2). Edward I (1272-1307)

Pre-reading tasks: How did Edward I expand the rule of England?

IN edward I, the English found the king they sorely needed after the tribulations of Henry III's reign. Thirty-three years old at the time of his accession, Edward was an out­standing man, in physique as well as in character; fair-haired and handsome, he towered over most of his contemporaries, and his long legs earned him the nickname of 'Longshanks'. He had his father's droopy eyes, but in energy, efficiency and military skill he more resembled his earlier prede­cessors Henry II and Richard the Lionheart. Born at Westminster, in 1239, Edward was married to Eleanor of Castile when he was 15 years old. It was a diplomatic alliance, arranged for the protection of English-owned Gascony, but it turned into a love-match. Queen Eleanor bore her husband 16 children, seven of whom survived, and when she died in 1290, in Nottingham­shire, Edward mourned her bitterly. He vowed that he would build a cross in her memory at every town where her body rested on its way to Westminster; three still survive.

In his youth, Edward showed little pro­mise. Despite his private happiness, in public life he was undisciplined and unreliable, and the chronicler Matthew Paris foretold a troubled future for England under his rule. As he grew older, however, Edward's image changed, and he began to acquire a re­putation for courage and wisdom. He de­monstrated his idealism by going on a Crusade in 1270; two years later, while he was away, his father died, and he succeeded unopposed to the English throne.

In the summer of 1274 Edward I landed at Dover to claim his kingdom, and almost immediately set about the task of governing a country whose monarchy had been weakened. Royal commissioners were sent out to visit every region and investigate the workings of the law and local administration; as the result of their findings, corrupt local officials were brought to heel and baronial powers defined and curbed. Extensive legal reforms were carried out, and under Edward separate Courts of the Exchequer, Common Pleas and King's Bench were established with legal proceedings being recorded in full for the first time. It was an ambitious programme on which Edward embarked, but he gained the support of the people, and the sense of nationalism which had begun to emerge under Henry III, fostered by Simon de Montfort, gained ground.

In 1277 Edward I turned his attention to disaffected Wales. The Lord of Snowdonia Llewelyn ap Gruffydd had been acknowl­edged as Prince of Wales, and was seeking to consolidate his power, unchecked by the efforts of the Marcher Lords who controlled the border areas (or Marches), in return for considerable privileges from the English Crown. Llewelyn had for some time been refusing to pay homage to Edward; in 1277 Edward responded with an efficient cam­paign which ended in the Welsh leader's surrender. Terms were agreed, but five years later Wales rose again, and this time the King of England had a harder struggle on his hands. But eventually the death of Llewelyn turned the tide in England's favour, and Edward gained complete control of North Wales. The Statute of Wales, in 1284, gave him dominion over his valuable conquest, and an enduring monument to Edward I's occupation of Wales can still be seen in the circuit of grim castles which he built there: massive strongholds such as Conway, Caer­narvon and Harlech. Despite his reorganisa­tion of the Principality, revolts continued to erupt. According to tradition, in an attempt to win over the Welsh, the English king promised them that they should have a Prince who spoke no English - and produced his own baby son, Edward, who as yet spoke no words at all. Whatever the truth of that legend, in 1301 at the age of 16, this Edward - who had been born at Caernarvon - was proclaimed Prince of Wales, the first heir to an English monarch to bear the title.

The unification of Britain was Edward I's ambition, and having secured Wales he hoped for a time that Scotland might be peacefully annexed by means of a marriage between his heir and the infant Queen of Scots, Margaret. But the little Queen died in 1290, leaving the succession in dispute. Edward, who claimed overlordship of Scot­land, stepped in to appoint the new ruler; and to his own benefit he chose John Balliol, a relatively weak candidate, and proceeded to assert his own interests in the northern kingdom. When the Scots found themselves a valuable ally in the King of France, with whom Edward was then at war, the English king marched on Scotland.

What followed was, from the Plantagenet king's standpoint, a dramatically successful campaign. He swept in triumph through Scotland, received homage from the Scots nobles and leaders, and returned to London with the prize of the great Stone of Destiny in his possession. Known in England as the Stone of Scone, since it had been taken from Scone Abbey, it was the object on which Kings of Scots had traditionally been crow­ned; its symbolic value to Edward was thus immense. He had it placed beneath a specially-built chair in Westminster Abbey, and monarchs of England and Great Britain have been crowned above it ever since.

