The Three Edwards

by Thomas B. Costain

  Long before the decision was reached, Edward was on his way to the Crusades. Burnell could not now be made archbishop, but the newly anointed king did the next best thing. On September 21, Edward appointed him chancellor, a post where he could be used to advantage in the mighty labor the king was planning.

  * See previous volume, The Magnificent Century.

  CHAPTER II

  The English Justinian—and the Queen Who Had Many Handsome Children

  1

  EDWARD had not hurried on the way home from the Crusades, but he proceeded now to make up for his tardiness. Consider the schedule he followed. He landed at Dover on August 2, was crowned on Sunday, August 19; he proceeded at once to a reorganization of the civil machinery and on September 21 made Robert Burnell chancellor; on October 2 he appointed a commission with that brisk and efficient official at its head to review what had been done to the royal demesne during his absence, and on the first of November he was at Shrewsbury to discuss the adjustment of relations with Wales and to begin on what was his main function, the reform and codification of the laws of the land. This monumental labor was to continue throughout most of his reign, but the steps he initiated at the beginning were so carefully conceived and so ably conducted that on April 22 of the following year he felt free to summon a great Parliament at Westminster to convert his suggestions into the permanency of national law.

  The laws of England had been in a sorry tangle since the coming of the Normans. William the Conqueror had retained much of the Anglo-Saxon machinery of justice, including the Hundred-moot and the Shire-moot, but the conflict between the grasping newcomers and the resentful English had led to feudal impositions. The despotism of the lords of the manor, with their tall grim castles, had reached its height in the reign of Stephen when each baron had his own dungeons, his own torture chamber, and his own gibbet. The diabolical practice of deciding guilt by a man’s ability to carry a heated iron bar or to walk over red-hot plowshares had been hard to eradicate, as had another superstitious survival, the ordeal by water. The Normans had a preference for settling lawsuits by hiring champions to fight it out in the lists. The hatred between the newcomers and the downtrodden Saxons had imposed presentment of Englishry on the land, which meant proving the victim of murder to be English in order to escape the furious penalties exacted from whole townships in which a Norman had been assassinated.

  The reforms of Henry II had tended to break the hold of feudalism by bringing justice under the supervision of the crown. His system of periodical assizes, presided over by itinerant judges, was not only revolutionary but so sound in practice that it has been continued to this day. The Great Charter had recognized the right of the individual, even against sovereign authority, but through the long years of his reign Henry III, Edward’s father, had never ceased his stubborn efforts to disregard the limitations the Charter had placed on kingly power.

  In setting about the arduous task of bringing order out of this tangle, the young king had the best advice. Henry de Bracton, a clear-thinking and able legal commentator, was not present in person (he had died six years before) but he was there in spirit. His books on English law, written during the previous reign, while a weak monarch sought to increase its perplexities still further, had been concise and convincing and had pointed the way to what Edward was striving to accomplish. With the king, of course, were Francesco Accursi and Robert Burnell. The latter might be termed the work horse of the combination. He it was who labored over the detail, who contrived and indexed and found ways to overcome difficulties, and who saw where compromise could be applied to vexed problems.

  When Parliament met at Westminster, therefore, Edward had something tangible to lay before that body. It was a measure of fifty-one clauses and so broad in its applications that it has been described as practically a code in itself. It dealt not only with the clarification of common law but went into matters of governmental control. Most important of its many exactments was its affirmation of the Great Charter. The rights and privileges of the individual were to apply not only to men of noble birth but to all free men. The exact words of the Charter were employed, in fact, in denying the right to imprison or “amerce” the individual except by due process of law. The right of kings and their ministers to make irregular financial demands on the nation was denied. A redefining of wardships limited the power of guardians to profit from the estates of minors, not excepting the kings, who had battened on the heritage of widows and orphans. The highly practical measures of Henry II were confirmed and, where necessary, amended to suit new conditions.

  Out of the reports laid before this first Parliament of his reign came the Statute of Westminster I, which embodied all of his recommendations. It would be followed by many other enactments over the years, each directed at some specific reform. In the end they would add up to a complete code, combining the best measures of the past with the new provisions that the spirit of the times made essential. In addition Edward would succeed in converting Parliament, which had been for two centuries a Normanized version of the Anglo-Saxon Witanagemot, into a House of Commons.

  The strength of Edward was not in innovation but in his genius for adaptation and his appreciation of the need to define and codify. He would in the years ahead of him earn the title of the English Justinian.

  Edward did not rest his case, nor indeed rest his labors, with the Statute of Westminster I. It was the first of many enactments, each carrying on to a further point the refinement and amendment of laws old and new. In 1285 he placed before Parliament a series of declarations that were embodied in the Statute of Westminster II, which is described in the Annals of Osney as follows: “He stirred up the ancient laws that had slumbered during the disturbances of the realm; some of which have been corrupted by abuses he recalled to their due form; some which were less evident and clear of interpretation he declared; some new ones, useful and honorable, he added.”

