Kings and Castles

Marc Morris

© Marc Morris
2012

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

First published 2012 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

Contents

1. English Castles – A Spotter’s Guide

2. Castles and Symbolism

3. The Castles of the Conqueror

4. Castle Acre and the Warennes

5. Goodrich Castle

6. Framlingham
Castle and the Bigods

7. The King’s Companions

8. Introducing Edward I

9. Encapsulating Edward I

10. The Best of Kings, the Worst of
Kings

11. The Conquest of Wales – A
Visitor’s Guide

12. The Riddle of the Winchester
Round Table – Revealed

13. Slaying Myths: The Origins of
the Cult of St George

14. 1290: The Watershed in
Anglo-Scottish Relations

15. Lanercost
Priory and Edward I

Acknowledgements

Free book preview: History Today and Tomorrow by Paul Lay

1. English
Castles – A Spotter’s Guide

Castles are an exceedingly mixed bunch. They can apparently
be anything from giant fortress-palaces to underwhelming mounds of earth; they
can date from thousands of years ago or from well into the modern age. Even for
those who know their history, the diversity of what constitutes a castle can
seem more than a little baffling.

So what is a castle? The Oxford English Dictionary tells us
that the word itself derives from the Latin castellum,
and suggests that a castle is ‘a fortified building... a stronghold’. Most
castle experts would go further. A true castle, they would say, was also a
private residence – a home – and this important qualification helps narrow the
field considerably. Take, for example, Maiden Castle in Dorset,
or Uffington Castle in Oxfordshire – both majestic
fortifications, but, crucially, communal ones, erected to protect entire
prehistoric communities; rightly speaking, we should (and generally do) refer
to them as Iron Age hill forts. Similarly, we can disqualify Richborough ‘Castle’ in Kent, which was in reality a camp
for Roman soldiers. And, while we’re kicking impostors out of the castle club,
we should exclude all those little ‘castles’ that Henry VIII built along the
south coast to foil a French invasion. Deal, Walmer, Pendennis, St Mawes, Camber, Calshot, Hurst, Portland – sturdy little troopers all, but
artillery forts for Henry’s gunners, not homes for the king himself.

The true castle was not prehistoric, Roman or Tudor, but
medieval. It is in the Middle Ages (from 1066 to, say,
1500) that we see fortification and domesticity fusing to create a new and
distinctive category of building. In a castle, defensive elements (the drawbridge,
the portcullis, arrowloops and battlements) are
elegantly combined with the residential ones (the hall, the chapel, chambers
and kitchens). Of course, not all castles possess all these features – like
modern private homes, no two are exactly alike. As you might expect, in a
period spanning more than four centuries, there was an awful lot of variety in
castle design.

As the date 1066 suggests, the story of castles in England begins with the Normans. These earliest castles were first
and foremost weapons of conquest, used by the Normans to hold down a reluctant English
population, and as such the vast majority of them were built at great speed –
out of wood. For the most part they were also built to a common design – the
famous ‘motte and bailey’. The motte,
a giant artificial mound of earth surmounted by a wooden tower, was the
castle’s look-out and ultimate place of defence; the adjacent bailey, an
enclosure formed by steep banks and ditches, housed the rest of the castle’s
buildings. Pickering in Yorkshire
provides an excellent example. Of course, the original wooden walls at such
castles are now long gone but, if you spot a motte,
you can be sure it was erected early: certainly within a century (and most
likely within a generation) of the Conquest itself.

While most early castles were hastily erected from earth and
wood, a tiny handful were being built out of stone, and to a far grander
design. In place of a motte, the richest
castle-builders – the king and his greatest barons – erected giant stone towers
(or keeps, as they are sometimes called today). The earliest belong to the
eleventh century, but in general ‘the great tower’ is a twelfth-century
phenomenon. And phenomenon, as the recreated interior of Henry II’s Great Tower at Dover
makes clear, is an entirely appropriate word, for these buildings were palaces,
nothing less. Identifying them is fairly straightforward, because of their
sheer size and bulk (Rochester in Kent, soaring to 113 feet, is the tallest such
tower in Europe). The period in which they
were built means that they exhibit ‘Romanesque’ features – look out for
semi-circular arches, chevron decoration and blind arcading (as at Castle
Rising in Norfolk).
Perhaps surprisingly, great towers often display no obvious military hardware –
few of them, for example, have arrowloops – because
in each case they were surrounded by defensible walls which have often (as at Orford in Suffolk) entirely vanished.

Those walls, however, are the key to the next big development
in castle design. Around the year 1200, great towers fell out of favour –
probably because they were viewed as vulnerable to new more advanced forms of
attack (the giant catapults known as trebuchets). Attention shifted to the
perimeter walls, which were now interrupted by towers. Early examples (such as Framlingham in Suffolk)
favoured square towers, but soon the preference was for round ones (again,
probably because they were believed to be stronger). At the same time, extra
care was taken to defend the castle’s entrance by positioning a tower either
side of it, creating a ‘twin-towered’ gatehouse. Such gatehouses, and round
mural towers – these are the tell-tale signs that you are confronting a
thirteenth-century castle. Goodrich, near the Welsh border in Herefordshire,
provides a splendid example.

As we move into the late Middle
Ages, identifying a common type of castle becomes virtually impossible.
Contrary to popular belief, England
at this time was relatively peaceful; there was little need to build for
defence and, consequently, castles tended to become more architecturally
exuberant. Certain defensive features help with dating: sure signs of a late
medieval build are gunloops (as opposed to arrowloops) and machicolation (masonry standing proud
around the top of a tower). At the same time, these features are often so
mannered that modern experts wonder whether they were merely stuck on for
reasons of status. In general, if a castle seems to be almost too picturesque
(like Nunney in Somerset),
or its design too clever by half (Old Wardour in
Wiltshire, or Warkworth in Northumbria), a late medieval date
is likely. The same is true if a castle is built of brick, like Kirby Muxloe in Leicestershire, built from 1480. Or rather
half-built, for construction there came to an abrupt halt in 1483 when its
unfortunate owner had his head chopped off – about as good an end for the story
of the medieval castle as one could wish for.

2. Castles and Symbolism

Castles are the most important architectural legacy of the Middle Ages. In terms of scale and sheer numbers, they
outclass every other form of ancient monument. What’s more, the public has an
enduring love affair with these great buildings. Every year, over fifty million
people pay a visit to a castle in the UK.

But what is a castle? A thousand years after their
introduction to Britain,
you’d have thought the experts could come up with a straightforward answer to
such an apparently simple question. But when it comes to castles, we live in
uncertain times. At present, a satisfactory definition of what they really are
seems to be more elusive than ever.

The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, is not
particularly helpful. A castle, it tells us, is ‘a fortified building, a
stronghold’. But it takes only a moment’s reflection to work out that this
definition will not do as a qualifying test. Plenty of other things besides
castles could be described in this way: Iron Age hill forts, nineteenth-century
Martello towers, and Second World War pill boxes are all ‘strongholds’ – but
they are clearly not castles.

In fact, historians have been pointing out for a long time
that a ‘true’ castle ought to have more than just military potential; it also
had to function as a home. A real castle was a private residence for a lord and
his family, not simply a stronghold for a garrison of fighting men.
Accordingly, at a castle we should expect to find not just arrowloops,
battlements and drawbridges, but also great halls, chapels, bedrooms, kitchens
– all the things necessary for an aristocrat and his household to lead the
medieval good life.

So historians eventually settled on a definition of a castle
as a ‘strongly fortified, private home’, and this seemed to do the trick. It
distinguished the earliest Norman castles from the communal defences of the
Anglo-Saxons and the Romans that came before them, and it differentiated later
castles from the purely military buildings that were constructed once the Middle Ages were over. Using this definition, we could point
to places like Uffington
Castle in Oxfordshire (really an Iron
Age hill fort) or Deal Castle in Kent
(one of a number of artillery bastions built along England’s south coast by Henry
VIII) and knowledgeably expose them as castle frauds. For a long time everybody
was happy with the idea that a true castle was a fortress and a private home
rolled into one.

Recently, however, some bright sparks have politely pointed
out that there is a tiny problem with this definition: a lot of the country’s
favourite castles seemed to be useless as fortresses.

Take, for example, Bodiam Castle
in Sussex.
A late fourteenth-century creation, it belongs towards the end of the
castle-building tradition in England.
Nevertheless, its credentials as a castle seem impeccable. Indeed, Bodiam seems to strike a perfect balance between the military
and the domestic – a beautiful, comfortable place to live, but also a supremely
well-equipped fortress. Bristling with battlements and towers, protected by
portcullises and gun-loops, and situated at the centre of a broad moat, Bodiam exhibits all the military hardware that the
security-conscious medieval family could wish for.

The only snag is that none of these military features
actually work. The gun-loops are ill-positioned, the moat could easily be
drained and the battlements are small and thin. The castle’s main gate, which
speaks loudly of military might, is contradicted by its back entrance, which
would have been easy to access and weakly defended. Bodiam,
in other words, is all talk and no action; in a real fight, it would have been
almost useless.

The castle, however, is not weedy by accident. Its builder,
Sir Edward Dallingridge, was an expert soldier –
indeed, he paid for Bodiam using the profits he made
in war. As such, he would have been the first person to spot whether or not a
building was suitable for defence. But like the mason whom he employed to
design the castle, Sir Edward was well aware that late fourteenth-century England (Chaucer’s England, if you like) was a
peaceful place, where serious fortification was unnecessary. What he needed was
not an impregnable fortress, but a splendid home, crammed to the rafters with
accommodation. At Bodiam, you can still count around
thirty fireplaces and a similar number of toilets. Dallingridge
was a man rising rapidly through the ranks of society – his family came from
humble origins, but he ended his days as a royal councillor. The castle he
built was not intended to house a garrison of soldiers, but to provide
hospitality for honoured guests.

At the same time, Sir Edward was a knight, not a hotelier. He needed a home in which to play the host, but
it had to be a home that spoke of nobility. In short, it had to be a castle. Bodiam is decked out with portcullises, battlements, towers
and a moat, not because they were necessary as defences, but because they were
essential as symbols of aristocratic power.

It is this symbolic value of castles that has attracted the
attention of scholars in recent years. They have been keen to point out that
castles did not necessarily have to be built as functional fortresses, but as
symbols of their owners’ right to rule. What’s more, this was true not only of
late medieval castles like Bodiam, where defence was
only a minor consideration, but also of earlier examples, where fortification
would still have been high on the list of priorities.

Travel back a hundred years from Bodiam
to the late thirteenth century, and leave the rolling hills of Sussex for the wild frontier of Wales. King
Edward I, having conquered the country, has secured his hold on it by building
the most remarkable string of castles in the world. The mighty structures that
still stand at Harlech, Conwy, Caernarfon, Beaumaris, Rhuddlan and Flint are
tribute to the iron will of the king, the genius of his master mason, and the
enormous power of late medieval England as a state. There is no question that
these buildings, as well as being luxury residences fit for a king, were also
fighting machines par excellence. The technology of defence at each of Edward’s
castles is absolutely state of the art.

But Edward also wanted his new castles to be symbols of his
power. By choosing to build the greatest of them at Caernarfon, he was bringing
to life an ancient legend. The king was an enthusiastic devotee of chivalric
literature, and knew of an old Welsh story that told of a great castle at
Caernarfon, ‘the fairest mortal ever saw’. The fortress-palace that Edward
began to build was certainly worthy of such a description. But fulfilling the
legend meant more than simply creating a castle that was big and beautiful.
When they came to design Caernarfon, Edward and his architect made a radical
departure from the features used at his other Welsh castles. At Rhuddlan, Beaumaris, Conwy and Harlech, the towers are round, and the walls were once
whitewashed. At Caernarfon the walls are polygonal, and the masonry was left
bare, in order to expose the different coloured bands of stone in the castle’s
walls.

Why the difference? The answer is that Caernarfon was said in
legend to be the birthplace of the Roman emperor Constantine, founder of the
city of Constantinople.
The ancient walls of this imperial capital had polygonal towers and banded
masonry. Edward, by building his new
castle to the same pattern, was delivering a powerful
message to all who cared to read it. Welsh independence, he declared, was over;
Wales
was now part of a new English empire. As a finishing touch, stone eagles were
perched on top of Caernarfon’s greatest tower, hammering the imperial message
home.

Edward I was not the first English king to go to such elaborate
lengths in order to make a political point. The greatest castle building king
of the previous century, Henry II, was also responsible for creating castles in
order to symbolise his authority. One of the king’s castles, Orford in Suffolk,
has a great tower built to a highly unusual design. The body of the keep is
round, and supported by three large buttressing towers. Traditionally these
features have been explained as developments in military technology, but
recently this analysis has been rejected; if anything, such novelties made the
keep itself more vulnerable. Orford actually seems to
be an intentionally whimsical creation, built as an exercise in geometry, and
inspired by descriptions of circular halls in twelfth-century romances.

Likewise, Henry’s new keep at Dover, which is always interpreted as a
stronghold built to guard the White Cliffs from some unspecified foreign
menace, can be understood as the king’s response to a threat much closer to
home. Just fifteen miles from Dover stands
Canterbury Cathedral, then as now the administrative heart of the English Church. Thanks to Henry’s unintentional
martyring of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170, Canterbury became an international
destination for pilgrims. The keep at Dover,
constructed just over decade after Becket’s death, was perhaps a royal response
to Canterbury’s
growing power – a reminder to all who saw it that Henry, although he was very
sorry about Becket’s death, was still determined to be master in his own
kingdom.

Even when we cast our eye back to the eleventh century, we
find William the Conqueror, the builder of the first stone castles in England, using
castles for propaganda purposes. The king’s contemporary biographer is forever
comparing his royal subject to Julius Caesar, and likens William’s leading men
to the Roman senate. Such flattery seems to have rubbed off on the king
himself, to judge from some of the castles he built. Wherever he invested in
stone, William deliberately invoked the Roman past. In his new capital, he
began to build the Tower
of London, making use of
the existing Roman walls to form the outer enclosure. At Colchester, a similar
great tower was erected over the foundations of the ruined Roman temple of Claudius. At Chepstow the king
constructed a great hall using material from an old Roman town, and decorated
throughout in an imperial style. With such grand castles, built in a
‘Romanesque’ style, William declared himself a conqueror on a par with Julius
Caesar.

Even the humblest type of early castle – the kind made from
earth and timber – could be built with attention to symbolic detail. Take a
look at the castle at Bayeux
as shown on the famous Bayeux Tapestry. The mound of earth, or motte, is topped with a very elaborate, decorated
structure, complete with what appears to be a dragon’s head over the doorway.
This image is a useful reminder that even castles made of wood were not
constructed exclusively for reasons of defence and accommodation. They were
built to proclaim loudly their owners’ authority, and to show off their
strength. In England
after 1066, such castles advertised the arrival of a new power in the land.

Such ostentatious castle-building was not confined to England and Wales. The distinctive type of
castle that dominated late medieval Scotland, the tower house, had a
symbolic importance that often outweighed considerations of security. This is
especially obvious in the case of the very last examples, like Craigievar in Aberdeenshire (about as useful in a siege
situation as the Disney castle it resembles). But it is also true of earlier
models. Take Borthwick, near Edinburgh, the biggest tower house of them
all. When the Scottish king James I licensed the construction
of the tower in 1430, he gave the builder specific permission for ‘defensive
ornaments on top’.

Kings and nobles at the time, in other words, were under no
illusion that the castle they built made flamboyant statements about their own
importance. It is only later, more imaginative generations who mistakenly
interpreted the architectural embellishments on these buildings as serious
military hardware. The main purpose of Borthwick Castle was the same as Bodiam – hospitality. Its suitability in this regard is
perfectly underlined by its present day use as a fancy hotel.

So, the next time you visit a castle, and the guide talks
exclusively in terms of crossbows and cannonballs, boiling oil and battering
rams, ask yourself if you’re getting the whole picture. Remember, castles were
homes to their owners, not just instruments of war. And ask yourself if the
castle is really spoiling for a fight, or just wearing a military costume for
eye-catching effect. Medieval society was steeped in symbols, from
coats-of-arms to religious icons. A castle’s symbolic power was often the
greatest strength that it possessed.

3. The Castles of
the Conqueror

In 1066, as everybody knows, the Normans
invaded England.
That most engaging of all medieval sources, the Bayeux Tapestry, shows them
landing their horses at Pevensey in Sussex and racing
to occupy nearby Hastings, from where they will shortly set out to fight the
most famous battle in English history. Before that, however, they pause to have
an elaborate sit-down meal – barbecued chicken is on the menu – and attend to
their own protection. ‘This man’, says the caption above an important-looking
Norman holding a banner, ‘orders a castle to be dug at Hastings’, and to his
right we see nine other men, armed with picks and shovels, setting to do just
that.

The Normans’
decision to erect a castle at the very moment of their arrival might not strike
us as particularly remarkable: after all, medieval warfare revolved around the
building and besieging of fortresses, and the English landscape of today is
liberally studded with their remains. But at the time of the invasion in late
September 1066 the Normans’ action was
startlingly novel, for prior to that point castles had been virtually unknown
in England.
The only exception was a tiny handful constructed a few years earlier by the
French friends of King Edward the Confessor. ‘The foreigners had built a castle
in Herefordshire’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1051, ‘and had inflicted
every possible injury and insult upon the king’s men in those parts’. The fact
that he was reporting a new phenomenon is conveyed not only by the chronicler’s
palpable outrage at the Frenchmen’s behaviour, but also by his need to borrow
their word for the offending object: this is the first recorded use of ‘castle’
in English.

