A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (2 page)

By this stage, anyone who had quizzed me about the making of this book – assuming they were still listening – must have had a third question forming in their minds, though they were all too polite to pose it. That question, I imagine, was ‘why bother?’ Why devote a sizeable chunk of one’s own life to re-examining the deeds of a man who has been dead for seven centuries? The answer, as I hope the finished product will make clear, is that the reign of Edward I matters. Not for nothing did I settle on a subtitle that includes the phrase ‘the forging of Britain’. This period was one of the most pivotal in the whole of British history, a moment when the destinies of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland were decided. It was also one of the most dramatic. Edward summoned the biggest armies and the largest parliaments seen in Britain during the Middle Ages; he built the greatest chain of castles in Europe; he expelled the Jews, conquered the Welsh and very nearly succeeded in conquering the Scots. We are often told these days that we ought to have a greater sense of what it means to be British. I hope that this book goes some small way towards fulfilling that need.

Naturally, this is not the first attempt to broach the subject (nor, I predict, will it be the last). In the twentieth century Edward I was examined at length by two eminent medieval historians, Maurice Powicke and Michael Prestwich. As the notes at the end of this book make clear, my debt to both is very great. During several years of writing and research I have turned to their books constantly and repeatedly, and have always been struck by insights that would not have occurred to me from the original evidence. And even when I have looked at the evidence and reached different conclusions, their work has always provided me with an invaluable starting point. The main way in which my work differs from theirs is in its construction. Both Powicke and Prestwich chose to approach Edward thematically, devoting whole chapters to his lawmaking, his diplomacy, and so on. I have opted for a chronological treatment, which gives the following pages some claim to originality. No one has attempted to tell Edward’s story from beginning to end since before the First World War, which effectively means that no one has told his story in this way since the invention of medieval history as a modern academic discipline. Of course, such a chronological approach has certain inherent drawbacks. Some academic readers may be disappointed that there is not more here on Edward’s statutes or his governmental inquiries. I can only offer the excuse that the discussion of such topics would have been hard to incorporate into an already complicated narrative without the whole thing grinding to a halt, and that, in any case, these topics have been well covered elsewhere. I also take some comfort from recent research which suggests that the ‘English Justinian’ probably had no hand, and perhaps little interest, in drawing up the laws that were issued in his name. On a more positive note, the task of putting the events of Edward’s life in their correct order has led me to question existing orthodoxies more frequently than I had imagined might be necessary. I hope that the new interpretations I have offered in their place will be found convincing, or at least stimulating, by other medievalists.

Mention of other medievalists leads me to a long list of acknowledgements; as I have already said, this volume rests in no small measure on the researches of others. Chapter Eight, for example, draws heavily on the recent work of Archie Duncan, who was kind enough to send me a draft of his latest thoughts on Edward’s activities at Norham, and also to lend me his translation of the sections of Walter of Guisborough that relate to events in Scotland. Paul Brand and Henry Summerson were equally kind in allowing me to read their recent unpublished papers, Huw Ridgeway and Bob Stacey responded helpfully to emails requesting clarification of certain aspects of Henry III’s reign, and David D’Avray and George Garnett patiently answered my telephone inquiries about the mysteries of the English coronation. I received similar help, in one form or another, from Jeremy Ashbee, Paul Binski, Robert Bartlett, Nicola Coldstream, Beth Hartland, Jess Nelson, Michael Prestwich, John Pryor, Matthew Reeve, Robin Studd, Mark Vaughn and Fiona Watson. Others have provided useful critical feedback and moral support: in particular, I should like to thank Adrian Jobson, Michael Ray and Andrew Spencer, and also Richard Huscroft, who offered me the additional treat of a tour of the tombs at Westminster Abbey. On another visit to the Abbey I was well received by Richard Mortimer, while Jane Spooner, Chris Gidlow and their colleagues were similarly welcoming at the Tower of London. My special thanks to Guilhem Pépin for his considerable assistance with the map of Gascony, and to Philippe Dufour for the aerial photograph of Monpazier. I must also thank Gillian Suttie for her hospitality during a tour of Scotland, and Mark Slater and Jo Topping for the gracious use of their house in France which lies conveniently close to some of Edward’s bastides. Martin Allen at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge provided last-minute help with coins, and Jeff Cottenden took a rather splendid picture for the front cover. My estimable agent, Julian Alexander, had great faith in this project from the first, and introduced me to Hutchinson, where I have been well looked after by my editor Tony Whittome, his colleague James Nightingale, and the others at Random House.

The biggest debts, as usual, I have left until last. Once again I have to thank my former supervisors in London and Oxford, David Carpenter and John Maddicott, for their invaluable support and advice. As well as fielding email inquiries and phone calls, both read the entire book in draft, made many useful suggestions and saved me from innumerable errors. The same thanks go to my partner, Catherine, who has probably suffered more than any other person in recent years on account of Edward I. Not only did she read every word of every draft; she has also stoically endured Edward’s tendency to crop up in almost every conversation, and uncomplainingly allowed him to dictate her holiday destinations for the past three years. I hope at least some of it was fun, and promise that the sequel will be set in New York, Japan or Australia.

My final words of thanks, though, are reserved for Rees Davies. When I arrived in Oxford ten years ago to begin my doctorate, I knew little about English medieval history, but even less about the histories of Wales, Ireland and Scotland. It is chiefly down to Rees’s teaching and writing that this imbalance was corrected. He was never my teacher in any strict sense, but during my time in Oxford he offered advice and support without which I would never have completed my thesis. Although he had few positive things to say about Edward I, he was supportive of my intention of writing a book about him and unstinting in his encouragement while I was in the early stages of research. In intellectual terms, the finished product owes more to Rees than to any other individual, and if it encourages others to seek out and discover his works for themselves, then for that reason alone it will have been a book worth writing.

