Edward I (1272–1307)
Edward I was thirty-three years old when he succeeded to the throne. He is known as Edward I because he was the first Plantagenet king with that name though there had been two Anglo-Saxon predecessors, Edward the Elder and Edward the Confessor. He was nicknamed Longshanks for his great height, a feature which helped save him from being wounded in battle because his long arms gave him an advantage with a lance and opponents could never get near enough. He was a brilliant soldier, the man who finally broke the power of the Welsh rulers–which no one, not even the Romans, the world’s finest soldiers, had succeeded in doing before. Holding the country down by a ring of famous castles which still stand today, he brought Wales permanently under English rule. In place of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd he made his eldest son the Prince of Wales. On his large but austere tomb of Purbeck marble in Westminster Abbey, itself a reflection of his stern personality, an unknown fourteenth-century hand scrawled the words ‘malleus Scotorum’, the Hammer of the Scots. But though Edward I hammered Scotland he never completely conquered her, and died within sight of that independent land.
The new king was named Edward because Henry III so greatly admired Edward the Confessor. Yet no one could have been less like that mild saint. Edward I more closely resembled his forbidding and decisive ancestor William the Conqueror. His experiences during his father’s reign and in the course of what was in effect an apprenticeship in politics under Simon de Montfort had convinced him that the great earl’s broad-based Parliament was the best way of uniting the country. The immediate challenge of Edward’s reign came from Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, whom it took two Welsh campaigns to destroy. But the king’s energies were chiefly bent on a series of legal reforms designed to put the royal government on a firm footing after the anarchy of the previous seventy-five years, and above all to limit the power of the magnates.
Edward I was inspired by a chivalric ideal of good kingship which had come to dominate the mindset of the age through the courtly romances of the previous century. He took a keen interest in King Arthur, whose supposed bones were reburied in a special ceremony performed before him and his queen at Glastonbury Abbey and he was famous for his Round Table banquets. The legendary devotion that existed between him and his wife Eleanor of Castile in an age when many marriages were dynastic affairs reveals a man of strong feelings. She accompanied him on most of his military campaigns, even attending him on his Crusade to the Holy Land in 1270. The legend that she saved the life of Edward there when he was wounded probably indicates that she had brought with her from her native Castile some of the superior medical knowledge of its Arab doctors. When Queen Eleanor died at Harby in Nottinghamshire in 1290, most unusually her distraught widower followed her cortège all the way to Westminster Abbey. He erected the celebrated series of Eleanor Crosses–twelve in all–to mark the places where her body rested as it was carried south. Some of them are still standing, though the best known, which gave Charing Cross its name, is a copy.
But Edward I was not just a romantic warrior, he was also immensely practical. He drew up new laws to encourage foreign merchants and reformed the coinage. He had a political motive here too, because he understood that if he promoted the mercantile interest or trade it would balance the power of the barons. Visiting his French territories on the way back from the Crusades, he was struck by the lawlessness of Guienne in Gascony. He therefore made it a policy to found new towns named bastides to encourage the growth of a law-abiding middle-class population of merchants and lawyers. No less practically, one of his first actions was to make sure the crown profited from England’s growing wool trade, which had hugely expanded thanks to the Cistercian monks’ pioneering work clearing forests to breed sheep. In 1275 he instituted a royal tax on every sack of wool, sheepskin and leather exported to northern Europe.
Under Edward I, more than ever the area round the Tower of London became the seat of government. He moved the mint there from Westminster and built the medieval palace we know today next to the White Tower. The plainness of his quarters, with the little chapel off his bedroom, at a time when the English decorative arts were at their richest suggests the hard purposefulness and lack of frivolity in his character which contrast so dramatically with his father’s sensuous and artistic nature.
In 1274, the year of his coronation on his return from the Holy Land, Edward relaunched throughout the country that old Norman administrative tool, the inquest. Owing to the careless nature of his father’s administration many of the baronial courts had taken over the jurisdiction and rights of the royal courts to the detriment of the king’s power. Undertaking an investigation known as Quo warranto (Latin for ‘by what right’) royal commissioners travelled throughout the country inquiring into what rights each baron claimed for himself and whether they were justified. This could mainly be achieved through the production of a charter or piece of parchment sealed with the king’s Great Seal, though in some places of course the right to hold a court stretched back to Anglo-Saxon times and was treated as being based on immemorial custom.
