The Demon's Brood (16 page)

While accepting Edward's suzerainty, Llewelyn ap Gruffydd of Gwynedd, Prince of Wales, regarded himself as an independent sovereign and overlord of the Welsh chieftains in the south. Several times Edward ordered him to come to court and pay homage as his grandfather had done, but Llewelyn declined. In 1275 Llewelyn's brother Dafydd fled to England after plotting to depose him, and was given sanctuary. When Simon de Montfort's daughter Eleanor, to whom Llewelyn had been betrothed for ten years, sailed to Wales for their wedding, her ship was intercepted and she was taken to Windsor. The king refused to release her until the prince paid homage. At the end of 1276 Edward appointed commanders for north Wales, west Wales and the central Marches. Allying with disaffected Welsh chieftains, they quickly overran the new lands acquired by Llewelyn.
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The king understood Welsh tactics very well – to raid, then hide among trackless hills, hardy mountain ponies giving them mobility. Living in rough bothies, they could move their families and flocks at a moment's notice, luring enemies into harsh country where bad weather and lack of provisions took a severe toll. ‘Grievous is war there, and hard to endure', says a chronicler. ‘When it is summer elsewhere, it is winter in Wales.'
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Their weapons were spears, javelins and long knives, while men of the south used bows that could send an arrow through a church door. If unable to face a charge by mailed knights, they were lethally effective in ambushes.

Edward did not intend to conquer Wales, however, merely to tame Llewelyn. In July 1277 he assembled an army 16,000 strong (with 9,000 mercenaries from south Wales) at Worcester, where munitions and food were stockpiled, and marched up to Flint. He brought woodmen and miners to build roads through the woods and mountains, to dig earthworks and erect stockades, as well as masons and labourers to construct castles. Thirty Cinque Port ships with supplies were stationed on the River Dee.

From his headquarters at Flint, Edward invaded Gwynedd and Powys, destroying crops and livestock, capturing enemy strongholds. By 29 July he was at Deganwy on the River Conwy's west bank, sending troops over to Anglesey, who burned the harvest on which the prince's people relied to feed them in winter. His area commanders had already wrecked much of Llewelyn's regime – and what was left disintegrated. Early in November 1277 at the treaty of Conwy, Llewelyn formally surrendered half his territory, agreeing to pay an indemnity of £50,000. When he did homage for his ‘fief', the king not only remitted the indemnity but let him marry Eleanor de Montfort, giving a wedding banquet at Worcester in their honour.

Having hoped to replace his brother as Prince of Wales, Dafydd was furious. Eventually, knowing that his fellow countrymen resented the arrival of new settlers and the replacement of the code of Hywel Dda with English law, on Easter Sunday 1282 Dafydd ‘went playing the fox'.
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He and his men got into Hawarden Castle near Flint by bearing palms in token of peace, then slaughtered the garrison to show that he too hated Englishmen. Other castles fell, and even if they did not fall, the Welsh who lived around them rose, defeating the Earl of Gloucester at Llandeilo in June and massacring settlers. Realizing this was a revolt by the whole nation, Llewelyn assumed leadership. Trying to lessen the English campaign's impact by broadening the front, he moved down to Powys.

Llewelyn rushed back to Gwynedd, however, when a
shipborne force under Luke de Tany occupied Anglesey in October, building a bridge of boats across the Menai Strait to attack western Snowdonia. Meanwhile, the king established his headquarters at Rhuddlan, subduing the Perfyddwlad (Flint and Denbighshire) and eastern Gwynedd. At the same time, Marchers cowed the Welsh in their area, burning churches and slaughtering men, women and children – including babies at the breast. Yet Edward was so alarmed that secretly he offered Llewelyn an English earldom in exchange for Gwynedd.

In October the Welsh were encouraged by the death of Roger Mortimer, a Marcher lord who had been one of the king's principal commanders. In November it seemed they might win. Ambushed on the way back from a raid, Luke de Tany was drowned with many troops (including twenty knights) when the pontoon bridge collapsed into the sea as they retreated. The English counteroffensive had stalled, and Llewelyn finally rejected peace offers.