  The points covered had largely to do with land laws, with dower rights, and with advowson (the right to present to ecclesiastical offices). The holding of assizes at stated periods to permit of itinerant justices was remodeled to fit the changes in conditions since Henry II began the system. Manorial justice was sharply restricted. The second Westminster enactment deserves, in fact, to be ranked in importance with the first. The two, placed together, form an almost complete code bearing on the practice and extent of manorial jurisprudence.

  A third enactment, called the Statute of Westminster, which was made law by parliamentary sanction the same year as the second from Westminster, moved backward in point of time to restate, define, and amend the old laws relating to popular action. The obligations of the Hundred in regard to enforcement of justice and the defense of the realm were adjusted. The term “hundred” referred to divisions of land in a township (some variations being “ward” and “wapentake”) and generally meant as much land as made up a hundred “hides,” a hide in turn being as much land as could be tilled annually by a single plow. The Hue and Cry, a regulation by which all men were obligated to join in the pursuit and apprehension of offenders against the law, came under consideration and was amended, removing among other things all traces of the obnoxious presentment of Englishry.

  It was on these amendments that Edward’s reputation as a wise lawgiver rests.

  2

  While Edward labored thus to establish order in the land, his queen was equally active. She was finding some difficulty in settling down with her family. To begin with, she had no liking for the Tower of London as a home. This was not strange. It was too bleak, too grim, and too busy. The White Tower, which contained the royal apartments, was ninety feet high, with walls varying in thickness from twelve to fifteen feet. It had been built by a Norman architect, a monk of Bee named Gundulf, who was called the Weeper, and in accordance with Norman ideas he had been concerned only with its strength and durability. The White Tower was built for the ages, but it was square and graceless and cold. It developed also that Master Gundulf
the Weeper had been guilty of a curious error: he had forgotten that the people who lived there would need to move about.

  There was only one entrance to this towering block of masonry, a door so narrow that no more than one person could go through it at one time. Inside there was only a single well-stair, which began in the dark and damp vaults, where prisoners were kept, and continued on up to the floors above. Now the White Tower swarmed with people at all seasons and all hours. Not to mention the prisoners, who did not have a chance to get about, there were the king’s guards, the workers in the Mint, the Jewel House, and the Wardrobe (the word “Wardrobe” included all the household departments as well as the household troops, the War Office, and the Admiralty), and the myriad clerks who served the officials of state in the Council Chamber and the Lesser Hall of the Justiciars as well as the members of the royal household with all their body servants and lackeys and grooms. The one entrance and the one well-stair with its hazardous stone steps were sadly inadequate for so many people. There was another serious drawback. The only fireplace in the Tower was in the state banqueting room on the second floor. The royal apartments were on the floor above, at the end of a dark passage from St. John’s Chapel. The place was so lacking in comfort and coziness (a flagrant understatement) that the lovely queen from sunny Castile felt she must find a better home for her ailing children.

  There were innumerable royal residences to choose from; so many, in fact, that a lifetime was hardly sufficient to get acquainted with all of them. It would be many years, for instance, before the devoted couple would perceive the charms of Leeds Castle, which stood on an island in the midst of a Kentish lake, and make it their favorite. But Eleanor’s choice was limited by the fact that the king must not be many miles from London, and so it inevitably fell on Windsor Castle. It should have been a happy selection, for Windsor stood high and dry above a thickly wooded countryside, and it had come in for the serious attentions of Edward’s father. The old king had seen that the King’s House built by Henry I in the shadow of the round Norman keep had suffered too badly in the many sieges the castle had sustained. His instinct for building aroused, Henry III had constructed a new wall along a chalk range and inside the cover thus provided had raised a new King’s House sixty feet long, a Queen’s Chamber, a chapel of seventy feet, and a Great Hall of truly magnificent proportions. But, alas, his builders had been optimistic in their estimate of the strength of the chalk ridge. Gradually the handsome new walls began to creak and sag. Then one day the ramparts were seen to be heaving, and soon there was a loud crash; and down came all the walls, taking with them some of the pride of the builder king.

  It was to the King’s House of Henry I, therefore, that Edward’s queen took her family. It had been renovated earlier and fitted up at great expense, as already noted, and so they were quite comfortable there. Although the queen was to continue bearing children with great regularity, she contrived to accompany her royal spouse on most of his journeyings at home and abroad. This meant there had to be a home in which to leave the children, and Windsor was selected.

  There is a disagreement among authorities as to the number of children presented to Edward by his queen, some saying fifteen, others claiming a total of seventeen. On one point there is accord, however. Only four of the children were sons. Of the eleven or thirteen daughters, as the case may be, a number died in their infancy and nothing is known about them, not even their names. With those who lingered just long enough to acquire names, there has been little statistical recognition. Let us pick out one at random from the long list: Eleanor, Joanna, Margaret, Berengaria, Mary, Elizabeth, Alice, Blanche, Beatrice, Katherine; Berengaria let it be, the fifth (an unnamed one was born in the East), who was called after the sad princess from Navarre who married Richard the Lion-Heart and was so openly neglected all her life. Here is what is recorded of little Berengaria. She was born in 1276, the exact day not known, at Kennington, and died either that year or the next, being buried at Westminster beside two of her little brothers; so ends the story of her brief existence. It may have been that princesses given that rare and lovely name were destined to ill luck.