The Conquest that followed fifteen years later ensured it
would not be the last: the castle was the primary instrument by which the Normans stamped their authority on England. From
having almost none in the period before 1066, the country was quickly crowded
with them. According to one conservative modern estimate, based on the number
of surviving earthworks, at least 500, and possibly closer to 1,000, had been
constructed by the end of the eleventh century, barely two generations since
the time of the Normans’
initial landing.

Of course, England
had not been without defences before 1066: the pre-Conquest landscape
contained, among other things, Iron-Age hill forts, Roman legionary forts, and
the fortified towns built by the Anglo-Saxons themselves, known as boroughs or burhs. But all of these differed from what followed by
being large enclosures designed to protect large communities, including, in
some cases, non-military personnel. Castles, by contrast, were comparatively
small affairs, designed to be defended by a limited number of fighting men.
They had originated in France
around the turn of the first millennium as a result of the collapse of royal
and provincial authority, when power ultimately devolved to those who had the
means to build their own private fortifications and fill them with mounted
warriors.

As well as being smaller, castles were also taller. Some of
the earliest French examples were great stone towers, such as the soaring
donjon at Loches on the River Loire, built by the
buccaneering Fulk Nerra,
count of Anjou, around 1000 AD, and still impressive a thousand years on. But
the crucial thing about castles was that they could be created without the need
for such colossal investment. It was quite possible to obtain the same
advantage of height quickly and on a fraction of the budget by throwing up a great
mound of earth and topping it with a tower of wood. As every schoolchild knows,
such mounds were known from the first as ‘mottes’.

The point about size and speed is reinforced by the Normans’ behaviour in England immediately after their
arrival. At Pevensey they created a castle by
adapting a Roman fort, and at Hastings by customizing an Iron-Age hill
fort, in each case hiving off a smaller section of the much larger original.
After their victory at Hastings, as they set
about crushing the remaining English resistance, they continued to act in
exactly the same manner, adding new fortifications to the ancient defences at Dover, and almost certainly creating the castle at Wallingford by destroying
a corner of the Anglo-Saxon borough. When, towards the end of 1066, the
citizens of London
at last submitted to William the Conqueror, his first thought was to plant a
castle in the south-eastern angle of the city – the site which would soon
become home to the Tower.

In the months and years that followed, the castle-building
campaign intensified. The Normans,
wept the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1067, ‘built castles far and wide throughout
the land, oppressing the unhappy people, and things went ever from bad to
worse’. Part of the reason for this intensification was the repeated attempts
by the English to throw off the rule of their conquerors. The southwest of England rose in revolt at the start of 1068,
apparently led by the surviving remnants of the Godwine
family, while in the summer of the same year there were similar risings in the
Midlands and northern England.
William methodically crushed them all, marching in with his army and planting
castles in major towns and cities. Exeter, Warwick, Nottingham, York, Lincoln, Cambridge and
Huntingdon all received new royal fortresses at this time, and further examples
were added in the years that followed: Chester
and Stafford in 1069–70, Ely in 1071 and Durham
in 1072. The northernmost outpost of Norman power was established in 1080 by
the Conqueror’s son, Robert, who planted a ‘new castle’ upon the River Tyne,
while William himself marked the western limit of his authority during an
expedition to Wales the following year, founding a new fortress in an old Roman
fort called Cardiff.

The foundation of castles, however, was far from being an
exclusively royal affair. William may have raised armies to quell major
rebellions, but the rest of the time he relied on other Normans to keep order in his newly conquered
kingdom. In the two decades after 1066, the new king rewarded his closest
followers with extensive grants of land in England, and the first act of any
sensible incoming lord was invariably to construct a castle. In some instances
it appears that these were planted on top of existing English seigneurial residences, so as to emphasize a continuity of
lordship. But in the majority of cases such continuity was lacking because the
process of conquest had caused the country’s existing tenurial
map to be torn up. Sussex,
for example, was sliced up into half-a-dozen new lordships, known locally as
rapes, which paid no heed whatsoever to earlier patterns of ownership. New
lordships required new castles, and the rapes were named in each case after the
fortresses that sprung up at Chichester, Hastings,
Bramber, Arundel, Lewes and Pevensey.

The reorganization of Sussex into continental-style, castle-centred lordships seems to have been a decision
determined by cold military logic. The county was the Normans’ initial beach-head, and also the
former Godwine heartland. The rapes run north-south,
and their castles are all located near the coast, as if to keep the route
between London and Normandy secure.

In recent decades, however, the scholarly trend has been to
emphasize that castles had other roles beyond the military. The fact that they were
often sited so as to command road and river routes, for example, meant that
their owners were also well placed to control trade, and could both protect and
exploit mercantile traffic. We are also reminded that part of the reason for
building a castle could be symbolic. A great fortress, towering above
everything else for miles around, provided a constant physical reminder of its
owner’s power, a permanent assertion of his right to rule.

During the Conqueror’s reign, this was most obviously true in
the case of the three great stone towers the king himself is known to have
created at Chepstow, Colchester and (most famously) London. In each case these giant buildings,
the like of which England had not seen since the time of the Romans, have
strong Roman resonances, and were partially constructed using the stone from
nearby Roman ruins (not for nothing did twentieth-century scholars christen the
style ‘Romanesque’). Indeed, in the case of Colchester,
it is difficult to suggest a reason for the construction of so massive a
building beyond a desire to be associated with the town’s imperial past. There
are no reports of rebellions or military action in Essex at any point during
William’s reign; but the great tower he created in Colchester
was erected on the ruins of the town’s ruined Roman temple. The Conqueror’s
sycophantic biographer, William of Poitiers, draws frequent comparisons between
his royal master and Julius Caesar. To judge from buildings like Chepstow,
Colchester and the Tower
of London, it was a comparison
that the king himself was keen to cultivate.

At the same time, we need to guard against hyper-correction.
In recent years, it seems to me, the revisionist arguments about Norman castles
have been pushed too far, to the extent that some historians now come close to
arguing that they had almost no military function at all. Take, for example,
the castle that William the Conqueror caused to be built at Exeter in 1068. Its original gatehouse still
survives, and has been judged defensively weak because it was originally
entered at ground level. This may be so, but it takes a considerable leap to
conclude from this, as one historian has done, that the whole castle was
‘militarily ineffectual’. Much of the site has now vanished, but it occupied an
area of around 600 feet by 600 feet; Domesday
suggests that 48 houses were destroyed in order to make room for it. It was
built on the highest point in the town, and separated by a deep ditch and
rampart. Exeter fell to William in 1068 after a bitter three-week siege which
saw heavy casualties on both sides (and during which, if we believe the later
chronicler William of Malmesbury, one of the English
defenders signalled his defiance by dropping his trousers and farting in the
king’s general direction). It beggars belief to suppose that the Conqueror,
having taken the city at such cost, would have commissioned a building that had
no military capability, and was concerned only with the projection of what has
been called ‘peaceable power’.

The notion that castles had little military purpose also
requires us to ignore the testimony of contemporary chroniclers. The
Conqueror’s biographer, William of Poitiers, repeatedly describes the castles
his master besieged on the Continent before 1066 using terms such as ‘very
strong’ or ‘virtually impregnable’, and such descriptions are borne out by the
fact that it took the duke months and in some cases years to take them. Yet
some scholars are curiously reluctant to allow that castles built in England after
the Conquest served a similar military purpose. The Conqueror’s great stone
tower at Chepstow, for instance, has been plausibly reinterpreted in recent
years as an audience chamber where the king or his representatives could
receive and overawe the native rulers of Wales. But the fact remains that it
was still a formidably tough building, situated high on a cliff above the River
Wye, and defended at each end by ditches cut deep into the rock. True, it does
not bristle with arrowloops, turrets and
machicolations, but then no castles did in this early period, because the
technology of attack was also primitive in comparison to what came later.
Without the great stone-throwing machines known as trebuchets, there was not
much an enemy at the gates could do, beyond mounting a blockade and trying to
starve a garrison into submission. In these circumstances, a well-situated and
well-stocked castle could be militarily decisive. In 1069 the people of Northumbria succeeded in taking Durham, massacring its newly arrived Norman
garrison who tried and failed to hold out in the hall of the local bishop. But
when the Northumbrians attempted to take the town for a second time in 1080,
they failed, because they were unable to take its new castle.

One of the remarkable things about the Norman Conquest was
how quickly the rift between the English and the Normans was healed. Within a
generation or two, it is possible to point to castles that did owe more to
ideas of peaceful living than military deterrence. But in the years immediately
after 1066, filled as they were with bloody rebellion and even bloodier
repression; when a few thousand Normans
lived among a population of two million English in the daily fear of violent
death: in these circumstances castles have to be regarded first and foremost as
military installations, introduced to subdue an unwilling population.
Unfashionable though it may be among castle scholars, there is every reason to
listen to the testimony of the half-English, half-Norman historian Orderic Vitalis, born in Shropshire within a decade of 1066, who
attributed the success of Conquest to one factor above all others. ‘The
fortifications that the Normans
called castles’, he explains, ‘were scarcely known in the English provinces,
and so the English – in spite of their courage and love of fighting – could put
up only a weak resistance to their enemies’.

4. Castle Acre and the Warennes

Castle Acre, a wonderful little village in Norfolk, offers the most amazing
three-for-one deal. A really splendid Norman fortress, so
impressive in scale that it could command attention all by itself. A gorgeous priory, the best preserved example of its kind in England.
And, as if these two were not enough, there’s also a medieval town there too,
still discernible from the layout of its streets, its earth ramparts and a
well-preserved stone gate. As the new interpretative displays and audio tour of
the priory explain, it’s one of the best locations in Britain for
seeing how the forces of violence, religion and commerce combined in the Middle
Ages to shape the landscape that we see today.

We owe this concentration of quality sites to a family by the
name of Warenne, so called because they originally
hailed from a town called Varenne in Normandy. Like so many
men of those parts, the Warennes backed the winning
horse in 1066. ‘My ancestors came with William the Bastard and conquered their
lands with the sword’, said one of the their number
some two centuries later, brandishing an ancient, rusty blade to prove his
point. It was a exclamation born of frustration with
the interference of royal government, but such conflict with the Crown was
exceptionally rare. The story of the Warennes is, in fact, proof positive that the way to get ahead in
medieval England
was to swing a strong right arm in the service of the king.

The founder of the family’s fortune, and therefore putative
owner of the rusty sword, was William de Warenne. One
of the Conqueror’s closest companions, he was at the front of the queue when
the spoils were being dished out. Extensive lands in Sussex
were given to him when he was barely off the boat, and he set about organizing
them around the town and castle
of Lewes. Other prizes
soon followed. By the time Domesday Book was compiled
in 1086 William was the fourth richest individual after the king himself, and
owned estates in more than a dozen English counties. The overwhelming bulk of
them were concentrated in East
Anglia, and centred on what would become
known as Castle Acre.

Castles were, of course, one of the most striking innovations
that the Normans
introduced to the English countryside, and the earliest examples tended to be
built to a common-or-garden design. A great mound of earth raised the lord’s
residence high above its surroundings, and a larger, lower enclosure
accommodated his household and their horses. Such castles, as every schoolgirl
knows, we now call ‘motte-and-baileys’.

At first glance, the structure created by William de Warenne at Castle Acre would seem to be a prime example of
this type. Initial appearances, however, can be deceptive. Archaeological
investigation has revealed that, whilst the bailey probably dates to William’s
time, there was originally no motte at all. William
had instead settled for a much shallower, lightly defended enclosure, in the
middle of which he built a rather luxurious stone house (the foundations of
which can still be seen). It was only his later descendants, living through the
uncertainty of a civil war, who decided that a large mound of earth would be a
good idea after all. Castle Acre, therefore, presents a uniquely peculiar case,
a motte-and-bailey without a motte.
Curiously, and by contrast, William’s other castle at Lewes has not one motte but two. One cannot help wondering if part of his
intention was to frustrate castle historians of the future.

Unconventional he may have been when it came to building
castles, but in all other respects William was a textbook Norman conqueror, a
warrior who carved out an empire for himself and ran it with ruthless
efficiency. Such men wanted not only glory but profit – hence, in part, the
need for a town at Castle Acre. They also needed to atone for a lifetime of
maiming and killing. In the 1080s William set off on pilgrimage to Rome, but in the event got no further than Burgundy and the great abbey of Cluny. Suitably inspired, he returned to England and founded two priories of his own, one
at Lewes, the other at Acre. As the earlier of
the two, Lewes had the greater claim on the Warenne’s
loyalties. When William died in 1088 – killed, appropriately, by an arrow-wound
sustained during a siege – he was buried there, as were all his later
descendants. But Lewes Priory suffered severely in later centuries, not least
from having a railway driven through its precinct. Castle Acre Priory, by
contrast, is a wonderfully well-preserved ruin, located in as serene a setting
as could be imagined. Visit on a fine day, and you’ll almost wish they were
still looking for new monks.

Shortly before his death, William de Warenne
was created earl of Surrey – a rare
distinction, and a final confirmation of his highly successful career. It was a
success replicated by his descendants who, over the next three centuries,
emulated his model of dynamic lordship and service to the Crown to maintain
their place at the top of society. But in the fourteenth century, the story
came to an abrupt end. John de Warenne, seventh earl
of Surrey, was by no means incompetent either
as a soldier or as a politician, but his personal life was a disaster. His
marriage, forced on him by Edward I, was doomed from the start: he was not
quite twenty, his new wife not quite ten. But, since she was the king’s
granddaughter, the match proved hard to dissolve, and successive popes refused
to grant a divorce. The earl’s case was not helped by his notorious way with
the ladies: he had at least two mistresses, and later confessed to having had
an affair with his wife’s aunt, a decidedly loose-living nun. Earl John ended
his days living with a certain Isabella Holland,
referred to in his will as ‘my companion’. Through these various liaisons he
had at least six children, but none by his wife. Thus, when he died in 1347,
his vast estate passed by law to his legitimate but distant relatives. Castle
Acre, where generations of his family had kept company with kings, fell quickly
into ruin. And so passed the Warennes,
one of the greatest dynasties in medieval England, their fortune won with the
sword, but lost through lust and love.

5. Goodrich Castle

Colonel John Birch (1615-91) could boast an impressive CV –
war-hero, politician, sometime wine-merchant – but he might well have failed an
interview with English Heritage, especially had he been quizzed about Goodrich
Castle. ‘I humbly conceive it is useless,’ he wrote to parliament in 1646, ‘and
a great burden to the country’. As his letter to the house made abundantly
clear, the colonel was all in favour of having the castle pulled down.

We may be thankful that his advice was not followed: Goodrich
still stands today, perched high above the banks of the River Wye in
Herefordshire, and is one of the finest properties in EH’s
care. At the same time, one has to sympathize somewhat with Birch’s destructive
urges, for in 1646 the castle had given him an awful lot of trouble. That year
had seen the conclusion of the English Civil War (the first one, at any rate),
during which the colonel and his Parliamentarian comrades had spent a great
deal of time and effort trying to wrest control of Goodrich, and other castles
like it, from the hands of their royalist opponents.

To tackle Goodrich itself, Birch had
not only been forced to deploy the usual array of trenches, tunnels and cannon;
in addition, he had also been obliged to have a new weapon, nicknamed Roaring
Meg, made especially for the occasion. A squat little tub of malevolence, Meg
was not a cannon but a mortar-piece, designed to lob 200lb grenades over the
castle’s walls and amongst its defenders. Unsurprisingly, once she had been
finished and brought out to play, the garrison at Goodrich soon decided it was
time to surrender.

Having gone to such lengths, Birch and
his colleagues were anxious not to have to repeat the experience, and saw
pulling down castles as the answer to their problem. Unfortunately for them,
however, but luckily for us, outright demolition also proved to be problematic,
owing to the time and costs involved. In the end the Parliamentarians had to
content themselves with partial destruction – a process they called
‘slighting’. Castles that were slighted had their defensible parts knocked down
or undermined so that they could not be held in future. Such was the fate of
Goodrich, which is why it still stands today, albeit in ruins.

Goodrich, of course, was not a new building when Birch and
Meg began smashing it up in 1646. Like the vast majority of castles, it was
established in the late eleventh century, in the wake of the Norman Conquest.
Unfortunately, little is known about its actual beginnings. How it came to
acquire its distinctive name is pretty clear: a documentary reference of 1102
reveals that this was once ‘Godric’s Castle’, and Godric himself is named as the local landowner in the Domesday Book (compiled 1086). Who he was, however, and
what his castle looked like, is altogether more mysterious: this is Godric’s only brush with the historical record, and nothing
survives of the castle’s original structure. The mystery is rendered all the
more perplexing by the fact that name ‘Godric’ would
appear to indicate we are dealing with Englishman. Precisely how an Englishman
came to be holding a castle in Herefordshire in the immediate aftermath of the
Norman invasion would have been a story well worth hearing.

But no matter: whatever once stood at Goodrich, the building
that stands today is unquestionably finer and has better tales to tell. Apart
from its twelfth-century keep – a splendid building, but of uncertain
sponsorship – the castle is chiefly the work of William de Valence, one of the
most powerful and controversial magnates to have lived in thirteenth-century England.

Valence owed his
existence, in a fundamental sense, to King John, who in October 1216 obliged
his wife Isabella of Angoulême and the rest of
subjects by dropping dead. No sooner was the king in his tomb than the queen
had abandoned England
and with it her children by her late, unloved husband. Isabella returned to her
homeland in France,
remarried and had more children – nine more, to be precise. Valence was one of the youngest.

As for his career in England,
Valence owed
that to King John’s son, Henry III. In 1247, Henry invited his young
half-brother to cross the Channel and gave him the hand of a rich heiress,
thereby making him the owner of vast estates – including Goodrich Castle.
Unfortunately, the king’s indulgence also extended to turning a blind eye to
Valence’s excessively violent behaviour, which so angered the rest of the
aristocracy that it eventually helped trigger a constitutional crisis – the one
usually associated with Simon de Montfort. It was, indeed, Montfort himself who
told Valence in
1258 ‘make no mistake about it: either you lose your castles, or you lose your
head’.

