During the years of peace after the treaty of Calais, Edward III. completed the scheme for the establishment of his family begun with the grant of Aquitaine to the Black Prince.  The state of the king’s finances made it impossible for him to provide for numerous sons and daughters from the royal exchequer, and the system of appanages had seldom been popular or successful in England.  Edward found an easier way of endowing his offspring by politic marriages that transferred to his sons the endowments and dignities of the great houses, which, in spite of lavish creations of new earldoms, were steadily dying out in the male line.  Some of his daughters in the same way were married into baronial families whose attachment to the throne would, it was believed, be strengthened by intermarriage with the king’s kin; while others, wedded to foreign princes, helped to widen the circle of continental alliances on which he never ceased to build large hopes.  Collateral branches of the royal family were pressed into the same system, which was so systematically ordered that it has passed for a new departure in English history.  This is, however, hardly the case.  Many previous kings, notably Edward I., carried out a policy based upon similar lines, and only less conspicuous by reason of the smaller number of children that they had to provide for.  The descendants of Henry III. and Edward I. in no wise kept true to the monarchical tradition, but rather gave distinction to the baronial opposition by ennobling it with royal alliances.  But the martial and vigorous policy of Edward III. had at least the effect of reducing to inactivity the tradition of constitutional opposition which had been the common characteristic of successive generations of the royal house of Lancaster, the chief collateral branch of the royal family.  Subsequent history will show that the Edwardian family settlement was as unsuccessful as that of his grandfather.  The alliances which Edward built up brought neither solidarity to the royal house, nor strength to the crown, nor union to the baronage.  But the working out of this, as of so many of the new developments of the later part of Edward’s reign, can only be seen after his death.

Edward’s eldest son became, as we have seen, Duke of Cornwall, Prince of Wales, and Earl of Chester even before he received Aquitaine.  He was the first of the continuous line of English princes of Wales, for Edward III. never bore that title.  The Black Prince’s marriage with his cousin, Joan of Kent, was a love-match, and the estates of his bride were scarcely an important consideration to the lord of Wales and Cheshire.  Yet the only child of the unlucky Edmund of Woodstock was no mean heiress, bringing with her the estates of her father’s earldom of Kent, besides the inheritance of her mother’s family, the Wakes of Liddell and Lincolnshire.  The estates and earldom afterwards passed to Joan’s son by a former husband, and the Holland earls of Kent formed a minor family connexion which closely supported the throne of Richard of Bordeaux.  Though their paternal inheritance was that of Lancashire squires, the Hollands won a leading place in the history of the next generation.