The First Statute of Westminster of 1275 summarized the results of this inquiry, while the Statute of Gloucester in 1278 curtailed many former baronial jurisdictions and replaced them with royal courts. The Third Statute of Westminster, generally known as Quia emptores, further weakened the power of the feudal party by allowing the sale of land without feudal obligation to the seller. Instead the buyer became the vassal of the seller’s own lord–frequently the crown. The responsibility of the hundreds in England to prevent crime within their boundaries was reinforced by the Second Statute of Westminster, which also set down new arrangements for managing the fyrd–from now on to be known as the militia.
Edward I also attempted to check the authority of the Church. He put an end to the annual payment to the pope established by John as Rome’s vassal, and laid down that the Church courts should never encroach on the jurisdiction of the common law. By the Statute of Mortmain of 1279 (from the Latin for dead hand, mortua manu) men and women were prevented from leaving their property to the Church without the crown’s leave. All these measures made Edward I richer than his father had been and enabled him to do without the wealth of the Jewish community. Edward’s passionately Christian religious convictions stimulated an anti-Semitic streak in him. Objecting to the high rates of interest the Jewish community charged for loans and accusing them of using foreign coins instead of the sterling he insisted upon, in 1290 he expelled the Jews from England. They did not return for three and a half centuries, when Oliver Cromwell asked them back.
In another display of force, complaints about the judiciary persuaded the king to have every one of the royal judges tried in 1289. All but four were dismissed from office. From 1292 advocacy was put on a more professional basis with the introduction of a rule that only lawyers trained by judges could appear in the royal courts. And the Inns of Court, which all barristers must belong to, date from this era as centres of legal education.
But the wars against Wales and Scotland were the dominating feature of Edward’s reign. His campaign against the Welsh under Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffydd began as early as 1277. Prince Llywelyn had used the Treaty of Shrewsbury as an opportunity to enhance his powers. His aim was to overrun the lands of the English marcher lords and double the size of his dominion. When Edward heard that Llywelyn, who was engaged to Simon de Montfort’s daughter Eleanor, was claiming to be the spiritual heir of the great rebel, he marched an army into north Wales. By the Treaty of Conway Llywelyn lost the overlordship of Wales and was reduced to being a petty prince once more. Most of his territory was put under English law with no regard for Welsh custom.
Oppressing the Welsh population, with English soldiers placed in every district, soon provoked another rebellion, led by Llywelyn and his brother Dafydd. Once again Edward led an army into north Wales and blockaded Prince Llywelyn in Snowdonia. But Llywelyn managed to flee through the English lines and escape to the upper Wye. There Prince Llywelyn made his last stand with the support of many of the ordinary people of the marches. But on 11 December he was killed at the Battle of Orewin Bridge.
This time Edward was less merciful in his dealings. Llywelyn’s head was cut from his body, mounted on a pike and crowned with willow in cruel mockery of the way the Welsh used to crown their kings. In the tradition of the age it was left rotting outside the Tower of London as a warning. Though Prince Dafydd held out for a year longer, hidden in the woods and secret valleys around his home, by 1283 he too had been executed at Shrewsbury.
North Wales was organized along the lines of English local government. The Marcher lands remained semi-independent feudal fiefdoms until the sixteenth century, but most of Wales, particularly the north and coastal regions, was reorganized on the English model. It was divided into six counties (Anglesey, Carmarthen, Caernarvon, Merioneth and Cardigan, the sixth being invented by Edward I and named Flintshire), each with its own sheriffs. The country was fenced off by a series of impregnable white castles, among them Caernarvon, Conway and Harlech. Edward’s surviving eldest son, the future Edward II, was born at Caernarvon Castle in 1284. Legend has it that Edward shouted to the crowds assembled below, ‘I will give you a prince who speaks no English,’ and produced the newborn babe at the window. From 1301 the title Prince of Wales has always been given to the eldest son of the English monarch.
The conquest of Scotland, though achieved more rapidly than that of Wales, would in fact be a short-lived affair. By the end of the thirteenth century Scotland was a large, unified area ruled by one king and running from the Highlands in the north, which were populated by Celtic tribes who had intermarried with Norman settlers, down to the River Tweed in the south. In the south west the kingdom reached down from Galloway to the old Welsh kingdom of what is today known as Cumbria or the Lake District. So extensive a territory might prove a haven for enemies of England. On any reading, statecraft suggested that it might be better under English control.
