by Simon Schama
Henry III gave thanks for the salvation of his crown in the only way he knew: by completing the shrine of Edward the Confessor and finally, in 1269, by seeing the saint’s remains translated into the darkly glowing sanctuary. In 1272, with Edward on crusade in Palestine, Henry III was himself laid, temporarily, in the tomb of the Confessor, pending the creation of his own ornately Italianate sarcophagus, set at a respectful distance from that of his hero. (Dante, rather unkindly, placed him in the portion of purgatory reserved for simpletons.) It was against this background of Roman magnificence that Edward I was crowned in August 1274.
Like the hybrid English ‘nation’, Edward was an intriguing mixture of inherited and culturally acquired characteristics: he was ruthless in war, yet capable of falling apart when the queen who had borne him fifteen children died. In his youth he would have seen the three leopards, which had been sent to his father, Henry III, by the Holy Roman Emperor and which he kept in the Tower of London (along with a polar bear, a porcupine and an elephant). So perhaps he might not have minded the unflattering comparisons with a leopard: fierce and fleet, but also notorious for changing its spots. The hostile writer of The Song of Lewes, for example, warned: ‘when he is cornered he promises anything you like . . . but once he has escaped he soon goes back on his word. The lying by which he gains his ends he calls providence . . . and whatever he wants he calls lawful and thinks there are no legal bounds to his power.’ But Edward did what it took to survive and triumph. His mettle had been tested early and often, by bungled military campaigns in Wales, by disingenuous flirtations with the opponents of his father and by falling hostage (literally) to a great civil war. While he was on crusade he had to be tough enough to withstand the poisoned dagger of an assassin and to be patient while the venom was sucked from the wound (possibly by his wife) and while the surgeons made a butchery of his wounded limb. By the time he was crowned in 1274 Edward had seen pretty much everything that medieval politics and warfare could put a prince’s way, which was just as well, since Edward Plantagenet had, from his childhood, been the bearer of impossible dreams.
But where was his empire to lie? In England he was sensible enough to leave some of the reforms of 1258 temporarily untouched, even while he hounded the de Montforts themselves to ruin and oblivion. The experience had taught Edward never to make his father’s mistake of appearing to be the pawn of foreign courtiers; rather he would make himself and his monarchy the personification of the community of the realm. In the hectic weeks between his escape from Hereford and the battle of Evesham, Edward had quite deliberately presented himself as the true custodian of the great reforms of 1258 and Simon de Montfort as a power-crazed nepotist. Needless to say, he had no intention of abiding by a political regime that reduced the real power of the Crown to a nullity, but he could easily imagine a working relationship with the barons and bishops in which rather than treating parliament as the perpetual adversary of the Crown he could co-opt it as a partner in the enterprise of England. And if that didn’t work, he would be free to exploit the natural divisions separating barons from knights of the shire and burgesses. It was characteristic of the future king that after the initial vindictiveness had passed, the proclamation disinheriting all barons associated with the rebellion was changed so that they could buy back their seized estates: the appearance of clemency with the reality of profit.
In essence, Edward I revived the basic axiom of his great-grandfather, Henry II: that allegiance depended on the expectation by the great magnates and barons that they were part of an ever-expanding enterprise. But while Henry II’s Angevin enterprise had taken as its field of expansion most of western and northern France, Edward reconceived his empire as Britain. As with Henry, Edward had no particular wish (at the beginning at any rate) to impose standardized English institutions and law on the several disparate parts of his empire. What he wanted from the rulers of Ireland, Wales and Scotland was an unconditional admission that he was their feudal overlord, and, with that admission, their obligation to provide him with men and money where and when he chose. As the acknowledged emperor of Britain he would then be able to try his strength, blow for blow, with the king of France.
Was Edward, from the beginning, deluded in his mania for sovereignty? Could he not see that Ireland, Wales and Scotland were, in fact, independent realms, inhabited by peoples of different cultures, steeped in a sense of their own history and accustomed to utterly different systems of law and government? It is certain that he could not, but in many ways his myopia is understandable. For the civil war had amply demonstrated not the separateness of the ruling clans of the British into neat national compartments but their complicated and unavoidable interconnections. The royalist army at Lewes had contingents from both the Anglo-Norman Irish knights (who themselves, remember, had originally been settlers in Wales) and from some of the major Scottish dynasties, like the Bruces, who possessed land on both sides of the border and who acknowledged Edward as their feudal lord, at least for their English manors. De Montfort had made an alliance with Llewellyn ap Gruffydd, the prince of Wales; while Llewellyn’s enemies, the Marcher lords such as the Mortimers and de Clares, had sealed his doom at Evesham.
