The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  Clustered, therefore, around the wars of Welsh conquest was a huge programme of English legislative and financial reform. Almost every area of English administration, justice and financial regulation was addressed, as Edward’s government strove both to purge the machine of royal government of rogue agents, and to reach its hand deeper into the shires. The programme was the first great sweep of legal state-building that had taken place since Henry II’s day. Some of this was badly needed after the drift of Henry III’s reign, but the willingness of Edward’s government to engage with reform was also critical to the king’s success in raising the eye-watering levels of finance required to pursue his ambitious foreign policy in the British Isles.

  The key measures were the statutes, overseen by Burnell, whose role in the architecture of the new English state was no less fundamental than Master James’s in Edward’s castle-building programme. The three statutes made before the second Welsh invasion (Westminster, Gloucester and Mortmain) had begun the process. After the invasions, the flood of legislation continued. The statutes of Acton Burnell (1283) and Merchants (1285) dealt with matters of debt. Westminster II (1285) was, like Westminster I, a massively wide-ranging piece of legislation whose fifty dense and detailed clauses set out new processes, rules and writs for everything from the inheritance and alienation of land and the passing of land from dead men to their widows, to the troublesome issues of false accusations of homicide and jury-dodging by rich men who bribed sheriffs to avoid doing their service.

  These legal reforms were not simply aimed at making land disputes and trade agreements easier for the kingdom’s barons. Rather, they penetrated to the very lowest levels of society. The Statute of Winchester of 1285 revolutionized criminal justice at village level, where it was believed that criminals were avoiding justice because juries unwilling to indict and convict their own people were shielding them from the full weight of the law. ‘Whereas every day robbery, homicide, and arson are committed more frequently than used to be the case,’ it read, ‘and jurors … would see the felonies committed on strangers pass unpunished rather than accuse the offenders, many of whom are persons of the same country … our lord the king to reduce the power of felons establishes a penalty in such case, so that for fear of the penalty … they shall henceforth not spare anyone nor conceal any felony.’

  Winchester demanded that local communities took responsibility for flushing out felons. If a crime was committed and no criminal produced, then the hundred would be punished collectively. It turned the whole system of law and order into a system where every subject had a responsibility to help keep the peace. ‘People living in the district shall answer for robberies and felonies committed in the district,’ said the statute, succinctly. ‘In great towns which are walled the gates shall be closed from sunset to sunrise … anybody harbouring or otherwise lodging persons suspected of being … violators of the peace’ would be punished as an accomplice to the crime.

  But most visibly, Winchester left a stamp on the English landscape. Just as Edward’s workmen and woodcutters had cut a vast path through the woodlands of Wales during the pursuit of Llywelyn the Last, so now every commercial road in England was to be cleared for safety: ‘It is commanded that highways from one trading town to another shall be enlarged wherever there are woods, hedges, or ditches; so that there shall be neither ditches, underbrush, nor bushes for two hundred feet on the one side and two hundred feet on the other, where men can hide near the road with evil intent,’ read the statute. The mercantile arteries of England were turned into treeless highways to allow the free movement of goods and money about the realm.

  Alongside the system of statutory reform, Edward’s government was characterized by a drive to streamline royal finances. A recoinage in 1279 sought to rectify the currency from Henry III’s reign, which was, according to Matthew Paris, ‘so intolerably debased by money-clippers and forgers, that neither natives nor foreigners could look upon it with other than angry eyes and disturbed feelings’.

  Edward also instituted reform to the systems of royal bookkeeping. The Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 arranged for old debts to be written off the pipe rolls on which government business was recorded, the processes for chasing up debts and fines from the royal courts were speeded up and royal commissioners were subsequently sent around the country to investigate debts owed to the Crown.

  But even with these measures there remained a gaping deficit in royal finance by 1289. Edward relied heavily on bankers’ loans and a combination of regular taxes upon the lay and clerical population to top up his income. It was a sign of the political credit earned through his reform programme that he could raise taxes of fifteenths on lay and clerical goods early in his reign, and could continue to raise finance this way for years to come.

  In law as in war, Edward was determined that his government should pursue radical and permanent policies that would leave a legacy long after his death. Only by this sort of active government could he hope to bind together a nation that would support him in his expensive foreign policy. Yet if his reforms were much needed and vital for the financial and political security of the Crown, there was a much darker side, too. The darkest stain upon Edward’s transformation of his kingdom spread from his treatment of England’s Jews.

  The Expulsion of the Jews

  On Tuesday 10 October 1290, a group of poor Jews from London boarded a boat down the Thames. In their hands they carried royal warrants of safe passage. On their coats they wore the yellow, book-shaped badges that the law declared they must wear to distinguish themselves from Christians. In their packs they carried all their worldly possessions. They were headed for the coast, and after the coast for the Continent. They knew they would never return to England.

  The boat passed out of London, and through the countryside that surrounded the capital. They were leaving behind a city in which it had been increasingly difficult to live; in which ever more strict and onerous laws had been passed against their people, preventing them from trading or earning, or even from engaging with their Christian neighbours, as their ancestors had done quite freely. Their synagogues had been burned, their friends beaten or hanged, and hot-headed preachers had called for their conversion to Christianity. London was a city that no longer welcomed or wanted them. They had no choice but to leave.