The English and Scots had lived in peace for more than a hundred years since the Treaty of Falaise in 1174. But in 1286 the situation became far more volatile: King Alexander III, the last in the line of old Scottish kings, whom tragedy had deprived of his two male heirs within two years of one another, died unexpectedly. This left his seven-year-old granddaughter Margaret, the Maid of Norway, the only heir to the throne. But when she too died four years later, there was then no obvious heir. No fewer than thirteen claimants to the Scottish throne registered their claim. The most important were John Balliol and Robert Bruce, who were both descended in the female line. Their claims were sufficiently contentious for there to be a very real possibility of civil war. The Scottish magnates, many of whom held land in England, decided that Edward I was best placed to name the new king. But Edward would do so only at a price. Ever since Richard the Lionheart had commuted the Treaty of Falaise for money, so that the Scottish king only did homage to the English for his lands in England, the notion of the English king as overlord of the Scots had fallen away. Edward I agreed to judge the contest on condition that all the Scottish nobility and the claimants themselves first performed an act of homage to him as overlord of Scotland.
The chief claimants and the magnates were so anxious to secure Edward’s support that they agreed. Assisted by 104 judges, Edward tried the suit for the succession to the Scottish throne. After much deliberation the crown was finally granted in 1292 to John Balliol, who was proclaimed king at Berwick-on-Tweed, then a Scottish town. Almost immediately, however, this apparent solution was thrown into doubt when war broke out once again between France and England over the English possessions on the Continent. Edward I led an English army to Gascony to defend it against the French king Philip IV, while Philip used his agents to stir up rebellion against his English enemy in Wales and Scotland. Although the Welsh rebellion was quickly put down, the Scots threat was far more powerful. From 1293 dates the series of diplomatic treaties and close links between Scotland and France against their mutual enemy England which is known as the Auld Alliance.
A certain amount of antagonism towards Edward I had already been aroused among the Scots barons. Legal appeals by ordinary Scotsmen from the local feudal courts to the royal courts of England were becoming common, partly because of the reputation for fairer, more professional justice in England. But the Scots were also angry at being asked to form part of the English feudal levy against the French army in Gascony. John Balliol was despised as a poor leader of men who was too much in the English king’s pocket. He was now more or less supplanted as ruler of Scotland by a committee of twelve nobles similar to the Council of Fifteen which had ruled England for Henry III.
Threatened on all his borders, Edward I followed Earl Simon’s example before him. By summoning in 1295 what is known as the Model Parliament he involved the whole English nation in the looming crisis and ratcheted the political organization of the country up another level. The Great Charter had limited the powers of the king by law. But Edward went a step further and stressed that in England the king’s government was by the assent of the governed. The writ requesting the attendance of two elected representatives from each shire, and from cities and boroughs to join with the barons and bishops includes the celebrated phrase: ‘What touches all should be approved of all.’ The document went on, ‘It is also very clear that common dangers should be met by measures agreed upon in common.’
Edward had been used to calling upon Parliament since the beginning of his reign. But this was the first time he accepted that, in return for voting new taxes for the war, he should allow the nation to enter into the councils of state. With the large sums of money voted him by the Model Parliament in 1296 he embarked on bringing Scotland to heel. Faced with Edward’s huge invading army John Balliol gave up the crown of Scotland, Edward pronounced himself king, and the country was divided among his lieutenants on English county lines. To mark the change of rule, the great Stone of Scone or Stone of Destiny, where Scottish kings since the sixth century had been enthroned, was carted south to lie beneath the English king’s throne in Westminster Abbey. There it remained until 1999, when in honour of the new Scottish Assembly, it came home after 700 years.
The king now marched south, having apparently disposed of both of the King of France’s allies, to prepare for war in Gascony. But in England he found that his war plans were resisted by both the clergy and the baronage. They had evidently taken Edward’s injunction that what touches all must be approved by all strongly to heart. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Winchelsea, declared that in accordance with Pope Boniface VIII’s most recent bull the English clergy would pay no more taxes to the lay ruler. The Constable of England, Humphrey Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk and Marshal of England, and most of the rest of the great magnates meeting in Parliament at Salisbury in 1297 refused to go to Gascony as ordered. Edward stormed off there by himself. Denied money by the estates of the realm he financed the French expedition by the illegal tax known as the Maltolt: this entailed his soldiers confiscating all the merchants’ wool and releasing it in return for gold.
