The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  Unsurprisingly, Pecham clashed numerous times with Edward from the very beginning of his tenure as archbishop. His stance on pluralism irritated the king, who gained a good deal of advantage from being able to award his royal clerks multiple lucrative posts in the Church as reward for their work. There was also a long-running battle over the jurisdictions of royal and Church courts – a battle which had its roots in the same issues that had animated Becket against Henry II – and Pecham frequently expressed to the king his frustration at royal ministers’ reluctance to help enforce sanctions against those (numerous) people whom he had excommunicated from the Church. In autumn 1279 a furious argument blew up in which Pecham was forced to back down over his demand that a copy of Magna Carta should be hung in all of England’s cathedrals and collegiate churches.

  Fortunately, despite their equally strong characters, Edward and Pecham were diplomatic enough to ensure that their relationship never spilled over into the murderous hostility that had ended Henry and Becket’s. Indeed, despite their political differences, they were generally on good terms, and on some matters they agreed wholeheartedly. One such matter was the character of the Welsh, whom both king and archbishop considered unreconstructed savages. It was as well for his survival that Pecham took such a view, for in 1282 Edward’s war with Wales once more exploded, this time in an even bloodier form.

  On the weekend before Easter 1282, during the night preceding Palm Sunday, Llywelyn’s brother Dafydd – a former ally at the English court – appeared unexpectedly at Hawarden castle. The residence of Edward’s ally Roger Clifford loomed in the darkness, a great 40-foot stone keep on top of its rounded motte. The Welsh prince had been expected as an Easter guest, but he turned up early, in company and armed. In the dead of night, Dafydd led a band of men in storming the castle, seizing Clifford from his bed and filling the corridors of the stone fortress with the stifled screams of men whose throats were slit in the dark. This was no Easter visit. It was a declaration of war.

  During the next few days Wales slid into rebellious uproar. Royal officials were tricked, grabbed and held as hostages. Castles in English hands were attacked and taken in lightning raids by bands of armed Welsh rebels. The peace imposed by Edward I at Rhuddlan disintegrated almost overnight as Wales was plunged back into violence.

  The instigator on this occasion was Dafydd, but his brother Llywelyn’s hand lurked close behind. The villain of 1277 had been welcomed into Edward’s circle, allowed to marry Eleanor de Montfort in a ceremony at which Edward himself gave away the bride, and gently coaxed into the ranks of the Edwardian aristocracy. But he was never quite of the English camp. And although the prince professed his ignorance of the rebellion until it had fully erupted, he had spent his time since 1277 moving quietly to re-establish his prestige among the minor Welsh princes.

  Despite the attempts to rehabilitate both brothers, in the early 1280s Dafydd and Llywelyn still had personal grievances with Edward, which dwelt on the redistribution of lands seized after the first war. As their attitudes towards the English king hardened in the years following Rhuddlan, they adeptly spun their complaints into a wider argument about Edward’s apparent desire to override Welsh law and customs.

  After his victory, Edward had imposed English law, customs and administrative efforts harder on the Welsh than any Plantagenet king before him. Llywelyn and Dafydd suggested to their compatriots that in doing so, the English king was making a deliberate attempt to crush the whole spirit of the Welsh people. The effort was crystallized in a complex legal dispute between Llywelyn and his compatriot Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn over the cantref of Arwystli – a county to the south-east of Gwynedd. Llywelyn wished it to be judged under Welsh law; Edward pushed for it to be ruled upon under Marcher law. A dispute over an obscure parcel of land was effectively parlayed into a test-case for the very survival of Welsh law and customs. The result was to produce a quite different Welsh opposition to that which Edward had faced at the beginning of his reign. In those days he had taken it upon himself to discipline a wayward neighbour. Now he faced a war of national identity.