  They floated downstream. After many miles, the river widened, and the Kentish landscape to starboard fragmented into islands and sandbanks. The open sea lay ahead. The tide was going out.

  Their captain, a Christian, turned the boat south, towards the Isle of Sheppey. As the tide grew lower and lower, he cast the anchor overboard, and allowed the vessel to come to a rest on the exposed sand of the Thames estuary’s ebb-tide. Calling to his Jewish passengers, he explained that they could go no further until the waters began to rise. Feel free to leave the boat, he told them – stretch your legs on the sandbank.

  All the passengers took his advice, stepping out of the vessel and walking on the wet sand. They did not notice the tide coming back in.

  The captain, of course, did notice. He and his crew knew that after ebb-tide, the Thames rushes back over the sands it has vacated, carrying all before it. He rushed to the side of his boat and clambered aboard. He shouted down to his Jewish passengers, who had wandered on the sandbanks and were now cut off from safety, telling them to call upon Moses, who had parted the seas for them once before, to do so again. Then the boat sailed off, with its passengers’ stolen baggage still aboard. The Jews were swept away as the tide rolled in around them. Every one of them was drowned.

  For their efforts, the captain and crew of the boat were later imprisoned. Their crime was one of the most heinous acts that accompanied Edward’s expulsion of England’s small Jewish community in 1290. It was not typical of what was generally a rather peaceful exodus, but it was a painful illustration of the hatred and callous cruelty that was aimed towards Jews by Europe’s Christian people and governments during the thirteenth century.

  By t
he time of Edward’s reign England’s Jewish population numbered around 2,000 people, organized into about fifteen mainly urban communities and still living, as they were in John’s day, under the terms spelled out by the apocryphal laws of Edward the Confessor: ‘the Jews themselves and all their chattels are the King’s’. Yet since John’s reign, conditions had grown less and less welcoming for the English Jews. The blood libel had become more regularly levelled against Jewish communities: in 1240, three Jews in Norwich were executed for the supposed crime of having circumcised a five-year-old child, whom it was said they planned to crucify at Easter, in a case that prompted attacks on Jews and their property. In 1255 a Jew called Jopin was accused of having murdered an eight- or nine-year-old Christian boy by torturing him to death with a number of accomplices in a ceremony associated with witchcraft. A legend held that the boy’s body would not sink in a stream, nor be buried in the ground; when thrown in a well it was said to have emitted a sweet smell and a bright light. When Henry III visited Lincoln, he had ordered Jopin’s death, and had ninety-one Jews rounded up and sent to London, where all were condemned to death; eighteen were executed before Richard earl of Cornwall intervened to spare the rest. Similar cases were recorded in London and Northampton in the 1260s and 1270s.

  In 1269 Henry III had restricted the terms under which the Jews could trade, and made blasphemy by Jews a hanging offence. When Edward returned from crusade, he passed the Statute of Jewry (1275), which outlawed most forms of usury, restricted Jews to living in certain cities, imposed the yellow badge of shame, described as ‘in the form of two tables [i.e. religious tablets] joined, of yellow felt, of the length of six inches and of the breadth of three inches’, and levied an annual 3d tax on all Jews aged over twelve. The queen mother, Eleanor of Provence, expelled Jews from all her lands at around the same time as the Statute of the Jews was proclaimed. Subsequently, when Edward instituted harsh laws against coin-clipping and his justices began prosecuting offenders in 1278–9, the Jews were subjected to a judicial massacre: although almost equal numbers of Christians and Jews were found guilty of coin-clipping, ten times as many Jews as Christians were executed for their crimes. The head of every Jewish household in England was at some point imprisoned in the late 1270s on suspicion of coin-clipping, and in a climate of legal terror there were frequent cases of extortion against Jewish families, as their unscrupulous neighbours threatened to report them for coin offences. Further mass arrests and forced tallages continued during the 1280s. In 1283 Jews were excluded from the protection afforded to ordinary merchants, and in 1284 Archbishop Pecham issued a decree ordering that London synagogues should be destroyed except for one. Two years later Pope Honorius IV demanded that the archbishops of Canterbury and York stamp out intercourse between Christians and the ‘accursed and perfidious’ Jews.

  None of this was unique to England. The thirteenth century was perhaps the most violently anti-Semitic of the whole Middle Ages. Kings across Europe enacted similarly oppressive measures against their kingdoms’ Jews. Frederick II demanded that Sicilian Jews wear a blue T-shaped badge and keep their beards long. French kings since Philip Augustus had ordered French Jews to wear a wheel-shaped badge. Pogroms, massacres, ghettoization, discriminatory laws, persecution and abuse were on the rise against Jewish people wherever they lived. Edward, obedient to his time with his aggressive, muscular, intolerant Christianity, was following the trend of a bigoted age.

