The Plantagenets (41 page)

Edward, however, was determined. When spring arrived, he sent Henry of Almain back to ensure the new French king did not attempt
to threaten his lands in Gascony, then set out with his remaining men for Outremer. They arrived in mid-May.

Just over a year later Edward found himself in the heart of the labyrinthine politics of the Middle East. Christian Outremer had dwindled almost into oblivion. Frankish rule was in a parlous way. Despite Richard earl of Cornwall’s efforts briefly to reinstate control over Jerusalem during the 1240s, and Louis IX’s massive expenditure fortifying the city of Caesarea at the same time, most of the great cities of Christian Palestine had since fallen to Mamluk invaders. Caesarea and Jerusalem were in infidel hands. So too were Antioch and the supposedly impregnable crusader fortress the Crac des Chevaliers, whose soaring walls had resisted the hammering of trebuchets but which had fallen to trickery. What remained of the kingdom was ruled from Acre – a demoralized city surrounded by hostile country and dreading any day the arrival of a Mamluk army thousands strong beneath its walls.

It was clear from the outset that Edward’s crusade was never destined to be much more than a sortie into a hopeless battlefield. The Christians were done for, and the days of great triumphs before the walls of the most spectacular cities of the Middle East were over. The main enemy to the Muslim forces of Palestine was now no longer the Frankish knights of the West but the terrifying Mongol horsemen who attacked them from the north and east. Edward and his companions found not a vast war to be joined, but a diplomatic jigsaw to be puzzled over.

Yet Edward stayed for more than a year, organizing sorties into Muslim territory, exchanging letters with the Mongol leader Abagha Khan in Marageh – a city some 700 miles from Acre – and welcoming the occasional arrival of fresh troops from the West, including a party led by his brother Edmund. He was determined to make the best of his crusade, even in heroically unpromising circumstances.

On the evening of 17 June 1272 – his thirty-third birthday – Edward lay in bed with his wife in his private chambers in Acre. As he drifted into sleep, he had much to contemplate. His small band of men suffered horribly from heat and dysentery. The Mamluk leader
Baybars had vastly superior forces and supplies. Hugh III, the titular king of Jerusalem, was more inclined to peace than war, and the previous month had signed a ten-year peace with Baybars, which restricted Edward’s hopes of glory still further. Edward had been furious when the treaty was agreed. He had refused to become a party to it: quite likely he was still brooding as he fell asleep on his night of reckoning in the East.

What happened to Edward that evening became the stuff of legend. As he slept, a messenger arrived, claiming to be a renegade diplomat: a turncoat from Baybars, here at the English court bearing lavish gifts and ready to give up his own side’s secrets. Whatever message he gave Edward’s servants and guards must have sounded both urgent and convincing, for they woke the sleeping prince and asked him to meet his visitor. Edward staggered out of his sleeping chamber and met the man while still wearing his nightclothes.

As it transpired, the messenger wished to give Edward a very special birthday gift: a death blow. His position as the only non-signatory to the peace deal had made him a dangerous presence, whom Baybars wished to be rid of. The messenger rushed at Edward with a dagger, attempting to stab him in the hip. But Edward, no mean fighter, was up to the task. ‘The Saracen met him and stabbed him on the hip with a dagger, making a deep, dangerous wound,’ wrote the chronicler known as the Templar of Tyre. ‘The Lord Edward felt himself struck, and he struck the Saracen a blow with his fist, on the temple, which knocked him senseless to the ground for a moment. Then the Lord Edward caught up a dagger from the table which was in the chamber, and stabbed the Saracen in the head and killed him.’ In hand-to-hand combat, there were few who could match the long-limbed Englishman.

Nevertheless, when he rose from his opponent’s dying body, Edward realized that the blow that had caught him was a serious one. As attendants rushed to the scene, it was feared that the weapon might be poisoned. Legend has it that Eleanor of Castile tried to suck the venom from her husband’s wound, though as it turned out the dagger was almost certainly poison-free.

