The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  The Hundred Rolls inquiries were massively wide-ranging and extremely detailed. They were the first great project undertaken by Edward’s new chancellor Burnell, now the bishop of Bath and Wells, and a trusted, highly capable diplomat. Robert Burnell had governed England during Edward’s absence on crusade, and he would oversee much of the governance and administrative reform of England until his death in 1292. The commissioners he appointed collected vast amounts of material from the hundreds, ranging from examples of appalling abuses of power (beatings, torture and illegal imprisonment by royal officials cropped up in some places) to comical, harebrained schemes by imaginative or deluded men during the civil war (the sheriff of Essex was accused of having plotted to release flying cockerels carrying incendiary bombs over London during the troubles in 1267). They produced, in practice, far more information about wrongdoing and royal rights than could be manageably dealt with, and even when a general eyre was sent out to punish the crimes uncovered, it was clear that the king could not successfully prosecute every deviant royal official in the land. Still, the keen investigations into wrongdoing in county society conveyed the message to everyone in England that the new king was deeply committed to shaking out the corruption among royal officials that had blighted Henry III’s reign, and which had so animated the knightly class in particular.

  The point of the Hundred Rolls inquiries, then, was more their symbolic value than their practical use. They showed that Edward had learned lessons from the baronial reform programmes of the 1250s, and had taken to heart the spirit of the Provisions of Oxford and the Montfortian protesters. By adopting and expanding the programme under the royal banner, Edward made an immediate statement about his reign: he would be the king who remedied ills of his own accord.

  Well might Edward do so. For although he did not share his father’s instinctive dislike of political reform, he shared with him an extraordinary capacity for spending money. Edward had returned from the Holy Land with debts amounting to more than £100,000, much of which was owed to Italian bankers. Simply to manage debt like this would require political consensus and financial innovation. And given the ambitious plans that Edward would shortly unveil for an even more expensive and ambitious foreign policy than his father’s, he would need the community of the realm behind him. Legally, financially and politically, England – and Britain – was to be transformed. The first area of transformation would be Wales.

  A New Arthur

  One of the greatest popular crazes in thirteenth-century Europe was for the legends of King Arthur. Reflected in the art, literature and tourist industry of the day, Arthurianism had the power to excite, inspire and entertain men and women everywhere from Sicily to Scotland, and there were few men who were more excited by the stories and supposed relics pertaining to Arthur than King Edward I.

  The legend of Arthur – for we now know that Arthur belongs to imagination, and not to history – had been a part of European literary tradition since the early ninth century, when stories were exchanged of a native Briton who rose to become king and fought against both the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons who invaded England. Down the centuries his legend had been remoulded and translated to suit the cultures that took an interest in it, until in the 1130s the author Geoffrey of Monmouth inserted a vivid and dramatic account of Arthur’s life and reign into his wildly successful book The History of the Kings of Britain. Geoffrey’s Arthur was a pious Christian king who fought valiantly against pagans, Saxons and Romans alike, driving invaders out of native British lands, uniting the British kingdom, conquering Ireland, Iceland, parts of Germany and Orkney and subduing Norway, Aquitaine, Gaul and the Balkan kingdom of Dacia. He was the heroic, beneficent king of a British kingdom that was the envy of the world. Geoffrey related that in Arthur’s time: ‘Britain had arrived at such a pitch of grandeur, that in abundance of riches, luxury of ornaments, and politeness of inhabitants, it far surpassed all other kingdoms. The knights in it that were famous for feats of chivalry, wore their clothes and arms all of the same colour and fashion: and the women also no less celebrated for their wit, wore all the same kind of apparel; and esteemed none worthy of their love, but such as had given a proof of their valour in several battles. Thus was the valour of the men an encouragement for the women’s chastity, and the love of the women a spur to the soldier’s bravery.’ Romance, chivalry and beauty abounded in this knightly paradise, and it was not hard to see why the stories appealed to the late medieval barons, knights and ladies who heard them.

