by Morris, Marc
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 circle
s 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 opport
unity 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.