This only hardened Edward's determination. He did not see the struggle as conquest – he was punishing rebellion. To avoid being starved out of Snowdonia, Llewelyn returned to Powys, where on 11 December 1282 during a skirmish at a bridge over the River Irfon near Builth, he was run through with a lance by a knight who did not recognize him. His head was displayed on a stake at London, crowned with an ivy wreath. After the death of ‘Llewelyn the Last', who despite his volatility had been a superb leader, the spirit went out of the Welsh.

The war was not over, as his successor, his brother Prince Dafydd, knew he could expect no mercy. Ignoring the winter weather, Edward marched into Snowdonia in January 1283, taking the enemy's remaining castles. When Castell-y-Bere, the last stronghold in Welsh hands, fell in April, Dafydd fled into the mountains. Betrayed by a fellow countryman, he was caught hiding in a marsh and taken in chains to the king at Rhuddlan, then tried at Shrewsbury in September by a ‘parliament' of barons. It condemned him to be drawn on a hurdle to a gallows,
half-hanged, then cut down alive for castration, disembowelment and quartering – the first to suffer this ghastly penalty.

The Welsh had never stood a chance, overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Mustering so many men was a remarkable achievement by Edward's bureaucracy.
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Munitions as well as men were assembled in huge quantities, crossbow bolts ordered by tens of thousands. The king's tactics may sometimes be questioned, but not his logistics.

In spring 1284 Edward issued the Statutes of Wales, replacing Welsh cantreds with English shires and hundreds in regions annexed by the Crown such as Gwynedd, although Marcher lordships retained their autonomy. English criminal law was introduced, but this time the Welsh kept some of Hywel Dda's code for civil matters. New towns were founded in freshly conquered areas, five defended by huge castles where settlers could take refuge. Because of thirteenth-century land hunger there was no shortage of ‘Saxon' immigrants, who were encouraged to settle by the king.

The biggest of eight new castles was Caernarfon, with its polygonal towers; almost a town. Edward's architect was James of Savoy, whose work he had seen when returning from the Holy Land. Operating from Harlech, which he had designed and where he was castellan, James constructed all eight. Intended to hold down a conquered country, they were within close reach of the sea, so that troops and supplies could be rushed in by ship.

In 1294, when Edward was preparing for war with France, there was a dangerous revolt in north Wales, led by Madog ap Llewelyn, a member of the old ruling family, who called himself Prince of Wales. Still only half-built, Caernarfon was captured, but at Harlech forty men held off Madog's entire army. The size of the force Edward sent to deal with the rising, twice as big as in 1277 and formed of troops needed in Gascony, shows his alarm. He took charge of operations in December, but his baggage train was ambushed and he found himself besieged in Conwy – sharing his one barrel of wine with his men. Madog
was decisively defeated in March, however, all resistance petering out by summer.

Where finance was concerned, Edward was thoroughly unscrupulous. Having sucked dry the Jews (who were outside the law), he confiscated their property and in 1290 expelled the entire community from England – about 2,000 souls. He had paid for the Welsh wars by borrowing from the Riccardi of Lucca, who were allowed to collect customs duties on wool. Owing to commitments elsewhere, the Riccardi could not help with his request for a big loan in 1294, so Edward took the wool duties away from them and seized their other English assets (such as security for loans), which ruined them.

Later, he persuaded the Frescobaldi at Florence to lend him large sums, again in return for wool duties, but insolvency loomed. The only hope was taxing his subjects, but he had to secure their consent. ‘After 1215 the next great halting place in the history of the national assembly is the year 1295', wrote Maitland, referring to the Model Parliament at Westminster in which earls, barons and knights agreed to give a twelfth of their movable goods to pay for war with France, burgesses agreeing on an eighth.
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Yet it is anachronistic to think of Edward as founding parliamentary government – he soon reverted to sporadic bursts of arbitrary taxation.

At the same time, he did his best to stimulate the economy, issuing a new coinage in 1279 and introducing a Statute of Merchants in 1285 that ordered debtors to pay bills on pain of imprisonment or distraint. Aware that Winchelsea, with a bigger fleet than any other Cinque Port, was vanishing under the sea, Edward began building a town and haven in 1283 to replace it, employing an architect who had built fortified towns (bastides) for him in Gascony. Laid out on a grid pattern, it was given seventy huge cellars to encourage the wine trade with Bordeaux.