Edward might, in fact, be forgiven for not thinking of Ireland, Scotland and Wales as discrete, cleanly demarcated nations and realms. Their relationship was sometimes personal and familial. His own sister, Margaret, was married to the Scottish king, Alexander III, and the prince of Gwynedd was descended from Joan, the bastard daughter of King John. All three realms were sub-divided into an ancestral, indigenous, non-English-speaking core, with their heart and home in the highlands and islands, and a much more densely populated, culturally hybridized lowland region. In the remoter upland areas the customary laws of kinship and the allegiance of the clan cut across the authority of the ruler’s laws. Traditional rituals such as the blood-feud survived, and in pura Wallia (deep Wales) the laws of Hwel Dada, which had been codified in the tenth century and which, for example, pardoned a theft if the culprit had passed ten houses and failed to obtain anything to eat, still obtained. Most often, too, these regions were pastoral and hunting worlds, living off native cattle, horses and goats. Between the upland and the lowland zones, in dales and valleys, Cistercian abbeys (like Melrose in Scotland or Strata Florida and Valle Crucis in central Wales) ran flocks of sheep so enormous that they arguably constituted the single most important industry in the British isles. The lowlands – Carmarthen and Glamorgan in Wales, the area between the Tweed and the Firth of Forth in Scotland, and the eastern half and centre of Ireland – had all been colonized by varieties of Middle English tongue (together with Latin for the clergy and French for the aristocracy) along with the baronial magnates who built the castles that signified their staying power. Gaelic and Celtic had been pushed back into the highlands. As the language zones shaded down into a hybrid mix at the edges of these worlds, so did the landscape. In the lowlands peasants worked scattered strips of land within open fields just as they did in England, pastured their animals on the village’s designated common land and supplied either personal labour or a sum of money in commutation to their lord in return for the privilege of being where they were. It was in these lowlands (or gently hilly regions, like the Cheviots and the Black Mountains) that the frontiers were most unstable and shadowy, moving back and forth across hills and rivers according to which ruler could, for the time being, command the greatest power.
In many respects, Wales, Scotland and England were becoming more, not less, alike. In the middle to late thirteenth century all three were subject to the strenuous policies of aggressive, intelligent and dynamic princes who sought to impose a single law and a single rule on the disparate pieces of their jurisdiction. In Scotland Alexander III, who reigned from 1249 to 1286, presided over a flourishing kingdom, with its ceremonial centre divided between Scone, the place of royal inauguration, and Dunfermline Abbey, the necropolis of the House of Canmore. The prosperous maritime port cities of Scotland, from Aberdeen
in the north to Berwick-upon-Tweed in the south, shipped hides and wool and housed the same mix of local artisans and foreign merchants and bankers – especially the Hansa Germans and the ubiquitous Flemish – and had established a place in the dynamic trading economy of the North Sea.
None of this is to say that what was in progress in the thirteenth century was some sort of spontaneously developing common British economy and society. Quite the opposite was, in fact, the case. Similarity does not necessarily make for affinity. The more alike these regions became, the more determined they were to remain apart. In Wales the great power was the ruler of the northern, mountainous kingdom of Gwynedd, Llewellyn ap Gruffydd. He was the grandson of Llewellyn ap Iorweth, ‘Llewellyn the Great’, who had successfully resisted all the efforts of the Angevins to subdue Wales and who had married John’s bastard daughter, Joan.
Llewellyn’s son by Joan, Daffydd, had died childless, and his elder half-brother, Gruffydd, had been taken hostage and incarcerated in the Tower of London from where he fell to his death on St David’s day 1244, attempting to escape down a knotted sheet. Llewellyn II, his son, made up for this misfortune by breaking out from Gwynedd into the neighbouring kingdoms to the south. By 1257 he was master of two-thirds of the territory of Wales and was writing to the Scots as ‘the prince ofWales’.
Even though his core territory was the mountain fastness of Snowdonia, Llewellyn was the opposite of a primitive ‘tribal’ king. His court had the full complement of falconers, harpists, bards and even a ‘silentiary’, whose job it was to silence a rowdy company at table when things got out of hand. Llewellyn was also responsible – like Alexander in Scotland and Edward in England – for trying to standardize the law or at least for demarcating clearly the boundaries between customary and manorial law and the laws of the realm. Llewellyn II, as much as de Montfort, Edward and Alexander III, was a conscious state-maker, attempting to bring law and custom, language and history, together in a new polity. He was also enough of a general to withstand the armed expeditions that came his way whether they were launched by the Marcher lords or Henry III. In 1265 he had made an alliance with Simon de Montfort, sealed by the promise of marriage between himself and Simon’s daughter, Elinor, which pushed the frontiers of pura Wallia much further east and south than they had been for centuries. Two years later, in 1267, the Treaty of Montgomery recognized his title as ‘prince of Wales’, while he in turn acknowledged the king of England as his feudal overlord. Wales was not, then, regarded as a completely independent state, but within its territory a Welsh prince, not the Marchers or any other colonist, was to be recognized as supreme.
Wales in the thirteenth century.
