by Marc Morris
A Great and Terrible King
Marc Morris is an historian and broadcaster. He studied and taught history at the universities of London and Oxford, and his doctorate on the thirteenth-century earls of Norfolk was published in 2005. In 2003 he presented the highly-acclaimed television series Castle, and wrote its accompanying book.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Castle: A History of the Buildings that Shaped Medieval Britain
The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century
A Great and
Terrible King
Marc Morris
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First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Hutchinson
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A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099481751
In memory of Rees Davies
Countries are not laid up in heaven; they are shaped and reshaped here on earth by the stratagems of men and the victories of the fortuitous.
R. R. Davies, The First English Empire (2000)
Like Alexander, he would speedily subdue the whole world, if Fortune’s moving wheel would stand still forever.
The Song of Lewes, on Edward I (1264)
Contents
Illustrations
Preface
1 A Saint in Name
2 The Family Feud
3 Civil Peace and Holy War
4 The Return of the King
5 The Disobedient Prince
6 Arthur’s Crown
7 Peaceful Endeavours
8 The Great Cause
9 The Struggle for Mastery
10 Uniting the Kingdom?
11 A Lasting Vengeance
12 A Great and Terrible King
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Family Trees
Illustrations
First section
The Mappa Mundi (© The Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust)
A page from the Alphonso Psalter (© The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Add. MS 24686, f.14v)
The chapel doors at Windsor Castle (By permission of the Dean and Canons of Windsor)
An initial from the Douce Apocalypse (© The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS Douce 180, fol. 1r)
The coronation of Edward the Confessor (© Society of Antiquaries of London)
Edward and Eleanor pictured wearing their crowns (© The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Cotton Nero D. II, f.179v)
A silver penny of Edward I (© Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
The Great Seal of Edward I (© King’s College Library, Cambridge, GBR/57a)
A seal bag from Westminster Abbey (© Dean and Chapter of Westminster)
Conwy Castle (Cadw/Crown Copyright)
Harlech Castle (Cadw/Crown Copyright)
Caernarfon Castle (Cadw/Crown Copyright)
Beaumaris Castle (Cadw/Crown Copyright)
Edward I’s chamber at the Tower of London (St Thomas’s Tower) (© Historic Royal Palaces/newsteam.co.uk)
The Round Table in Winchester Great Hall (By permission of Hampshire County Council)
Second section
Matthew Paris’s map of Britain (© The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Cotton Claudius D. VI, f.12v)
Flint (Cambridge University Collection of Air Photographs, Unit for Landscape Modelling)
Monpazier (© Philippe Dufour)
Winchelsea (© Crown Copyright/MOD. Reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office)
The tomb of Eleanor of Castile (© Westminster Abbey, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library)
The Eleanor Cross at Geddington (© English Heritage Photo Library)
The persecution of the Jews (© The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Cotton Nero D. II, f.183v)
The tomb of Henry III (© Dean and Chapter of Westminster)
Débonaireté defeating ira (© Society of Antiquaries of London)
The Coronation Chair (© Dean and Chapter of Westminster)
A possible portrait of Edward I (© Dean and Chapter of Westminster)
The warfare of Judas Maccabeus (© Society of Antiquaries of London)
The tomb of Edward I at Westminster (© Dean and Chapter of Westminster)
Edward I in his open tomb (© Society of Antiquaries of London)
Maps
England
Wales
Gascony
Scotland
Preface
On learning that I was writing a book about Edward I, my non-historian friends and neighbours have asked me, almost invariably, the same two questions. ‘Was he Edward the Confessor?’ has been by far the most common. No, I would always answer, he was not; but he was named after him. In many cases this only served to provoke a subsidiary, more vexed inquiry. If my subject was named after one of his forebears, then how on earth could he possibly be ‘the First’? The answer, of course, is that he couldn’t, and that, strictly speaking, he wasn’t. For those who would care to know precisely how this confusing situation came about, I have added a short note of explanation at the end of this Preface.
