Honi soit qui mal y pense.
(Shame on him who thinks evil of it.)Motto of the Order of the Garter, founded by Edward III around 1348
Edward III
parents: Edward II and Isabella of France
date and place of birth: 13 November 1312 at Windsor Castle
wife: Philippa of Hainault
date of marriage: 24 January 1328 at York Minster
children: Edward (the Black Prince), Isabella, Joan, Lionel of Antwerp, John of Gaunt, Edmund of Langley, Mary, Margaret, Thomas of Woodstock, and several who died in infancy
years of reign: 1327-1377
date of coronation: 1 February 1327 at Westminster Abbey
date and place of death: 21 June 1377 at Sheen Palace, Surrey
place of burial: Westminster Abbey
Edward III became king because his mother deposed his father. Edward II had lost at Bannockburn, loaded his favourites with lands and titles, and alienated nearly every baron in England. His queen, Isabella of France, went to Paris in 1325 to negotiate a treaty, took her thirteen-year-old son with her, and refused to come home. There she took as her lover Roger Mortimer, a Marcher lord who had escaped from the Tower, and in September 1326 the two of them landed in Suffolk with a small army. Edward II's support collapsed. In January 1327 Parliament forced him to give up the crown in favour of his son, and the boy was crowned on 1 February. That September his father died in Berkeley Castle, almost certainly murdered. The story of the red-hot poker comes from later chroniclers, and nobody knows how he died.
The Coup at Nottingham
For three years Isabella and Mortimer ruled in the young king's name. Mortimer made himself Earl of March, took estates for himself and his family, and in 1328 signed the Treaty of Northampton, which recognised Robert the Bruce as King of Scots and gave up English claims to overlordship. The English called it the "shameful peace." In March 1330 Mortimer had the king's uncle, the Earl of Kent, beheaded for plotting to restore Edward II, whom Kent believed still alive.
Edward was seventeen, married, and the father of a son. On the night of 19 October 1330, a band of his friends led by William Montagu entered Nottingham Castle through a secret passage in the rock beneath it, burst into the queen mother's apartments and arrested Mortimer while Isabella begged them to spare her "gentle Mortimer." Parliament condemned him without letting him speak, and he was hanged at Tyburn on 29 November. Edward treated his mother with care: she lived out her life in comfort at Castle Rising in Norfolk, and he visited her regularly.
Scotland and the Claim to France
Edward overturned the shameful peace almost at once. He backed Edward Balliol, the son of the John Balliol whom Edward I had deposed, in an invasion of Scotland, and in July 1333 he beat the Scots at Halidon Hill outside Berwick. His archers shot down the Scottish schiltrons as they climbed the slope, a tactic he would use again in France.
France was the larger quarrel. Edward's mother was the daughter of Philip IV of France, and when the last of her brothers died in 1328 without a son, Edward was the nearest male heir through the female line. The French nobility chose his cousin Philip of Valois instead, ruling that a claim could not pass through a woman. Edward did homage to Philip VI for his lands in Gascony, but relations broke down over Gascony, Flanders and French support for the Scots, and in 1337 Philip confiscated the duchy. Edward answered by claiming the French crown for himself. In 1340 he quartered the lilies of France with the lions of England on his coat of arms, and English monarchs kept the French lilies until 1801. The war he started, with long truces, lasted until 1453; see our page on the Hundred Years War.
Sluys, Crécy and Calais
The first great victory came at sea. On 24 June 1340 Edward's fleet caught the French navy packed into the harbour at Sluys, on the Flemish coast, and destroyed it. The English archers swept the French decks before the men-at-arms boarded, and the French lost most of their ships and thousands of men. Nobody dared tell Philip VI, the story goes, until his jester informed him that the English sailors were cowards because they had not jumped into the sea like the brave French.
