have them over taxes raised for war. Far more commonly they were over taxes raised for purposes seen as far more beneficial to the King than to England, or were raised when the King used his authority to demand extraordinary taxation - as well as the usual revolting against perceived evil or unwise councillors to the King leading him down unpopular paths.
The early Plantagenets fought three civil wars against parliament, were deposed once by parliament, and did all they could to keep it small and unrepresentative. Parliamentary boroughs were mostly added under the house of York.I also won't argue that the Tudors were very absolutist re: their treatment of Parliament, but the Plantagenets, by and large, were not so, and since we aren't discussing the Tudors, I am not considering them here.
Yes, but almost every other part of France had a powerful duke or count who ran his personal domains like a kingdom and could easily be a pain in the ass to the plantagenet, especially as he owes them his crown.Re: Gascony, I won't give you any talk of "that's how the Gascons were". Rather, the difference between Aquitaine and France was that Aquitaine, as I said, was unusual in that the Duke had little to no power as he had little to no income, and the Gascon lords over time had become accustomed to a political scenario where their lord exerted little serious control over them - in no small part because their liege lord was typically either King of France or England, and thus had bigger fish to fry - and where they had gorged themselves on virtually unrestricted freedom to pursue their own agendas, including blood feuds and family vendettas, pursuing their own alliances against neighbouring lords and occasionally seeking to pervert the Duke's authority into their political web. By contrast, few places in France had such weak authority exerted by the reigning count/duke etc, and Aquitaine had enough castles to be a nightmare for any Duke who sought to pacify it - as Richard I found out when he spent 10 years campaigning there and achieved virtually nothing whatsoever. Every gain he made he lost again. The Aquitanian vassals knew how to be vicious and manipulative when they needed to be.