The defeated Scots, in response to the English incursions, rallied round their own nationalist heroes. The first to emerge, William Wallace, was a master of guerrilla warfare. Helped by his knowledge of the terrain and the fierce loyalty of his followers, he won an impressive victory over the English commander Earl Warenne at Stirling Bridge in 1297. A year later, Edward himself appeared at the head of a huge army and defeated Wallace's force at Falkirk, though the Scots leader eluded capture until 1305. His place was soon filled by another celebrated figure, Robert Bruce, who had himself crowned King of Scots. Bruce did not share Wallace's success, but he remained a potent force in Scottish affairs. Despite his increasing age and ill-health, Edward was determined to crush the Scots finally.

He was on his way to the Scottish border to pursue his ambition when he died, on 7 July 1307. It was the last command of the king who was to be remembered as 'the Hammer of the Scots' that his heir should carry on his efforts until the last Scottish soldier had surrendered.

Edward I's concern for justice was deep-rooted; but he did not transcend the bigotries of his time. To add to his record in Scotland and Wales, in 1290 he had turned on the time-honoured scapegoats for a nation's ills, and expelled the Jews from England. It proved an unwise, as well as inhuman action, as he had then to find other sources of credit for the Crown, and he ended his reign heavily in debt.

Nevertheless Edward was a respected ruler; and for his far-reaching legal reforms and his encouragement of the growth of Parliament. In his reign, he could justly be called the greatest of the Plantagenets.

(from “The Kings and Queens of Great Britain” by Josephine Ross, L. 1982)

C+Barons demanded that Magna Carta, liberties of the clergy and the people, and much more, should be accepted by the King. Edward was in Ghent. He accepted the principles, but acceptance and observance are different matters. Eventually at another Parliament, this time held at Lincoln, solemn agreement was reached.C+By this crisis and its manner of resolution, two principles had been established from which important consequences flowed. One was that the King had no right to despatch the feudal host wherever he might choose This limitation sounded the death-knell of the feudal levy and led, in the following century, to the rise of indentured armies serving for pay. The second point of principle now recognized was that the King could not plead 'urgent necessity' as a reason for imposing taxation without consent. Other English monarchs as late as the seventeenth century were to make the attempt. But by Edward's failure, a precedent had been set up, and a long stride had been taken towards the dependence of the Crown upon Parliamentary grants. Since the end of the twelfth century, the English kings had fought their own clergy, barons and earls. The clergy refused to accept that, in matters spiritual the King was above the church. The barons were protecting their own interests. But there was a constant in the conflict between monarch, people, church and baronage. It was this: the English kings were devoted to protecting their interests in France. It was, after all, where they came from. And their magnates had land, titles and families across the Channel. So for a long time after the Conquest it was easy for the King to convince his nobles, and therefore their exchequers, to fight for him in France. But as the decades went by fewer of the English magnates were directly tied to continental lands. The King's difficulty then was to persuade them to come up with the money, as well as the soldiers, for overseas expeditions.

By the closing years of the thirteenth century, successive kings had been so obsessed with their French campaigns that they had never properly dealt with the threat closer to home. It began in Scotland and, more immediately, in Wales.

C+There had been fitful interference both in Wales and Scotland, but the task of keeping the frontiers safe had fallen mainly upon the shoulders of the local Marcher lords [the border lords]. Edward I was the first of the English kings to put the whole weight of the Crown's resources behind the effort of national expansion in the West and North... He took the first great step towards the unification of the Island All assertions of Welsh independ­ence were a vexation to Edward; but scarcely less obnoxious was a system of guarding the frontiers of England by a confederacy of robber barons who had more than once presumed to challenge the authority of the Crown. As in Scotland, geography had a great deal to do with the character of the Welsh people and their relations with the English. Warring Welsh chieftains had long had the advantage of being able to withdraw to the hills and mountains, and even across the sea to Ireland. Furthermore, in Wales as in Scotland, there had never been, during this period, a national purpose. Local jealousies were always stronger than any claim of Welsh unity. Even when great Welsh lords such as Rhys or Owen Gwynedd commanded the country, family feuds dissolved any such unity once the lords were dead. So there could be no simple, single operation to gain control of Wales. By Edward's reign, Llewellyn II was ready for another attempt at independence. [Edward I] resolved, in the name of justice and progress, to subdue the unconquered refuge of petty princes and wild mountaineers in which barbaric freedom had dwelt since remote antiquity, and at the same time to curb the privileges of the Marcher lords. [He] conquered Wales in several years of persistent warfare, coldly and carefully devised, by land and sea. The forces he employed were mainly Welsh levies in his pay, reinforced by regular troops from Gascony and by one of the last appearances of the feudal levy; but above all, it was by the terror of the winter campaigns that he broke the power of the valiant Ancient Britons. Edward knew this was to be a drawn-out campaign. The first thing he did was to establish a base at Chester. Then, just as a modern general would have to do, Edward set up a communications line. He cut a road through the wooded coastline to Aberconway. He sent his fleet round to Anglesey and his Marcher lords in from the east and south. It took time, it was bloody, but it worked. Within two years of the signing or a treaty at Aberconway, much of the Welsh holdings were being organized on an English county system. All seemed settled but all was not.