  As they were distributed, retold and embellished by other writers, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s stories – dressed up as a genuine history of the British Isles – began to be thought of as literally true. By the time Edward was born, there was a booming trade in Arthuriana, and a healthy industry had grown up around his imagined memory. When Glastonbury Abbey burned down in 1184, Henry II had encouraged the monks to broadcast the fact that they had ‘discovered’ the tomb of Arthur and his queen Guinevere buried beneath the ruins. Arthur had originally been a Welshman, and it was a matter of faith among the Welsh that he would return to liberate them from the English; now he was conveniently revealed to be both English and dead, and the Glastonbury brothers encouraged paying tourists to come and inspect the skeletons that they had supposedly found. During the course of the twelfth century the legend became a potent part of English aristocratic culture, and tournaments known as ‘Round Tables’ were held to award prizes for gallantry and good jousting. It was no surprise, therefore, that Edward, a young man with conventional noble tastes, was since his youth as enthralled by Arthur as his peers, or indeed that when he married Eleanor of Castile he had whisked her off on honeymoon to see the tomb at Glastonbury.

  For Edward, however, the myth of an Anglicized Arthur was more than just a matter for entertainment and courtly discussion. It was a mental template for his whole approach to kingship. Just as Henry III had grown fixated upon the Confessor as his guide, inspiration and saviour, so Edward would see the world through the prism of his own particular version of Arthurianism. It was as convenient a myth for him to cleave to as had been the Confessor to his father, for his problems were Arthur’s in mirror-image. Arthur, to put it crudely, had been a Welsh king whose mission was to crush the English. Edward, in 1277, faced the opposite task.

  In the summer of 1277, Edward assembled his first great army. More than 15,000 men, equipped with horses, supplies and vicious weaponry, advanced along the coast road from Chester into north Wales. Above them fluttered the multiplicity of banners and flags that marked out the various components of the feudal host. They rumbled towards Gwynedd to root out and crush the ‘rebel and disturber of the peace’, Llywelyn the Last, prince of Wales.

  This was a national army, agreed upon by Edward, his magnates and an assembly of the knights of the shire at one of the twice-yearly parliaments he held almost every Easter and Michaelmas from the start of his reign until its end. On or around 12 November 1176, the English had declared war upon Llywelyn, determined to stamp on this troublesome prince in the name of security and stability for the kingdom. Edward had been unable to raise more than a handful of his household knights when he made the journey to Palestine. But he found that, with the support of his barons and knights in parliament behind him, he could take the whole might of England to war against the Welsh.

  Wales had been a constant problem for the Plantagenets. As every English king since the Norman invasion had found, to control or even pacify Wales was a task that required immense resources, time and will. Since King John’s advances against the Welsh during the brief period of his British mastery, English power beyond the Marches had been slipping away. The greatest strides had been made during the first half of Henry III’s reign by Llywelyn the Great, who was effectively sole ruler of Wales from his power base in the north-western province of Gwynedd until he died in 1240. Subsequently, during the Barons’ Wars, Llywelyn the Great’s grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd – also known as Llywelyn the Last – had allied with de
Montfort to take further advantage of the English Crown’s weakened position. The Treaty of Montgomery, sealed as Henry’s realm was being pacified in 1267, had cemented Welsh gains during peacetime. In fact, the Treaty of Montgomery was, from Llywelyn’s point of view, one of the great treaties in Welsh history: Llywelyn was acknowledged as prince of Wales in his own right, with direct control over Gwynedd and feudal lordship over almost every other lord in Wales.

  The Treaty of Montgomery was irksome to Edward for many reasons. Personally it had compelled him to give up land of his own in Wales. Viewed in the context of kingship, it represented a damaging loss of the Crown’s rights, of the kind that he had sworn a holy coronation oath to reverse.

