A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (25 page)

By then the business of reforming England’s government had already begun. In the middle of October, within weeks of Burnell’s appointment, orders had gone out for the removal and replacement of all England’s sheriffs. The sheriffs, as the king’s chief agents in the counties (shire-reeves), were responsible for executing royal orders and accounting for the profits of royal lands. They were also responsible for enforcing the law and doing justice, and to that extent their role is comparable with that of their more recent and familiar Hollywood counterparts. Like the sheriffs of the Wild West, the sheriffs of medieval England exercised great power in their localities; good ones were always in demand, bad ones a perennial cause for complaint. By beginning his reign, therefore, with a clean sweep of the board, Edward sent out a clear signal that major change was under way.
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Shuffling the sheriffs, however, was only the first part of a much grander project. That same autumn, Edward and Burnell launched a great inquiry. In November, specially appointed commissioners began travelling in pairs around the country, assembling juries of local people, and requiring them to answer a long list of questions – as many as fifty in some cases. Certain questions demonstrated the same basic concern that Edward had shown in Gascony – that is, they asked how much land the king held in each county and what services he could expect in consequence. In general, however, this inquest went much further than its Gascon predecessor. Edward also wanted information, as he explained in his instructions to the commissioners, ‘concerning the deeds and behaviour of all our sheriffs and bailiffs’. This, in other words, was not merely an investigation into rights and liberties; it was also an exercise in uncovering their abuse. Hence the need for the sheriffs to be switched in advance: folk would be far more likely to come forward and complain of corruption or oppression once their chief oppressor was gone. Nor was it just royal officials who were under the spotlight. Local people were also asked ‘whether lords, or their stewards, or bailiffs of any kind’ had committed transgressions or crimes against the king and the community.
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The main point of the exercise, to judge from the weighting of the questions, was to discover where and by whom the king’s rights had been usurped – the recovery of lost rights being Edward’s main pre-occupation. And yet, by virtue of asking questions about the conduct of local officials, both royal and baronial, it was seen at the time as being a much more laudable and less self-interested exercise. Indeed, the chroniclers who commented on the inquiry saw it exclusively as a crackdown by the king on the corrupt, and a step in keeping with his promise to improve law and order. It was, in short, a cleverly handled initiative on the government’s part, contrived with the intention not only of recovering royal rights and correcting official abuse, but also of winning popular acclaim for the new king and his government.

To this extent, the survey was a great success. In every district visited by the commissioners, men and women came forward in great numbers to give their evidence. It helped that there were no cumbersome legal procedures involved; people could just turn up and complain orally. The commissioners held their inquiries, not at a county level, but at the level of the now-redundant subdivision of the county known as the hundred (depending on size and density of population, a county could have as few as four hundreds or as many as forty). Consequently, their findings, once written up, formed what are now known as the Hundred Rolls. Working at great speed throughout the winter of 1274–75, Edward’s commissioners conducted the single greatest survey of England since the Domesday Book some two centuries before.
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Domesday, however, was a dusty and fundamentally dissimilar precedent. The immediate ancestor of the initiatives that Edward introduced at the start of his reign was the reform programme that had been foisted on his father in 1258. Edward, of course, had strenuously resisted the attempt to limit the king’s authority by means of a baronial council, but, this important difference apart, he had otherwise admired the ideals espoused by the reformers. Montfort and his co-conspirators had taught him in a matter of months a lesson that Henry III had spent a lifetime failing to grasp, namely that royal power depended not merely on the support of a few great men at court, but ultimately on the goodwill of many hundreds of lesser men across the rest of the country. The first steps taken by the revolutionary council in 1258 had been to replace all the sheriffs and address the grievances of local society – precisely the steps that Edward sought to replicate after his accession. Such reforms had not failed the first time round because they were inherently unworkable; on the contrary, many of them were eminently sensible and practical, the product of much serious and conscientious thought on the part of their authors. What they would require to work – and what Edward was now able to provide – was firm application. The new king was ready to put his house in order himself.
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As in 1258, so too in Edward’s reign, the process of inquiry culminated in the drafting of new legislation. By March 1275 the Hundred Rolls commissioners had completed their work, and their findings were returned to the king, who used them to compile a comprehensive set of remedies. The result was a great statute, published at Westminster soon after Easter. It began by stating its intention boldly. ‘Our lord the king greatly wills and desires to set to rights the state of the kingdom in the things in which there is need of amendment.’ No fewer than fifty-one separate articles followed (more than double the number set down by the statute’s spiritual predecessor, the Provisions of Westminster drafted by the reformers in 1259). Most set out to address Edward’s two main policy aims – restoring royal rights and improving law and order. The latter intention, in particular, was emphasised from the start, where the statute lamented that ‘the peace has been less kept than it ought to be, the laws abused, and wrongdoers less punished than they ought to be’. ‘People are less afraid to do wrong,’ it continued, and for this reason many of the proposed solutions involved the introduction of stiffer penalties: mandatory minimum sentences and heavy fines. But steps were also taken to try to improve matters by other means. All men, for instance, were reminded of their duty to be armed and ready to accompany the sheriff when he needed to raise a posse (Latin,
posse comitatus
, the power of the county) for the pursuit and arrest of criminals.
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Not all of this giant piece of legislation can have been concocted as a direct response to the Hundred Rolls inquiry. The commissioners had assembled a vast amount of information – far too much for even the most dedicated team of ministers to process in the short time that elapsed before the Statute of Westminster was published. As the targeted questions given to the investigators show, the king’s ministers had been aware from the start of the nature of the problems they faced. This was especially true in the case of Robert Burnell. The man who had steered the ship during Edward’s absence must have been one of the key figures in drafting the new statute, along with other ministers, senior judges and lawyers.
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Nevertheless, some parts of the statute were clearly informed by the inquiry’s findings. In particular, those clauses that sought to alleviate the burden of local government seem to respond directly to the most common complaints recorded in the rolls. And being seen to respond was the essential point of the exercise. The inquiry had taken the country’s pulse. Each new roll, as it was received, must have sharpened awareness of the legislators, either confirming their earlier diagnoses or suggesting new ones. The Statute of Westminster is steeped in a sense of its own worth; designed, in its own words, ‘for the common good and for the relief of those who are oppressed’. It begins and ends with a reminder that this was Edward’s first act ‘after his coronation’, and in this respect it resembles the ‘coronation charters’ issued by earlier kings – promises of good government made at the start of their reigns in order to win popularity. Edward’s statute went much further than any of these earlier manifestos. Prepared over many months, during which there was unprecedented public consultation, it was the most thorough-going and extensive coronation charter ever issued.