  The invasion blueprint he followed was essentially that which had proven so effective in 1277. Once more, troops and engineers worked in tandem, tearing through the Welsh countryside and establishing building sites where they went. Military assistance was requested from the English earls, which was formalized as a call to the feudal host in May. To carry the cost of the building works, large loans were raised with Italian bankers. Once more, forces were mustered at Worcester and marched via Chester to Rhuddlan. Once more the Cinque Ports provided shipping. Once more, Marcher lords were relied upon to carry out private engagements in the south. The main body of the Welsh was encircled in Snowdonia, and Anglesey was linked to the mainland by a giant bridge formed of forty pontoon boats, built to order by huge teams of Chester carpenters. Those remaining outposts of the Plantagenet dominions that lay overseas were called upon for their support, and aid was sent from Ireland, Gascony and Queen Eleanor’s county of Ponthieu.

  Progress was not so swift as it had been five years previously. The Welsh were in no mood to trust Edward, nor to submit to another round of his punitive treaty-making. Edward, for his part, was determined that he should not give an inch. The best offer he was prepared to make to Llywelyn was to exchange Snowdonia for a rich English earldom, which Llywelyn rejected out of hand. Losing Snowdonia would mean giving up land so valuable that Gerald of Wales had written during the previous century that ‘if all the herds in Wales were driven together, Snowdonia could provide them with pasture’. Moreover, it could not be granted to the English without destroying the territorial integrity of Gwynedd, the centre of Welsh resistance and national identity. This Edward well knew. Pecham tried to arbitrate, but it was clear from the outset that the two sides were set for a bitter fight.

  The Welsh fought valiantly, as was their way. Llywelyn orchestrated the war from the north, while Dafydd roamed more freely across the principality. (Their borther Owain had retired to his estates and took no part in the rising.) They achieved a significant victory in November 1282, when forces led by Edward’s Gascon supporter Luke de Tany were ambushed near the pontoon bridge with Anglesey, and large numbers of knights drowned beneath the weight of their armour in a cold sea. But these losses were not enough to deter the English king from his task.

  The English fought into the winter, reinforced by hundreds of men drafted over from Gascony. They squeezed Snowdonia hard, and in December Llywelyn, fearing starvation, tried to make a desperate sortie from his hideaway. He was ambushed at Irfon Bridge, near Builth in the central Marches, and slaughtered in battle on 11 December 1282. The accounts of his death are hopelessly confused, but he was probably run through with a lance before his prone, bloodied body was decapitated.

  Llywelyn’s death was the final blow to Welsh independence, struck on a freezing hillside surrounded by bare trees, shortly before Christmas. The Welsh fought on under Dafydd until the spring came, but in April 1283 the final Welsh stronghold, Castell y Bere, was captured after a short siege, and in June Dafydd was betrayed and captured by Edwardian Welshmen. He was taken to Rhuddlan, and then to Shrewsbury for trial in front of a Michaelmas parliament.

  Edward delivered the severest punishment on a man who he felt had betrayed his hospitality and lordship, and represented the scion of a family of traitors. Dafydd was hauled roughly to the scaffold and hanged as a common killer. Before he was dead, his intestines were slashed clean from his body with a butcher’s blade, and burned in front of him. His body was hacked into quarters and sent to four English cities. His head was sent to London and set on a spike at the Tower of London. It was a traitor’s death. In London Dafydd was reunited with his brother: the two Welsh princes stared lifeless over England’s largest city. Meanwhile the nation for which they had given their lives was smothered beneath a typically ambitious Plantagenet building project. Edward was determined that his victory should be Arthurian: complete. To ensure that Wales wo
uld not rise again he put into action the greatest castle-building programme that Britain had ever seen.

  The King’s Castles

  A medieval building site was a raucous, dirty, smelly place; a cacophony of clatter. For seven months of every year – between April and November, when the hard earth softened and the weather allowed for unbroken outdoor work – the castle-building season entered full swing. Wherever a major fortress was erected, the landscape around it was sculpted and transformed. Woodland was felled and levelled, stone cut and dragged into place, furnaces roared. Endless streams of carts arrived bearing giant logs and pieces of timber hewn in faraway forests. New roads and routes were trodden by innumerable artisans and labourers, carpenters and masons. Great piles of earth rose against the horizon, thrown up out of the deep ditches that were dug as protection around the working site. Workers’ campsites hummed with the reek and warmth of human bodies, piled close together, creating mounds of rubbish and filth as they laboured beneath summer’s elements.