  This much is well established, that all the royal children shared the Plantagenet beauty. Some of the daughters were blond and blue-eyed, some were cast in the duskier mold of Castile. Eleanor, the first, seems to have been the great beauty of the family. The second, Joanna, who was born at Acre and named after her maternal grandmother, was dark and of an imperious temper. She was left for several years at the court of Castile with her grandparents, who worshiped her, and she seems even at that tender age to have carried things off with a high hand. They could not fail to be bright, these children of a really great father and a vital and beautiful mother; all but one, and that story will have to be told later.

  The first months at home were sad ones. The health of Prince Henry, the only son left after John’s death, grew steadily worse. The king and queen did everything possible to save him. His wasted frame was kept wrapped in the skins of newly slaughtered sheep, in the hope that the animal heat would revive his energies. He was filled with all manner of queer medicinal mixtures. Wax replicas of his body were sent about to shrines to be burned in oil; a very strange superstition of that particular day. Nothing seemed to have any beneficial effect, and so finally they came to the last resort. A large number of poor widows were hired to supplement the efforts of the royal confessors by performing vigils ceaselessly for his recovery. Their mournful supplications, which filled the air at all hours, had no more effect than the weird efforts of the medical men. The heir to the throne, having been removed to Merton, passed away there.

  Edward loved all his daughters devotedly, but he must have looked them over with an uneasy eye. Daughters made poor successors to a throne as contentious as that of England.

  CHAPTER III

  The English and the Welsh

  1

  TO the English, Wales had always been a troublesome neighbor. To the Welsh, England was a constant threat to their liberty.

  The Welsh were what was left (with additional population pockets in Cornwall and Devonshire) of the inhabitants of the island who had fought so bravely against the Romans, the natives who were called in Rome “the black singers.” They were an imaginative race, poetic, high-strung, brave, and much given to singing and the harp. Back into their mountainous corner, their interests were limited, as were their opportunities for prosperity and abundance. They had faithful memories for the heroes of the past and they still believed that Arthur, the pendragon of glorious memory, would shake off his cerements someday and rise from the grave to lead them again to greatness.

  They were in a fortunate position to carry on persistent warfare with the English. They could swoop through the passes in the hills and harry the countryside and then defy retaliation by retiring into the almost impassable land above which stood white-topped Snowdon. Although they were seldom united among themselves, the black singers could keep their wooded glens free of alien feet. This hit-and-run warfare had been going on for centuries when the Normans came over. William the Conqueror decided that something decisive must be done. He led one force into the mountains, getting as far as St. David’s, and then decided that the risks outweighed the possible gains. As a second-best measure he decided to “contain” the mountaineers. The strip of country that bordered on the Welsh foothills, and through which all invading forces going in either direction had to pass, was converted into a feudal no man’s land. The country was divided among three Norman leaders, Hugo the Wolf, William Fitz-Osborn, and Roger de Montgomery. These palatine earls were given full control of their respective counties, in return for which they were to maintain armed troops in the field and assume the responsibility of holding the Welsh in check. This system had been in effect for nearly two hundred years when Edward came to the throne, and the earls had become known as Marcher Barons. Their control of the land had become so absolute that it was said “the king’s writ did not run north of the Wye”
; in other words, that they ruled in their own right and could wink at kingly powers. Political refugees were safe if they could get across the Wye.

  A second move made by the resourceful Conqueror had been more successful. He had laid hands on southern Wales, which lacked the high barriers, and through the instrumentality of one Robert Fitz-Hamon had constructed a string of stone strongholds running from the Wye to the port of Milford Haven.

  Edward fixed his piercing eye on Wales and he did not admire the prospect. His writ must run not only through the Marcher country but into the deepest fastnesses of the high Welsh hills. As a further stimulant, he was keenly conscious of the assistance Wales had given Simon de Montfort in the closing phases of his father’s reign. That was a score to be wiped off the slate.

  He made up his mind that the problem of Wales must now be settled once and for all.

  2

  At the start of his reign, however, Edward had not anticipated trouble because the ruler of the mountain country, Llewelyn ab Gruffydd, had made a most advantageous treaty with Henry III and was believed to be in a pacific mood. There was another reason which should have inclined the Welsh leader to peace. Some years before, when Simon de Montfort had raised the baronage against the feckless old king, the young Llewelyn had visited the commoner leader and had seen his daughter, Eleanor, who was called in the family the Demoiselle. Simon’s wife was a sister of King Henry and had passed on to the Demoiselle a full share of the Plantagenet beauty. The Welsh prince had fallen instantaneously and completely in love with the girl and, when he left, it was with the understanding they would be married when peace in the country had been restored. Even after Simon’s defeat and death and the confiscation of all the great estates and castles of the De Montforts, the infatuated Llewelyn still desired nothing better than to claim his promised bride. The Demoiselle had to fly to France with her mother after the battle of Evesham, and it was not until the mother’s death that she was put on a ship to recross the Channel and join her lover.