  This alone might have justified a war of reconquest. If further cause were needed, throughout the early 1270s Llywelyn piled on further provocations. He invaded English baronies in Shropshire and the Marches, antagonizing important Marcher lords including Roger Mortimer and Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford. In 1270 Llywelyn invaded Glamorgan, causing a rift with his erstwhile ally, Gilbert, earl of Gloucester. At home Llywelyn quarrelled with his brothers: imprisoning one, Owain, and forcing the other, Dafydd, into exile at the English court. But Llywelyn himself refused to go anywhere near Edward’s presence, despite repeated requests that he do so. Neither would he pay the English Crown the 15,000 marks due to it under the terms of the Treaty of Montgomery.

  In a final, fatal act of overreach, in 1275 Llywelyn gave Edward an indisputable casus belli. Having reached his fifties without producing an heir, he began negotiations to bring Eleanor de Montfort to Wales. The daughter of the late Simon de Montfort, Eleanor was a potent symbol of the damage the Welsh had done to the royal family by their alliances during the Barons’ Wars. She had been betrothed to Llywelyn in 1267, but was living in exile in France. In 1275 she was married to the Welshman by proxy, and at the end of the year she set out from the Continent to meet her husband.

  It was an impressive litany of provocation, and Edward was compelled to respond. He headed off Eleanor by having her ship captured in the Bristol Channel and imprisoning the good lady at Windsor. But preventing a marriage between the Welsh prince and the de Montfort daughter was not enough. Edward needed to put Llywelyn firmly back in his place.

  Edward invaded Wales in 1277 and marched his army through the summer down the coast road from Chester. Shadowing the knights, soldiers and supply wagons on their march along the coast was a fleet of ships that served both to blockade the Welsh from escape or reprovision via Ireland and to keep the enormous English army well supplied on their march west.

  The whole campaign was supremely well organized. Edward’s constant military companions managed the logistics. Crusading men such as Roger Clifford, Otto de Grandison and John de Vescy combined with civil war veterans like William de Beauchamp, earl of Warwick. They based themselves at Worcester, and began to gather a terrifying arsenal with which to batter Llywelyn into submission. Confident that his longstanding allies were up to the job, Edward showed that he had something of his father in him. He allowed them to organize the war muster while he toured the shrines of East Anglia, praying before Henry’s favourite relics, and giving a passable impression of a man of peace.

  But peace was not what was planned at Worcester. Hundreds of thousands of crossbow bolts were ordered from Gloucestershire. Warhorses were bought in the specialist markets in France, wheat and oats ordered from the justiciar of Ireland. Vehicles were requisitioned from private owners all over England. The royal mints produced silver pennies to pay the many thousands of soldiers drafted to fight for England’s security and the Plantagenet family’s honour. It was a mark of Llywelyn’s fractured authority that Edward’s royal infantry included around 9,000 Welsh mercenaries.

  More important even than the infantry, however, were the large teams of engineers, who were engaged with the purpose of cutting a path through north Wales along which Edward’s huge advance might be made. Guarded by crossbowmen and knights, teams of men from the English interior constructed a huge road along which the invading army could roll. They felled the thick, silent woodlands that overhung the regular routes to Snowdonia, clearing a way that was in places hundreds of feet wide, and now rendered impervious to Welsh guerrilla tactics, which relied upon swooping out of the trees to slash and hack at an unguarded enemy before disappearing. At Flint, where Henry II had almost been killed by just such tactics, a great timber fortress was begun as a forward base of operations.

  The whole effort was a magnificent achievement of military requisitioning, planning and engineering. In pure numerical terms Edward’s army was not as strong as the armies that marched on Toulouse for Henry II or mustered for the Third Crusade under Richard I. But the campaign was conducted with deadly logistical intent to neuter Llywelyn’s only fighting option. He could not hope to harry an army on the move by use of guerrilla tactics, for Edward’s engineers had blown his cover.

  The army marched deep into Llywelyn’s territory. Throughout August they cut a path from Flint to Rhuddlan, and then on to Conwy. As they ground their way into Gwynedd they gradually cut off supplies and movement of men, surrounding the Welsh and starving them into submission. At every main outpost they stopped and engineers began digging to create sites on which permanent castles could later be constructed.