  Master James of St George was the greatest castle-builder of his age, the man who knew more about building sites than any other. He had met Edward in Italy, during the returning king’s meandering journey back from Outremer to claim his Crown, and the king had not forgotten him. James came from a building dynasty: he had learned the art of masonry from his father, and spent his youth working on castles for the counts of Savoy. They had built towns and castles across the Alps, tailoring their magnificent projects to the tastes and security needs of the demanding and wealthy nobles of northern Italy. Master James was a mason and a military engineer, a specialist in organizing and managing building sites rather than an architect, but his ability to carry out ambitious projects to exacting standards made him an invaluable servant to the kings and princes who were his clients. He knew the best experts in Europe for specialist skills such as canal-digging, and he had long experience building castles in difficult and dangerous Alpine terrain.

  In 1278, Edward hired Master James for one of the biggest commissions of the age: a massive ring of fortresses designed to brand Plantagenet power deep into the flesh of the principality of Wales, altering both the landscape and the political make-up of the nation so that it would for ever reflect English dominance.

  Every Plantagenet king with the exception of Richard I had come to Wales, and all departed having barely left a footprint. Edward I ended that trend emphatically. His two invasions cost him immense amounts of cash and political capital, and right from the start it was clear that he meant to enforce a settlement that would prevent the Welsh from ever rising in rebellion as an independent nation again. He intended to build such an imposing ring of castles around the heart of Gwynedd that the Welsh could not physically remove the English, and would be confronted every time they looked to the horizon by a reminder of their subject status.

  Edward and his advisers had a very clear vision of what they wanted from the castles. They were to be placed on strategically important sites and built to incorporate features of the best fortresses of north-west France and the southern Marches of Wales – two regions that had seen some of the heaviest and most prolonged warfare of the last century and which had, accordingly, developed the best defences. The king corresponded directly in person with Master James, instructing him on the positioning of towers and moats, the fine details of gate-posts, the type and colour of stone and timber to be used, and even where he wanted the latrines to be located. Most of the castles whose building was managed by Master James still stand. Some were extensive reworkings of castles already built. Others were new commissions. The earliest begun were at Flint and Rhuddlan on the northern border with England, Aberystwyth on the west coast and Builth, in the southern Marches. All of these were begun in 1277 as part of the limited settlement programme undertaken after Edward’s first Welsh invasion. The first three were attacked during the rebellion that prompted Edward’s second invasion, during which time the half-built structure at Aberystwyth was badly burned, and had to be started again once the war was over.

  By the time Aberystwyth came to be reconstructed, however, the building programme had been extended in scope and ambition. Alongside Rhuddlan, Flint and Aberystwyth, further castles were commissioned at Denbigh, Harlech, Conwy and Caernarfon. (A final castle, perhaps the most magnificent of all, was begun on Anglesey, at Beaumaris, in 1295.)

  The beauty and terrifying magnificence of Edward’s castles is hard to overstate. They were, like all castles, visible symbols of the wealth, military might and artistic sophistication of a conquering dynasty. But they also had Arthurian overtones. Edward was not simply constructing military outposts; he was wrenching at the national imagination of the Welsh, co-opting their legends and knitting them together with the Plantagenet myth.

  The castles took many years to build and in some cases – as with Caernarfon – they were never completely finished. Some were pragmatic refortifications of existing structures, and thus worked within blueprints already set. But for the great fortresses of the north – the finest were Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech and Beaumaris – Master James worked to a template of a keep surrounded by concentric walls, studded with towers and twin-towered gatehouses, and defended with a devilish innovation: the arrow-slit. It was nearly impossible for the enemy to aim an arrow into an arrow-slit, but a crossbow bolt could be quite easily fired out.

