In the summer of 1307, Edward I went north to fight the Scots. Once across the border, he planned to finish off what he had begun a decade earlier, by defeating Robert the Bruce and asserting English authority over his kingdom. Fate had other plans. At 67, Edward was no longer the intimidating figure he once was; despite large medicinal doses of pomegranate wine and rose water, he could barely walk. Consequently, by early July the royal entourage was still in England, at the Cumbrian fortress of Burgh by Sands. There, a few days later, the ‘Hammer of the Scots’ died peacefully in his bed.

Though Edward I had not been a perfect king, he was widely considered to be a good one; his reign was a period of relative stability and prosperity. In contrast, the century following his death was one of crisis, characterised by difficulties (including war, economic crisis, popular unrest, climate change, and plague), which feel uncomfortably familiar to a 21^st-century reader. These problems posed significant challenges to the trio of kings – Edward II, Edward III and Richard II – whose stories are at the heart of Helen Carr’s lively and accessible history of the 14^th century.

Carr, the author of a bestselling biography of John of Gaunt, begins her story with the young, energetic Edward II, who got off to a good start by pledging to uphold ‘the laws and customs which the community of the realm shall have chosen’. But his intense devotion to the obnoxious Piers Gaveston caused such resentment that the English nobility (led by Edward’s cousin, Thomas of Lancaster) first demanded Gaveston’s exile, and then killed him. Rather than mending his ways, Edward quickly acquired a new favourite – the equally unpopular, and far more calculating, Hugh Despenser the Younger – and continued to rule in a manner that made clear his lack of political nous.

Matters came to a head in 1322, when Edward defeated the rebellious barons at the Battle of Boroughbridge and executed Lancaster. But through his increasing dependence on Despenser, Edward had created another, more dangerous enemy: his wife. In 1325 Isabella returned to her native France, where she joined forces with the exiled Marcher lord, Roger Mortimer. When, late the following year, the new couple returned to England at the head of a small army, they swept easily to victory. Despenser, condemned as a ‘traitor, tyrant and renegade’, was swiftly and very publicly dispatched, his genitals burnt in ‘a symbolic destruction of his line’ and his head displayed on London Bridge. Edward endured a slower end: forced to abdicate in favour of his son, he spent several months imprisoned at Berkeley Castle before being quietly dispatched in September 1327.

In the years immediately after the deposition, Isabella and Mortimer reigned supreme, ruling on behalf of the teenage Edward III, though they also found time to dress up as Guinevere and Lancelot to host Arthurian-themed tournaments. The young king increasingly resented their authority, and, in October 1330, he took control, executing Mortimer and placing his mother under house arrest. In doing so, he displayed a fearlessness that would serve him well for the next five decades, during a reign punctuated by significant military victories in both Scotland (where he resumed his grandfather’s campaign) and France (where, in pursuit of a real if somewhat tenuous claim to the French throne, he began the Hundred Years War).

Though she acknowledges Edward’s military skill and describes him as ‘a natural political leader’, Carr is clearly not as taken with this long-lived monarch as some modern biographers. Even in his lifetime, he faced criticism from those who disliked the extravagance of his court, his habit of borrowing from foreign bankers, and the heavy taxation needed to pay for his constant wars. The complaints intensified in his final years, when his dependence on and generosity to his mistress Alice Perrers (described by the chronicler Thomas Walsingham as ‘a shameless, impudent harlot of low birth’) provoked Parliament to demand both an end to court corruption and reforms to the governance of the realm.

By the time Edward III died in 1377, England was once again desperately in need of a strong, capable king to tackle its many problems. What it got was the ten-year-old Richard II, assisted by his capable but deeply unpopular uncle, John of Gaunt. The imposition of a series of poll taxes on a struggling population led in 1381 to the Peasants’ Revolt – a brutal uprising, during which the rebels were allegedly told that ‘whoever could catch any Fleming or other aliens of the nation, might cut off their head’. The Archbishop of Canterbury was a victim of it, too. The young king rode out to meet the rebels and managed to pacify them, a success that convinced him of his readiness to rule.

Unfortunately, even as an adult, Richard was clearly out of his depth. A cultured but unworldly man who never truly grew up, he was peculiarly reluctant to go to war and (even by the standards of medieval kings) exceptionally self-important. Like Edward II, for whose canonisation he campaigned, he doted on male favourites and alienated most of the nobility. By the late 1380s, the situation was so bad that a group of nobles, the Lords Appellant, took control of the realm. From this point onwards, Richard’s primary goal was to get revenge on this quintet – an ambition he partially achieved in 1397, when Arundel and Gloucester were killed, and Warwick permanently exiled to the Isle of Man.

A wiser man would have stopped there, but Richard decided to exile his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s eldest son and heir. When, a few months later, Gaunt died, Richard confiscated his lands, depriving his sworn enemy of his inheritance, and sealing his own fate. By September 1399, Richard was imprisoned in the Tower of London, reflecting on ‘this strange and fickle land… which has destroyed and ruined so many kings, so many rulers, so many great men’. A month later, Bolingbroke was crowned Henry IV.

At heart, Sceptred Isle is an old-fashioned narrative history focusing on the lives of great (and not-so-great) men; despite its subtitle, the book offers little that is truly ‘new’. Nevertheless, Carr’s retelling of this familiar story is both compelling and empathetic, with a keen sense of the humanity of its subjects, including the elite women who lived alongside these kings. Both Philippa of Hainault and Anne of Bohemia exercised considerable behind-the-scenes influence, so that Edward III and Richard II were arguably worse rulers after death deprived them of the restraining influence of their wives.

Proximity to power came at considerable personal cost. Women such as the de Clare sisters (who possessed both royal blood and vast inheritances) were little more than pawns on the marriage market: Margaret and Eleanor were married off to royal favourites (Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser, respectively), whilst Elizabeth was twice widowed, and thrice married, before her 21st birthday. Their sister-in-law Maud de Clare, who spent two years desperately insisting that she was pregnant with her late husband’s heir, was equally unfortunate.

Maud’s husband, Gilbert, was killed at Bannockburn, one of the many battles fought during a century in which England was almost constantly at war. Although Carr is keen on a good battle scene, and highlights war’s ability to boost national morale and unite the nobility, she is also careful to acknowledge the human cost. Thousands perished, and many more endured terrible suffering. Edward III’s siege of Calais, for example, left its inhabitants ‘deranged with hunger’, with the garrison’s commander complaining to the French king that ‘everything is eaten up… we have nothing left to subsist on unless we eat each other’.

Prisoners-of-war were often subjected to brutal punishments: Isabella, Countess of Carrick and Buchan, who crowned Robert the Bruce, subsequently spent several years imprisoned in ‘a little enclosure made of iron and stone… suspended at Berwick under the open heavens’, where she served as a warning to anyone who might consider defying the English.

Yet such horrors paled into insignificance alongside the misery and death caused by the Great Famine of 1315-17 (a period of relentless rain, repeated crop failures and animal murrains, and widespread starvation) and the Black Death. The latter killed so many that ‘the living were hardly able to bury the dead’, and no-one was safe: one of the earliest English victims was Edward III’s teenage daughter Joan, whose death left her parents ‘inwardly desolated by the sting of this bitter grief’. While many found solace in religion (Joan’s family consoled themselves that she had ‘been sent ahead to heaven to reign among the choirs of virgins’), the proliferation of macabre imagery in the subsequent decades suggests that many felt, like Petrarch, that ‘Our former hopes are buried with our friends.’

Though the relentless dramas of this turbulent era make for a gripping read, those unfortunate enough to experience them at first hand would surely have preferred not to live in such interesting times.