The second question that has usually been put to me concerns the nature of the evidence for writing the biography of a medieval king, and specifically its quantity. In general, people tend to presume that there can’t be very much, and imagine that I must spend my days poking around in castle muniment rooms, looking for previously undiscovered scraps of parchment. Sadly, they are mistaken. The answer I always give to the question of how much evidence is: more than one person could look at in a lifetime. From the early twelfth century, the kings of England began to keep written accounts of their annual expenditure, and by the end of the century they were keeping a written record of almost every aspect of royal government. Each time a royal document was issued, be it a grand charter or a routine writ, a copy was dutifully entered on to a large parchment roll. Meanwhile, in the provinces, the king’s justices kept similar rolls to record the proceedings of the cases that came before his courts. Miraculously, the great majority of the
se documents have survived, and are now preserved in the National Archives at Kew near London. Some of them, when unrolled, extend to twenty or thirty feet. And their number is legion: for the thirteenth century alone, it runs to tens of thousands. Mercifully for the medieval historian, the most important have been transcribed and published, but even this printed matter would be enough to line the walls of an average-sized front room with books. Moreover, the quantity is increased by the inclusion of non-royal material. Others besides the king were keeping records during Edward I’s day. Noblemen also drew up financial accounts, issued charters and wrote letters; monks did the same, only in their case the chances of such material surviving was much improved by their membership of an institution. Monks, in addition, continued to do as they had always done, and kept chronicles, and these too provide plenty to keep the historian busy. To take just the most obvious example from the thirteenth century, the monk of St Albans called Matthew Paris composed a chronicle, the original parts of which cover the quarter century from 1234 to 1259. In its modern edition it runs to seven volumes.
I say all this merely to demonstrate how much there is to know about our medieval ancestors, and not to pretend that I have in some way managed to scale this mountain all by myself. For the most part I have not even had to approach the mountain at all, for this book is grounded on the scholarly work of others. Nevertheless, even the secondary material for a study of Edward I presents a daunting prospect. At a conservative estimate, well over a thousand books and articles have been published in the last hundred years that deal with one aspect or another of the king’s reign. For scholarly works on the thirteenth century as a whole, that figure would have to be multiplied many times over.
By this stage, anyone who had quizzed me about the making of this book – assuming they were still listening – must have had a third question forming in their minds, though they were all too polite to pose it. That question, I imagine, was ‘why bother?’ Why devote a sizeable chunk of one’s own life to re-examining the deeds of a man who has been dead for seven centuries? The answer, as I hope the finished product will make clear, is that the reign of Edward I matters. Not for nothing did I settle on a subtitle that includes the phrase ‘the forging of Britain’. This period was one of the most pivotal in the whole of British history, a moment when the destinies of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland were decided. It was also one of the most dramatic. Edward summoned the biggest armies and the largest parliaments seen in Britain during the Middle Ages; he built the greatest chain of castles in Europe; he expelled the Jews, conquered the Welsh and very nearly succeeded in conquering the Scots. We are often told these days that we ought to have a greater sense of what it means to be British. I hope that this book goes some small way towards fulfilling that need.
Naturally, this is not the first attempt to broach the subject (nor, I predict, will it be the last). In the twentieth century Edward I was examined at length by two eminent medieval historians, Maurice Powicke and Michael Prestwich. As the notes at the end of this book make clear, my debt to both is very great. During several years of writing and research I have turned to their books constantly and repeatedly, and have always been struck by insights that would not have occurred to me from the original evidence. And even when I have looked at the evidence and reached different conclusions, their work has always provided me with an invaluable starting point. The main way in which my work differs from theirs is in its construction. Both Powicke and Prestwich chose to approach Edward thematically, devoting whole chapters to his lawmaking, his diplomacy, and so on. I have opted for a chronological treatment, which gives the following pages some claim to originality. No one has attempted to tell Edward’s story from beginning to end since before the First World War, which effectively means that no one has told his story in this way since the invention of medieval history as a modern academic discipline. Of course, such a chronological approach has certain inherent drawbacks. Some academic readers may be disappointed that there is not more here on Edward’s statutes or his governmental inquiries. I can only offer the excuse that the discussion of such topics would have been hard to incorporate into an already complicated narrative without the whole thing grinding to a halt, and that, in any case, these topics have been well covered elsewhere. I also take some comfort from recent research which suggests that the ‘English Justinian’ probably had no hand, and perhaps little interest, in drawing up the laws that were issued in his name. On a more positive note, the task of putting the events of Edward’s life in their correct order has led me to question existing orthodoxies more frequently than I had imagined might be necessary. I hope that the new interpretations I have offered in their place will be found convincing, or at least stimulating, by other medievalists.