This was reflected in the correspondingly elaborate efforts taken to publicise the finished statute. On the king’s instructions, it was read aloud in local courts, in the marketplaces of towns and cities, and in other places besides. Copies were given not only to sheriffs and royal bailiffs (to impress upon them their responsibilities) but also, as an additional safeguard, to several local knights in every county (the probable intention being that they should watch for infringements). The most impressive part of the publicity process, however, was the initial fanfare. Publication of the statute was timed to coincide with the first parliament of Edward’s reign, which was, for this reason, enormous in its size. As many as 800 representatives were summoned, both knights from the shires and, especially, burgesses from the towns. Together with the usual turnout of earls, barons, bishops and abbots, they constituted not only the largest audience imaginable, but also the biggest parliament assembled in England in the Middle Ages.
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The confident assurance with which Edward and his ministers handled public opinion and legislation at the start of his reign is further reflected in the sure-footed way they managed parliament. As we have seen, parliament had experienced a quantum leap during the early part of Henry III’s reign. The word itself is first used in an official context around the time that the king, as well as summoning the great men with whom English monarchs had long been wont to discuss important matters of state, had taken the innovative step of summoning representatives from the shires and boroughs. But Henry, having fathered this new child, failed to nurture it, with the result that parliament became ever more argumentative and obstructive. The king wanted the knights and burgesses he summoned to approve his requests for money. They, in turn, demanded redress of their grievances with his government. Henry responded to such criticism by jamming his fingers in his ears; parliament retaliated by withholding its consent to taxation. From one assembly to the next, for year after year, this predictable pantomime was re-enacted. The king and his people would meet to parlay, only to talk at cross purposes.
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With Edward’s accession, however, the relationship was reinvented, and the dialogue became meaningful and productive. Rather than ignore his subjects’ criticisms, the new king actively solicited them. The evidence suggests that those knights and burgesses summoned to his first parliament at Easter 1275 were encouraged to bring their complaints for consideration. Those that did so must have been moderately surprised to receive swift redress, either in the course of the meeting itself, or soon afterwards, by special commissioners who were sent out ‘to hear and determine’ (
oyer et terminer
) the plaintiff’s case. This was, therefore, an exercise in consultation in keeping with the spirit of the Hundred Rolls inquiry. The difference was that it was not intended to be a one-off. Parliaments were henceforward to be regular events, just as the reformers in 1258 had insisted they should be, and Edward continued to invite complaints, or ‘petitions’, as they became known. The initiative was, in fact, so popular that dealing with petitions quickly became one of parliament’s principal functions (later in the reign, restrictions on petitioning had to be introduced, to ensure there was still sufficient time to discuss more important matters of state). At a stroke, Edward had transformed the malfunctioning institution he had inherited from his father into a forum where the king and his people could come together for their mutual benefit.
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In order to preserve this new spirit of bonhomie, Edward knew that it would be essential to avoid his father’s tendency of demanding money from parliament. Apart from antagonising his subjects, taxation was a dangerously unstable base on which to found the Crown’s finances. In all of his endeavours, Henry III had been repeatedly hamstrung by parliament’s refusal to grant him funds. If Edward was to avoid the same unpopularity and embarrassment, he had to find another, more reliable form of income.

The solution was to tap trade. Thirteenth-century England was a rich country with a rapidly expanding economy. The evidence was everywhere: markets and fairs were being established at a rapid rate; forests were being felled to create new arable land and pasture; more and more silver coinage was being minted and put into circulation. Nowhere, however, was this prosperity more apparent than in the ever-increasing numbers of sheep. Wool had long been England’s main export, sold to the textile manufacturers of Flanders. By the thirteenth century the business was booming. Great monasteries and lay magnates built up massive flocks on their estates, then sold their fleeces on to an increasingly prosperous class of merchants. If there was one sector of the economy that could afford to contribute to the royal coffers, the wool market was it.
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What Edward therefore proposed in 1275 was the introduction of customs duties on wool. This had been tried on a couple of occasions in the past, but with no great success. On this occasion, however, the circumstances were more propitious. In the first place, Edward to some extent had the mercantile community over a barrel. During his absence on crusade a trade dispute between England and Flanders had prompted the regency government to impose an embargo on the export of wool. It had not been terribly effective – Edward at one stage complained that the number of contraband fleeces being smuggled out of England was making him a laughing stock on the Continent – but in the end this initial period of laxity worked to the king’s advantage. It meant that, when Edward returned, not only was the ban enforced with much greater stringency; he was also able to threaten the punishment of those who had contrived to evade it. Anxious to avoid Edward’s wrath, and desirous to have the restrictions lifted, the wool merchants were predisposed to lend a favourable ear to his new customs scheme. In the course of the Easter parliament they agreed that the Crown should collect half a mark (a third of a pound) on every sack of wool exported. Since a sack held around 250 fleeces and sold for about £10, the new duty only amounted to about 3 per cent.
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