So Valence wisely chose to
forsake Goodrich Castle and go into exile, though only
for a short time. His saving grace was his close friendship with Henry III’s son, Edward, later to become the formidable Edward I,
who was able to make good use of his half-uncle’s penchant for violence. Valence fought with
Edward at the Battle of Evesham (where Montfort met his end), accompanied him
on crusade, and assisted the king in the most successful military enterprise of
his reign – the Conquest of Wales.

It is the Conquest of Wales that provides the most likely
context for Goodrich’s reconstruction, although not in the obvious way that one
might imagine. To subjugate his new territories, as is well known, Edward I
built a string of celebrated castles – Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech
and Beaumaris being the most spectacular. His leading
magnates followed suit, constructing new castles of their own or upgrading
existing ones. In many cases, though, this massive aristocratic investment in
stone was less about improving military security, and more about keeping up
with the Joneses. Goodrich shares many architectural similarities with its near
neighbour at Chepstow, rebuilt in the last decades of the thirteenth century by
Valence’s contemporary, the earl of Norfolk. Neither man was
really expecting much in the way of trouble from the already vanquished Welsh.
But, with everyone’s attention focused on Wales, they were anticipating
having to spend a lot more time in the region, with their great households in
tow. The pressure was on to outdo each other, to entertain each other, and –
occasionally – to entertain the king.

What is striking about Goodrich,
therefore, is not so much its strong stone walls as the wealth of luxury
accommodation crammed within them. You’ll find many more window seats,
fireplaces and toilets than you will arrow-loops. Indeed, with its
well-preserved ‘solar’ of private apartments, and its chapel, complete with
recently restored stained-glass windows, Goodrich possesses one of the
best-preserved interiors of any thirteenth-century English castle. It’s not so
much of a fortress; more of a stately home with attitude.

For those who demand their history grisly, however, Goodrich
can now boast an additional bonus. In 2003, having languished for many years
outside a local museum, Roaring Meg returned. The last
surviving mortar-piece of the English Civil War, she sits today within the
courtyard of the castle she was specially created to ruin. To those unaware of
her past, she must seem an unassuming object, no more terrifying than a cement
mixer or a water-butt. But the ghosts of Goodrich Castle
know better, and remember the sound of her roar.

6. Framlingham Castle and the Bigods

If you want to imagine yourself in the
guise of a medieval warrior – and, let’s face it, who
doesn’t – there are few better places to visit than Framlingham Castle
in Suffolk.
Approach as if to attack, and you are confronted with one of the most
impressive and impregnable-looking fortresses in England: a mighty ring of stone
walls, thirteen metres high, surrounded by a broad, deep ditch. Twelve
surviving towers stand taller still, and are amply supplied with arrow-loops.
Make no mistake about it: this is a fantastically tough old building, designed
in expectation of trouble.

To say that this is a veritable and
venerable fortress, however, is to tell only a small part of its story. Inside
those giant walls, the only structure that stands today is a
seventeenth-century poorhouse. Now home to the local museum, it’s a building
well worth visiting in its own right, with a harrowing history that once
reduced the normally flinty Jeremy Paxman to tears.
Medievalists, meanwhile, lament the fact that it was ever built at all, for its
stones were salvaged from the castle’s original interior. As a result, the
casual observer now has a highly distorted view of Framlingham;
one which reinforces the traditional misapprehension that castles were all
about fighting, battlements and boiling oil. The reality was, of course, very
different.

Framlingham was established by the Bigods, a family
who came to England with
William the Conqueror in 1066 and quickly established themselves as the most
powerful barons in East Anglia
– a position officially acknowledged in the middle of the twelfth century when
they were invested as earls of Norfolk.
A cursory glance at the history of these men suggest
that they liked nothing better than a scrap with England’s kings. Earl Hugh Bigod (d. 1177), for instance, unsuccessfully challenged
Henry II, with the result that the original Framlingham Castle, a conventional earth-and-timber
structure, was torn down by royal command in 1174. The present castle was built
by Hugh’s son and successor, Roger (d. 1221), to proclaim that the Bigods were back in business – and ready to challenge King
John, who laid siege to the castle in 1216. But in actual fact, the Bigods, like most medieval magnates, almost always worked
in partnership with the Crown. Framlingham was hardly
ever used as a fortress (even the so-called ‘siege’ of 1216 lasted less than 48
hours). It was, on the contrary, a place where power was expressed in a very
different way – through benign local lordship, conspicuous consumption and
luxurious living.

Ironically, a fantastic snapshot of ordinary, everyday life
at Framlingham has been preserved because of the
desperate, extraordinary decision taken by the last of the Bigod
line. In 1297, at the end of a long but fairly unremarkable career, Earl Roger
IV led a movement of popular resistance against the indomitable Edward I, whose
government was widely deemed to have become unjust and oppressive. Although he
met with considerable success, the earl was bankrupted by this stand, and so
ended up having to cut a deal with the king. In return for an annuity for the
rest of his life, Roger agreed to make Edward his heir. Accordingly, when the
earl died a few years later, his vast estate in England,
Wales and Ireland – Framlingham Castle included – passed to the Crown. And so too did all his estate accounts, some 650 neatly written
rolls of parchment, which survive to this day in the National Archives at Kew. It is these documents which permit a unique
glimpse into the earl’s private affairs, and a window through which we can look
at life inside Framlingham Castle.

Roger himself was only occasionally in residence. Medieval
magnates, like modern rock stars, were forever on tour. Nevertheless, in the
earl’s absence, the castle did not stand idle. It was from here that his
officials oversaw the workings of the entire Bigod
administration in East
Anglia, and it was to here that money
generated on other manors was sent to be kept in the treasury. Framlingham was also an agricultural centre in its own
right: the account rolls reveal all manner of produce being farmed, ranging
from the expected (dairy, poultry, sheep and cattle) to the surprising (regular
wages and robes were given to the earl’s vintner for tending his vineyards).
Periodically there were visits from members of the earl’s own household: his
knights came to hunt venison or to track falcons in the adjacent park; his
accountants to check every bushel and barrel, even as they themselves consumed
large quantities of fancy foodstuffs.

When the earl himself was due to arrive, the administration
went into overdrive. Roger typically travelled with around fifty people in tow,
and the castle had to be brought rapidly up to speed to cater for this
entourage. Produce and provender poured in from the outlying manors. Deer were
driven from the park, beer was brewed and bread baked. At Easter 1286 it was
even necessary to bring in extra crockery from Tattingstone,
some twenty miles away. Equally as important, the buildings in the castle had
to be cleaned, repaired and, where necessary, rebuilt. The full extent of the
castle’s vanished interior stands revealed in the rolls. We read of service
buildings, such as the saucery, larder and kitchen,
and accommodation, including the chambers of the earl, his steward, his knights
and his servants.

The most important building of all was the castle’s hall. It
was here that the earl and his household were wined, dined and entertained.
Originally located on the eastern side of the courtyard, the hall was moved to
face west when the castle was rebuilt around the year 1200, and this move reflects
a corresponding shift in the Bigods’ domestic
priorities. To the west of the castle, the ground falls away until it reaches a
great lake or mere. This itself was a man-made
feature, a piece of medieval landscaping. Of course, it could have helped to
defend the castle, but its primary purpose was to provide dramatic effect. From
afar, the castle’s appearance is greatly enhanced by its own reflection. From
within, the views to the west are spectacular, which explains the relocation of
the hall. The mere also provides the backdrop to the so-called
Lower Court, a
levelled area directly below the hall, almost certainly created as a private
enclosure for the earl and his family. Whether in the hall or
the garden, the Bigods and their guests could watch
the sun setting across the water as they dined and relaxed.

Such was the normal life at Framlingham
during its thirteenth-century heyday. It was not a place that the Bigods used to confront their kings, but rather to welcome
them. In 1256 Roger’s predecessor threw open his doors to Henry III, and Roger
himself played host to Edward I in 1277 (sadly, a year for which no accounts
exist). The earl died a peaceful death at Framlingham
in 1306 and, under the terms of his agreement with Edward, his dynasty drew to an close. It seems only fitting, on the seven-hundredth
anniversary of the family’s eclipse, that we remember their main castle as it
really was. Mount the walls at Framlingham and
exercise your imagination, but bear in mind that the sight of an advancing army
would have been almost as surprising for the Bigods
as it would be for us today. Picture instead a ‘landscape of lordship’: men
fishing in the mere and felling trees, knights hunting in the park; carpenters
and masons, glaziers and gardeners, all seeking to beautify the castle and its
surroundings; carts creaking across the drawbridge, laden with building
materials, fine foods and bags of money. A peaceful panorama, but a busy one,
animated by the news that the earl was riding towards Framlingham,
eagerly anticipating the comforts and pleasures to be had within.

7. The King’s
Companions

Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk and marshal of England, was by all accounts a very
bellicose and irascible chap, and so knew a golden opportunity to settle an old
score when he saw one. In 1245, while travelling through France on
diplomatic business, he was rudely detained by Arnaud, count of Guisnes. This minor French aristocrat failed to show the
earl the respect he felt was his due and extorted money from him and his men in
exchange for their continued safe passage. When, therefore, some four years
later, Arnaud showed up on this side of the Channel, Bigod
had no hesitation in ordering his immediate seizure. This led to the whole
business coming before King Henry III (1216–72), enabling the earl to justify
his retaliation: if an upstart French count was free to sell the roads and the
air to travellers, Bigod reasoned, then so was he. ‘I
am an earl’, he barked, ‘just as he is!’

To modern ears this defence sounds puzzling: ‘earl’ is
(almost self-evidently) an English word, and was used as a title from the
eleventh century by those who governed large regions of Anglo-Saxon England in
the king’s name. How, then, could it be applied to the count of Guisnes? The problem is that the sense of Bigod’s retort has been lost in translation. The above
episode comes down to us thanks to the reporting of Matthew Paris, a gossipy
monk of St Albans who was frequently at Henry III’s court. Paris
wrote his account in Latin and, in Latin, ‘earl’ and ‘count’ are denoted by the
same word – comes. Similarly, Bigod, while he
probably understood English and knew that most of his fellow countrymen
referred to him as an ‘earl’, was a high-ranking member of an aristocratic
elite that still habitually spoke French. Thus the word he would have used to
describe himself would have been cuens or conte: again, the same word used to describe a French
count.

At a purely linguistic level,
therefore, Bigod was right – he and the count of Guisnes did have exactly the same title. On another level,
however, he was quite wrong, as he must have known well. The powers of a
continental comes (a count) were very different to those of an English comes
(an earl). The count of Guisnes was only small fry,
but there were French counts in the thirteenth century who were virtually
independent rulers of their own provinces – for example, the counts of Anjou, Toulouse and Flanders. Such men could make their own laws, mint coins
in their own name, and answered in only a vague and occasional way to the king
of France.
By contrast, English earls like Bigod were altogether
less impressive creatures, being merely the greatest subjects of the English
king.

The equation of English earls with
French counts began, unsurprisingly, with the Norman Conquest. It was also, as
we shall see, precisely at this point that the powers enjoyed by earls were
dramatically curtailed. Prior to 1066, earls exercised real authority in their
regions, albeit delegated from the king: they presided over the provincial courts,
handing down judgements of life and death; they assisted in the collection of
fines and taxes, in return for which they received a third of the profits from
both; and, in times of war, it fell to them to lead the armies. Earls were
essentially the same as ealdormen, who first occur in the seventh century, and
who exercised the same kind of wide powers from the early tenth century. The
preference for the shorter title was a semantic shift caused by the
less-celebrated take-over of England
by the Danes in 1016. King Cnut (1016–35) preferred to call his English
provincial governors jarls like their contemporary Scandinavian counterparts.
There was precious little difference, however, in the kind of powers they
exercised. If anything, ealdormen/earls were becoming more powerful in the
eleventh century. The greatest among them governed regions that corresponded to
the former kingdoms that had combined to form the English state: Northumbria, East
Anglia, Mercia
and Wessex.
Thus, hardly anyone blinked when, at the start of 1066, the earl of Wessex, Harold Godwineson, decided that he would be the best person to
succeed the recently deceased Edward the Confessor and had himself crowned
king.

William the Conqueror (1066–87), who
took a rather different view on the succession, also viewed the balance of
power between the Crown and the earls with a fresh and critical eye. After a
few years trying to govern England
along conventional English lines, only to be rewarded with one rebellion after
another, he set about a radical restructuring of power. The size of surviving
earldoms was much reduced and, when new earls were created, as was the case in
Herefordshire, Shropshire and Cheshire, their
territorial responsibilities were confined to a single shire – or ‘county’ as
the Normans
began to call these units, for it was at this point that the English earl was
equated with the French count. This, too, signalled a demotion: previously, the
English word ‘earl’ had been translated into Latin as dux (duke). Duke was
William’s own title as ruler of Normandy
– he was not about to start sharing it.

The policy of keeping earls firmly in their place was
followed by William’s sons. Under William Rufus (1087–1100) and Henry I (1100–35)
the number of earldoms was kept down to single figures, and the formal powers
that earls had enjoyed before the Conquest began to ebb away. Earls no longer
aided in the collection of tax and were seen less and less in the county
courts. If they raised and led armies, they did so in their capacity as the
king’s sworn men, obliged to aid him as a condition of their landholding,
rather than because of any public duties attached to their titles.
Increasingly, ‘earl’ was regarded as only an honorary designation.

It was just at the point, however, when the position of the
earls seemed to be almost entirely empty, that England acquired a king who took
the deliberate decision to increase their number and devolve huge, unheard-of
amounts of authority directly into their hands. King Stephen (1135–54) clearly
felt that this was the best way to deal with the tricky state of affairs that
obtained at the start of his reign, namely an aristocracy chafing at the bit
for greater rewards, and a rival for power in the shape of his cousin, Matilda.
His aim seems to have been to have an earl for every county: by the end of his
reign only five counties had no earl, and the overall number of earls had
trebled. But what seemed a straightforward and inexpensive way to appease his
greatest subjects and outdo his opponents quickly spun out of control.
Governmental powers that were given to one earl – say,
the right to hold a royal castle, or to control the king’s sheriff – came to be
expected by the others. Such expectations were difficult to contain, moreover,
for this was not an insular aristocracy, but a cross-channel one. A man called
comes in England was naturally likely to compare himself with a
similarly-styled cousin or brother on the continent and think, as Roger Bigod did a century later, ‘I am an earl, just as he is’.
Why, therefore, should English earls not hold their own courts? Why settle for
a third of judicial profits when you could have the lot? Come to that, why not mint your own coins, with your own face on,
rather than the king’s? By the end of Stephen’s reign, several English earls
had done just that.

Stephen soon repented of his policy and tried to throw it
into reverse. It took the greater skill and firmer purpose of his successor,
however, to restore the primacy of the Crown and ensure that England did not become – as, for example, Germany had – a confederation of independent
princes rather than a united
kingdom. Nevertheless, Henry II (1135–54)
faced a formidable task in this, the nature of which is well illustrated by the
example of Hugh Bigod, great-grandfather of Roger,
and no less bellicose than his descendant. Hugh was one of the new earls of
Stephen’s reign, and it is quite clear from his actions that he intended to
make East Anglia his own. Along the River
Waveney, which divides Norfolk from Suffolk, he seized a string of manors, and built a new castle at Bungay to control them. Further afield, he set his sights
on controlling the royal castles and county towns at Norwich
and Ipswich. His comital
title (that is, his earldom) had been given to him by Matilda, Henry II’s mother, and for this reason he may have expected some
degree of latitude from her son. But Hugh and others like him who had done very
well for themselves during Stephen’s reign suffered a rude awakening during the
reign of his successor. Henry II not only wrested control of royal castles from
those who had usurped it; he also in some instances compelled the destruction
of fortresses built by the earls themselves. After Hugh Bigod
and some other old die-hards attempted to reassert their independence in 1173–74,
the earl was compelled by Henry to hand over his main castle at Framlingham, and watch as the king had it torn down.

Because of his success in dealing with the separatist
tendencies of the English earls, Henry II is regarded as one of the great
heroes of England’s
‘constitutional’ history. During his reign no new earldoms were created and
many existing ones were allowed to lapse on the death of their holders. Hugh Bigod’s son, for example – another Roger – was not allowed
to style himself ‘earl of Norfolk’,
in spite of his record of loyal service to the Crown. It was only thanks to the
generosity – and dire financial need – of Richard I (1189–99) that the Bigod family were able to buy back their lost title. Other
changes initiated by Henry, especially his expansion of royal justice,
increased the power of the Crown to the extent that, while the king himself
might be challenged, his position was never again called into question.

By the thirteenth century, therefore, there was no power that
automatically went with being an earl: certainly nobody
claiming independence from royal control by virtue of his title. This is not to
say that earls were not powerful men – they were. Their power, however, was
based on purely material measures: how much land they had, how much money they
raked in, and how many men they could afford to keep in their service as a
consequence. Most earls had land and money in abundance, and were therefore
politically important. But the few exceptions prove the point that simply being
an earl did not in itself grant much of an advantage. The earl of Oxford, for example, had
little in the way of land and resources; his wealth was only a fraction of that
enjoyed by his fellow earls, and he was less well-off than a good many barons.
As a result, he was politically inconsequent – his title counted for
next-to-nothing. Of the public powers that had once belonged to the earl in
Anglo-Saxon times, only a single vestige remained in the thirteenth century.
This was the so called ‘third penny’, once taken as a third share of the
profits of royal justice, but now commuted to a fixed sum, and not a
particularly large one at that.

