Politcs Finance Church During the Reign of Edward II

by Mark Buck

Walter Stapeldon, fifteenth bishop of Exeter, was the founder of Exeter College, Oxford, and the greatest of Edward II's treasurers of the Exchequer. As Edward's regime crumbled in 1326, he paid the price of his master's rapacious policies, of which he was the chief instrument. This study shows how the Plantagenet revolution in government, the most massive overhaul of the Exchequer ever undertaken in medieval England, was shaped with a clear financial purpose. On the basis of his extensive research in the Exchequer archives, Dr Buck reveals for the first time the extent and severity of the government's action on the levying of debts to the Crown, which, although initiated earlier, was exacerbated in the early 1320s when parliament and the clergy were refusing the king supply. Placing the policies of Stapeldon's treasurership in their political and parliamentary context, he argues that the Exchequer was Edward's most powerful weapon against the aristocratic opposition and in the process reassesses the accepted interpretation of these years of turmoil.

264 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 1983

About the author

Mark Buck is a pracademic, a practitioner who develops and tests ideas while doing the work those ideas are meant to explain. He writes about how organisations actually work, and in particular about the capable people who quietly hold weak systems together until the day they leave. Much of his work asks what allows a good result to survive the departure of the person who first produced it.

His first book, Leadership Without Arrival, begins with a deal that nearly didn’t complete. Its argument is that leadership done properly rarely produces a sense of arrival. It produces the next problem, often carrying the cost of the last solution. It was the first title published by Roebuck Publishing and is the first in a planned series on leadership, organisations and institutional capability. In its launch week in August 2026 it reached #1 Hot New Release on Amazon UK in HR & Personnel Management, Self-Employment and Small Business eBooks.

He is Chief Executive of GSI, a UK financial planning, wealth management and estate planning group, and Chief Operating Officer of Mitchell & Mitchell Asset Management, where he chairs the Investment Committee. Before financial services he spent more than twenty years in consulting, hotel and resort transactions and travel, including running what was then the largest private travel company in sub-Saharan Africa. His articles have appeared in FT Adviser, Money Marketing, Professional Adviser, The European Business Review and CFA UK’s Professional Investor.

He read Classics and German at Rhodes University and holds an MBA from Bond University. His writing through Roebuck Publishing is personal and doesn’t represent the views of GSI or Mitchell & Mitchell. When he isn’t running businesses or writing, he is usually reading history, philosophy or business, or being supervised by two Labradors who remain unconvinced by any of it.