On Palm Sunday, 1282, the Welsh attacked. Llewellyn's brother, Dafydd, invaded Cardigan and captured Aberystwyth. Early in December, Llewellyn left the North, where he was safe, for the Upper Wye valley. He was killed, not in some great battle, but at what might have been, except for his death, an insignificant skirmish close to Builth in 1282. Six months later, Dafydd was betrayed to the English and executed. A Statute, the Statute of Rhudddlan, was proclaimed on 19 March 1284, arid Edward regarded himself as the conqueror of the Welsh.

C+By Edward's Statute of Wales, the independent principality came to an end. The land of Llewellyn's Wales was transferred to the King’s dominions and organized into the shires of Anglesey, Carnarvon, Merioneth. Cardigan and Carmarthen. The Welsh wars of Edward reveal to us the process by which the military system of England was transformed from the age-long Saxon and feudal basis of occasional service, to that of paid regular troops. Even when the settlement was agreed, there were uprisings. And it took more than two centuries before Wales was incorporated into union with England, with representation in the Parliament. The methods of warfare also changed.

С+А new type of infantry raised from the common people began to prove its dominating quality. This infantry operated, not by club or sword or spear, or even by hand-flung missiles, but by an archery which, after a long development, concealed from Europe, was very soon to make an astonish­ing entrance upon the military scene and gain a dramatic ascendancy upon the battlefields of the Continent. In South Wales the practice of drawing the long-bow had already attained an astonishing efficiency, of which one of the Marcher lords has left a record. One of his knights had been hit by an arrow which pierced not only the skirts of his mailed shirt, but his mailed breeches, his thigh; and the wood of his saddle, and finally struck deep into his horse's flank. For the first time, infantry possessed a weapon which could penetrate the armour of a clanking age, and which in range and rate of tire was superior to any method ever used before, or ever used again until the coining of the modern rifle. It was in Carnavon Castle that the English King's son, Edward, was born, during the same year as the Statute of Rhuddlan was proclaimed, 1284. Seventeen years later, in 1301, this Edward became the first English Prince of Wales. One day he too would be King.

C+The great quarrel of Edward [I]'s reign was with Scotland. For long years the two kingdoms had dwelt in amity. In the year 1286 Alexander III of Scotland, riding his horse over a cliff in the darchess, left as his heir Margaret, his granddaughter, known as the Maid of Norway. The Scottish magnates had been persuaded to recognize this three-year-old as his successor. Now the bright project arose that the Maid of Norway should at the same moment succeed to the Scottish throne and marry Edward, the [English] King's son. Thus would be achieved a union of royal families by which the antagonism of England and Scotland might be laid to rest. It was a dream and it passed as a dream. The Maid of Norway embarked in 1290 upon stormy seas, only to the before reaching land, and Scotland was bequeadied the problem of a disputed succession, in the decision of which the English interest must be a heavy factor. The Scottish nobility were allied at many points with the English royal family, and from a dozen claimants, some of them bastards, two men stood clearly forth: John Balliol and Robert Bruce. Bruce asserted his aged father's closeness in relationship to the common royal ancestor; Balliol, a more distant descendant, the rights of primogeniture. Ever since the ninth century and the conquests of the Picts by the Scots, the kings of the Scots had regarded a lot of what is now northern England as fair game. Had the Scots been less clannish, had they avoided their own internal jealousies, then perhaps the lands of the Scots might have expanded. But it was never to be. Under the true kingship of David I during the first half of the twelfth century, the Scots achieved recognition for his claims to the English northern counties. But by the time of Alexander II in 1237, those claims were abandoned by the Treaty of York, in return for yet more contrived family relations, payment in silver as compensation for English broken promises, and a few thousand acres of land.