All of which is to say that the more thoughtful earls of
thirteenth-century England, if they ever took a moment to reflect on the nature
of the title they enjoyed, must have been left wondering precisely what the
point of it was. To be an earl was clearly to be special: in the first half of
the thirteenth century there were never more than twenty individuals who could style
themselves as such at any one time, and in the second half their numbers rarely
rose above ten. ‘Earl’ was, moreover, a unique distinction: there were no other
competing ranks of nobility – no dukes or marquises of the kind found on the
continent, and introduced to England in the fourteenth century. English society
at this time was quite open to ambitious social climbers, and those with
sufficient drive and ambition could rise through a variety of means: a career
in royal service, distinguished conduct on the tournament field or in battle,
the acquisition of lands by purchase. Such men could get themselves knighted,
but they could not buy or fight their way to an earldom. Only the king, it was
accepted, could create an earldom from scratch and, after Stephen’s reign,
kings were understandably reluctant to do so. The only way to obtain an earldom
was to inherit one or marry into one, and in both cases the king might still
withhold the title (as nearly happened in the case of the Bigod
family, and as did happen in the case of William Longespée
and John fitz Geoffrey, who succeeded to their
fathers’ lands but not to their titles). When an individual was admitted to the
rank of earl, it involved a special public ceremony, in which he was ‘belted’
by the king with a sword. The restricted numbers, the ceremonial investment: it
all suggested that contemporaries still saw the rank of earl as significant,
yet if they had any specific theories about the rights and duties that went
with the title they have not survived.

Doubtless many earls
conceived their role rather vaguely as being leaders of local society and the
king’s natural advisers. For most of the time, it is important to remember,
kings and their magnates got along with the routine business of government. We
might expect, therefore, that theories about the nature of ‘comital’
power would develop more rapidly at times of political crisis, when this normal
working relationship broke down. Again, however, this does not seem to have
happened. There were three great crises in the thirteenth century – in 1215,
1258 and 1297 – and in each case earls were at the forefront of opposition to
the Crown. Yet, in the propaganda and the programmes for reform they generated,
nothing specific is said about the role of earls. ‘Community’ and ‘common
counsel’ – these were the buzzwords of thirteenth-century political debate. Nor
was this mere rhetoric to disguise the schemes of great aristocrats: the demand
for greater political involvement of the wider community led to the firmer
establishment of parliament, and parliament involved more than just earls and
barons.

The failure to develop any special claims for the rank of
earl is seemingly underlined by the fairly desperate attempts of certain
thirteenth-century earls to invest their other honorific titles with greater
meaning. Simon de Montfort, the celebrated earl of Leicester
who effectively seized control of Henry III’s
government after the battle of Lewes in 1264, sought to bolster his precarious
position by investigating his rights as hereditary steward of the king’s
household – even to the extent of quizzing an aged and distant female relative
about their precise extent. Similarly, when Roger Bigod
and Humphrey de Bohun opposed Edward I’s plan to lead an army to Gascony
in 1297, they took their stand not as the earls of Norfolk
and Hereford,
but in their capacities as the king’s hereditary marshal and constable.

And yet, as the thirteenth century progressed, and the power
of the Crown increased inexorably, the notion did begin to develop that earls
were in some sense uniquely placed to challenge it. The germ of such an idea
can be found as early as the 1230s, in a legal treatise known as Bracton, notable in almost every other respect for its
staunch defence of royal supremacy. In one particular passage, inspired by a
rebellion against Henry III in 1233–34, the author speaks of the necessity of
‘bridling’ the king if he goes beyond the rule of law. He is not terribly
specific about what this entails or who is to do it – responsibility for
dragging the king into line falls to the ‘his court – that is, his earls and
barons’. Elsewhere, however, Bracton had more to say
on the subject of earls. They are called comites (the
plural of comes), he said, because they are the king’s companions.
Etymologically speaking, he was quite right: originally comes had simply meant
‘companion’; it was first used as an official title in the fourth century for
the courtiers of the Roman emperors. Having reasserted this
idea, Bracton expanded on it: the king’s associates
helped him to govern the people, he said, and the swords with which they were
girded signified the defence of the kingdom.

From these two unconnected and rather unpromising strands a
new theory of what it meant to be an earl was woven in the latter part of the
thirteenth century, when the power of the English medieval monarchy reached its
highest point. During the reign of Edward I (1272–1307), huge armies, tens of
thousands strong, conquered Wales
and invaded Scotland, while
in England
royal lawyers were pushing the Crown’s rights to their utmost limits, even to
the extent of debating whether in all instances the king was bound by the law.
Just as military expansion provoked resistance from the likes of Llywelyn ap
Gruffudd and William Wallace, so too did the
extension of the king’s power in England find its opponents. The
Mirror of Justices, a legal diatribe written in the period 1285–90, took as its
main theme the idea that the king should not be allowed to rule unfettered.
Taking his cue from the earlier comments of Bracton,
the author of The Mirror concocted a spurious historical justification for what
he saw as the proper function of earls vis-à-vis the
king. When the Anglo-Saxons, he says, first came to Britain, they were a folk led by as
many as forty sovereigns; only after a long time fighting among themselves did
they agree to put themselves under the rule of a single king, whom they elected
and crowned. The forty sovereigns, the author then explained, settled down to
govern and defend individual districts, which were known as counties, so-called
because the sovereigns were the king’s companions. From all this nonsense a
powerful conclusion flowed: namely, that it was the special job of the earls to
bring the king to book if he should govern badly.

Frustratingly, we do not know who wrote The Mirror of
Justices, or for whom it was written. It is interesting to note, however, that
in its detestation for royal justices and its appeal to an imagined past in
which the king and earls were partners, the Mirror chimes very well with the
views famously put into the mouth of John de Warenne,
earl of Surrey in precisely the same period. According to a later chronicler, Warenne reacted angrily when called before the king’s
justices to defend his rights. When asked ‘by what warrant’ (quo warranto) he held his lands, the earl produced an ancient
and rusty sword, and said ‘Look
at this, my lords: this is my warrant! For my ancestors came
with William the Bastard and conquered their lands with the sword, and by the
sword I will defend them from anyone intending to seize them. The king
did not conquer and subject the land by himself, but our forebears were sharers
and partners with him.’

It is unlikely that appeals to history of this kind would have convinced
Edward I to share more of his authority with his earls, or to allow that they
had the right to correct his actions. This was, after all, a king who regarded
history as yet another weapon in his own armoury; who
ordered every monastery in England to search their chronicles for historical
precedents that would justify his superior lordship of Scotland, and who had
dug up King Arthur at Glastonbury to prove to the Welsh that their legendary
leader was not coming back to save them. When, in 1297, the earl of Norfolk chose to make a
stand against Edward, he appealed to the rights of the community as set down in
Magna Carta, and what he called ‘human and divine
reason’. It was only after the king’s death that the theories that had been
germinating in his reign began to be advanced as political argument. During the
reign of Edward II (1307–27) there was far less talk of community, and much
greater emphasis on the importance of earls. Chroniclers who otherwise lamented
the behaviour of certain individual earls
nevertheless claimed that England’s
woes – especially its embarrassing defeats in Scotland – were caused by their
insufficiency. ‘There was a time,’ opined one anonymous writer, ‘when
fifteen earls or more were wont to follow the standard of English kings to
battle. But now only five or six earls bear help to our king.’ Such sentiments
caught on fast, to the extent that by the beginning of the next reign the
necessity of having more earls was accepted as self-evident truth even by the
king himself. In 1337, Edward III declared that royalty worked best when ‘buttressed by wise counsels and fortified by
mighty powers’, expressed regret at the ‘serious
decline in names, honours and ranks of dignity’, and aimed to set things
right by the simultaneous creation of no less than six new earldoms. It was the
first deliberate attempt to increase the numbers of earls since the reign of
King Stephen two hundred years before.

Fortunately, much had changed in that time: England’s
aristocracy now had a much greater sense of themselves as the leading members
of a united kingdom.
When Hugh de Courtenay, created earl of Devon
by Edward III in 1335, went around boasting that his new title made him the
king’s equal and gave him the right to make laws, there was little cause for
genuine alarm. Courtenay had been a victim of Edward I’s
masterful meanness, denied his ancestral right to inherit his earldom when
still a teenager. Having spent almost forty years pressing for redress, he was
no doubt rather surprised in his old age to find his claim suddenly upheld, and
seems to have let his imagination get the better of him. Back in the real
world, there was no likelihood that England might fragment into tiny
pieces, each governed by an independent earl who thought himself the equal of
the king. It was no longer possible to say to the king, ‘I am an earl,
therefore you cannot touch me’. Instead, the earls had developed a new theory:
something along the lines of ‘we are earls, and therefore we can replace you’.
Before the deposition of Edward II in 1327, no king of England had
been permanently removed in this way. In the late Middle
Ages, however, many others would share his fate. And it was the earls, above
all, who were the kingmakers.

8. Introducing
Edward I

Many people, confronted with the long line of heroes and
villains who have at one time or another sat on England’s throne, would no doubt
struggle to identify Edward I. His life, unlike those of several of his
successors, was never celebrated by Shakespeare; he was neither hunchbacked nor
notably handsome; he did not murder any nephews nor meet with a grisly end; to
the best of our knowledge, he never urged his men once more unto the breach,
nor offered his kingdom in exchange for a horse. It is understandable,
therefore, that this thirteenth-century king should sometimes slip from our
collective national consciousness, or be confused with his numerous royal
namesakes (altogether we have had eleven King Edwards). But it is also a great
pity, because Edward I was the most important of them all, and, indeed, one of
the most important monarchs this nation has ever known.

Edward has not been entirely overlooked in popular culture.
In 1995 he made his big-screen debut in Braveheart,
appearing as ‘Longshanks’, the villainous nemesis of
the film’s hero, Sir William Wallace. The nickname, at least, had some basis in
contemporary fact: Edward was a remarkably tall man for his day and age,
standing around six foot two in his silken socks (such was the length of his
corpse when exhumed in 1774). But otherwise, as you might expect, Gibson’s
biopic provides a poor guide to understanding the king’s character and
motivations, especially since it deals with only the last decade of a
remarkably long reign. Edward was the longest lived of all England’s
medieval monarchs, 68 years old when he died in the summer of 1307. Not until Elizabeth I limped on
into the seventeenth century was his record broken.

And what a life he had lived. Before his accession, Edward
had served one of the toughest apprenticeships of any English ruler, having
seen his father, the ineffectual Henry III, stripped of power, and having
suffered defeat and imprisonment at the hands of his uncle, Simon de Montfort.
It fell to Edward to lead the royalist fightback and
restore Henry to full authority, a feat he eventually achieved in 1265 at
Evesham, where he met Montfort in battle and had him
hacked to death.

Restoring the power of the Crown
remained one of Edward’s principal preoccupations for the rest of his days. The
other was recovering Jerusalem
for Christendom. In 1270, still uncrowned, Edward became the second of only two
English kings (the other being his great uncle, Richard the Lionheart)
to lead a crusade to the Holy Land. It was,
much to his disappointment, an unsuccessful expedition, and it remained
Edward’s lifelong ambition to return east at the head of a far greater host.
Nevertheless, his crusade, and his other youthful adventures in Europe (to Spain,
for instance, where he married Eleanor of Castile), made Edward the most widely
travelled English monarch until well into the modern age. Not until the future
Edward VII visited India
in 1875 did any king or queen travel further.

Plans for a new crusade, however, were
ultimately dashed by struggles closer to home. Edward returned from the East
determined to assert his authority on all fronts. One of his initial projects,
for example, was to rebuild the Tower
of London – the massive
scale of the site that exists today is largely Edward’s achievement. A grander
architectural legacy still arose as a consequence of the king’s intervention in
Wales,
which prior to this point was essentially an independent country. When the
native Welsh princes met Edward’s demands for submission with defiance, the
king responded by terminating their power forever. In 1277 and 1283 Wales was
conquered in two devastating campaigns, and conquest was cemented with the most
spectacular string of castles ever created. The mighty fortresses at Harlech, Conwy, Beaumaris and
Caernarfon (to name just the four most famous) are all World Heritage Sites,
and testimony to the awesome power that the English medieval state achieved
with Edward I at the helm.

For the first half of his reign Edward
enjoyed almost unqualified success. As well as victory in Wales, there were
triumphs on the domestic front. The Crown’s finances were righted by the
creation of a national customs system; new laws were promulgated and the peace
well kept. Parliament, a novel but hitherto malfunctioning institution, was
transformed into a forum in which the nation could come together and devise
common remedies. In 1290, for example, the knights of the shires assembled in Westminster to solve the
pressing problems associated with Jewish credit. In a profoundly anti-Semitic
age, the solution was a simple one, and Edward ordered the total expulsion of
all Jews from his kingdom – the first European monarch to take such a measure.

From that moment on, however, Edward’s
success started to unravel. Just a few weeks after the Expulsion, he lost his
beloved queen, Eleanor of Castile. Around the same time, news arrived of the
death of Margaret, the so-called ‘Maid of Norway’, heiress to the Scottish
throne and fiancée of Edward’s namesake son. The collapse of this matrimonial
alliance – a scheme that would have seen England
and Scotland
united in 1290 rather than 1603 – persuaded Edward to impose himself on the
Scots by force. They responded by allying themselves with the French, and the
English king soon found himself at war with two formerly friendly neighbours.
Edward spent his final years, not fighting in the Holy
Land as he had hoped, but engaged in a ceaseless round of
campaigns north of the Border. It was en route towards the Border that he
eventually died, trying but failing to stamp out the rebellion of Robert Bruce.
A king both great and terrible, he left England far stronger and more
united than he found it at the time of his accession. But he left a legacy of
division between the peoples of the British Isles
that has lasted from his day to our own.

9. Encapsulating
Edward I

For the past four years or so, I have
been writing a biography of King Edward I, the working title for which was
Edward I. As it happens, all of my publications to date have been labelled in
this does-exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin fashion. My last book, for example, a
serial biography of the thirteenth-century earls of Norfolk,
was entitled The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century. Similarly,
my first foray in the field of popular history was a television series and a
book about castles, both of which, after numerous agonised production meetings,
were eventually called Castle.

It therefore presented a novel
challenge when, some six months ago, my publishers informed me that, in today’s
competitive marketplace, Edward I would simply not pass muster. How, they
reasoned, would the book-buying public, historically curious but not
necessarily historically aware, distinguish him from the numerous other
monarchs who have shared the same name? This, I should say immediately, was a
suggestion I readily embraced, having reached much the same conclusion myself
in the course of researching the book. On those rare occasions when I ventured
out of the library, I had inevitably been asked what I was working on, and when
I replied ‘Edward I’, it often engendered a kind of mild panic in the eyes of
the questioner. Was he the gay one? No, he was the father of the Black Prince,
wasn’t he? (this mostly from French people); No, wait
a moment, an Englishman would interject, surely he was the Confessor? This
last, of course, caused yet more confusion. No, I would have to remind them,
Edward I was not the Confessor, but he was named after him. How, then, could he
be ‘the First’, some people worried, while others decided it was time to slip off
in search of another drink.

Thank heavens, therefore, for Mel Gibson (not a phrase that
historians of the thirteenth century are known to overuse). Invariably, the
quickest and surest route to helping the temporarily befuddled to identify the
king in question was to remind them of Braveheart,
Gibson’s hilarious biopic of the celebrated Scottish patriot, William Wallace.
Yes, of course, Edward I was ‘Longshanks’, Braveheart’s bad guy – a cruel, scheming monster, played
with relish by Patrick ‘The Prisoner’ McGoohan,
ordering men into battle like some anglicised medieval Nazi commandant (and
hence, for my money, by far the best thing in it).

How about that for a title then: Longshanks?
Has a certain ring to it, and enables us to pin down the particular Edward
we’re after. The problem, however, is that Longshanks,
while it helps a good many people put Edward I into some sort of context,
doesn’t actually tell you much else about him, besides the fact that he was
remarkably tall (six foot two, to be precise: a figure established when
antiquarians cracked open his coffin in 1774 and measured his decomposing
corpse). Likewise, Edward’s other well-known, vaguely contemporary epithet,
‘The Hammer of the Scots’, must also be rejected
because it locates the king in too narrow a context. It was not until the end
of his reign that Edward turned his attention to Scottish affairs, and before
that he had already lived an astonishingly action-packed life.

Remember Simon de Montfort? It was Edward who defeated and
killed him in battle, thereby saving his future crown. Interested in the
crusades? So was Edward: before his accession he had travelled to the Holy Land
and back, taking in Sicily, Cyprus and North Africa
for good measure. Ever visited North Wales,
and marvelled at the magnificent castles at Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech and Beaumaris? All of
them, and many others besides, are Edward’s handiwork, the end result of his
devastating conquest of 1282–83, a conquest which was never reversed and which
marked the end of Wales
as an independent nation.

Longshanks, you soon realise, hardly
begins to do justice to the man. Nor, for that matter, do any of the epithets
that contemporaries attached to him. ‘Edward the Conqueror’, for example, was
how he was remembered in the decades after his death by the new English
settlers in north Wales.
Yet there was more to Edward than just war and conquest. True, he raised the
largest armies seen in Britain
during the Middle Ages – an impressive 30,000 men smashed Wallace’s forces at Falkirk. But Edward also summoned the largest parliaments
of the Middle Ages and promulgated the most legislation. To England, and to his duchy of Gascony
in southern France,
he gave the best government that they had experienced for more than a century.
He lived longer than any other medieval English monarch, and fathered no fewer
than eighteen children (fifteen of them by his first wife, Eleanor of Castile,
in memory of whom he erected the Eleanor Crosses). He travelled further than
any other king or queen of England
until the modern age. Not until Elizabeth I
lived on into the seventeenth century, and Edward VII visited India in 1875,
would Edward I’s records be broken.