Mention of other medievalists leads me to a long list of acknowledgements; as I have already said, this volume rests in no small measure on the researches of others. Chapter Eight, for example, draws heavily on the recent work of Archie Duncan, who was kind enough to send me a draft of his latest thoughts on Edward’s activities at Norham, and also to lend me his translation of the sections of Walter of Guisborough that relate to events in Scotland. Paul Brand and Henry Summerson were equally kind in allowing me to read their recent unpublished papers, Huw Ridgeway and Bob Stacey responded helpfully to emails requesting clarification of certain aspects of Henry III’s reign, and David D’Avray and George Garnett patiently answered my telephone inquiries about the mysteries of the English coronation. I received similar help, in one form or another, from Jeremy Ashbee, Paul Binski, Robert Bartlett, Nicola Coldstream, Beth Hartland, Jess Nelson, Michael Prestwich, John Pryor, Matthew Reeve, Robin Studd, Mark Vaughn and Fiona Watson. Others have provided useful critical feedback and moral support: in particular, I should like to thank Adrian Jobson, Michael Ray and Andrew Spencer, and also Richard Huscroft, who offered me the additional treat of a tour of the tombs at Westminster Abbey. On another visit to the Abbey I was well received by Richard Mortimer, while Jane Spooner, Chris Gidlow and their colleagues were similarly welcoming at the Tower of London. My special thanks to Guilhem Pépin for his considerable assistance with the map of Gascony, and to Philippe Dufour for the aerial photograph of Monpazier. I must also thank Gillian Suttie for her hospitality during a tour of Scotland, and Mark Slater and Jo Topping for the gracious use of their house in France which lies conveniently close to some of Edward’s bastides. Martin Allen at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge provided last-minute help with coins, and Jeff Cottenden took a rather splendid picture for the front cover. My estimable agent, Julian Alexander, had great faith in this project from the first, and introduced me to Hutchinson, where I have been well looked after by my editor Tony Whittome, his colleague James Nightingale, and the others at Random House.
The biggest debts, as usual, I have left until last. Once again I have to thank my former supervisors in London and Oxford, David Carpenter and John Maddicott, for their invaluable support and advice. As well as fielding email inquiries and phone calls, both read the entire book in draft, made many useful suggestions and saved me from innumerable errors. The same thanks go to my partner, Catherine, who has probably suffered more than any other person in recent years on account of Edward I. Not only did she read every word of every draft; she has also stoically endured Edward’s tendency to crop up in almost every conversation, and uncomplainingly allowed him to dictate her holiday destinations for the past three years. I hope at least some of it was fun, and promise that the sequel will be set in New York, Japan or Australia.
My final words of thanks, though, are reserved for Rees Davies. When I arrived in Oxford ten years ago to begin my doctorate, I knew little about English medieval history, but even less about the histories of Wales, Ireland and Scotland. It is chiefly down to Rees’s teaching and writing that this imbalance was corrected. He was never my teacher in any strict sense, but during my time in Oxford he offered advice and support without which I would never have completed my thesis. Although
he had few positive things to say about Edward I, he was supportive of my intention of writing a book about him and unstinting in his encouragement while I was in the early stages of research. In intellectual terms, the finished product owes more to Rees than to any other individual, and if it encourages others to seek out and discover his works for themselves, then for that reason alone it will have been a book worth writing.
Edward the First, or Edward the Fourth?
Before the reign of the king we call Edward I, England had been ruled by several other kings who shared his name; the trouble was that, even from a thirteenth-century standpoint, they had all lived a very long time in the past. At the time of Edward’s accession in 1272, even his most recent royal namesake, Edward the Confessor, had been dead for more than two centuries. Everyone in the thirteenth century remembered the Confessor, for by then he had become the patron saint of the English royal family. But when it came to the other King Edwards, people were altogether more hazy. Towards the end of Edward I’s reign, for example, some of his subjects felt compelled to chronicle his remarkable deeds, and decided that they needed to distinguish the king by giving him a number. Unfortunately, they miscounted, including in their tallies the Confessor (who ruled from 1042 to 1066), and also the celebrated tenth-century king, Edward the Elder (899–924), but overlooking entirely the short and unmemorable reign of Edward the Martyr (975–78). For this reason, at least two thirteenth-century writers referred to Edward I as ‘Edward the Third’. Had they counted correctly, they would have called him ‘Edward the Fourth’.
Fortunately for us, such early and inaccurate numbering schemes did not endure. In general, when his contemporaries wished to distinguish Edward, they called him ‘King Edward, son of King Henry’. The need for numbers arose only after his death, when he was succeeded by a son, and then a grandson, both of whom bore his illustrious name. By the middle of the fourteenth century, Englishmen found themselves having to differentiate between three consecutive, identically named kings, and so unsurprisingly they started referring to them as the First, Second and Third. Anyone troubled by the recollection that once upon a time there had been other kings called Edward could salve their historical conscience by adding ‘since the Conquest’. Thus the Norman Conquest became the official starting point for the numbering of English kings. But it was only necessary to have such a starting point in the first place because of Henry III’s idiosyncratic decision to resurrect the name of a long-dead Anglo-Saxon royal saint and bestow it on his eldest son.