Twenty years of success may have made Llewellyn over-confident, however, for in 1274 he failed to perform the basic obligation incumbent on a feudal vassal, no matter how grand he might be: to kneel at the feet of a new king, place his hands in the hands of his liege lord and pledge fealty. Certainly, Llewellyn had his reasons. He was angry that his Welsh enemies (including his elder brothers) were being given refuge in England and argued, reasonably, that this was a violation of the Treaty of Montgomery. Edward had already stated, however, that he would not recognize the validity of the treaty, so Llewellyn may well have feared for his physical safety should he venture into England. After all, his betrothed, Elinor de Montfort, was being held prisoner in Windsor Castle on the groundless suspicion of reviving a Montfortian plot. Between 1276 and 1277 he wrote Edward three letters stating that he was not ignoring but merely postponing his act of homage until the differences between them were resolved. But Edward, who had experienced years of political upheaval turning precisely on issues of allegiance, was not interested in discussion. When Llewellyn failed to answer not one summons but five, the king declared him a rebel.
In the summer of 1277 Edward mobilized the biggest army Wales had ever seen – some 800 knights and 15,000 foot soldiers (9000 of them Welsh, raised from all those who had been offended by Llewellyn’s pretensions: the Marcher lords and the princes of Powys and Deheubarth) – and marched on Gwynedd. Going south from the stronghold of Chester, Edward took Anglesey, cutting off Snowdonia’s grain supply from the sea. With winter approaching and starvation a serious possibility, Llewellyn capitulated in November. Although Llewellyn finally performed the overdue act of homage at Worcester in 1278, when he also married Elinor in the king’s presence, Edward was not inclined to be magnanimous. Not for the last time, his appetite for territories and sovereignty had grown with the eating. All the territories Llewellyn had governed at the height of his powers were stripped away, leaving him with a rump state in Gwynedd alone.
As they apprehensively watched new royal castles go up at Aberystwyth, Flint, Builth and Rhuddlan, forward bases for English garrisons, Llewellyn and his younger brother, Daffydd, suspected with good reason that the reduction of their state was just a prelude to what, sooner or later, would be a complete and outright annexation. Llewellyn now attempted to suggest a ‘federal’ solution to Edward, declaring that:
each province under the lord king’s dominion – the Gascons in Gascony, the Scots in Scotland, the Irish in Ireland and the English in England – has its own laws and customs according to the modes and usage of those parts where they are situated, [and that this] amplifies rather than diminishes the Crown. In the same wise he seeks to have his own Welsh law and be able to proceed by it especially as the lord king had, of his own free will in the peace made between them, granted this law to him and to all Welshmen.
But when clashes of jurisdiction arose, English justices (especially the justiciar of Chester) made it clear that they would hear cases in the royal courts referred to them from plaintiffs adversely judged under Welsh law and if necessary overrule them, thus further reducing the prince ofWales’s dignity and power. In this, the royal officers were, in fact, faithfully reflecting Edward’s own increasingly imperialist instincts.
Something bad was in the offing. The choice for the prince ofWales seemed to be either to submit to gradual but inexorable subjugation or to resist, perhaps hopelessly, perhaps not. Kings of England, after all, had been repelled before. Taking a leaf from Edward’s own ruthless book, Daffydd, Llewellyn’s brother, struck first, attacking an English garrison at Hawarden Castle on Palm Sunday 1282. Edward threw at the Welsh everything he could: another huge army, led by himself, moving by land and sea and abundantly supplied with weapons, provisions and even clothes, from materials sent from all over his dominions. The army of repression was once again a mixed coalition, including once again Robert Bruce senior, the Scots Earl of Carrick, the Marcher lords and Llewellyn’s Welsh enemies. But after some initial successes in taking strongholds in the north and east, the offensive faltered as so many others had before. The Marchers in the south lost ground and fortresses, and in Anglesey, at the beginning of November, an army of knights sent to secure a connection between the island and the mainland was cut to pieces by the Welsh, and many of the knights drowned in the Menai Strait.
It was at this point, during a truce, that John Pecham, Archbishop of Canterbury, attempted some sort of arbitration. Might Llewellyn consider a lordship in England worth £1000 a year in return for handing over Gwynedd to the king? Pecham might not have been the ideal negotiator, considering that he had also let it be known that the traditional laws of Wales were contrary to the Bible. Back came Llewellyn’s unequivocal reply that the country was not his to give: ‘let it be known that since Snowdonia is something that pertains to the principality of Wales which he and his ancestors have held since the time of Brutus, his council does not permit him to renounce that land and take in its place a land in England to which he has less claim.’ More trenchantly, it was Pecham’s proposal that provoked in counter-response the stirring declaration drafted by Welsh lords that insisted that, even if Llewellyn or some other prince ‘should give overlordship to the King, they themselves would refuse to do homage to any foreigner of whose language, customs and laws they were ignorant’.
/>