There was still a real risk of infection, though, which could lead to the same sort of agonizing gangrenous death that Richard I had suffered at Châlus-Chabrol. Edward was saved from a similar fate by a more skilful surgeon, who cut away the rotting flesh that festered around his wound. He took his time to recuperate, before he and Eleanor of Castile, together with their young daughter Joan who had been born in Acre, departed Outremer for Europe in late September. They stopped in Sicily on their way home, before travelling to the Italian mainland for Christmas. It was here that they were met by English messengers bearing sad news. Henry III had died in November, aged sixty-five, following a short illness. After a magnificent funeral, he had been buried in the tomb vacated by Edward the Confessor’s recent translation. And after one of the most remarkable apprenticeships in his family’s eventful history, Edward I was now king.

He took his time returning to England. Trusting the government of his kingdom to ministers such as Robert Burnell, his most trusted and senior clerk, Edward stayed abroad to enjoy the fruits of his glamorous crusader reputation. He joined in French tournaments, did homage to Philip III for his French lands, and settled the rumblings of rebellion in Gascony. Then, during the dog days of 1274, he sailed for England, his coronation day set for Sunday 19 August 1274.

Edward alighted at Dover on 4 August, setting foot on home soil for the first time in nearly four years. He returned to a country that had waited patiently for his kingship, and which now acclaimed him in style. There had been plenty of time to prepare for his arrival. Edward was the first king to be crowned for more than half a century. There was a whole new royal family to welcome. At the coronation Queen Eleanor was in the early stages of her tenth pregnancy with a child, Margaret, who would be born in 1275. After the long and troubled reign of Henry III, here was a brand-new generation of royal power and people to welcome.

The citizens of London – despite or perhaps because of their acrimonious history with Edward – used the occasion to produce a festival of show and wealth. ‘When Edward thrives, behold!’ wrote one enthusiastic Londoner. ‘He shines like a new Richard!’ Unfortunately,
no detailed accounts of the ceremony survive, but it is known that the city was draped in gold cloth, and certain that there was pageantry and mass celebration in the streets as the king and his entourage rode into the city. Edward most likely processed from the Tower of London to the palace of Westminster on the day before his coronation, before staying overnight in the Painted Chamber, richly decorated with biblical images and scenes from his family’s history.

The abbey must have been packed with magnates from England and her neighbours, who would have watched rapt as Edward processed towards a giant wooden stage at the crossing of the church. They would have watched him make an offering at the altar of two gold figurines – one of St Edward the Confessor and another of St John the Evangelist. Then he made the same coronation oath that his ancestors had sworn. In what was now time-honoured fashion, Edward promised to protect the Church, to do justice to all men, to abolish evil customs and to protect the rights of the Crown. Unlike many of his predecessors, as Edward swore these things to a packed abbey, he meant every word. However he conceived of simple lordship, he always treated kingship as an office predicated on the need for strong, universal authority. It was time to win back the power lost by his forebears.

Edward’s first priority was the oath he swore to protect the rights of the Crown. Almost as soon as the celebrations were complete, royal servants began a survey of royal rights in England that was conducted on a gigantic scale – comparable only to the Domesday Book of William I’s reign. It was known as the Hundred Rolls inquiries, since it concentrated on the hundreds – the smaller subdivisions of the English shires, which were used for administrative and judicial purposes at a local level. Between November 1274 and March 1275, every hundred in England received a visit from royal commissioners, who put detailed questions before local juries ‘about the lord king’s rights and liberties which have been taken away and the excessive demands of the sheriffs, coroners, escheators and other of the lord king’s bailiffs and of any other bailiffs whosoever appertaining/belonging to the lord king in any way, in the third year of King
Edward’s reign 1274–1275’. This, at least, was the purpose laid out in the text of the enrolled returns that collated the information that the commissioners gathered.

The Hundred Rolls inquiries were massively wide-ranging and extremely detailed. They were the first great project undertaken by Edward’s new chancellor Burnell, now the bishop of Bath and Wells, and a trusted, highly capable diplomat. Robert Burnell had governed England during Edward’s absence on crusade, and he would oversee much of the governance and administrative reform of England until his death in 1292. The commissioners he appointed collected vast amounts of material from the hundreds, ranging from examples of appalling abuses of power (beatings, torture and illegal imprisonment by royal officials cropped up in some places) to comical, harebrained schemes by imaginative or deluded men during the civil war (the sheriff of Essex was accused of having plotted to release flying cockerels carrying incendiary bombs over London during the troubles in 1267). They produced, in practice, far more information about wrongdoing and royal rights than could be manageably dealt with, and even when a general eyre was sent out to punish the crimes uncovered, it was clear that the king could not successfully prosecute every deviant royal official in the land. Still, the keen investigations into wrongdoing in county society conveyed the message to everyone in England that the new king was deeply committed to shaking out the corruption among royal officials that had blighted Henry III’s reign, and which had so animated the knightly class in particular.