  The architectural and historical influences brought to bear upon the Welsh castles were many and varied. Nowhere captured Edward’s imagination more than the building at Caernarfon which was the site of an ancient Roman fort, Segontium, said to have been built by the Emperor Magnus Maximus, whom legend held to be the father of Constantine. Caernarfon was built with multicoloured masonry and octagonal towers, rather than the round towers seen elsewhere in Wales. It took its cue from the angular walls of Constantinople, and was awarded even greater historical significance by the supposed discovery during the construction of Maximus’s remains, which were exhumed and interred in the town church.

  In many cases Edward’s castles were accompanied by fortified new towns: planned settlements designed to deepen the grounding of the garrison in the locality and provide an income to offset the dazzling cost of building the castle. In an age of rapidly rising population, as the thirteenth century was, there was no shortage of English settlers and workers ready to head west for a new life in Wales, even if they had to contend with the hostility of the conquered locals.

  And there was one settler more symbolic than any other. In the spring of 1284, during the early stages of work on Caernarfon castle, Queen Eleanor was brought to the town, where she went into labour for perhaps the sixteenth time of her life. The couple already had six surviving children: five girls, named Eleanor, Joan, Margaret, Mary and Elizabeth; and a boy named Alfonso after his maternal grandfather. (At least eight other children, including the king’s first- and second-born sons, John and Henry, had died in infancy.) On 25 April the queen gave birth to another son, who was named Edward after his father. The birth missed St George’s feast day by a couple of days, but the symbolism was otherwise perfect. A prince who shared his father’s Saxon–Plantagenet name was delivered to the world at a town rich in ancient British history. The little boy, named Edward of Caernarfon, was a flag of conquest and a tool of propaganda. He was the fourth son that Eleanor had borne, and his birth wove yet more historicist legend into the Plantagenet story. His birth was part of a narrative that drew on Arthur, Maximus and the Britons of time immemorial. It was perhaps destiny that this child should ascend to his father’s throne. And so it would transpire when the ten-year-old Alfonso died at Windsor in August 1284. Suddenly, the four-month-old Edward became heir to the newly reimagined kingdom of Britain. With Wales conquered, myths created and a new heir born, Edward’s kingly vision was taking shape. All he had to do now was to pay for it.

  The Price of Conquest

  Stamping the legacy of conquest upon the Welsh was a project that required huge investment. The first Welsh war, it has be
en estimated, cost a relatively modest £23,000, but the second ran up costs of around £150,000. Much of this went on the castles built to secure victory, each of them worth between £14,000 (the eventual cost of the never-finished castle at Beaumaris) and £20,000 (for building Anglesey).

  The investment was not all made in stone and timber. Edward imposed on Wales a conqueror’s peace as severe as the Norman settlement of England. In keeping with the legal revolution beginning in England under Robert Burnell’s supervision, the Welsh settlement was grounded in statutory law. The Statute of Wales, passed in 1284, overrode much of the native Welsh legal and administrative systems. Flint, Anglesey, Merioneth and Caernarfon all became English-style counties with the administrative machinery of sheriffs and courts that formed the central nervous system of government in the localities. English criminal law took formal precedence over Welsh custom and legal procedure. Edward also focused his ire on the Welsh princes, as family after family was destroyed, its lands taken and inheritances confiscated. Loyal Edwardians were parachuted into the principality to hasten the process of Anglicization from above.

  But for all the changes the conquest imposed upon Wales, its effect in England was no less extraordinary. The vast price of conquest abroad – even if this only meant beyond the Marches – put Edward under serious pressure to make sure that a political consensus was maintained at home. As a child of the Second Barons’ War, he had seen his father fritter money on foreign policy, only to reap his rewards in the form of rebellion from the political community who paid for it. It was an experience he was determined not to repeat.