Edward the First, or Edward the Fourth?

Before the reign of the king we call Edward I, England had been ruled by several other kings who shared his name; the trouble was that, even from a thirteenth-century standpoint, they had all lived a very long time in the past. At the time of Edward’s accession in 1272, even his most recent royal namesake, Edward the Confessor, had been dead for more than two centuries. Everyone in the thirteenth century remembered the Confessor, for by then he had become the patron saint of the English royal family. But when it came to the other King Edwards, people were altogether more hazy. Towards the end of Edward I’s reign, for example, some of his subjects felt compelled to chronicle his remarkable deeds, and decided that they needed to distinguish the king by giving him a number. Unfortunately, they miscounted, including in their tallies the Confessor (who ruled from 1042 to 1066), and also the celebrated tenth-century king, Edward the Elder (899–924), but overlooking entirely the short and unmemorable reign of Edward the Martyr (975–78). For this reason, at least two thirteenth-century writers referred to Edward I as ‘Edward the Third’. Had they counted correctly, they would have called him ‘Edward the Fourth’.

Fortunately for us, such early and inaccurate numbering schemes did not endure. In general, when his contemporaries wished to distinguish Edward, they called him ‘King Edward, son of King Henry’. The need for numbers arose only after his death, when he was succeeded by a son, and then a grandson, both of whom bore his illustrious name. By the middle of the fourteenth century, Englishmen found themselves having to differentiate between three consecutive, identically named kings, and so unsurprisingly they started referring to them as the First, Second and Third. Anyone troubled by the recollection that once upon a time there had been other kings called Edward could salve their historical conscience by adding ‘since the Conquest’. Thus the Norman Conquest became the official starting point for the numbering of English kings. But it was only necessary to have such a starting point in the first place because of Henry III’s idiosyncratic decision to resurrect the name of a long-dead Anglo-Saxon royal saint and bestow it on his eldest son.

A Note on Money

For those readers who, like me, were born after the English currency was decimalised, it is worth pointing out that sterling used to be measured in pounds, shillings and pence: twelve pennies made a shilling, and twenty shillings made a pound. This was as true in the thirteenth century as it was before 1971, though in the Middle Ages the pennies went a good deal further. In Edward I’s day an unskilled labourer could earn one or two pence for a day’s work, while a skilled craftsmen might earn double that sum. A man who took home £20 a year would have been considered very well off, and even the greatest individuals in English society – the earls – rarely enjoyed incomes in excess of £5,000. Only Edward himself had a five-figure income, receiving around £27,000 a year from ordinary royal revenues, which he spent running his household and, by extension, the kingdom as a whole. Caernarfon Castle, although never completed, ended up costing roughly the same amount. The only type of coin in widespread circulation was the silver penny, so a pound was a weighty bag of coins, and even a small-sounding sum like £5 had to be counted out as 1,200 silver pennies. Money was also reckoned in marks, which were equivalent to 160 pennies, or two-thirds of a pound.

A Saint in Name

T
his story begins in the year 1239 with a girl called Eleanor. Eleanor lives in England, a peaceful and prosperous kingdom, much the same size then as it is now. Eleanor herself, however, is not English. She was bred and brought up in Provence, an independent county in the south of what is now modern France. The reason Eleanor is living in England in 1239 is because, three and a half years earlier, she had been married to the king of England, Henry III. At the time of their wedding, Henry was twenty-eight. Eleanor was twelve.

Eleanor is now sixteen years old, or very nearly so, and reportedly a great beauty: graceful, charming and elegant. Henry is very much in love with her, and she with him, but she has yet to win the hearts of his subjects. In the thirteenth century the English did not take to foreigners with the same easy readiness they do today. We may take as our witness a monk of St Albans by the name of Matthew Paris, who, as well as being a thorough-going xenophobe, also happens to be one of the most gossipy, prolific and best-informed chroniclers of the entire Middle Ages. Brother Matthew and his contemporaries had observed the effects of Eleanor’s arrival and seen the thing they most feared: an influx of foreigners, surrounding their king, separating him from his ‘natural’ subjects and advising him – so the English believed – badly. Rather ridiculously, Paris tried to pin the blame for this on Eleanor. Foreigners were pulling the kingdom to pieces, he said, and Henry, ‘being under the influence of his wife’, was letting them.

It was also apparently held against Eleanor that, three years into her marriage, she had not produced any children. ‘It was feared the queen was barren,’ said Matthew Paris, with the sympathy of a professional celibate. Again, this was quite ridiculous, given Eleanor’s tender years. What is much more likely is that Henry III, a kind and considerate man, had been exercising a bit of self-restraint. Twelve was the minimum age at which the medieval Church would permit girls to marry, and Henry and Eleanor had probably had sex soon after their wedding, but this would have been for political reasons, to ensure that their union was valid and binding. Common sense and compassion suggested that twelve was too young for regular marital relations and to run the risk that Eleanor might become pregnant.

By the time Matthew Paris made this comment, however, Eleanor was fifteen, Henry was thirty-one, and they were definitely sleeping together. We know this because on 9 September 1238, in the middle of the night, a knife-wielding madman broke into Henry’s bedchamber with the intention of killing the king. He failed because, as Matthew Paris himself tells us, Henry was not in his room at the time. Luckily, he was with the queen.