The problem, therefore, remained: how to encapsulate such an
epic and varied life in a short and punchy title? Dozens of ideas were proposed
and rejected. All the time, however, that we were batting around words like
Conqueror and Hammer, one word lurked at the back of my brain, a word which was
often used by contemporaries to describe Edward and, until recently, by modern
historians too. Even Mel Gibson, in his enthralling director’s commentary to Braveheart, acknowledges that his villain was ‘a great
king’.

But what did Mel mean by this? ‘Great’ is an attractive word
but, as the BBC’s efforts to provoke a national debate on the matter in 2002
shows, people have very different ideas about what greatness entails. The Great
British public, when ask to place its greatest sons and daughters in rank
order, unsurprisingly put that celebrated scourge of fascism, Sir Winston
Churchill, in the number-one spot. But they also awarded a quite respectable
55th place to Enoch Powell, thereby demonstrating that, for certain sections of
the population, being an unpleasant racist constitutes no bar to greatness.
More baffling still was the appearance of the actor Michael Crawford at number
seventeen, just ahead of Queen Victoria.
Greatness, we can only conclude, is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Where, then, does this leave Edward I (number 92 on the BBC’s
list), apart from well below his rivals William Wallace (48) and Robert Bruce
(74)? For historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Edward’s greatness lay for the most part in his success as a lawgiver and
constitution-builder. Edward, we were once assured, was the king who had given
parliament its definitive form (the so-called ‘Model Parliament’ of 1295). The
sheer volume of legislation that the king enacted was such that it prompted the
seventeenth-century lawyer Sir Edward Coke to describe Edward as ‘our
Justinian’ (after the emperor who codified Roman law), and the name stuck. A
biography published in 1902 was actually entitled The English Justinian.
Another, written a few years before but in much the same spirit was called The
Greatest of All the Plantagenets.

It will hardly be a surprise to learn that neither of these
biographies were written by Scotsmen. North of the
Border there has been an equally long and wholly understandable tradition of
regarding Edward as a cruel tyrant, very much in the Patrick McGoohan mode. Similarly, the Welsh have found few positive
things to say down the years about a king who terminated their political
independence so decisively. ‘Ruin seize thee, ruthless
king!’ shouts the eponymous Bard at Edward in the opening line of Thomas Gray’s
famous poem. Perhaps the most damning indictment, however, has emerged in the
recent re-examination of Edward’s policy towards the Jews, a policy that
resulted in the largest state-sanctioned pogrom in British history, and ultimately
in the outright expulsion of all Jews from England in 1290. Jewish and
(somewhat belatedly) non-Jewish historians have quite rightly suggested that
this should temper any positive general conclusions we might otherwise be
tempted to draw about Edward I.

Thus, in recent years, historians have been understandably
reluctant to use the word ‘great’ to describe this particular English king.
It’s a pity, because it was a word used to describe him by his contemporaries. Edwardus Magnus is a phrase found in obituaries written as
far afield as Westminster and the west of Ireland.
Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century folk, of course, had quite different
ideas about greatness to our own. They also praised Edward for his parliaments
and for his justice, but to them what made the king a truly awesome figure was
his success in war. ‘He ruled with the power of warring down his enemies’, said
one clergyman approvingly when he preached a memorial sermon before the pope.
We regard Edward’s expulsion of the Jews with horror; contemporary Englishmen
who shared his bigoted Christianity regarded it as one of his most commendable
acts – a fact that forces us to confront an unpleasant truth about our medieval
ancestors.

Yet even as they cheered his
victories, they were not oblivious to the consequences of his rule. As one poet
who marched in his army put it, the English king confronting his enemies was
like the three lions embroidered in gold on the red of his banner – dreadful,
fierce and cruel. And one anonymous obituarist put it
in even more telegraphic terms. Edward, he said, was peaceable to the obedient,
but to those who opposed him he was ‘a terrible king’.

When I stumbled across this line, I
realised I had my title. It was possible to allow Edward his greatness, as long
as we also acknowledged the terrible nature of his rule. On first hearing the
phrase ‘great and terrible’, many people remark on the apparent contradiction.
How can someone, or something, be both at the same time? Naturally, not
everything can be described in this way: we could hardly recommend to our
friends a great and terrible restaurant, or boast to them about our new, great
and terrible carpet. But when we move beyond the mundane and begin to
contemplate the mighty, great and terrible seem to be less contradictory,
and even complementary adjectives. ‘The great and terrible wilderness’ is how
the Bible describes the Sinai Desert; ‘Do not tempt me!’ says Gandalf to Frodo,
alarmed by the hobbit’s offer of the One Ring. ‘I should have a power too great
and terrible.’ The kind of power, in fact, pretended by
another, altogether less bona-fide wizard. ‘I am Oz, the Great and
Terrible’, he booms, before being exposed as a pathetic little man hiding
behind the curtain.

Kings, like wizards, were expected to wield enormous power.
Some of them found it too much to handle and were merely terrible in the more
modern sense of the word. Others abused their power and were truly terrible, to
the extent that they could inspire great terror. King John, for example, that famously
bad king of England,
was regarded by contemporaries with considerable dread. Being terrible,
clearly, did not make one great. But did being great mean one had to be
terrible? When it comes to kings, I would argue that the answer must be yes.
William the Conqueror, Henry I, Henry II: all could justly be described as
great, and in each case this was partly down to their ability to inflict
immense terror. None of them, however, was greater, or more terrible, than
Edward I.

10. The Best of
Kings, the Worst of Kings: A Reassessment of Edward I

On an otherwise unremarkable building opposite Holborn tube
station, some five or six storeys above the commuter throng, sits a serene and
noble-looking Edward I. The work of a young sculptor Richard Garbe (d. 1957), he was placed there in 1902, and evidently
intended as a tribute: on the opposite corner of the same building sits a
similar statue of Edward VII, who was crowned that same year.

The accession of a new King Edward, the first in 350 years,
evidently prompted some of his subjects to look back through the annals of
English history in search of a similarly named exemplar. No doubt they quickly
dismissed as unsuitable the two boy kings, Edwards V and VI, the usurper Edward
IV and the unspeakable Edward II, and ignored the three unnumbered pre-Conquest
Edwards on the grounds of their comparative obscurity. Today they might have
considered the merits of Edward III, a successful king whose reign witnessed
the greatest English triumphs of the Hundred Years War. But at the start of the
twentieth century no one was in the mood to celebrate a man who appeared to
have gone looking for glory on the battlefields of Europe;
the victor of Crécy and the founder of the Order of
the Garter was at that time regarded as a feckless and irresponsible warmonger.

By a process of elimination, therefore, it had to be a statue
of Edward I. Like his namesake grandson, Edward had also been a warrior king.
His wars, however, were perceived to have been conflicts of quite a different
order, fought in the national interest, and forced him on him by the
rebelliousness of his subjects in Wales
and Scotland.
Moreover, the first Edward, unlike the third, could be held up as man possessed
of strong moral fibre, uxorious to an almost Victorian degree, the father of no
less than fifteen with his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, in whose memory he
erected the celebrated Eleanor Crosses.

There was more to recommend Edward I, however, besides his
martial and marital virtues. What endeared him most to observers at the turn of
the nineteenth century were his roles as lawgiver and constitution-builder. It
was in the 1870s that William Stubbs, one of the founding fathers of history as
a modern academic subject at Oxford, had first published his Constitutional
History of England, in which he argued that it was under Edward’s firm guiding
hand that that most cherished of English institutions – parliament – had
attained its definitive form; so much so that he dubbed the
not-especially-noteworthy assembly of 1295 ‘the Model Parliament’. Recognition
of Edward’s achievement as a legislator, meanwhile, had a much longer pedigree.
In the early seventeenth century the lawyer Edward Coke, surveying the statute
book and noting how much of its contents had originated in the late thirteenth
century, declared that we should regard Edward I as ‘our Justinian’ – implying,
of course, that the king rivalled the Roman emperor who had codified imperial
law. It was an epithet that stuck. In 1902 – again, the year of the coronation,
and just as the two statutes were being hoisted into place in Holborn – the
juror and writer Edward Jenks published a biography of Edward I to which he
gave the subtitle ‘the English Justinian’. For some, it seems, the dawn of a
new Edwardian age was a positive invitation to sing the praises of their new
king’s most illustrious namesake. A certain Wallace Leonard Palmer spotted a
gap in Shakespeare’s canon and began penning his own cod-Shakespearean epic The
Life and Death of Edward I: a play in four acts. Alas, by the time it was
published in 1910 the world had moved on, Edward VII was dead and buried, and –
to the great loss of theatre-lovers everywhere – his masterpiece has rested in
utter obscurity ever since.

There were other reasons, however, why this burst of
enthusiasm for Edward I at the start of the twentieth century should have
proved short-lived. Truth be told, Garbe, Palmer and
even Stubbs were working with fairly intractable material. It was difficult to
present a king whose tomb is inscribed ‘Here is Edward I, Hammer of the Scots’
as a hero whom all Britons might hold in admiration. While Englishmen might
enthuse about the quality of Edward I’s justice,
north of the Border there was an equally longstanding tradition of regarding
him as a cruel oppressor. Another play about Edward I, published in Edinburgh in 1844, is
subtitled ‘The Tyrant’s Triumph’. Nor were the Welsh, for that matter, ready to
forgive the king who had terminated their independence so decisively with his
devastating military campaigns and mighty castles. ‘Ruin seize
thee, Ruthless King!’ is how the eponymous Bard greets the arrival of Edward in
Thomas Gray’s famous poem, before proceeding to heap further curses upon the
conqueror’s head.

For a long time, Englishmen were happy to dismiss such
peripheral sniping as nothing more than Caledonian and Cambrian sour grapes.
‘No native of that northern kingdom,’ opined Robert Seeley in the preface to
his unambiguously titled Edward I: The Greatest of All the Plantagenets
(1860), ‘could be expected to write this king’s
history in a just and impartial manner.’ (Impartiality, of course, being the sole preserve of those lucky enough to live
south of the Tweed and the Solway.) It was
still possible, in the first half of the twentieth century, to present Edward I
in a largely uncritical light. Indeed, it was in the middle of the century that
the argument that Edward was a truly great king received its most powerful
restatement to date in the works of Sir Maurice Powicke.
In his Henry III and the Lord Edward (1947), Powicke
urged readers ‘to forget everything that has happened since 1307 (the year of
Edward’s death) and to look at the world as he saw it’. By doing this, the
historian hoped to convince his audience that his subject was indeed ‘a great
man’, conventionally medieval in his tastes, and hence well suited to fill ‘a
great position’. As late as 1965, it was still possible to write that ‘the
stock of other medieval kings may rise or fall; that of Edward I remains firm
and … conspicuously high’.

This, however, was the first line of a well-known article by
K. B. McFarlane, in which the author went on to deliver a devastating broadside
against the king from which he has never recovered. McFarlane did not try to
knock corners off Edward for his conduct in Wales
and Scotland, or his
questionable conduct in England
during the last ten years of his reign. Instead, he hit the English Justinian
where it hurt the most, and called into question his reputation as a just
ruler. A historian who had pioneered the idea that medieval society might be
usefully examined from the point of view of the nobility rather than that of
the Crown, McFarlane proceeded to examine ‘a remarkable series of transactions’
between Edward and his great magnates, and argued that the king had acted
illegally, or at the very least unjustly and coercively, to persuade many of
these men and women to part with their lands and disinherit their families.

Immediately Edward’s hitherto high stock started to go into
free fall. In the same year that McFarlane’s article was published, a new
scholarly biography of Robert Bruce by the Scottish historian Geoffrey Barrow
appeared, in which the English king was subjected to similarly well-aimed
blows. Barrow gave substance to the age-old Scottish accusations of tyranny,
and further dented Edward’s prestige by questioning his credentials as a
paragon of chivalry. Women prisoners hung in cages on the outside of castle
towers; castle garrisons bombarded with missiles even after they had offered to
surrender; Scottish patriots – most notably William Wallace – ripped to pieces
in public and dispatched for public display: were these really the actions of a
great and noble king? Barrow thought not, and condemned Edward for his
‘meanness of spirit and implacable, almost paranoid hostility’. Within a few
years these sentiments were being echoed in other scholarly works, such as
Michael Prestwich’s War, Politics and Finance under
Edward I. The king’s defenders found themselves fighting a desperate rearguard
action. Lionel Stones published a very brief, excusatory book about Edward in
1968, and five years later a critical review of Prestwich.
Accordingly, when the latter came to write his own giant biography, published
in 1988, he drew a more balanced picture of the king, and in many instances
granted him the benefit of the doubt.

But the Celtic assault continued. Just as Prestwich
went to press, Rees Davies was delivering a series of lectures in Belfast that
would eventually become a book called Domination and Conquest, in which Edward
I appears as the antithesis of Powicke’s ‘ordinary
Christian gentleman’. Not only is he ‘ruthless’ as in Gray’s poem; he is, in
addition, ‘sinister’ and even ‘chilling’ – this last on account of the writs he
sent out in the winter of 1282, in which he proposed ‘to put an end finally …
to the malice of the Welsh’. And it was not just the Welsh, of course, for whom
Edward devised a final solution. His reign also witnessed the total expulsion
of all Jews from England,
a fact which, as Colin Richmond pointed out in an excoriating article of 1992,
most of the English historical profession had contrived to ignore, or to view
in sympathetic terms. They would not do so any more. When Michael Clanchy came to write a new epilogue about Edward I for the
second edition of his England
and its Rulers (1998), he pointed out that, because of the expulsion, the king
‘has affinities with Hitler’.

From hero to Hitler in just a hundred years: how the mighty
have fallen! Small wonder that no one has been tempted to
erect any new statues of Edward I in the past century. Who now, to adapt
McFarlane’s metaphor, would want to buy shares in such a king? Nevertheless,
what I aim to do in the remainder of this article is to reconsider some of this
criticism. My intention is not to whitewash Edward or to excuse any of his
actions; only to place the criticism of him in some kind of revised
perspective.

To start in an obvious place, we may observe that modern
criticism of Edward I is almost entirely at odds with
contemporary praise for the king. At the time of his death, Edward was lauded
as brave, eloquent, wise, just and pious. In both Westminster and the west of
Ireland he was described as ‘Edward the Great’, and in the years thereafter his
life continued to be celebrated, both in written form and as mural paintings on
the walls of various royal and episcopal palaces.

So what, you might reasonably say: eulogists are bound to be
eulogistic. What of contemporary criticism of the king? The problem is, there really isn’t that much. If we go back to the very
beginning of Edward’s career, we find, unsurprisingly, that he was condemned
for being an unruly teenager. The chronicler Matthew Paris has a well-known
(but suspiciously vague and uncorroborated) story about how Edward, out one day
with his gang of thuggish followers, met another young man and ordered his
gratuitous mutilation. Other more credible evidence shows that, by the time he
was twenty, Edward was determined to put his wayward past behind him. In a
private letter of August 1259, the future king wrote to the chief official in
his lordship of Chester,
instructing him to deal justly with everyone. ‘If … common justice is denied to
any one of our subjects,’ he declared, ‘then we lose the favour of God and man,
and our lordship is belittled’.

Another well-known piece of criticism was levelled at Edward
a few years later in the course of his struggle with Simon de Montfort. In The
Song of Lewes, one of Montfort’s clerical acolytes suggested that Edwardus was like a leopardus – a
beastly blend of vice and virtue. While brave like a lion (leo), he was also shifty and duplicitous like a
panther (pardus). McFarlane took this ex parte
statement as the starting point in his famous article, arguing that it was a
more accurate guide to the king’s conduct than the empty words of his
eulogists. Yet McFarlane overstated his case. There can be no doubt that, in
one or two of his dealings with the nobility, Edward overreached himself and committed acts which were unjust. But many of
the other examples that McFarlane went on to adduce – the king’s land-deals
with the earls of Gloucester, Hereford,
Lincoln and Norfolk – hardly bear out the accusation of
injustice. All of these men entered into arrangements with the Crown
voluntarily. In fact, as another private letter written towards the end of his
life proves, Edward had never abandoned his earlier respect for what was legal.
‘Be as stiff and harsh … in this business as can be,’ he instructed his
chancellor in 1304, ‘without offending the law’. Edward’s court was never
perceived as unjust, as those of his father and grandfather had been. ‘Truly,
in our times no king’s kingdom was made firm and strong with so much justice’,
said a preacher before the pope in 1307, and in general terms he was right.

The only real criticism that was levied at Edward during the
first two decades of his reign arose as a result of his determination to
recover the rights that he contended had been usurped during the lax rules of
his predecessors. Disgruntlement with the king’s famous Quo Warranto
inquiry (so-called because of the inquisitors persistent demand to know ‘by
what warrant’ a landowner claimed his special privileges) mounted during the
late 1280s, partly because the inquiry intensified in these years, and partly
because there were no parliaments during this period – Edward spent the years
1286–89 overseas, attending to his duchy of Gascony. But on his return Edward
punished the judges and ultimately compromised on Quo Warranto,
allowing that landlords could retain their privileges if they were able to show
more than a century of continuous usage. Unlike the implacable tyrant of some
texts, this was a man who was quite capable of finding a middle course.

The king’s desire to appease his subjects in 1290 brings us
to his expulsion of the Jews. There is no point trying to defend him, as some
have done, on the grounds that the exercise was carried out efficiently and
that the incidents of murderous violence involved were unauthorised and
apparently few in number. Edward had no sympathy with
the Jews and had already visited plenty of violence on them of his own accord.
A decade earlier, to maximise the profits of an impending recoinage,
he had instituted a covert crackdown on ‘coin-clippers’ – criminals who shaved
silver off the edge of his coins to make new ingots. Of those convicted and
hanged, twenty-nine were Christians but almost ten times that number were Jews,
which makes Edward I responsible for the biggest pogrom in British history.

