Marc Morris - A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain

A Great and Terrible King

Marc Morris

WINDMILL BOOKS

Publish ed by Windmill Books 2009

Copyright Marc Morris 2008

Marc Morris has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Hutchinson

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ISBN 9780099481751

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In memory of Rees Davies

Countries are not laid up in heaven; they are shaped and reshaped here on earth by the stratagems of men and the victories of the fortuitous.

R. R. Davies, Th e First English Empire (2000)

Like Alexander, he would speedily subdue the whole world, if Fortune's moving wheel would stand still forever.

Th e Song of Lewes, on Edward I (1264)

Contents

Illustrations Preface

1. A Saint in Name
2. The Family Feud
3. Civil Peace and Holy War
4. The Return of the King
5. The Disobedient Prince
6. Arthur's Crown
7. Peaceful Endeavours
8. The Great Cause
9. The Struggle for Mastery
10. Uniting the Kingdom?
11. A Lasting Vengeance
12. A Great and Terrible King

Abbreviations Notes

Bibliography Family Trees Index

Maps

England Wales

Gascony Scotland p. xv11

p- 30

p. 206

p. 238

Preface

On learning that I was writing a book about Edward I, my non-historian friends and neighbours have asked me, almost invariably, the same two questions. 'Was he Edward the Confessor?' has been by far the most common. No, I would always answer, he was not; but he was named after him. In many cases this only served to provoke a subsidiary, more vexed inquiry. If my subject was named after one of his forebears, then how on earth could he possibly be 'the First'? The answer, of course, is that he couldn't, and that, strictly speaking, he wasn't. For those who would care to know precisely how this confusing situation came about, I have added a short note of explanation at the end of this Preface.

The second question that has usually been put to me concerns the nature of the evidence for writing the biography of a medieval king, and specifically its quantity. In general, people tend to presume that there can't be very much, and imagine that I must spend my days poking around in castle muniment rooms, looking for previously undiscovered scraps of parchment. Sadly, they are mistaken. The answer I always give to the question of how much evidence is: more than one person could look at in a lifetime. From the early twelfth century, the kings of England began to keep written accounts of their annual expenditure, and by the end of the century they were keeping a written record of almost every aspect of royal government. Each time a royal document was issued, be it a grand charter or a routine writ, a copy was dutifully entered on to a large parchment roll. Meanwhile, in the provinces, the king's justices kept similar rolls to record the proceedings of the cases that came before his courts. Miraculously, the great majority of these documents have survived, and are now preserved in the National Archives at Kew near London. Some of them, when unrolled, extend to twenty or thirty feet. And their number is legion:

for the thirteenth century alone, it runs to tens of thousands. Mercifully for the medieval historian, the most important have been transcribed and published, but even this printed matter would be enough to line the walls of an average-sized front room with books. Moreover, the quantity is increased by the inclusion of non-royal material. Others besides the king were keeping records during Edward Fs day. Noblemen also drew up financial accounts, issued charters and wrote letters; monks did the same, only in their case the chances of such material surviving was much improved by their membership of an institution. Monks, in addition, continued to do as they had always done, and kept chronicles, and these too provide plenty to keep the historian busy. To take just the most obvious example from the thirteenth century, the monk of St Albans called Matthew Paris composed a chronicle, the original parts of which cover the quarter century from 1234 to 1259. In its modern edition it runs to seven volumes.

I say all this merely to demonstrate how much there is to know about our medieval ancestors, and not to pretend that I have in some way managed to scale this mountain all by myself. For the most part I have not even had to approach the mountain at all, for this book is grounded on the scholarly work of others. Nevertheless, even the secondary material for a study of Edward I presents a daunting prospect. At a conservative estimate, well over a thousand books and articles have been published in the last hundred years that deal with one aspect or another of the king s reign. For scholarly works on the thirteenth century as a whole, that figure would have to be multiplied many times over.

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 subtitl e 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 castle s 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 constandy 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 law - making, 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.