The point of the Hundred Rolls inquiries, then, was more their symbolic value than their practical use. They showed that Edward had learned lessons from the baronial reform programmes of the 1250s, and had taken to heart the spirit of the Provisions of Oxford and the Montfortian protesters. By adopting and expanding the programme under the royal banner, Edward made an immediate statement about his reign: he would be the king who remedied ills of his own accord.

Well might Edward do so. For although he did not share his father’s instinctive dislike of political reform, he shared with him an extraordinary capacity for spending money. Edward had returned from the
Holy Land with debts amounting to more than £100,000, much of which was owed to Italian bankers. Simply to manage debt like this would require political consensus and financial innovation. And given the ambitious plans that Edward would shortly unveil for an even more expensive and ambitious foreign policy than his father’s, he would need the community of the realm behind him. Legally, financially and politically, England – and Britain – was to be transformed. The first area of transformation would be Wales.

A New Arthur

One of the greatest popular crazes in thirteenth-century Europe was for the legends of King Arthur. Reflected in the art, literature and tourist industry of the day, Arthurianism had the power to excite, inspire and entertain men and women everywhere from Sicily to Scotland, and there were few men who were more excited by the stories and supposed relics pertaining to Arthur than King Edward I.

The legend of Arthur – for we now know that Arthur belongs to imagination, and not to history – had been a part of European literary tradition since the early ninth century, when stories were exchanged of a native Briton who rose to become king and fought against both the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons who invaded England. Down the centuries his legend had been remoulded and translated to suit the cultures that took an interest in it, until in the 1130s the author Geoffrey of Monmouth inserted a vivid and dramatic account of Arthur’s life and reign into his wildly successful book
The History of the Kings of Britain
. Geoffrey’s Arthur was a pious Christian king who fought valiantly against pagans, Saxons and Romans alike, driving invaders out of native British lands, uniting the British kingdom, conquering Ireland, Iceland, parts of Germany and Orkney and subduing Norway, Aquitaine, Gaul and the Balkan kingdom of Dacia. He was the heroic, beneficent king of a British kingdom that was the envy of the world. Geoffrey related that in Arthur’s time: ‘Britain had arrived at such a pitch of grandeur, that in abundance of riches, luxury of ornaments, and politeness of inhabitants, it far surpassed all other kingdoms. The knights in it that were famous for feats
of chivalry, wore their clothes and arms all of the same colour and fashion: and the women also no less celebrated for their wit, wore all the same kind of apparel; and esteemed none worthy of their love, but such as had given a proof of their valour in several battles. Thus was the valour of the men an encouragement for the women’s chastity, and the love of the women a spur to the soldier’s bravery.’ Romance, chivalry and beauty abounded in this knightly paradise, and it was not hard to see why the stories appealed to the late medieval barons, knights and ladies who heard them.

As they were distributed, retold and embellished by other writers, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s stories – dressed up as a genuine history of the British Isles – began to be thought of as literally true. By the time Edward was born, there was a booming trade in Arthuriana, and a healthy industry had grown up around his imagined memory. When Glastonbury Abbey burned down in 1184, Henry II had encouraged the monks to broadcast the fact that they had ‘discovered’ the tomb of Arthur and his queen Guinevere buried beneath the ruins. Arthur had originally been a Welshman, and it was a matter of faith among the Welsh that he would return to liberate them from the English; now he was conveniently revealed to be both English and dead, and the Glastonbury brothers encouraged paying tourists to come and inspect the skeletons that they had supposedly found. During the course of the twelfth century the legend became a potent part of English aristocratic culture, and tournaments known as ‘Round Tables’ were held to award prizes for gallantry and good jousting. It was no surprise, therefore, that Edward, a young man with conventional noble tastes, was since his youth as enthralled by Arthur as his peers, or indeed that when he married Eleanor of Castile he had whisked her off on honeymoon to see the tomb at Glastonbury.