His expulsion of the Jews, by contrast, is not quite as
remarkable or record-breaking as is often portrayed. Edward, it is true, became
the first king to enforce a nationwide Jewish exodus. Yet all this proves is
that his was the powerful king of a precociously united kingdom; for more than
a century, other kings, princes and counts had been expelling Jews from their
demesnes to the fullest extent of their more limited authority. Simon de
Montfort, for example, whose name is commemorated by a new university in Leicester, had expelled the Jews from that town at the
start of his English career. Moreover, he had done so expressly for the
salvation of his and his family’s souls. Thirteenth-century Europe was a
profoundly anti-Semitic place, and no corner of it
more so than England.
What motivated Edward to expel the Jews in 1290 was not simply his own personal
hatred; it was his desperate need of money, which could only be satisfied by a
grant of tax from parliament. The knights of the shires, those heroes of
Victorian constitutional history, were duly summoned, and demanded the
expulsion as the price of their consent. The expulsion, in short, was a popular
act in every sense: Edward received the biggest tax of the English Middle Ages,
and his subjects cheered him for his pious performance in driving ‘the
faithless multitude of Jews and unbelievers from England’. It is quite easy to
present Edward I as a Hitler figure; more difficult, perhaps, to confront the
fact that all Englishmen once shared his virulent anti-Semitism.

We could likewise easily condemn Edward for his wars, but
this too would be to adopt an anachronistic stance: contemporaries were quick
to praise him. ‘Long may he live and conquer and rule’, wrote a jubilant
English clerk in Rome
when he heard that Edward had defeated the Welsh, ‘that domestic enemy … the
disturber of English peace’. After the king’s death, it was recalled with
approval that ‘he tried to war down all those who wished to throw his people in
confusion’ – this from a sermon preached before the pope. Medieval monarchs
were expected to go after their enemies with fire and sword. As one poet
proudly put it, the English king confronting his foes was alike to the three
lions on his banner: ‘proud, fierce and cruel’. Another writer put expressed
the same point in even more concise terms. To the sons of pride, he said,
Edward I was ‘a terrible king’. The terror he unleashed against the Scots has
been the basis of much modern criticism. Yet it has been recently and
convincingly argued that, in prosecuting this war, Edward’s conduct was
entirely in keeping with the contemporary laws of arms. If anything, in fact,
Edward was surprisingly lenient in his treatment of the Scots, at least until
1306. One north-country English chronicler averred that the king was too
compassionate.

Nevertheless, there are limits to the amount we can forgive
or understand Edward’s behaviour, even when judged by the standards of his own
day, and this is most obviously the case in relation to Scotland. The
English and the Scots, unlike the English and the Welsh, got on well in the
thirteenth century. To take just the most obvious examples, Edward’s aunt,
Joanna, had been married to Alexander II (king of Scots from 1214–49), and
Edward’s sister Margaret was married to Alexander III (1249–86). The kings of England had
always taken the trouble to stress their superiority in this relationship, and
the Scots, in return, had always politely insisted on their independence. But
in 1290, following the tragic deaths of Alexander III and all his direct heirs,
Edward saw a unique opportunity for extracting from the Scots an unqualified
admission of their subordination. He appealed to history to make his case,
ordering a trawl of monastic chronicles to unearth the evidence that would
prove his right to overlordship. That case, built as
it was on flimsy or fantastical foundations, failed to convince, and the Scots
rejected both the king’s dodgy dossier and his demand for submission. But when
argument failed Edward bullied and coerced, and at length the Scots crumpled,
and told the English king what he wanted to hear.

Edward’s triumph, however, was short-lived. As soon as he had
finished browbeating the Scots into submission, he found himself on the
receiving end of similar aggression from the king of France, who confiscated
and invaded his duchy of Gascony.
Edward was dragged into a Continental war which, in different circumstances, he
might have concluded with reasonable speed. But, because of his recent
hostility, the Scots, who might otherwise have sided with him, allied
themselves with the French, and as a result Edward found himself embroiled in
ceaseless fighting for the rest of his days. In his efforts to beat the Scots
and the French, he was forced to undermine much of the constructive achievement
of the first half of his reign. Criminals were pardoned in return for military
service; taxation was demanded at punitive levels and, as a result, the
political consensus in England
began to collapse. Faced with opposition to his demands for money and military
service, the consensus-builder resorted to evermore arbitrary measures,
attempting to levy taxes without consent, and disregarding his subjects’
demands for the confirmation of their existing liberties. Once again,
Englishmen started to regard Edward as an untrustworthy creature.

By the time of Edward’s death in July 1307, this crisis had
subsided. The French had returned Gascony; the
Welsh, who had also rejoined the fray, had been re-conquered; England was
once again politically acquiescent. Only in Scotland was there ongoing trouble
in the shape of Robert Bruce, but this too looked certain to be a passing
thing. There seemed little doubt at the time that the newly proclaimed Scottish
king would soon be defeated, captured, and treated to the same grisly death
that William Wallace had experienced just two years before.

In conclusion therefore, we must surely allow Edward I the
greatness that has been denied to him in almost all recent writing. We are,
after all, talking about the man who out-generalled
and defeated Simon de Montfort in battle; who, alone of all the crusade leaders
of 1270, reached the Holy Land; the man who conquered Wales and built the
castles at Conwy, Beaumaris, Harlech
and Caernarfon; the man who for a time gave England the best government it had
enjoyed since the Norman Conquest and left an enduring legacy in the shape of
his laws and in the development of parliament. All of this can be admitted,
provided at the same time we recognise that Edward was also, as contemporaries
observed, a terrible king. He was, as one native Irish annalist put it, ‘a
knight most prudent, most violent and most valiant. It was by him that the
greatest number of people fell in his time.’ Terrible in his wars, Edward also
made a terrible error of judgement in trying to lord it over Scotland, destroying the previously good
relations that had existed with England,
and leaving a legacy of vengeance that endured for centuries, and that still
resonates today.

11.
The Conquest of Wales
– A Visitor’s Guide

In the mid-thirteenth century Wales was to all intents and
purposes an independent nation. Its people not only spoke their own language;
they also lived according to their own laws and customs, and were governed by
their own native princes. Yet in the space of a single generation this
independence was decisively terminated. By the end of the thirteenth century,
the halls of the Welsh princes had been razed and replaced by mighty English
castles. The country was governed by Englishmen, and English law prevailed. Wales, in a
word, had been conquered.

Anglo-Welsh hostility had a long history – not for nothing
were the two peoples separated by the eighth-century earthwork known as Offa’s
Dyke – but in the century or so before the conquest this hostility had been
sharpened by contrasting economic fortunes. Thanks to its expanding
agricultural base, twelfth-century England could boast new towns,
large cities, great cathedrals, international trade and a plentiful silver
coinage. Wales,
with its pastoral economy, had none of these things, though Englishmen at the
time felt that the fault lay in Welsh themselves, whom they began to regard as
wilfully backward, indolent and immoral – barbarians in need of taming.

A more recent cause of the conquest was political change in Wales. Before
the thirteenth century it had been a country divided against itself,
with dozens of petty kings and princes fighting each other for supremacy.
Because Welsh custom decreed that a man’s possessions must be divided on his
death, any territorial gains made in one generation were generally lost during
the next, with brother fighting brother for a share of the spoils. During the
thirteenth century, however, one princely dynasty began to dominate all the
others. By 1258, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, ruler of the
northwest region of Gwynedd, had achieved such success against his neighbours
(and his brothers) that he felt justified in styling himself ‘prince of Wales’.
Nine years later, even the English king, Henry III, was obliged to recognize
the prince’s self-proclaimed status.

But Llywelyn failed to appreciate
that his success owed much to Henry’s ineptitude. When the old king died in
1272 he was succeeded by his masterful and warlike son, Edward I – better
known, thanks to Braveheart, by his contemporary
nickname, Longshanks. The Welsh leader continued to
act as he had always done, meeting English demands for homage and fealty with
bluster and defiance, reckoning that he would always triumph if matters came to
blows. The scale of his misjudgement became clear in 1277, when Edward led a
huge, well supplied and well-disciplined army into northwest Wales. Llywelyn lost all but a handful of the lordships he had
acquired since the start of his career, and Snowdonia was surrounded by several
new English castles.

It is a moot point as to whether Edward had intended to
conquer Wales
completely at this point and found it beyond his resources, or whether he had
always planned to leave a diminished Llywelyn in
place. The mountainous heartlands of the prince’s power would be difficult to
conquer and promised little by way of financial return. It was only after a
major Welsh uprising in the spring of 1282 that outright conquest became
inevitable. Edward again led a large army along the north Welsh coast, only to
suffer a disaster in November when a company of his men were fatally ambushed
as they tried to cross the Menai Strait
by means of a pontoon bridge. ‘The people of Snowdonia’, declared Llywelyn and his council a few days later, ‘do not wish to
do homage to a stranger of whose language, manners and laws they are entirely
ignorant.’ Shortly afterwards, Edward’s own letters proposed ‘to put an end
finally to the matter that he has now begun of suppressing the malice of the
Welsh’. Henceforth it would be a struggle to the death.

In Llywelyn’s case, death followed
swiftly: he was killed in a skirmish with English forces in mid-Wales the
following month. For Wales
itself, the agony was more protracted, as Edward cautiously massed the
necessary forces for a final push. In March 1283 English troops spilled across
the River Conwy and occupied Snowdonia. Llywelyn’s
brother, Dafydd, who had led the Easter uprising, was
captured on the slopes of Snowdon and taken to Shrewsbury to be executed. Thousands of
others must have died in the fighting, both Welsh and English. The death toll
is unknown, but we know that Edward I had raised what were at the time the
largest armies ever seen in the British Isles.
When the Welsh rose up again in 1294, the king deployed a staggering 37,000 men
to crush the rebellion. ‘What is left to us that we should linger?’ wailed one
Welsh poet. ‘No place of escape from Terror’s prison / No place to live –
wretched is living!’

Edward’s conquest was brutally thorough. Some secular
treasures and sacred relics were carted off to be kept as trophies at
Westminster Abbey; others were eradicated. The silver seal matrices of Llywelyn and Dafydd were melted
down and made into a chalice for the king, while Conwy abbey, which housed the
bones of the prince’s ancestors, was destroyed in order to make way for Conwy Castle.
It was his new castles, above all, that cemented Edward’s conquest and
symbolized his determination that it should never be underdone. ‘Divine
providence’, began his Statute of Wales in 1284, ‘has wholly and entirely
converted the land
of Wales into a dominion
of our ownership’.

Caerphilly

A major short-term cause of Edward’s first war of 1276–77 was
the territorial disputes along the Welsh border between Llywelyn
and the English marcher lords. The most serious of these was a clash between
the prince and Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester,
the legacy of which is the mighty castle
of Caerphilly. The earl
began building the fortress in 1268 to assert his right to rule upland
Glamorgan, and Llywelyn spent much of the next four
years trying to destroy it (at one stage, indeed, the Welsh leader succeeded in
overrunning the site). But Gilbert was one of the greatest (i.e. wealthiest) of
all English magnates, able to deploy resources on a scale that the prince simply
could not match. Caerphilly is a giant among castles; at the time of its
construction it was the greatest building of its kind in the British Isles, its
concentric design predating by several years the similar scheme that was used
by Edward at the Tower
of London. Yet there is
no sign that these defences were ever put to the test. The conquest of Wales meant
that Caerphilly’s role as a frontier fortress was extremely short-lived.

Rhuddlan

To cement his territorial gains after the first Welsh war,
Edward built three new fortresses: Aberystwyth, Flint and Rhuddlan.
Rhuddlan was the most substantial of the three and
was intended to serve as the principal administrative seat for the newly
conquered territories. It was located not far from Dyserth,
where Henry III had built a new castle just thirty years earlier. Henry’s
castle, however, had been located on high ground – easy to defend but also easy
to encircle – and in 1263 Llywelyn had captured and
destroyed it. Mindful of his father’s mistake, Edward ensured that his own new
fortresses could be easily resupplied by sea. At Rhuddlan
this called for a major civil engineering project, since the River Clwyd that
linked the site to the sea had too many meanders for large ships. During the
first three years of construction, therefore, a separate army of diggers,
almost a thousand strong, laboured to make the river straighter.

As the foremost English base in north Wales, Rhuddlan was naturally the muster-point for Edward’s army
(and his fleet) when the second Welsh war erupted in 1282. It was also here
that the king, famed for his lawgiving, issued the Statute of Wales in 1284,
laying down the legal framework that would be used to govern the newly
conquered country.

Glastonbury Abbey

At Easter 1278, within a few months of accepting Llywelyn’s homage at Westminster,
Edward travelled to Glastonbury
to visit the tomb of King Arthur. We can say with confidence that the tomb was
fake, because we know that Arthur had never really existed. But Edward and his
contemporaries had no means of knowing this – to them the legendary king was as
real a historic figure as William the Conqueror or Richard the Lionheart. The only problem with Arthur was his origins –
he was an ancient British king who had battled against the Anglo-Saxons – or,
put another way, a Welshman who had fought the English. To the Welsh,
therefore, he was a potent symbol of resistance. They maintained that he had
never actually died, and one day he would return to lead them to victory.

Hence Edward’s decision to visit Glastonbury in the immediate wake of Llywelyn’s defeat. In a carefully contrived
ceremony, the king unearthed the bones, wrapped them in cloth of gold and had
them reinterred in a new tomb. The skull was not reburied, but left on display
‘on account of popular devotion’. The real reason, surely, was to make a
political point. Arthur was dead, and would not be coming back to save anyone.

Cilmeri

The Welsh rising that triggered the second Welsh war was
orchestrated by Llywelyn’s young brother, Dafydd; there is no good evidence that the prince himself
was privy to the plan. Once the war was underway, however, Llywelyn
had little choice but to support his brother and the Welsh people in their
struggle. Seeking to avoid the encirclement that had brought about his
surrender in 1277, the prince decided in late 1282 to strike at the middle
March, hoping to exploit the confusion caused by the recent death of Roger
Mortimer, Edward’s commander in the region. On arrival, however, Llywelyn found huge English forces ranged against him. The
two sides met in battle on high ground to the west of Builth,
at a place called Cilmeri, and during the encounter
the prince of Wales fell. At first he was
unrecognized, but at length the English realized they had scored a decisive
victory. ‘Know, Sire’, wrote their captain to his royal master, ‘that Llywelyn ap Gruffudd
is dead, his army broken, and the flower of his men killed’. Letters found on
the prince’s body suggest that he had been lured into a trap by Mortimer’s
sons, who had pretended to be ready to switch sides.

Dolwyddelan

The second war of 1282–83 was a war of outright conquest,
with English troops driven right into the what had
been the heart of Llywelyn’s power. In January 1283
Edward’s forces pushed across the River Conwy into Snowdonia, where they laid
siege to the native Welsh castle at Dolwyddelan.
Compared with the giant fortresses that Edward was in the process of erecting,
the castles of the Welsh princes were small and outmoded. Dolwyddelan
was certainly no match for the English war machine, and its defenders
surrendered after a short siege. Two months later Edward himself crossed the
Conwy – probably the first English king ever to do so – and in May 1283 he made
the castle his temporary headquarters. Its fall was a symbolic as well as a
military triumph, for Dolwyddelan had been the birth
place of Llywelyn’s grandfather, Llywelyn
the Great, who had built the castle there during the early decades of the
thirteenth century.

Like several other natives castles (e.g. Criccieth
and Castell-y-Bere), Dolwyddelan
was retained and renovated after the English conquest. Records show that in
1283 a new chamber block was added, along with a new bridge and a water mill.

Caernarfon

Just as with the first Welsh war, so too with the second:
victory was cemented with a trio of new castles. Similarly situated on the
coast, they were more ambitious than their predecessors, and more dramatic.
Conwy, with its multiple towers and turrets, looks like something out of
medieval romance, while Harlech, perched high on its
famous rock, is one of the most visually striking castles ever built. It was at
Caernarfon, however, that Edward and his architect pulled out all the stops. A
giant fortress-palace, and the seat of the principality’s new government, this
mighty castle also drew its power from the past. According to Welsh legend,
Caernarfon was the birth place of the Roman Emperor Maximus
(and apparently also his death place: in 1283, Edward discovered and reburied Maximus’s bones there, much as he had done with Arthur at Glastonbury). The fact
that Maximus was also said to be the father of the
Emperor Constantine, founder of Constantinople, almost certainly explains the
castle’s unusual design: with its polygonal towers and different coloured bands
of masonry, Caernarfon appears to be built in conscious imitation of Constantinople’s walls. Work continued after the revolt
of 1294–95, during which the castle was damaged, but despite colossal
expenditure it was never fully finished.

Llyn cwm Dulyn

In the spring of 1284, almost a year on from the end of
hostilities, Edward I returned to Wales to consolidate his conquest.
Besides issuing the statute of Rhuddlan (see above),
the king orchestrated a host of special events, including the birth of his
namesake son (and future successor) at Caernarfon on 25 April, and, later in
the summer, a ‘Round Table’ tournament at Nefyn,
where the prophecies of Merlin were said to have been discovered. Such
Arthur-themed entertainment served an obvious political purpose, but one gets
the strong impression that by this point Edward was also indulging a genuine
enthusiasm. (The Welsh themselves seem to have picked up on this and pandered
to it, presenting the king with a coronet they called ‘Arthur’s Crown’). Such enthusiasm
would also explain why Edward’s itinerary that summer took him to so many
remote locations, for several of them have legendary associations. Bardsey
Island, said to be the
burial place of 20,000 saints, was one. Another was Llyn
cwm Dulyn, a deep, dark
lake some ten miles south of Caernarfon, where Edward spent three whole weeks,
including his 45th birthday. Was he waiting, one wonders, for Excalibur to be
borne aloft from the waters?