In autumn 1290 Eleanor of Castile fell gravely ill near Lincoln and Edward hurried north to be with her, but she died before he arrived. Heartbroken, he rode with her corpse to Westminster, and later had a stone cross (originally wooden) erected at each halting place. A contemporary translator of Langtoft's chronicle comments. ‘On fell things he thought and wax[ed] heavy as lead . . . His solace was all [be]reft that she from him was gone.'
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Robert Burnell died in 1292. Three years later his place was taken by Walter Langton, Keeper of the Wardrobe, who became treasurer and Bishop of Lichfield. Even greedier than Burnell, he aroused widespread dislike. Later he was charged with adultery and murder – helping his mistress to strangle her husband – besides being accused of ‘intercourse with the devil' whose backside he was said to have kissed; but he was acquitted. The king ignored these peccadilloes, regarding Walter as his eyes and ears.

Another blow was Philip IV's abandonment of the family entente. Guyenne (Gascony) had been Edward's patrimony when he was a boy. He knew it well, having spent 1254–6 there, besides visiting it on his way back from the Crusades. As a French-speaking Englishman, with southern blood from his mother and grandmother, he felt at home there. He visited again from 1286 to 1289, overhauling the region's administration, improving its legal system, building bastides and exacting homage from its noblemen – many of whom had fought for him in Wales.

The sphinx-like Philip ‘the Handsome', who succeeded his father as king in 1285, was the most formidable man in Europe; he later bridled the papacy and destroyed the Templars. His forebears had conquered most of the Plantagenet lands and he wanted Gascony too, despite Edward paying homage for it. In
1293 mercantile rivalry erupted in a pirate war, during which Gascon sailors sacked La Rochelle and a Cinque Ports fleet routed a Norman flotilla. Philip saw his chance. Marching into the Agenais and Perigord, he seized Bordeaux, then summoned the English king to Paris for trial as a contumacious vassal.

Still believing in the family entente, Edward sent his brother Edmund of Lancaster, who brokered a peace deal. To show good faith, Gascony's border strongholds were temporarily surrendered to Philip, who was allowed to station small, token forces in important towns, while Edward would marry Philip's sister Margaret on the understanding that the duchy was to be inherited by their children. The French king promised to return Gascony within forty days and cancel Edward's summons to Paris.

However, Philip then occupied towns all over the duchy. War followed, sieges and skirmishes rather than battles, and a campaign at sea, Edward building thirty galleys, each with sixty oars a side. But his army had to be diverted to crush the Welsh rising of 1294 so that most of Gascony stayed in enemy hands. Edward's next move was an alliance with the Count of Flanders and the Rhineland princes, whereupon Philip withdrew most of his troops to guard his northern frontier. When the Germans did not cooperate, Edward abandoned his plan of attacking from the north and in 1297 agreed a truce with Philip, who five years later – after a terrible defeat by the Flemish at Courtrai – returned Gascony to him.

In 1299 Edward married Philip's half-sister, Margaret of France. Peter Langtoft says he had hoped to marry her elder sister Blanche, sending envoys to Paris to learn if she was pretty and had a good figure. They reported that ‘in body, in face, in leg, in hand, in foot, no fairer creature could found in the whole world'.
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Sadly, Blanche preferred to marry the Duke of Austria, who was expected to become emperor. But Edward's second marriage was unusually happy, despite his bride being forty years younger than him. He doted on ‘the lady Margaret in whose
least finger there is more goodness and beauty, whoever sees her, than in the fair Idoine whom Amadas loved'.
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When she went down with measles, he warned the doctor not to let her travel before she was fully cured or ‘by God's thigh, you'll pay for it',
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while he was always giving her presents despite her extravagance. Margaret returned his affection, seeing him as a father figure, and nursed him devotedly during his last years. They had two sons and a daughter.

The king grew increasingly autocratic, seizing woolsacks, sheepskins and hides awaiting export, which he released only on payment of a fine. Confiscating all coined money in cathedral or abbey treasuries, he demanded that the clergy pay half their annual income or be outlawed. When the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Winchelsey, obtained a bull forbidding clergy to pay taxes without papal approval, Edward again threatened them with outlawry, and they paid.