But for the moment relations were sound; in fact they were so good that Edward I was called upon to arbitrate between the claims for the Scottish throne.

C+King Edward, whose legal abilities were renowned now imposed himself with considerable acceptance as arbitrator in the Scottish succes­sion. Since the alternatives were the splitting of Scotland into rival kingships, or a civil war to decide the matter, the Scots were induced to seek Edward's judgment; and he, pursuing all the time a path of strict legality, consented to the task only upon the prior condition of the reaffirmation of his overlordship, betokened by the surrender of certain Scottish castles. He [Edward] pronounced in 1292 in favour of John Balliol. [But]John Balliol inevitably became not merely his [Edward's] choice but his puppet. ... the Scottish baronage accepted King Edward's award, but they also furnished the new King John with an authoritative council of twelve great lords to overawe him and look after the rights of Scotland. Thus King Edward [was] confronted with an independent and not a subject Government, and with a hostile rather than a submissive nation.

At this very moment, the same argument of overlordship was pressed upon him by the formidable French King, Philip IV. Here Edward was the vassal, proudly defending feudal interests, and the French suzerain had the lawful advantage. This double conflict imposed a strain upon the financial and military resources of the English monarchy which it could by no means meet. The rest of Edward's reign was spent in a two-fold struggle North and South, for the sake of which he had to tax his subjects beyond all endurance. Thus [Edward was] forced to drive his people beyond their strength, and in this process to rouse oppositions which darkened his life and clouded his fame.And the Scots allied themselves with the French. Edward was furious. He demanded that Balliol meet him at Berwick. But the Scottish baronage told their King not to go. The time for consultations was over. Edward regarded the Scots' defiance and alignment with France as an act of war. He marched on Berwick and, in an act of savagery, sacked the once peaceful town. Thousands were slaughtered and the town surrendered. Edinburgh, Perth and Stirling followed. But Edward's victory was short-lived and William Wallace rose to lead the Scottish rebellion.

C+Warenne, Earl of Surrey, was Edward's commander in the North. At Stirling Bridge, in September 1297, he found himself in the presence of Wallace's army. Many Scotsmen were in the English service. One of diese warned him of the dangers of trying to deploy beyond the long, narrow bridge and causeway which spanned the river. He spoke of a ford higher up, by which at least a flanking force could cross. But Earl Warenne would have none of diese things. Wallace watched with measuring eye the accumulation of the English troops across the bridge, and at the right moment hurled his full force upon them, seized the bridgehead, and slaughtered the vanguard of 5000 men. Warenne evacuated the greater part of Scotland. His fortress garrisons were reduced one alter the other. The English could barely hold the line of the Tweed. Wallace was now the ruler of Scotland, and the war was without truce or mercy. A hated English official, a tax-gatherer, had fallen at the bridge. His skin, cut into suitable strips, covered Wallace's sword-belt for the future. Edward, forced to quit his campaign in France, hastened to the scene of the disaster and, with the whole feudal levy of England, advanced against the Scots. The deciding battle took place at Falkirk on 22 July 1298. Wallace made a simple and centuries-old mistake: instead of fighting the advancing forces in a series of disrupting skirmishes, he fought in open battle. His cavalry fled. Wallace had relied on his spearmen, but Edward had brought his longbow-men from Wales. They fired volley after volley at the Scottish schiltrons (circles of spearmen) until there were more dead and wounded than living.

C+Into the gaps and over the carcasses, the knighthood of England forced their way. The slaughter ended only in the depths of the woods, and Wallace and the Scottish Army were once again fugutives, but still in arms. The Scots were unconquerable foes. It was not until 1305 that Wallace was captured, tried with full ceremonial in Westminster Hall, and hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn.

Edward I now faced a new King, crowned at Scone, Robert the Bruce. In the summer of 1306, Bruce was defeated and tied to Rathlin Island off the Antrim coast, and the legend of the Bruce and the spider grew up. The legend claims that on Rathlin Island, Robert the Bruce watched a spider trying, again and again to climb a single slender strand, and that the spider's eventual success inspired the Bruce to return to Scotland and continue the fight. Robert the Bruce returned to Scotland and Edward. now too weak to ride, was carried to do battle once more against the rebellious Scots. But he died on the road as the rebellion continued.

(from “This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee, L. 1990)