Beaumaris

The Welsh revolt of 1294–95 had begun, in north Wales, on the Island
of Anglesey, when the local people in
the town of Llanfaes
had lynched their English sheriff. The attack had exposed Anglesey
as the weak link in Edward’s chain of castles, and the king responded by
levelling Llanfaes and replacing it with one final
giant fortress. Beaumaris, as its name implies, was
built on marshy ground, rather than the usual rocky platform, and Edward’s
architect responded by creating a moated castle of
perfect symmetry. In terms of total area it was his bigger even than
Caernarfon, with an outer perimeter that ran for a quarter of a mile, and a
harbour that enabled ships of up to forty tons to dock at the water-gate. The
castle’s island location meant that most of the building material had to be brought
there by ship, and this, combined with the scale of
the enterprise – at one stage there were almost 3,000 workers on site – meant
that construction was hugely expensive. Unfortunately for Edward he was by this
stage fighting new wars against France
and Scotland
which drained his treasury. As a result, Beaumaris,
like Caernarfon, remained unfinished at the time of the king’s death in 1307.

12. The Riddle of
the Winchester Round Table –
Revealed

More so than any other medieval monarch, Edward I loved to
travel. Every corner of Britain,
most of Europe, and even the Holy Land – there
were precious few places that this particular English king had not visited. At
first glance, therefore, his arrival in Winchester
in September 1285 might seem unremarkable – a routine royal pit-stop, notable
only for the promulgation of some law-and-order legislation. In actual fact,
this was the occasion for a great chivalric festivity, long since forgotten,
but which probably explains the creation of one of the most intriguing of all
medieval artefacts – the Winchester Round Table.

The Round Table at Winchester
– ‘King Arthur’s Round Table’ – is justly famous. A giant disc of solid oak,
eighteen feet in diameter and three-quarters of a ton in weight, it now hangs
at the end of the Great Hall of what was once Winchester Castle.
Obviously, the table has nothing to do with a real King Arthur (whisper it
quietly – he never existed). Scientific analysis has proved that it was made at
some point in the second half of the thirteenth century, and thus most likely
dates from the reign of Edward I (1272–1307).

The current orthodoxy holds that the table was probably made
in 1290, in connection with a two-day tournament that Edward staged in Winchester to celebrate
the marriage of one of his daughters. A closer reading of the evidence,
however, suggests that the true context of the table’s creation lies in the
little-regarded royal visit of five years earlier. A glance at the names of
those witnessing the king’s charters, for example, shows that in September 1285
Edward was surrounded by almost all his earls and most of his greater barons,
but almost none of his bishops. Far from being a routine parliament, as
historians have previously supposed, this was an exclusively secular assembly.
Moreover, the unusual nature of the event finds powerful confirmation in the
reliable (but hitherto overlooked) words of a contemporary chronicler. In his
entry for 1285, the Worcester Annalist states laconically that ‘on the feast of
the nativity of the Virgin [8 September] the king gave arms to 44 knights at Winchester’. In other
words, Edward was involved in dubbing that day – creating new knights, en
masse, surrounded by the greatest military men in his realm.

Creating a large number of knights at one time, while
comparatively rare, was nothing new. Typically kings or other potentates would
organize such grand ceremonies when they wanted to honour one especially
important participant. (When, for instance, Edward himself was knighted by the
king of Spain
in 1254, the same accolade had been simultaneously bestowed on a crowd of
lesser candidates.) Frustratingly, in the case of the Winchester ceremony, we know the names of
only a handful of those present, and none of these men are important enough to
have been the focus of festivities. Possibly the occasion was contrived in
order to honour Edward’s nineteen-year-old nephew, John of Brittany, whose
career on the tournament field appears to have begun around this point.

The king, however, clearly had other motives for organizing a
mass knighting in the autumn of 1285. Earlier in the year he had ordered that
all men in his kingdom with lands worth more than £100 a year should come
before him to be knighted on 8 September – the same date, that is, on which the
Winchester
ceremony took place. This was quite unusual. English kings often decreed that
their subjects with income above a certain level should take up arms, but
normally they did so in order to raise money, reckoning that most men would
rather pay a fine than actually have to bear the expense that knighthood
entailed. In 1285, by contrast, Edward I seems
genuinely to have wanted to increase the number of knights in his kingdom.

The reason for the king’s determination to dub on this
occasion was his recent conquest of Wales. In 1282–83 Edward had driven
huge armies into Snowdonia and extinguished its ruling dynasties, while much of
1284 had been spent touring the newly conquered territory (supervising, amongst
other things, the construction of the mighty castles at Conwy, Harlech and Caernarfon). The scale of the victory was
awesome, but it had inevitably led the king to place huge demands on his
English subjects, and sparked arguments about the extent of military obligation
– several times in the course of the conflict Edward had tried to compel men to
take up arms. By revisiting the issue in 1285 Edward hoped to draw a line under
these arguments, and to establish a clear precedent for the future, namely that men of certain economic means ought to be knights as a
matter of course.

The conquest of Wales also explains why the dubbing
ceremony should assume an Arthurian air. Of course, in the thirteenth century
Arthur was immensely popular all over Europe, and
nowhere more so than in England.
For the English, however, the legendary king presented a peculiar problem
because of his British origins – ethnically, the man that everyone admired so
much was Welsh. Edward I set about squaring this circle by appropriating Arthur
for himself, effectively rebranding the British warrior as an honorary Englishman.
In 1278, for example, just months after the conclusion of his first war with Wales, the English king visited Glastonbury, and ceremoniously reburied the
body that the local monks swore blind was that of Arthur. Similarly, in 1283,
the conquered Welsh sought to placate their new overlord by presenting him with
a trinket which they claimed was ‘Arthur’s crown’. The following year, as part
of his victor’s progress, the Edward held a celebratory tournament at Nefyn, which contemporaries described as a ‘round table’.

Edward, in short, was an Arthurian enthusiast, and for
political reasons – because of his recent engagement with Wales – his
enthusiasm was probably at its peak in 1285. On his return to London
in May that year, the king celebrated his victory once again for the benefit of
the citizens, processing from the Tower
of London – still decorated with the
mouldering heads of the defeated Welsh princes – to Westminster Abbey, where he
presented some of the religious relics he had liberated from Wales at the
high altar. This was the immediate context for his decision to hold a mass
knighting in four months’ time: the order to the £100 landowners to come before
him and receive arms was given just two days later.

Short of an explicit statement on a royal roll – and, alas, a
comprehensive trawl of the surviving documents has revealed no such nugget – we
cannot be entirely certain. We can, however, be fairly sure that, having issued
the order that would lead to the great chivalric gathering in September 1285,
Edward would have started to plan the ceremony itself. He must have soon
settled on Winchester,
with its royal castle and resplendent great hall, as a suitable venue. And it
also seems very probable that, being in an Arthurian frame of mind, and keen to
be regarded in the same light as the legendary British king, Edward also let it
be known that for this occasion he required a special centrepiece. Most likely
it was that summer that royal carpenters assembled in Winchester and began, on the king’s instructions,
to build him a great round table.

The Later Life of
the Round Table

The Winchester Round Table was originally built to serve as a
functional piece of furniture – that much is clear
from the holes on its reverse side left by its twelve lost legs. Quite when
these were removed to transform it into a wall hanging is unclear, but it may
have been as early as the mid fourteenth century. It was certainly displayed in
this manner by the late fifteenth century, to judge from the comments of a
contemporary chronicler, and in the sixteenth century it was painted with its
current decorative scheme, giving it in the unfortunate appearance of a giant
dartboard. For hundreds of years thereafter it remained largely undisturbed, no
doubt because of its immense weight and size; only in 1873, when the entrance
to the hall was remodelled, was it moved from one end of the hall to the other.
In the 1970s, however, a restoration of the hall meant that the table had to be
moved again, allowing for a thorough scientific analysis under the direction of
Martin Biddle, which led to the conclusion that it had been made in the reign
of Edward I. All they got wrong, it seems, was the date.

Further Reading

Martin Biddle, King Arthur’s Round Table: An archaeological
investigation (Woodbridge,
2000).

Marc Morris, ‘Edward I and the Knights of the Round Table’,
Foundations of Medieval Scholarship: records edited in honour of David Crook,
ed. P. Brand and S. Cunningham (York,
2008).

13. Slaying
Myths: The Origins of the Cult of St George

As is widely appreciated, St George owes much of his
popularity in England
to the enthusiasm of Edward III. In 1348, when the king established the Order
of the Garter, his super-select chivalric club, he picked George as its special
patron, at the same time designating his birthplace, Windsor Castle, as the
order’s spiritual headquarters, and rededicating the chapel there (formerly
devoted to St Edward) in the saint’s honour. Just three years later the king
was pleased to refer to St George in his letters as ‘the most invincible
athlete of Christ, whose name and protection the English nation invoke as that
of their patron, especially in war’.

This was, it seems, a considerable
exaggeration. Recent historical writing, while still giving Edward III full
credit for establishing George’s cult on the firmest of royal footings, has
questioned the saint’s popularity with the English people as a whole. George
may have been beloved of Edward and his knights, but it was not until the
fifteenth century, in the wake of the victories of Henry V, that his cult
really began to assume a truly national status. Moreover, while it is clear
that Edward was particularly devoted to St George from an early age, it is also
apparent that interest in the saint’s cult had been intensifying in royal and
aristocratic circles for some time before the king’s accession.

The cult of St George, which originated in the eastern
Mediterranean in the fourth century, transferred to England in two phases. He was known
to the Anglo-Saxons, but only in his original manifestation as an early
Christian martyr. To judge from the minimal number of references to him, he was
never very popular in this guise, and some authorities – Bede, for example –
clearly considered him to be a dubious addition to the saintly canon. By the
time of the Norman Conquest, however, George had been reinvented as a Byzantine
soldier-saint, and his new-found military prowess made him irresistibly popular
with the knights of western Christendom, many of whom went east themselves in the course of the First Crusade. Indeed, a
quantum leap for George’s popularity in the West was his reported appearance in
aid of the First Crusaders during their successful siege of Antioch
in 1098; soon thereafter we find some of the earliest images of St George as a
knight on tombs and church doorways in England.

When did he move from the margins to the mainstream? One
thing is now certain – the shift had nothing to do with Richard the Lionheart. Until very recently, any book on the subject of
St George would invariably assert that his first flush of popularity in England, if not
his introduction to these shores, was due to the devotion of the famous
crusader king. Richard, it was confidently reported, had beheld a vision of
George during the siege of Acre, rebuilt a church in his honour at Lydda, and, most significantly, had adopted the saint’s
emblem – the red cross on a white ground – as England’s arms. This tradition,
however, was completely discredited fifteen years ago by Oliver de Laborderie, who showed Richard’s connection with St George
to be entirely spurious, a legend invented for political purposes at the Tudor
court and unquestioningly accepted and embellished thereafter. Contemporary
sources for Richard’s reign mention neither visions nor church-building, and
inform us that the king and his crusaders wore white crosses, not red ones.
Apart from the incidental fact that he was married in a church dedicated to St
George, Richard has no demonstrable connection with him at all.

As far as can be determined, the earliest interest in St
George in royal and aristocratic circles in England was expressed two
generations after Richard’s death, in the middle decades of the thirteenth
century. In 1245, for example, King Henry III paid a certain Henry the Versemaker for writing an account of George’s life, and a
decade later he ordered an image of the saint to be installed over the entrance
to the hall at Winchester
Castle. Similarly, at
some point before his death in 1251, Paulin Piper,
one of the king’s closest courtiers, composed some lines of poetry (now sadly
lost) in George’s honour, while in 1251 itself, William de Cantilupe,
a baron with strong court connections, decided to call his firstborn son George
– the earliest person mentioned in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
to bear that name after the saint himself.

Possibly this early English interest in St George had
something to do with crusading – it is interesting to note that each of the
above men – Henry III, Piper and Cantilupe – had
taken the cross. At the same time, none of them actually went on crusade; their
interest in George equally likely to have been stirred by the growing
enthusiasm that his cult was attracting elsewhere in Europe.
In England
itself that enthusiasm remained muted. These are the only two references to
connect Henry III with George in a 56 year reign, compared with the thousands
that link the king to his favourite saint, Edward the Confessor, in whose
honour he rebuilt Westminster Abbey. Likewise, young George de Cantilupe may have been the first of that name, but for a
long time he was also the last. Of the 1550 entries in the Dictionary of
National Biography for the thirteenth century, he is the only George.

If there was significant interest in St George at Henry’s
court, it is less likely to have been driven by the king, whose model was the
peaceable and pious Confessor, than by the more martial and mettlesome members
of his family circle. Henry’s queen, for instance, Eleanor of Provence, was an
avid reader of romance literature and an enthusiastic devotee of the cult of
chivalry. A romance work written for her after Henry’s death contains only a
passing reference to St George, but its very terseness shows that by this date
(1270s) the saint had become a byword for knightly prowess.

More likely still to have been an advocate for St George was
Henry’s son, the Lord Edward, later to reign as the formidable Edward I. Henry
may have had no need for a military role model, but that was not true of Edward
and his contemporaries, who hungered for glory on the tournament field, and who
yearned to go on crusade. For these young men George would have been an ideal
patron, and it is therefore probably significant that, when Henry’s reign
collapsed into civil war, they rode into battle against Simon de Montfort
wearing red crosses on a white ground – the earliest recorded use of the
saint’s device in England,
although not identified as such in the sources.

Unequivocal evidence of Edward’s identification with St
George, and the biggest advance for his standing in England
before the founding of the Garter, came in the course
of the English conquest of Wales.
In both his campaigns against the Welsh (1276–77 and 1282–83) Edward led armies
that marched behind St George’s banner, and his
infantry were issued with St George’s
cross armbands, now explicitly described as such in royal financial accounts.
The association of George with the conquest was further underlined on the
king’s return to England in
1285, when he gave thanks for his victory by presenting four gold figures at
the altar of Canterbury Cathedral: St Edward and St John, the favourites of his father, were
now joined by St George and his horse.

Edward I was clearly not as singularly devoted to St George
as his namesake grandson. Indeed, when it came to the heavenly host, he
preferred to recruit as widely as possible. In later campaigns against the
Scots his troops still carried George’s banner, but they also bore the arms of
St Edward, St Edmund, St Cuthbert and St John of Beverley. Nor does Edward
appear to have had any marked personal interest in George’s cult. He regularly
gave alms St George’s
day (23 April), but did the same for scores of other saints. More tellingly, in
the inventory of royal relics taken after the king’s death in 1307, George
finds no mention.

In this respect, therefore, the prominence given to St George
during the conquest of Wales
seems peculiar and precocious, and one naturally wonders what lay behind it.
Edward, unlike his father, had not only taken the cross but had also been on
crusade (1270–72); as an experienced holy warrior, it was perhaps unsurprising
that his struggle against the Welsh should assume the aspect of a holy war.
More tentatively, one cannot help but wonder, given the longstanding
association of the Celtic peoples with the image of the dragon, whether George
was invoked because of his special skills in the slaying department. Certainly
the dragon legend, which had formed no part of George’s earliest lives, was
known in England
by this date.

Whatever the case, Edward I’s
decision to invoke St George as his special patron during the conquest of Wales
– the earliest recorded occasion on which English armies marched under St
George’s banner – was a seemingly unique experiment, and George had to wait
another two generations before he his pre-eminent status was assured.

Would he have had to wait so long, however, had events in
1284 taken a slightly different turn? In the wake of his conquest of Wales, Edward returned to Snowdonia for a series
of carefully contrived victory celebrations, and on 25 April, his queen,
Eleanor of Castile, gave birth at Caernarfon
Castle to a son who would
eventually become his father’s successor. But would Edward II have borne that
name had he arrived just 48 hours earlier? Might the fourteenth century, rather
than the eighteenth century, have seen our first King George?

14. 1290: The
Watershed in Anglo-Scottish Relations

At the start of the year 1290, Edward
I was fifty years old and at the height of his power. King of England for over
seventeen years, he had been a legend for even longer. Half a lifetime earlier
he had defeated and killed his notorious uncle, Simon de Montfort, at the
Battle of Evesham; a little later, in his early thirties, he had travelled to
the Holy Land on crusade – an adventure in which he had miraculously dodged
death by surviving an attack from a knife-wielding Assassin. Above all there
had been his conquest of Wales.
During the first decade of his rule, Edward had decisively terminated Welsh
independence with an awesome display of military power, still manifest today at
Conwy, Harlech and Caernarfon, to name just the three
most celebrated of his many Welsh castles.

Now, at the start of 1290, Edward was
close to realizing an even greater goal. Since the conquest of Wales, his overriding ambition had been to lead
a new crusade and recover Jerusalem.
It was a project that had kept him busy for years, partly because of protracted
negotiation with the papacy on the question of funding, but mainly because the
other kings of Europe had been engaged in a
fratricidal war. From 1286, Edward had spent over three years outside of England, trekking back and forth across the
Pyrenees, trying to broker peace between France and Aragon, and to effect the liberation of his cousin, the captive king of Sicily. By the time he
returned home in the summer of 1289, his plan was approaching fruition. The
Sicilian king was free, peace seemed to be in prospect, and, at the end of the
year, the pope proposed a financial package for the crusade that would require
only minuscule fine-tuning. When, in January 1290, a parliament assembled in Westminster – the first in almost four years – Edward was
pleased to receive an embassy from the Mongol il-khan
of Persia, who professed to
be ready to ally with the English king, and who promised to meet him outside
the walls of Damascus
in one year’s time.