But the English magnates were the king’s equal in decisive behaviour. As soon as Edward was in Gascony, encouraged by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Bohun and Bigod took his son Edward of Caernarvon prisoner and refused to release him until the king had reissued Magna Carta. They also insisted on the addition of new provisions: that the Maltolt be abolished and that henceforth it be deemed illegal to raise taxes without the permission of Parliament (in place of the twenty-five barons of Magna Carta). This process is known as the Confirmatio Cartarum. Edward I was in no position to refuse, and authorized the Confirmation without further ado.
His troubles were far from over. A great popular rebellion in Scotland brought Longshanks hurrying back from the continent. Under a Scottish knight named Sir William Wallace (known as Braveheart) a series of risings had broken out all over the country, and at the decisive battle of Stirling Bridge in September 1297 Wallace dramatically defeated the king’s representative in Scotland, Earl Warenne. By the end of the year Scotland had expelled the English, and Wallace was burning all their border towns.
Wallace’s supporters tended to be ordinary people, rather than Scots nobles who frequently held estates in England as well as Scotland and therefore had every reason for not antagonizing the English king. Indeed, most of his ragged army were so impoverished that they could not afford a horse. But Wallace himself was a tactician of genius, and the Battle of Falkirk the following year was a very close-run thing. Only Edward I’s employment of archers trained in the esoteric art of the longbow, whose superiority he had first observed during the Welsh wars, defeated Wallace’s use of squares and pikes designed to impale the superb English cavalry.
Problems with the baronage soon required the king’s presence in the south. It was not until 1303 that he could return to the north and make sure of his Scottish kingdom. By now he was a sick man. Though he was in his late sixties, an elderly man by the standards of those days, he refused to be borne in the litter that his advisers felt would be appropriate for the long journey north. Instead he rode at the head of the army to besiege Stirling Castle, the key to the country’s defences. So close was the king to the castle walls during the siege that a crossbow bolt lodged itself in his saddle. But, though his men begged him to retire, the stiff-backed old warrior refused, and sat on his charger day after day watching as the Scots threw Greek fire and boiling oil at their attackers.
When Stirling at last fell, the conquest of Scotland seemed a foregone conclusion. Wallace was captured, taken south and hanged, drawn and quartered, and his head joined Prince Llywelyn’s above the gate at the Tower of London. English rule was reimposed. Scotland was divided into four areas to be governed overall by Edward I’s nephew John of Brittany, while Edward left for the south. But no sooner had he departed than a new revolt broke out, led by another of Scotland’s greatest heroes, Robert the Bruce.
Bruce, grandson of John Balliol’s rival, had initially been one of the Scots nobles who supported English rule in Scotland, until the brutality with which English soldiers treated the Scots aroused his ire (great ladies like the Countess of Buchan had been humiliated by being kept in cages suspended from castle walls). In 1306, during an assignation between Bruce and John Comyn in a lonely church in Dumfries to hatch a plot against English rule, the hot-tempered Bruce murdered Comyn. Comyn also had a claim to the Scottish throne and Bruce seems to have been unable to prevent himself seizing the moment to put paid to his rival. Although Bruce was rendered an outlaw by this act, which was made more heinous by being committed on holy ground, the ordinary people began to rally to him, with many joining him at his hideout in the hills.
From there an irresistible momentum seized the Scots. Fighting broke out everywhere, the English were expelled from the country, and at the end of that year Robert the Bruce was crowned King of Scotland at Scone.
Although Edward I was by now almost seventy years of age and his health was poor, his will was as strong as ever. For the third time he set out from the south to enforce his rule on the recalcitrant Scots. But on 7 July 1307 he died at Burgh on Sands within sight of his goal. The fierce old king had demanded that his bones be boiled down so they could be carried before the English army when they crossed the border on their way north. His son, Edward II, was made of rather different stuff. Despite his promise to his father to continue his campaign, he abandoned it and retreated south to the company of a handsome Gascon knight called Piers Gaveston.