  Llywelyn fell back into the mountains. Edward pushed forward to the river Conwy and camped at Deganwy. This was deep into enemy territory, where Welsh regard for Plantagenet rule was shown starkly by the silhouette of a ruined castle Henry III had once built on the spot.

  Soon the lesser Welsh princes started fleeing Llywelyn’s cause. The decisive blow was struck in early September, when Edwardian marines disembarked on Anglesey, occupied the island and harvested the grain crop there, thus capturing the richest farmland in Wales and simultaneously emptying the granary of Gwynedd. It was enough to persuade Llywelyn that the English king was an opponent to be taken seriously. He surrendered within days, and on 9 November agreed to a truce at Rhuddlan. He was allowed to keep Gwynedd, but virtually everything else was taken from him. Llywelyn submitted to a fine of £50,000, as well as abandoning his claims to the Four Cantrefs – the four small counties that bordered Gwynedd – and everything that Edward had seized on his march west. The disputes with his brothers Owain and Dafydd were to be settled and, in recognition of the supremacy of the English king over the Welsh prince, Llywelyn agreed to do homage to Edward not only on his borders at Rhuddlan, but back at Westminster, at the seat of English governance and power.

  Llywelyn had been sorely beaten, and the treaty was, from Edward’s point of view, a satisfactory way to end the expedition. To solidify the English position, castles were planned in Aberystwyth and Builth, Flint and Rhuddlan. The English now had military outposts bristling on the outskirts of Welsh territory. The 1277 invasion had been an impressive success. Little did Llywelyn know that this was only the beginning.

  The Final Stand

  Edward was delighted at his victory over Llywelyn. He celebrated in Easter 1278 with an eerie ceremony at twilight in Glastonbury Abbey on 19 April, at which the tomb of Arthur and Guinevere was opened. According to the local chronicler Adam of Domerham, the skeletons were found side by side, each in a casket with their images and arms painted on the sides. The following day, the piles of bones were moved to a grand new resting place in the abbey. The new tomb was destroyed in the dissolution of the monasteries, but the sixteenth-century antiquary John Leland described it as made from black marble with two lions at each end and an effigy of Arthur himself at the top. The ceremony fairly pulsed with messages about the new regime: on the one hand, the King Arthur whom the Welsh so venerated was dead; but on the other, he was to live long in Edward. As the king and Queen Eleanor venerated the piles of bones in Glastonbury Abbey, they sought to stitch the myth of Arthur into the fabric of Plantagenet family lore. It was a well-contrived end to a brutally effective campaign.

  In the aftermath of Edward’s first
victory over Llywelyn, he turned his attention to domestic affairs. His chancellor Robert Burnell was pressing ahead with the first stages of a sweeping programme of legal reform, and three extremely wide-ranging statutes were passed in 1275, 1278 and 1279 (known respectively as the first Statute of Westminster, the Statute of Gloucester and the Statute of Mortmain). They dealt with matters as diverse as rules on land tenure, ensuring free elections to parliament and the right of all free men, rich or poor, to justice (Westminster); establishing a new system of eyres to travel the country investigating abuses of royal rights (Gloucester); and preventing land from being granted to the Church in order to avoid feudal dues and taxes (Mortmain). They marked the start of a legal revolution by statute, which would continue for more than a decade.

  The matter of the Church also began to vex the King. He was prevented from promoting Burnell to archbishop of Canterbury by Pope Nicholas III, and had to accept the difficult and extremely pious Franciscan friar John Pecham as archbishop instead. Pecham was a highly principled ecclesiastical politician and a strict observer of the Franciscan rule. He refused all personal property (which meant that he had no income, and was thus constantly in crippling debt to Italian bankers), insisted on extremely strict discipline from the English clergy, and believed that he had a divine mission to root out corruption and abuse in the Church, most notably among those clergy who grew rich from pluralism – the practice of holding multiple benefices. His view on relations between Church and Crown was pithily alluded to in his official seal, which had an image of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket on the reverse.