The year 1290, moreover, looked set to
be an annus mirabilis in more ways than one. Another
subject for discussion in that parliament would have been the situation in Scotland.
Almost four years earlier, on the eve of Edward’s departure for the Continent,
the northern kingdom had suffered a terrible tragedy. King Alexander III,
forty-five years old, vigorous and successful, had set out riding in a storm
and tumbled over a cliff. The scale of the disaster was magnified by the fact
that all three of his children by his first marriage had predeceased him, and
the pregnancy of his second queen had ended after his death with the delivery
of a stillborn child.

Yet out of this tragedy a golden opportunity had arisen, for
Alexander had not died entirely without heirs. Five years earlier, his late
daughter had been married to the king of Norway, and in their brief time
together the young couple had produced a daughter of their own. This girl, only
three years old at the time of her grandfather’s untimely end, was named
Margaret, like her mother. But to posterity she is better known as ‘the Maid of
Norway’. She was the last chance of survival for Scotland’s established line of
kings, but also the hope of something far greater still.

What if this young girl, heiress to the throne of Scotland, were to marry a son of the king of England? Edward
I had been hardly more lucky than Alexander III in his
family: he and his wife Eleanor of Castile had produced at least fifteen,
possibly sixteen children, but only six of them were still living in 1290, and
only one of the survivors was a boy. Nevertheless, one boy was all that was
required. If the six-year-old Edward of Caernarfon were married to the Maid, he
would become king of Scotland
in right of his wife. Any children they went on to have would one day stand to
inherit two kingdoms. Perhaps, in time, they would seek to rule them as a united kingdom.
What was on the cards in 1290, in short, was nothing less than a union of the
crowns, over three centuries in advance of the eventual union of 1603.

To many modern ears, this may sound like a ridiculous
suggestion. The textbooks tell us that England
and Scotland
were enemies for much of their history, and we are inclined to believe that it
was ever thus. ‘March straight back to England,’ says Mel Gibson’s William
Wallace to his English opponents in Braveheart,
‘stopping at every home you pass by to beg forgiveness for a hundred years of
theft, rape and murder’. But this is the biggest of the film’s many nonsenses. Not only had there been no armed conflict
between the two kingdoms for eighty years before 1296; during those eighty
years, and for many decades beforehand, the English and Scots had been getting
on like a house on fire.

This was largely because, since the twelfth century, Scotland been busy approximating itself to England. The
Scots, led by the example of their kings, had embraced social, economic and
moral standards that were normal south of the Border. At the same time,
Englishmen – merchants, labourers and monks – began emigrating
to Scotland in their
thousands, helping to found new towns, or to establish new religious
communities which retained their links with England. Meanwhile Scottish
aristocrats built castles (such as Caerlaverock, near
Dumfries) after the English example, and
intermarried with their English counterparts. And this was also true of their
respective royal families. Edward I’s aunt, Joanna
(d. 1238) had been married to Alexander II (d. 1249), and his sister, Margaret
(d. 1275) had been the first wife of Alexander III. Nothing could have been
more natural, therefore, than another Anglo-Scottish royal wedding in 1290. In
March that year, the magnates of Scotland assembled on the Border at
Birgham, and unanimously agreed that the match should
go ahead.

The only difficulty lay in deciding how the new relationship
would work in practice. The Scots wanted a powerful protector for their infant
queen, and Edward I was certainly that. But they were concerned that he might
prove too powerful, and might make demands that would compromise Scotland’s
independence. Thus, during the spring of 1290, there was much discussion
between the representatives of the two nations. On many points they were able
to reach agreement, but when it came to control of Scotland’s royal castles, there was
deadlock. Edward was determined that the right to appoint their keepers should
belong to him alone, and the Scots were equally adamant in their refusal to
accept his demand.

For a while, therefore, the projected marriage hung fire, and
Edward proceeded with other momentous business. In April he took the remarkable
step of safeguarding England’s
future stability by fixing the English succession on his daughters, should he
and his namesake son die without other heirs. At the end of the month, one of
these daughters – Joan – became the first of the king’s children to marry,
taking as her husband the earl of Gloucester.
A few weeks later Edward caused the body of his father, Henry III, to be moved
to a new tomb in Westminster Abbey, subsequently decorated with the magnificent
gilded-bronze effigy that can still be seen today. Later, on 9 July, there was
more ceremony in the abbey when another of the king’s daughters, Margaret, was
married with great pomp to the duke of Brabant.
Lastly, on 18 July, Edward committed one of the most notorious acts of his
entire career when, in return for a generous grant of taxation, and to the
universal delight of his other subjects, he ordered the expulsion of all the
Jews from England. It would be more than three centuries before they were
allowed to return.

At length, as the summer drew to a close, there was a
breakthrough in negotiations with the Scots, though not because either side had
abandoned their earlier contrary positions. What seems to have happened is
that, around the end of August, Edward learned that the Maid had set sail from Norway and was en route to Scotland, and
that this intelligence obliged him to settle. The crucial question of castles
was fudged; the Scottish envoys contented themselves with the statement that
their keepers would be appointed ‘on the common advice of the Scots and the
English king’. In return they received a clear statement safeguarding their
country’s independence. In the most resonant phrase of the agreement, Edward
promised that Scotland would
remain ‘free in itself, and without subjection, from the kingdom of England’.

With the third royal wedding that year seemingly just weeks
away, Edward sent his own envoys into Scotland, bearing jewels with which
to welcome the Maid on her arrival. At the same time, he prepared to finalize
his crusading plans. By this stage he had received a final offer from the pope
to which he was ready to commit, and a small parliament of magnates was
summoned to meet in Sherwood Forest in October
in order to witness its approval. In the meantime, Edward took himself into
Derbyshire and the Peak District for a spot of hunting.

Then the wheel of fortune turned and the king’s plans
collapsed. When he arrived in Sherwood in mid-October, it was to the news that
the Maid of Norway was dead. Probably she had been inadvertently poisoned by
eating decayed food during her voyage. A fortnight later and the next blow
fell. Eleanor of Castile, who had contracted a lingering malarial fever on the
Continent the previous year, suddenly became seriously ill. Despite desperate
efforts to save her, the queen died at the end of November. Edward had her body
carried from Lincoln to London in a slow, mournful procession – every
stop would later be marked with an ornate monumental cross – and buried in
Westminster Abbey on 17 December. The king then retreated into a religious
house at Ashridge in Hertfordshire, to spend
Christmas and New Year in the deepest sorrow.

Eleanor’s death was more devastating in personal terms, but
it was the death of the Maid that altered the course of history. Had the girl
lived, the union of the crowns would have taken place in the autumn of 1290,
and England and Scotland could
have been peaceably united for generations to come. Edward might well have gone
on crusade for a second time (in spite of the bad news from the north, he did
ratify the pope’s offer), with Scotsmen fighting by his side, as had been the
case during his first expedition. Closer to home, too, there would have been
ample scope for Anglo-Scottish co-operation. Together, the English and the
Scots, led by a single monarchy and their intermarried aristocracies, might
have directed their energies into subjugating the peoples who dwelt in the
northern and western extremities of the British Isles – the ‘wild Scots’ of the
Highlands and Islands, and the ‘wild Irish’ – resulting in a single kingdom
that was precociously united.

But none of this was to be. The Maid’s death left the Scots
unable to agree on who should wear their country’s crown, and the king of England was
invited to come and arbitrate between the two most obvious candidates. But when
Edward emerged from his mourning at Ashridge, it was
to announce a disastrous Plan B, ‘to reduce the king and kingdom of Scots
to his rule’. To the Scots’ dismay, he came north insisting that he was Scotland’s
rightful overlord. By coercion and intimidation he persuaded the two principal
claimants, plus a host of other less credible contenders, to admit his
superiority. At length he found in favour of John Balliol, who was forced to
perform an unambiguous act of homage, to annul the guarantees of independence
that had been given in 1290, and to travel to Westminster
whenever the king of England
demanded.

In this way, Edward I turned the Scots, who had long been
friends and allies of the English, into their most embittered enemies. When, in
1294, war unexpectedly broke out between England
and France, Scotland for
the first time allied itself to the latter. The trend towards convergence in
the British Isles was thereby arrested and
thrown into reverse. Edward spent the last ten years of his life hammering away
at the Scots, devastating their country with fire and sword in an effort to
persuade them to accept his authority. In so doing, he established the hostile
relationship between the two countries that persisted for the rest of the
Middle Ages and beyond, and which in some respects persists even in our own
day. Scotsmen had once striven to make themselves more like their cousins south
of the Border; in the years before 1290, many of them had been pleased to
christen their sons ‘Edward’. They would not do so in the future. ‘As long as a
hundred of us remain alive’, they famously wrote to the pope in 1320, ‘we will
never on any conditions submit to the dominion of the English’. It was a change
of heart that had been caused by the death of a seven-year-old girl from Norway, and the
terrible miscalculation of Edward I.

15. Lanercost Priory and
Edward I

By the start of 1306, Edward I had lived longer, travelled
further, and achieved more than any previous king of England. At sixty-six years old, he
had visited not only every corner of Britain but also France, Belgium, Italy,
Sicily, Spain, Sardinia, Cyprus, North Africa and the Holy Land. And, in the
eyes of his contemporaries, he had performed the most praiseworthy deeds. He
had fought against the infidels on crusade; he had, as one chronicler put it,
‘expelled the faithless multitude of Jews from England’,
and he had – also to the great rejoicing of his English subjects – conquered Wales.

The great chain of castles that the king constructed to
cement his victory over the Welsh are his most enduring architectural legacy.
Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech and Beaumaris,
to name just the four most famous, are collectively recognized today as a World
Heritage Site, and are a must-see for anyone even marginally interested in the
medieval past. They are not, however, the focus of this present story, which is
devoted to the last few months of Edward’s life, and a ruined monastic church
in Cumbria,
now in the care of English Heritage.

Lanercost Priory lies on the
Anglo-Scottish Border, close to Hadrian’s Wall,
which might seem a foolhardy place for anyone to have planted a religious
community. Most people assume that during the Middle Ages England and Scotland
existed in a state of perpetual hostility. But, in fact, for a century and more
after Lanercost was founded in 1169, the two kingdoms
had been getting on famously. English merchants and monks had emigrated to
Scotland, helping to found new towns and monasteries; the aristocracies of the
two realms had intermarried, and so too had their royal families: Edward I’s aunt, Joan, and his sister, Margaret, were both married
to consecutive kings of Scots. The line of the Border on which Lanercost lies was fixed by treaty in 1237. Far from being
a hostile frontier, this was a place where two cultures met and merged on
peaceful terms and for mutual profit.

But all this changed in the 1280s, when a series of tragic
deaths wiped out the Scottish royal family, leaving the Scottish throne with no
obvious heir. Edward I was invited to help decide between the various
claimants, but used the opportunity to browbeat the Scots into accepting him as
their superior lord. Having found in favour of one candidate (John Balliol), he
forced him to perform a humiliating act of homage, and repeatedly required him
to appear in Westminster.
Eventually the new Scottish king and his subjects decided that they would stand
for no more, and sought to reclaim their lost independence. For the first time
in over eighty years, the two countries went to war.

Naturally, this was bad news for those living at Lanercost. Within days of the war’s outbreak in 1296, the
priory had been raided by the Scots – ‘dastardly thieves’, as the local
chronicler described them – and the following year it was attacked again, this
time by none other than William Wallace (‘that bloody man’, said the same
chronicler). In general, however, this was a war in which the English had the
best of the fighting. In 1304, after eight years of devastating English
invasions, the Scots surrendered. The following year Wallace was captured and
sent to London
to be executed. Edward erected a new government in Scotland, to be overseen by an
English governor. Scotland
was declared to be a kingdom no longer, and was to have no new king.

Which brings us back to the start of 1306. Just when Edward
thought his life’s work was complete, news came out of the north of a new
Scottish rebellion, led by Robert Bruce, who resurrected his country’s claim to
independence by having himself crowned king. Inevitably this meant the
resumption of war, and within weeks a new English army was advancing into Scotland. But
Edward I was not there to lead it. News of Bruce’s revolt coincided with (and
thus possibly triggered) a sharp decline in his health. When the English king
eventually set out northwards that summer, he had to be carried on a litter.
His intended destination was Carlisle, but
after three agonizing months he was forced to stop just twelve miles short of
the city – at Lanercost Priory.

Religious houses were accustomed to receiving the kings of England from
time to time as they toured their domains. Such stays, however, were always
kept short, for the royal household was a monstrous and all-devouring beast.
Edward arrived at Lanercost on 29 September 1306 with
almost 200 people in tow – mostly grooms, cooks, carters, clerks and huntsmen –
and that was just the core of his entourage. He would have been attended in
addition by military men coming and going from the field, and also by the
merchants, beggars and prostitutes that his household invariably drew in its
wake. Lanercost had been once again been invaded by
an army, albeit a friendly one.

But it was quite clear that, on this occasion, the army was
going nowhere. Edward’s condition meant that he could not be moved, so his
household proceeded to ensconce itself in the priory for the long haul. Soon
teams of carpenters, plumbers and glaziers were arriving to build new chambers
for the king, the queen and their manifold servants. Surviving household rolls
reveal the considerable extent of the work. The priory precinct may appear
peaceful and empty today; but in the winter of 1306 it must have resembled
nothing less than a small town, crammed with new timber buildings and
innumerable tents.

Edward’s household rolls also reveal something of his existence
that winter. He travelled with vast quantities of gold and silver plate,
including a pair of table knives with crystal handles. Food was obtained in
huge quantities: scores of oxen and pigs, and cartloads of almonds, rice, sugar
and bread. The other great expense was medicine: the king’s doctors ordered a
cornucopia of spices, herbs and oils in their effort to prolong his life.
Edward also had the benefit of the chests of holy relics with which he
habitually travelled – a hoard that included a fragment of Christ’s cross
appropriated from Wales, a piece of St Andrew’s cross taken from the Scots, as
well as a saint’s tooth ‘effective against lightning and thunder’.

In the spring of 1307, Edward finally left Lanercost, but he never recovered his health. Soon after
reaching Carlisle he fell sick again, and the
rumour arose that he was already dead. In a grand gesture of defiance, the king
gave up his litter, mounted his war-horse and led his army out of the city
towards Scotland.
Ten days later he died at Burgh by Sands on the Cumbrian coast, having advanced
barely six miles.

Lanercost never recovered either. In
1292 its estates had been valued at a healthy £200 a year, but at the time of
the Dissolution in 1536 that figure had shrunk to just £85. This decline in
prosperity was due in part to the long centuries of hatred that Edward I had
engendered by his attempt to conquer Scotland. But the decisive turning
point in the priory’s fortunes had come in the winter of 1306–7, when for five
months its resources had been decimated by the magnificent court of a dying
English king.

Acknowledgements

The essays and articles in this collection were originally
published in BBC History Magazine, History Today and Heritage Today (the
magazine for members of English Heritage). The author would like to thank the
editors and owners of these periodicals for their kind permission to reissue
them here. Places of original publication are noted below.

1. Heritage Today, no. 89, March 2010.

2. Living History Magazine, vol. 1, April 2003.

3. BBC History Magazine, vol. 13, August 2012.

4. Heritage Today, no. 75, September 2006.

5. Heritage Today, no. 79, September 2007.

6. Heritage Today, no. 74, June 2006.

7. History Today, vol. 55, December 2005.

8. Heritage Today, no. 82, May 2008.

9. This article appears here for the first time.

10. History Today, vol. 58, March 2008.

11. BBC History Magazine, vol. 12, August 2011.

12. BBC History Magazine, vol. 10, March 2009.

13. History Today, vol. 59, April 2009.

14. BBC History Magazine, vol. 9, March 2008.

15. This article was written for Heritage Today but never
published, and so appears here for the first time.

If you enjoyed Kings and
Castles you may like to read:

History Today and Tomorrow

Paul Lay

History, at its best, calls everything into question. It
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possibilities of human existence. It is unafraid of casting its cold eye on
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It is his story, her story, our story, their story, history from above and from
below, richer, more diverse and increasingly global. It has no end, as the
benighted Francis Fukuyama discovered when the permanent present ushered in by
the fall of the Berlin Wall came crashing down on September 11th, 2001. History
opposes hubris and warns of nemesis. It doesn’t value events by their outcome;
the Whig interpretation of history expired long ago.

The discipline has undergone major shifts. It took the
pioneering work of Peter Burke in the 1970s and 1980s to make cultural history
acceptable, widening the remit of the academy considerably: now there are
histories of fashion, of shopping, of the family, even of perfume and the
Internet, yet the histories of high politics and military conflict are still
evident and more skilfullt researched and written
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the Middle Ages and Juliet Gardiner paints vivid
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There is a substantial audience for serious history.
Programmes such as BBC Radio 4’s In
Our Time and The History of the World in 100
Objects have captivated audiences
worldwide. Historians outside the academy such as Simon Sebag
Montefiore, Antony Beevor
and AmandaForeman sell large numbers of critically
acclaimed books to readers unafraid of challenging narratives. History Today continues to gain new subscribers and
readers from around the world eager to explore history from every continent,
encompassing all periods and genres. The reputation of British historians and
the history departments in which they work alongside
an international cast of excellence, remains high. History departments in
universities elsewhere, from Turkey
to China,
now teach their students in English. The future of the study of the past
appears bright. Nevertheless there are problems, imposed largely from without,
which threaten the discipline’s well being. This personal account examines
history’s current condition and points to its future.

To continue reading and discover more Endeavour Press titles go to: www.endeavourpress.com