The fourteenth century

Helen Castor, She-Wolves: The Women who Ruled England before Elizabeth (Faber and Faber)
Gerald Harris, Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005)
Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: the Kings who made England (William Collins, 2013)
Michael Prestwich, Plantagenet England 1225-1360 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
Miri Rubin, The Hollow Crown. A History of Britain in the late Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 2006)
Tidemann, Lauren, ‘For the Glory of England: The Changing Nature of Kingship on Fourteenth-Century England’, Sententiae: The Harvard Undergraduate Journal of Medieval Studies (2011)[This can be viewed here.]

The fourteenth century saw the deposition of two monarchs, the Black Death that killed a third of the population, a war with France, and a popular revolt. Parliament became more assertive and activist. It met more frequently than in the thirteenth or the fifteenth centuries and the length of the sessions increased.

Edward II (1307-27)

"Edward II - British Library Royal 20 A ii f10 (detail)"
Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Edward’s reign was one of the most troubled in English history. It was a time of natural disaster, with a series of bad harvests leading to the Great Famine of 1315-22, in which between 10 and 15 per cent of the population died, and northern England was plagued by invasions from Scotland. But many of Edward’s troubles were of his own making.

The traitor's death

Those of you with a strong stomach might like to read the earliest known account of a traitor's death. The post is by Marc Morris, the author of the excellent biography of Edward I, A Great and Terrible King.

The British dimension: Scotland

The Wallace Monument, Stirling
an example of 19th-century nationalism

An independent kingdom

Unlike Wales, Scotland was not a single ethnic group. In the south-east the population was mainly of English stock, a relic of the once extensive Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. In the west, however the natives were of Irish or Norwegian descent.  But though Scotland was a cultural and ethnic melting pot, it was united politically under its kings, in part because the Scottish

Replica of the Stone of Scone

monarchy had adopted primogeniture. The kings claimed descent from Scota, daughter of Pharaoh of Egypt, and they were crowned at Scone Abbey over an ancient stone. After 1066, when the Normans moved north, they were absorbed with relative ease into the existing society, drawing Scotland into mainstream European culture. A typical Scottish-Norman surname was Bruce, derived from Brix in Normandy. In addition, like England, Scotland had towns (burghs) and abbeys and priories on the continental model and its regions were characteristically cast as ‘shires’ along English lines.

The British dimension: Wales

Books I've consulted for this and the post about Scotland:

David Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery. The Penguin History of Britain 1066-1284 (London: Penguin, 2004)
Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: the Kings who made England (William Collins, 2013)
Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (London: Windmill Books, 2009)
Michael Prestwich, Plantagenet England 1225-1360 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
Miri Rubin, The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain the Late Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 2006)

"Caernarfon castle interior".
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
via Wikimedia Commons

Wales

Wales was culturally strange to the English. Even at the highest levels the inhabitants spoke Welsh and this made them incomprehensible to the French-speaking English aristocracy. Even more importantly, the Welsh had different inheritance rules from the English, ‘partible’ inheritance rather than primogeniture. This was the main reason why there was no single political authority in Wales.  Rather than a recognisable nation-state it was a complex pattern of petty lordships.

Following his Conquest of England William the Conqueror established earldoms along the Welsh marches at Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford. All these earls encroached into Welsh territory and gave Norman names to the lands they conquered. By 1200 the marchlands included part of Flintshire and Montgomeryshire, most of Radnorshire, Breconshire and Glamorgan, most of Monmouthshire, the southern part of Carmarthenshire and virtually the whole of Pembroke. These lordships were anomalous, neither Welsh nor English and very much a law unto themselves.

The origins of Parliament

Simon de Montfort
window of Chartres Cathedral
Bibliothèque Nationale de France

These are the books I've consulted:
David Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery. The Penguin History of Britain 1066-1284 (London: Penguin, 2004)
Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: the Kings who made England (William Collins, 2013)
Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (London: Windmill Books, 2009)
Michael Prestwich, Plantagenet England 1225-1360 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
Robin Shepherd, Westminster a Biography: From the Earliest Times to the Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2012)

David Carpenter argues (p. 491) that 

‘Magna Carta ‘constituted a watershed between different styles of government, making it much harder for the king to treat individuals in an arbitrary fashion, especially when it come to taking their money’. 

Henry III (1216-72)

During Henry’s childhood, and until he began his personal rule in 1234, England was ruled by a series of regencies. The most fundamental developments of his reign were the emergence of parliament, the widening of the political community and the growing sense of xenophobic national identity, all shaped by opposition to royal politics. In 1258 his personal rule was ended by a political revolution far more radical than Magna Carta in 1215. 
Henry’s high view of kingship can be seen in his rebuilding of Westminster Abbey from 1245 in honour of Edward the Confessor. It was twenty-four years before the new abbey could be consecrated, and even then the building was unfinished. However, he also confirmed Magna Carta in 1237 and 1253, apparently sincerely, suggesting that he believed that the king had to act under the law. 

King John and Magna Carta

One of the four extant copies of Magna Carta

See 
David Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain 1066-1284 (London: Penguin, 2004)
Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Kings who made England (William Collins, 2013) 
See also here and here.

The sudden death of Richard I at Limoges in 1199 led to the accession of his brother, John and one of the most disastrous and

Richard I's castle, Chateau
Gaillard, that fell to the French
in 1204

momentous reigns in history.  Within five years of his accession, he had lost Anjou and Maine (1203) and Normandy (1204) to the French king, Philip Augustus. In 1206 he was forced to recognise Philip’s conquest of the northern part of Aquitaine. John was left Gascony as his sole French territory. The consequences were momentous.

‘The Capetian conquest of Normandy was a turning point in European history. It made the Capetian kings dominant in western Europe, and ended the cross-Channel Anglo-Norman state. [Although] England did not cease to be part of the “community of Europe”… the days of the absentee kings were over…From 1204…kings of England for the first time since 1066 were just that…Henceforth the high aristocracy would be born and hold lands only in England. They could become as English as everyone else.’ (Carpenter 270)