  Despite the rising tide of abuse and the legal hobbling of their trade, however, the Jews still just about remained England’s de facto financial sector. Usury continued illicitly, and Jews traded in bonds of debt, by which loans were sold to speculators who could hope to inherit the lands against which the loans were secured if the borrower defaulted. For obvious reasons, Jews were not popular with the landowning classes who fell into the default trap. By Edward’s reign there was severe religious and political pressure upon the king to cripple both them and their trade once and for all. It was a pressure to which the king, at once conventionally pious and happy to advance any position that filled his barren coffers, would easily bend.

  Edward had profited personally from the presence of Jews in England. His father had awarded a Jewish tallage of 6,000 marks for his crusading fund, and between 1272 and 1278 Edward’s exchequer attempted to raise more than £20,000 from the Jews (albeit unsuccessfully). But Edward was also a crusader prince whose contempt for the rights of other religions was easily stirred. He was a conventional bigot no more enlightened or unusual than his fellow Englishmen who, like Archbishop Pecham and Thomas de Cantelupe, bishop of Hereford, were of the opinion that Jews should either convert or face persecution.

  The immediate causes of the expulsion, as with so much in Edward’s reign, were financial. Almost immediately after the settlement of Wales, the king had been compelled to go to Gascony, to overhaul his rule in the duchy. He left England on 13 May 1286 and stayed there for more than three years, investigating his feudal rights, establishing new towns, and codifying the ducal government, which ran under officials separated from England. Gascony experienced a sweeping, ordered and regulated Edwardian reform programme, but of course it took royal expenditure. On his return from the duchy, Edward owed the Riccardi bankers of Lucca more than £100,000.

  He returned on 12 August 1289 to find the political atmosphere highly charged. There were allegations current of serious corruption against some of his foremost officials, including the two most senior judges in England – the chief justices of the courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas. His officials’ searching probes into royal rights that had lapsed in the English localities were causing irritation and unrest, and several English earls were muttering about the legitimacy of Edward’s demands for financial assistance when he was outside the realm. In October Edward was compelled to write to every shire of England inviting anyone with a complaint against royal ministers or officials to bring it before his commissioners at Westminster. This was not a political environment in which to demand more money from a parliament without making major concessions.

  Yet money was on Edward’s mind, for he had begun to think once again of the possibility of returning to the Holy Land on another crusade. The Mongols had sent diplomatic messages enquiring about Edward’s return to fight the Mamluks, and his trusted ally Otto de Grandison was already en route to the Holy Land on a reconnaissance mission. Negotiations were opening with the papacy to levy a crusader tax, but Edward would need to call extensively on the wealth of his barons and the country’s lesser landowners if he was to fit out a more successful crusading mission than his first. Desperate for money and willing to accommodate any policy that would help him raise it, he turned quite naturally to the logical conclusion of Plantagenet policy towards the Jews. The landowning classes wanted rid of them; Edward was ambivalent and perhaps even enthusiastic about the idea. He had expelled all the Jews of Gascony in 1287. Now he would do the same in England. It would buy him political capital, raise a popular tax, and perhaps bring in some income from the confiscated property of the departing Jews.

  Thus when England’s nobles and knights assembled at Westminster in July 1290, a deal was struck. A tax was granted in exchange for the expulsion of the Jews. The Edict of Expulsion issued on 18 July 1290 commanded England’s Jewish minority to leave the realm by 1 November on pain of death. The Edict was distributed throughout the realm and read aloud in synagogues. The Jews put up no real resistance. During the summer they began to leave, and by the autumn they were mostly either gone or – in the case of those unfortunates who boarded ships like the one that sailed down the Thames on 10 October – dead.

  The Edict of Expulsion marked the end-point of nearly a century of increasing hostility aimed against the Jews by Edward and his ancestors. For all the pain, dislocation and misery inflicted on Jews who left England for an equally unwelcoming Europe, the expulsion was a populist move that proved spectacularly successful. As the 2,000 or so Jews who had escaped death or ruin during the f
irst eighteen years of Edward’s reign were handed their passes to leave England, royal tax collectors worked on the Christian population that remained. England’s delighted landowners, or those who were represented in parliament at any rate, had granted Edward a tax of a fifteenth on all movable goods. It yielded an astonishing £116,000: the biggest tax levied on England in the entire Middle Ages. ‘The people groaned inconsolably,’ wrote the Osney chronicler of its effect on the ordinary English folk. The Jews groaned all the louder as they dispersed throughout Europe. But no one was listening. Edward had once again shown his willingness to legislate and reform according to the needs of a Plantagenet realm that was about to be plunged into another prolonged and expensive state of war.

  The Great Cause

  As the Jews departed England in the autumn of 1290, all signs pointed to Edward I leaving the country with them, on a crusade of reconquest in Outremer. As tax collectors worked the land, milking its secular and clerical wealth, it seemed as though ‘the new Richard’ was about to usher in another great period of death and glory in the name of Jerusalem. Yet within months, fortune had decreed that there would be no journey east, and no new chapter in the story of the Plantagenet crusades. The rest of Edward’s reign would be concerned with events far closer to home: revived insurgency in Wales, a newly aggressive French monarchy with designs on throwing the Plantagenets out of Gascony, and bloodiest of all, the war with Scotland.