Six years later Edward landed in Normandy with around fifteen thousand men, sacked Caen, and marched towards Paris before turning north. Philip caught up with him near the village of Crécy in Ponthieu on 26 August 1346. Edward dismounted his men-at-arms and set them on a slope with the longbowmen on their flanks. The Genoese crossbowmen in French service went in first, with rain-soaked strings, and fell back under the English arrows; the French knights rode through them and charged up the hill again and again into the arrowstorm. By nightfall the French had lost the King of Bohemia, the Count of Flanders, the Duke of Lorraine, Philip's own brother and well over a thousand knights. Edward's sixteen-year-old son, the future Black Prince, commanded the front division and won his spurs that day.
Edward went on to besiege Calais, which held out for eleven months. Meanwhile an English army in the north captured David II of Scotland at Neville's Cross in October 1346. When Calais surrendered in August 1347, Edward demanded that six leading citizens come out barefoot, with nooses round their necks, to be executed. The chronicler Jean Froissart tells how Queen Philippa, heavily pregnant, knelt before her husband and begged for their lives, and he gave way. Calais stayed English for more than two hundred years. Read the full account on our Siege of Calais page.
The Order of the Garter
Edward liked to present his court as a new Camelot. In 1344 he announced a Round Table at Windsor, and around 1348 he founded the Order of the Garter: the king, the Prince of Wales and twenty-four knights, most of them veterans of Crécy, with St George as their patron and St George's Chapel at Windsor as their home. The story that the emblem came from the Countess of Salisbury dropping her garter at a ball, and the king tying it round his own leg with the words of the motto, appears only in much later sources. The order still exists, and the monarch still appoints its members.
The Black Death
In the summer of 1348 the plague reached Melcombe in Dorset. Over the next eighteen months it killed somewhere between a third and a half of the population of England. Edward lost his daughter Joan, who died of it in Bordeaux on her way to marry the heir to Castile. The shortage of labour that followed pushed wages up, and the government tried to hold them down with the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349 and the Statute of Labourers in 1351, which fixed pay at pre-plague rates and made it an offence to refuse work. Resentment at these laws, and at later poll taxes, fed into the Peasants' Revolt against Edward's grandson in 1381.
Poitiers and the Peace of Brétigny
The war went on. In September 1356 the Black Prince, on a raid out of Gascony, found himself cornered near Poitiers by a much larger French army under King John II. He won anyway, and captured the French king. With John a prisoner in London alongside David II of Scotland, Edward had two kings in his custody. He invaded France again in 1359 hoping to be crowned at Reims, failed to take the city, and settled for the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360. He gave up his claim to the French throne in return for full sovereignty over an enlarged Aquitaine, Calais and Ponthieu, and a ransom of three million gold écus for John.
Parliament and the English Language
Edward's wars needed money, and Parliament learned to bargain for it. During his reign the Commons began to sit apart from the Lords, and they came to expect their grievances heard before they granted taxes. The Treason Act of 1351 defined high treason for the first time, and parts of it are still law. In 1362 the Statute of Pleading ordered that cases in the king's courts be pleaded in English rather than French, because, the statute said, the people did not understand French. The same year the Chancellor opened Parliament in English for the first time.
The Last Years
Edward's reign ended badly. The war in France turned against the English after 1369, and by the time of his death they held little beyond Calais, Bordeaux and Bayonne. Queen Philippa died in 1369, and the ageing king fell under the influence of his mistress, Alice Perrers, who attended court sessions, took bribes and was widely loathed. In 1376 the Good Parliament impeached several of the king's ministers and banished Alice from court, though she was soon back. The Black Prince died that June, a year before his father. Edward III died at Sheen on 21 June 1377. Thomas Walsingham claimed that Alice stripped the rings from his fingers as he lay dying.
The crown passed to his ten-year-old grandson, Richard II. Edward had given his many sons great estates and titles to hold the kingdom together; their descendants, the houses of Lancaster and York, would fight over the crown in the Wars of the Roses.
Link/cite this page
If you use any of the content on this page in your own work, please use the code below to cite this page as the source of the content.
Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "Edward III" https://englishhistory.net/middle-ages/edward-iii/, September 30, 2026